Ghosts of Empire (36 page)

The Battle of Omdurman marks the end of an era of military adventurism and battlefield heroics. It was a day of frightful carnage for the dervish tribesmen, but it would, perhaps ironically, be dwarfed by the 20,000 dead the British themselves suffered on the first day of the Somme, less than eighteen years after Omdurman. Later observers reflected on this macabre symmetry. The constant theme of the battle is the contrast between what the British called civilization, on the one hand, and barbarism on the other. Churchill summed this up when he described Omdurman as the ‘most signal triumph ever gained by the arms of science over barbarians'. Tales of barbarism and savagery sold newspapers. Steevens, the great journalist, with a good eye for sensationalism, threw sex into the mix, and one understands how the Victorian journalist often used exotic barbarians and their customs as a means of titillating the prurient tastes of his reading public. On arriving in the town of Omdurman after the battle, Steevens gave a graphic account of the women of Omdurman:

Steevens, the sophisticated Classical scholar, would have appreciated the irony of his describing ‘African lust' in such vivid colours to bored commuters from Bromley and other London suburbs, the ‘office boys', in
Lord Salisbury's sneering phrase, who read the
Daily Mail
. This type of mock indignation, combined with a secret titillation, has informed mass-market newspapers ever since. Kitchener, of course, would have regarded himself as being above such basic impulses. As the victor of the Sudan, he reached his apogee as a national hero. At the end of 1898, following the Battle of Omdurman, he was raised to the peerage as Baron Kitchener of Khartoum, and was known as K of K ever after. He was given £30,000 to support the dignity of his new status, and, because of his frugal bachelor lifestyle, he hoarded considerable wealth. There was the slight scandal of the destruction of the Mahdi's tomb, when it was reported that Kitchener had taken the dead man's skull as a trophy of war, while throwing the rest of his remains into the Nile. Even Queen Victoria expressed concern about these reports, writing to Kitchener to say that the ‘destruction of the body of the Mahdi who–whether he was very bad and cruel–was a man of a certain importance . . . savours . . . too much of the Middle Ages'.
⁵²
Kitchener justified his action in destroying the body and tomb on political grounds, and denied ever taking possession of the Mahdi's skull.

The cult of Kitchener now reached its most vivid expression. The
New Penny Magazine
, a publication which catered for the burgeoning lower-middle-class public, for whom the
Daily Mail
had been launched, included a lengthy profile of the newly ennobled Kitchener of Khartoum in its edition at the end of November 1898, less than three months after the Battle of Omdurman. Kitchener's looks were dilated on at some length; he is ‘as dark as an Arab, with a fine figure and commanding presence'. This description was a good excuse to recount tales of his adopting disguises while wandering the Sudan as an intelligence officer. Although Kitchener led a dull private life, the
New Penny Magazine
tried to present a more human side to the great warlord: he collected porcelain and was a devoted numismatist, possessing an ‘unrivalled collection' of Eastern coins; ‘though a bachelor, he is noted in Cairo as a host', while in London the ‘Sirdar spends most of his time at one of the well-known service clubs'; ‘his knowledge of foreign languages is exceptional'.
⁵³

In addition to his status as a cult figure, Kitchener enjoyed warm relations with Queen Victoria. In 1899 the Queen asked him to sit for the Austrian Heinrich von Angeli, whom she described as the ‘greatest living portrait painter'. Victoria was gratified when she duly received the portrait in November that year. She also asked for and received a white donkey from Egypt, which delighted the eighty-year-old monarch. Such was her solicitude for Kitchener that Victoria offered him dates on which to stay at her Isle of Wight retreat, Osborne House: ‘would it be most convenient for you to come here from the 1st to the 3rd, or from the 7th to the 9th?' –an unprecedented degree of flexibility from a monarch to a subject who, under normal circumstances, would be summoned to the royal residence on a particular date, without having any choice in the matter of timing.
⁵⁴

 

Herbert Horatio Kitchener, Ist Earl Kitchener of Khartoum
by Sir Hubert von Herkomer and Frederick Goodall (1890). This highly romanticized portrait of Lord Kitchener (1850–1916) outside the walls of Cairo was painted at the zenith of the British Empire. More than any other individual, Kitchener symbolized the British Empire. He would be immortalized in one of the most famous posters in history for the slogan, ‘Your country needs you'.

 

Rajah Gulab Singh
by an unidentified Indian artist,
c.
1840. Gulab Singh (1792–1857) bought Kashmir from the British in 1846 for the enormous sum of £500,000. His descendants would continue to rule as sovereign Maharajas of Kashmir until independence in 1947.

 

The Charge of the 21st Lancers at the Battle of Omdurman
by Richard Caton Woodville (1898). The charge at Omdurman in 1898 is remembered as the last cavalry charge of the British Army, in which Winston Churchill, then just twenty-three, took part. It marked the end of the revolt, which cost 10,000 Mahdist lives, but fewer than fifty British deaths.

 

General Charles George Gordon (1833–85). A brave and committed soldier, Gordon was sent to Khartoum to quell the Mahdist revolt.

 

Mohammed Ahmed (
c.
1844–85), a religious leader who claimed to be the ‘Mahdi', the successor to Mohammed, was portrayed as a wild fanatic by the British popular press. The Mahdi's troops famously killed Gordon on the steps of the palace in Khartoum.

 

Faisal I (1883–1933) alongside T. E. Lawrence (
third from right
) and Nuri al-Said (
second from left
), amongst others, at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. Faisal was crowned King of Iraq in 1921. Faisal and Lawrence were friends and allies in the Arab Revolt against Ottoman rule during the First World War.

 

George Nathaniel Curzon (1859–1925) (
second from left
) was, according to an undergraduate ditty about him, a ‘most superior person' who enjoyed a gilded imperial career, appointed Viceroy of India aged just thirty-nine.

 

Gertrude Bell (1867–1925), the daughter of a family of industrialists based in Tyneside. She was self-willed, highly intelligent and focused–and one of the founders of modern Iraq. She supported the Hashemite monarchy and was a key figure in building such institutions as the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad.