First Jihad: Khartoum, and the Dawn of Militant Islam (25 page)

The siege of Khartoum would last for 317 days.
It was a curious affair at first, almost more of a blockade than a siege.
Each side had its own unique weaknesses which the other sought to exploit.
The Mahdi had an enormous advantage in numbers, and was quite willing to be patient, hoping to starve Gordon out.
His army was deeply deficient in firepower, however: the antiquated artillery it had captured from the Hicks column and in taking El Obeid were no match for the modern 9- and 16-pounder Krupp guns in Khartoum.
Unable to bring his own guns close enough to bear effectively on the city’s walls without exposing them to devastating counter-battery fire, the Mahdi had to content himself with keeping up a harassing fire from the Ansar’s small arms.

Gordon had the advantage of being on the defensive, which was much less physically taxing than offensive actions.
He was sitting behind secure walls and fortifications, with plenty of ammunition and an apparently sufficient store of food.
Gordon’s greatest weakness was lack of communications—he was sure that a relief expedition would be mounted, but could never be quite certain, nor know exactly when.
There was also the disadvantage of being forced to remain inside a slowly shrinking perimeter.
While his losses in men and material might be slight, the sense of feeling trapped was a psychological burden that would gradually come to wear on the garrison and the people of Khartoum.

As his masses closed in around the city, the Madhi issued a long and elaborate proclamation to the inhabitants of Khartoum.
In it he asserted both his divine calling and the invincibility of his army, blessed as it was by Allah in the performance of
jihad
.
He called upon the people of Khartoum to surrender and accept the mercy of Allah and his messenger, the Madhi.

Gordon, making his disdain blatantly obvious, had the proclamation read to the populace within Khartoum, then asked for an answer.
The clamor to stand against the Mahdi’s army was deafening.
In a telling moment, one of Khartoum’s most revered and learned sheiks declared that Muhammed Ahmed was a false Madhi.
God would defend the city, he said, if the people put their trust in General Gordon.
At the General’s request, the sheikh drafted a reply to the Mahdi’s decree, couched in theological terms, which rejected outright his call to surrender.
The letter pointed out, with ecclesiastical precision, that Muhammed Ahmed had not fulfilled all the words of the ancient prophets.
At his appearance, had the Euphrates dried up and revealed a hill of gold?
Had contradiction and difference ceased upon the earth?
Even more telling, did not the faithful know that the true Mahdi was born in the year of the prophet 255, from which it surely followed that he must be now 1,046 years old?
And was it not clear to all men that this pretender was not a tenth of that age?
It’s not recorded how Muhammed Ahmed received these challenges to his divine authority, but from the moment his call to surrender was rejected, it was clear to everyone that the siege of Khartoum would end only when the city fell or the Mahdi’s army was driven back into the desert.
The duel between Gordon and the Madhi for the fate of the city had begun.

For his part, Gordon was confident that he could hold out almost indefinitely—or at least as long as the city’s morale could endure.
The city walls were strong and well made, and more than proof against the Mahdist artillery; the least of Gordon’s worries was a breach at any point.
Ammunition for his guns and the troops’ rifles was never a problem, and the food supplies seemed to be more than adequate for a siege of at least a few months.
For as long as he could, Gordon staged raids on the Ansar camps, stealing whatever cattle and grain could be carried off, to help augment the supplies in the city.
Sometimes Gordon would lead these raids himself, having never lost the taste for personal action.
These raids also had the benefit of helping boost the morale of the garrison and the city, both by keeping the soldiers busy and giving the impression that the city and its defenders weren’t completely helpless in the face of the Mahdi’s threat.

But as the weeks passed, the grip held by the Mahdi’s forces surrounding the city grew tighter, and the garrison grew correspondingly weaker.
Omdurman continued to hold out, while the nine small river steamers under Gordon’s command were able to keep its garrison reasonably well supplied.
They also were able to keep up a steady skirmishing fire along both Niles whenever the Mahdi’s troops were careless enough to expose themselves.
In turn, the Ansar, the Mahdi’s followers, forced their way into the village of Hadji Ali, on the north side of the Nile, and from there could bring a sporadic rifle fire down on the city, in particular on the Governor’s Palace.
Time and again Gordon’s batteries of 16-pounders would bombard the houses where the Arab snipers hid, driving them off briefly, but always they returned, and as the weeks passed the volume and intensity of their rifle fire increased.
But the crucial factor was food.
El Obeid had fallen not because it had been overrun but because the garrison had been starved into submission; the situation confronting Khartoum was essentially the same.

Muhammed Ahmed made no determined attempt to take the city by storm until August.
His experience with El Obeid and the other small towns and cities of the Sudan had shown him that starvation was his best ally.
When no British troops followed Gordon into Khartoum in the months after the General’s arrival, the Mahdi took it as a sign that the British government had well and truly abandoned the city to its fate, so there was no urgency to the task of taking it.
Better to starve Gordon and the garrison into surrender than risk losing too many of the faithful to Gordon’s guns and mines.

That was a lesson that the Ansar had learned fairly early.
Gordon was not another William Hicks, nor was he a typical Egyptian officer, appointed more for his family connections than his competence.
Gordon’s moat between the rivers, his caltrops and mines, his carefully sighted guns, had all caused varying degrees of consternation and casualties to the Mahdi’s army when they first approached the city.
The Nile itself was Gordon’s valuable ally: as the summer progressed and the river rose, the moat guarding the southern approach to the city became far too deep to ford, while Gordon’s guns and mines had turned the open stretches around the moat into a killing ground.
The Mahdi knew this, and knew that the handful of steamers Gordon kept on patrol in the Blue and White Niles were sufficient to drive off any attempt to cross the rivers by boat.
The only watercraft the Mahdi had available were lightly constructed
dhows
and
feluccas
, shallow draft, single-masted sailboats built from wood.
They were the types of boats that the Madhi had grown up watching his father build, and he well knew that a single hit from one of Khartoum’s Krupp cannon would blow such craft to splinters.

At the same time, while the Mahdi’s followers seemed to be “mere rag-tag and bob-tail” to Gordon, more rabble in arms than army, he lacked the strength to go out and meet them in open battle.
While his estimate that “five hundred brave men” could have driven off the Mahdi’s army was clearly wishful thinking, he knew too well after the Halfaya debacle that his eight thousand-man garrison could not be trusted in open battle.
Behind secure walls, with artillery in support, they were reliable enough, but he estimated that he had fewer than a hundred who could be trusted not to bolt at the first shot on a battlefield.
Thus the fighting was confined to a duel of artillery shelling on one side, and volleys of rifle-fire on the other until the early summer.
All the while, however, the Arabs were slowly tightening their grip.

In mid-April Gordon was able to get a message to Berber, which was then sent on by telegraph to Cairo.
In it he said that he had provisions for at least five months, and that he was confident that if he were given two thousand or three thousand “reliable” (i.e.
British) troops, he would be able to drive the Madhi back into the heart of the Sudan and quickly “settle” the rebellion.
Gladstone, of course, was still adamant at this point about not sending a single British soldier to the Sudan, but it is curious to note that when, four months later, he did finally agree to send a military force up the Nile, he envisaged no more than three thousand troops being committed to the expedition.

Money soon became a problem, as the Egyptian soldiers expected to be paid, and the merchants in the city still expected likewise for whatever supplies Gordon purchased.
On April 26, he began issuing paper notes against British credit in Cairo.
They were made to look like Egyptian pound notes, the first printing being the sum of £2,500, and were redeemable at their face value six months from their date of issue.
Subsequent issues raised the outstanding debt to £25,000 by July 30, and at the same time Gordon borrowed some £50,000 from the city merchants.
Yet such was the confidence that the people had in him that despite the opportunity for rampant inflation, the notes held their value until almost the end of the siege.

All the while, Gordon was well aware that the garrison and the city both looked to him as the central pillar of their somewhat fragile morale, so he did what he could to maintain a semblance of normality under the circumstances.
He tried to set a personal example of courage and endurance.
In a classic display of British phlegm, when a shell fired by an Arab gun crashed through one of the walls of the Governor’s Palace—fortunately it was a dud—he ordered the date of its arrival to be inscribed above the hole.
He also enforced a stern discipline on everyone in the city, declaring, “I am an advocate of summary and quick punishment!” At one point, on the evidence of Frank Power, four sheikhs who were accused of plotting to betray the city to the Madhi were shot on Gordon’s orders.

Gordon understood a basic truth that later generations of “leaders” would try to discredit: fear can be an essential part of ensuring obedience among reluctant followers.
It was a lesson he had been willing to impose as far back as his days in China while commanding the “Ever Victorious Army.” Still, an intimidating pose was not one with which he was ever thoroughly comfortable.
“It is quite painful to see men tremble so,” reads one passage in his journal, written in September, “when they come and see me, that they cannot hold the match to their cigarette.”

Yet the need for such harsh discipline was made clear on April 27, when Valeh Bey, one of the tribal chieftains who had proclaimed himself loyal to Gordon, suddenly surrendered himself and his followers to the Mahdi at Mesalimeh, a small port on the Nile between Berber and Metemma.
It was a significant blow to Gordon’s prestige among those Arabs whose loyalty was wavering, and it was also costly in the material sense, for when Valeh capitulated he also surrendered one of the precious river steamers, seventy boatloads of provisions, and two thousand rifles.

But if he could be stern, even harsh, in enforcing his discipline, Gordon could also be generous with his praise.
In April he commissioned several jewelers in the city to begin striking medals to honor distinguished service in the defense of Khartoum—-silver for officers, silver-gilt and pewter for other ranks.
The medals were shaped in the form of a crescent moon encircling a star; in the center of the star they bore an inscription from the Koran, a date, and the words “Siege of Khartoum” engraved over the image of an old-fashioned “flaming onion” grenade.
Nor did he neglect awards for the civilians.
“Schoolchildren and women,” he wrote in his journal, “also received medals; consequently, I am very popular with the black ladies of Khartoum.”

Gordon’s residence, the Governor’s Palace, was a flat-roofed, three-storey structure on the north side of the city, just a few hundred yards from the river.
On a whim, Gordon had placed his telescope on the Palace roof, and discovered that his field of view was amazing.
He had direct lines of sight across the Blue Nile, up the Nile proper to the north, and over to the west to Omdurman.
It became his habit to spend several hours there each day, for not only could he see his troops in every part of the city, they could see him as well, and their knowledge that his eye might be upon them at any given moment helped him maintain discipline.
If left unwatched, sentries would fall asleep and posts would be neglected.
At times Gordon’s despair over the wretched quality of the average Egyptian soldier sounds almost comical: “I certainly claim to having commanded, more often than any other man, cowardly troops, but this experience of 1884 beats all past experiences….
A more contemptible soldier than the Egyptian never existed.
Here we never count on them; they are held in supreme contempt, poor creatures.
They never go out to fight; it would be perfectly iniquitous to make them.” Yet despite his frustrations with his Egyptian troops, Gordon never gave thought to abandoning them.
By the end of October, having decided that the majority of the garrison were simply useless mouths to be fed if they remained in the city, he packed them into his five remaining steamers and sent them down to Metemma with orders not to return to Khartoum.
Now the defenders numbered less than a thousand, but they were all, at least so Gordon believed, reliable.

For the Mahdi, when Valeh Bey changed allegiance in April it was yet another great moral victory, as Arab tribes all over the Sudan and southern Egypt were rallying to his call for a
jihad
against the foreigners, their Turkish clients, and their Egyptians vassals.
By now the Mahdi was the absolute ruler of all of the Sudan, parts of Abyssinia, and the south of Egypt.
His domain was as large a territory as all of Europe from Germany west to the British Isles.
Tremors were felt as far north as Cairo, where the recently suppressed Arabi revolt left stillsimmering resentments among the common people that threatened to boil over again in open revolt and mutiny.
His proclamation of
jihad
had been heard throughout the marketplaces of the Middle East, threatening the security of the Ottoman Empire.
No longer was he just another desert mystic suffering from delusions of grandeur; he was now perceived as a genuine threat as far away as Constantinople.