Peter Ziegler - Omdurman

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FOR TOBY

First published in 1973 by Messrs Wm Collins Sons & Co Ltd

Published in 2003, in this format, by

PEN & SWORD MILITARY CLASSICS

Pen & Sword Books Limited

47 Church Street

Barnsley

S. Yorkshire

S70 2AS

Copyright Philip Zeigler, 1973, 2003

Cover illustration:

The Charge of the 21st Lancers at the Battle of Omdurman.

Painting by R. Caton Woodville

ISBN 0 85052 994 8

A CIP record for this book is

available from the British Library

Printed in England by

CPI UK

THIS is a book about the battle of Omdurman and the few days that led up to it; seeking to bring the action to life by drawing on the many records of participants which survive in books, regimental journals and manuscript collections. It is not a book about the Sudan campaigns of 1896 to 1898 for that the reader will still do best to turn to Winston Churchills The River War. Though sometimes egocentric in approach and inaccurate in detail this is a magnificent history which reads as well today as when first written. Still less have I written a political or social study of the Sudan; for this the best recourse is P. M. Holts excellent The Mahdist State in the Sudan. My intention is more modest: it is to describe the battle in such a way that the reader will know something of what it was like to be there, what it felt like to face the headlong assault of twenty thousand dervishes or to charge with the 21st Lancers into what seemed almost certain destruction. If I have succeeded it is largely thanks to those soldiers whose personal accounts, written for family and friends, speak with an authenticity which no historian can surpass.

The transliteration of Arabic is notoriously difficult. I have adopted the somewhat over-simplified solution of using the version which it seems to me will be most readily recognised by the general reader. This will hardly satisfy the scholar, but since no one scholar is likely to agree with another on what is in fact correct, the layman can perhaps be permitted to follow his own fancy. I am nevertheless most grateful to Mr Alan Goulty of the British Embassy, Khartoum, for remedying some impossibilities and inconsistencies.

EARLY in the morning of January 26, 1885, the dervish armies stormed the ramparts of Khartoum. To the starving and demoralised garrison the final onslaught can have come as no surprise; the wonder was rather that it had been delayed so long. For more than three hundred days the rebel forces under their leader, the Mahdi, had massed around the walls of the city. Little by little the net had grown tighter, supplies of grain and ammunition had dwindled, the Egyptian and Sudanese defenders had slipped away to make peace with the new high priest and hero of Islam. Each day General Gordon climbed to the roof of his palace to scan the waters of the Nile for the smoke of the long-awaited steamers with reinforcements and supplies. Each day he saw only the leaden waters, the distant palm-fringed banks, the kites and buzzards circling attentively overhead. Far to the north the relief force, too slow in starting, too leisurely in advance, crawled uneasily towards its goal.

Still the Mahdi held his hand. Even after he had overrun the fort at Omdurman on the other side of the river and had massed all his forces against the city, he seemed curiously loath to apply the coup de grce. He pleaded with Gordon to surrender, promising him honourable terms, freedom to return to England without even the payment of any ransom. Contemptuously Gordon ignored the offer; he had prepared for himself a martyrs bed and nothing was going to stop him lying in it except the total capitulation of all his adversaries a group in which Mr Gladstones government in London played a part almost as prominent as the dervish hordes. And then the Mahdi received the news that the vanguard of the relief expedition was within a few days of Khartoum. If Gordons garrison were to be overrun, it had to be done at once. One restriction only was imposed on the attackers by their leader: let the infidels and Turks be butchered, the women raped, the city burned and looted the life of Gordon must be spared.

And so, at 3.30 a.m. the Ansar infantry had crept stealthily towards the moat and hurled themselves, with appalling ferocity, upon the battered walls of Khartoum. They had expected savage fighting, instead the defences crumbled before them. A few strong points held out but these were the exceptions; for the most part the garrison, weakened by hunger and lack of sleep, convinced of the inevitability of defeat, cowered before the invaders and pleaded for their lives. The plea was rarely heeded. But the massacre of the despised Egyptians did not sate the appetite of the dervishes. Now they swarmed towards the palace, cutting down the few guards who dared oppose them. The swelling cacophony of victors and vanquished warned Gordon that the moment of his martyrdom was near.