“I had bought myself an automatic Mauser pistol in London, at that time the last and newest of its kind. So I decided to fight with this weapon”, Winston Churchill later described his preparations before Omdurman. Shortly thereafter, it was to be shown that the Mauser was clearly superior to “the highly praised ‘bare weapon'”. This was also the conclusion drawn by the general under whose command the then 21-year-old cavalry lieutenant and later prime minister fought: Horatio Herbert Kitchener (1850–1916). He, too, relied on a weapon of “the latest kind”, Maxim machine guns. With them he went into the decisive battle against the followers of the Mahdi, who had controlled Sudan since the mid-1880s.
Although it was a colonial war of sorts, historians have declared the Battle of Omdurman on September 2, 1898 to be a historic turning point. One of the last great cavalry attacks in history took place here. And it was here that the effectiveness of the machine gun, which would dominate the battlefields of the First World War a few years later, was demonstrated for the first time on a large scale.
The fact that Kitchener had the right eye for this was not least due to his parents’ home. His father came from a middle-class background and had worked his way up to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the army. Feudal tampering with tradition was alien to him. This may explain why he placed his son at the Royal Military Academy Woolwich, where war was taught as a modern science. After volunteering on the French side in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, Horatio Kitchener left the Academy in 1871 as a lieutenant in the engineering corps.
The first step in his career was as a topographer in Palestine and Cyprus. He also learned the languages of the countries, which opened the next door for him. Kitchener joined the troops that put down the Urabi uprising in Egypt in 1882/83 against increasing French and, above all, British penetration. As a result, the Nile country, which was formally governed largely autonomously by an Ottoman viceroy, became a kind of English protectorate. Kitchener was among the officers who organized the rebuilding of a loyal army.
When the Mahdi uprising shook the British position in Sudan from 1884, he was among the troops who were supposed to relieve the Egyptian governor in Khartoum, Charles Gordon. They reached the city two days after its conquest by the Mahdists. From then on it became – intermittently – Kitchener’s task to win back the Sudan. Appointed sirdar (commander-in-chief) of the Egyptian army in 1892, the government in London gave him the go-ahead in 1896.
In contrast to other English generals, who had previously lost out to the Mahdists, Kitchener relied on the possibilities of the modern armaments industry. Steam-powered gunboats were brought in. The problem of resupply across the desert was solved with a new railway line. 8,200 British and 17,600 Egyptian soldiers were drawn together. In 1897 they started moving south.
Only in the summer of the following year did the Anglo-Egyptian army reach Atbara, opposite the confluence of the Nile tributary of the same name. From there it was around 350 kilometers to the Mahdi’s residence in Omdurman near Khartoum. After the death of Muhammad Ahmad, who had declared himself the Mahdi – the leader of the Muslim community sent by Allah – in 1881, its leadership passed to Abdallahi ibn Muhammad. He founded a caliphate in which Sharia was the law and the slave trade was allowed again. Although his advances into Egypt had been repelled, large parts of the Sudan were controlled by the caliph.
Undisturbed by the Mahdists, Kitchener was able to August bypassed the heights of Shabluka and from there advanced in full battle formation to Omdurman, only 90 kilometers away. The caliph opposed him on September 2, 1898. Whether there were really 50,000 to 60,000 fighters, as Churchill and other eyewitnesses claimed, or only 30,000, as some historians state, remains to be seen.
In any case, the parade of the “broad and deep slaughterhouses of white-robed dervishes” made a deep impression on European eyewitnesses. “The singing, the war drums, and the tam-tams were soon heard clearly, filling the air with a roar; at times the voices joined in a long drawn-out ‘Allahuuu’, recalled the German military attaché Adolf von Tiedemann. “It was the war and death song of 50,000 dervishes.” Fearing death, they charged into artillery and automatic rifle fire.
The British took few prisoners. Churchill excused this behavior “as it seemed necessary for the safety and freedom of movement of the troops”. Because many opponents played dead in order to suddenly rise up “and fire their rifles into the ranks of the troops marching past or over them,” writes Tiedemann. However, Churchill admits that it was mainly Egyptians and marauders who let themselves be carried away.
The losses confirmed Kitchener’s concept. 500 dead and wounded British and Egyptians faced 20,000 Mahdist casualties. “Dirt, heat, stench, corpses and flies – that was Omdurman,” Tiedemann summarized his observations. Kitchener moved into undefended Omdurman, where he had the body of the Mahdi removed from its grave and mutilated. Shortly thereafter, he received an order from London that had a lot to do with colonial expansion but little to do with the horrors of a colonial war. Further south at Fashoda, a French expedition under the command of Jean-Baptiste Marchand had hoisted the French flag on the Nile.
The so-called Fashoda crisis brought France and England to the brink of a major war. The fact that Kitchener defused them and made Sudan part of the Empire was another building block in his career. After positions as chief of staff in the Boer War (where he built concentration camps), as commander-in-chief in India and viceroy in Egypt-Sudan, he was appointed Minister of War after the outbreak of World War I in August 1914.
In this role, too, he proved that he understood the laws of modern machine warfare. Instead of following British tradition of waging war with professional soldiers, he created dozens of “Kitchener Divisions” of volunteers. He did not live to see their destruction in the Somme offensive from July 1916. On June 5, the cruiser that was taking him to Russia for talks struck a mine, pulling Kitchener and his staff down.
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