A Patriot's History of the Modern World (7 page)

Major Smedley Butler, the “fighting Quaker” who had deep reservations about the benefits of military involvement in the region and who later in life became an outspoken critic of military adventurism, typified the American involvement in Latin American missions. Never lacking courage under fire, Butler won two Medals of Honor, his first in 1914 in Veracruz, after he led his men in a door-to-door battle to occupy the city.
⁶²
A year later, in Haiti, Butler and his patrol of 44 mounted Marines were ambushed by 400
Cacos
. After holding their perimeter throughout the night, the Marines under Butler charged the larger enemy force from three directions the following morning and, convinced they were nearly surrounded, the
Cacos
fled. Notably, Butler's exploits came when medals were seldom awarded for political purposes and when great bravery was common on the field of battle.

Sudan's Jihad

Just a month before Dewey stunned the Spanish, in May 1898, England had mounted a powerful expedition to move up the Nile River to subdue the forces of Abdallah al-Taashi, known as the Khalifa. The Khalifa had emerged from a three-way struggle among the successors of the Mahdi (“expected one”)—whose men had killed British hero Charles “Chinese” Gordon, former governor of Sudan (though the Mahdi himself claimed credit). Gordon had suppressed the slave trade in Sudan from 1874 to 1875, earning him the title “Pasha.” Revered on two continents, Gordon was a larger-than-life figure who occasionally counted on his reputation to
supersede reality. Often, it worked. In 1883, the Khedive (viceroy) of Egypt had undertaken a campaign against the fanatical Islamic sectarian Muhammad Ahmad bin Abd Allah, who called himself the Mahdi. Unmoved by oceans of blood and contemptuous of all non-Sudanese, the Mahdi viewed himself as a redeemer and strict adherent of the Koran, called to spread the word to Cairo, Damascus, and Constantinople; anyone who rejected him was to die.

The British sent an expedition of Egyptians commanded by Colonel William Hicks, which the Mahdi annihilated, killing all but about 300 of the 10,000 men.
⁶³
Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice said in a speech to the House of Lords that an “army has not vanished in such a fashion since Pharaoh's host perished in the Red Sea.” While Hicks was incompetent and put his overconfident forces at extreme risk in a march through the desert with insufficient supplies, by the time he was attacked he was outnumbered four to one by the Mahdi's men, some of them equipped with modern weapons. Subsequently, two more Egyptian armies were likewise routed.

Egypt ordered the withdrawal of its garrisons from Sudan, and the British government requested that Charles Gordon go to Egypt and supervise the operation from Khartoum. England doubted that even the Mahdi would make war on England by killing a British citizen of such visibility. Gordon arrived in Khartoum in 1884, but instead of evacuating the city, chose to stay and fight. After early successes, Gordon found himself surrounded inside Khartoum and under siege from the Mahdi's forces. Finally, a relief force under Sir Garnet Wolseley set out from Cairo, but it reached Khartoum three days after the city fell on January 22, 1885. When two steamers Wolseley sent ahead arrived at the city, they found a massacre. Gordon's head, which had been displayed on a pike, was already gone. The Mahdi died of typhus shortly after taking Khartoum; Gordon was honored with statues in Trafalgar Square and at the Gordon School in Surrey.

Britain's Sudanese experiences, while perhaps superficially similar to the American struggles with the Plains Indians, were of a different type altogether, for this was an enemy whose religious fanaticism united large numbers of tribes and regions. Whereas the Sioux under Sitting Bull were fortunate to unite several of their own bands, plus the Cheyenne, the Mahdi had assembled massive armies all driven by a fanatical version of Islam. The Americans had experienced an early “War on Terror” with the Muslim Barbary pirates, but the Mahdist uprising constituted the West's first brush with Islam as a unifying military force on a widespread basis since the 1500s.

Another contrast existed in the almost exclusively American tendency to make citizens out of all those in subjugated or colonized areas (although Indians were excluded for a long span). Virtually none of the Egyptians or Sudanese had any connection to the British Empire, and certainly little loyalty. It is a misperception that the British Empire was, in fact, “British” in any sense save that of purely military and political control. Subjects were
not encouraged to “become British”—on the contrary, they were derided and scorned by the English when they attempted to do so. This proved all the more remarkable in that several of Africa's loudest voices for independence came from natives educated in the British system, who had been viewed by fellow African revolutionaries as traitors.
⁶⁴

Nevertheless, elite Africans such as James Davies of the
Nigerian Times
and Ghanaian lawyer J. E. Casely Hayford “commonly believed as much as their European mentors in Western civilisation [sic], and commonly thought that disseminating it was what Africa urgently needed.”
⁶⁵
They were products of “the missionary movement upon whose arguments of the correlations between Western civilisation and Christianity rested the foundations of their outlook [and they] saw Christianity as the essential preliminary to the building in West Africa of a nation whose society would be modelled [sic] on that of the Western world.”
⁶⁶

Regardless of the services they performed for the Empire, and regardless of the European power in question, natives were never considered potential citizens. In 1918, after thousands of Africans and soldiers from other European empires had died on the Western Front, Senegalese writer Lamine Senghor observed, “When we are needed, to make us kill or make us work, we are French; but when it comes to give us rights, we are no longer French, we are
Nègres
.”
⁶⁷

Americans, on the other hand, thanks to the Land Ordinance of 1785 and the Northwest Ordinance, rapidly made new settlers and those of newly colonized areas citizens. At first, these were mostly whites, although there are records of freed African indentures not only voting but, in one case, serving in the Maryland assembly in the colonial era. Even later when races such as southwestern Hispanics were denied full social and economic equality for a time, in the eyes of the law they were as American as the Vanderbilts. Had such a system been in place in Egypt or Sudan, the Mahdist armies might never have grown to such size, and local support for the British army would have differed substantially.

After the death of the Mahdi, the Khalifa took control over the desert tribes, and the British, having withdrawn most troops, could no longer ignore Egypt and Sudan. Sir Horatio Herbert Kitchener led a new expeditionary force, including 8,000 British regulars and 17,000 native troops from Sudan and Egypt, southward along the Nile. Unlike Hicks fifteen years before, Kitchener had no intention of separating himself from his supply line along the river, or from the additional firepower of his gunboats.
Like Lord Chelmsford at Ulundi in 1879, Kitchener forced the Khalifa to attack him on ground of his choosing.

The Western Way of Victory

By the late 1890s, Westerners were beginning to realize that their style of fighting against non-Westerners, not just their technology, gave them a critical edge in battle. Americans had seen this on the frontier against the Indians, and would see it again in the Philippine campaigns against the
insurrectos
and the Moros, and it was already recognized by the British. The Europeans had perfected their military techniques over two centuries of conquest in Africa, India, and Latin America, but historians had downplayed the impact of military history in the Age of Imperialism, especially in the early 1800s before steam and rapid-fire weapons were available. This was a mistake, however. As early as the 1500s, Cortés in Mexico and Pizarro in Peru demonstrated that a handful of well-trained, decently armed Europeans could defeat a hundred
times
their number of natives, who lacked the basic concepts of volley fire, rank and order drill, and individual autonomy of the warriors. Even when cultures did encourage fighters to act independently—such as among some of the Plains Indian tribes in North America—the result was not autonomous soldiers willingly subjecting themselves to the greater discipline of the unit, but a ragtag, helter-skelter approach to fighting.

Certainly, even the best European units, poorly deployed or ineptly led, could be overwhelmed, and ultimately overwhelming numbers could prevail. Yet Europeans, who take perverse satisfaction in romanticizing their few defeats, have overplayed such debacles as Isandlwana, where 1,800 British troops (including 850 Natal Kaffirs) were overwhelmed by Zulus, or Balaclava, where the Light Brigade charged emplaced cannons on horseback. These glorious defeats have often been depicted in works of art.
Charge of the Light Brigade
, by the painter Richard Caton Woodville, immortalized the “Noble six hundred” men of the 17th Lancers as most of them rode to their deaths at Balaclava. And the only memorable painting of Kitchener's victory at Omdurman is one celebrating the charge of the 21st Lancers—a near disaster.

While stirring, paintings and heroic poems such as Alfred, Lord Tennyson's famous 1854 verse “The Charge of the Light Brigade” failed to capture the reality of Western warfare that was evidenced at Omdurman, or at the final obliteration of the Muslim forces at the Battle of Umm Diwaykarat
in November 1899. There, relatively equal British/Egyptian and Mahdist forces squared off; only
three
British troops were killed while Mahdist warriors suffered 1,000 casualties, mostly to Maxim machine guns, and another 3,000 were captured.
⁶⁸
Osman Digna, the last of the Mahdist rebels, was captured the following year. By then, the British were already hip-deep in the Second Boer War, which, for all its illumination about the carnage enabled by mass firepower and long-range artillery, obscured the utter dominance the European style of war demonstrated over those using any other combat formula.

What the Age of Imperialism showed was that Europeans and Americans could easily subdue native peoples because their firepower was augmented and vastly enhanced by a culture of fighting that emphasized volunteer and well-trained armies that prized individual initiative to the benefit of the unit. Those traits came from the Western system of individual rights, free expression (including about tactics and strategy), and civilian control of the military. In American conquests, a common-law structure gave everyone a stake in the survival and expansion of the society—a factor sadly absent in most conquered countries and tribes, even after the colonizing powers left. A similar shallow approach afflicted those countries, including Mexico (another civil-law country), that had won independence from Spain during the nineteenth century. They failed to develop the political and cultural structures necessary for a free people to thrive. Survive they could, but prosper? Not with the primitive Old World economic systems they adopted.

Western military tactics could not be easily grafted onto African, Asian, or Islamic societies, making it more difficult for them to compete with the West by simply picking up Western arms. Merely introducing free markets did not prove a solution either unless the societies wanted to embrace open trade and less regulation—indeed, to adopt the entirety of Western culture, which they were often loath to do. The problem was, whether in rifles or railroads, the non-Western world had not constructed the scaffolding of private property rights crystallized into title deeds and paper certificates of ownership that already had catapulted the United States ahead of the rest of the world. It took until the late twentieth century for a Peruvian economist, Hernando de Soto, to realize that Latin American nations (and by implication, the decolonized states of Africa and Asia) were poor not because they had no wealth, but because the wealth they had could not be leveraged through loans and collateral inherent in titles and deeds. Moreover, the
absence of a paper trail of deeds and titles that could be cited in court cast the entire process of making, buying, and selling into a giant vat of corrupt molasses, slowing everything down by years, exhausting owner and worker alike. Applied on a state level, the effects were a grinding poverty at worst and a lethargic economy at best.

In fact it was production, itself the result of creative juices and investment, that vaulted the Western world into military dominance. Marxists and those steeped in the leftist drivel of “Eurocentric oppression” and imperialism answer that it is inherent in capitalist nations to expand, and to an extent, they would be correct. Yet the Zulus and Mahdists (for entirely less noble reasons) themselves wanted to expand, as seen in their conquests of Sudan and South Africa, but they did not go farther nor could they defeat the Europeans. Why? One answer is that by the late 1900s, only the West could make mistakes and still recover. Capitalism provided a culture of instant replacement, yes, even for soldiers lost in combat. When troops were lost, more soldiers could immediately take their place in a rifle line, operate a Maxim gun, or shovel coal into furnaces that powered the
Olympia
and similar ships. Virtually no native army, anywhere, could or did recover from a debacle such as the Americans suffered at Little Bighorn or the British at Isandlwana, but the U.S. Army and the British Empire hurled new forces into the field in each case within months and achieved victory in their campaigns. Western capitalist structures, and the systems of free citizens voting themselves into wars, provided a nearly bottomless pit of manpower and machines, even for nations with relatively small populations like England. Because of this technology multiplier, and the resilience of the economies, Great Britain at one point in the nineteenth century ruled more than one third of the globe with a regular army smaller than that which the United States sent into Iraq in 2003.