Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made (12 page)

V

The Battle of Omdurman – or Karari, as it is known locally – took place on 2 September 1898. The Mahdists chose to fight outside the city, and to attack in daylight. Against the amassed British weaponry they stood no chance; surviving veterans interviewed in the 1970s spoke unaffectedly of their quest for martyrdom.
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The Mahdists were to suffer, by one estimate, 11,000 dead and 16,000 wounded.
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British-Egyptian losses were trivial in comparison – 48 killed and 428 wounded.
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From their point of view the only thing that went seriously wrong during the battle was the famous charge of the 21st Lancers, in which Churchill was caught up. At 8.40 a.m. the Lancers received orders to harass the enemy, who by this time had already suffered heavy losses, and to try and prevent them retreating to Omdurman. As they advanced they came under fire from a group of what appeared to be only a few hundred Mahdists. The Lancers’ colonel – who was clearly out for glory come what may – ordered the troops to turn and charge directly at them. However, they discovered too late that a further great mass of enemy soldiers were concealed in a dry watercourse for which they were directly headed. The Lancers plunged in, and in the next two minutes five officers and sixty-five men out of a total strength of 310 were killed or wounded, as were about 120 horses. Churchill described vividly how the mutual butchery seemed to pass in silence; the scene seemed to flicker like a cinematograph picture.
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He had previously expressed his ‘keen aboriginal desire to kill several of these odious dervishes’, and he now got his wish.
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His estimates of his personal tally were to vary, but he was certain he shot at least three.
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He reached the far side unscathed, but was frustrated that the regiment did not turn about and do it all over again. Although this would have been ‘magnificent’ rather than ‘practical’, he told his mother, ‘another fifty or sixty casualties would have made the performance historic – & have made us all proud of our race & blood’.
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The charge was instantly commemorated as an act of imperial heroism, but Kitchener was displeased at the needless loss of life.
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Steevens – not a man quick to allege military incompetence – condemned it as a ‘gross blunder’. ‘For cavalry to charge unbroken infantry, of unknown strength, over unknown ground, within a mile of their own advancing infantry, was as grave a tactical crime as cavalry could possibly commit’, he argued.
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Churchill, though, claimed that the charge – even though it had little impact on the actual outcome of the battle – ‘was of perhaps as great value to the Empire as the victory itself’. This was because the courage of the soldiers would reassure British patriots that the Empire was not suffering degeneration or decay, and that ‘the blood of the race’ continued to circulate with health and vigour.
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Such views might suggest that Churchill’s ideas had developed little since his North-West Frontier experiences. He continued often (if not invariably) to use the word ‘savages’ to refer to the Sudanese – although in one despatch he restrainedly struck out the word ‘filthy’ that had originally preceded it.
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He continued to view Islam as being ‘as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog’, and blamed it for stifling economic development – although he did acknowledge that it gave its believers bravery in death.
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Nevertheless, he came to admire the courage of the Sudanese warriors; furthermore, the aftermath of the battle made a profound impression on him. The horrors that he saw may help explain the relatively nuanced (if sometimes conflicting) opinions that he was to express over the coming months. He never questioned that the war had been necessary, yet he did criticize certain aspects of its conduct and showed some appreciation of the Mahdists’ motives. The contradictions in his behaviour may well be accounted for by his mixed emotions – on the one hand, unstinted faith in the British Empire; on the other, first-hand knowledge of the cruelties it could sometimes inflict. The picture was further complicated by his feelings of resentment towards Kitchener.

Of course, he had seen barbarities committed by the British side in India, but the sheer scale of the killing at Omdurman was new to him. Three days after the battle he toured the site with the Marquess of Tullibardine, who was serving with the Egyptian cavalry, and he described the scene in an extraordinary despatch of 10 September. The dead Sudanese were strewn across the ground, sometimes two or three deep. In one place more than four hundred bodies were packed into a hundred square yards. The corpses were of monstrous appearance, bloated to huge proportions by the sun. Churchill and Tullibardine cautiously approached the remaining wounded, and distributed what water they had. They saw a man with only one foot who had crawled a mile since the battle but who was still two miles from the river. Another man had reached the Nile only to die at its edge. Churchill wrote, in what has become a famous passage:

there was nothing
dulce et decorum
about the Dervish dead. Nothing of the dignity of unconquerable manhood. All was filthy corruption. Yet these were as brave men as ever walked the earth. The conviction was borne in on me that their claim beyond the grave in respect of a valiant death was as good as that which any of our countrymen could make. The thought may not be original. It may happily be untrue. It was certainly most unwelcome.
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Expressions of respect for the enemy dead were indeed quite conventional – ‘the Dervishes were superb’, wrote Steevens
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– but that is not to say that Churchill’s sentiments were less than heartfelt. He even wrote of how his sense of victory faded to be replaced by a ‘mournful feeling of disgust’. Yet he ended his despatch on an optimistic note, perhaps comforted by Winwood Reade’s vision of warfare rendering itself redundant once it had fulfilled its social function. The ‘terrible machinery of scientific war’ had completed its work, Churchill wrote. He looked forward to a time long in the future when the plain of Omdurman would be converted through irrigation to a ‘fertile garden’ supporting a great metropolis, and the battle itself would be but dimly remembered.
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In this analysis, even the filthy corruption of the defeated dead did not detract from the war’s ultimate civilizing purpose.

VI

After the Sudanese war, Churchill went back to India briefly. But in the spring of 1899 he left the army – not least because writing and journalism were more profitable, and because in England he could pursue politics – and he never returned to India again. By this stage he had embarked on
The River War
(and he also completed a novel,
Savrola
). This book illustrates Churchill’s growing intellectual maturity; and yet, other statements made around the time he was writing it are suggestive of some internal conflict on his part.

Churchill had been upset by two aspects of the battle’s aftermath: the maltreatment of the Sudanese wounded and the of desecration of the Mahdi’s tomb. He underwent several twists and turns of opinion in respect to both issues. In a letter to Ian Hamilton of 16 September 1898 he called the treatment of the wounded ‘disgraceful’, and reported that his private remarks on these lines had been repeated to an angry Kitchener.
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Furthermore, his account of the battle’s aftermath – quoted above – provided fuel for critics of the campaign. In October the editor of
Concord
magazine wrote to the
Westminster Gazette
, describing the battle as a ‘massacre’ and citing in support ‘Lieutenant Churchill’s account of how the enemy was “destroyed, not conquered by machinery”, and of the terrible scenes on the battlefield afterwards’. However, Churchill did not like the construction placed on his account and wrote a reply. He declined to discuss ‘the legitimacy of the practice of killing the wounded’ but denied there had been ‘unnecessary bloodthirstiness’.
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Churchill then changed his tune again. Ernest Bennett, the
Gazette
’s war correspondent, had written a book in which he alleged that ‘in many cases wounded Dervishes, unarmed and helpless, were butchered from sheer wantonness and lust of bloodshed’.
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He reiterated these charges in the
Contemporary Review
in January 1899, and also turned his fire on Churchill. Bennett poured scorn on one of his
Morning Post
articles, in which Churchill argued, ‘The laws of war do not admit the right of a beaten enemy to quarter.’
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Bennett wrote that this ‘truly remarkable utterance’ was ‘absolutely at variance’ with the laws of war; it was ‘monstrous’ to assert ‘that quarter need not be given to the vanquished’.
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Perhaps Churchill’s conscience was stung by this, as he now told his cousin that he was determined to reveal the truth, even at the risk of an outcry.
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He told his mother that he had read Bennett’s article, without mentioning that he himself had been attacked in it. ‘It is vy clever & as far as my experience goes absolutely correct’, he wrote. ‘I am going to avoid details of all kinds on this subject and shall merely say that “the victory at Omdurman” was disgraced by the inhuman slaughter of the wounded and that Kitchener is responsible for this.’
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In the book itself, published in November, Churchill claimed that unarmed wounded had been killed and that Kitchener could have done more to make it clear he did not desire this. It is worth noting that Churchill blamed the atrocities chiefly on non-white troops, plenty of whom had been recently assimilated from the ranks of the enemy.
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(Some years later, though, he recalled that he had seen British troops ‘spearing the wounded and leaning with their whole weight on their lances’.)
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Yet even these fairly modest criticisms were silently withdrawn when a new condensed edition of the book was published in 1902. It was a similar tale with the Mahdi’s tomb episode. Churchill witnessed the Commons debate on the issue, and later recalled his sympathy with the Liberal attacks.
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But in June, on the eve of his first election campaign, he said that Kitchener’s critics had blown things out of proportion, and that the Sirdar himself had not been directly responsible for ‘the barbarity which was perpetrated’ and was in fact sheltering his subordinates.
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In response, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt wrote to the
Daily News
arguing that Kitchener was ‘the sole culprit’;
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perhaps it was on account of this that Churchill said in
The River War
that the tomb had been profaned ‘By Sir H. Kitchener’s orders’. If the Sudanese still venerated the Mahdi, the book argued, then ‘to destroy what was sacred and holy to them was a wicked act’.
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But again, the criticisms were cut out of the later edition.

Churchill’s alternating attitudes may be explained partly by the ambivalence of his own feelings.
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He struggled to reconcile the demands of his conscience with those of political conformity. He originally submitted the passages on Kitchener to Lord Salisbury, to whom he dedicated the book, offering to delete them if the Prime Minister disapproved. Salisbury was happy to accept the dedication without any excisions being made – which suggests that he did not think Churchill had gone beyond the bounds of fair comment.
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(After all, even the Queen disapproved of the destruction of the tomb.)
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Nor did the book’s publication provoke the storm of criticism that Churchill had anticipated. The
Daily Telegraph
, it is true, was not the only paper to feel that the criticisms of Kitchener were an ‘obvious and serious blot’ on the book (which it thought otherwise admirable). The
World
thought the volumes revealed Churchill’s belief that he could have run the campaign better than Kitchener.
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The harshest review of all, by F. I. Maxse in the
National Review
, strongly deprecated the attacks on the Sirdar, alleged serial errors of fact and claimed that Churchill had played up the role of British soldiers at the expense of their Egyptian and Sudanese comrades.
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Luckily for Churchill, though, Maxse’s piece did not come out until 1900, by which time he had achieved hero status in the Boer War and the negative publicity found no purchase. Many of the other reviewers did not comment on the Kitchener aspect at all. At least one positively approved of his ‘blistering castigation’ of the Sirdar.
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In other words, although his statements were surely unusual for someone seeking a Conservative parliamentary seat, they did not, for most commentators, stray outside the limits of acceptable discourse. Perhaps, though, Churchill became aware of his own public inconsistencies as his passions about the issues faded. If so, the need to shorten the book for the one-volume republication may have provided a useful excuse to exclude problematic material.
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