Vying for the NileHistory’s ability to keep on repeating itself is frightening. Settling down to read Winston Churchill’s second book, an episode of colonial ambition along the Nile at the end of the 1800s, one expects dusty Victorian drama under the palms. What one gets instead is a sneak preview of the 21st Century, equal parts western adventurism and Arab unrest.
How did one of the greatest figures of the century in-between deal with such turmoil? By keeping a cool head and a bit of distance. Churchill’s The River War offers an opinionated, involving historical account, albeit often consumed with logistical minutiae.
Not quite a memoir, as it isn’t a first-person narrative of events, The River War nevertheless gives us Churchill in all his brainy youthful effulgence, a 23-year-old cavalry officer who recounts the many struggles and final glory of a campaign undertaken jointly by Egyptian and British forces against a fierce band of Arab marauders who had overrun Egyptian territory along the lower Nile River valley known as the Sudan, or as Churchill keeps spelling it here, Soudan.
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| The Nile River running through Sudan. "...all who have drunk deeply of its soft yet fateful waters – fateful, since they give both life and death – will understand why the old Egyptians worshiped the river," wrote Churchill in The River War. Photo by Muthanna59 from http://sd.geoview.info/the_sunset_on_white_nile_sudan,33029245p. |
The banks of the
Nile, except by contrast with the desert, display an abundance of barrenness.
Their characteristic is monotony. Their attraction is their sadness. Yet there
is one hour when all is changed. Just before the sun sets toward the western
cliffs a delicious flush brightens and enlivens the landscape. It as though
some Titanic artist in an hour of inspiration were retouching the picture,
painting in dark purple shadows among the rocks, strengthening the lights on
the sands, gilding and beautifying everything, and making the whole scene live.
Something
of the same effect happens in The River
War. For long sections of the book, Churchill dryly recounts formation
movements and battle results. Then, just as the pages threaten to transform
themselves into deserts of skimmable text, you light upon an extended passage
like the one above and realize you are in the hands of a literary master.
The
war against the Mahdist Sudanese, a. k. a. the Dervishes, was long and bloody, triggered
by Egypt’s harsh rule over the Sudan and the ensuing resentment of its native
population. Add to it a new religious movement sweeping across the Sudan and
Great Britain’s near-colonial domination over Egypt, and the result was one of
the first instances of Western realpolitik coming to grips with Islam.
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| Muhammad Ahmad, leader of the Sudanese revolt against Egypt. Proclaimed the Mahdi, or redeemer of the Islamic faith, he died of typhus in 1885, months after leading his people to victory at Khartoum. Defending his triumph against the Egyptians and their British allies became the object of his successors related in The River War. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Ahmad. |
What
was the reason for British involvement in this war, anyway? Churchill opines a
key cause was the refusal of British leadership to allow Egypt’s choice of a
governor of Sudan, on the grounds he was an infamous slaver of the Sudanese and
of dubious loyalty besides.
Meritable
as those qualms may have been, forcing them upon the Egyptian leader, or
khedive, was “tantamount to an admission that affairs in the Soudan involved
the honour of England as well as the honour of Egypt.” Add to that the killing
by Mahdists in 1885 of the British General Gordon, who had been made governor
of Sudan, and Great Britain’s hand was forced, for better or worse.
Churchill
argues the uniquely unifying character of the Mahdist insurrection made
conflict of some sort inevitable:
Fanaticism is not
a cause of war. It is the means which helps savage peoples to fight. It is the
spirit which enables them to combine – the great common object before which all
personal or tribal disputes become insignificant. What the horn is to the
rhinoceros, what the sting is to the wasp, the Mohummedan faith was to the
Arabs of the Soudan – a faculty of offence or defence.
Churchill
does go out of his way to criticize Britain’s foreign policy under the Liberal
Party’s William Gladstone, which involved the United Kingdom in Egyptian
affairs. Yet at the same time, The River
War makes clear how vital the issue was to British interests. The Nile, he
writes, represents a critical geopolitical conduit worth fighting for: “Without
it there is only suffocation. Aut Nilus,
aut nihil!”
All
this is prelude to the meat of the book, the invasion of Sudan by an
Anglo-Egyptian force under the command of Lord Kitchener, a figure of much
later fame who, like Churchill, made his grand debut on the world stage in the Sudan.
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| Lord Horatio Herbert Kitchener, in a famous pose from a later conflict he did not live to see the end of. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Kitchener,_1st_Earl_Kitchener. |
Churchill
describes Kitchener at one point as “stern and sullen, equally unmoved by fear
or enthusiasm.” While complementary of Kitchener’s accomplishments, the fact
the two future icons disliked one another does peek through the generally
official tone of Churchill’s book.
Apparently
the much-lengthier first edition of this book, published in 1899, was more
fault-finding, criticizing Kitchener for excesses such as desecrating the tomb
of the Mahdi in Omdurman. Here, the most pointed Churchill gets about his
former commander is telling how Kitchener ordered a weak force to invest a
Mahdist stronghold at Gedaref, an operation successfully, if perilously,
accomplished:
But while we
applaud the skill of the commander and the devotion of his subordinates, it is
impossible not to criticise the rash and over-confident policy which sent such
a weak and ill-equipped force on so hazardous an enterprise.
It
is ironic to see the future author of the disaster at Gallipoli hold forth on another
leader’s overreach. Still, it seems a fair point to make.
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| Young Winston Churchill in uniform as an officer of the 21st Lancers in 1898, the same year he saw action with them at the Battle of Omdurman. Image from https://www.britishbattles.com/war-in-egypt-and-sudan/battle-of-omdurman/. |
Many
lovely Churchillian bon mots show up in The
River War, showing his precocious wit and gift for phrase-making:
To some minds the
exercise of power is pleasant, but few sensations are more painful than
responsibility without control…
The violence of
the battle may be cheaply braved, but the insidious attacks of disease appall the boldest…
Countless and
inestimable are the chances of war…We live in a world of ‘ifs.’ ‘What
happened,’ is singular; ‘what might have happened,’ legion…
Victory is the
beautiful, bright-coloured flower. Transport is the stem without which it could
never have blossomed.
Churchill’s
own arrival in the conflict comes rather late, at page 245, as a soldier of the
21st Lancers cavalry regiment. In his first book detailing his
experiences with another military expedition in India, The Story Of The Malakand Field Force, Churchill was
reticent about putting himself in the forefront of his narrative. Here he
seems even more that way.
In the climactic
Battle of Omdurman, fought near Khartoum, Churchill’s unit started out in reserve
but soon found itself thrust in the heart of the battle, countering an
encirclement maneuver by the larger Mahdi force at considerable cost. Churchill
gives a memorable if circumspect taste of what that had been like:
They shattered the
Dervish array, and, their pace reduced to a walk, scrambled out of the khor on the further side, leaving a score of
troopers behind them, and dragging on with the charge more than a thousand
Arabs. Then, and not till then, the killing began; and thereafter each man saw
the world along his lance, under his guard, or through the back-sight of his
pistol; and each had his own strange tale to tell.
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| The 21st Lancers' attack at the Battle of Omdurman, as painted by William Barns Wollen. Image from https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/the-21st-lancers-at-omdurman-sudan-42805. |
The River War is sometimes
cited as an example of colonialist jingoism and casual racism; I frankly did
not see either. Churchill’s attitude is distinctly imperialist, though of an
enlightened and human sort. His attitude seems to be that if the British weren’t
involving themselves in Egyptian affairs, then others like the French would
step in, to the disadvantage of both Egypt and Great Britain. He notes an attempt
by the French after Omdurman to invest a Nile port town of Fashoda (today known
as Kodok), cutting off British-Egyptian control of the Nile. Social Darwinism
was a very real thing, and Churchill notes how this episode led to some tension
before the French were made to back off.
As
to racism, Churchill clearly carried the prejudicial attitudes of his class and
culture, though not to an ugly extreme. He doesn’t identify casualties by name
unless they happen to be British officers, and criticizes the black troops for
being exceptionally poor shots in battle. Yet he also praises their bravery and
loyalty under fire, and takes care to note many times the human qualities of
the Madhi foemen.
Apparently Churchill was more withering about Islam and its influence upon the Sudanese population in his first edition of The River War. But little of this attitude crept through the edition I read, and the one he made available to the public in 1902. It suggests he reconsidered his harsher judgments over time.
As
a military historian, Churchill comes across as very precise and a bit windy. He
seems to recognize this, noting defensively: “To appreciate the tale it is less
necessary to contemplate the wild scenes and stirring incidents, than
thoroughly to understand the logical sequence of incidents which all tend to
and ultimately culminate in a decisive trial of strength.”
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| The Camel Corps was a critical component of the force Lord Kitchener led in battle to face the Mahdi, able to traverse long journeys across desert for both reconnaissance and attack. "If he starts having filled himself with water, he can march for five days without refreshment," Churchill writes of the camel in The River War. A watercolor by Frank Dadd from https://www.1stdibs.com/art/drawings-watercolor-paintings/figurative-drawings-watercolors/frank-dadd-british-army-camel-corps-sudan-northern-africa-en-grisaille-watercolor/id-a_1359533/. |
Maybe
the most disappointing element of the book was something Churchill’s
contemporary readers would have found reassuring: English victory here seems
preordained. The battles described are often one-sided affairs, with the
Anglo-Egyptian force able to deploy cannon, machine guns, and armored gunboats
against a foe largely armed with muskets and short-range rifles. Given the disparate
numbers, such weaponry was needed for victory, but for Churchill it was more a matter of
getting everyone in position than any Gunga-Din-style heroics:
The array of the
enemy was, without doubt, both longer and deeper. Yet there seemed a superior
strength in the solid battalions, whose lines were so straight that they might
have been drawn with a ruler.
The River War seems mostly regarded
today as a curio of its time. Paul Rahe, a history professor at Hillsdale College, pushes against this idea: “In an age
when the Great Democracies are likely to be called on to respond to ugly little
conflicts marked by social, sectarian, and tribal rivalries in odd corners of
the world…I can think of no other historical work that better deserves our
attention than The River War.”
That
oversells the case, but makes a good point, too. As a prelude to the global
nature of human conflict that defined the 20th century, as well as a
glimmering of one man’s role in determining its outcome, The River War is not only a worthwhile read, but set off by brilliant
prose. Cumbrous, yes, but never a chore, it merits attention for anyone
interested in Western history.
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