In July 1898, fresh from the Malakand Campaign in India and his book which publicized the action and his part in it, Winston was still thirsting for the heat of battle. It was then that he had a fortuitous stroke of good luck.
Winston meets the Prime Minister
British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury had been impressed by Winston’s book, The Malakand Field Force: An Episode of Frontier War, and invited the young writer to 10 Downing Street, his official residence in London.
Salisbury arranged for Winston to transfer to the 21st Lancers, who were due to leave for the Sunday under the command of General Herbert Kitchener. This was precisely the newsworthy military action Winston had been longing for.
War in the Sudan
A showdown was imminent between Anglo-Egyptian forces and the Dervishes, led by the Muslim holy man, the Mahdi, who had conquered the Egyptian-ruled Sunday thirteen years previously.
The Egyptians wanted their territory back and the British had their own grievance: they wanted to avenge the death of General Charles Gordon, murdered by Dervishes at the siege of Khartoum in 1885.
The Dervishs had resisted all attempts to regain control over the Sudan, but in September 1898, Kitchener was at last in a position to bring them to battle with a good chance of victory. The battleground was the fortress of Omdurman, which lay on the River Nile north of Khartoum.
Winston at Omdurman
The Anglo-Egyptian force of twenty-six thousand men faced an army of forty thousand Dervishes, but superiority in numbers counted for little in the face of Kitchener’s mechanized weaponry.
The wave of Dervishes which swept towards the British positions at Omdurman, yelling ferocious war cries, were felled by the hundreds in a blaze of machine gun and small arms fire, In his biography, My Early Life, Churchill described the scene: “After an enormous carnage exceeding twenty thousand men who strewed the ground in heaps and swatches like snowdrifts,” Winston wrote “the whole mass of the Dervishes dissolved into fragments and into particles and streamed away into the fantastic mirages of the desert”.
Anxious that the Dervishes might retreat and take the city of Khartoum, three miles from Omdurman, Kitchener ordered the 21st Lancers, Churchill’s cavalry regiment, to sweep the field before the enemy could regroup. This, though, was no easy task.
Cavalry charge at Omdurman
Winston was in command of a group of around twenty-five men. “I was riding a handy, surefooted grey Arab polo pony” he wrote “... I saw immediately before me, and now only half a length of a polo ground away (450 feet), a row of crouching blue figures - Dervishes - firing frantically, wreathed in white smoke.
“We were going at a fast but steady gallop I looked again towards the enemy. The scene appeared to be suddenly transformed. The blue-black men were still firing, but behind them there now came into view a depression like a shallow, sunken road.
“This was crowded and crammed with men rising up from the ground where they had hidden ... the Dervishes appeared to be ten or twelve deep at the thickest, a great grey mass gleaming with steel.”
Winston escapes death
Winston’s men increased their speed to the fastest gallop. “The collision was now very near” he continued. “I saw immediately before me ... the two blue men who lay in my path. They were perhaps a couple of yards apart. I rode at the interval between them. They both fired. I passed through the smoke, conscious that I was unhurt ... the trooper immediately behind me was killed.”
A few moments later, another Dervish, this time armed with a spear, suddenly jumped up and made for Winston, weapon raised to strike.Winston shot him dead when he was less than nine feet away. The first charge over, Winston expected an order to charge again, but there was no need. The Dervishes retreated and the battle of Omdurman was finished.
A scene of carnage
The scene after the battle was appalling. “Horses spouting blood, struggling on three legs,” Winston recorded later. “Men bleeding from terrible wounds, fish-hook spears stuck right through them, arms and faces cut to pieces, bowels protruding men gasping, crying collapsing, expiring.”
This fearful experience convinced Winston that war as an aberration in the life of a civilized nation, and an occasion for letting loose barbarities that were not the monopoly of native tribesmen like the Afridis of India or the Dervishes of east Africa.
Embarrassing revelations
As Winston revealed in The River War, his book on the Sudan campaign, atrocities were also committed on the British side, including the killing of thousands of wounded Dervishes on the battlefield and the desecration of the tomb and corpse of the Mahdi, the Dervishes’ holy former leader.
In military circles, Winston was heavily criticized for these embarrassing revelations and particularly for charging General Kitchener with responsibility. In spite of, or perhaps because of, its controversial stance, The River War was a considerable success with the reading public.
By the time The River War was published in 1899, Churchill had resigned from the British Army. After Omdurman, he briefly returned to Bangalore in India and his former regiment, the fourth Hussars. He remained there long enough to help the regiment win a polo competition but in the third week of March 1899, he departed, never to see India again.
Please See Also: Adventure in South Africa (Winston Churchill's Escape from the Boers)
Sources
Featherstone, Donald F. Omdurman 1898: Kitchener's Victory in the Sudan (Praeger Illustrated Military History Series,)Westport Connecticut, Praeger Publishers, 2005) by Donald F. Featherstone ISBN-10: 0275986314/ISBN-13: 978-0275986315
Nicholl, Fergus: The Mahdi of Sudan and the Death of General Gordon by Fergus Nicoll (Sgtroud, Gloucesershire, UK: The History Press, 2005) ISBN-10: 0750932996/ISBN-13: 978-0750932998
Renaissance Man - International Churchill Society Canada
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Brenda Ralph Lewis - My interest in history dates from childhood. I am presently the author of 120 books and hundreds of articles, all on historical ...
