The London Illustrated News and The Graphic sent artists to Egypt and Sudan, and their efforts provided readers with representations of the conflict that appealed to the Victorian imagination. The prints were reproduced in popular histories published immediately after the war and thus enjoyed a life beyond the limits of an ephemeral newspaper illustration. This picture of one of Muhammad Ahmad’s supporters was titled “Follower of the False Prophet.”
Gladstone chose the wrong man for the job when he bowed to political, public, and press pressure to send Major-General Charles Gordon. Reappointed governor general in 1884, and accompanied solely by one staff officer, Lieutenant-Colonel J.D.H. Stewart, Gordon left England for Sudan, reached Khartoum on February 18, 1884, and took command of the garrison of 7,500 Egyptian and Sudanese soldiers in the city of over thirty thousand inhabitants, of whom a large percentage were slaves. Despite his instructions, Gordon was not the kind of man merely to report on local conditions or organize a retreat, the latter of which would have been logistically complicated in any event and would have taken at least six months with the river transport available to him because the number of Egyptian soldiers spread around Sudan, along with their dependents, expatriates, and other vulnerable people, totalled about twenty thousand individuals. One person at the time who recognized the magnitude of the problem was Britain’s consul general to Egypt (and its de facto ruler), Sir Evelyn Baring. He thought the policy of withdrawal was the best one, but was “not sure if the extreme difficulty of carrying it out, or the consequences to which it must almost invariably lead” were “fully appreciated at home.”53 In looking back on the events of 1884–85 in his memoirs, Baring felt that it was a mistake to send a Briton rather than a local person to Khartoum, especially such a famous one, because public opinion might necessitate committing a relief expedition to save him even though the government wanted to turn its back on the province.54
For his part, the inconsistent and erratic Gordon decided shortly after arriving in Khartoum that the challenge posed by Muhammad Ahmad had to be met through military action. His conclusion, sent in a brusque telegram to his superiors eight days after his arrival in the Sudanese capital, declared that, “if Egypt is to be quiet, Mahdi must be smashed up.”55 Although he continued to change his opinions frequently in the weeks that followed, the Sudanese governor general may have been emboldened to take such a firm stand to some extent because he assumed that Britain would be forced to commit troops despite Gladstone’s unwillingness to do so. At the same time, Charles Gordon’s important friend, Garnet Wolseley, victor of Tel el Kebir, disagreed with Gladstone’s policy and thought that evacuating Sudan would be “the worst of ignorant, cowardly folly” and assumed that even an evacuation would require the help of British forces, although he probably believed that the British could launch a successful campaign that would result in the long-term occupation of the territory.56 General Gordon’s views ought not to have surprised anyone: before leaving England he had stated his opposition to abandoning Sudan, worrying that the revolt could inflame the entire Muslim world if it were not crushed. While favouring Sudanese independence, or at least a weaker Turco-Egyptian presence in the province, he believed a ruthless Mahdist dictatorship represented the wrong answer to the Sudanese question. Other officials, such as Baring, hoped the situation could be stabilized at least until the garrisons could be evacuated by employing someone else to govern the province in the interim. However, the only individual who seemed like a possible candidate in place of Gordon was a notorious and unsavoury anti-British slave dealer, Zobeir Pasha, and Sir Evelyn could not generate any enthusiasm for the man in London, so Gladstone ended up sending Charles Gordon to Khartoum.
Despite wanting to turn his back on Sudan, Gladstone’s concern about the security of its Red Sea ports led him to land sailors and marines from Royal Navy warships in Suakin in February 1885, and then to dispatch soldiers to augment this force. The British next won battles over the Mahdists at El Teb and Tamai early in 1884 in an attempt to disperse the region’s hostile forces, although the long-term value of these victories was small. Looking ahead, Suakin also might serve as a point for evacuating Egyptian forces from Sudan, as the port was accessible via a caravan route from Berber on the Nile, and such an initiative might obviate the need to dispatch British troops to Khartoum. Yet while the rebellion’s leaders suffered defeat in northeastern Sudan, Muhammad Ahmad’s armies won victories over Egyptian troops in other encounters in 1884, cut the telegraph line to Khartoum, and began their famous siege of the Sudanese capital in March of that year. As the months passed, they increased their pressure on the city as various tribes joined the revolt, eventually swelling insurgent numbers around the capital into the tens of thousands. Then, late in May, the rebels captured Berber, which likely would make an evacuation northwards from Khartoum impossible after that date without the intervention of the British army.
“The Camel Corps for the Nile Expedition”: the Sudan War would pit a small modern British army, equipped with accurate rifles, artillery, and early machine guns, against one the world’s last great medieval-style forces, armed mainly with swords, spears, and shields.
William Gladstone was enraged that Charles Gordon had not fulfilled his assigned tasks in the four months he had been in the Sudanese capital. However, the prime minister, with a slow reluctance, bowed to intense pressure to try and save the popular hero. (Gordon probably could have escaped Khartoum on his own with a few followers, or even with a portion of the garrison, but his highly developed sense of honour prevented him from abandoning the thousands of other people for whom he felt responsible.) About six months after the siege began, at the beginning of August 1884, the prime minister obtained parliamentary approval to finance a British expedition to rescue the governor general trapped in Khartoum in what was developing quickly into something of a forlorn hope. Nevertheless, the timing was advantageous in terms of providing the army with the opportunity to use the rising waters of the Nile to hasten movements upriver in the autumn because the river was much easier to navigate at that time in comparison with the annual period of declining waters or “low Nile.”
Military authorities had been studying how to overcome the challenge of moving upriver to Khartoum for some months before the government’s decision to attempt a rescue. A number of senior army and navy officers wanted to build a railway between Suakin and Berber to advance an expedition and to create the means for maintaining long-term control over Sudan. Yet, the route — whether by rail or overland — was difficult in the extreme, its life-giving and essential wells could be destroyed or poisoned, and it was vulnerable to attack by the Mahdists, who preserved their capacity to fight after their battles with the British. Yet it was attractive because the 750-kilometre route from Suakin to Khartoum, via Berber, represented the shortest practical distance between a port the British could control and the besieged capital. Nevertheless, Garnet Wolseley, now a full general and titled Baron Wolseley of Cairo after his 1882 victory, preferred a different plan to the railway scheme, and it was his idea that the army would adopt. He wanted to send a force up the Nile from Cairo to Khartoum, either on the river or along its banks, with Alexandria serving as the primary port connection to the outside world and with the northern Sudanese market town of Wadi Halfa (called “Bloody Halfway” by British soldiers) serving as a base for operations in the rebellious province. The distance between Alexandria and Khartoum was almost three thousand kilometres, but the route boasted far better communications as well as something of a transportation infrastructure