Fashoda

In the late 19th century, the British Army had found itself divided into two camps. One group was headed by General Wolosely and was most often referred too as the “Africans.” The other group, centered around Lord Roberts, was called the “Indians.” Their names said it all in that Wolosely’s crew was of the mind that the British military should center it’s efforts on Africa while Roberts and his people thought that India was a wiser choice. Each faction competed for resources and the animosity between them even filtered as far down as social situations. General Horatio Kitchener belonged to neither of these factions.

Kitchener was considered to be an outsider by all, equally detested by Africans and Indians alike. The man certainly earned that distinction in that his quirks were many and his social graces (that he chose to display to most people) were few. There could also be the added element, the very thing that allowed Kitchener to rise through the ranks, that Kitchener was usually successful. In such a formal setting as the British Officer Corps it is easy to imagine that a man who can “get away with it” would be despised and that his talents would spark jealousy.

It is no secret, to any national leader, that men such as Kitchener can be useful. Their reputations are as such that they can commit the most heinous of acts and most people will just shrug their shoulders and go, “well what did you expect?” One of the most un-talked of realities in politics is that there will be instances where a down right dirty blow is the only option available. For that reason, men like Kitchener will always be around.

Such men are usually considered insane and some really are. Very few are looked on favorably in the history books when the day is done. One of Kitchener’s predecessors, Arthur Wellseley the 1st Duke of Wellington, is probably one of the few exceptions to the rule. He and Kitchener shared a great many traits in common. Neither man “thought in the box” and both men were ripe with personal inadequacies that made them socially unacceptable to their peers. Wellington only faired better because he was the man to beat Napoleon. For that reason his quirks were smoothed over by the public mindset and his legend, more than the man, achieved the status of near sainthood.

For Kitchener there was no Napoleon to beat. In 1898 he only had Abdullah al-Taashi. Even with no background, Abdullah sounds to be a second rate nemesis at best. He was that and not even the man the British really wanted, that man being, the self proclaimed prophet “The Mahdi” Muhammad Ahmad. The Mahdi had been the man who ordered the execution of General “China” Gordon some eighteen years before. In 1898 the Mahdi was well beyond the British grasp for the man was dead (although Kitchener would try anyway).

Kitchener had arrived in Egypt in 1897 where he was treated like royalty by the Egyptian leadership (as a present they gave him an island to call his own). By the end of the year he was moving south, along the Nile, with a force of some eight thousand British regulars and a mixed force of seventeenth thousand Sudanese and Egyptians. This was an army of unheard of size in colonial warfare when you consider that some garrisons, of European possessions, numbered as few as seven men.

It is a common misconception that the Europeans conquered the rest of the world by means of military and technological superiority. The last outright military invasion that resulted in the conquest of a non-European power was made by Francisco Pizarro in 1532. He was emulating the first such conquest made by Cortez in 1518. These are the only two out right military invasions on record. Even in the cases of Pizarro and Cortez, both conquerors were aided by large numbers of indigenous troops who had axes to grind.

It is rather strange that the common view today, that the European Armies could walk over whomever they chose, was not as common in the late 19th century. There were those who believed it at the time, however, many of them would regret it. Less than twenty years before Kitchener marched into the Sudan, another British Army marched into Zululand where they were slaughtered, almost to a man, by a Zulu force that was mostly armed with spears. The only reason why such great losses were rare was because that such engagements were as well. The fact is that European styled militaries did not fair any better or worse against indigenous armies than they did against each other. The Europeans did have a technological edge but, as this goes to show, that is not always a decisive advantage.

European domination of the rest of the world was primarily achieved by political and economic means. When war did occur it was usually to aide these policies and not for the purposes outright conquest which was, in most cases, beyond European abilities. This was aided by the fact that, in most cases, the Europeans were supplanting rulers of area’s who were foreigners themselves and, as a result, the Europeans most often received aid from the local population. This was still true in 1898, as exampled by the afore mentioned Quing Dynasty who were not Chinese but, in fact, Manchurians. Such distinctions were sometimes not even recognized by westerners but, to the local populations, the differences were vast.

These were the same reasons why so many European garrisons were so small. A larger force was not needed because when military force was required there was usually a local contingent who were more than willing to fight for their overlords. If one local faction revolted then the European soldiers recruited troops from their rivals. It was an exercise in playing off one group of subjects on the other and made all the easier because so much of the worlds population had never known anything else. 

This was why Kitchener’s force was unprecedented in size. The British had already faced too many reverses and defeats in the Sudan. It was also recognized in London that if the Mahdists were not subdued then Britain would be effectively blocked and the French would win the race to build the transcontinental railroad. Boulanger’s efforts to consolidate his presence in North Africa had put pressure on the British. They were now in a hurry and their fears were not unfounded. After all, the British didn’t reach the crossroads first.

Abdullah al-Taashi’s army was substantially larger than the Anglo-Egyptian Army he faced. He had close to fifty-thousand men at his command. He did have some troops that were every bit as well armed as those of his enemy but, they did not represent the bulk of his force. That was not his biggest problem though. The main problem with the Mahdist army was that it suffered from the very same thing that allowed Europeans to dominate so much of the world. Al-Taashi’s army was drawn from many different tribes that had no more love for each other than they did the British. This made command and control of the army rather difficult and was detrimental to morale in the extreme.

This weakness would reveal itself, over and over again, for most of the campaign. It was only as Kitchener’s army approached Khartoum, the Sudanese capital, that al-Taashi was able to consolidate enough of his forces in order to mount a serous defense. It took that much of a threat to the Mahdi’s to get many of them to fight side by side. By this time it was too late.

Kitchener defeated al-Taashi’s army at the battle of Omdurman on the 2nd of September. The fighting was almost a homage to an era that was soon to be blown entirely away. Kitchener’s army did make liberal use of Maxim Machineguns at the battle but, this was about the only similarity to 20th Century warfare. There were cavalry charges and battle lines that would have not looked all that unfamiliar to Arthur Wesley. The next battle would be somewhat different.

Al-Taashi escaped the battle along with many of his soldiers. They were unable to hold the capital but not yet ready to give up. Kitchener may have pursued them in force and ended the fighting within months. He was not able to do so because he received word of an even greater threat. A French army was in the Sudan and it had taken up fortified positions near the small village of Fashoda.

At around the same time that Kitchener had arrived in Egypt, another European military force was landing on the east coast Africa. This force was French and it was commanded by none other than Christian de Bonchamps (the very man who had opened up communications between Boulanger and the Americans). In comparison to the size of Kitchener’s army it was tiny. It consisted of barely three hundred men. When augmented with native levies and some African troops, Bonchamps would have a force of nearly a thousand.

The French had received rights of transit from the independent Kingdom of Ethiopia. Bonchamps had orders to march overland from French Somaliland and link up with two other French columns that he should encounter in the southern Sudan. Once accomplished he should have a force of nearly fifteen hundred men at his disposal and this was considered more than adequate to give France control over the area. At that point, Boulanger could claim it as a French Protectorate and the race against Britain would be won.

When the plan was hatched in Paris it sounded good. The Liotard expedition had already accomplished most of it’s objectives and split into two separate columns. The first, and larger of the two, was still at Brazzaville on the upper Congo. The second one had proceeded towards Chad where there were already some French outposts. It was at one of these outposts that the orders, to divert to the Sudan, were received by a twenty-five year old Major named Jean-Baptiste Marchand. The orders to the main column, still at Brazzaville, would not arrive until well after it was all over with.

Marchand was leading a force of some one hundred and fifty sharpshooters, seventy five cavalrymen who were either mercenaries or Muslim, and fourteen native levees.  It was more than sufficient  to handle any opposition he might encounter in the Congo or upper Niger regions. It was wholly inadequate against either the Mahdi’s or the British. This did not seem to matter to the planners in Paris who thought of Marchand’s column as little more than reinforcements for the Bonchamps column that, had been specifically raised for this mission. If Marchand did not even make it then nobody in Paris would loose any sleep. At the time that the orders left Paris, nobody there was even sure if the dispatches would ever find Marchand. 

The small French column departed from Chad and not only made it to Fashoda first but, they were the only one, of the three French columns, that ever would.  

It is generally believed by many that both Kitchener and Marchand had no idea of the state of the world at the time of their encounter. This is completely untrue. Marchand had left Chad before the onset of the crisis but, he had received, and replied to, any number of dispatches after establishing his post at Fashoda in mid-July. While he could not have known the details he was well aware that tensions were high. Kitchener, on the other hand, had detailed reports of everything going on, in the world at large, before he departed Khartoum with a flotilla of gunboats on the 10th of September. In fact, those dispatches were exactly why he acted so quickly upon hearing about Marchand.

The event that struck Kitchener with such a sense of urgency was none of the tension that was building in any of the aforementioned places. It came from a seemingly mundane report that arrived not long before the British became aware of Marchand. This report came to Kitchener, via Cairo, from the island of Cyprus that is located just off the Turkish coast.

The Ottoman Empire, in the late 1890’s, was a European state in all but look. It had been accepted by the European powers as an equal member, of their little club of Empires, as far back as the 1850’s during the Crimean War. The emphasis for this had little to do with any progressive relations between the Muslim and Christian worlds, but rather, due to Britain’s apprehension over Russian expansion into the area. Regardless of the reasons, the Ottoman empire really was a modern state and being subjected to all the social pressures that Europe was.

There were any number of ethnic minorities in the Sultan’s empire and some were less liked than others. Pressure with one of these groups, the Armenians, had resulted in a series of bloody purges. The measures only served to backfire against the Sultan and he was ousted from power in a coup that was perpetrated by a loose alliance of his enemies. These groups would collectively come to be known as the “Young Turks.” They were mostly secular, pro modernization, and unfortunately for the Armenians, the Young Turks were like a great many radicals of their day. The pogroms against the Armenians only intensified and this eventually sparked public backlash, in Europe, against these would be reformers.

The result was an international blockade of the Turkish coast. Several nations participated in it but the bulk of the forces came from the French and Royal navies. They both used Cyprus as their base for this operation. The French had long been considering dropping out. Public sentiment, in regards to the Armenians, had been on the wane for some time. Boulanger’s increasingly ambitious foreign policy was putting quite a strain on his navy. These two reasons combined and the result was that the French chose to redeploy their ships.

In reality, Boulanger had ordered his ships to cease patrols and return to Marseille as far back as January of 98. It was his cabinet who had decided to delay the order, until July, for diplomatic reasons that are far to many to go into. In theory at least, the French ships should have left Cyprus sometime in late summer. That was not to happen because, despite what some might think, dictators can be at the mercies of their bureaucracies as much democratically elected leaders. In the case of the Boulanger Regime it was never more true. Despite all of Boulanger’s attempts to rid himself of the massive ministries of the Third Republic, even he could not accomplish this feat. In fact, they all grew substantially in size during his reign.

The orders for the withdrawal of the French Squadron at Cyprus did not actually make it’s way to Cyprus until September 2nd and, by that time, the crisis was starting to build. The orders had been temporarily countermanded by the French Admiral, in Marseille, who wished the Cypriot Squadron to remain on hand just a little while longer so that they could gather some needed intelligence. On paper, in Paris, the ships were already steaming home while in reality they were still on station in Cyprus.

The order did not just have to go through the French Admiralty either. Another set of the orders were delivered to the Foreign Ministry, so that, by protocol, the other participants in the blockade could be notified. Unlike the French Navy, and quite out of character, the Foreign Office actually delivered the notifications, to the respective embassies, in a timely manner. For some reason, that is still unknown, the British Embassy in Paris received the notification but never did anything more with it than requesting reports from the Royal Navy as to the disposition of the French warships in Cyprus. This was in July, of course, and because the ships never left the blockade it is quite possible that the British Embassy thought the message in error. By September when the ships did leave, the notification had been either lost or forgotten about. To the Royal Navy, it looked as if the French had just pulled up anchor and left without so much as a goodbye.

The situation in London, in early September, could naturally be described as one of extreme panic on the part of most government officials. As far as anyone knew at the time, Kitchener, was well in command of the situation in the Sudan so he was the least of their worries. The departure of the French ships, while not considered overly important to the situations in Alaska and South Africa, were thought to be sufficiently important to Kitchener’s operations. He was notified of the developments via the normal channels and received the intelligence on the 8th.

From Kitchener’s point of view, he was now confronted with multiple threats from a military power that was starting to look more and more like they were behind any number of offensive operations against the British Empire. Kitchener had been informed of the Bonchamps expedition and, as far as he knew, it was Bonchamps who was camped out at Fashoda. Kitchener still had a sizable Mahdist force in the area and he was not completely sure of their exact disposition. When you add all of that to the possibility of a squadron of French Cruisers steaming around the eastern Mediterranean, his position was starting to look untenable. If the French chose to strike at Alexandria, or the Canal, Kitchener could very well find himself in the same position as Gordon had been, back in 80.

 In very typical Kitchener fashion, he decided his best defense was a good offense. Even if all of this French movement was a part of some coordinated opening strike against him, they would still not be able to adequately coordinate it while so spread apart. All the while he was sitting, concentrated, in a central area and, while he could not stay here very long if his supply lines were disrupted, he could still get his licks in before the French could do very much.

When Kitchener’s force departed Khartoum, they also effectively left their lines of communications behind them. The Mahdists may have been religious zealots who were throw backs to the 12th century but, al-Taashib had no problem at all using the technology of the 19th.  He had strung up as much telegraph wire as he could and Kitchener had inherited it after Omdurman. There were no lines as far south as Fashoda however. In fact, there were no lines anywhere south of Khartoum. Kitchener would have to rely on his river boat force for communications and that was now crucial given the increased threat to the Egyptian coastline.

Marchand actually detected the sizable British force long before it arrived. Local Bedouins had seen the gunboats steaming south on the river and knew they could sell the information to the French. The early warning did not help Marchand in any way. His seventy cavalry and fourteen levies all abandoned him that night. It left him with a force of just over one hundred and thirty men. Seven had died since he had left Chad and the rest were either sick or injured. The British were approaching with a small Cavalry contingent and a sizeable force of infantry that were all British regulars. Including the riverboat sailors, Kitchener had nearly three thousand men at his disposal when they landed within sight of the French fort on the 17th.

There was a young British soldier who (he was actually with the column in the official capacity as a civilian reporter) had been serving with the 21st Lancers since the campaign had begun. His name was Winston Churchill and his writings on this war have been a valuable source. Not only did he serve through most of it but, he got to see the conflict from so many different perspectives. Besides being with Kitchener at Fashoda, he had also been in Cuba the year before. While there, he had actually managed to fight along side Spanish troops and Cuban rebels, at different times of course. He also spent some time, while in Havana, in the company of the American artist, Frederick Remington, who was working for the newspaperman, William Randolph Hurst.

Churchill’s views on Cuba, that he had published in a number of newspapers back in England, almost seem prophetic today. He believed that the Cuban people should be free, although he would not publish that until he was back home in London, and firmly believed that a war between the US and CS would result from the situation if nothing was done about it. He was right although, it would be some years before anyone acknowledged it.

Since Churchill’s French was impeccable he was sent over to the French fort under a flag of truce. There are those who suggested that Kitchener picked the young Lieutenant because of his press credentials and that he wished some sort of ill will on the boy. After the battle of Omdurman, Kitchener had had the Mahdi Abdullah dug up out of his grave so that he, Kitchener, could drink wine from the skull of the man who had killed China Gordon. This story has been disputed but, the fact is, that it was widely reported in the newspapers back in England where Kitchener took a sound beating for it. After that, Kitchener had ejected all of the reporters in his command. Churchill was the exception because he was also a soldier on detached duty from his regiment. The idea that Kitchener thought the French might possibly harm Churchill is, of course, absurd. 

The young English Lieutenant spoke directly with Marchand, delivered Kitchener’s ultimatum, and then reported back. He informed Kitchener’s aide-de-camp, Horace Smith-Dorrien, of Marchand’s request for time to consider the offer. By this time Kitchener had had enough time to count the enemy in front of him and fully understood the advantage he had. He also understood what Marchand was undoubtedly thinking. Bonchamps was still out there and could show up at any minute. Even with Bonchamps, the French would still be heavily outnumbered but Marchand held both a fortified position and the high ground. With reinforcements he might have a fighting chance of holding out so playing for time was Marchand’s best course action. Kitchener turned down the request and repeated his call for the French to unconditionally stack arms.

Once again, what should have been a positive factor was working against Marchand. The possibility of relief was only sealing his fate. All the while his alleged reinforcements were almost back to French Somaliland, the point at which they had departed. Bonchamps column had ran into trouble almost from the start. More than once they had found themselves having to fight local tribes for a variety of reasons. They found the mountainous terrain between Ethiopia and Sudan far to rouged to traverse with the equipment they had. The final straw came when the Ethiopians had finally reached the limits of their patience and rescinded the French right of transit. Bonchamps was in no shape to take on the entire Ethiopian army so he beat a hasty retreat back to French territory and unknowingly abandoned Marchand to his fate.

On September the 18th, 1898, the same day that Tirpitz departed Manila en route to the China coast, the first shots of the new war were fired from British gunboats, on the Nile River, near a little African village that no one had ever heard of before now. In what is possibly the final irony of the crisis, that led to the war, the first battle was surprisingly bloodless. The British bombarded the French positions for six hours at which point Marchand struck his colors and surrendered the fort. No one had been killed although one British sailor suffered from sun stroke.

News of the engagement reached the capitals of the world on the evening of September the 24th. This was within hours of the arrival of news about the German landings at Kiaochow. On the Morning of the 25th, the newspapers in Europe had crowded headlines about the battles of Fashoda, Kiaochow, and Tientsin. The house of cards collapsed.