QUOTE OF THE MONTH (bonus)

'Charles Neufeld, a German arms dealer waiting for deliverance after twelve years as a prisoner of the Khalifa, heard apocalyptic sounds from the city gaol. For months he had been shackled in irons. Now he was half-smothered in dust and stones. The explosion sounded to him and his fellow prisoners “like the screeches of the damned let loose”. The gaolers climbed on to the roof and reported that the “devils” came from boats (in fact, they came from 5-inch howitzers) which had steamed up to Halfeya, a few miles north of the city. Later that afternoon, Neufeld was told that the bombardment had failed … By the mercy of Allah, the boats of the infidel had been driven off … and sunk. Neufeld collapsed into despair. But that night, he lay awake and heard an eerie sound – the pat-pat-pat of bare feet as thousands of men fled silently through the narrow streets to escape the English invaders …

Despite the bombardment of the Mahdi's tomb, morale seemed excellent. The Khalifa's troops fired a volley of shots, as though to celebrate a victory. It was impossible to hide the scale of desertions; yet the great majority of the Khalifa's vast army stood firm. There must have been 50,000 white-robed Ansar there in the plain, banners flying, spears and swords flashing in the fierce sunlight.'

'What a spectacle, [Winston Churchill] wrote later, “Never shall I see such a sight again” … the Khalifa's army was marching swiftly towards him … concentrated on a front only four miles wide, under hundreds of wildly waving banners. “The whole side of the hill seemed to move”, wrote Churchill later, “and the sun, glinting on many hostile spear-points, spread a sparkling cloud”.

Behind Jebel Sugham, the black hill at Churchill's back, and invisible to the Mahdists, rose the dust of 25,000 men, six brigades of [General] Kitchener's British and Egyptian infantry …'

'For [Kitchener] the war had began thirteen years earlier, on 26 January 1885, that day of shame for Britain, when Khartoum fell and Gordon died [Kitchener had been a major in the failed relief column]. Now it was time for them to repay that debt and wipe the slate clean. So he had sternly reminded his men on 7 April that year, on the eve of the battle of Atbara: “The Sirdar [Kitchener] is absolutely confident that every officer and every man will do his duty, he only wishes to impress upon them two words: 'Remember Gordon'. The enemy before them are Gordon's murderers.” '

'About an hour after dawn on 2 September, the cavalry patrols reported that the Dervish army was advancing straight towards the British camp. Within half an hour their flags and spears broke the skyline over the black hill to the south-west. … At 6.50 a.m. British field-guns began to knock holes in the advancing line, giving the cue to the Egyptian batteries, and the gunboats on the river to the east. Armageddon had begun.'

'Two divisions of the Khalifa's army (about 6,000 men under Osman Digna and 8,000 men under the Emir Osman Azrak) put their faith in Allah and charged straight at the British camp. They wore the holy uniform of the patched jibbah (plus, in some cases, chain mail). They advanced in an enormous crescent, brandishing their spears and their texts from the Koran, and chanting, like the muezzin from the minaret, “La Illah illa'uah wa Muhammad rasul Allah” (“There is but one God and Muhammad is his Prophet”). The shells knocked holes in their lines, but the holes were soon filled. From 2,000 yards the British infantry started volley-firing with their smokeless Lee-Merfords. Still the Dervishes came on steadily, now running, now walking. The Maxims then joined in. At 800 yards' range the Egyptian and Sundanese battalions followed with their Martini-Henrys, firing black powder. There was pandemonium in the British camp, and the enemy was lost in the smoke … British infantry were firing volleys shoulder to shoulder, with the front rank kneeling and the rear rank standing … As the smoke cleared, shot and mangled, 2,000 men at least [lay] in crumpled heaps. Thousands more were retreating, wounded. Not a single man had survived to reach the British firing line.'

'Yet only a quarter of the Khalifa's army had been fully engaged. The Army of the Green Flag, 20,000 men under Emir Wad el Sheikh and Ali Wad Helu, had vanished northwards. After a tussle with the cavalry and the camel corps, they had slipped behind the Karan Hills, two miles north of the British camp. And where was the Army of the Black Flag: 17,000 men led by the Khalifa himself and his brother Yakob?'

'[Kitchener] gave orders for the 21^st Lancers to reconnoitre the plain, followed by the army, advancing in echelon of brigades from the left.'

'Their [21^st Lancers] CO, Colonel Martin, insisted on a cavalry charge. The regiment had been mocked for having no battle honours, and now they got a bellyful. For a few extraordinary moments, Winston Churchill felt the stunning shock of the collision between 400 shouting horsemen and 2,000 yelling [Dervish] infantry.'

'There was now no cavalry to reconnoitre. So Kitchener's two front brigades marched briskly off … unaware that the rear brigade – the 1^st Egyptian Brigade of Brigadier-General Hector MacDonald – was a mile behind the rest, and cut off by nearly 40,000 Dervishes … “Fighting Mac” was a veteran of Majuba (where he was supposed to have knocked out a Boer with his bare fist). He was a square-jawed Scot, promoted from the ranks of the Gordons … he sent off a galloper, a messenger to tell the Sirdar about their predicament. The galloper got short change. “Can't he see that we're marching on Omdurman?” was the Sirdar's reply. “Tell him to follow on”.

Fortunately, something made the great man change his mind. In a few minutes the two British brigades and the other Egyptian brigades wheeled away from Omdurman and swung west to protect MacDonald's left flank. Still more fortunately, the two surviving Mahdist armies … were unable to coordinate their attacks … So MacDonald was able to parry each in turn. First he smashed down a charge from the west: a yelling line of white-robed figures, under a huge black banner, crumpled and mangled by the combined Martini-Henrys, Maxims and field-guns firing case shot. Then he smashed down a charge from the north, and drove the men of the Green Flag back to the shelter of Karari, pursued by Broadwood's Egyptian cavalry.

It was time to resume the march on Omdurman … The enemy [Kitchener] remarked, had had a “good dusting”.'

'[Kitchener] had destroyed the Khalifa's army and added a vast new territory to the British Empire, nominally in partnership with Egypt. Only one thing detracted from the completeness of his victory: taking a fresh camel, the Khalifa had escaped with a trusty band … But all relics of the Mahdi were scatted to the winds.

Four days after the battle, Kitchener order the dome, cupola, plinth and every trace of the Mahdi's tomb to be razed to the ground.'

'Kitchener set the seal on the recovery of Khartoum. On 4 September the gunboats steamed across the river for a memorial service to be held in front of the ruins of Gordon's palace. The upper storey had crumbled away, and so had the famous staircase where Gordon had died … Twin flags, the Union Jack and the red flag of the Khedive, were solemnly hoisted on the broken wall and twin national anthems … crashed out across the river front. The service ended with Gordon's favourite hymn, “Abide With Me”, played by the 11^th Sudanese. And Kitchener, the man of stone, impervious to suffering or triumph, found he had no voice to dismiss the parade. Tears swelled the large pale-blue eyes, smudged the dust on his cheeks – tears of happiness and gratitude, he explained to his astonished staff … After thirteen years he had redeemed his country's honour. Gordon was avenged.

Three thousand miles away in Berlin, the Kaiser was writing to his grandmother, Queen Victoria, to congratulate her on the British victory. She too was thinking of the place where “poor Gordon met his cruel fate”.'

The above extracts are from The Scramble for Africa, by Thomas Pakenham, and give an account of the Battle of Omdurman (1898).

Had 'Fighting Mac' and Kitchener been less careful, and had the Dervishes been able to coordinate their attacks, then 'Fighting Mac' and his men may have met the same fate as the British army at Isandlwana at the hand of the Zulus January 1879.

General Gordon, who had been sent to Khartoum to organise the Anglo-Egyptian withdrawal from Sudan, was killed by the Mahdists at Khartoum. His severed head was wedged between branches in a tree to be pelted with stones by passers-by.

Joseph Chamberlain, the Colonial Secretary, who was in the USA at the time of the Battle of Omdurman, said to a New York reporter: 'That settles it for all time. Gordon is avenged.'

There are two lessons to be learned from this. First, the struggle against ISIS and other sects of radical Islam has been described by both British and American politicians as being a 'generational struggle' (see the English Rights Campaign item dated the 24 March 2016). As a point of historical fact, that is untrue. Extremists have been popping up in north Africa and the Middle East for centuries and are likely to continue to do so for centuries more. This is an ongoing problem.

Second, despite the long wars in Egypt and the Sudan, there were no dervishes committing atrocities in Britain, or any other Western country. Yet Radical Islamist extremists are doing so now. The cause of this wave of terrorism and violence is not simply Radical Islam – otherwise we would have experienced the same in the 19^th century. The immediate cause of the atrocities across many Western countries today is that the Islamist extremists are being brought into Western countries, and are even being transported across the Atlantic. It is those who advocate mass immigration, those who are forever demanding that ever more 'refugees' be brought over to the West, and the politically correct, who are to blame. It is their monopoly on governance that has ended the country as being a safe place for the nation to live.