By Kevin Morrow
Just a few hours beyond sunset, the Anglo-Egyptian army stopped to rest, officers and men stretching out on blankets on the desert floor. A few hours later, orders to assemble whispered through the ranks. For half the night, the men would march in tight formation over the gravelly, uneven ground under the light of a waning moon.
A halt was called at 3:45 a.m. and, while some slept, others wondered in low voices—Were we there yet? Would the enemy fight or flee? If they resisted, how would we get over the high, thick palisade of thorns enclosing the enemy camp?
In fact, the enemy position along the Atbara River, a tributary of the mighty Nile River in east-central Sudan, lay barely a mile and a half away through the darkness. It was early morning on Good Friday, April 8, 1898, and this mixed fighting force of Englishmen, Scots, Egyptians, and Sudanese were facing one of the last remaining armies that had risen up in revolt in 1881 against Egyptian rule in Sudan.
When the rebel armies defeated the Egyptians and their British allies in 1885—capturing Khartoum, then Sudan’s capital and killing British garrison commander Gen. Charles Gordon—Anglo-Egyptian forces were forced to completely evacuate the country. Now, 13 years later, they were back to finish what they had started.
An army commanded by British General Horatio Herbert Kitchener spent months slowly, methodically pushing its way south, seizing riverfront towns with relatively little resistance. Along the Atbara River later that morning, though, they would face the first serious battle of the campaign.
At sunrise, British war correspondent George Steevens remembered, “the word came, and the men sprang up. In one superb sweep, nearly 12,000 men moved forward towards the enemy. All England and all Egypt, and the flower of the black lands beyond … all welded into one, the awful war machine went into action.”
The men could now see the enemy’s fortifications in the morning light as they advanced in a silence broken only by the crunch of boots on gravel and the low buzz of conversation among the ranks. They halted half a mile from the enemy’s front positions.
Then Kitchener’s artillery erupted in a thunderous barrage against the enemy camp. Steevens looked down at his watch. It was 6:20 a.m. He later wrote, “The battle that had now menaced, now evaded us for a month . . . had begun.”
Seventeen years earlier in 1881, Sudan stood on the edge of revolt. Egypt had annexed Sudan in 1820, ruling through brutal, corrupt Egyptian governors and soldiers to extract wealth from the country through excessive taxation and by dominating the lucrative gold and ivory trades. Even more lucrative for the Egyptians was Sudan’s centuries-old slave trade that they now appropriated to fulfill their own manpower needs on sugar and cotton plantations in the Nile Delta and to fill the ranks of their army.
In the 1840s, European mercenaries and traders began coming to Sudan to enrich themselves through the commodity and slave trades. The barbarity of the Sudanese slave trade horrified the diplomats, missionaries, and humanitarians who came in their wake, and soon, the British public began loudly demanding that Egypt take action to abolish it.
The abolitionists’ political leverage had grown through the 1870s as Egypt’s ruler, Isma’il, became increasingly indebted to the European investors helping him to modernize his country. So eager was he to ingratiate himself that he willingly responded to the public outcry over the slave trade by installing British provincial governors in Sudan tasked with destroying it. But the slave trade continued, as did the wretched poverty, drought, and brutal domination by foreigners that had troubled Sudan for decades.
Moved by the suffering of his people and the corruption of Islamic life, the Sufi Islamist cleric Muhammad Ahmad publicly declared himself the Mahdi al Muntazar (“the Expected Guide”) on June 29, 1881—as God’s messenger his mission was to redeem Sudan and the world for Islam through holy war. The local Egyptian governor tried to bribe him into quiescence by offering him a government stipend, but the Mahdi refused it. “He who follows me will be victorious,” he wrote to the governor. “He who does not believe in me will be purified by the sword.” Taking this as a declaration of war, the Egyptians went after Muhammad Ahmad and his growing army of Sufi cultists, Egyptian deserters, riverine farmers, and desert nomads known collectively as the “Dervishes.”
The fight did not go well for the Egyptians. Facing impending defeat and the loss of Sudan, they called for help from the British, who had effectively annexed Egypt in 1882. But instead of sending troops to defend Egypt’s empire, Britain decided that Egypt should evacuate Sudan.
Egypt’s military leadership balked, refusing to implement the mass evacuation for reasons of national pride and the utter infeasibility of carrying it out through a country without roads. The British, then, had to send one of their own to do the job, the man that Vanity Fair called “the grandest Englishman now alive,” British military hero General Charles “Chinese” Gordon. This failed too, ending in the killing of Gordon and the capture of Khartoum in January 1885 by the Dervishes after a year-long siege. Five months later, the Mahdi was dead of typhus, and he was immediately succeeded by his chief subordinate, Abdullahi ibn Muhammad at-Taishi, who turned Sudan into an even more brutal autocracy as the khalifa (or “successor” in Arabic, a title used by the 7th century successors of the prophet Muhammad).
Britain quickly lost interest in Sudan, but disillusioned British Army veterans of the Sudan campaign including Herbert Kitchener (who in 1892 became the “sirdar,” or commander-in-chief of the Egyptian Army) began waging a campaign aimed at moving the British government to approve a rematch in Sudan. During the war, Kitchener had served as the critical communications link between Gordon, who he had greatly admired, and British Army headquarters in Cairo. He considered Gordon’s death and the loss of Sudan as a personal source of shame and a national disgrace that cried out for vengeance. The British government, alas, maintained what one critic called “a policy of do nothing,” fueled at least in part by doubts that reconquering Sudan would be worth the cost in arms and men.
Meanwhile, events in Africa would soon force Britain to complete its unfinished business there. Europe’s great powers—Britain, Germany, France, Belgium, and Portugal—had begun scrambling to seize spheres of influence across the African continent. This, with growing French threats to territory along the southern reaches of the Nile closest to Egypt, forced Britain to strengthen its colonial presence for fear of losing territorial influence to its European competitors.
In May 1894, the British struck a critical agreement with the Belgians allowing them to “lease” the western bank of the White Nile from Fashoda in southern Sudan, to Lake Albert in Uganda. A couple of months later, the French claimed most of that territory as theirs, which constituted a threat to Britain’s publicly stated claim to the entirety of the Nile and its tributaries.
The Italian invasion of French-allied Abyssinia caused alarm in London when, in December 1895, and again in March 1896, the Abyssinians beat the Italians in battle. The national shame of the fall of Khartoum had not been enough to prod Britain into retaking Sudan, but successful French incursions into central Africa now forced Britain to act.
At 3 a.m. on March 13, 1896, Kitchener awoke to the sound of pebbles hitting his bedroom window at his official residence in Cairo. From the window he saw his night watchman standing beside his adjutant, Captain Jimmy Watson, who was waving a piece of paper.
Kitchener came down in his pajamas to find a cabled order from the British government in London via the Egyptian War Office. Reading by the watchman’s lamp, he saw he was directed to occupy the frontier post at the Sudanese town of Akasha, the southernmost point on British-held Egypt’s border with Sudan. So overjoyed was Kitchener that he actually began dancing a jig, lamp in one hand and the cable in the other. The British reconquest of Sudan was on, and two days later, the first troops left Cairo for its journey south.
Arriving in Sudan, Kitchener experienced the problems with troop and supply transport that had bedeviled the British Army a decade before. At that time, the only options were to go upriver by boat (impossible during the winter when water levels were low) or cross the broiling desert on foot. Kitchener opted for neither, directing the Royal Engineers to build a railway (starting on January 1, 1897) straight across the desert and then south down the Nile toward its confluence with the Atbara River. “Fighting the Dervish was primarily a matter of transport,” Winston Churchill, who accompanied Kitchener’s Sudan campaign as a subaltern in the 21st Lancers, triumphantly wrote, an assertion seemingly borne out by the campaign’s inexorable southward progress.
The railway resolved Kitchener’s logistical problems, cutting a trip of many days down to mere hours. The line also made the penetration of Sudan possible regardless of the season and independent of in-country resources.
Observing these events, Abdullahi concluded an attack on the Dervish capital down at Omdurman was fast approaching, and so forbade his subordinates from advancing further north than el Matamma, 120 miles south along the Nile from Berber. He also ordered his general Othman Diqna to merge his army at Adarama, 70 miles east of el Matamma along the Atbara River, with that of Othman’s superior commander, Mahmud Ahmad.
By November 1897, water levels on the Nile had begun their seasonal drop, restricting the activities of the gunboats that Kitchener had been using to observe and harass Dervish forces along the river. His forces in Berber, still numbering only 2,000, remained in the town without movement, while the railroad had only reached a little ways beyond Abu Hamad 120 miles north along the Nile. Failing to take into account the powers of swift concentration that the railway represented, Abdullahi concluded that this might be a good time to strike, so he gathered together Dervish forces numbering 60,000 for a general advance northward.
This moved Kitchener to initiate a concentration of Egyptian troops towards Berber in late December, and he also telegraphed Cairo to ask for a British brigade. English and Scottish troops were soon on their way to Sudan from Egypt and Malta as reinforcements. While these troops were in motion, Kitchener sent several infantry battalions to begin digging at a position between the Nile and Atbara rivers, which eventually became a major rear area fortification, Fort Atbara.
By January, Kitchener’s troops had concentrated themselves in camps along the Nile between Abu Hamad and Fort Atbara. Despite this looming threat, Abdullahi inexplicably disbanded his massive Dervish army on January 23, 1898, because of squabbling among his generals, and consequently, Mahmud decided to press forward with his much smaller force of 20,000.
At this critical juncture, a number of important decisions not taken gave Kitchener the space to make preparations that would affect the outcome of the coming fight. If Mahmud had advanced from el Matamma as early as mid-January, he could have retaken Berber, and if the larger army near Omdurman had taken the field, this would have become a certainty. At any rate, Mahmud sent his army across the Nile from el Matamma to Shendi on February 25 and moved north on March 18 with orders to attack Berber and destroy the British railhead. Mahmud had originally intended to head straight north towards the enemy, but once Kitchener’s gunboats began shelling Mahmud’s column, Mahmud changed directions, leading his army eastward into the desert toward the Atbara River.
Mahmud now put himself in a bind. He was further away from Berber than ever with inadequate water and food supplies, cut off from the wells seized and stores destroyed by his enemies, and worst of all, plagued by desertions. In response to Kitchener’s movements, Mahmud dug in along the Atbara River 40 miles southeast of its junction with the Nile in between the towns of an-Nakheila and el Fahada on March 20. In contrast to the barren lands through which the Nile passed, the banks of the Atbara were flanked by dense belts of green scrub and groves of palm trees, while the river bed itself was mostly dry sand dotted with small pools of water (the remains of the stream as it receded with the onset of hot weather). Mahmud’s camp had been built within this green riverine belt, enclosed on all sides for three miles by a zariba, a barrier built of mimosa thorns. The interior camp fortifications consisted of dried mud ramparts, log palisades, cross trenches, gun emplacements, squat forts, and clusters of camp huts or shelters (called tukals) made of palm branches or grass.
Kitchener’s army, which was rushing by train, camel, gunboat, and foot to come together, all reached camp at Kunur, five miles north along the Nile from the Atbara River, by March 16, and by March 20, the whole army was at Hudi on the Atbara, and then Ra’s el Hudi further downriver the next day. For more than a week, the troops sweltered in 115-degree heat, waiting and hoping for news of imminent battle while the sirdar sent out mounted reconnaissance patrols, which discovered Mahmud’s camp on March 30.
After thoroughly spying out Mahmud’s defenses and troop strength, Kitchener determined that the enemy was sufficiently weak to merit an attack. The main army left el Hudi April 4 for Abadar to get closer for one last reconnaissance sweep, and then on the morning of April 6th, the army reached Umm Dabiya, its last camp before going into battle. The men spent much of the next day cleaning the sand and dust from their rifles, loading their rifles with dum-dum bullets, resting, or writing letters home. Churchill observed that “all the camp throbbed with suppressed excitement” about the coming battle. Army commanders also took the time to relay Kitchener’s battle orders to the men, which was very revealing of Kitchener’s mindset on the eve of battle: “[The sirdar] only wishes to impress upon them two words: remember Gordon. The enemy before them are Gordon’s murderers.”
All was ready by the next evening, April 7th. The brigades (the British in the lead) formed up into squares and got underway in the red glow of the setting sun. For three hours, the onward march continued. At 9 p.m., the army arrived at Mutrus, where the men sat down to wolf down a meal of bran biscuits and water and a rest. For the next four hours, only the sentries remained awake, as well as the commanding officers, including Kitchener and his staff, who roamed the ranks to inspect the men in the darkness.
Quiet reigned over the camp until just after midnight when one of the Highlanders, who had been kicked by a mule, awoke and suddenly cried out in the darkness. The men jumped up, arms at the ready, “gazing,” Churchill said, “with fierce, eager eyes into the darkness” until learning that it had been a false alarm. Silence resumed.
At 1:15 a.m., now April 8—Good Friday—the men were roused from sleep. The march resumed under moonlight, the men miraculously keeping their formations despite the uneven ground. “There was a heavy muffled sound through the night that did not carry far, as of thousands of feet tramping slowly,” an unnamed Sunday Times of Sydney correspondent wrote, “the weird potency of a dimly seen, silent armed force.”
The army halted in front of the Dervish position at 3:45 a.m. Nothing was visible in the darkness but the enemy’s campfires a mile and a half away. The army then deployed into attack formation: on the far left, eight Egyptian cavalry squadrons, the British Brigade (1st Battalions of the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders, Royal Warwickshire, Seaforth Highlanders, and Lincolnshire Regiments) commanded by Maj. Gen. William Gatacre; the Egyptian Brigade (9th, 10th, and 11th Sudanese and 2nd Egyptian Battalions) commanded by Col. Hector MacDonald; and the 1st Egyptian Brigade (12th, 13th, 14th Sudanese and 8th and 15th Egyptian Battalions) under Col. John Maxwell. This force of 14,000 men was additionally supported by 24 artillery pieces, 4 Maxim guns, and a Royal Navy 24-pound rocket detachment.
The line advanced to within half a mile of the Dervish zariba, advancing through shallow gullies that twisted and turned in every direction. The sun began to rise, but all was still quiet. In the quickening light, the Dervishes finally spotted the approaching army. “There was a great stir in their encampment,” the Times reporter said. “Mounted men and men afoot hurried from point to point, and horsemen began to issue in hundreds from the south corner of the zariba and trot off to our left … Gradually, most of those who had been standing up and looking at us stepped back and down into their trenches.” Farther in the distance, groups of horsemen had taken their stand on higher places, watching the army’s movements. One Dervish who stood out, wearing a commanding general’s hat and jibbah (a loose-fitting linen shirt decorated with colored patches of cloth and worn over loose-fitting trousers) and holding a spear, stood watching on a raised fortification near the center of the Dervish lines.
Kitchener’s commanders chose two good artillery positions from which to shell enemy defenses, and at 6:20 a.m., all 24 guns came into action supported by fire from the rocket detachment, keeping up a thunderous bombardment for more than an hour.
Hardly 10 minutes into the bombardment, a massive cloud of dust rose within the zariba, followed by the appearance of 2,000 Dervish horsemen coming around the side of the zariba facing the army’s left wing. Dashing to intercept them, the Egyptian cavalry supported by heavy Maxim fire drove them back into the belt of palm trees, where they remained for some time as a silent threat to the British left flank. The bombardment continued, methodically pounding one section of the camp at a time from front to rear. The gunfire managed to break up the log palisades, and within half an hour, several straw huts had caught on fire. Throughout most of the artillery barrage, every Dervish infantryman ducked and remained hidden without firing back, or “lying doggo,” as the Tommies called it, except for a brief fusillade of Dervish gunfire directed at the artillery crews that quickly went silent again.
While the artillery barrage continued, Kitchener’s infantry began forming up into three columns for a frontal assault at 7:15 a.m.—the British brigade on the left, a mixed Sudanese-Egyptian brigade in the center, and a Sudanese brigade on the right. The Camerons were put at the front of the British brigade, equipped with rawhide gloves, bill hooks, blankets, sacks, and scaling ladders to be used for either ripping apart or surmounting the thorny zariba barrier.
The battle plan called for the columns to advance with the line out in front, suppressing enemy fire as they went. Once reaching the zariba, the front assault line would tear it apart, allowing the columns behind them to follow through the gaps and move rightward through the camp, clearing it with bayonets and gunfire.
“They stood still, waiting on the bugle,” Steevens wrote, “a line of khaki and dark tartan blending to purple, of flashing bayonets at the slope, and set, two-month bearded faces strained toward the zariba.” The expected bugle call for the general advance finally came at 7:40 a.m. A slow march began, accompanied by the music of the Scottish bagpipers, the English fife and drum players, and the Sudanese drummers, as well a tremendous shout which started on the right flank and was echoed by the men on the left.
At 300 yards out the enemy opened fire, but the infantry kept advancing, halting now and then to fire section volleys into the waiting Dervishes. The encampment was enveloped in clouds of gun smoke while spurts of dust kicked up by Dervish rifle bullets erupted from the pebbly sand around the advancing soldiers. About 100 attackers went down, picked up by stretcher bearers and doctors as the line passed, but they reformed their line and continued bearing down on the zariba.
Reaching the barrier, the advance halted. Amid shouts and cheers of “Come on, men!” and “Remember Gordon!,” the Camerons went to work ripping gaps in the wall of thorns. Their comrades provided covering fire aimed at the palisade and trenches beyond.
Soon, all the attacking columns had burst through. Advancing in successive rushes, they now encountered a stockade and a triple trench system, which they soon took, bayonetting, shooting, and parrying blows from the Dervish soldiers, which began running for cover further in, stopping every so often to turn and fire. In every hut and trench, more hidden Dervishes poured on fire, rushing out from among groups of wounded or jumping out of holes and other hiding places with guns, spears and swords. With the Highlanders still in the lead and English and Sudanese troops pressing in behind them, the southward advance through the camp toward the river continued unabated nonetheless, killing the enemy soldiers in their path. “It was,” Churchill said, “as if a wave had broken on a child’s castle in the sand, toppling over the weak walls, pouring in from every side, and sweeping the whole place clear and level.”
Kitchener’s soldiers wrought horrific carnage as they went, treading over “pits choked with dead and dying, among heaps of mangled camels and donkeys, among decapitated or eviscerated trunks, the ghastly results of the shell fire; women and little children killed by the bombardment or praying in wild terror for mercy, blacks chained in their trenches, slaughtered in their chains. Always onwards [they] marched with bayonets running blood, clothes, hands, and faces all besmeared … and the savage whistle of random bullets in their ears,” as Churchill remembered.
The fight inside the camp became utterly chaotic, “a horrible nightmare,” but not just for the Dervishes. Occasional lapses of fire discipline caused some troops to fire wildly in all directions, and the broken ground of the battlefield caused a number of friendly-fire casualties. Also, resistance from Dervish troops on the high ground in the middle of the camp—Mahmud’s command post was held by 1,000 of his chosen followers—almost annihilated the 11th Sudanese as they rushed it, taking 100 casualties. The many small interior forts, in which all defenders were killed, also made for difficult fighting.
Despite the tough Dervish resistance, the men broke through to the zariba on the river bank at about 8:20 a.m. The survivors of Mahmud’s army had escaped the enclosure and were fleeing across the dry river bed into the desert. The attackers opened fire, killing hundreds of fleeing Dervishes. Using the cover of the river bank, a few Dervishes made a brief last stand, but the Tommies broke through the mimosa and palm tree barrier with a shout, overwhelming them.
With that, the battle was over. The entire affair, from the opening artillery salvo to the breakthrough to the river behind the camp, took only two hours. Sporadic shots rang out as any remaining Dervishes hiding along the river bank fled to the desert on the other side. The firing finally ceased and the Sudanese troops ran in among the British—cheering wildly, waving their rifles aloft, and shaking hands with the Tommies, which the Tommies returned in kind. The Times correspondent commented, “Brothers in arms, blacks and whites, their fraternal unity has been cemented by mutual goodwill and close companionship in danger…. As Tommy himself has been overheard since to say, “Those bally blacks after all can fight a bit, you bet.”
As the troops moved back through the camp toward the open desert, Kitchener and his staff rode up, and were feted with loud cheers from the entire army, with helmets and tarbushes held aloft on rifles. Even the sirdar, known for his unemotional aloofness, was visibly moved by this tribute. “He was quite human for a quarter of an hour,” one officer remarked.
The crushing British victory at the Atbara, marked “a very Good Friday,” in Kitchener’s words. The Anglo-Egyptian army had lost 81 dead and 478 wounded in the fighting that day. The Dervish losses, though, were catastrophic: more than 3,000 killed within and around the zareba, and perhaps as many as another 5,000 were killed in the act of fleeing the battlefield over the days that followed. About 2,000 prisoners were taken—some of which subsequently defected to Kitchener’s army—as well as quantities of banners, war drums, rifles, 10 artillery pieces and all the baggage of the Dervish army. With the exception of Osman Digna (who fled with a large contingent of troops) and three other chiefs, all the important Dervish commanders were killed.
As for Mahmud, a Sudanese platoon found him sitting on a carpet in his hut after the battle, wearing the Dervish jibba uniform, his weapons at his side, “in the manner of defeated war chiefs who await death,” Steevens wrote. They brought him to Kitchener just as he was beginning to write his dispatches after the battle. Steevens was impressed, describing him as “the narrow-cheeked, high-foreheaded type … his expression was cruel, but high,” and he approached Kitchener head defiantly held erect but yet limping slightly, his short baggy drawers stained with blood from a bayonet thrust.
“Are you the man Mahmoud?” Kitchener asked.
“Yes, I am Mahmud, and the same as you [i.e., top commander],” Mahmud replied.
“Why did you come to make war here?”
“I came because I was told, the same as you.”
Throughout the rest of the day, the army reformed again outside the zariba and settled down for a rest, lit fires, and had some tea, biscuits and tinned meat. As the sun rose, the blast furnace heat became unbearable in the shadeless desert. The water in their containers was hot and was running out, while the water from the river was foul and muddy. Some of the Highlanders spread their kilts on the small, scrubby bushes to create shade, but their English, Sudanese, and Egyptian comrades had no such accoutrements to work with, so they just suffered throughout the daytime hours.
While the men were resting, the thinly staffed field hospital contingent were gathering up the wounded, who also suffered from the heat and the unavailability of medical equipment and supplies. Funerals were held for the dead at 3 p.m., consisting of burial in a shallow trench dug into the hard, stony sand on the battlefield accompanied by rifle volleys and a piper playing the tune “Lochaber No More.” The march back to the rear area at Umm Dabiya began at 4 p.m., and the troops arrived at 2 a.m. the following morning.
Kitchener returned to Berber, first stopping off at Fort Atbara to attend a thanksgiving service on Easter Sunday. Once in Berber, Kitchener ordered a victory parade of his troops, at the head of which Mahmoud was forced to march past the review stand where the sirdar and his staff sat watching, his hands bound behind his back and wearing a yoke. A flag preceded Mahmud bearing the Arabic inscription, “This is Mahmud, who said he would take Berber.”
The last Dervish force between the Anglo-Egyptian force and the Dervish capital at Omdurman was now destroyed. The way lay open. The Anglo-Egyptian army spent the summer in camp, but gathering again for one last final push, they wreaked a terrible slaughter on the only remaining Dervish army at Karari, seven miles north of Omdurman on September 2, killing 10,000 soldiers, an awful ending to 17 years of war.
Now the undisputed masters of Sudan, the British Army wreaked its vengeance on the Mahdi by destroying his tomb in Omdurman and throwing his bones into the Nile, saving the Mahdi’s skull to present to Kitchener as a grisly trophy. Kitchener, not knowing what to do with it, stored it in a Cairo warehouse until it was ultimately buried back in Sudan.
The French threat to the Southern Nile was also extinguished when a French military camp at Fashoda over 500 miles south of Omdurman peacefully disbanded itself in November 1898.
Abdullahi fled south after the defeat at Omdurman, and on November 25, 1899, the British captured and killed him. His top generals were imprisoned at Rosetta in the Nile Delta, and many of them, including Mahmud, died there.
And that was the end of the Mahdist war, but not of Sudan’s troubles. British rule ended in 1956, but this tortured nation has continued suffering under dictatorships, a dismemberment in 2011 into a southern black African state and a northern Arab state, and an ongoing bloody civil war in the north since 2023.
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