Battle of Omdurman, 1898: rifles and Maxims on the Nile

No battle of the age of empire showed more starkly what industrial firepower could do. John P. Dunn calls Omdurman the clearest case of science against pluck: tens of thousands of brave men with spears, swords and old rifles against machine guns, quick-firing artillery and gunboats. In a single morning the state the Mahdi had founded was broken, and the Sudan passed under British rule.²

Background: the Mahdi and the fall of Khartoum

In 1881 a religious teacher from Dongola, Muhammad Ahmad, proclaimed himself the Mahdi, the divinely guided one sent to restore Islam, and rose against the Egyptian government of the Sudan. Britannica notes that the movement drew on wide discontent and that European writers of the time were wrong to call it a revolt of dervishes. His followers, the ansar, destroyed one Egyptian army after another and captured modern rifles and artillery. In January 1885 they stormed Khartoum and killed General Charles Gordon, sent to evacuate the Egyptian garrisons.³

The Mahdi died a few months later, in June 1885, and his successor, the Khalifa Abdallahi, ruled the Mahdist state for thirteen years from Omdurman, the Mahdi's capital across the Nile from the ruins of Khartoum. Britannica and the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica both describe him moving whole tribes into the city to keep the Nile valley under his eye.⁴

In 1896 the British government sent an Anglo-Egyptian army under Herbert Kitchener, the Sirdar or commander of the Egyptian army, back up the Nile. Britannica gives a strategic reason, to keep the Nile waters out of French hands. Kitchener advanced slowly and methodically, building a railway across the desert behind him to carry his supplies, and beat the Mahdist armies at Dongola in 1896 and on the Atbara on 8 April 1898. By the end of August he was ready for the final march on Omdurman.⁵

Armies and commanders

On 24 August 1898 Kitchener had about 26,000 men: a British division of two brigades and an Egyptian division of four. BritishBattles.com counts 8,200 British and 17,600 Egyptian and Sudanese soldiers, 44 guns and 20 Maxim machine guns, supported by ten gunboats on the river mounting 36 more guns and 24 Maxims. The British infantry carried the Lee-Metford magazine rifle; Dunn notes that the Egyptian battalions still had the older single-shot Martini-Henry.⁶

Against them the Khalifa gathered the largest army the Mahdist state could field. Estimates vary: some 40,000 or 60,000 in different passages of Britannica, about 50,000 according to BritishBattles.com, and 35,000 to 52,000 according to Dunn. It was mostly infantry with swords and spears, some captured rifles and a few guns, and a small force of horsemen. Its commanders included Osman Azrak, Ali Wad Helu and Yakub, the Khalifa's trusted deputy, whose division marched under the great Black Flag.⁷

Dunn writes that the only sensible Mahdist plan would have been to abandon the city and fight a guerrilla war, but that few dared to say so, since the Khalifa believed his army could beat the invaders in the open.⁸

The night before

On 1 September the gunboats shelled the Mahdist forts on both banks and breached the wall of Omdurman, while the army camped at the village of El Egeiga, about four miles north of the city, behind a thorn fence, a zariba, and shallow trenches in a long curve with both ends on the river. That afternoon the cavalry watched the Khalifa's army advance over the plain in a line some four miles long, then halt for the night.⁹

The British feared a night attack above all. Churchill, who was there, wrote that it was the great peril that threatened the expedition, because in the dark the rifles could only open fire at a few hundred yards. The gunboats swept the desert with searchlights through the night. The attack never came.¹⁰

The battle in phases

The first attack. At about 5:50 a.m. on 2 September the Mahdist army raised a great cheer and its line began to move toward the camp. About 15,000 men under Osman Azrak made the frontal assault, while the Khalifa and Yakub waited with another 15,000 behind the ridge of Jebel Surgham, ready to join the attack if it succeeded. The batteries opened fire at about 3,000 yards, then the Maxims and the infantry volleys. The attackers were stopped hundreds of yards short of the line; Dunn notes that even the Egyptian battalions with their old rifles halted the charges at 500 yards, beyond the effective range of most Mahdist weapons.¹¹

The fight in the Kerreri hills. On the northern flank a large force under Ali Wad Helu and Osman Sheikh ed Din fell on the Egyptian cavalry, the Camel Corps and the horse artillery in the Kerreri hills. The slow Camel Corps escaped back to the camp under the guns of the gunboats, while the cavalry under Lieutenant Colonel Broadwood drew its pursuers away to the north, out of the battle.¹²

The charge of the 21st Lancers. By about 8 a.m. the attack had failed, and Kitchener marched south for Omdurman before the Khalifa's survivors could hold it, sending the 21st Lancers ahead. Seeing what looked like a few hundred men, the Lancers charged and found a dry watercourse, a khor, packed with some 2,000 to 2,500 warriors. They rode through and out the other side. Churchill, attached to the regiment and writing for the Morning Post, counted five officers, 65 men and 119 horses killed or wounded out of fewer than 400 in 120 seconds; Britannica puts the loss at a fifth of the regiment. Dunn calls it a rash charge, the only action of the day that put the Anglo-Egyptian army in real danger.¹³

Turning point: Macdonald's stand

The real crisis came at the rear of the column. As the brigades marched toward the city, the Khalifa's reserve came out from behind Jebel Surgham and fell on Hector Macdonald's brigade of Sudanese and Egyptian battalions. Macdonald turned his brigade to face it in line and brought his guns into action, and when Ali Wad Helu's men came back from the Kerreri hills against his other flank, he swung part of his brigade round again to meet them. The Lincolnshire Regiment came up in support, and the attacks broke within a few hundred yards of his line.¹⁴

BritishBattles.com records that Kitchener himself saw Macdonald, rather than the Lancers, as the hero of the battle. By late morning the Mahdist army was in full retreat, and Kitchener, in Britannica's words, was grateful to have won in the open field and so avoided costly street fighting in the city.¹⁵

Counting the cost

The figures show how one-sided the day was. BritishBattles.com gives the Anglo-Egyptian losses as 20 officers and 462 men killed and wounded, Dunn as 48 killed and 434 wounded, and Britannica as about 500 casualties. On the Mahdist side BritishBattles.com counts about 9,700 dead, perhaps 12,000 wounded and some 5,000 prisoners; Britannica gives about 10,000 killed, 10,000 wounded and 5,000 captured.¹⁶

Aftermath

Kitchener entered Omdurman the same afternoon through gaps the bombardment had blown in its walls. The Khalifa had already fled, and most of his beaten men streamed past the city toward their homes. Dozens of European prisoners of the Mahdists were freed, and the captured Black Flag was sent to Queen Victoria. The bombardment had damaged the dome of the Mahdi's tomb, the great shrine of the city, at which British guns had fired. On 4 September Kitchener crossed to Khartoum and held a service for Gordon near the place of his death.¹⁷

Kitchener could not pursue at once. Within days he steamed up the Nile to Fashoda, where a small French expedition had raised its flag, and a tense standoff followed until France gave up its claim. Britannica notes that the crisis was settled peacefully and that relations between the two countries improved afterward, leading in the end to the Entente Cordiale of 1904. Churchill devoted a chapter of his book to the Fashoda incident.¹⁸

Under the Condominium Agreement of January 1899 the Sudan became, in effect, a British protectorate under nominal joint rule with Egypt, to the resentment of many Egyptians and Sudanese. The Khalifa held out with a shrinking army until November 1899, when he was killed at Umm Diwaykarat; the National Army Museum notes that the Sudan was quickly subdued after Omdurman.¹⁹ › 2 September in military history

Legacy and memory

For Britain, Omdurman avenged Gordon and made Kitchener a national hero; Britannica follows him on to command in South Africa and to the War Office in 1914. For the young Churchill the campaign became the subject of The River War, published in 1899, a long and, in places, critical account of the reconquest. For the Sudanese the day was one of immense loss. The National Army Museum, presenting a talk on the battle by the historian Peter Hart, speaks of the Mahdists' bravery and of the fleeting nature of the peace that followed.²⁰

Historians still treat the battle as the classic case of the gap between the industrial powers and the peoples they conquered. Britannica puts the outcome down in large part to technological superiority, artillery, machine guns and massed rifle fire against a frontal assault, and Dunn calls it a demonstration of the impact of industrialization on warfare.²¹ › Battle of Isandlwana, 1879