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appear to have possessed any of the qualities which would have fitted him to undertake the difficult task he had in hand.’ Nonetheless, he was forced to conclude that ‘no Christian martyr tied to the stake or thrown to the wild beasts of ancient Rome, ever faced death with more unconcern than General Gordon. His faith was sublime.’ The Mahdi did not live to enjoy his triumph of self-determination for very much longer, dying after a short, violent illness only six months later, mourned by his supposed seventy wives. A mighty tomb was raised, its shining dome visible far out into the desert.* His rule, with its slavery, hand-loppings and floggings to death, passed to the Khalifa Abdullah, who soon felt secure enough to send a letter to Queen Victoria, warning her that her only chance of survival lay in converting to Islam, otherwise ‘Thou shalt be crushed by the power of God and his might, or be afflicted by the death of many of thy people … by reason of thy Satanic presumption.’ The queen did not reply.

In 1896 – the year before Victoria’s diamond jubilee – the newly elected Conservative government in London decided to settle the issue of Sudan once and for all. Ministers were now worried that if they did not take the region, then the French might, and with it the headwaters of the Nile. There was the usual – and in this case certainly fatuous – worry about a risk to the Suez Canal. And there was the death of Gordon to avenge. Command of the expedition was given to the man whose pediment moustache and imperious gaze would later make him the poster boy of the British Empire, General Horatio Herbert Kitchener. Ruthless, scheming, vain, arrogant, vulgar, vaultingly ambitious and glacial in manner, as a younger officer Kitchener had taken part in the failed attempt to rescue Gordon. This time, with no need to stage a rescue, progress was steady and utterly determined. Kitchener’s army advanced up the Nile laying railway tracks as it went. Up the railway line came more troops, guns and even armoured gunboats, which had been built in London, disassembled and then reassembled on the Nile under the eye of Gordon’s nephew, Major ‘Monkey’ Gordon of the Royal Engineers.* The newly founded Daily Mail called Kitchener ‘The Sudan Machine’, a well-chosen phrase, as his army closed on Khartoum like some steam-driven leviathan.

By September 1898, Kitchener’s army had reached Omdurman, across the river from Khartoum. Through his binoculars a young Winston Churchill, a self-assured cavalry officer-cum-war reporter with the 21st Lancers, could see the pale dome of the Mahdi’s tomb rising above the mud walls of the town. In front of the walls was the astonishing sight of the waving banners of perhaps 50,000 men on horses and on foot, in a line about 4 miles across. Kitchener’s force was half as big. But it contained forty-four guns and the small flotilla of gunboats, which poured shells into the town. Soon after dawn on 2 September the Khalifa’s medievally equipped force advanced and was met by shells from Kitchener’s artillery. Still, in a display of astonishing bravery, the force came on, and at a distance of 2,000 yards the British infantry prepared to volley-fire into them. Again, the Arabs advanced, in their holy uniform of long, patched smocks. Next the Maxim guns (which could pour out 600 rounds a minute) opened up, and then, at 800 yards, the Martini-Henry rifles of the Egyptian and Sudanese troops in Kitchener’s column.

Churchill claimed that Kitchener encouraged his men ‘to regard the enemy as vermin – unfit to live’, and the blood-letting was so one-sided that at one point the general was compelled to call out, ‘Cease fire! Cease fire! Oh what a dreadful waste of ammunition!’ Even so British cavalry, including Winston Churchill, made a superfluous mounted charge just for the hell of it. By 11.30 that morning Kitchener was able to comment that the enemy had been given ‘a good dusting’. There were almost 11,000 Sudanese dead on the ground, with an estimated 16,000 wounded. Out of a force of 26,000, the British had lost forty-eight