Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [96]
By then, Kitchener had long accomplished his purpose. On 4 September, four army chaplains conducted a service in front of the palace where Gordon had been hacked to death. A guard of British soldiers sang Gordon’s favourite hymn, ‘Abide with Me’, and three cheers were raised for the queen and another three for the Khedive of Egypt, the cipher whose name justified the adventure. Gordon’s death had been avenged and Kitchener returned to England the following year a hero. At the end of a parliamentary debate in which Lord Charles Beresford conceded that perhaps the ‘disentombment’ of the Mahdi ‘might have been done in a very much better manner’, Kitchener was voted a large gift of public money and all was right with the world once more.
The British like to see their military history as a succession of scrapes – the Armada or the Battle of Britain, for example – in which they are outnumbered and outgunned and survive by guts and ingenuity. It seems to demonstrate a higher moral purpose. But much of the story of their empire is testament not to moral but to technological superiority. Omdurman avenged the death of their martyr. But the Dervishes had spears, while the British had rifles and machine guns. As Hilaire Belloc put it in The Modern Traveller, published that year:
Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim Gun, and they have not.
There was an imperial coda to this massacre. Five days after the Khalifa’s forces were wiped out at Omdurman, a boat came drifting down the Nile bearing unmistakable evidence of having been shot up. The crew described how they had been on a foraging mission upriver, near the town of Fashoda, when they had come under fire from the riverbank. Who their attackers were they knew not, just that they were black soldiers under the command of white officers. As Winston Churchill told the story, curious British officers then dug into the wooden hull and extracted nickel-covered bullets of the kind used only by European forces. This was firm evidence that some other European power was encroaching on to what Kitchener had now established was British territory. But which one? Could it be a Belgian expedition which had set off from the Congo? Italians advancing their country’s repeated claims to some of the spoils of Africa? Might they be French? The crew of the boat were asked what flag had been flying, but were unable to agree on the colours they had seen.
Gathering a couple of battalions of Sudanese troops, two companies of Cameron Highlanders, an artillery battery and four Maxim guns, Kitchener set off upriver with five of his gunboats. As he approached Fashoda on 18 September 1898, the identity of the intruders was settled, for he was greeted by soldiers carrying a letter from a Major Jean-Baptiste Marchand. It had the impertinence to welcome him, in the name of France. The British Empire in Africa was hung on a north–south axis, along the lines of Cecil Rhodes’s dream of a railway line from the Cape to Cairo. French possessions in Africa were concentrated on the Atlantic coast of west Africa, although the French had recently taken control of the fly-blown but strategically important territory of Djibouti on the Horn of Africa. Paris dreamed of linking the two and Fashoda was the point where the British north–south line crossed the French east–west line. Marchand and his small group of officers had spent two years hacking their way across the continent on a march from west Africa. By comparison