To End All Wars_ A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 - Adam Hochschild [14]
Haig came from a Scottish family famous for its whiskey distillery; funds from that fortune ensured that he would never have John French's money problems. Like French, he was on horseback from his early years, keeping two horses and a full-time groom while at Oxford and later becoming a member of the British national polo team. Entering the army, he soon acquired a reputation as a short-fused martinet who displayed no lack of imperial pride. "I am not one," he would declare later in life, "who is ashamed of the wars that were fought to open the markets of the world to our traders." It was at a cavalry camp in India that Haig first met French, nine years older, senior in rank, and in personality his opposite, for Haig was puritanical, incapable of small talk, and as stiff as the high collar of his dress uniform. Nonetheless, in an army laced with networks of patrons and protégés, he had a keen eye for strategic friendships.
Although French was now stuck at a post back in England, Haig had used family connections to win himself a place at Omdurman, where he was eagerly awaiting his first taste of combat. An hour after dawn on September 2, 1898, the day following Churchill's first sight of them, the Sudanese launched a frontal attack on the British position. Over their jibbahs, loose robes with colored patches, some of them wore chain mail and they outnumbered the British Empire troops by nearly two to one. But as British fire tore into the Sudanese line, the bloodshed was immense—and nothing was more devastating than the latest models of Hiram Maxim's machine gun.
For decades, military inventors had been struggling to make an effective rapid-fire weapon, but the results had been cumbersome in the extreme: generally a gunner had to turn a crank, and, to keep a single barrel from overheating, a series of them fired in succession—one early model had 37 barrels, another 50. Only in 1884 had Maxim finally perfected the first such gun that was both single-barreled and fully automatic: it used the energy of its own recoil to eject each spent cartridge and pull the next one into place—and it kept shooting as long as a soldier squeezed the trigger. A jacket of water, refilled as the liquid boiled away, kept the barrel from getting too hot. The Maxim could fire 500 rounds a minute.
No one was watching the Sudan fighting more closely than Britain's major imperial rival, Germany. "The enemy went down in heaps," wrote a German newspaperman with the British forces, "and it was evident that the six Maxim guns were doing a large share of the work." Indeed, thanks to the Maxims, in a few hours the British were able to fire an extraordinary 500,000 bullets at the hapless Sudanese.
It was a historic slaughter. When the Battle of Omdurman was over later in the day, some 10,800 Sudanese lay dead on the desert sand beneath a brilliantly clear sky. At least 16,000 more had been wounded, and were either bleeding to death or trying to drag themselves away. The British lost only 48 dead. A Union Jack was raised, the assembled empire troops gave three cheers for the Queen, and General Kitchener wept as a regimental band played "Abide with Me."
Britain's wars, the jubilant victors at Omdurman expected, would continue to be just such lopsided victories—or massacres, as a dissenter like Charlotte Despard might say—against poorly armed Arabs, Africans, and Asians. This assumption, and the confidence that weapons like the Maxim gun would always give Britain superiority, underlay a sort of ecstasy about battle that shines through the writing of this period. Lord Wolseley, army