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

In 1885 the forces of Muhammad Ahmad, who called himself the Mahdi, took Khartoum and killed General Charles Gordon, as the National Army Museum recalls. For thirteen years the Mahdi's successor, the Khalifa Abdullahi, ruled the Sudan from Omdurman, across the Nile from the ruins of Khartoum. In the 1890s an Anglo-Egyptian army under Major General Herbert Kitchener, the Sirdar or commander of the Egyptian army, worked its way up the Nile, building a railway as it went and winning a series of battles. After a victory at the Atbara on 8 April 1898, Kitchener waited for reinforcements for the final advance.²

The army on the Nile

By August Kitchener had, according to BritishBattles.com, 8,200 British and 17,600 Egyptian and Sudanese troops, 44 guns and 20 Maxim machine guns, supported by ten river steamers mounting 36 more guns and 24 Maxims. The British infantry carried the Lee-Metford magazine rifle; the Egyptian and Sudanese battalions had older single-shot rifles. The Khalifa's army, perhaps 50,000 men, was armed mostly with swords and spears, with some captured rifles and a few guns. John P. Dunn, writing for EBSCO, puts it at 35,000 to 52,000 and notes that the only sensible Mahdist strategy, to give up the city and wage a guerrilla war, was never seriously considered.³

On 1 September the Anglo-Egyptian army camped by the village of El Egeiga on the Nile, eight miles north of Omdurman, behind a thorn hedge and shallow trenches in a long curve with both ends on the river. That morning the gunboats shelled the Mahdist forts and the walls of Omdurman. Around 11 am the cavalry saw what they had taken for a long thorn fence begin to move: it was a line of warriors four miles long. The Khalifa halted for the night, and, as Dunn notes, he ruled out a night attack, which would have given his men their best chance.⁴

The first attack

At 5:50 am on 2 September the Mahdist line advanced across the plain toward the camp. About 15,000 men under Osman Azrak made the frontal assault, joined by a further division coming over the Jebel Surgham ridge, while the Khalifa held back his own force behind the ridge. Kitchener's batteries opened at 3,000 yards, followed by the Maxims and then the infantry. The attackers came to a halt 800 yards from the British brigades and within 300 yards of the Egyptian and Sudanese battalions, and by about 8 am the attack had failed all along the line. Dunn notes that even Egyptians with obsolete rifles stopped the charges at 500 yards, far beyond the reach of most Mahdist weapons.⁵

On the northern flank, a Mahdist division under Ali Wad Helu struck the Egyptian cavalry and the Camel Corps in the Kerreri Hills. Lieutenant Colonel Broadwood drew it off to the north, away from the camp, while the gunboats covered the Camel Corps as it escaped back to the river.⁶

The charge of the 21st Lancers

Kitchener now wanted to reach Omdurman before the Khalifa's survivors could hold it, and sent the 21st Lancers ahead to clear the way. The regiment had never been in action, and one of its attached officers was Lieutenant Winston Churchill, also writing for the Morning Post. Seeing what looked like a small body of Mahdists, the Lancers charged and found a hidden watercourse, a khor, packed with about 2,500 men. In a clash Churchill timed at two minutes they rode through, losing 1 officer and 20 men killed and many more wounded. Dunn calls it a rash charge, the only action of the day that put Anglo-Egyptian soldiers in real danger.⁷

Macdonald's stand

As the army marched south, the Khalifa's reserve, about 15,000 men under the Black Flag of Yakub, came out from behind Jebel Surgham and fell on Hector Macdonald's Sudanese and Egyptian brigade at the rear of the column. Macdonald turned his brigade to face it and then, as Ali Wad Helu's division attacked from the north, turned part of it again. The British Lincolnshire Regiment came up in support, and the attacks broke within about 300 yards of his line. BritishBattles.com records that Kitchener saw Macdonald, not the Lancers, as the hero of the battle.⁸

The cost

The figures show how one-sided the day was. BritishBattles.com gives the Anglo-Egyptian casualties as 20 officers and 462 men killed and wounded; Dunn gives 48 killed and 434 wounded. Mahdist losses are given as about 9,700 killed, perhaps 12,000 wounded and 5,000 prisoners by BritishBattles.com, and as 10,000 dead and countless wounded by Dunn. Accounts by returning war correspondents of wounded and prisoners being killed after the battle led to a parliamentary inquiry, which cleared Kitchener.⁹

The end of the Mahdist state

Kitchener entered Omdurman the same afternoon. The Khalifa had already fled on a donkey with a few followers, and his men streamed past the city toward their homes. Kitchener crossed to Khartoum and held a memorial service for Gordon at his ruined palace. The Khalifa evaded capture until November 1899, but the Sudan was quickly subdued, and the National Army Museum calls the battle the blow that effectively dismantled Mahdist power. The Sudan passed to joint Anglo-Egyptian rule, in practice run by British officials.¹⁰