The Downfall of the Dervishes; or, The Avenging of Gordon

by Ernest Nathaniel Bennett

While the Lancers had met and engaged the enemy beyond Gebel Surgham, the whole of the infantry, artillery, and baggage-train had left the zeriba and advanced in échelon upon Omdurman. The British battalions led the way on the left; on the right marched the Egyptians and Sudanese—Maxwell's brigade in front, Lewis's next, and Macdonald's bringing up the rear. I joined Lewis's men, and as the line of our advance led us over the ground covered by a portion of the attack, we speedily found ourselves amongst dead and dying Dervishes. The first of these I came across was the brave leader who had led the charge of the Baggara cavalry. He and his horse were quite dead—both of them riddled with bullets. His spear lay beside him, and was seized by a Sudanese soldier as a present for his bimbashi. As we marched towards Gebel Surgham, and further out upon the plain, the efficacy of our shell and rifle fire became more apparent every yard we advanced. In every direction rows and clusters of white gibbehs and black bodies lay scattered over the sand.

Here and there, too, horses were stretched motionless, or else tossed restlessly to and fro, unable to rise. I cannot account for the fact, but the sight of a wounded horse is much more painful to myself, and, I know, to many other men, than the sight of a wounded man. As one walks over a battlefield one gazes with indifference or vague curiosity on mangled heaps of human bodies, but where one sees a horse cruelly torn by a shell splinter, raising and drooping its head upon the sand, with terror and anguish in its beautiful eyes—such a sight as this must fill the heart of any lover of animals with pain and pity.

Our native battalions were soon busily engaged in killing the wounded. The Sudanese undertook this task with evident relish, and never spared a single Dervish along their path. On our left front, at the foot of the Surgham slope, where the opening shell fire of the batteries on the left had covered the hillside with dead and wounded, a large number of servants and camp followers were also busy. These harpies, intent solely on loot, had armed themselves with various weapons. Some carried clubs or spears, others had managed to secure old rifles. They advanced with great caution, and I saw them fire repeatedly into bodies which were already quite dead, before they dared to rush in and strip the corpse of its arms and clothing. These cowardly wretches ought most certainly to have been prevented from carrying on this irresponsible shooting. They fired anyhow, without looking to see who was in front, and their bullets continually ricochetted against the rocks. One of these bullets passed quite close to the front of our brigade as we advanced, and I heard that an officer was wounded by another.

The barbarous usage of killing the wounded has become traditional in Sudanese warfare, and in some cases it must be looked upon as a painful necessity. The wounded Dervishes—as I saw with my own eyes, and on one occasion nearly felt with my own body—sometimes raised themselves and fired one last round at our advancing line. On one occasion a wounded Baggara suddenly rose up from a little heap of bodies and stabbed no less than seven Egyptian cavalry troopers before he was finally dispatched. Still, when all has been said in defence of this practice, it is certain that in many cases wounded Dervishes, unarmed and helpless, were butchered from sheer wantonness and lust of bloodshed. The whole formed a hideous picture, not easy to forget.

Some of the wounded turned wearily over, and paid no attention to our advance. For many of them, indeed, the bitterness of death was already past. They lay in the scorching heat, with shattered bodies and shattered hopes, awaiting the final thrust of the merciless bayonet. Many of them were doubtless good as well as brave men. They had trusted in Allah that he would deliver them, but their prayer had been in vain. There are few experiences in this world more cruel than the sudden extinction of religious hope, and the dying thoughts of some of these Dervishes must have been exceeding bitter.

As I tramped along with Lewis's brigade towards Omdurman, we were suddenly aware that something had gone wrong on the right flank and rear of the column. The "ispt," "ispt" of bullets was heard in every direction, and men began to fall. Turning round, I soon saw what had happened. The enemy had actually renewed the fight, and an orderly attack was being made on Macdonald's brigade by the large Dervish force under Sheikh Ed-Din, which had retreated under the fire of the gunboats at the beginning of the engagement, and held itself in readiness behind the Kerreri ridge for this flank attack. At the same time several other bodies of Dervishes appeared to the west of Surgham, and also from behind the low hills straight in front.

The brunt of this fresh attack fell upon the rear brigade. Colonel Macdonald did not lose a moment. His blacks were at once formed into two lines, meeting at an obtuse angle, and a steady fire was opened on the enemy, who advanced with marvellous rapidity. Towards the left centre, the black standard of the Khalifa rose again to view, and behind this, and on either flank, line after line of infantry swept once more over the undulating desert.

This was the only portion of the fight in which any part of our position was seriously threatened, and during this second battle—for it practically amounted to this—the Sudanese and Egyptian infantry had most of the fighting to themselves. Right well they fought—one native brigade against some twenty-five thousand Dervishes. Any wavering or panic on the part of these battalions would have been fatal, for during the really critical period of the fight they were quite isolated. Lewis's brigade—their nearest support—was at least nine hundred yards away, and most of the British columns were actually out of sight, advancing along the river a mile and a half in front. The men of the brigade, which comprised the 9th, 10th, and 11th Sudanese and the 2nd Egyptians, were armed with Martinis; and the smoke of the black powder they used interfered to some extent with the accuracy of their fire, which always tends, in the case of native troops, to become rather wild as the excitement of battle grows upon them. Thus it happened that the enemy managed to get to much closer quarters with us than previously. Their foremost ranks sometimes seemed to advance within one hundred and fifty yards of the Sudanese, and when a perfect flood of Sheikh Ed-Din's infantry was let loose from the Kerreri slopes upon Macdonald's rear, some of the Dervishes, despite the withering rifle fire, actually ran up and used their spears against our men, until they were bayoneted or shot down at the very muzzles of the rifles. Another brilliant attempt was made by the Khalifa's cavalry to break the Sudanese lines, and some of the horsemen got within a few yards of the line before they were shot down in detail. One determined standard-bearer, with nothing in his hands except his flagstaff, struggled on heroically to within a dozen yards of the blacks before he fell, riddled with bullets.

Efforts had, of course, been made all along the line to lend assistance to Macdonald in his one-handed struggle. The gunboats had joined with his own three batteries in shelling the dense masses under Sheikh Ed-Din, while on the left other batteries had galloped up, and now from the northern slopes of Surgham poured round after round of shell upon the indomitable enemy. Three battalions, too, of the 1st British Brigade had come up at the double, and the Lincolns had been dispatched to aid in the final dispersion of Ed-Din's Dervishes amongst the rugged slopes of Kerreri.