At 2 p.m. the gunboats, with the Sultan leading, advanced farther up the stream in order to shell the forts of Omdurman. As they steamed slowly up past the city, the boats were met by a heavy shell fire, and occasional volleys from Dervish riflemen. The enemy's shells burst all round the boats, but they only succeeded in scoring two hits the whole day, one of which splintered some woodwork on a barge, while the other struck an iron mantlet at an angle and glanced harmlessly off into the water. At such short range the Dervish gunners ought most certainly to have made better practice, but the fact is, that the aim of our quick-firing guns was so marvellously accurate that it was almost impossible for the enemy to work their artillery. Thanks very largely to the skill of two Royal Marine sergeants, our fire silenced one battery after another. In some cases actually two shells out of three penetrated the embrasures of the forts, dismounting the guns inside, and doing terrible execution amongst the Dervish gunners.
While the twelve-pounder guns were demolishing the forts, the Maxims were turned with deadly effect on the Dervishes who were running about the banks. As two more forts in Khartum—one at the juncture of the Blue and White Nile, the other close to Gordon's palace—continued to fire upon us, the gunboats steamed past the ruined city, and speedily converted these last defences of the enemy into mere heaps of rubbish. At 5 p.m. the Friendlies were disembarked on the right bank, where they remained with the howitzer battery and the British detachment under Captain Ferguson of the Northumberland Fusiliers. The five gunboats then returned and took up a position off El Genuaia opposite to the zeriba.
During the battle on the morning of 2nd September, the gunboats were posted at both ends of the zeriba, and made themselves extremely useful. As was mentioned above, the fire of these boats lying off Kerreri village practically saved the Camel Corps from annihilation. Throughout the rest of the fight, too, a galling shell fire was kept up on the Dervish forces advancing from the north-west and, more especially, from the south, over the sandy ridge between Surgham and the Nile.
Meanwhile the howitzer battery had again opened fire at daybreak, and continued its work of destruction amongst the buildings of Omdurman. The effect of the Lyddite shells was so terrible that the Khalifa seems to have abandoned his plan of falling back behind the walls of his capital. This was a most fortunate thing, so far as we were concerned, for if, after the fearful slaughter of his troops in the first half of the engagement, the Khalifa had retreated with ten or fifteen thousand men inside the tortuous streets and crowded houses of Omdurman, we should have had the utmost difficulty in driving the enemy out, and could not, in all probability, have occupied Omdurman on the evening of the 2nd. House-to-house fighting is always a costly and dangerous business, and had it taken place, the prophetic estimate popularly attributed to the Sirdar of "one thousand casualties before Khartum is ours," might well have been realised in fact. As it was, the Dervishes prepared to take their chance in the open desert, rather than await our onset under a continual fire of fifty-pounder shells which burst amid sheets of flame and clouds of dust, and sent huge fragments for hundreds of yards, wrecking every obstacle in their path.
When the battle was over, the gunboats steamed up side by side with the general advance, and were met at Omdurman by a hot rifle fire from Dervishes concealed in the houses along the margin of the river. The streets leading to the southern exit of the town were by this time crowded with a mass of fugitives. In addition to mounted Baggaras and Dervish infantry, a mob of inhabitants—men, women, and children, dragging after them camels, horses, and donkeys laden with goods and chattels—all this confused stream of human beings and animals was pressing madly forward in panic-stricken flight. Orders were given to fire upon the fugitives, and as the artillerymen on the gunboats, from their raised position, could see well over the walls, a deadly fire was opened upon the crowded thoroughfares. One street especially, which led down to the river, was swept by a frightful hail of Maxim bullets, which mowed the poor wretches down in scores.
After taking part in the battle and the subsequent destruction of fugitives, the gunboats proceeded, on the night of the 2nd, about one hundred miles farther up the river, and returned to Omdurman on 5th September with the report that they had seen no more Dervishes.
During the fighting off Omdurman on the 1st, two of the Khalifa's gunboats were destroyed. There was a pathetic interest attached to old vessels like the Bordein and Ismailia, as they had formed a part of Gordon's little fleet in the old days of thirteen years ago! The Bordein had been despatched northwards by Gordon, but, like the Abbas, had been wrecked. She struck on a rock in the Shabluka Cataract, on 30th January 1885, and foundered, but was subsequently raised by the Dervishes. When our gunners came within sight of the vessel, voices were raised to save the old boat for Gordon's sake. "Don't let us fire on the poor old Bordein!" But there is little room for sentiment or loving-kindness amid the exigencies of warfare, and under our fire the Bordein was headed for the shore, and sank as she reached it.
A still worse fate overtook the Ismailia. In some way or other she fouled one of the mines laid down by the Khalifa's engineers in midstream; the mine exploded, and the Ismailia, literally hoist by its own petard, was blown out of the water. Two other mines had also been laid in the channel, near the right bank opposite Omdurman. The ropes connecting these with the shore were afterwards found inside the ruined forts, but all our attempts to explode them were futile. The Dervish steamer which was subsequently captured by the Sirdar on his way to Fashoda was, I believe, the solitary survivor of Gordon's ill-starred flotilla. The Talawahiyah had been sunk off Rojan Island, on 29th January 1885, and was never recovered. The Abbas, which set out from Khartum with Colonel Stewart and Mr. Power on board,—the one last desperate attempt to reopen communications with the North,—was wrecked at Hebbeh, between Abu Hamed and Kirbekan, and now lies there, keel uppermost.