It is generally believed that France gave way at this juncture partly because her navy was known to be unequal to a conflict with that of Great Britain, but also because Franco-German relations were none of the best. Or, in the language of the Parisian boulevards: "How do we know that while we are fighting the British for the Nile valley, Germany will not invade Lorraine?" As to the influences emanating from St. Petersburg contradictory statements have been made. Rumour asserted that the Czar sought to moderate the irritation in France and to bring about a peaceful settlement of the dispute; and this story won general acceptance. The astonishment was therefore great when, in the early part of the Russo-Japanese war, the Paris Figaro published documents which seemed to prove that he had assured the French Government of his determination to fulfil the terms of the alliance if matters came to the sword.
There we must leave the affair, merely noting that the Anglo-French agreement of March 1899 peaceably ended the dispute and placed the whole of the Egyptian Sudan, together with the Bahr-el-Ghazal district and the greater part of the Libyan Desert, west of Egypt, under the Anglo-Egyptian sphere of influence. (See map at the end of this volume.)
The battle of Omdurman therefore ranks with the most decisive in modern history, not only in a military sense, but also because it extended British influence up the Nile valley as far as Uganda. Had French statesmen and M. Marchand achieved their aims, there is little doubt that a solid wedge would have been driven through north-central Africa from west to east, from the Ubangi Province of French Congoland to the mouth of the Red Sea. The Sirdar's triumph came just in time to thwart this design and to place in the hands that administered Egypt the control of the waters whence that land draws its life. Without crediting the stories that were put forth in the French Press as to the possibility of France damming up the Nile at Fashoda and diverting its floods into the Bahr-el-Ghazal district, we may recognise that the control of that river by Egypt is a vital necessity, and that the nation which helped the Khedive to regain that control thereby established one more claim to a close partnership in the administration at Cairo. The reasonableness of that claim was finally admitted by France in the Anglo-French agreement of the year 1904.
That treaty set the seal, apparently, on a series of efforts of a strangely mixed character. The control of bondholders, the ill-advised strivings of Arabi, the armed intervention undertaken by Sir Beauchamp Seymour and Sir Garnet Wolseley, the forlorn hope of Gordon's Mission to Khartum, the fanaticism of the Mahdists, the diplomatic skill of Lord Cromer, the covert opposition of France and the Sultan, and the organising genius of Lord Kitchener--such is the medley of influences, ranging from the basest up to the noblest of which human nature is capable, that served to draw the Government of Great Britain deeper and deeper into the meshes of the Egyptian Question, until the heroism, skill, and stubbornness of a few of her sons brought about results which would now astonish those who early in the eighties tardily put forth the first timid efforts at intervention.
FOOTNOTES:
[407] Wingate, Mahdism, pp. 228-233.
[408] England in Egypt, by Sir Alfred Milner, pp. 145-153.
[409] For the Sudan in this period see Wingate's Mahdism; Slatin's Fire and Sword in the Sudan; C. Neufeld's A Prisoner of the Khalifa.
[410] See articles by Dr. E. J. Dillon and by Jules Simon in the Contemporary Review for April and May 1896. Kassala was handed over to an Egyptian force under Colonel Parsons in December 1897. The Egyptian Sudan, by H. S. L. Alford and W. D. Sword (1898).