Another pivotal character in this story is Sir Charles Wilson, who was blamed by Wolseley for failing to reach Gordon in time after Wilson was obliged to take over the desert column when its commander, Brigadier General Herbert Stewart, was mortally wounded in the battle that followed Abu Klea. Wilson’s own published book, noted above, rebutting the criticisms of Wolseley, is the best eyewitness account of the final stages of the campaign; much personal correspondence and writing related to his wider career is found in Colonel Sir Charles Watson’s The Life of Major-General Sir Charles Wilson, published by the Royal Engineers in 1909. The breadth of Wilson’s activities, as a mapmaker, geographer and intelligence officer, from North America to Asia Minor and the Sudan, make him one of the great unsung achievers of the Victorian age, and it is fascinating to speculate that his role as founder of the War Office Intelligence Department – the antecedent of the modern Secret Intelligence Service – might have included the sanctioning of a ‘mandate to kill’ that has become such an ingrained part of our view of covert intelligence activities since the novels of Ian Fleming were first published.
Colonel William Francis Butler describes a long-range ‘rifle duel’ between his men and the Arabs near Kirbekan, the basis for my fictional action between Major Mayne and the Mahdist sharpshooter in Chapter 8. His description of the cataracts is invaluable because much of the atmosphere of the place was lost after the Aswan dam was constructed, and today it requires some imagination to see the place as it would have been in pharaonic times or during the days in 1884 when the Gordon relief expedition struggled against the Nile towards Khartoum. A fascinating recent project to study the length of the railway built by the Royal Engineers to supply that expedition shows how much detritus remains in the desert, much of it in a remarkable state of preservation: spent ammunition casings, tins and tobacco packaging, the remains of camps and supply dumps, and places where burials undoubtedly exist, swept over and lost beneath the shifting sands of the desert. These investigations are a new kind of archaeology, giving a vivid basis for understanding the challenges of ancient campaigns into the desert as well as a fresh perspective on precisely what went on during those fateful months leading up to the fall of Khartoum in January 1885.
The description of the battle of Abu Klea in Chapter 11 is inspired by eyewitness accounts, including that of Colonel Sir Charles Wilson. Some 1,400 British troops confronted at least 11,000 dervishes; in ten minutes of ferocious fighting more than a thousand dervishes were killed, at a cost of 81 British killed and 121 wounded. The battle became one of the most famous in military history, the last time the British fought in a square, in a conflict immortalised by Rudyard Kipling in his 1890 poem ‘Fuzzy-Wuzzy’:
(Along with ‘dervish’, the British soldiers commonly referred to their Sudanese enemy as ‘Fuzzy-Wuzzy’, a term originally coined for the wild-haired Beja of the Red Sea coast who were the first of the Sudanese the British fought in pitched battles, in early 1884, when they did actually break a square.)
One of the casualties at Abu Klea was Colonel Fred Burnaby, who was discovered by an officer lying against a rock surrounded by dead dervishes, a spear having ‘inflicted a terrible wound on the side of his neck and throat’, and his skull ‘cleft by a blow from a two-handed sword’. The expression that I have Burnaby using, that he was ‘bowled over a terrible crumpler’, comes from eyewitness of that day, Count Albert Gleichen, a Grenadiers officer serving with the Camel Corps, who used it to describe the death of a dervish (Gleichen, A., With the Camel Corps on the Nile, London 1889, p 135). The young soldier who had first seen Burnaby and called the officer over wondered why ‘the bravest man in England’ should be dying without succour; his last words as the boy propped him up were supposedly ‘look after yourself’. Burnaby had ridden out of the square to help bring skirmishers back in, an act of near-suicidal courage that cost him his life; it was the type of act for which the Victoria Cross was invented, and perhaps he would have been awarded it had his commanding officer, Brigadier General Stewart, not himself been fatally wounded two days later, before having the time to write despatches and make recommendations for the fight at Abu Klea. Burnaby died as he had lived, larger than life, yet he should be remembered as much for his achievements as an intelligence officer and adventurer, revealed in his marvellous book On Horseback through Asia Minor (1878), still in print and widely read today.
There is no single authoritative eyewitness account of the death of Gordon. One of the best known of many fanciful images, General Gordon’s Last Stand, by George William Joy (1893), showing Gordon waiting coolly at the top of the stairs, revolver in hand, as the dervish spearmen approach him from below, probably contains elements of the truth; an account by Gordon’s servant Orfali suggests that Gordon and his Sudanese bodyguards fought to the end, and that Gordon personally accounted for several of the enemy. What does seem certain is that he was decapitated and his head taken to the Mahdi, where it was seen by his captive, the Austrian officer Rudolf von Slatin, a friend of Gordon and future inspector general of the Sudan, whose box of Gordon relics resides in the Royal Engineers Museum. ‘A brave soldier, who fell at his post. Happy is he to have fallen. His sufferings are over,’ von Slatin famously told his captors. It was von Slatin’s account of the treatment of Gordon’s body that hardened Kitchener’s resolve to wreak the terrible vengeance he eventually inflicted on the dervish army at Omdurman thirteen years later, including the desecration of the Mahdi’s tomb.
Sir Charles Wilson’s operative, Major Edward Mayne, is fictional, though he bears the surname of an Anglo-Irish family who figured in the Army List – another Mayne appears in the Second World War in my novel The Mask of Troy – and I have based his career and interests closely on Royal Engineers officers of the period. The same is true for his subordinate at the cataract, the fictional Lieutenant Tanner, who is killed along with General Earle in the battle that the river column were eventually forced to fight at Kirbekan, when more than two thousand dervishes were killed for the loss of some eighty British soldiers. In my fiction, Mayne’s servant, Corporal Jones, missed the battle because he had been reassigned to the 8th Railway Company, RE, building the line south of Korti; he also appears in my novel The Tiger Warrior in the 1879 Rampa rebellion in India as Sergeant Jones (having subsequently been reduced in rank for misdemeanour), and is inspired in part by a real-life soldier from that railway company, 17818 Sapper M. Knight, whose Khedive’s Star and Egypt medal with the clasp ‘The Nile 1884–85’ are illustrated on my website.
Colonel William Francis Butler writes of his astonishment and pleasure at seeing a Canadian birch-bark canoe on the Nile, above the second cataract; it was paddled by William Prince, ‘Chief of the Swampy Indians’, whom Butler had last met fourteen years before during the Red River expedition in Canada, a man ‘grown more massive of frame … but still keen of eye and steady of hand as when I last saw him standing bowman in a bark canoe among the whirling waters whose echoes were lost in the endless pine woods of the great Lone Land’.