Mohawks on the Nile. Carl Benn

      The London Illustrated News and The Graphic sent artists to Egypt and Sudan, and their efforts provided readers with representations of the conflict that appealed to the Victorian imagination. The prints were reproduced in popular histories published immediately after the war and thus enjoyed a life beyond the limits of an ephemeral newspaper illustration. This picture of one of Muhammad Ahmad’s supporters was titled “Follower of the False Prophet.”

      Gladstone chose the wrong man for the job when he bowed to political, public, and press pressure to send Major-General Charles Gordon. Reappointed governor general in 1884, and accompanied solely by one staff officer, Lieutenant-Colonel J.D.H. Stewart, Gordon left England for Sudan, reached Khartoum on February 18, 1884, and took command of the garrison of 7,500 Egyptian and Sudanese soldiers in the city of over thirty thousand inhabitants, of whom a large percentage were slaves. Despite his instructions, Gordon was not the kind of man merely to report on local conditions or organize a retreat, the latter of which would have been logistically complicated in any event and would have taken at least six months with the river transport available to him because the number of Egyptian soldiers spread around Sudan, along with their dependents, expatriates, and other vulnerable people, totalled about twenty thousand individuals. One person at the time who recognized the magnitude of the problem was Britain’s consul general to Egypt (and its de facto ruler), Sir Evelyn Baring. He thought the policy of withdrawal was the best one, but was “not sure if the extreme difficulty of carrying it out, or the consequences to which it must almost invariably lead” were “fully appreciated at home.”⁵³ In looking back on the events of 1884–85 in his memoirs, Baring felt that it was a mistake to send a Briton rather than a local person to Khartoum, especially such a famous one, because public opinion might necessitate committing a relief expedition to save him even though the government wanted to turn its back on the province.⁵⁴

      For his part, the inconsistent and erratic Gordon decided shortly after arriving in Khartoum that the challenge posed by Muhammad Ahmad had to be met through military action. His conclusion, sent in a brusque telegram to his superiors eight days after his arrival in the Sudanese capital, declared that, “if Egypt is to be quiet, Mahdi must be smashed up.”⁵⁵ Although he continued to change his opinions frequently in the weeks that followed, the Sudanese governor general may have been emboldened to take such a firm stand to some extent because he assumed that Britain would be forced to commit troops despite Gladstone’s unwillingness to do so. At the same time, Charles Gordon’s important friend, Garnet Wolseley, victor of Tel el Kebir, disagreed with Gladstone’s policy and thought that evacuating Sudan would be “the worst of ignorant, cowardly folly” and assumed that even an evacuation would require the help of British forces, although he probably believed that the British could launch a successful campaign that would result in the long-term occupation of the territory.⁵⁶ General Gordon’s views ought not to have surprised anyone: before leaving England he had stated his opposition to abandoning Sudan, worrying that the revolt could inflame the entire Muslim world if it were not crushed. While favouring Sudanese independence, or at least a weaker Turco-Egyptian presence in the province, he believed a ruthless Mahdist dictatorship represented the wrong answer to the Sudanese question. Other officials, such as Baring, hoped the situation could be stabilized at least until the garrisons could be evacuated by employing someone else to govern the province in the interim. However, the only individual who seemed like a possible candidate in place of Gordon was a notorious and unsavoury anti-British slave dealer, Zobeir Pasha, and Sir Evelyn could not generate any enthusiasm for the man in London, so Gladstone ended up sending Charles Gordon to Khartoum.

      Despite wanting to turn his back on Sudan, Gladstone’s concern about the security of its Red Sea ports led him to land sailors and marines from Royal Navy warships in Suakin in February 1885, and then to dispatch soldiers to augment this force. The British next won battles over the Mahdists at El Teb and Tamai early in 1884 in an attempt to disperse the region’s hostile forces, although the long-term value of these victories was small. Looking ahead, Suakin also might serve as a point for evacuating Egyptian forces from Sudan, as the port was accessible via a caravan route from Berber on the Nile, and such an initiative might obviate the need to dispatch British troops to Khartoum. Yet while the rebellion’s leaders suffered defeat in northeastern Sudan, Muhammad Ahmad’s armies won victories over Egyptian troops in other encounters in 1884, cut the telegraph line to Khartoum, and began their famous siege of the Sudanese capital in March of that year. As the months passed, they increased their pressure on the city as various tribes joined the revolt, eventually swelling insurgent numbers around the capital into the tens of thousands. Then, late in May, the rebels captured Berber, which likely would make an evacuation northwards from Khartoum impossible after that date without the intervention of the British army.