The Gun

Roosevelt hedged his endorsement of machine gunnery, but barely. He proposed creating permanent machine-gun units for the wars ahead.

I have had too little experience to make judgment final; but certainly, if I were to command either a regiment or a brigade, whether of cavalry or infantry, I would try to get a Gatling battery—under a good man—with me. I feel sure that the greatest possible assistance would be rendered, under almost all circumstances, by such a Gatling battery, if well handled; for I believe that it could be pushed fairly to the front of the firing line.⁶³

Lieutenant Parker had four Gatling guns under his command. Several months later, in autumn 1898, the British military brought many more machine guns—of the newer Maxim variety—into battle in Sudan and put them to their most lethal use yet. The latest campaign along the Nile reached back to 1895, when the British government decided to reassert its influence over Sudan, hoping that a conquest of the Islamic forces in the desert would establish a firmer colonial presence from Cairo to the Cape of Good Hope. A large expeditionary force, more than eight thousand British soldiers accompanied by nearly eighteen thousand Egyptian and African troops, was placed under the command of General Herbert Kitchener. It massed in Egypt and prepared for the arduous trek and river movement up the Nile to destroy the forces of the Khalifa, the Sudanese leader, and reclaim Khartoum. The campaign would serve a second purpose: to avenge the beheading of General Gordon in 1885. A feat of logistics and administration made the final clash possible. Kitchener built a railroad through the desert to keep his soldiers well supplied. An escort of gunboats accompanied them as they traveled upriver. The Maxims were brought overland wrapped in silk, to prevent them from collecting sand and grit.⁶⁴

By late summer 1898, with the British columns nearing the capital at last, the Khalifa prepared to annihilate them outside Omdurman, on the Nile’s western bank and to Khartoum’s north. War drums beat in the city, and before dawn on September 2, General Kitchener’s soldiers formed into order near the village of Karari, anchoring one end along the river and the other at the end of an arc that swept across a plain. Thousands of Sudanese warriors, called Dervishes by the British troops, had spent the night in the field, readying to turn back the invaders. Winston Churchill, then twenty-three years old and a correspondent for the Morning Post, was with the British cavalry as the two sides closed the last distance between them. The battle unfolded around him in a series of unequal scenes, as the lightly armed and technologically unsophisticated Sudanese fighter moved toward an enemy equipped with repeating rifles, artillery, and batteries of Maxim’s guns. Some of the Sudanese men carried rifles, but they were a mixed collection of rusting older patterns. The fighters themselves lamented them. Roughly half of the Khalifa’s soldiers had no firearms at all.⁶⁵

The indigenous army numbered into the tens of thousands. As many as eight thousand Sudanese men streamed forward for the first frontal attack. The Maxims had a longer range than their limited assortment of rifles. Even before bullets were fired, while the Sudanese formations were far off, the British artillery began dropping shells in the midst of the dense charge, stopping men in clusters. The opening minutes of fighting consumed a column led by Ibrahim al Khalil, and defined the day. Al Khalil went into battle with two horses, Aim and End, and after the artillery barrage, Aim had been killed. The commander pushed on.

The plain was filled with thousands of corpses. Yet they had had the enemy in sight for only half an hour. Aware of his acute disadvantage in the face of this massive firepower, Ibrahim decided, at a distance of 800 yards from the zariba, to veer to the right and enter one of the khurs[3] where he might pause, take stock, realign his forces and continue the attack. There he would be only 1,200 yards from the zariba. He motioned to his men to follow him to the right. Then at this moment, 0705, he was hit in the chest and head. He fell from his horse. End also fell, for he too had been hit. The Maxim machine-guns had opened fire, and one of their first victims was the commander of the Kara army. It was remarkable that he had survived so long, for throughout the long artillery bombardment he had been in the front line. Four horsemen dismounted and bore Ibrahim back amid a shower of bullets. The ferocity of the fire was such that the army’s pace was checked, preventing it from turning to the right to shelter in the khur. But even so the scattered survivors continued to advance. Shells exploded on all sides. Many men fell; few rose again. When they had the chance they fired their guns, but it was an unequal contest. Moreover, the twelve machine guns of the three steamers were all now firing at a range of about 1,000 yards. Shaykh Babikr Badri, who was a few miles away, described the regular volleys as being fired at intervals and the enemy fired on them with a sound like runnnn. The command now fell on the shoulders of Muhammad Ishaq who tried to rally the reduced force. He indicated the new direction with his hand, but was immediately and fatally struck by a whole volley of bullets. In the open space there was no cover for a warrior to concentrate his aim and direct his fire, apart from a few scattered bushes, and even when these were reached the machine-gun fire was directed at them, and men and trees were torn up without discrimination.⁶⁶

By eight o’clock in the morning, the mismatch was obvious. Thousands of Sudanese soldiers had been wounded or killed, and not one had managed to come close enough to the British lines to throw a spear. Churchill watched the charges lose momentum, waver, and stop. The remaining Sudanese men tried to get away. There was little chance for that.

As the shells burst accurately above the Dervish skirmishers and spearmen who were taking refuge in the folds of the plain, they rose by hundreds and by fifties to fly. Instantly the hungry and attentive Maxims and the watchful infantry opened on them, sweeping them all to the ground—some in death, others in terror. Again the shells followed them to their new concealment. Again they rose, fewer than before, and ran. Again the Maxims and the rifles spluttered. Again they fell. And so on until the front of the zeriba was clear of unwounded men for at least half a mile.⁶⁷

The British cavalry, the Twenty-first Lancers, organized for a sweep of the plain and pounded out from the lines and across the ground to exploit the enemy’s helplessness and confusion. Roughly four hundred horsemen strong, they rode unexpectedly to a large and deep depression, and met a Sudanese force in hiding. The horsemen were too close to stop, so instead they accelerated and collided with the wall of men in the trench. For ten seconds, both sides were stunned. They continued to fight while intermingled, slashing and stabbing and shooting into one another, sometimes with muzzles pressed almost to one another’s flesh. Then the British broke through, but not before having lost more than a quarter of their horses and suffering seventy wounded or dead men. Less than two minutes had passed since the two groups collided. The British survivors regrouped and wheeled back to prepare to repeat their charge, as riderless horses or horses carrying sagging, bloodied men wandered uselessly about. The Lancers had just completed the last effective British cavalry charge in history. It had been an anachronism in real time, and an example of older, outmoded ideas of tactics urging men to do what Maxim guns no longer required.

The cavalrymen galloped to the Sudanese flank, dismounted, and the two sides exchanged rifle fire as the Sudanese fighters retreated, allowing the British to recover their dead. General Kitchener in the meanwhile had directed his units to move forward and capture Omdurman, and his forces were attacked en route by a massive concentration of the Khalifa’s fighters. The British set their Maxim guns and shattered charge after charge. The battle passed with astonishing quickness. Churchill, a veteran of the seesaw skirmishes against Pashtun tribes on the Afghan and Pakistani frontier, was both astonished and horrified. A huge collection of drilled fighting men had been cut down, almost extinguished, by modern arms. The British force had suffered forty-eight dead, including those lost in the cavalry charge. Contemporaneous estimates of the Sudanese dead exceeded ten thousand, and sometimes were twice that. It was not yet noon. “Within the space of five hours,” Churchill wrote, “the strongest and best-armed savage army yet arrayed against a modern European power had been destroyed and dispersed with hardly any difficulty, comparatively small risk, and insignificant loss to the victors.”

Three days later Churchill accompanied a British horseback patrol that toured the plain, which was covered with the grisly remains of the local army’s dead, and a far smaller number of the wounded, some of whom were trying to crawl with their wrecked frames to the Nile, for a drink. His report of the ride is among the most chilling pieces of battlefield correspondence from the nineteenth century, and the most complete assessment in its time of