The Gun

the power of automatic fire.

A strong, hot wind blew from the west across the great plain and hurried foul and tainted to the river. Keeping to windward of the thickest clusters, we picked our way, and the story of the fight unfolded itself. Here was where the artillery had opened on the swarming masses. Men had fallen in little groups of five or six to each shell. Nearer to the zeriba—about 1,000 yards from it—the musketry had begun to tell, and the dead lay evenly scattered about—one every ten yards. Two hundred yards further the full force of the fire—artillery, Maxims and rifles—had burst on them. In places desperate rushes to get on at all costs had been made by devoted fearless men. In such places the bodies lay so thickly as to hide the ground. Occasionally there were double layers of this hideous covering. Once I saw them lying three deep. In a space not exceeding a hundred yards square more than 400 corpses lay festering.

Churchill was shaken. “I have tried to gild war,” he wrote, “and to solace myself for the loss of dear and gallant friends, with the thought that a soldier’s death for a cause that he believes in will count for much, whatever may be beyond this world.” But he was unable to square the sights before him, acre upon acre of the remains of soldiers on their own land, with his understanding of war waged by a “civilized Power.”

There was nothing dulce et decorum about the Dervish dead; nothing of the dignity of unconquerable manhood; all was filthy corruption. Yet these were as brave men as ever walked the earth. The conviction was born in me that their claim beyond the grave in respect of a valiant death was not less good than that which any of our countrymen could make.

The patrol continued on. Its members traced the outlines of the battle by following the lines and piles of corpses. Churchill had participated in the charge of the Twenty-first Lancers; he knew of its exhilaration and frantic terror, and had been within the rushing wall of four hundred horsemen crashing at high speed against a denser wall of dismounted men. As he roamed away from the location of the Lancers’ victory, out onto the plain near the Nile, he came to the spot where another cavalry charge—this one by the Baggara, who were aligned with the Khalifa— had been stopped by Maxims. The result had been utterly different. The area of the Baggara attack was marked by a sun-bloated collection of dead horses and men. Churchill saw immediately the distinction between the charges. It was as if two events from different eras had occurred side by side on the same field. The British cavalry had faced rifles, swords, and spears, and made it up to and through the Sudanese lines, just as their tacticians had imagined, and much like cavalrymen from another time. The collision eroded the will of the defenders, and as the British turned around, reorganized, and attacked again, the Sudanese men fled. The Baggara faced a line thick with machine guns. A few European men, peering down metal sights and pressing metal buttons with their thumbs, had filled them and their horses with bullets, bringing them to a not quite instantaneous stop.

Every man had galloped at full speed, and when he fell he shot many lengths in front of his horse, rolling over and over—destroyed, not conquered, by machinery. At such sights the triumph of victory faded on the mind, and a mournful feeling of disgust grew stronger.

Battle had changed. Modern weapons were no longer curiosities. The questions about their reliability had been put to rest. Sudan would fall back under British control. War had entered a new phase.

Now only the heaps of corruption on the plain, and the fugitives dispersed and scattered in the wilderness, remained. The terrible machinery of scientific war had done its work.

For this victory, General Kitchener would be named Kitchener of Khartoum and propelled to celebrity and ahead of other British officers in his career. And other movements were afoot. Adolf von Tiedemann, a German military attache, had toured the right flank during the battle and taken notes of the work of the Maxim guns. He estimated that more than half of the Sudanese deaths were caused by them, and saw the ruinous effect of reliable and massed automatic fire used against soldiers who moved into it in traditional military style.⁶⁸ While London celebrated, the attache was sending back his reports. Germany would soon increase its production of Maxim guns.

Reaction to the sudden dominance of machine gunnery on the battle-field was mixed. By 1893, after British expeditions had gunned down the Yonnies and the Ndebele, the British Parliament was debating the merits and morality of machine gunnery. Several politicians found the startlingly lopsided killing unfair and suggested it was counterproductive. “Treaties with savage Chiefs were not of much value,” the parliamentarian A. C. Morton told his fellow members in 1893. “They were very often brought about by the aid of Maxim guns, aided not infrequently by the whisky bottle.” Hilaire Belloc, the deeply Catholic French writer who had taken residence in England, was also made uneasy by the ready application of machine gunnery in colonial governance and the callous attitudes that accompanied it. In 1898 he published The Modern Traveler, a narrative poem about a trio of Englishmen who traveled to Africa for profit and tried to exert their will. One of the characters, a feckless stockbroker named William Blood, relied on machine guns even to settle a wage dispute.

Blood thought he knew the native mind;
He said you must be firm, but kind.
A mutiny resulted.
I shall never forget the way
That Blood stood upon this awful day
Preserved us all from death.
He stood upon a little mound
Cast his lethargic eyes around,
And said beneath his breath:
“Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim Gun, and they have not.”

He marked them in their rude advance,
He hushed their rebel cheers;
With one extremely vulgar glance
He broke the Mutineers.
(I have a picture in my book
Of how he broke them with a look.)
We shot and hanged a few, and then
The rest became devoted men.

As General Kitchener was marching across the desert in 1897, Rudyard Kipling had already commandeered the word Maxim. He made it a verb, describing a British sergeant, a man “with a charm for making riflemen from mud,” training his colonial charges in the arts of military rule.

Said England unto Pharaoh, “I must make a man of you,
That will stand upon his feet and play the game;
That will Maxim his oppressor as a Christian ought to do.”⁶⁹