Empire: What Ruling the World Did to the British by Jeremy Paxman

Author:Jeremy Paxman
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Europe, Great Britain, Western, History
ISBN: 9780670919604
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2011-10-06T00:00:00+00:00

The Maxim Gun, and they have not.

There was an imperial coda to this massacre. Five days after the Khalifa’s forces were wiped out at Omdurman, a boat came drifting down the Nile bearing unmistakable evidence of having been shot up. The crew described how they had been on a foraging mission upriver, near the town of Fashoda, when they had come under fire from the riverbank. Who their attackers were they knew not, just that they were black soldiers under the command of white officers. As Winston Churchill told the story, curious British officers then dug into the wooden hull and extracted nickel-covered bullets of the kind used only by European forces. This was firm evidence that some other European power was encroaching on to what Kitchener had now established was British territory. But which one? Could it be a Belgian expedition which had set off from the Congo? Italians advancing their country’s repeated claims to some of the spoils of Africa? Might they be French? The crew of the boat were asked what flag had been flying, but were unable to agree on the colours they had seen.

Gathering a couple of battalions of Sudanese troops, two companies of Cameron Highlanders, an artillery battery and four Maxim guns, Kitchener set off upriver with five of his gunboats. As he approached Fashoda on 18 September 1898, the identity of the intruders was settled, for he was greeted by soldiers carrying a letter from a Major Jean-Baptiste Marchand. It had the impertinence to welcome him, in the name of France. The British Empire in Africa was hung on a north–south axis, along the lines of Cecil Rhodes’s dream of a railway line from the Cape to Cairo. French possessions in Africa were concentrated on the Atlantic coast of west Africa, although the French had recently taken control of the fly-blown but strategically important territory of Djibouti on the Horn of Africa. Paris dreamed of linking the two and Fashoda was the point where the British north–south line crossed the French east–west line. Marchand and his small group of officers had spent two years hacking their way across the continent on a march from west Africa. By comparison with the British force, the Frenchmen were in a poor state, exhausted, short of ammunition for their rifles and with no artillery at all. Kitchener congratulated the major on his endurance. Marchand pointed to his men and replied that the achievement was all theirs. At this point, Kitchener decided, ‘I knew he was a gentleman.’ Blithely ignoring the French flag which was flying above the fort, he then ordered that the British and Egyptian flags be raised, the national anthems played and salutes fired from the gunboats. Then, leaving a colonel, troops, four artillery pieces and a couple of Maxim guns behind him, he continued his progress upriver.

Kitchener sent news of the confrontation through to London by the telegraph which had been laid down the Nile from Khartoum to Cairo: this was an impasse which would have to be sorted by the British and French governments.

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