Khartoum Campaign, 1898; Or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan

In 1885, General Charles Gordon died at Khartoum, his body left to the crocodiles of the Nile. Britain did not forget. Thirteen years later, General Kitchener assembled the largest Anglo-Egyptian force the region had ever seen and marched south to settle an old score. The Battle of Omdurman on September 2, 1898, would shatter the Mahdist state forever and rewrite the map of northeastern Africa. Bennet Burleigh, a war correspondent who covered the campaign from its earliest planning stages, wrote this account with the urgency of a man who had seen too much to stay silent. He traces the reorganization of the Egyptian army under British command, the intricate diplomacy with local leaders, and the fateful decision to give battle at Omdurman, where eleven thousand Mahdist warriors fell in under an hour. The book captures both the grand maneuverings of empire and the grim, particular details of soldiers who walked into a wall of Maxim gun fire. This is Victorian military history at its most vivid and unflinching: a primary source that documents not just what happened, but how it felt to be there when the old world of tribal warfare collided with the new machinery of empire.