THE RIVER WAR

An Account of the Reconquest of the Sudan

(1902 edition)

By Winston S. Churchill

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I.   THE REBELLION OF THE MAHDI

CHAPTER II.   THE FATE OF THE ENVOY

CHAPTER III.   THE DERVISH EMPIRE

CHAPTER IV.   THE YEARS OF PREPARATION

CHAPTER V.   THE BEGINNING OF THE WAR

CHAPTER VI.   FIRKET

CHAPTER VII.   THE RECOVERY OF THE DONGOLA PROVINCE

CHAPTER VIII.   THE DESERT RAILWAY

CHAPTER IX.   ABU HAMED

CHAPTER X.   BERBER

CHAPTER XI.   RECONNAISSANCE

CHAPTER XII.   THE BATTLE OF THE ATBARA

CHAPTER XIII.   THE GRAND ADVANCE

CHAPTER XIV.   THE OPERATIONS OF THE FIRST OF SEPTEMBER

CHAPTER XV.   THE BATTLE OF OMDURMAN

CHAPTER XVI.   THE FALL OF THE CITY

CHAPTER XVII.   'THE FASHODA INCIDENT'

CHAPTER XVIII.      ON THE BLUE NILE

CHAPTER XIX.   THE END OF THE KHALIFA

APPENDIX.   

CHAPTER I: THE REBELLION OF THE MAHDI

The north-eastern quarter of the continent of Africa is drained and watered by the Nile. Among and about the headstreams and tributaries of this mighty river lie the wide and fertile provinces of the Egyptian Soudan. Situated in the very centre of the land, these remote regions are on every side divided from the seas by five hundred miles of mountain, swamp, or desert. The great river is their only means of growth, their only channel of progress. It is by the Nile alone that their commerce can reach the outer markets, or European civilisation can penetrate the inner darkness. The Soudan is joined to Egypt by the Nile, as a diver is connected with the surface by his air-pipe. Without it there is only suffocation. Aut Nilus, aut nihil!

The town of Khartoum, at the confluence of the Blue and White Niles, is the point on which the trade of the south must inevitably converge. It is the great spout through which the merchandise collected from a wide area streams northwards to the Mediterranean shore. It marks the extreme northern limit of the fertile Soudan. Between Khartoum and Assuan the river flows for twelve hundred miles through deserts of surpassing desolation. At last the wilderness recedes and the living world broadens out again into Egypt and the Delta. It is with events that have occurred in the intervening waste that these pages are concerned.

The real Soudan, known to the statesman and the explorer, lies far to the south—moist, undulating, and exuberant. But there is another Soudan, which some mistake for the true, whose solitudes oppress the Nile from the Egyptian frontier to Omdurman. This is the Soudan of the soldier. Destitute of