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Articles
Churchill’s Descriptive Power: The River War and Herbert Kitchener
- By ALAN STRAUS-SCHOM
- | July 13, 2023
- Category: Explore Great Contemporaries The Literary Churchill
One of Winston Churchill’s greatest books, The River War has been frequently praised herein. An accomplished historian, Dr. Alan Straus-Schom offers his particular view of its merits, including an appreciation of Lord Kitchener, who led the reconquest of the Sudan. His personal relationship with the Third Earl Kitchener adds dimension to his account. Dr. Straus-Schom’s notes were sent privately, but believing they deserve a shared audience, we asked his permission to publish them. Our thanks to Andrew Roberts for bringing this to our attention. —RML
The Sudan and the Nile
Reading The River War, I am reminded what a talented, indeed magnificent, writer Churchill was—and, to the mind of this colonial, the finest since Shakespeare. The first few pages, describing the Sudan, establish those credentials—so many talents vested in one man: political leader, orator, poet and painter….
Level plains of smooth sand—a little rosier than buff, a little paler than salmon—are interrupted only by occasional peaks of rock—black, stark, and shapeless. Rainless storms dance tirelessly over the hot, crisp surface of the ground…. The earth burns with the quenchless thirst of ages…. The sky from a dull blue deepens into violet in the west…. And then the sun sinks altogether behind the rocks, the colours fade out of the sky, the flush off the sands, and gradually everything darkens and grows grey, like a man’s cheek when he is bleeding to death. We are left sad and sorrowful in the dark, until the stars light up and remind us that there is always something beyond.
In a land whose beauty is the beauty of a moment, whose face is desolate, and whose character is strangely stern, the curse of war was hardly needed to produce a melancholy effect. Where everything is hot and burning, the caustic plants appear superfluous. In deserts where thirst is enthroned…. The area multiplies the desolation.
In the account of the River War the Nile is naturally supreme. It is the great motif that recurs throughout the whole opera…. It is the life of the lands through which it flows. It is the cause of the war. It is the means by which we fight; the end at which we aim. Imagination should paint the river through every page in the story…. It is the explanation of nearly every military movement…. Without the river…none might have continued. Without it none could ever have returned…. Kingdoms and dominations have risen and fallen by its banks.
Mastery of the particular
The reader is amazed at Churchill’s extraordinary detail. An entire chapter, for example, is devoted to Kitchener’s construction of the military railway. Young Winston notes even the 1500-gallon water tank placed along the route of line. He closely describes the great rail workshop at Wadi Halfa, the forty locomotives ultimately used. Some of these were from the USA (due to strikes in the UK). Churchill found them superior to the British versions. American engines, he writes, were better built, faster and provided with interchangeable parts.1
Churchill also details the significance of water transport and the role of large gunboats, capable of carrying 200-300 soldiers. Clearly the English army and navy had closely studied the American Civil War. The Royal Navy adopted an American invention, rotating turret batteries, even before the Civil War was over, then improving on the American models. The originals were made of thick iron plates, replaced by steel later in the century.
More interesting for me, as a naval historian, was the adaptation of large numbers of heavily armed gunboats. During the American Civil War, U.S. Navy Admiral David Porter commanded a squadron of seventy such vessels. The British deployed them for the same purposes in the Sudan (although lacking heavy American armor). They effectively cleared Dervish forts and artillery, escorted supply vessels, and protected infantry advancing along the Nile from Egypt to Khartoum.
I have not yet discovered how many gunboats and steamers Kitchener used. Curiously enough, the Americans, though operating along heavily wooded rivers, used coal (from Illinois), while steamers on the barren banks of the Nile appear to have relied more on wood, a very scarce commodity in the Sudan!
Churchill on Kitchener
Churchill deftly describes Herbert Kitchener, Sirdar (Commander) of the Egyptian Army, with whom he would have more encounters in a greater war to come. No detail escapes Kitchener’s gaze. He constantly inspects everything from machine shops, to transport to the cooking arrangements, even verifying the quality of grain, clothing, and food. But Churchill at this time sees Kitchener as “ungracious”: cold and aloof, incapable of human warmth and gratitude. Later he would be more magnanimous.
Major Henry Kitchener, 3rd Earl Kitchener, Lord Kitchener’s grand-nephew, whom I knew for over forty years, was similar. He always stood and sat ramrod straight, unwilling to let his guard down. Still, he was always most kind and attentive, and we got on very well together. In Dorset, when he stayed with his niece Emma Kitchener-Fellowes,2 he asked that I be invited. and we always shared a small wing of Stafford House to ourselves. I was the only American he knew well. I have fond memories of our meetings over the years, and have a much better understanding of Herbert Kitchener as a result.
Something else strikes me about Churchill’s book that is atypical in English military accounts of the time: His determination to represent both sides adds critical balance to his tale. Churchill includes much detail about the Sudanese and Dervish leaders—where they operated, their numbers, their types of arms. He even describes the fighting between different leaders and tribes, while at the same time facing Kitchener’s army. Clearly he consulted British army officers with fluent Arabic, presumably including Sudan’s future 1899-1916 Governor General, Sir Reginald Wingate.
Kitchener postscript
Kitchener had regarded young Winston as bumptious and ambitious, and resisted his joining the Sudan expedition as a war correspondent. Again in 1914, the Great War threw them together. They frequently disagreed, yet Kitchener paid a touching visit when WSC was dismissed as First Lord of the Admiralty in May 1915. Churchill’s account says as much about him as it does Kitchener….
It was during this interval that I had the honour of receiving a visit of ceremony from Lord Kitchener. I was not at first aware of what it was about. We had differed strongly and on a broad front at the last meeting of the War Council. Moreover, no decision of any importance on naval and military affairs could be taken during the hiatus. We talked about the situation.
After some general remarks he asked me whether it was settled that I should leave the Admiralty. I said it was. He asked what I was going to do. I said I had no idea; nothing was settled. He spoke very kindly about our work together. He evidently had no idea how narrowly he had escaped my fate.
As he got up to go he turned and said, in the impressive and almost majestic manner which was natural to him, “Well, there is one thing at any rate they cannot take from you. The Fleet was ready.” After that he was gone.
During the months that we were still to serve together in the new Cabinet I was condemned often to differ from him, to oppose him and to criticize him. But I cannot forget the rugged kindness and warm-hearted courtesy which led him to pay me this visit.3
The author
Dr. Strauss-Schom is the Founder and first President of the French Colonial History Society, and is Senior Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, London. He is the author of eight historical works including Napoleon Bonaparte, Trafalgar: Countdown to Battle, and The Eagle and the Rising Sun: The Japanese-American War 1941-1943. He has just completed his ninth book, The Civil War Battle History of the U.S. Navy 1861-65, and is currently writing Fashoda. For more information, please refer to his website.
Notes
1 Churchill’s praise of American mechanical interchangeability is remindful of a famous demonstration at Brooklands in 1907. Three one-cylinder Cadillac cars painted different colors were taken apart, the components jumbled into separate piles. They were put back together with wrenches and screwdrivers. The result was a motley trio of mismatched colors, but each ran perfectly.
2 In 1990, Emma Joy Kitchener married actor and screenwriter Julian Fellowes, famed for Gosford Park and Downton Abbey.
3 Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, vol. 2, 1915 (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1923), 374-75.
Further reading and viewing
Ronald I. Cohen, “The River War Returns in a Masterful and Scholarly New Edition,” 2021.
Paul Rahe, “The Timeless Value of Winston Churchill’s The River War,” 2015.
Video: James Muller, “Lessons from The River War,” Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar, 2015.