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The River War An Historical Account
of the Reconquest of the Soudan
Winston S. Churchill
Edited by James W. Muller
New Foreword by Mary Soames South Bend (Indiana): St. Augustine's Press, 2020 Hardcover. 2 volumes
(cclvi+432 / xxvi+846 pages; illustrations, maps) ISBN 978-1587317002. $150
Reviewed by Antoine Capet Université
de Rouen
Before an impressive set of this nature, edited by the
well-known Churchill
scholar, Professor James W. Muller of the University of Alaska, the
reviewer has to consider five main points: the text itself; the reception of
the text at the time; the text in historical perspective; the critical
apparatus; and the typographical, physical and technical characteristics of the
set. All readers with an interest in Churchill will know that
the publishing history of the book is tortuous, and that the short-lived, original
edition in two volumes of 1899 has long become a costly collector’s item since
it was the only one to give Churchill’s unabridged text and was never reprinted
– until now (though Professor Muller mentions a facsimile reproduction with one
map left out and all other maps in black and white offered in 2000 [I, clxii,
N.113]). Anyone wanting to read The
River War,
therefore, had to be satisfied with the 1902 abridged reprint in one volume (now
even scarcer), which spawned a succession of more or less garbled subsequent
editions until 2008 [I, clxxv]. Internet substitutes are no better from the
point of view of completeness. The online Gutenberg version does not even give
Churchill’s Preface, though it was largely kept in the 1902 abridgement. And
yet no better summary of the ambit of the book can be found than its opening
sentences:
The first object of this book is to relate in military detail the operations
directed by Lord Kitchener of Khartoum on the Upper Nile from April 1896 to
February 1899, which I have called ‘The River War’, and which resulted in the
reconquest of the Egyptian Soudan. But in order that the reader may understand,
and even sympathise with the emotions which these events excited, I have
prefixed a general survey of the geography, aspect, and history of the country,
and tried to show its connection with Egypt and Great Britain. [I, ccxxxvii] Churchill was of course setting himself an enormous task if he was
meaningfully to cover ‘the geography, aspect,
and history of the country’ – which he magnificently did in the text of the
first edition given here. Uninformed commentators often erroneously
ascribe his attribution of the Nobel Prize of Literature in 1953 ‘for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as
for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values’ to his six-volume The
Second World War, which was not yet in fact completed, and which was not
mentioned in the presentation speech – but The River War was: On a visit to Omdurman many years ago I discovered how the final
struggle in the crushing of the Mahdi’s rebellion, as it is depicted in The
River War (1899), was branded on my memory. I could see in front of me the
dervish hordes brandishing their spears and guns, the ochre-yellow sand
ramparts shot to pieces, the Anglo-Egyptian troops’ methodical advance, and the
cavalry charge which nearly cost Churchill his life. [I, clxxx] It is impossible of course to quote all the superb pages of the book, but
here is a sample of what Churchill probably meant by describing ‘the aspect of the country’:
The
banks of the Nile, except by contrast with the desert, display an abundance of
barrenness. Their characteristic is monotony. Their attraction is their
sadness. Yet there is one hour when all is changed. Just before the sun sets
towards the western cliffs a delicious flush brightens and enlivens the
landscape. It is as though some Titanic artist in the hour of inspiration was
retouching the picture, painting in dark purple shadows among the rocks, strengthening
the lights on the sand, gilding and beautifying everything, and making the
whole scene live. The river, whose windings give the impression of a lake,
turns from muddy brown to silver-grey. The sky from a dull blue deepens into
violet in the west. Everything under that magic touch becomes vivid and alive.
And then the sun sinks altogether behind the rocks, the colors 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. [I, 5] Anyone tempted to mock the choice of the Nobel Prize judges should first
read this kind of prose, everywhere to be found in The River War. As for the ‘history of the country’, again one example will suffice: it
is a commonplace of the way history used to be taught in British and French schools that ‘l’incident de
Fachoda’ of 1898 was known to all French lycéens as one of the factors
leading to the Entente Cordiale a few years later, whereas hardly anyone had
heard of Fashoda in the British Isles outside
academic circles. Well – Churchill devotes a whole chapter to it [II, Chapter
XXIV], with full details of ‘an incident which might easily have convulsed
Europe, and from which far-reaching consequences have arisen’:
Towards the end of 1896 a French expedition was despatched from the Atlantic into the heart of Africa under the command of Major Marchand. […] [O]n
the 18th of September [1898] they approached Fashoda. […] The Sirdar
[Lord Kitchener] and his
officers on their part were thrilled with admiration at the wonderful
achievements of this small band of heroic men. Two years had passed since they
left the Atlantic coast. For four months they had been absolutely lost from
human ken. They had fought with savages; they had struggled with fever; they
had climbed mountains and pierced the most gloomy forests. Five days and five
nights they had stood up to their necks in swamp and water. A fifth of their
number had perished; yet at last they had carried out their mission and,
arriving at Fashoda on the 10th of July, had planted the tricolour
upon the Upper Nile. [II, 286, 292-293] The abridged version immediately moves on to describe the friendly
reception, with full military honours, which the French detachment received on Kitchener’s part. But
the original version first had a glowing disquisition which is important for
anyone interested in the subject of Churchill’s francophilia – especially his
admiration for the French Army (already expressed a few years earlier, in 1891, in letters to his
mother during his stay in Versailles):
Happy the nation that can produce such men! Dark though her fortunes, and vexed though her politics may be, while France can
find soldiers like Marchand and, let us add, like Picquart, her citizens need
not despair of the safety of the Republic, nor her generals of the honour of
the army. [II, 293] The expression ‘spheres of influence’ recurs several times in the
chapter, showing that the 24-year-old Churchill was already keenly interested
in world affairs and the diplomatic dimension of military operations. He starts
his long examination of the happy conclusion of the Fashoda confrontation by
putting it in the perspective of the rivalry between the European Great Powers
in the last few years of the 19th century:
Let us settle the international aspect of the reconquest of the Soudan while we are in the way with it. The disputes between France and England about
the valley of the Upper Nile were terminated, as far as material cause was
concerned, by an Agreement, signed in London on the 21st of March,
1899, by Lord Salisbury and M. Cambon. The Declaration limiting the respective
Spheres of Influence of the two Powers took the form of an addition to the IVth
Article of the Niger Convention, concluded in the previous year. […] Its
practical effect is to reserve the whole drainage system of the Nile to England
and Egypt, and to engage that France shall have a free hand, so far as those
Powers are concerned, in the rest of Northern Africa not yet occupied by
Europeans west of the Nile Valley. This stupendous partition of half a
continent by two European Powers could scarcely be expected to excite the
enthusiasm of the rest. Germany was, however, soothed by the promise of the
observance of the 'Open Door' policy upon the Upper Nile. Italy, protesting
meekly, followed Germany. Russia had no interests in this quarter. France and
England were agreed. The rest were not consulted: and the Declaration may thus
be said to have been recognised by the world in general. [II, 301] Naturally, ‘the first object of th[e] book’ is given pride of place in
the narrative, notably the decisive confrontation in Omdurman on 2 September
1898, whose chapter so entitled occupies no less than 53 pages – but in fact
the following three chapters also discuss the immediate military aftermath and
political repercussions of the battle, so that it can legitimately be argued
that it is effectively given 231 pages. Some pages!, to paraphrase Churchill. As the late Lady Soames wrote in her Foreword:
And it is not only the battle-lines and skirmishes which Churchill recounts so inimitably – he makes the sheer organisational and
physical struggle to deploy and supply an army on the move, in the harsh conditions
of that howling desert region, compelling reading. [I, xii] The value of the chapters comes not only from the description of the
actual battle, but also from the comments which involved him in controversy –
then and now. Churchillians know that the Press reception of the original
volumes was overwhelmingly favourable, and they also know that privately it
offended at least one of the principal actors – one that could be useful for his
future career, namely the commander-in-chief (‘Sirdar’), Lord Kitchener
himself, whom he did not spare in his comments in the original edition:
Horatio Herbert Kitchener […] passed through the ordinary routine of a military training without attracting the attention of his comrades or
instructors either by promise in study or prowess in athletics. […] It is strange that the soldier [Kitchener] who is at this moment the
bitterest opponent of the Press that modern militarism has yet produced in
England should have received much material assistance at the turning-point of
his life from a ‘special correspondent’. [I, 155, 156] Churchill of course had received the second highest marks in
horsemanship at his Sandhurst final examination, and he had already written a
lot in the Press when The River War came out. This is by
way of introduction, as the ‘character assassination’, as we would now say,
gets far worse in the second volume, when Churchill assesses the behaviour of
the commander-in-chief after his victory at Omdurman:
By Sir H. Kitchener’s orders the Tomb [of the Moslem Mahdi] has been profaned and razed to the ground. The corpse of the Mahdi was dug up. The head
was separated from the body. […] The limbs and trunk were flung into the Nile.
Such was the chivalry of the conquerors! […] [I]t was an act of Vandalism and folly. […] It is a gloomy augury for
the future of the Soudan that the first action of its civilised conquerors and
present ruler [Kitchener] should have been to level the one pinnacle which rose
above the mud houses. […] [It] was a wicked act, of which the true Christian,
no less than the philosopher, must express his abhorrence. [II, 193, 195-196] No wonder then
that these offensive passages – all hostages to fortune – should have been
among those that were the most heavily ‘jettisoned’, as Churchill put it in the
New Preface to the abridged 1902 edition. ‘The original edition is breathless
and wordy, the revised version stately and reserved’, we read in the Editor’s
Introduction [I, clxviii]. But whereas Professor Muller convincingly explains
why the new MP (elected in 1900) had to be careful with powerful national
figures like Kitchener, he admits that he sees no obvious reasons why Churchill
also excised what are now the most famous – or notorious – passages of the
book, those in which he gives his opinion of Islam and its effect on the character
of the Mohammedans. At the time nobody raised an eyebrow, and this certainly
did not affect the reception of his two volumes – but today they infringe the
canons of the ‘politically correct’ in the highest degree. Of course, Professor
Muller rightly does not fail to mention how a right-wing activist was arrested
in Winchester in 2014 for reading a page aloud in public without saying that it
was written by the Greatest Briton of all time [I, cxvi]. The page notably
goes:
How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in
a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in
many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods
of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the
Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and
refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan
law every woman must belong to some
man as his absolute property—either as a child, a wife, or a concubine—must
delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be
a great power among men. [II, 227] As a Professor of Political Science, Dr Muller is perfectly aware of the
offensive nature of many of the words employed by Churchill in this paragraph quoted with relish by both extreme sides –
the anti-Islam Right and the anti-Churchill Left – and he devotes several pages
to a commentary on Churchill’s perceived racialism, pointing to another passage
now considered as intolerably outrageous:
[T]he Arabs of the Soudan are a race formed by the interbreeding of negro and Arab,
and yet distinct from either. […] The qualities of mongrels are rarely
admirable, and the mixture of the Arab and negro types has produced a debased
and cruel breed, more shocking because they are more intelligent than the
primitive savages. [I, 15, 16 (this was kept in the 1902 abridgement)] Treading very carefully because of the highly-charged nature of the
discussion, he replaces Churchill’s words in
the context of his time before explaining how they have been exploited and
distorted by some recent African leaders and sadly concluding that the Sudan
(to use today’s spelling) remains in a sorry state 120 years later, over half
of them spent in full independence:
In its postwar retreat from empire, Britain freed the Sudan to govern itself. Unfortunately, as Churchill realized, it takes more than self-government to achieve good
government. Native rule by tyrants of the same race, color, and creed as their
people, which has proved a disappointment to so many Africans in the
post-imperial era, has particularly afflicted citizens of the Sudan. Through
more than six decades of independence, successive rulers have selected their
own ‘terrible road’ [a phrase used by Churchill in The River War] for the patient but put-upon people of the country to follow. The
nation’s career under native self-government has been marked by tyranny,
corruption, civil war, false hopes, genocide, famine, and eventually partition,
reminding us what a rare and precious achievement good government is. [I, clxxviii] The thoughtful reader of both Churchill’s text and Professor Muller’s
sensitive comments can only meditate on the weight of historical perspective
and how it largely vindicates Churchill’s many apprehensions in his encounters
with non-Western civilisations. Turning to the critical apparatus, one is left in awe before this stupendous scholarly achievement, which only years of patient research on several continents could
have produced. The French, with their Roman Catholic background, admiringly speak in such cases
of ‘un travail de bénédictin’ – the
Benedictine monks famous for their untiring work in the seclusion of the
medieval scriptorium. Several
examples have already been given of the extensive Introduction – essential today, after over 120 years in which so much
has changed in the world. As was already the case in Great Contemporaries,
a previous Churchill book edited by James Muller with the help of the late Paul
Courtenay (to whose memory the present work is dedicated) reviewed in Cercles, all proper names benefit from a biographical note (as for
instance Marchand and Picquart mentioned above), all archaic and foreign words are explained, all foreign phrases are
translated into English, and all forgotten or strange institutions are
elucidated, often in an extensive way. The reader never has to consult a
dictionary or encyclopedia to be able to follow Churchill’s reasoning,
understand his meaning and identify the protagonists and places mentioned – no
mean feat when one considers the complexity of the task. To this comprehensive footnoting, the second volume adds an extensive
section of Appendices, with material which was not included in the original edition,
notably over 150 pages of Churchill’s original dispatches written for the Morning Post, but not always published
verbatim, and a series of over twenty sketches from Angus McNeill’s 1898 Notebook.
Likewise, a new forty-page classified Bibliography
is added to Churchill’s initial two pages in the first volume. ‘To be truly complete, a new edition of the original text should add the
new material from 1902, and a tabulation of the 1902 excisions’, Richard
Langworth wrote of the 1899 two-volume edition in 1998 on p. 28 of his Connoisseur’s Guide to the Books of Sir
Winston Churchill. Well – here we are, down to the commas, which are
mentioned when they differ. The technique adopted to distinguish between the
two is the clever but expensive one of resorting to printing in two colours: to
the abridged version in black type are seamlessly added in red ink the passages
which had been removed from the first edition. When the words were not deleted,
but changed, a footnote gives the difference. There are further refinements,
like the distinction between the three impressions of the 1899 edition: all are
clearly explained in ‘A Note on the Text’, which runs to no less than seven
pages. This allusion to technical devices leads us to our last point. If The River War was so expensive (36 shillings when Seebohm Rowntree recommended a weekly
wage of 21 shillings for a single man), it was because it was an unashamedly de luxe edition, with no expense spared
to make it a fine illustrated book, not only with line drawings, but also with
folding maps in colour – at a time when printing in colour was a complicated, labour-intensive,
slow and therefore costly process. Likewise, no expense was spared in the St.
Augustine's Press edition to make it as faithful as possible to the original,
including of course the illustrations by Angus McNeill of the Seaforth
Highlanders and the folding maps in colour – no less than nine in the second
volume for the battle of Omdurman alone. Anyone who has ever tried to use a
modern office printer knows how difficult it is to reproduce the sometimes very
fine lines of old drawings and how the colour prints are often extremely
disappointing in comparison with the original images. All in all, St.
Augustine's Press has probably managed to get the best results according to the
latest developments in reproduction technology. In thick, heavy books like that, the
quality of the binding is essential for durability. Here again, St. Augustine's
Press opted for the best, viz. sewn
sections as opposed to cheap gluing of ‘guillotined’ sheets. The Bodoni-inspired
type is very pleasant to read, and – last but not least – the proof-reading
must have been of the highest quality since no error was detected in such a
complex editorial undertaking. In his 1902 New Preface, an unrepentant Churchill wrote in defence of
the abridgement:
What has been jettisoned consists mainly of personal impressions and opinions, often controversial in character, which, however
just, were not essential to the narrative or to a permanent record, and which
some indeed may think not to have been the most valuable part of the book. [I,
ccxxxvi] This
new edition, by restoring the excised passages, shows how wrong he was to
dismiss and delete them so lightly, and 21st-century readers can only be
thankful to Professor Muller and St. Augustine's Press for giving them access
again to these admittedly ‘often controversial’ – but undoubtedly fascinating –
‘personal impressions and opinions’. The
final word must however go to Lady Soames, who wrote in her Foreword: ‘Indeed,
as I read on, I found it increasingly difficult to grasp that this magisterial
book was written by a man of twenty-four over a period of a year’ [I, ix]. Who
would not agree with her?
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