Battle of Abu Klea

The battle was short, lasting barely fifteen minutes from start to finish. Casualties for the British were nine officers and 65 other ranks killed and over a hundred wounded. The Mahdists lost 1,100 dead during the fifteen minutes of fighting, made all the worse by only 3,000–5,000 of the dervish force being engaged.

The Desert Column set out from Abu Klea in the late afternoon of 18 January and marched through the night towards Metemmeh. It fought a battle on the afternoon of 19 January near Abu Kru, in the vicinity of Metemmeh, in which it repulsed another charge by the Mahdists. The column's leader, Major General Herbert Stewart, was wounded by Remington rifle fire that night and transferred command to an inexperienced leader, Brigadier General Charles Wilson, his intelligence officer). (Stewart would die of his wound a month later.) Wilson was slow to organize his forces, and in tarrying another day, it was he who was the cause of that advance detachment's delay.

On 20 January a flotilla of four steamers with a motley force of Sudanese and Egyptian troops sent downriver by Gordon reached the British camp. After some reconnaissance up and down the river, Wilson set off towards Khartoum with two of the steamers and a small force on 24 January. His orders from Wolseley were to make contact and confer with Gordon.^[6] They arrived after 11 o’clock on 28 January and were met with enemy fire from the riverbanks. Khartoum had fallen to the Mahdi on 26 January and Gordon had been killed.

The British then withdrew from the Sudan, leaving the Mahdi to rule Sudan for the next 13 years. The official public blame for this failure was left with Prime Minister Gladstone for delaying several months to authorise a rescue, to the considerable anger expressed in public of Queen Victoria.

Poetic tributes

The battle was celebrated by the doggerel poet William McGonagall:

Ye sons of Mars, come join with me,
And sing in praise of Sir Herbert Stewart’s little army,
That made ten thousand Arabs flee
At the charge of the bayonet at Abou Klea

and so on for 19 stanzas.^[7]

The battle and one of its notable participants is mentioned in the song "Colonel Burnaby", which has as its chorus:

Weep not my boys, for those who fell, They did not flinch nor fear. They stood their ground like Englishmen, and died at Abu Klea

The rhymes in these poems show varying attempts at pronouncing "Klea" from the English spelling, and the rhyme with "fear" shows British English

More celebrated and of higher literary quality ^[

…The sand of the desert is sodden red,
Red with the wreck of a square that broke;
The

Gatling

's jammed and the colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.
The river of death has brimmed his banks,
And England’s far, and Honour a name,
But the voice of the schoolboy rallies the ranks,
"Play up! play up! and play the game!”

"The wreck of a square" is a severe exaggeration, and Newbolt conflated Abu Klea with other events such as the

• The Triumph of the Sun (2005 novel) by Wilbur Smith
• Khartoum (film)
• The Four Feathers, a film from 2002, where the battle is portrayed very different from reality and as a disastrous defeat instead of a victory.

References

• Asher, Michael, "Khartoum - The Ultimate Imperial Adventure" Penguin, 2004. Includes a vivid description of the battle from the perspective of both British and Mahdist forces.
• Craig, Simon, "Breaking the Square: Dervishes vs. Brits at the 1885 Battle of Abu Klea", Military Heritage, volume 3, No. 3 (December 2001), 78–84. (Describes the failed British attempt to rescue major general Charles Gordon and friendly forces at Khartoum from the Dervishes led by the Mahdi.)
• Churchill, Winston Spencer. The River War: An Account of the Reconquest of the Sudan, Middlesex: The Echo Library, 2007. 43–48.
• White-Spunner^{[full citation needed]}
• Snook, Col Mike, "Beyond the Reach of Empire: Wolseley's Failed Campaign to Save Gordon and Khartoum." (London, 2013).
  ISBN 978-1-84832-601-9
  .

Wikisource has the text of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article "Abu Klea".

• The Battle of Abu Klea Full text of the poem, from McGonagall Online.
• Abu Clea Painting by Karl Kopinski