Maybe after Gordon of Khartoum....
Gordon organised the defence of Khartoum, but a siege by the Mahdist forces started on March 18, 1884. The British had decided to abandon the Sudan, but it was clear that Gordon had other plans, and the public increasingly called for a relief expedition. It was not until August that the government decided to take steps to relieve Gordon, and only by November was the British relief force, called the Nile Expedition, or, more popularly, the Khartoum Relief Expedition or Gordon Relief Expedition (a title that Gordon strongly deprecated), under the command of Field Marshal Garnet Wolseley, ready.
The force consisted of two groups, a "flying column" of camel-borne troops from Wadi Halfa. The troops reached Korti towards the end of December, and arrived at Metemma on January 20, 1885. There they found four gunboats which had been sent north by Gordon four months earlier, and prepared them for the trip back up the Nile. On January 24, two of the steamers started for Khartoum, but on arriving there on January 28, they found that the city had been captured and Gordon had been killed two days previously (two days before his 52nd birthday).
The British press criticised the Army for arriving two days late but it was later argued that the Mahdi's forces had good intelligence and if the Army had advanced earlier the attack on Khartoum would also have come earlier.
June 26, 2009, 08:36:29 AM
