Sirdar and Khalifa — Bennet Burleigh

Description

War correspondent Bennet Burleigh's gripping account of the reconquest of the Sudan in 1898. Following Kitchener's Anglo-Egyptian army from Cairo to Khartoum, Burleigh witnessed the decisive Battle of Omdurman and the fall of the Khalifa's empire. A vivid dispatch from one of the great war reporters of the Victorian era.

Excerpt

It remained for the latter part of the nineteenth century to see orderly government, and the extension of civilisation under European control, into that vast territory known as the Egyptian Soudan, suddenly destroyed, and the land voluntarily given over to barbarism. How horrible rule by savagery is, few readers can imagine. Broadly stated, it means human association where slavery, cruelty, and vice are the normal condition, and where property and life are at the instant disposal of passion and the sword.

In that period not only were men, women, and children ruthlessly slain, but rich provinces were devastated and turned into barren places.