(click image to enlarge)
The present image refers to the Battle of Atbara, fought on 8 April 1898 between the combined Anglo-Egyptian Army and the forces of Mahdist Sudan, on the banks of the Atbara River in Sudan. The cartoon portrays the triumphant Commander of the British forces, Horatio Herbert Kitchener, following his army’s decisive victory. The victory was a turning point in the Mahdist War, which had begun 17 years earlier with an uprising led by a religious leader, Muhammad Ahmad bin Abdullah, who had proclaimed himself the ‘Mahdi’, or Guided One, of Islam. By January 1885, the rebels had overthrown the Ottoman-Egyptian administration and taken the capital, Khartoum, resulting in the death of the famous British officer, Charles Gordon. Following Kitchener’s victory at Atbara, the Mahdist army suffered another decisive defeat in September 1898 at the Mahdi capital of Omdurman. In November 1899 at the Battle of Umm Daikarat, the remainder of the Mahdist army was defeated and the Sudanese Khalifa, Abdallahi ibn Muhammad, was killed, ending the war.
After his influential role in the British victory in Sudan, Commander Kitchener would become Secretary of State for War during the First World War, and became immortalized in 1914 on Alfred Leete’s famous ‘Your Country Needs You!’ recruitment poster. On 15 June 1916, he was lost at sea aboard the HMS Hampshire, when the ship hit a mine and sank.
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