To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918

by Adam Hochschild

Britain’s wars, the jubilant victors at Omdurman expected, would continue to be just such lopsided victories—or massacres, as a dissenter like Charlotte Despard might say—against poorly armed Arabs, Africans, and Asians. This assumption, and the confidence that weapons like the Maxim gun would always give Britain superiority, underlay a sort of ecstasy about battle that shines through the writing of this period. Lord Wolseley, army commander in chief at the time of Omdurman, wrote of “the rapture-giving delight which the attack upon an enemy affords. I cannot analyse nor weigh, nor can I justify the feeling. But once experienced, all other subsequent sensations are but as a tinkling of a doorbell in comparison with the throbbing of Big Ben.” Both the British and Germans had already experienced that rapture while wielding Maxim guns to deadly effect elsewhere in Africa. This, to Europeans, seemed the machine gun’s logical use: “It is a weapon,” declared the Army and Navy Journal, “which is specially adapted to terrify a barbarous or semi-civilised foe.” No one imagined that either British or German soldiers would ever find themselves in the role of Sudanese Arabs, experiencing their own Omdurmans in the very heart of Europe.