A young Frenchman rushed from London to join the British forces: Louis Napoleon – the twenty-two-year-old Loulou, only son of Napoleon III and Eugénie. Loulou begged to enlist. Disraeli vetoed it, but Eugénie appealed to Queen Victoria. ‘What can you do,’ sighed Disraeli, ‘when you have two obstinate women to deal with?’ Loulou – nicknamed PI (prince imperial) – was keen to fight, saying, ‘If I had to fall, I’d prefer an assegai to a bullet.’ Out scouting, his small unit was ambushed by thirty Zulus; his horse bolted with him clinging on until he fell and he was left behind, firing his pistol, until he was overwhelmed, sustaining eighteen assegai wounds.
Victoria visited Eugénie at her Kentish home to offer comfort. Later when Cetshwayo offered peace, he returned Loulou’s Napoleonic sword. At home in England, his death, marking as it did the end of the Bonapartes, fascinated the public almost as much as Rorke’s Drift.
On 4 July 1879, Chelmsford advanced on the royal kraal at Ulundi, where, facing the Zulu army in a hollow-square formation, his two Gatling guns and artillery scythed down 1,500, wounding thousands in thirty minutes. Afterwards he burned Ulundi. The king was captured and dispatched to London, the kingdom broken up.* The fall of Cetshwayo unleashed the Afrikaners, sharpshooting maestros of commando warfare, who defeated the redcoats. Britain recognized their independence, but the diamonds, soon followed by gold, would transform South Africa.
‘The terrible disaster,’ Disraeli remarked of Isandlwana, ‘has shaken me to the centre’ – and so did his other fiasco in Kabul. On 3 September, a mutiny of unpaid Afghan soldiers escalated into an insurgency: the British plenipotentiary was murdered, 7,000 British troops besieged and defeated. Isandlwana and Kabul demonstrated how a great empire is one that can be defeated on more than one front simultaneously, without any loss of prestige.
With an election campaign underway Disraeli’s rival William Gladstone, an indefatigable seventy-year-old, attacked the imperial impresario for his showy vainglory, while Disraeli, five years older, suffering gout and asthma, mocked that ‘sophisticated rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity’. But the verbosity worked: in April 1880, Gladstone won a landslide, exulting that Disraeli’s defeat was ‘like the vanishing of some vast magnificent castle in an Italian romance’.
Gladstone – nicknamed GOM (Grand Old Man) – was committed to granting Home Rule to troublesome Ireland, where Catholic peasants raged against Protestant lords. But he could not avoid the imperial vortex: Afghanistan had to be stabilized. This time the British were better led by General Frederick ‘Bobs’ Roberts, small, wiry Anglo-Irish veteran of India and Ethiopia, who repulsed the siege of his palisade then retook Kabul. In July 1880, a British force of 2,500 mainly Indian troops was routed by Afghans under Sher Ali’s son. But Bobs led his Kabul and Kandahar Field Force to save Kandahar, where in September he routed the Afghans in turn. As in 1842, the British understood the principle of Afghan war: strike hard and then get out fast, leaving a friendly ruler. ‘It may not be very flattering to our amour propre,’ wrote Bobs, ‘but … the less the Afghans see of us the less they’ll dislike us.’ The new amir, Abdur Rahman, agreed that Afghanistan would have foreign relations only with Britain and then spent twelve years crushing rebellions. When in 1885 Russian troops assaulted an Afghan unit at Panjdeh, bringing Russia and Britain to the brink of war, the amir and his British backers held their nerve. The debacles of 1878 won Britain another forty years of protectorate over Afghanistan.
Gladstone’s other imperial vortex was Egypt, where in 1882 British interference provoked a nationalist revolt. To protect the Canal, Gladstone reluctantly sent Wolseley to occupy the country, but further south in Sudan, Britain’s anti-slavery mission had unleashed a jihadist insurgency under a Nilotic boat builder’s son, Muhammad Ahmed, who after a life of austere hermitage experienced divine visions and claimed to be the Mahdi. ‘We shall destroy this and create the next world,’ he said. ‘Whoever doesn’t believe in my messianism shall be purified by the sword.’ He then ordered his adepts, the Ansaris (after the followers of Muhammad who went to Medina), ‘Kill the Turks [Egyptians], pay no taxes.’ The Mahdi’s rebellion was backed by the reactionary slave traders who had been threatened by well-meaning British abolitionism.
