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‘Well, we have given them a damn good dusting,’ said the Machine, killing the enemy wounded. Churchill thought the British were ‘disgraced by the inhuman slaughter of the wounded’. Twelve thousand Sudanese lay dead. As a witness observed, ‘It was not a battle but an execution … The bodies weren’t in heaps – bodies hardly ever are; but they [were] spread evenly over acres and acres.’ There were just forty-eight British dead. Churchill was further ‘scandalized’ by Kitchener’s ‘desecration of the Mahdi’s Tomb and the barbarous manner in which he had carried off the Mahdi’s head in a kerosene can as a trophy’, planning to use it as his inkstand. Although an outcry forced him to bury it, Kitchener was raised to the peerage, the khalifa defeated and killed.

South Sudan was the last corner of Africa unclaimed by Europeans. Kitchener learned that a French captain and 120 Senegalese Tirailleurs, travelling all the way from Brazzaville, had reached the village of Fashoda in a bid to secure a French transcontinental empire. Kitchener sailed down the Nile and faced off the French as his subaltern Churchill rushed down to South Africa, where Britain would be humiliated by very different enemies.

In October 1899, as British uitlanders demanded voting rights within the Afrikaner republics, the latter’s commandos, expert fighters armed with their own Maxim machine guns, launched pre-emptive attacks on British towns, besieging Kimberley and Ladysmith and defeating cumbersome British forces. Rhodes helped defend Kimberley. Churchill, covering the war for a newspaper, was captured but managed to escape, his adventures making his name. Meanwhile, in a very different milieu, an Indian lawyer worked as a stretcher-bearer for the British at the battle outside Ladysmith. Mohandas Gandhi, middle-class son of the chief minister of a small fiefdom in Rajasthan, had been called to the Bar in London, but in 1893, when he was twenty-three, he was invited to take a case in South Africa. He moved to Durban, where, dapper in starched collar, trimmed moustache and suit, he would spend twenty-one years, representing Indians’ rights. While Churchill returned to London as a hero of empire and was elected to Parliament, Gandhi developed his concept of non-violent protest, satyagraha (truth force), which he would later apply to the cause of Indian independence.

As inept British forces floundered, Salisbury sent in the Sudan Machine. In December 1899, Kitchener arrived to break the Afrikaners, burning their farms, ‘concentrating’ their families in new camps, in which around 26,000 children and women died of disease, and finally capturing their capitals and defeating their armies.^* Kaiser Wilhelm and Tsar Nicholas were delighted by the near humiliation of Queen Victoria’s empire – just as the crisis of that other empress, Cixi, gave them a chance to gobble up more of China.

TWO ANCIENT EMPRESSES: CIXI AND VICTORIA

‘I’ve often thought I’m the cleverest woman that ever lived,’ Empress Cixi said later, but she admitted she was about to make ‘the only serious mistake I made in my life’. Unable to kill her loathed nephew the Guangxu Emperor, who still reigned while under house arrest, she turned on his Consort Zhen, exposing her corruption and forcing her to watch the torturing of her eunuchs. But the national humiliation of the war against Japan sparked a new rebellion led by a Society of Righteous Harmonious Fists, who practised martial arts in the belief that they made them invulnerable to European bullets. Aiming to ‘exterminate the foreigners’, these so-called Boxers, 250,000 pike-wielding peasants in red bandannas, advanced on Beijing to expel the Europeans. As westerners sheltered in their legations, many Chinese and Manchu paladins sympathized and cooperated with the Boxers. ‘The Boxers were sent by heaven,’ said Cixi, ‘to rid China of hated foreigners.’

As Cixi herself wavered, the eight great powers, led by a German general, intervened to save their subjects. ‘Should you encounter the enemy, give no quarter, take no prisoners,’ the kaiser told his troops. ‘Just as a thousand years ago the Huns under their King Attila made a name for themselves … may the name German be affirmed by you in such a way that no Chinese will ever again dare to look cross-eyed at a German.’ Even Eulenburg was privately worried about Willy, because he ‘is no longer in control of himself when seized by rage. I regard the situation as highly dangerous.’