Page 23 - GAHS Journal Volume 9

GREYSTONES ARCHAEOLOGICAL & HISTORICAL SOCIETY JOURNAL VOLUME 9

a state of readiness to withstand a siege while at the same time
commencing the evacuation of the foreign civilians. General
Gordon made it clear that he had only sufficient resources for
forty days once Khartoum came under siege. (This siege has
been the subject of the epic film Khartoum (1966, directed by
Basil Dearden) which starred Charlton Heston as General
Gordon and Sir Laurence Olivier as the Mahdi, and is screened
on TV from time to time.)

In April 1884 the Mahdi captured Berber, a town on the Nile,
north of Khartoum cutting General Gordon’s sole communication
route with Egypt. He sent his second-in-command Colonel
Stewart with a message for Sir Evelyn Baring, the British
Commissioner in Cairo. Although the steamer carrying him made
it past Berber, it then ran around, Stewart was taken prisoner
and then executed by one of the Mahdi’s lieutenants.

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