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Compassion The Culture and Politics of an Emotion
Essays from the English Institute 1st Edition Lauren
Berlant Digital Instant Download
Author(s): Lauren Berlant
ISBN(s): 9780415970518, 0415970512
Edition: 1
File Details: PDF, 3.19 MB
Year: 2004
Language: english
Compassion
 ESSAYS FROM THE ENGLISH INSTITUTE
Since 1944, the English Institute has presented work by
distinguished scholars in English and American literatures, foreign
literatures, and related fields.
Also available in the series from Routledge:
Time and the Literary
Karen Newman, Jay Clayton, and Marianne Hirsch, editors
Cosmopolitan Geographies
Vinay Dharwadker, editor
What’s Left of Theory?
Judith Butler, John Guillory, and Kendall Thomas, editors
Language Machines
Jeffrey Masten, Peter Stallybrass, and Nancy J.Vickers, editors
Human, All Too Human
Diana Fuss, editor
Performativity and Performance
Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, editors
Borders, Boundaries and Frames
Mae Henderson, editor
English Inside and Out
Susan Gubar and Jonathan Kamhotlz, editors
 Compassion
The Culture and Politics of an
Emotion
EDITED BY

LAUREN BERLANT

Routledge
NEW YORK AND LONDON
 Published in 2004 by
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“Compassion’s Compulsion” from No Future: Queer Theory and the Death
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 Contents

INTRODUCTION COMPASSION (AND 1

WITHHOLDING)
Lauren Berlant
CHAPTER 1 COMPASSION 15
Marjorie Garber
CHAPTER 2 MUCH OF MADNESS AND MORE OF 29
SIN Compassion, for Ligeia
Candace Vogler
CHAPTER 3 CALCULATING COMPASSION 59
Kathleen Woodward
CHAPTER 4 POOR HETTY 87
Neil Hertz
CHAPTER 5 MOVING PICTURES 105
George Eliot and Melodrama
Carolyn Williams
CHAPTER 6 PROVOKING GEORGE ELIOT 145
Mary Ann O’Farrell
CHAPTER 7 COMPASSION’S COMPULSION 159
Lee Edelman
CHAPTER 8 COSMETIC SURGEONS OF THE 187
SOCIAL
Darwin, Freud, and Wells and the Limits
of Sympathy on The Island of Dr. Moreau
Neville Hoad
CHAPTER 9 SUFFERING AND THINKING 219
The Scandal of Tone in Eichmann in
Jerusalem
Deborah Nelson

CONTRIBUTORS 245
vi
 Introduction
Compassion (and Withholding)

LAUREN BERLANT

There is nothing clear about compassion except that it implies a

social relation between spectators and sufferers, with the emphasis
on the spectator’s experience of feeling compassion and its
subsequent relation to material practice. To open the
investigations of compassion that follow, I would like to propose a
counterintuitive view. You will see that these essays cannot help
but be histories of the present: not just because knowledge always
shapes and is shaped by the scene of its emergence, but because
in the context of the United States where these essays are written,
the word compassion carries the weight of ongoing debates about
the ethics of privilege—in particular about the state as an
economic, military, and moral actor that represents and
establishes collective norms of obligation, and about individual and
collective obligations to read a scene of distress not as a judgment
against the distressed but as a claim on the spectator to become
an ameliorative actor.
This national dispute about compassion is as old as the United
States and has been organized mainly by the gap between its
democratic promise and its historic class hierarchies, racial and
sexual penalties, and handling of immigrant populations. The
current debate takes its particular shape from the popular memory
of the welfare state, whose avatar is Lyndon Johnson’s Great
Society, with its focus on redressing those legal, civic, and
economic inequities that acted, effectively, like
disenfranchisement. Now the Republican Party of the twenty-first
century brands itself with the phrase “compassionate
conservatism” and insists that there is a moral imperative to
change our image of the kinds of state and personal actions that
demonstrate compassion for those people whose suffering can be
deemed to be social.
2 LAUREN BERLANT

In particular, its advocates seek to replace the grand gestures of

the Great Society welfare state with a melodrama of the overtaxed
and the underemployed, those whose dignity must be restored to
them by tax cuts and welfare-to-work programs. If an expanding
liberal state used laws and programs to animate the technology of
amelioration, the compassionately conservative state wants to limit
these mechanisms severely and in particular to shift its economic
obligations from redressing poverty to protecting income by taking
less from and giving less back to workers and citizens. Compassion
can be said to be at the heart of this shrinkage, because the
attendant policies relocate the template of justice from the
collective condition of specific populations to that of the individual,
whose economic sovereignty the state vows to protect.1
Great Society ideology had presumed that the social realities of
privilege did not require individual intentions and practices to
contribute directly to inequality. Nor were one’s particular
experiences deemed authentic evidence of whether undemocratic
practices were organizing life. Instead, the Johnson administration
argued that unjust inequalities were objective and enabled by state
sanction, such that the state must alter its economic, juridical, and
bureaucratic rules and practices toward equality while also placing
demands on smaller institutions to make the same changes.
In contrast, currently reigning Republican thought resituates
who the subject of compassionate action ought to be. No longer is
the icon of structural damage any member of a historically and
structurally subordinated population but rather the working citizen
—that is, the person who works for a living, especially for his
family’s living. (By “his” I point to the crisis of paternal value that
this particular state ideology seeks to ameliorate.) But what
happens to those who do not work, do not work steadily, or do not
belong to heterosexual nuclear families? The aim of current state
policy is to impel these people to work harder and to enter nuclear
families, at which point state entitlements will step in to protect
their economic interests. The more successful one is at these prac-
tices, the more one is protected by the state put forward by this
administration.
In other words, compassionate conservatism advocates a sense
of dignity to be derived from labor itself—of a particular sort. No
longer casting a living wage, public education, affordable housing,
and universal access to economic resources as the foundation of
 INTRODUCTION 3

the individual and collective good life in the United States, the
current state ideology sanctifies the personal labor of reproducing
life at work, at home, and in communities. That is, income-
producing labor is deemed valuable chiefly in the context of its part
in making smallerscale, face-to-face publics. The Republican view
supports the amassing of corporate wealth on the theory that such
wealth will produce investments that make the jobs that workers
need to maintain their zones of intimacy.
What links these zones conceptually is no longer the American
Dream of social mobility as such but faith, faith in the highly
symbolized, relatively immobile structures of intimate attachment
from the family and the nation to God. Faith in such a project of
social membership is seen to provide the moral tone of a state and
a nation; at the same time, when compassionate action is
necessary to alleviate social suffering, it is seen as at best a local
response put out by individuals and smaller institutions toward
people who live somewhere, sharing an everyday life. The problem
of social interdependence is no longer deemed structural but
located in the faith that binds to itself a visible, lived-in community.
In this view all occupants of the United States are local: we
cultivate compassion for those lacking the foundations for
belonging where we live, and where we live is less the United States
of promise and progress or rights and resources than it is a
community whose fundamental asset is humane recognition.
Operating powerfully is a presumption that the local is the same
thing as the communal, both experientially and institutionally.2
This remediation of national life away from the federal state does
not blank out the nation but sees patriotism as a feeling of abstract
intimacy practiced from the ground up. In asking individuals and
local institutions to take up the obligation to ameliorate the
suffering that used to be addressed by the state, compassionate
conservatives see themselves as moral actors: for rather than
imposing solutions from on high, as it were, compassionate
conservatives believe that local institutions will best be able to
serve the less fortunate persons who come forward for help. All
social membership is voluntary in this view. By insisting that
society’s poorest members can achieve the good life through work,
family, community participation, and faith, compassionate
conservatives rephrase the embodied indignities of structural
4 LAUREN BERLANT

inequality as opportunities for individuals to reach out to each

other, to build concrete human relations.
In the new good life imagined by the contracting state, the
capitalist requirement that there be a population of poorly
remunerated laborers-in-waiting or those who cobble together
temporary work is not deemed part of a structural problem but
rather a problem of will and ingenuity, and if poverty becomes
severe enough for action to be asked for, the individuals caught in
that bind are left to themselves and to their community. For more
on this topic, see the volume’s first three essays: a genealogy of the
term “compassion” by Marjorie Garber; an analysis of the current
political debate by Kathleen Woodward, with an emphasis on the
place of suffering in liberal theory and its egregious absence in the
Right’s Compassionate Conservatism; and, through Emerson and
Poe, an ethical inquiry into the modern American compassionate
imaginary by Candace Vogler.
Although any emphasis on communal interdependence as the
scene of democratic collective life has much positive to be said for
it, it is worth noting that none of the essays in this volume admire
the project of compassionate conservatism; rather, they create new
genealogies and archives of compassion, seeking to understand the
concept as an emotion in operation. In operation, compassion is a
term denoting privilege: the sufferer is over there. You, the
compassionate one, have a resource that would alleviate someone
else’s suffering. But if the obligation to recognize and alleviate
suffering is more than a demand on consciousness—more than a
demand to feel right, as Harriet Beecher Stowe exhorted of her
white readers—then it is crucial to appreciate the multitude of
conventions around the relation of feeling to practice where
compassion is concerned.3 In a given scene of suffering, how do we
know what does and what should constitute sympathetic agency?4
Not only is this volume about the present moment, but the
present moment haunts its investigations of the compassionate
emotions, their aesthetic conventions, their place in political
theories, and their centrality to modern subjectivites. This is a
peculiarly modern topic, because members of mass society witness
suffering not just in concretely local spaces but in the elsewheres
brought home and made intimate by sensationalist media, where
documentary realness about the pain of strangers is increasingly
at the center of both fictional and nonfictional events.5 The
 INTRODUCTION 5

Freudian notion of Schadenfreude, the pleasure one takes in the

pain of another, only begins to tell the unfinished story of the
modern incitement to feel compassionately—even while being
entertained.
Some readers might feel that to think about compassion as a
social and aesthetic technology of belonging and not an organic
emotion is to demean its authenticity and its centrality to social
life. No one in this volume says that compassion is merely stupid,
naïve, or a narcissistic mirror in which the privileged can express
to themselves their worthiness. This worry—that critique seeks to
befoul its object—is especially acute in response to writing on what
we might call the humanizing emotions: compassion,
sentimentality, empathy, love, and so on. But scholarly critique
and investigation do not necessarily or even usually entail
nullifying the value of an affirmative phrase or relation of affmity.
It is more likely that a project of critique seeks not to destroy its
object but to explain the dynamics of its optimism and exclusions.6
If we challenge the affirmative forms of culture, it is not to call
affirmation wrong but to see how it has worked that forms of
progress also and at the same time support destructive practices
of social antagonism. Social optimism has costs when its
conventional images involve enforcing normative projects of
orderliness or truth. This kind of bargaining demands scrutiny, in
that desires for progress in some places are so often accompanied
by comfort with other social wrongs. Such contradictions were as
much a part of the Great Society as of the compassionately
conservative one.
Nonetheless, it makes sense that people object when analysis of
the intimate emotions makes those desires for attachment seem
equally like instruments of suffering. In the liberal society that
sanctions individuality as sovereign, we like our positive emotions
to feel well intentioned and we like our good intentions to constitute
the meaning of our acts. We do not like to hear that our good
intentions can sometimes be said to be aggressive, although
anyone versed in, say, the history of love or imperialism knows
volumes about the ways in which genuinely good intentions have
involved forms of ordinary terror (think about missionary
education) and control (think of state military, carceral, and police
practices). We do not like to be held responsible for consequences
we did not mean to enact. We can feel bad about it; we can feel
6 LAUREN BERLANT

compassionately toward those who suffer: why isn’t it enough to

have meant well, or not to have meant badly?
The authors of the essays in this volume look at scenes of
compassion and ask what kinds of obligation are being entailed
when we witness the theatrical scene of suffering that makes,
minimally, moral demands of our bodies—our hearts and tears—
as well as, sometimes, political and economic demands on the
people and institutions that house that suffering. For brilliant
readings of different aspects of compassion’s aesthetic ethics, see
the essays on George Eliot by Neil Hertz (on Adam Bede), Carolyn
Williams (on Daniel Deronda and melodrama’s theatrical
conventions), and Mary Ann O’Farrell (on Eliot, ethics, and style).
In this section we see that if compassion is a simple emotion
ideally, intending a clear program of amelioration or justice to
follow, in context its power involves myriad anxieties about who
among the sufferers deserves to be positively or negatively judged,
and why, and whether there is any adequate solution to the
problem at hand not only within the work but in the reader’s sense
of what is to be done. Indeed, the scale of the response is often what
is at stake in the experience of what Lee Edelman so accurately
calls “compassion’s compulsion”: Does a scene involve one person’s
suffering, or a population’s? What kinds of exemplification are
involved when a scene of compassion circulates in order to organize
a public response, whether aesthetic, economic, or political? When
we want to rescue X, are we thinking of rescuing everyone like X,
or is it a singular case that we see? When a multitude is symbolized
by an individual case, how can we keep from being overwhelmed
by the necessary scale that an ethical response would take? The
third section of this volume contains essays on the difficulty of
maintaining compassion in the scene of judgment framed by the
law, politics, and the human sciences; see Lee Edelman (on Lacan
and Hitchcock), Neville Hoad (on Freud, Darwin, and The Island of
Dr. Moreau), and Deborah Nelson (on Hannah Arendt).
Each essay takes these questions very seriously as aesthetic,
intellectual, and ethical problems to be opened up by analysis.
Each can be read as a case study in suffering and the aesthetics
and politics of compassionate responses to it. But this very
analytical seriousness works against the desire for the good to feel
simple. When people read about the positive, world-building social
emotions, they want to feel part of the world of goodness described
 INTRODUCTION 7

therein. No one of these authors claims that sentiments of

compassion are at root ethically false, destructive, or sadistic, just
that they derive from social training, emerge at historical moments,
are shaped by aesthetic conventions, and take place in scenes that
are anxious, volatile, surprising, and contradictory. We can
conclude from reading this volume that there is nothing simple
about compassion apart from the desire for it to be taken as simple,
as a true expression of human attachment and recognition.
But I have not yet described the counterintuitive perspective on
compassion advertised at this essay’s beginning. Instead, I have
laid out for you the geopolitical scene in which this volume
emerges, where another counterintuitive position was advanced
and gained political and institutional purchase. No doubt many
readers of this volume will not feel comfortable in the faith-based
society that is now being offered as the ground of the good. But this
does not mean that they are somehow superior to or untouched by
the contemporary culture of true feeling that places suffering at the
center of being and organizes images of ethical or honorable
sociality in response.7 When the response to sufferings scene is
compassion—as opposed to, say, pleasure, fascination,
hopelessness, or resentment—compassion measures ones value
(or one’s government’s value) in terms of the demonstrated capacity
not to turn one’s head away but to embrace a sense of obligation
to remember what one has seen and, in response to that haunting,
to become involved in a story of rescue or amelioration: to take a
sad song and make it better.
Needless to say, not all responses to social suffering that might
be called “compassion” take the same shape or envision the same
just world. For a salutary—and in its own way, equally polemical—
mirror to that offered by the shrinking republic of compassionate
conservatism, see the massive ethnographic theoretical work by
Pierre Bourdieu and colleagues, The Weight of the World: Social
Suffering in Contemporary Society.8 This volume catalogs the local,
embodied struggles of workers in the contemporary global
economy; the weight of the volume devastates with an archive of
the subjective experience of inequality so powerful and intricate
that it is hard to know how to respond. This is often as true for the
subjects interviewed as it will be for any close reader. Loïc
J.D.Wacquant writes:
8 LAUREN BERLANT

Under such conditions of relentless and all-pervading social

and economic insecurity, where existence becomes reduced
to the craft of dayto-day survival and where one must
continually do one’s best with whatever is at hand, that is,
precious little, the present becomes so uncertain that it
devours the future and prohibits thinking about it except as
fantasy…in its own way, a labor of social mourning that does
not say its name.9

Homosexuality, the love that dare not speak its name, echoes
within this phrasing of the labor of social mourning: both phrases
are about what must remain veiled in order that a scene of social
belonging may still be experienced as such. Such euphemisms
protect the vulnerable subjects and the social order that ejects
them from appropriateness. In Waquant’s case, social mourning
amidst poverty must remain unstated directly, on behalf of not
feeling defeated, of remaining optimistic. Hence, paradoxically, his
ethnographic interlocutor manifests mourning without feeling it in
an explicit way as hopelessness but is distracted by his own
projection of unworkable fantasy. Compassion would seem beyond
the point—or, more accurately, before the point, since no one in
the text, the ethnographers or their interviewees, asks for
compassion. Still, if one blames the people on the bottom of so
many social hierarchies for their residence there, one has not made
the fundamental connection between the structural conditions
that buoy some people and relegate others to treading water.
The various contributors to The Weight of the World refuse their
readers the pleasure of learning of social suffering by not asking
for fellow feeling or extracting a feeling of uplift at the refusal of
their subjects to be defeated by the project of living amidst
inequality. But the kinds of dignity and indignity produced by the
project of survival under the pressure of national and transnational
capitalism’s inequalities demand of the reader and the interviewers
both analytic and affective presence. Susan Sontag argues that
compassion is what you feel when you feel impotent, overwhelmed
by the enormity of painful spectacle; but one could also say the
opposite: that when suffering is presented to you in a way that
invites the gift of your compassion, compassion can feel like the
apex of affective agency among strangers.10 In the case of The
Weight of the World, neither affective position seems appropriate;
 INTRODUCTION 9

to feel compassion for people who struggle or fail is at best to take

the first step toward forging a personal relation to a politics of the
practice of equality.
All of this is to say, then, that the aesthetics of compassion—the
cultivation of the senses toward a more nuanced and capacious
engagement with scenes of human activity—opens a hornet’s nest
of problems about what responses should be desired and when
private responses are not only insufficient but a part of the practice
of injustice. Compassion turns out not to be so effective or a good
in itself. It turns out merely to describe a particular kind of social
relation, as I suggested in this essay’s first sentence. Indeed, it
would be possible to make an argument about the image of the
human the compassion archive provides for us that could bring
down on our heads the whole project of feeling committed to
compassion.
As I have worked through this volume, I have been struck by an
undertone accompanying the performance of compassion: that
scenes of vulnerability produce a desire to withhold compassionate
attachment, to be irritated by the scene of suffering in some way.
Repeatedly, we witness someone’s desire to not connect,
sympathize, or recognize an obligation to the sufferer; to refuse
engagement with the scene or to minimize its effects; to misread it
conveniently; to snuff or drown it out with pedantically shaped
phrases or carefully designed apartheids; not to rescue or help; to
go on blithely without conscience; to feel bad for the sufferers, but
only so that they will go away quickly. In this book’s archive, the
aesthetic and political spectacle of suffering vulnerability seems to
bring out something terrible, a drive not to feel compassion or
sympathy, an aversion to a moral claim on the spectator to engage,
when all the spectator wants to do is to turn away quickly and
harshly.
I thought about calling this volume Coldness and Cruelty, but
that title has been taken and it might confuse the issue by making
compassion seem like a bad thing.11 Yet the relation of compassion
to sadism seen generally cannot be overlooked. There was no way
to call this volume Withholding, either: there is no elastic enough
affective term for the variety of refusals archived here. Let me list
some of the forms that withholding compassion takes in the
following pages: Neil Hertz’s crisp representation of George Eliot’s
refusal to feel compassion for her characters’ stupidity; Neville
10 LAUREN BERLANT

Hoad’s representation of the aversion to compassion for the

animals and the captive humans on the Island of Dr. Moreau;
Deborah Nelson’s review of Hannah Arendt’s theoretically
consequential distaste for moral softness.
Some theorists, such as Veena Das, use the publicness of
politically silenced subjects and the alternative modes of
spectatorship those subjects make through bodily performance as
a way of talking about not the transparency of pain nor the need
for compassion but the fundamental break in the “human” that
manifests itself in scenes of structural violence. In this book too,
again and again, as we track the training in compassionate action
that each essay conveys and queries, we must also track the
training in aversion we receive, which must take place
simultaneously. When we are taught, from the time we are taught
anything, to measure the scale of pain and attachment, to feel
appropriately compassionate, we are being trained in stinginess, in
not caring, in not knowing what we know about the claim on us to
act, as Nietzsche would say scathingly, all too human.
What about that? What is the relation between becoming
capaciously compassionate and becoming distant from
responsibility for what one experiences directly and indirectly
about the populations relegated to social negativity? What if it
turns out that compassion and coldness are not opposite at all but
are two sides of a bargain that the subjects of modernity have
struck with structural inequality? Normatively, the bargain would
go like this: the experience of pain is pre-ideological, the universal
sign of membership in humanity, and so we are obligated to be
responsible to it; but since some pain is more compelling than
some other pain, we must make judgments about which cases
deserve attention. Justice is objective; it seeks out the cold, hard
facts against the incoherent mess of feeling. But we must be
compelled to feel right, to overcome our aversions to others’
suffering by training ourselves in compassionate practice. This
discipline is a discipline of our judgment, phrased as the
cultivation of our visceral sense of right. This logic only seems
circular. Actually, the moral elevation of compassion is reversed
when we raise questions about the scale of suffering, the measures
of justice, or the fault of the sufferers. The modern social logic of
compassion can as easily provide an alibi for an ethical or political
betrayal as it can initiate a circuit of practical relief.
 INTRODUCTION 11

This, then, is a book not just about the optimism of fellow feeling
nor the privileged pedagogies of social coldness. It is about an
emotional complex that has powerfully material and personal
consequences. As George Eliot demonstrates in Middlemarch:

Some discouragement, some faintness of heart at the new real

future which replaces the imaginary, is not unusual, and we
do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not
unusual. The element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of
frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion
of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much
of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human
life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s
heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the
other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about
well wadded with stupidity.12

Notes

1. The emergence of a culturally dominant discourse requires less a

beautiful mission statement and more countless commentaries on
the production of this as a fully intelligible discourse within what
passes as “common sense.” What follows is a list of works that
participated strongly in the normalization of compassionate
conservatism as a social referent posited against the traditional
association of compassion with personal and state practices of
recognition and redistribution. For performances of traditional
liberal affectivity, see John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1971) and Political Llberalism (New York Columbia
University Press, 1993); Martha Nussbaum, “Compassion: The Basic
Social Emotion,” Social Philosophy and Policy 13 (1996), 27–38; and,
more recently, the Compassionate Listening Project, available at
http://www.compassionatelistening.com. On behalf of
Compassionate Conservatism, see the White House archive at http://
www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/04/20020430.html; the
Heritage Foundation archive beginning with http://
www.heritage.org/Research/PoliticalPhilosophy/hl676.cfmj; the
Hoover Institute input at http://www-hoover.stanford.edu/
publications/digest/004/goldsmith.html; the Cato Institute at
http://www.cato.org/events/010220apf.html; and a general
middlebrow bibliography at http://
www.compassionateconservativism.org/. For critiques of the
Republican view see, for a start, Dana Milbank, “President’s
Compassionate Agenda Lags,” at http://www.washingtonpost.com/
12 LAUREN BERLANT

wpdyn/articles/A37908–2002Dec25.html; Bob Herbert, “The True

Believer,” at http://www.nytimes.com/2000/ll/30/opinion/
30HERB.html; John J.Dilulio, Jr., “The Future of Compassion,” at
http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/4636962.htm; and Robert
Kuttner, “The Compassionate Conservative’s Bait-and-Switch
Budget,” at http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/
03_10/b3823036_mzO 07.htm. In contrast to the substantial
bibliography of antiliberal, procompassionate conservative books
and despite much liberal and progressive ranting against it, there is
as yet no really full anticonservative booklength study of
compassionate conservatism as theory and practice.
2. On the antidemocratic nature of the idea of a community of
consensus, see Jacques Rancière, Disagreement, trans. Julie Rose
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). Rancière argues
that democracy, the practice of equality, requires public antagonism
and a destabilization of the identity forms derived from citizenship;
in his view, the translation of everything into pseudotransparent and
pseudoconsensual normative categories is postdemocratic, dressing
up as good fellow feeling a disciplinary regime.
3. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Or, Life Among the Lowly,
ed. Ann Douglass (New York: Penguin USA, 1986), p. 624.
4. Page Du Bois has recently argued that compassion initially described
any adverse event that befell one, and only with the advent of Jesus
did the concept turn to the scene of one mind reaching out to
another, suffering one, and alleviating that suffering through
recognition. See “A Passion for the Dead: Ancient Objects and
Everyday Life,” in Representing the Passions: Histories, Bodies,
Visions, ed. Richard Meyer (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute,
2003), p. 270.
5. The contemporary trauma bibliography is huge; this particular
selection is shaped by discussions of the public sphere. See Mark
Seltzer, Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture
(New York: Routledge, 1998); Hal Foster, “Death in America” October
75 (Winter 1996): 37–60; Avital Ronell, “Trauma TV,” in Finitude’s
Score: Essays for the End of the Millennium (Lincoln, NE: University
of Nebraska Press, 1999), and Stupidity (Urbana, IL: University of
Illinois Press, 2003); Veena Das, “Language and Body: Transactions
in the Construction of Pain,” in Social Suffering, ed. Arthur Kleinman,
Veena Das, and Margaret Lock (Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press, 1997), pp. 67–91; Veena Das, Arthur Kleinman, Mamphela
Ramphele, Pamela Reynolds, eds., Violence and Subjectivity
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998), and Remaking a
World: Violence, Social Suffering, and Recovery (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2001); Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of
Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002).
6. I have just described, in slightly different terms, what Gayatri Spivak
calls “affirmative deconstruction”; see her “Subaltern Studies:
Deconstructing Historiography,” Selected Subaltern Studies, ed.
 INTRODUCTION 13

Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1988), p. 16.
7. Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City:
Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
1997), and “The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy, and Politics”
in Cultural Studies and Political Theory, ed. Jodi Dean (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 200), pp. 42–62.
8. Pierre Bourdieu, et al., The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in
Contemporary Society, trans. Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, et al.,
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).
9. Loïc J.D.Wacquant, “Inside The Zone’: The Social Art of the Hustler
in the American Ghetto,” in Bourdieu, et al., p. 156.
10. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others.
11. Gilles Deleuze and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Masochism:
Coldness and Cruelty, trans. Jean McNeil (New York: Zone Books,
1991).
12. George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. David Caroll (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1986 [1871]), p. 226.
Another Random Scribd Document
with Unrelated Content
 264 THE KIVEE WAK sandy ridge towards the rocks of
Surgham — the position whence we had first seen the Dervish army.
The regiment wheeled about and fell back by alternate wings,
dropping two detached troops to the rear and flanks to make the
enemy's patrols keep their distance. But when the Arab horsemen
saw all the cavalry retiring they became very bold, and numerous
small groups of fives and sixes began to draw nearer at a trot.
Accordingly, whenever the ground was favourable, the squadrons
halted in turn for a few minutes to fire on them. In this way perhaps
half-a-dozen were killed or wounded. The others, however, paid little
attention to the bullets, and continued to pry curiously, until at last it
was thought necessary to send a troop to drive them away. The
score of Lancers galloped back towards the inquisitive patrols in the
most earnest fashion. The Dervishes, although more numerous,
were scattered about in small parties, and, being unable to collect,
they declined the combat. The great army, however, still advanced
majestically, pressing the cavalry back before it ; and it was evident
that if the Khalifa's movement continued, in spite of it being nearly
one o'clock, there would be a collision between the main forces
before the night. From the summit of the black hill of Surgham the
scene was extraordinary. The great army of Dervishes was dwarfed
by the size of the landscape to mere dark smears and smudges on
the brown of the plain. Looking east, another army was now visible
— the British and Egyptian army. All six brigades had passed the
Kerreri Hills, and now stood drawn up in a crescent, with their backs
to the Nile. The transport and the houses of the village of Egeiga
filled the enclosed space. Neither force could see the other, though
but five miles divided them. The array of the enemy was, without
doubt, both longer and deeper. Yet there seemed a superior strength
in the solid battalions, whose lines were so straight that they might
have been drawn with a ruler. The camp presented an animated
appearance. The troops had piled arms after the march, and had
already built a slender hedge of thorn-bushes around them. Now
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 264 THE KIVEE WAK sandy ridge towards the rocks of
Surgham — the position whence we had first seen the Dervish army.
The regiment wheeled about and fell back by alternate wings,
dropping two detached troops to the rear and flanks to make the
enemy's patrols keep their distance. But when the Arab horsemen
saw all the cavalry retiring they became very bold, and numerous
small groups of fives and sixes began to draw nearer at a trot.
Accordingly, whenever the ground was favourable, the squadrons
halted in turn for a few minutes to fire on them. In this way perhaps
half-a-dozen were killed or wounded. The others, however, paid little
attention to the bullets, and continued to pry curiously, until at last it
was thought necessary to send a troop to drive them away. The
score of Lancers galloped back towards the inquisitive patrols in the
most earnest fashion. The Dervishes, although more numerous,
were scattered about in small parties, and, being unable to collect,
they declined the combat. The great army, however, still advanced
majestically, pressing the cavalry back before it ; and it was evident
that if the Khalifa's movement continued, in spite of it being nearly
one o'clock, there would be a collision between the main forces
before the night. From the summit of the black hill of Surgham the
scene was extraordinary. The great army of Dervishes was dwarfed
by the size of the landscape to mere dark smears and smudges on
the brown of the plain. Looking east, another army was now visible
— the British and Egyptian army. All six brigades had passed the
Kerreri Hills, and now stood drawn up in a crescent, with their backs
to the Nile. The transport and the houses of the village of Egeiga
filled the enclosed space. Neither force could see the other, though
but five miles divided them. The array of the enemy was, without
doubt, both longer and deeper. Yet there seemed a superior strength
in the solid battalions, whose lines were so straight that they might
have been drawn with a ruler. The camp presented an animated
appearance. The troops had piled arms after the march, and had
already built a slender hedge of thorn-bushes around them. Now
 OPEEATIONS OP THE FIEST OF SEPTEMBER 265 they were
eating their dinners, and in high expectation of a fight. The whole
army had been ordered to stand to arms at two o'clock in formation
to resist the attack which it seemed the Dervishes were about to
deliver. But at a quarter to two the Dervish army halted. Their drill
was excellent, and they all stopped as by a single command. Then
suddenly their riflemen discharged their rifles in the air with a great
roar — a barbaric feu de joie. The smoke sprang up along the whole
front of their array, running from one end to the other. After this
they lay down on the ground, and it became certain that the matter
would not be settled that day. We remained in our position among
the sandhills of the ridge until the approach of darkness, and during
the afternoon various petty encounters took place between our
patrols and those of the enemy, resulting in a loss to them of about
a dozen killed and wounded, and to us of one corporal wounded and
one horse killed. Then, as the light failed, we returned to the river to
water and encamp, passing into the zeriha through the ranks of the
British division, where officers and men, looking out steadfastly over
the fading plain, asked us whether the enemy were coming — and, if
so, when. And it was with confidence and satisfaction that we
replied, and they heard, ' Probably at daylight.' When the gunboats
had completed their bombardment, had sunk a Dervish steamer, had
silenced all the hostile batteries, and had sorely battered the Mahdi's
Tomb, they returned leisurely to the camp, and lay moored close to
the bank to lend the assistance of their guns in case of attack. As
the darkness became complete they threw their powerful
searchlights over the front of the zeriha and on to the distant hills.
The wheeling beams of dazzling light swept across the desolate, yet
not deserted, plain. The Dervish army lay for the night along the
eastern slope of the Shambat depression. All the 50,000 faithful
warriors rested in their companies near the flags of their Emirs. The
Khalifa slept in rear of the centre of his host, surrounded by his
generals. Suddenly the whole scene was lit by a pale glare. Abdullah
and the chiefs sprang up. Everything around them was bathed in an
awful white illumination. Far
 266 THE EIVEE WAE away by the river there gleamed a
brilliant circle of light — the cold, pitiless eye of a demon. The
Khalifa put his hand on Osman Azrak's shoulder — Osman, who was
to lead the frontal attack at dawn — and whispered, ' What is this
strange thing ? ' ' Sire,' replied Osman, ' they are looking at us.'
Thereat a great fear filled all their minds. The Khalifa had a small
tent, which showed conspicuously in the searchlight. He had it
hurriedly pulled down. Some of the Emirs covered their faces, lest
the baleful rays should blind them. All feared that some terrible
projectile would follow in the path of the light. And then suddenly it
passed on — for the sapper who worked the lens could see nothing
at that distance but the brown plain — and swept along the ranks of
the sleeping army, rousing up the startled warriors, as a wind
sweeps over a field of standing corn. The Anglo-Egyptian army had
not formed a quadrilateral camp, as on other nights, but had lain
down to rest in the formation for attack they had assumed in the
afternoon. Every fifty yards behind the thorn-bushes were double
sentries. Every hundred yards a patrol with an officer was to be met.
Fifty yards in rear of this line lay the battalions, the men in all their
ranks, armed and accoutred, but sprawled into every conceivable
attitude which utter weariness could suggest or dictate. The enemy,
twice as strong as the Expeditionary Force, were within five miles.
They had advanced that day with confidence and determination. But
it seemed impossible to believe that they would attack by daylight
across the open ground. Two explanations of their advance and halt
presented themselves. Either they had offered battle in a position
where they could not themselves be attacked until four o'clock in the
afternoon, and hoped that the Sirdar's army, even though victorious,
would have to fight a rearguard action in the darkness to the river ;
or they intended to make a night attack. It was not likely that an
experienced commander would accept battle at so late an hour in
the day. If the Dervishes were anxious to attack, so much the worse
for them. But the army would remain strictly on the defensive— at
any rate, until there was plenty of daylight. The alternative remained
— a night attack.
 OPEEATIONS OF THE FIEST OF SEPTEMBEE 267 Here lay
the great peril which threatened the expedition. What was to be
done with the troops during the hours of darkness ? In the daytime
they recked little of their enemy. But at night, when 400 yards was
the extreme range at which their fire could be opened, it was a
matter of grave doubt whether the front could be kept a.nd the
attack repelled. The consequences of the line being penetrated in
the darkness were appalling to think of. The sudden appearance of
crowds of figures swarming to the attack through the gloom ; the
wild outburst of musketry and artillery all along the zeriha ; the
crowds still coming on in spite of the bullets ; the fire getting
uncontrolled, and then a great bunching and crumpling of some part
of the front, and mad confusion, in which a multitude of fierce
swordsmen would surge through the gap, cutting and slashing at
every living thing ; in which transport animals would stampede and
rush wildly in all directions, upsetting every formation and destroying
all attempts to restore order ; in which regiments and brigades
would shift for themselves and fire savagely on all sides, slaying
alike friend and foe ; and out of which only a few thousand, perhaps
only a few hundred, demoralised men would escape in barges and
steamers to tell the tale of ruin and defeat. The picture — true or
false — flamed before the eyes of all the leaders that night ; but,
whatever their thoughts may have been, their tactics were bold.
Whatever advice was given, whatever opinions were expressed, the
responsibility was Sir Herbert Kitchener's. Upon his shoulders lay the
burden, and the decision that was taken must be attributed solely to
him. He might have formed the army into a solid mass of men and
animals, arranged the infantry four deep all round the perimeter, and
dug as big a ditch or built as high a zeriha as time allowed. He might
have filled the numerous houses with the infantry, making them join
the buildings with hasty entrenchments, and so enclose a little space
in which to squeeze cavalry, transport, and guns. I Instead he
formed his army in a long thin curve, resting ' on the river and
enclosing a wide area of ground, about which baggage and animals
were scattered in open order \
 1268 THE EIVER WAR and luxurious accommodation. His
line was but two deep ; and only two companies per battalion and
one Egyptian brigade (Collinson's) were in reserve. He thus obtained
the greatest possible development of fire, and waited, prepared if
necessary to stake everything on the arms of precision, but hoping
with fervour that he would not be -compelled to gamble by night.
The night was, however, undisturbed ; and the moonlit camp, with
its anxious generals, its weary soldiers, its fearful machinery of
destruction, all strewn along the bank of the great river, remained
plunged in silence, as if brooding over the chances of the morrow
and the failures of the past. And hardly four miles away another
army — twice as numerous, equally confident, equally brave — were
waiting impatiently for the morning and the final settlement of the
long quarrel.
 269 CHAPTEE XV THE BATTLE OP OMDURMAN September
2, 1898 The bugles all over the camp by the river began to sound at
half-past four. The cavalry trumpets and the drums and fifes of the
British division joined the chorus, and everyone awoke amid a
confusion of merry or defiant notes. Then it grew gradually lighter,
and the cavalry mounted their horses, the infantry stood to their
arms, and the gunners went to their batteries ; while the sun, rising
over the Nile, revealed the wide plain, the dark rocky hills, and the
waiting army. It was as if all the preliminaries were settled, the
ground cleared, and nothing remained but the final act and ' the
rigour of the game.' Even before it became light several squadrons
of British and Egyptian cavalry were pushed swiftly forward to gain
contact with the enemy and learn his intentions. The first of these,
under Captain Baring, occupied Surgham Hill, and waited in the
gloom until the whereabouts of the Dervishes should be disclosed by
the dawn. It was a perilous undertaking, for he might have found
them unexpectedly near. As the sun rose, the 21st Lancers trotted
out of the zeriha and threw out a spray of officers' patrols. As there
had been no night attack, it was expected that the Dervish army
would have retired to their original position or entered the town. It
was hardly conceivable that they would advance across the open
ground to attack the zeriha by daylight. Indeed, it appeared more
probable that their hearts had failed them in the night, and that they
had melted away into the desert. But these anticipations were
 270 THE EIVEE WAE immediately dispelled by the scene
which was visible from the crest of the ridge. It was a quarter to six.
The light was dim, but growing stronger every minute. There in the
plain lay the enemy, their numbers unaltered, their confidence and
intentions apparently unshaken. Their front was now nearly five
miles long, and composed of great masses of men Joined together
by thinner lines. Behind and near to the flanks were large reserves.
From the ridge they looked dark blurs and streaks, relieved and
diversified with an odd-looking shimmer of light from the spear-
points. At about ten minutes to six it was evident that the masses
were in motion and advancing swiftly. Their Emirs galloped about
and before their ranks. Scouts and patrols scattered themselves all
over the front. Then they began to cheer. They were still a mile
away from the hill, and were concealed from the Sirdar's army by
the folds of the ground. The noise of the shouting was heard, albeit
faintly, by the troops down by the river. But to those watching on the
hill a tremendous roar came up in waves of intense sound, like the
tumult of the rising wind and sea before a storm. The British and
Egyptian forces were arranged in line, with their back to the river.
The flanks were secured by the gunboats lying moored in the
stream. Before them was the rolling sandy plain, looking from the
slight elevation of the ridge smooth and flat as a table. To the right
rose the rocky hills of the Kerreri position, near which the Egyptian
cavalry were drawn up — a dark solid mass of men and horses. On
the left the 21st Lancers, with a single squadron thrown out in
advance, were halted watching their patrols, who climbed about
Surgham Hill, stretched forward beyond it, or perched, as we did, on
the ridge. The ground sloped gently up from the river, so that it
seemed as if the landward ends of the Surgham and Kerreri ridges
curved in towards each other, enclosing what lay between. Beyond
the long swell of sand which formed the western wall of this
spacious amphitheatre the black shapes of the distant hills rose in
misty confusion. The challengers
 THE BATTLE OF OMDUEMAN 271 were already in the
arena; their antagonists swiftly approached. Although the Dervishes
were steadily advancing, a belief that their musketry was inferior
encouraged a nearer view, and we trotted round the south-west
slopes of Surgham Hill until we reached the sandhills on the enemy's
side, among which the regiment had waited the day before. Thence
the whole array was visible in minute detail. It seemed that every
single man of all the thousands could be examined separately. The
pace of their march was fast and steady, and it was evident that it
would not be safe to wait long among the sandhills. Yet the wonder
of the scene exercised a dangerous fascination, and for a while we
tarried. The emblems of the more famous Emirs were easily
distinguishable. On the extreme left the chiefs and soldiers of the
bright green flag gathered under Ali-Wad-Helu ; between this and
the centre the large dark green flag of Osman Sheikh-ed-Din rose
above a dense mass of spearmen, preceded by long lines of warriors
armed presumably with rifles ; over the centre, commanded by
Yakub, the sacred Black banner of the Khalifa floated high and
remarkable ; while on the right a great square of Dervishes was
arrayed under an extraordinary number of white flags, amid which
the red ensign of Sherif was almost hidden. AJl the pride and might
of the Dervish Empire were massed on this last great day of its
existence. Biflemen who had helped to destroy Hicks, spearmen who
had charged at Abu Klea, Emirs who saw the sack of Gondar,
Baggara fresh from raiding the Shillooks, warriors who had besieged
Khartoum — all marched, inspired by the memories of former
triumphs and embittered by the knowledge of late defeats, to
chastise the impudent and accursed invaders. The advance
continued. The Dervish left began to stretch out across the plain
towards Kerreri — as I thought, to turn our right flank. Their centre,
under the Black Flag, moved directly towards Surgham. The right
pursued a line of advance south of that hill. This mass of men were
the most striking of all. They could not have mustered fewer than
6,000. Their array was perfect. They displayed a
 272 THE EIVER WAR great number of flags — perhaps 500
— which looked at the distance white, though they were really
covered with texts from the Koran, and which by their admirable
alignment made this division of the Khalifa's army look like the old
representations of the Crusaders in the Bayeux tapestry. The attack
developed. The left, nearly 20,000 strong, toiled across the plain and
approached the Egyptian squadrons. The leading masses of the
centre deployed facing the zeriba and marched forthwith to the
direct assault. As the whole Dervish army continued to advance, the
division with the white flags, which had until now been echeloned in
rear of their right, moved up into the general line and began to climb
the southern slopes of Surgham Hill. Meanwhile yet another body of
the enemy, comparatively insignificant in numbers, who had been
drawn up behind the ' White Flags,' were moving slowly towards the
Nile, echeloned still further behind their right, and not far from the
suburbs of Omdurman. These men had evidently been posted to
prevent the Dervish army being cut off from the city and to secure
their line of retreat ; and with them the 21st Lancers were destined
to have a much closer acquaintance about two hours later. The
Dervish centre had come within range. But it was not the British and
Egyptian army that began the battle. If there was one arm in which
the Arabs were beyond all comparison inferior to their adversaries, it
was in guns. Yet it was with this arm that they opened their attack.
In the middle of the Dervish line now marching in frontal assault
were two puffs of smoke. About fifty yards short of the thorn fence
two red clouds of sand and dust sprang up, where the projectiles
had struck. It looked like a challenge. It was immediately answered.
Great clouds of smoke appeared all along the front of the British and
Soudanese brigades. One after another four batteries opened on the
enemy at a range of about 3,000 yards. The sound of the cannonade
rolled up to us on the ridge, and was re-echoed by the hills. Above
the heads of the moving masses shells began to burst, dotting the
air with smoke-balls and the ground with bodies. But a nearer
tragedy impended. The ' White
The text on this page is estimated to be only 0.00%
accurate

[\ J k
 272 THE EIVEE WAB great number of flags — perhaps 500
— which looked at the distance white, though they were really
covered with texts from the Koran, and which by their admirable
alignment made this division of the Klialifa's army look like the old
representations of the Crusaders in the Bayeux tapestry. The attack
developed. The left, nearly 20,000 strong, toiled across the plain and
approached the Egyptian squadrons. The leading masses of the
centre deployed facing the zeriha and marched forthwith to the
direct assault. As the whole Dervish army continued to advance, the
division v^ith the white flags, which had until now been echeloned
in rear of their right, moved up into the general line and began to
climb the southern slopes of Surgham Hill. Meanwhile yet another
body of the enemy, comparatively insignificant in numbers, who had
been drawn up behind the ' White Flags,' were moving slowly
towards the Nile, echeloned still further behind their right, and not
far from the suburbs of Omdurman. These men had evidently been
posted to prevent the Dervish army being cut off from the city and
to secure their line of retreat ; and with them the 21st Lancers were
destined to have a much closer acquaintance about two hours later.
The Dervish centre had come within range. But it was not the British
and Egjrptian army that began the battle. If there was one arm in
which the Arabs were beyond all comparison inferior to their
adversaries, it was in guns. Yet it was with this arm that they
opened their attack. In the middle of the Dervish line now marching
in frontal assault were two puffs of smoke. About fifty yards short of
the thorn fence two red clouds of sand and dust sprang up, where
the projectiles had struck. It looked like a challenge. It was
immediately answered. Great clouds of smoke appeared all along the
front of the British and Soudanese brigades. One after another four
batteries opened on the enemy at a range of about 3,000 yards. The
sound of the cannonade rolled up to us on the ridge, and was re-
echoed by the hills. Above the heads of the moving masses shells
began to burst, dotting the air with smoke-balls and the ground with
bodies. But a nearer tragedy impended. The ' White
The text on this page is estimated to be only 11.96%
accurate

BATTLE or OMDTJRMAN THE FIRST ATTACK TIME 6-45

A.M. __ Scale ^niso or 1 ■ 5 Inch&s - 1 Milelards :iooo 500 o
 THE BATTLE OF OMDUEMAN 273 Flags ' were nearly over
the crest. In another minute they would become visible to the
batteries. Did they realise what would come to meet them ? They
were in a dense mass, 2,800 yards from the 32nd Field Battery and
the gunboats. The ranges were known. It was a matter of
inachinery. The more distant slaughter passed unnoticed, as the
mind was fascinated by the approaching horror. In a few seconds
swift destruction would rush on these brave men. They topped the
crest and drew out into full view of the whole army. Their white
banners made them conspicuous above all. As they saw the camp of
their enemies, they discharged their rifles with a great roar of
musketry and quickened their pace. For a moment the white flags
advanced in regular order, and the whole division crossed the crest
and were exposed. Forthwith the gunboats, the 32nd British Field
Battery, and other guns from the zeriha opened on them. About
twenty shells struck them in the first minute. Some burst high in the
air, others exactly in their faces. Others, again, plunged into the
sand and, exploding, dashed clouds of red dust, spHnters, and
bullets amid their ranks. The white banners toppled over in all
directions. Yet they rose again immediately, as other men pressed
forward to die for the Mahdi's sacred cause and in the defence of the
successor of the True Prophet. It was £U terrible sight, for as yet
they had not hurt us at all, and it seemed an unfair advantage to
strike thus cruelly when they could not reply. Under the influence of
the shellsthe mass of the ' White Flags ' dissolved into thin lines of
spearmen and skirmishers, and came on in altered formation, and
diminished numbers, but with unabated enthusiasm. And now, the
whole attack being thoroughly exposed, it became the duty of the
cavalry to clear the front as quickly as possible, and leave the further
conduct of the debate to the infantry and the Maxim guns. All the
patrols trotted or cantered back to their squadrons, and the
regiment retired swiftly into the zeriha, while the shells from the
gunboats screamed overhead and the whole length of the position
began to burst into flame and smoke. Nor was it long beforeT
 274 THE EIVEE WAE the tremendous banging of the
artillery was swollen by the roar of musketry. Taking advantage of
the shelter of the river-bank, the cavalry dismounted ; we watered
our horses, waited, and wondered what was happening. And every
moment the tumult grew louder and more intense, until even the
flickering stutter of the Maxims could scarcely be heard above the
continuous din. Eighty yards away, and perhaps twenty feet above
us, the 32nd Field Battery was in action. The nimble figures of the
gunners darted about as they busied themselves in their complicated
process of destruction. The officers, some standing on biscuit-boxes,
peered through their glasses and studied the effect. Of this I had
one glimpse. Eight hundred yards away a ragged line of men were
coming on desperately, struggling forward in the face of the pitiless
fire — white banners tossing and collapsing ; white figures subsiding
in dozens to the ground; little white puffs from their rifles, larger
white puffs spreading in a row all along their front from the bursting
shrapnel. The infantry fired steadily and stolidly, without hurry or
excitement, for the enemy were far away and the officers careful.
Besides, the soldiers were interested in the work and took great
pains. But presently the mere physical act became tedious. The tiny
figures seen over the slide of the backsight seemed a little larger, but
also fewer at each successive volley. The rifles grew hot — so hot
that they had to be changed for those of the reserve companies. The
Maxim guns exhausted all the water in their jackets, and several had
to be refreshed from the water-bottles of the Cameron Highlanders
before they could go on with their deadly work. The empty
cartridge-cases, tinkling to the ground, formed a small but growing
heap beside each man. And all the time out on the plain on the
other side bullets were shearing through flesh, smashing and
splintering bone ; blood spouted from terrible wounds ; valiant men
were struggling on through a hell of whistling metal, exploding
shells, and spurting dust — suffering, despairing, dying. Such was
the first phase of the battle of Omdurman. The Khalifa's plan of
attack appears to have been complex -J^
 THE BATTLE OF OMDURMAN 276 and ingenious. It was,
however, based on an extraordinary miscalculation of the power of
modern weapons ; with the exception of this cardinal error, it is not
necessary to criticise it. He first ordered about 15,000 men, drawn
chiefly from the army of Osman Sheikh-ed-Din and placed under the
command of Osman Azrak, to deliver a frontal attack. He himself
waited with an equal force near Surgham Hill to watch the result. If
it succeeded, he would move forward with his bodyguard, the flower
of the Arab army, and complete the victory. If it failed, there was yet
another chance. The Dervishes who were first launched against the
zeriba, although very brave men, were not by any means his best or
most reliable troops. Their destruction might be a heavy loss, but it
would not end the struggle. , While the attack was proceeding, the
valiant left, consisting I of the rest of the army of Osman Sheikh-ed-
Din, might move I unnoticed to the northern flank and curve round
on to the I front of the zeriba held by the Egyptian brigade. Ali-Wad-
I Helu was meanwhile to march to the Kerreri Hills, and I remain out
of range and, if possible, out of sight among ) them. Should the
frontal and flank attacks be unhappily repulsed, the ' enemies of
God,' exulting in their easy victory over the faithful, would leave their
strong place and march to the capture and sack of the city. Then,
while they were yet dispersed on the plain, with no zeriba to protect
them, the chosen warriors of the True Eeligion would abandon all
concealment, and hasten in their thousands to the utter destruction
of the accursed — the Khalifa vdth 15,000 falling upon them from
behind Surgham ; Ali-Wad-Heluand all that remained of Osman's
army assaihng them from Kerreri. Attacked at once from the north
and south, and encompassed on every side, the infidels would
abandon hope and order, and Kitchener might share the fate of
Hicks and Gordon. Two circumstances, which will appear as I the
account proceeds, prevented the accomplishment of this I plan. The
second attack was not executed simultaneously by I the two
divisions of the Dervish army ; and even had it been, the power of
the musketry would have triumphed, ajid though the Expeditionary
Force might have sustained heavier I 2
 276 THE EIVER WAR losses the main result could not have
been affected. The last hopes of barbarism had passed with the
shades of night. Colonel Broadwood, with nine squadrons of cavalry,
the Camel Corps, and the Horse Artillery, had been ordered to check
the Dervish left, and prevent it enveloping the downstream flank of
the zeriba, as this was held by the Egjrptian brigade, which it was
not thought desirable to expose to the full weight of an attack. With
this object, as the Dervishes approached, he had occupied the
Kerreri ridge with the Horse battery and the Camel Corps, holding
his cavalry in reserve in rear of the centre. The Kerreri ridge, to
which reference has so frequently been made, consists of two main
features, which rise to the height of about 300 feet above the plain,
are each above a mile long, and run nearly east and west, with a dip
or trough about 1,000 yards wide between them. The eastern ends
of these main ridges are perhaps 1,000 yards from the river, and in
this intervening space there are several rocky underfeatures and
knolls. The Kerreri Hills, the spaces between them, and the smaller
features are covered with rough boulders and angular stones of
volcanic origin, which render the movements of horses and camels
dijB&cult and painful.* The cavalry horses and camels were in the
dip between the two ridges ; and the dismounted men of the Camel
Corps were deployed along the crest of the most southerly of the
ridges, with their right at the desert end. Next in order to the Camel
Corps, the centre of the ridge was occupied by the dismounted
cavalry. The Horse Artillery were on the left. The remainder of the
cavalry waited in the hollow behind the guns. The tempestuous
advance of Osman soon brought him into contact with the mounted
force. His real intentions are still a matter of conjecture. Whether he
had been ordered to attack the Egyptian brigade, or to drive back
the cavalry, or to disappear behind the Kerreri Hills in conformity
with Ali-Wad-Helu, is impossible to pronounce. His action was,
however, clear. He could not safely assail the Egyptians with a
powerful cavalry force threatening his * Map, ' The Khalifa'a Attack,'
to face p. 290.
 THE BATTLE OF OMDUEMAN 277 left rear. He therefore
continued his move across the front of the zeriha. Keeping out of the
range of infantry fire, bringing up his right, and marching along due
north, he fell upon Broadwood. This officer, who had expected to
have to deal with small bodies on the Dervish flank, found himself
suddenly exposed to the attack of nearly 15,000 men, many of
whom were riflemen. The Sirdar, seeing the situation from the
zeriha, sent him an order to wdthdraw within the lines of infantry.
Colonel Broadwood, however, preferred to retire through the Kerreri
Hills to the northward, drawing Osman after him. He replied to that
effect. The first position had soon to be abandoned. The Dervishes,
advancing in a north-easterly direction, attacked the Kerreri Hills
obliquely. They immediately enveloped the right flank of the
mounted troops holding them. It will be seen from the map that as
soon as the Dervish riflemen gained a point west and in prolongation
of the trough between the two ridges, they not only turned the right
flank, but also threatened the retreat of the defenders of the
southerly ridge ; for they were able to sweep the trough from end to
end with their fire. As soon as it became certain that the southerly
ridge could not be held any longer, Colonel Broadwood retired the
battery to the east end of the second or northern ridge. This was
scarcely accomplished when the dip was enfiladed, and the cavalry
and Camel Corps who followed lost about fifty men and many horses
and camels killed and wounded. The Camel Corps were the most
unfortunate. They were soon encumbered with wounded, and it was
now painfully evident that in rocky ground the Dervishes could go
faster on their feet than the soldiers on their camels. Pressing on
impetuously at a pace of nearly seven miles an hour, and unchecked
by a heavy artillery fire from the zeriha and a less effective fire from
the Horse battery, which was only armed with 7-pounder Krapps of
an obsolete pattern, the Arabs rapidly diminished the distance
between themselves and their enemies. In these circumstances
Colonel Broadwood decided to send the Camel Corps back to the
zeriha under cover of a gunboat, which, watchfully observing the
progress of the fight, was coming down stream
 278 THE EIVEE WAE to assist. The distance which divided
the combatants was scarcely 400 yards and decreasing every
minute. The cavalry were drawn up across the eastern or river end
of the trough. The guns of the Horse battery fired steadily from their
new position on the northern ridge. But the Camel Corps were still
struggling in the broken ground, and it was clear that their position
was one of great peril. The Dervishes already carpeted the rocks of
the southern ridge with dull yellow swarms, and, heedless of the
shells which still assailed them in reverse from the zeriha, continued
to push their attack home. On the very instant that they saw the
Camel Corps make for the river they realised that those they had
deemed their prey were trying, like a hunted animal, to run to
ground within the lines of infantry. With that instinctive knowledge of
war which is the heritage of savage peoples, the whole attack swung
to the right, changed direction from north to east, and rushed down
the trough and along the southern ridge towards the Nile, with the
plain intention of cutting off the Camel Corps and driving them into
the river. The moment was critical. It appeared to the cavalry
commander that the Dervishes would actually succeed, and their
success must involve the total destruction of the Camel Corps. That
could not, of course, be tolerated. The whole nine squadrons of
cavalry assumed a preparatory formation. The British officers
believed that a terrible charge impended. They would meet in direct
collision the swarms of men who were hurrying down the trough.
The diversion might enable the Camel Corps to escape. But the
ground was bad ; the enemy's force was overwhelming ; the
Egyptian troopers were prepared to obey — but that was all. There
was no exalted enthusiasm such as at these moments carries sterner
breeds to victory. Few would return. Nevertheless, the operation
appeared inevitable. The Camel Corps were already close to the
river. But thousands of Dervishes were running swiftly towards them
at right angles to their line of retreat, and it was certain that if the
camelry attempted to cross this new front of the enemy they would
be annihilated. Their only hope lay in maintaining themselves by
their fire near the river-bank until help could reach
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