Under such leadership the finest soldiery would have soon degenerated.  The Egyptians in the Soudan were not fine soldiers.  Like their officers, they were the worst part of the Khedivial army.  Like them, they had been driven to the south.  Like them, they were slothful and effete.  Their training was imperfect; their discipline was lax; their courage was low.  Nor was even this all the weakness and peril of their position; for while the regular troops were thus demoralised, there existed a powerful local irregular force of Bazingers (Soudanese riflemen), as well armed as the soldiers, more numerous, more courageous, and who regarded the alien garrisons with fear that continually diminished and hate that continually grew.  And behind regulars and irregulars alike the wild Arab tribes of the desert and the hardy blacks of the forests, goaded by suffering and injustice, thought the foreigners the cause of all their woes, and were delayed only by their inability to combine from sweeping them off the face of the earth.  Never was there such a house of cards as the Egyptian dominion in the Soudan.  The marvel is that it stood so long, not that it fell so soon.

The names of two men of character and fame are forever connected with the actual outburst.  One was an English general, the other an Arab priest; yet, in spite of the great gulf and vivid contrast between their conditions, they resembled each other in many respects.  Both were earnest and enthusiastic men of keen sympathies and passionate emotions.  Both were powerfully swayed by religious fervour.  Both exerted great personal influence on all who came in contact with them.  Both were reformers.  The Arab was an African reproduction of the Englishman; the Englishman a superior and civilised development of the Arab.  In the end they fought to the death, but for an important part of their lives their influence on the fortunes of the Soudan was exerted in the same direction.  Mohammed Ahmed, ‘The Mahdi,’ will be discussed in his own place.  Charles Gordon needs little introduction.  Long before this tale begins his reputation was European, and the fame of the ‘Ever-victorious Army’ had spread far beyond the Great Wall of China.

The misgovernment of the Egyptians and the misery of the Soudanese reached their greatest extreme in the seventh decade of the present century.  From such a situation there seemed to be no issue other than by force of arms.  The Arab tribes lacked no provocation.  Yet they were destitute of two moral forces essential to all rebellions.  The first was the knowledge that better things existed.  The second was a spirit of combination.  General Gordon showed them the first.  The Mahdi provided the second.