The publication​ of The Four Feathers in 1902 established A.E.W. Mason’s reputation as a writer of adventure stories. Over the next forty years, the book sold nearly a million copies. The plot turns on Harry Feversham’s receipt of four white feathers accusing him of cowardice for refusing to enlist in Britain’s military campaign in Egypt in 1882. Subsequently, he attempts to redeem his reputation by undercover activities in Sudan. The seven film treatments of the book – the most recent was in 2002, starring Heath Ledger – foreground the martial aspect of the story: the extended British military offensive against the Sudanese religious leader, the Mahdi, and his adherents between 1883 and 1898. In doing so, they underplay the main theme of the book, which contains no battle scenes, but is a quasi-Christian fable about penitence and suffering in the wilderness, and eventual redemption.

It is also about the perils of imagination for a military man. The Fevershams have the army in their blood, and Harry has no choice but to make it his career. His problem is that, from his mother’s side, he has inherited a fertile imagination and a refined intellect. He is no coward, but he fears that his conscience, like Hamlet’s, might make him overthink, crippling his ability to focus on fighting and killing. He resigns his commission rather than go to Egypt because he is convinced that hesitation of this sort will make him the laughing-stock of the regiment, and disgrace the girl to whom he is engaged. She accepts the assessment made of him by three regimental friends, and gives him the fourth feather herself.

Written in the aftermath of the Boer War, the book aimed to challenge the uncritical army worship and shrill imperialism of the 1890s. An Oxford graduate in his mid-thirties, Mason was a playwright, former actor and soon-to-be Liberal MP. In 1910, his fascination with psychology and analytical intelligence led him to create Inspector Hanaud, one of the most interesting of the early fictional police detectives. Disinclined to marriage, Mason was often pigeonholed as an effeminate aesthete (though he also enjoyed the thrill of mountaineering). In The Four Feathers, Fevershams have populated the army for generations because they are ‘first-class fighting men’, but ‘rather stupid’. Willoughby, one of the feather-givers, also has ‘an aspect of invincible stupidity’. The British Army had always relied on such men’s unquestioning obedience. Too many women, like Harry’s fiancée, Ethne, admire ‘brute courage’ in a man.

Mason’s contrast between the intelligent sensitivity of his own circle and the military’s unthinking bravery came to mind when reading Peter Hart’s book. Hart tells the story of the Egyptian and Sudanese campaigns – Egypt in 1882, Sudan in 1883-85 and 1896-98 – through the eyewitness accounts left by soldiers and journalists, with the aim of uncovering how they were experienced and understood. Although Mason does not appear, Hart’s copious extracts produce the impression he was on to something.

Observing the eyes of Gerald Graham, the commander of the Suakin expeditions of 1884 and 1885, Major de Cosson compared their ‘placid expression’ to ‘the calm gaze of an ox’, even in moments of danger. And ‘danger was nothing to him – he enjoyed the whistle of a bullet as other people like the scent of a flower.’ The logic of the Suakin expeditions puzzled many soldiers, but theirs was not to reason why. Ernest Gambier-Parry observed that, ‘being soldiers, we went where we were told, and did what we were told when we got there, but beyond this I do not believe there was a man in the whole of this magnificent force who could have given you any intelligible reason for which we were fighting, if indeed his ingenuity enabled him to give you any reason at all.’ There were a few clever commanders, such as Henry Brackenbury, who found himself in charge of the River Column in February 1885 when General Earle was shot through the head, but the soldiers distrusted him as ‘bureaucratic’ and ‘scholastic’.

The men had ample opportunity for combat at its most basic. At Tamai in March 1884, when Graham ordered the Black Watch to move forward, Captain Andrew Scott-Stevenson found himself in danger of being overcome by a throng of Dervishes until ‘my trusty claymore found its way to the hilt into several black devils. I clove a piece out of one of their heads just as one does an egg for breakfast and saw his white brain exposed. I was mad with rage and fury … I think God must have put a coat of armour on me that day.’ (Hart uses the term ‘Dervishes’ rather than ‘Ansar’, as it appeared in contemporary accounts.) At Abu Klea in January 1885, the Desert Column on its way to relieve General Gordon (besieged at Khartoum) encountered its toughest test against the Mahdi’s army. The celebrated cavalry officer Colonel Burnaby, who had volunteered for the campaign, was heard shouting ‘Isn’t this fine sport, my boy,’ just before being fatally speared in the neck. In 1898, at Atbara, the Royal Warwickshire Regiment crashed through the defenders’ stockade to confront the enemy, with shouts of ‘Now you’re into them Warwickshire lads! Stick every mother’s son.’ Bayonets ‘were shoved through anything human in the most brutal and cold-blooded fashion’. And in September, at Omdurman, Private Rawding of the 21st Lancers enjoyed himself thoroughly. ‘I am ready for another man-killing job. It is nice to put a sword or a lance through a man; they are just like old hens, they just say “Quar!”’

The savagery of these battles was unavoidable given the close nature of the conflict and the relentlessness of the enemy attacks. The defeat of the Egyptian nationalists at Tel-el-Kebir in 1882 was a harbinger of the future: once the ramparts were overwhelmed, there was a lot of ‘bayonet work’ and ‘very little quarter given’. Very little quarter was given even once the heat of battle had passed, because British soldiers observed that severely wounded Muslim warriors were disposed to rise up and attack them if they could. It became standard practice to tour the battlefields, amid the ‘groans and shrieks’ of the dying, and to dispatch them with bayonets or pistols.Private Starr acknowledged that this might seem unmerciful, ‘but they were not to be trusted, for cases occurred where they counterfeited death and when anyone passed, they sprang up and disembowelled them!’ At Atbara, children were bayoneted because they were throwing spears at the British. Individual British deaths were taken very seriously. After Lieutenant Robert Grenfell was hacked to death during the cavalry charge at Omdurman, his brother’s angry account of it spurred the men inspecting the wasted battlefield to ‘polish off the wounded and dangerous Dervishes with their bayonets in a very determined way’.

This single-minded slaughter was mixed with admiration for the extraordinary courage of the enemy troops, who invariably faced the British onslaught without flinching. By the time of the climactic battle of 1898 at Omdurman, the British had access to ample supplies of the latest military technology – Maxim machine guns, Lee-Metford and Martini-Henry rifles – and deployed them unsparingly. Charles Townshend compared the Sudanese response to the Spartans’ heroics against the Persians: ‘No troops in the world could have lived under that fire. No Europeans would have faced it. The valour of those poor half-starved Dervishes in their patched jibbas would have graced Thermopylae.’ His recourse to an ancient parallel is striking; none of the soldiers seems to have had much interest in the religious or tribal basis of the Mahdist uprising. One civilian who did, the poet and Egyptian nationalist Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, was characteristically scathing about the morals of the British officers, ‘whose ideal is the green room of the Gaiety [Theatre]’, and who, in pursuit of promotion at home, thought nothing of butchering men who were fighting to defend a ‘thousand years of freedom’.

If the soldiers seemed lacking in imagination, the journalists who accompanied the expeditions more than made up for it. Bennet Burleigh, their doyen, had a very malleable sense of the truth. His greatest adventure came when he ran out of whisky, forcing him to ride to the store for more. On the way, he mistook a friendly patrol for the enemy and sped back to camp claiming that Dervishes had subjected him to running fire for ten miles. The journalist who made the greatest name for himself on the 1897-98 expedition was George Steevens, a young Oxford graduate whose early radicalism was sacrificed to the Daily Mail’s shilling. Steevens conveyed the elementalism of the desert to his readers: ‘small broken hills … now they were diaphanous blue on the horizon, now soft purple as we ran under their flanks. But always they were steeped through and through with sun … It looked like a part of the world quite new, with none of the bloom rubbed off.’ Meanwhile the 23-year-old Winston Churchill had a foot in both camps, as a supernumerary officer to the 21st Lancers who was also contracted to write a drama-laden column for the Morning Post, which the soldiers liked to mock: ‘Well, Churchill, how are the blazing yellow sands and purple sunsets today?’

Most soldiers found Sudan a lot less poetic than the journalists did. Travelling with the Suakin Field Force in 1885, de Cosson discovered that ‘whirling sand … penetrates everything – eyes, nose, ears, clothes, watches and boots, mixing with the water one drinks, and the bread that one eats, till it grates like cinders between the teeth.’ Nothing was ‘more exquisitely painful’ than having to ride against wind laden with ‘the germs disseminated by the dead camels and other objectionable matter about the camp’. The men had blue goggles and gauze veils to protect their faces, but these were of limited use. At El Teb in February 1884, the troops wore bags of camphor around their necks, in order to cope with the stench of the bodies left over from the battle fought there a few weeks before. Later that year, Ian Hamilton’s company of Gordon Highlanders, part of the River Column, endured ‘incessant toil’, rowing and wading waist-deep for hundreds of miles up the Nile in eleven small boats. After the Battle of Omdurman, the thirsty troops had to drink from stagnant pools containing dead animals, which led to outbreaks of dysentery and enteritis.

Steevens was talented enough to communicate the real horror of Sudan even while waving the flag (Hart has the space only for short extracts, but he deserves a fuller rediscovery). A rightly famous essay on the ‘pathology of thirst’ distinguished between three types: the sandstorm thirst, merely light soil in the gullet, and easily assuaged; the desert thirst, arising from hard riding through yellow sand and the sun’s glare; and the ‘true Sudan thirst’, which amounted to the ‘perpetual liquefaction and evaporation’ of self. This could be tackled only with an evening regime of comprehensive rehydration beginning with tea and ending with ‘that triumphant blend of all whetting flavours, an Abu Hamed – gin, vermouth, Angostura, lime-juice, soda’. Once Anglo-Saxon drinkers invaded the tropics in the early 20th century, the Abu Hamed became Steevens’s most enduring legacy, popularised by Jack London in his South Sea Tales.

Steevens told his readers that the deferred gratification provided by his nightly cocktail was such that it might tempt him to make a return trip to Sudan. But few of them can have believed him, for no one was better at conveying its desolation. His account of the Omdurman ‘triumph’ ended soberly:

Count up all the gains you will, yet what a hideous irony it remains, this fight of half a generation for such an emptiness. People talk of the Sudan as the East; it is not the East. The East has age and colour; the Sudan has no colour and no age … It is not a country; it has nothing that makes a country … it has neither nationality, nor history, nor arts, nor even natural features. Just the Nile – the niggard Nile refusing himself to the desert – and for the rest there is absolutely nothing to look at in the Sudan. Nothing grows green. Only yellow halfa-grass to make you stumble, and sapless mimosa to tear your eyes; dom-palms that mock with wooden fruit, and Sodom apples that lure with flatulent poison. For beasts it has tarantulas and scorpions and serpents, devouring white ants, and every kind of loathsome bug that flies or crawls. Its people are naked and dirty, ignorant and besotted. It is a quarter of a continent of sheer squalor. Overhead the pitiless furnace of the sun, underfoot the never-easing treadmill of the sand, dust in the throat, tuneless singing in the ears, searing flame in the eye – the Sudan is a God-accursed wilderness, an empty limbo of torment for ever and ever. Surely enough, ‘When Allah made the Sudan,’ say the Arabs, ‘he laughed.’ You can almost hear the fiendish echo of it crackling over the fiery sand.

Sudan’s historic role, in Steevens’s eyes, was as a ‘man-eater – red-gorged, but still insatiable’. Certainly, Britain’s first military campaign there, in 1883-85, destroyed most of those involved – including the Mahdi himself (who died of typhoid in June 1885), but not the movement he had started. The roll-call included Colonel Hicks, who died in the first disastrous Egyptian campaign against Mahdism in November 1883, and, of course, General Gordon, who was put in charge of the attempt to evacuate the remnants of Hicks’s army and those who wanted to leave Khartoum, but was then cut off there and killed by the invading Mahdists in January 1885. It also included Burnaby, the darling of London military society and of the Primrose League (he was due to run for election as a Tory MP alongside Churchill’s father); Herbert Stewart, the commander of the Relief Force’s Desert Column, trying to reach Khartoum to rescue Gordon; and Hamill Stewart, Gordon’s second in command, who was killed along with the journalist Frank Power while trying to escape the city by breaking the Mahdi’s blockade. In 1885, Gambier-Parry had to be invalided out of the army, while Graham, who had won the VC in the Crimea, was offered no further command after torrential criticism of the incompetence and extravagance of his Suakin expedition, which had produced only eighteen miles of railway. Lord Wolseley, the overall chief of the Gordon Relief Expedition, branded him ‘incorrigibly stupid’, but Wolseley, too, was never given another field command, on account of his disastrous fixation with the idea that a River Column carried on specially built whalers could reach Gordon in time to save him. Sudan was also the nemesis of Gladstone’s government in London, subjected to a relentless negative campaign by military men and the Tory press, who accused it of a series of muddled decisions: withdrawing the Suakin force in early 1884; hesitating for months about the need for a relief expedition to Khartoum, and then compelling the relief force to expose itself to unnecessary peril after Gordon’s death; sending a new force to Suakin, before quickly withdrawing both it and the relief force; and cancelling the Suakin-Berber railway.

In​ 1896-98, as in 1883-85, Sudan’s two great features were its appalling geography and its intractable Muslim warriors. As Hart shows, the only reason the later expeditions had a different outcome was Britain’s extraordinary outlay on the latest military equipment, including not just state of the art rifles and machine guns capable of rapid and relentless fire, but also the manufacture of dum-dum bullets, flattening off the point so as to cause maximum internal damage on impact. This was deemed the only way to stop the advance of Dervishes who seemed otherwise oblivious to pain. The widespread use of dum-dum bullets at Atbara and Omdurman caused such outrage that they were banned by the Hague Convention of 1899, despite protests by the British delegate, who insisted that they were necessary ‘against savage populations’.

Above all, the great novelty of 1896-98 was the construction of the Sudan Military Railway, running 225 miles across the desert from Wadi Halfa to Abu Hamed in 1897 and another 150 miles on to Atbara in 1898. The troops no longer had to march over sand dunes and row up cataracts. At Atbara in April 1898, around three thousand Mahdists died, compared to eighty British soldiers. At Omdurman in September, 25,000 British and Egyptian troops assembled with their modern guns and ten Nile gunboats. By no means everything went smoothly, in particular when the 21st Lancers were ambushed during a cavalry charge. Even so, Ronald Meiklejohn reflected that his troops ‘had taken part in one of the most spectacular – and perhaps “safest” – battles ever fought!’ The British dead numbered 48, with 434 wounded, while 9700 of the 52,000 Mahdists died and 13,000 were wounded. By 1898, the British Army in Sudan was a killing machine. Ambitious officers queued up to be associated with it. Many of the military leaders of the First World War – Douglas Haig, David Beatty and Hamilton – were there, under the distant and autocratic leadership of Herbert Kitchener.

The other great difference in 1898 was that there was no risk of repeating Gambier-Parry’s confusion of 1884. Every soldier and every newspaper reader knew – or thought they knew – why the campaign was being fought. It was to avenge the murder of Gordon on the steps of his palace in Khartoum. (This was not exactly true, since the prime minister, Lord Salisbury, had really sanctioned the expedition in order to check French expansion from West Africa into southern Sudan, but the Gordon affair provided attractive cover.) Preparing to attack at Atbara, Kitchener was certain that every man would do his duty: ‘Remember Gordon. The men before you are his murderers!’ ‘Remember Gordon and Khartoum!’ became the army’s watchword. The press took the same view. Steevens argued that it was finally time to conquer the man-eater.

In the years since his death, Gordon had been elevated into a Christian martyr who had gone to Sudan to make a stand against the fanaticism and violence of Africa, not least its slave trade. By avenging him, Britain would be taking a step towards ending these evils. In reality, the Gordon affair had been more complex. Gordon disliked the slave trade, but his primary hatred was for arrogant misgovernment by greedy British and Egyptian officials. He underrated the Mahdi and thought that he could be played off against other chiefs. He assumed that, once corrupt governors were replaced by men like himself, who were ascetic and sympathetic to Arab culture, the tribal leaders of Sudan would respond positively. But he had very little to offer them, and lacked authority without British military support. Disdaining to escape, he continued to believe that support would come, but if it did not, the idea of martyrdom was not unappealing, given his strong faith and sense of destiny.

The enduring power of the Gordon myth brings us back to Mason, who visited eastern Sudan in 1901, sourcing material for what would become The Four Feathers. Mason’s novel suggests that he was much more impressed by the Steevens vision of Sudan as wilderness than by the soldiers’ boasts that they had subdued it; indeed it is doubtful that he thought they had. To him, its elementalism remained its key feature. Harry Feversham endures six years in the desert and towns of Sudan, mostly in poverty and disguise, as penitence for his panic of 1882. His original aim is to return the four feathers to their bestowers, having tested and proved himself. This turns into a plan to rescue Trench, the original instigator of the feathers, from the House of Stone, the notorious prison at Omdurman. To do so, Harry must also incarcerate himself. The two men’s liberation from the fetid smells, nightly scorpion stings and jailer beatings is achieved only after interminable delays and disappointments. When Harry at last returns to England, his erstwhile fiancée, Ethne, who has also been on a long journey of self-discovery, accepts him. In doing so, she must let down her other suitor, Harry’s university friend Jack Durrance, who, lacking the other three soldiers’ insensitivity, would never have given him a feather (until the film scripts made him do so in 1929 and 1939).

Durrance went to Egypt in 1882 with the ambition of incorporating it within the empire. He is a Hector of Troy, a trusty friend and an ideal warrior. As befits the more imaginative kind of soldier, he has sympathy for the tribes and respect for their religion and their hatred of the Turks. He is promoted because his superiors want to use his liberal outlook to justify Britain’s forward policy. But then nature delivers its comeuppance: he is blinded by the glare of the sun on Sudanese sand, ‘smitten and cast out’ for his ambitions. Back in Britain, his blindness allows him to sharpen his analytical skills, so that he uncovers the whole sad story of Harry, the feathers and Ethne. Eventually, having relinquished her, he heads back to the Red Sea and the East whose freedom and spirit he loves, and which he is now incapable of damaging. Both Harry and Durrance can see that the only way to survive in Sudan is to empathise with native life, and native respect for the natural world.

After 1898, the British government was saddled with the problem of governing Sudan. It believed that Egypt, in order to be a successful colony playing its proper role at the heart of the imperial system, had to be weaned off wasteful militarism, and this depended on maintaining stability. British infrastructure made some inroads into Sudan – enough to remove its capacity to terrify the Western imagination. Nonetheless the attempt to impose British power was always problematic and involved periodic crises, including the assassination of the governor-general in 1924. In 1947, Britain announced that it would promote self-government, and it withdrew its troops in 1955. The Mahdi’s tomb in Omdurman, largely destroyed by artillery in 1898, was restored – though not his bones, which the British had thrown into the river. Sudan became independent in 1956. Meanwhile the fate of The Four Feathers in its successive cinema adaptations reflected the determination of the American and British film industries to rewrite history to please Western audiences. In 1966, the Mahdi was reborn twice over: in Sudan, his great-grandson became prime minister; in the epic Khartoum, he was transformed into Laurence Olivier.