Can we connect an urban cemetery in Falkirk, a Suffolk parish church, a café on the Coigach coast of North-west Scotland and an Ethiopian market town? Obviously the answer is going to be in the affirmative, although there would not be a link had an Italian army not been defeated at the Battle of Adwa in northern Ethiopia in March 1896.
The Italian defeat prompted the Mahdist regime in Sudan to threaten the Italian-occupied port of Kassala on the Gash River in eastern Sudan. As Kassala had previously been Egyptian the British/Egyptian powers wanted it back, and certainly did not want it falling into the hands of the Mahdists. The British-Egyptian forces, therefore, invaded Sudan from the north, spurred on also by their fear of French infiltration into the regions of the Upper Nile. If that is not complicated enough, throw in a soupçon of revenge, as the leader of the British forces, General Kitchener, was eager to avenge the death of his former commander, general Gordon, who had been killed by the Mahdists in Khartoum in 1885.
Kitchener entered Sudan in March 1896, and had early successes, but the strategy was to be slow but sure. Communications were the primary focus, with time and care spent constructing two railways south from Wadi Haifa, with extra and strengthened fortified camps to guard them. Over the following eighteen months the slow advance continued, punctuated by the occasional capture of Mahdist garrisons along the routes of the railway, and along the Nile.
