ABSTRACT
Charles Callwell famously remarked in Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice that colonial campaigns were fought 'rather against nature than against hostile armies'. That was certainly true of the reconquest of the Sudan between 1896 and 1898 in which much depended upon climate and terrain, not least the rise and fall of the Nile. However, in directing the campaign, the Sirdar of the Egyptian Army (EA), Major-General Herbert Kitchener, faced many other difficulties. Callwell was understandably concerned only with the purely military aspects of colonial campaigning and the nearest he got to acknowledging the political and concomitant financial pressures on commanders was a brief reference to circumstances arising in which soldiers might be required to fight a 'campaign of expediency'. 1 In some respects, the reconquest of the Sudan might be characterised as such a campaign and Kitchener's success a measure of his ability to overcome the kind of problem for which a perusal of Callwell's manual offered no solutions.
