Action at Beringia

On 22 May 1916, near the village of Beringia, on the road to El Fasher, the capital of Darfur, the field force of Lieutenant-Colonel Philip Kelly fought the only major battle of the expedition against Sultan Ali Dinar. Since March, when it entered Darfur, it had been taking one well after another on the waterless savannah, while the Sultan’s army avoided battle. At Beringia it struck with all its strength for the first time. The British chronology of the war modestly calls this battle an “affair” (affair), but for Darfur it was decisive.

The march on the capital

In April Kelly’s troops took Burush, Umm Kadada and the wells of Abiad, deep in the country, without much resistance. There General Sir Reginald Wingate, Governor-General of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, had to decide whether to wait for the rainy season or strike at once. The rains would provide water for larger forces, but would wash out the roads and favour the Sultan’s guerrilla warfare. According to his dispatch, published in the London Gazette in October 1916, after consulting Kelly he decided to advance on El Fasher at the full moon in May. General Archibald Murray, commanding in Egypt, lent the expedition four B.E.2c aircraft of No. 17 Squadron of the Royal Flying Corps. On 12 May one of them flew over the capital and dropped proclamations. According to the British official history of the air war, the leaflets gave assurances that the invaders had no intention of forcing Christianity on anyone, as such rumours were circulating.

On the mornings of 15 and 16 May two columns set out from Abiad: about 60 mounted scouts, four companies of the Camel Corps, eight infantry companies of the 13th and 14th Sudanese Battalions and the Arab Battalion, eight guns and 14 Maxim machine guns, including sections with British crews. On the way the scouts captured almost the whole of a mounted observation post of the Sultan, so the news of the march reached El Fasher too late. On 17 May the aircraft of Captain E. J. Bannatyne bombed the detachment defending the village of Melit (now Mellit), and the next day the troops occupied it without a fight. There was plentiful water there, but the soldiers were so exhausted by the heat that Kelly gave them several days’ rest.

The attack on the square

At 5.30 a.m. on 22 May the troops broke camp and moved on in square formation. From the start large groups of the Sultan’s horsemen on horses and camels circled around them. The terrain was difficult: low, broken sandy hills and scattered bushes, through which one could rarely see further than a few hundred metres. Sandstorms hampered flying, and the morning air reconnaissance spotted nothing. At about 10.30 a strong enemy position was sighted, roughly 1.8 kilometres away. The guns drove its defenders out of the forward trenches, and the square advanced about another 700 metres and began to dig in. A few hundred metres ahead lay the village of Beringia, and beyond it, in a semicircle nearly two kilometres long, the main trenches of the Sultan’s army.

Kelly decided to attack at once, but before he issued his orders a company of the Camel Corps covering the artillery on the right flank, contrary to its commander’s intentions, entered the village. Some of the soldiers went right through it, came under very heavy fire and began to fall back. The Fur leapt out of their trenches in pursuit, and immediately afterwards their whole army moved out of its positions and threw itself with great impetus against the southern face of the square. The British official history of operations in Egypt sees in this a return to the old tactics of the dervishes from the time of the Mahdist uprising, who tried to break British squares by assault. The attackers advanced under the fire of two batteries of mountain guns and machine guns, and some fell less than ten metres from the defenders’ line. After about 40 minutes their ranks wavered. Kelly had the advance sounded. The infantry went over to the counter-attack, the machine guns moving with it, and the Sultan’s army broke and fled in disorder.

Losses

According to Wingate’s dispatch, 231 dead and 96 severely wounded Fur were counted after the battle within about 450 metres of the square, and the enemy’s total losses were estimated at more than a thousand men. The historian M. W. Daly gives 261 dead. Reports found later in El Fasher showed that the Sultan had fielded about 3,600 riflemen, not counting spearmen and auxiliaries. Kelly’s losses were negligible: according to the same dispatch, three officers wounded, two soldiers killed, three died of wounds and 18 wounded, 26 men in all. Kelly attributed the victory to the coolness and discipline of the soldiers and the accurate support of the artillery. He called it a “soldiers’ battle”, won not by manoeuvre but by the steadfastness of the rank and file.

At four in the afternoon the troops moved on and spent the night in a fortified camp a few kilometres short of the capital. The Sultan no longer had an army capable of defending El Fasher. The next morning Kelly’s troops entered the city.