Sudanese troops enter Darfur

On 16 March 1916 the mounted units of Lieutenant-Colonel Philip Kelly’s field force set out westwards from En Nahud in western Kordofan. At the beginning of March the Governor-General of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, General Sir Reginald Wingate, had decided to finish with the hostile Sultan of Darfur, Ali Dinar, and ordered Kelly to cross the border. The first objective was not the Sultan’s capital but water: the wells at Umm Shanga and Jebel el Hilla, the only permanent sources on the road from En Nahud to El Fasher.

Kelly’s troops belonged to the Egyptian Army, which Wingate commanded as sirdar. The infantry battalions, the 13th and 14th Sudanese, the Arab Battalion and companies of the 4th Egyptian Battalion, were recruited in the Sudan and Egypt, and the senior officers were British, seconded from the British Army. Kelly himself came from the 3rd Hussars. The whole force numbered about 2,000 men: two companies of mounted infantry, five companies of the Camel Corps, six companies of Sudanese infantry, two of Arab and three of Egyptian, two batteries of mountain guns and a battery of Maxim machine guns. On 16 March its fast element set out: the mounted infantry scouts, an artillery battery, the machine guns and the Camel Corps. It reached the border by way of Wad Banda, and on the morning of 20 March it dispersed the Sultan’s observation post at Umm Shanga. The date of the border crossing is therefore uncertain: chronologies give 16 March as the day of the entry into Darfur, but on that day the units were only leaving En Nahud, which according to the British official history lay about 145 kilometres from the border.

At Umm Shanga it turned out that the wells were not enough for the whole force. The main body was due to arrive from En Nahud on the evening of 21 March with water for only two days. Kelly had to choose: return to En Nahud or push on with what he could water. Wingate wrote of “grave objections” to a withdrawal, so Kelly took the risk, halted the main body at Wad Banda, and at dawn on 22 March set off for Jebel el Hilla with a flying column: 30 mounted scouts, 240 men of the Camel Corps, two guns and eight machine guns. A few kilometres short of the objective about 800 of the Sultan’s horsemen tried to surround it, but were driven off by fire. Further on, the artillery and machine guns dispersed a large enemy concentration in a wooded valley. At 2.15 p.m. the column reached the wells. According to Wingate’s report the enemy lost about 20 killed and wounded, while the column’s own losses were negligible. On 26 March, when the rest of the force had come up, Kelly also occupied the wells at Lugud.

Wingate judged that the occupation of Jebel el Hilla had to a large extent restored the government’s prestige in the western Sudan. The Sultan’s main army, 4,000 to 6,000 riflemen and numerous auxiliaries with spears, still stood at El Fasher, however, about 400 kilometres from En Nahud, beyond a trackless savannah that at this time of year was almost waterless. Wingate ordered a road for light lorries to be built from the railway station at Er Rahad to support the camel transport. In April his troops occupied further wells deeper in Darfur, and the commander in Egypt, General Archibald Murray, lent them four aircraft. The decision came in May: on 22 May Kelly’s square repulsed a fierce attack by the Sultan’s army at Beringia, and the next day his cavalry rode into El Fasher.