Battle of Abu Klea - Aftermath

Aftermath

The column was too late to save Khartoum; it was taken by the Mahdists just a few days later leading to the death of General Gordon. The Dervishes of the Mahdi ruled over Sudan for the next thirteen years as the British pulled out of the area. The official public blame for this failure was left with Prime Minister Gladstone for delaying several months, to the considerable anger expressed in public of Queen Victoria, to authorize a rescue. Gladstone lost public confidence and much authority and within two months he resigned.

The battle was celebrated by the Scottish doggerel poet William McGonagall:

Ye sons of Mars, come join with me,
And sing in praise of Sir Herbert Stewart’s little army,
That made ten thousand Arabs flee
At the charge of the bayonet at Abou Klea

and so on for 19 stanzas

And also the battle and one of its notable participants is mentioned in the song "Colonel Burnaby", which has as its chorus:

Weep not my boys, for those who fell, They did not flinch nor fear. They stood their ground like Englishmen, and died at Abu Klea

The rhymes in these poems show varying attempts at pronouncing "Klea" from the English spelling, and the rhyme with "fear" shows British English arhotic pronunciation.

More celebrated and of higher literary quality is the mention of the battle in verse two of Sir Henry Newbolt's poem "Vitai Lampada":

…The sand of the desert is sodden red,
Red with the wreck of a square that broke;
The Gatling’s jammed and the colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.
The river of death has brimmed his banks,
And England’s far, and Honour a name,
But the voice of the schoolboy rallies the ranks,
“Play up! play up! and play the game!”

"The wreck of a square" is a severe exaggeration; most of the dead were Mahdists. Newbolt's reference to the Gatling is incorrect as the British force at Abu Klea had the American Gardner machine gun, whose name scans just as well as Gatling (but perhaps he knew that in listening to the poem the name "Gardner" could have been misheard as "gardener"). The Royal Artillery unit which took part in the battle still exists today, re-numbered as 176 Battery, and has the honour title "Abu Klea", awarded in 1955 in recognition of the Victoria Cross won by Gunner Smith.