Winston Churchill

Biography

The future prime minister was a 23-year-old cavalry subaltern and aspiring writer when he wangled his way into Kitchener's army for the Omdurman campaign — over the objections of Kitchener himself. He rode in the celebrated, and largely pointless, charge of the 21st Lancers, one of the last great cavalry charges of the British army, and came away both thrilled and disturbed by the slaughter he had witnessed. Churchill turned the experience into 'The River War,' a vivid two-volume account that criticised Kitchener's harshness — including the desecration of the Mahdi's tomb — and made his name as a writer. The campaign was a formative episode in the making of the man who would lead Britain through its greatest war forty years later, and his account remains one of the classic eyewitness records of imperial warfare.

Key Battles