The River War: An Account of the Reconquest of the Sudan.

CHURCHILL, Winston S.

Item Number: 129570

London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1951.

Finely bound printing of Churchill’s history of the conquest of the Sudan. Octavo, bound in full crushed red morocco by Sangorski and Sutcliffe, gilt titles and tooling to the spine in six compartments within raised gilt bands, gilt ruling to the front and rear panels, gilt turn-ins and inner dentelles, marbled endpapers, all edges gilt, illustrated with 22 maps and plans, several folding. In near fine condition.

Churchill served in the 21st Lancers during Lord Kitchener’s campaign on the Upper Nile in the late 1890s and was a participant there in the last great cavalry charge of the British Army. “Hopping on a ferry, and not bothering to trouble his commanding officer in distant South India for leave, Winston turned up in the Abbasya barracks in Cairo on August 2, 1898, and joined the 21st’s A Squadron. He was fully outfitted, had bought a horse, and was, most important of all, equipped with a commission from the Morning Post to send dispatches at £15 a time” (Keegan, 46). “Far from accepting uncritically the superiority of British civilization, Churchill shows his appreciation for the longing for liberty among the indigenous inhabitants of the Sudan; but he finds their native regime defective in its inadequate legal and customary protection for the liberty of subjects. On the other hand, he criticizes the British army, and in particular its commander Lord Kitchener, for departing in its campaign from the kind of civilized respect for the liberty and humanity of adversaries that alone could justify British civilization and imperial rule over the Sudan” (Langworth, 27).