Episode 382: The Gordon Relief Expedition

Hey everybody, Joe here.

Good news, I suppose.

Our October 4th show in Glasgow, Scotland is sold out.

We have sold out the second biggest venue we've ever done a show at.

But good news, if you still want to see us, we will be live streaming it.

There's no limit on however many live stream tickets are available.

You can get it at the link below.

It also comes with video on demand, so if you can't stay up that late, depending on your time zone or whatever, you'll still have the video available for you when you wake up and want to watch it at your own convenience.

So check out the show notes, see the live stream link, and get your tickets for October 4th.

Thanks.

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We all have that one friend.

Surely you know the type.

Loyal servant of empire, mental piece full of photos of himself in pith helmets, emotionally void relationship with his wife and children.

Errant comments about, are there any filthy versions of Rudyard Kipling poems?

Well, if you've been wondering what to say to your dear friend when he makes the conversation unbearably awkward, we've now got a solution.

As of september first, nineteen oh nine, reservations are open for Sotatic Sunshine, our all-inclusive vacation, resort, and spa network located in the choicest latitudes of the globe.

Indulge the French disease in Ceylon.

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And don't worry, none of it is unnatural.

It's just what happens to all men when they travel south of Dover.

Well, at least, all Englishmen.

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Send a telegram to Burton Enterprises, One Sloane Square, London, with the reference code Buggery.

I'm really enjoying the rebranding of Nothing Beats a Jet 2 holiday.

Jess Glynn needs to answer about the Satatic Zone.

Easy Jet is not taking you to the Satanic Zone, unfortunately.

Weird 78 RPM, fucking like

music in the background like that.

Yeah.

Yeah, not a lot of people know that the original version of the song from Top Gun was Highway

to the Satanic Zone.

Oh, man.

In the situation, the Satanic Zone is the farm you do not pay taxes on.

Oh, my goodness.

We're back.

You asked, and I delivered, Joe.

You said, write me a radio script.

I'm pleasantly surprised.

I like that I could just send you like a prompt for weird perverted British shit, like you're a humid version of chat GPT.

It's like, I texted for a little

peek behind the curtain.

I cannot do accents famously.

So I came up with a really bad idea for an all-inclusive like satatic zone cruise.

And I was like, Nate can do a good posh accent.

So I just sent him a sentence like, Nate, make an intro.

Yeah, like nine o'clock last night, he sent me a text like, Mate, can you do a two-minute radio act for a citadic zone cruise?

The funny thing is, I can't really do English accents for real.

I'm better at being able if I had to freestyle it with Australians, maybe because they just make such a strong impression with the fucked up things they say.

But with English things, weirdly years ago, I had to subtitle promotional videos like social media clips.

And there was one particular thing for a client, and it was with fucking David Bedeal, who is one of the most annoying people to ever walk the earth.

And having to listen back to everything he said and subtitle it, and I was sort of like, Oh, surely the woke lefties on Twitter don't appreciate the comedy.

They have no love of joy or laughter.

And I started repeating it back to myself just like because I was so annoyed at how fucking irritating this guy was.

And then I realized, I'm like, oh shit, I can speak like this if I want to.

I have a voice now.

I'll just call my friends and say, hello, it's David Bedil, it's me.

I'm just to annoy the piss out of you.

Like, I can't do any other fucking accent in the English accent, but I can do that.

If I try to do Cockney, I sound Australian.

If I'm not careful with Australian, I start sounding like, you know, white van bass.

Geezer fucking trady.

Like, I can't actually do them that well unless I've heard somebody say something that's made such an impression, which is why I can remember the Australian guy seeing an anti-war protest and seeing us American soldiers in uniform, looking at them, looking at us, looking at them, looking at us and saying,

you go, Gansen can bottle shoot East Connozzo.

I look at your British accent much the same way my mother looks at me.

Good enough.

Yeah, I mean, like at the end of the day, you know, send me to.

See, that's the problem is that like I didn't get sent to accent school.

The British, actually, accent school starts at age seven and you get taken away from your parents.

But it's a different kind of accent school, a different purpose involved.

Well, boys, I've gathered you here today and I gave you that prompt because today we are once again talking about the British Empire.

Once upon a time, the sun never sat on the British Empire.

Currently, the sun is probably set on your local Tesco, as the once unbeatable legions of red coats and the Royal Navy has largely been replaced by one single underpaid G4S guy wearing a body can.

Soon the king will be a G4S contractor.

All that remains of the once great United Kingdom are its four modern pillars: Binmen, costume sex perverts, inbred royals, and of course, games workshop.

I mean, I was going to say, you know,

unhealthy relationship with alcohol and substances, seasonal affective disorder, undiagnosed seasonal affective disorder.

I feel like we could just fold those all into the bidmin and the sex perverts.

You know, here's the thing.

I owe my entire career to the opportunities that happen because of being able to move and work in the United Kingdom.

But the United Kingdom, I feel like it's one of those countries where it's like, they're going to do whatever the fuck they want to do.

They don't want anyone with my accent to say shit.

Even if I'm right and they know I'm right, it's going to make them mad.

So you know what?

Y'all, y'all do your thing.

Go do your thing.

And whatever it's going to be, it's going to maybe, maybe you'll recreate the empire more likely.

You're just going to, I don't know, fucking, it's, it's, as a person I met on via Twitter and then via another friend who actually has become a personal friend, very, very intelligent man named David East once said, Do you ever think that maybe Britain was like that in Children of Men because it wanted to be and everyone else in the world was normal?

Yeah, but the thing is, is that like, Nate, you critique the British and they'll just make fun of school shootings and I do it and then they just turn into Jonathan Swift's a decent proposal.

Well, that's someone pointed this out to me once I think it's really funny and I'll make this my last comment because I know Joe wants to stay on script here, which is that anything when Brits and Americans are feuding online over dumb bullshit and it's annoying.

If you know anything about either country, it's just annoying to see.

But anything the Brits can say about America, like global hegemon, imperialism, oppression, violence, genocide, you know, exploitation.

Well, the Brits also did that and they do that.

They still do it.

Do you think we learned it?

Exactly.

However, they don't have guns and they don't have school shootings.

That's the one thing.

That's the one thing to be like, yeah, you fucking, yeah, not as many.

Look, I mean, you can safely send your children to school in Britain with light-up shoes.

Whether or not, like, I don't know, they're going to get run over by like an Ice White Rage Rover because now doing school drop-off in London is basically like fucking Tom Walker playing GTA when all the cars are on 999 speed, but that's a different problem.

But for this episode, let's jump back to the 1800s.

And in order to do that, we have to first talk about what else but the Ottoman Empire.

Because of course we do.

In 1819, the Ottoman governor of Egypt, a man that we're all going to enjoy saying his name, Muhammad Ali, invaded it and conquered Sudan.

It's fun if you close your eyes and just pretend it's the boxer.

Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.

You're absolutely fucked if you're Sudanese.

Oh, shut the fuck.

Oh, god damn.

So Ali was an interesting guy during very strange times.

He was originally from Albania.

He rose up through the Ottoman political ranks over time thanks to his skill collecting and tabulating local taxes with the additional skill of not stealing them.

This turned out to be a revolutionary new job skill in Ottoman governing.

Just like, yeah.

We've imported these secret management techniques from the Albanians.

It's like they do act like a Japanese corporate restructuring Wabi-Sabi ship.

It's the Albanians.

Not a lot of people know know that Elton Mayo deeply, deeply studied Albanian business structures for his formation of HR policy.

Exactly.

He eventually joined the Ottoman military as a local volunteer, which is quite common.

He rose through the ranks thanks to this volunteer unit being commanded by his dad.

So that makes his promoted easier.

In the early 1800s, Napoleon famously invades Egypt, seizing it from the Ottomans.

Long story short here, this occupation fails.

Napoleon pretty much abandons his soldiers, and the French eventually abandoned Egypt.

Ali's volunteer unit was one of the Ottoman forces sent in to re-occupy it for the Sultan, leading to on-again, off-again wars with the Mamluks.

Didn't the French shoot the cannons at the Sphinx and blow its nose off?

Isn't that part of the whole thing?

It's something of an urban legend, but yeah,

it's a lot more fun if you think of it that way.

Yeah, no, they had to blow it off because they didn't want people to know that the Sphinx was canonically Armenian.

They had to blow it off because Napoleon had seduced the Sphinx.

He was cheating on his wife with a statue.

It's like the Taliban destroying the Bamyan Buddhas, but they're just destroying the Sphinx's feet so Napoleon will stop licking them.

Tell the Sphinx not to wash.

This went on for years, and over this period, Ali was careful to just generally leave normal people alone.

He was not doing the normal Ottoman commander thing of killing and burning everything that was in front of him.

And rather than torch towns he found with Mamluks and sympathizers inside, he would simply give them money.

He David Petraeus them into stopping fighting.

He paid them off.

And this worked.

This meant before long, Egyptians were a huge fan of this weird Albanian guy while blaming the Ottoman governor for all the problems that stemmed from years of warfare and mismanagement.

So a group of Egyptians got together and demanded the Ottomans fire the governor and replace him with Ali.

So they did.

And one of the first things that Ali did was to use the goodwill he had fostered over the years with the local Mamluks to invite them over for dinner and murder them all.

And Ali happened to come to this governorship at a time when, surprise, surprise, the Ottoman Empire was not doing so hot and was rapidly like decentralizing itself.

Thanks to Sultan Salim III getting assassinated, largely due to the fact that Salim wanted to modernize and reform the Ottoman Empire, and a lot of other people then.

So he got stabbed.

The problem with having a huge government administrative bloat in which you have 100 viziers to every actual person doing something is that the viziers can start scheming.

And when they do, like, hey, what if we made things slightly more efficient?

You've basically like it becomes a fucking bullet hell game.

Ottoman bullet hell.

My family lost that game.

Not only was the government bureaucracy inflating rapidly, but so was the onion hat.

You're fighting the Ottomans in a proto-version of metal slogan.

Yeah, except for like the onion hat is gigantic, but there's really a tiny little red jewel that's glowing, and that's what you have to shoot it in.

This ended up all being great for Ali.

He wanted absolutely nothing to do with the Ottoman Empire and wanted to instead build an independent Egyptian state.

Of course, with the single Albanian guy being in charge.

He did this through effective, rigid, and at first, largely fair taxation, because that's what he was good at, and nationalization of everything.

Farmers, producers, craftsmen, anything would have to first sell their products to the state, who would in turn have a monopoly on all trade, whether inside Egypt or exportation.

This worked.

This generated a massive amount of state income, and he used these new revenue streams to turn around and industrialize.

He was going to do the modernization project that had gotten Salim killed, but just for Egypt.

And before long, Egypt, while still technically part of the Ottoman Empire, was building its own pretty modern weapons facilities and shipyards.

He reached out to Europeans to come in and begin building modern schools and universities because the Ottoman Empire had pretty much neglected Egypt down to nothing.

He created a civil servant training program to teach and instruct people how to run various government ministries, But he wasn't that fair.

He was still worried about getting got.

So his inner circle was only made up of his sons and like cousins and uncles and stuff.

Yes, we have another court of uncle Can a nephew be an unknown?

We've established that unk is more of an energy

rather than an actual thing.

Being unk coded.

I don't know if you saw this, but there was a thing that got shared where a guy had a, there was a viral video, I believe it was in China, of a, let's say, middle-aged-ish, probably early 30s, but balding guy just completely dogwalking everyone on the basketball court.

Hell yeah.

But he was wearing like a polo tucked into slacks while doing it.

And they had basically done like a pitched down chopped and screwed version of Billie Jean while it did as the background music.

And someone's like, look at this balding unk just fucking destroying people.

And there were so many people who were confused by the term unknown.

They thought it meant UNC, like University of North Carolina.

It's like, no, no, it's a whole different, it's an epistemology.

The epistemology of uncle.

We are living in the century of Chinese uncles, so, you know.

I just something about this is more like a beauty queen from a movie scene while this guy is just fucking slamming people.

I don't know.

There's just like it's now embedded in my mind.

So, you know what?

You bring up uncles, and I'm like, that's he is the four pillars of the world, the four corners, the Chinese uncle.

He rules that kingdom.

That's the secret sixth pillar of Islam is uncs.

All right.

Well, shouts out to all our Muslim listeners because they can probably tell us all sorts of uncle stories.

Hey, listen, we're talking about an Albanian in Egypt.

Yeah.

All right.

All right.

All right.

Okay.

Digression over, Joe.

I just had to say that.

He also sent promising students, both civilian and military, to Europe to kind of learn and understand how they do things to bring it home because above all else, he wanted to build a modern military.

This did not go great because at this period of time, the modern European military is mostly based on vicious abuse and hazing,

something that the Egyptian people were not exactly used to.

I mean, like, the regimental system is relatively new, and yeah, it's just, it's going to be bad.

All of this was an economic and cultural shock to Egyptians who found themselves being drafted into either Corvée labor systems to build all of these works that Ali wanted to build, or being conscripted into the military.

Both existences were horrible.

They were so bad to the point that average people would just jam nails into one of their eyes because if you were half blind, you didn't have to do it.

I I feel like living in Egypt at this time, being Egyptian, it's just sort of like narrow path of land where I can live, random floods and shit, biblical plagues and curses, guys just show up and grab me to make me build like Civ Six Wonders.

Like, it's, it's probably like, I can imagine why I'll be like, yeah, this kind of sucks, man.

Yeah.

I don't know if you're going to be able to do it.

Give me the fucking nails.

Putting this in my goddamn white matter.

I don't know.

Those Albanians showed up, started telling me to build roads, so I poked out one of my own eyes.

I can't figure Albanians show up.

They're like, hey, build a lot of small defensive structures everywhere, please.

We don't yet have a word to describe it, but you know what?

It's something in our culture.

It's just, it's like been there since time immemorial.

When we were painting like, you know, pictures of like antelopes and wolves on the walls of caves, we also were like, can we make our own cave outside?

Ali and his newly educated officers believed first and foremost that soldiers need to be recreated into the image that they wanted, which was disciplined, regulation-following soldiers like they saw in Europe, or at least they thought they saw in Europe.

So they completely separate them from everything they knew before this.

And these new recruits would effectively live in a prison.

They were never allowed outside.

They lived in locked barracks and they were trained and ruthlessly beaten for even the smallest violation with the favorite kind of beating being foot whipping because they would whip this shit out of your feet and then you'd have to go march.

There was definitely some like commanding officer who had a thing for feet.

It was like, that's really specific.

Oh yeah, boss, they'd really hate it if you whipped their feet.

But first, we need to, like, properly, you know, like create cohesion in the technique.

You have to test it on me first.

Yeah.

I mean, the thing is, is that, like, as we all know, this kind of thing always worked really well and definitely doesn't have counterproductive results in the sense that like it doesn't actually make people tougher or more disciplined.

It just basically

creates like, I don't know, like micro-tessellations of new cultures of how to like get around it and hide shit and haze each other.

And in general, just like it, it actually, yeah, it just makes things suck really bad.

Or worse than that, the 1800s version of the Egyptian conscript vet bro.

Oh, God.

Oh, bro, you call that getting your feet whipped?

Yeah, exactly.

If you paid 2,000 coins,

you can join my two-week long boot camp where me and my hobies will whip your feet and spray with hoses down by the L.A.

River.

That person slowly transformed into Macho Man.

I don't know why.

Corporal punishment in the Satanic Zone involves getting your dogs out always.

yeah well i was thinking about the the ottoman empire vet bros they get out and they start a company that sells like like bro themed tea in turkish delight

no no that gay rose water in there black artifice tea company

using promo code saleem you can get six Death Delights.

Just like Turkish Delight cut out to be a skull.

Ali 10 promo code.

Yeah, exactly.

You can get a box of, I don't know how the fuck you would ship things back in those days.

It was delivered in like a crate on a boat, hoisted off by a rope.

And it's like, yeah.

Like two years after you ordered it.

Yes, this is with discount code Avenge Lepanto, and you can get 10% off.

No, with code Salim 10, you get to keep the slave that delivers your delivery.

At first, he used his new military to serve Ottoman purposes, but before long, he was using it to create his own empire through the invasion of Sudan in 1820.

Sudan was an obvious target for Ali.

Sudan wasn't unified, was tearing itself apart with beefs and disjointed mess of tribal politics, and they didn't exactly have a standing army that could really fight him off.

It also happened to be a wonderful source for slaves, because that is what Ali was making his money on, was the slave trade.

Over the course of several years, Ali managed to conquer Sudan for himself.

But like all imperial powers, Egypt ruled Sudan through an iron fist of taxation and slavery, empowering a northern tribe called the Shagia to be like the chosen in group, and he used them as like his police force to oppress everybody.

Taxes and state demands never decreased, even when famines and droughts hit Sudan, leaving thousands to die.

Though the iron-fisted rule of the modern Egyptian military kept the lid shut tightly over any unrest.

Though, eventually, Ali flew a bit too close to the sun.

Through haggling and then eventually fighting the Ottomans, as well as vastly overextending his empire by the mid-1800s, he and his state were pretty much bankrupt.

This wasn't helped by the fact that Ali was getting up there in his years and had completely lost his mind.

He was so senile by the end of his days that he was not even aware that his son had died and his heir apparent was now his nephew, Abbas, who is described by the Chambers Biographical Dictionary as, quote, bigoted and sensual.

Yes, the sensual bigot of the Satanic zone.

I don't know what this man did to be described in these words.

The horny racist.

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, that's just like some of Lord Byron's writings.

Yeah.

Abbas was wildly unpopular and cruel to the point that it made his uncle look normal, to the point that he was eventually murdered by his own servants, leaving his uncle Syed in charge in 1854.

Just in time for the Suez Canal project to be the new hotness sweeping through European powers, namely France.

The UK was in staunch opposition to the canal at first because they controlled every other route, like overland through India, the Cape Route around their colony in South Africa.

But construction eventually began anyway as the French-educated Syed was intertwined with France to the point that he even sent elements of his mostly slave army to Mexico to support France's imperial project there.

He was in deep with the French, but he also died in 1863, leaving power to his nephew Ishmael.

By this point, the ruler of Egypt stopped trying to be independent from the Ottomans and instead operate as a viceroy to the empire.

And thanks to like a deal they cut with the sultan, the viceroy would not be elected by the sultan, but would rather be allowed to pass through family lines.

And they were allowed to do pretty much their own thing as long as they paid taxes.

Okay.

Ishmael wanted to restore Egypt to the glory that Ali had brought it and once again attempted to modernize.

However, he was not nearly as good at this as Ali was.

Mostly, I think, of all of the problems that Ali had, of which there are several,

namely building a slave empire, he wasn't corrupt.

He wasn't stealing money from the state.

Ishmael was cartoonishly corrupt.

He was so corrupt personally that he plunged the country into massive amounts of debt.

He stole so much money from the state that he paralyzed the ongoing construction of the Suez Canal.

Which

well done, sir.

Kind of an important thing.

So, yeah, you really, really, I don't think a bag has ever been fumbled as much.

You haven't fucked with the bag as much as we're like, we're literally going to reduce the shipping time from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea so you don't have to go all the way around the entirety of the continent of Africa.

And you fucked this up.

Like, who on earth has fumbled the bag more than that?

It's like when the ship got stuck, but it's just a giant bag full of stuff that he's stolen.

But, like, you always, when you create a kind of, of a, I suppose a political dynasty is the best way to describe it.

You create a political dynasty like this.

You have always a binary choice of the furtive unk or the perfidious nephew.

The bigoted and sensual nephew.

Bigoted unknown sensual nephew.

Yes.

Instead of you, there are two wolves.

Genuinely, bigoted uncle, sensual, nephew sounds like it would be like a classical Chinese poem.

Like it would be like on a banner or some shit.

Like just like a brief verse poem.

That's actually my new indie band name.

We've just created the new version of you, Swan He Frog.

Enter the United Kingdom.

To the UK, it was clear in order to retain their massive transport monopoly, they needed that canal and they needed it to open.

So they swooped in, driving a wedge between the French and Ishmael, giving Ishmael an offer France ever could.

We'll pay for the whole thing.

But you have to give us a controlling share.

Ishmael agreed, and soon the UK was seeping seeping further and further into not only just that untouched canal, but also the Egyptian administration to the point that the UK and France just fully controlled Egypt's finances while also controlling multiple ministries of the government.

And the French were also fine with this arrangement too, because they get to use the canal.

They still get a share of it.

Fine.

This tag teaming eventually funneled away fully half of Egypt's entire budget just to repay debts taken from France and the UK.

So you have people that work for the British government who are now technically part of the Egyptian administration taking loans from the UK and then taking their own budget to pay them off.

The Egyptians are like saddled with a debt equivalent APR as if you gotten a loan from a guy on the corner called Dodgy Dave in fucking Deptford.

Well, I mean, they sealed the barracks off.

They decided to make, you know, being in the military suck as much as possible.

And now they're basically taking out 30% APR loans on Dodge chargers.

It's like when someone accidentally envisions envisions the future, but when like fucked up weird sci-fi or whatever, but they get it right.

That's what they've done here.

Most serene Ishmael.

We have not built a canal.

However, we have purchased several thousand Chevy Corvettes on really bad loans outside of Fort Hood or out of Fort Hood, Texas.

But I mean, Corvette is actually a word based on a kind of boat.

So there could have been a French guy named Chevrolet who built boats that were called Corvette.

So this could be real.

Oh, I miss your Chevrolet.

Ah, monsieur.

We la batides, we la

des corvatu pour des Egyptians, les automans, and Egyptiers.

I'm just saying, man, 30%.

I think this might be why the nephew is so sensual.

He got in with the Frenchman.

Sensual French nephew.

As the Egyptian state grew weaker, rebellions in Sedan began to blow up, leading to the Egyptians appointing a British governor of the province, Major General Charles Gordon, in 1873.

Now, you might remember remember that name because this is not Charles' first time popping up in this show.

He had cut his teeth as the commander of the multinational, ever-victorious army during the Taiping Rebellion, and he was given the nickname Chinese.

So he went by the name Charles Chinese Gordon.

Yes.

The British Empire has always had their equivalent of Big John.

Chinese Gordon.

All I can think of is.

Where does Flash Gordon fit into the family tree here?

You've got

Ming the Mercel.

Oh, yeah.

Good point.

You're right.

You're right.

Yeah.

Mind you, he is the most normal-looking British military officer you've ever seen.

Imagine meeting me or Tom or Nate for that matter.

Like, oh, you can call me Chinese.

Chinese Gordon rocking up saying Ni-Hao.

Bah.

But at the same time, though, it's like, come on, man.

Joe, you and I are both Americans.

Remember what they used to call General John Pershing?

Come on.

Yeah.

Just saying.

We've talked about that one before.

Racial slurs.

We're not going to repeat them in case you aren't aware of this.

Google it yourself.

Yeah, don't Google it in a library or at school.

If you're, for some reason, you're in school and you listen to Spotify.

You should Google it on your child's cell phone.

Just really fuck up their search history.

Yeah.

And then you'll be like, oh, damn, the search history is all over the place.

Every other famous military person and then slurs.

This kid's been listening to the wrong podcast.

Some kid is going to be like in the back of the car and their dad is listening to this podcast and they're typing in Chinese Gordon slur into their Fisher Prize tablet.

I'm just laughing at the idea because, I mean, to me, it's like I just wouldn't listen to a podcast if it was going to be a little bit off the rails.

Even though my kid's not at the, my concern right now is just my kid hearing a word and repeating it because she thinks it's funny and it's a swear word or whatever.

But like, if your kid was old enough to comprehend it and you're listening to the show, it's like, hey, hey, hey, kid, on your tablet.

I'm sorry.

We didn't mean to.

I know there's a million other things you'd rather be listening to right now.

I'm sorry.

I'm just saying.

And now your kid's going to get in trouble in a couple of years for calling some Swiss Swiss teacher unk.

Gordon quickly went to work trying to enforce a ban on slavery, which was the one thing in Egypt that was working like economically.

Not that that's a good thing.

Okay.

But it was the only thing paying the bills.

And this caused an even further economic collapse.

Egypt declined further.

The British got more involved.

They eventually bombed Alexandria to further prove their point that Egypt needs to listen to them now.

And all of this only made the situation in Sudan worse.

The slavery ban torpedoed the one part of the Sudanese economy that functioned with nothing to replace it.

Furthermore, people had never really been happy with an Egyptian governor in place, but now some non-Muslim dude from Britain was in charge.

Unrest got even worse.

I feel as though if your economy is based on slavery and collapses, your economy shouldn't have existed in the first place.

Oh, I mean, yeah,

getting an update here

that this is relevant to other places in the world.

I'm getting a teletype here from the United States at the same time.

It's actually been relayed by a guy on vacation with Satanic Sunshine.

He's like, I've got something really important to add.

This eventually birthed something of an Islamic political revival in the form of Muhammad Ahmed bin Abdallah bin Fahal, who would proclaim himself Mahdi.

In Islam, Ahmadi is a redeemer, a leader that is prophesied to appear and bring justice and peace before the end times.

Sometimes it's, you know, read as a time of troubles.

The British quickly nicknamed the man the Mad Body.

They also had a really racist term for his followers based on how their hair looked.

I'm not going to say it.

But yeah.

All I got to say is Alhamdulillah.

And the body quickly gained a ton of support through Saddan.

Even if Islamic scholars in Saddan at the time pointed out that, well, you know, just because our country is a bit fucked up, it's not the end times necessarily.

They were ignored.

His ranks continued to swell.

Gordon eventually resigned as governor and is replaced by Ralph Pasha, an attempt to cool the fires of rebellion, which did not work.

So Ralph sent two companies of infantry in to arrest the Mahdi in 1881, promising whoever captured him endless glories and riches.

However, the two companies were set at the Mahdi's village in two separate directions, with largely no coordination between them.

They accidentally began shooting at one another around the village, and then once they realized that like, oh, you're the other company, they stopped shooting.

They kill several of their own people.

And then they burst into the village, kick open some guy's hut thinking it's the Mahdi and shoot him.

It was not the Mahdi.

It was just some guy making tea.

Yeah.

Then the Mahdi's followers launched their trap.

At this point, the Mahdists had been peaceful mostly.

They didn't exactly have like an army or military weapons to speak of.

But they did know a bunch of soldiers showed up to try to kill their leader.

So a bunch of dudes armed with palm knives and rocks rushed the village and beat these dudes to death.

The Modest Rebellion had begun.

This is like a terrible version where, you know, they tried to make a sequel, but the only person they could get to is Jonah Hill because obviously P.

D.

D.

and Russell Brand are cancelled now.

So they had to rebrand it as Get Him to the Mahdi.

Is that what you want to call being cancelled?

I just feel like.

If your military exercise is such that you got run up on by guys with just pointed rocks and they won, like, you probably weren't all that well prepared.

The dude gets, like, prison shanked by a dude with a palm knife.

Like, you fucked up.

You had two companies of infantry, my man.

How did you do this?

The only thing you succeeded doing is shooting Steve and the other company and then gunning down the T guy.

They got absolutely like Flintstone stabbed.

As the bodies charge, you hear the

feeder going under their little car.

Getting chefed up by Fred Flintstone.

Run the fuck out of bedrock immediately.

And the hardest part of conquering bedrock is the counter-insurgency operations.

Not a lot of people know that Fred Flintstone runs bedrock like Tony Soprano.

Kneecapping dinosaurs for not letting him in on the cut parties like Paulie Walnut.

So does that imply that like, yeah, he's having a difficult time connecting with his son Bam Bam, who's on the fucking Stone Age computer all the time?

Yep.

Yeah.

Not that we know anything about that.

The Maddie led his men into the Cordophon and began to put some distance between him and the capital of Karma.

You kick up to Grand Puba and no one else.

And thousands of people flocked to the Mahdi's call.

When the Egyptian army marched after them, numbering about 4,000, they thought so little of their enemy that they just like camped out in the open, didn't put up any pickets or watchtowers or guards.

So the badists, now they're several thousand, fell upon the sleeping soldiers, butchering them with palm knives and beating them with more rocks.

I mean, butchering them with palm oil and then palm leaves.

It sounds like, oh, fuck shit.

God damn it.

We're getting turned into some kind of tropical dumpling.

Ah, shit.

They're dirting us like they're baking us some banana leaves.

They're putting us in a rock oven.

Imagine a whole army of 4,000 dudes so sound asleep that they methodically get their skulls caved in with rocks and just sleep through it.

The rock is the most silent weapon, though.

Yeah, but but like someone's gonna wake up like the 100 accurate of like one rock hit one kill is gonna fuck up one time someone's gonna be like ow i don't know i don't like wicked the guy next to him i don't know you just like ready to throw the rock and just vats pulls up with a percentage is 99 on the head

or maybe all like 6 000 bodice waited over one soldier for like the call to just crush the ball at once which kind of implies that in the biblical allegory of the conflict between david and Goliath, after getting hit with a sling in the eye, Goliath was like, You little motherfucker.

It was just loud, make noise.

It wasn't silent, it wasn't a sniper shot.

You get hit in the rock, like, ow, fuck, who did that?

Paul would say, ow, goddammit.

Because, you know, like, what do soldiers do when they sit around for too long?

They start throwing rocks at each other.

Yeah, I'm just testing the

effectiveness of my rock throwing.

Yeah.

Now, this pretty much marked the end of the first year of the rebellion.

Now, what else happens when you kill about 4,000 dudes who have guns?

You now suddenly have about 4,000 guns.

So now they have palm knives, rocks, and the occasional rifle, and a ton of ammo.

This left the British administration in Egypt pretty annoyed.

The entire Sudan project was bringing everything down a bit, you know?

Egypt originally conquered Sudan for slaves, and the British had outlawed the practice, meaning they didn't really see the rebellion even worth fighting.

Not to mention, it was technically an Egyptian problem, drawing funds from Egypt, namely in the form of paying for garrisoning soldiers in Sudan to put down the rebellion.

Money Egypt did not have and was wasting money that the British wanted to steal from Egypt.

And by 1883, Egypt controlled Sudan about as much as the Ottomans controlled Egypt.

So the British told their Egyptian proxies, you need to leave Sudan.

Call today, pack your shit.

Leave them to do whatever.

We don't care.

But in order to withdraw the garrisons, the government and everything else along with it, it would need to to be neat and orderly.

Otherwise, the Modest would surely come upon the column and destroy it, like when we did that episode years ago about the retreat from Kabul.

So the Egyptians asked the British to put a Brit in command of organizing the whole thing out of Khartoum, thinking that the Modests wouldn't dare to start a fight against the Brits.

Spoiler alert, this does not work.

Well, also, they've got like 2010s rap video levels of long guns now.

So it's like,

I feel as though 4,000 rifles, presumably, some kind of firearm firearm falling into their possession,

that might change their self-confidence levels.

And it sounds like the slaughtering of dudes sleeping went pretty well for them.

So they're probably also like, well, maybe this guy is right and we are actually fighting for the Mahdi.

You know what I mean?

Like maybe this is legit God's will.

So it's like, yeah, okay.

So they, you know, they're British.

Gentlemen, we found the one weakness of the soldier.

You simply hit them in the head with a rock while they're sleeping.

And the great thing about rocks is there is quite a plentiful supply of them.

So you don't have to reload a rock.

Or failing that, you're about to get pulled up on the Flintstone wagon with a whole bunch of dudes' guns.

Like, it's not good.

Fred Flintstone doing a drive-by and just fucking a rock out the window.

But I mean, also, like, can you imagine if you're going to ask to join a certain thing and it confirms your religious worldview, like it confirms specific lines from scripture?

And it's like, what if, like, you just randomly, you're like, fuck it, I'm going to give this a try.

And you ran around a building seven times and blew a horn and it did collapse.

Like, you would think you were Superman.

So it was like, in this guy's case, like, what hindrance do they possibly have?

You know, we overpowered two armies and didn't even have a gun.

Like, clearly, God is on our side.

It's like all the times we've talked about religious uprisings, like a lot of people for them, it really did seem like the end times.

You'd be like, Yeah, we all have that one friend who claims he can rip a lion in half with his hands, and then bees will make a dust inside its carcass and make honey.

But what if it actually happens?

What if you see that and you're like, damn, dude, this guy's real?

Okay, I believe him now.

They agreed, and they sent the former Sudanese governor, Charles Chinese Gordon.

Though, because Gordon was known to be,

let's call him aggressive in military matters, they also sent an officer named Jon Stewart.

I could only think of the day the Daily Show guy.

Campaign to restore sanity in the Upper Nile.

He technically was outranked by Gordon, but was given authorization to make sure that Gordon did not turn what was supposed to be an evacuation into a military campaign to put down the modest rebellion, which is what Gordon wanted to do from the very beginning and kept telling everyone, I'm going to do this.

Gordon arrived in Khartoum in February of 1884 and realized the task that he was given was virtually impossible.

There are three major Egyptian garrisons, all of which were already under siege.

There was another problem as well.

His orders were entirely vague.

London just told him, evacuate the Egyptian garrisons.

They did not tell him how to do it.

They did not give him a timeline in which to do it.

Also, they didn't exactly give him a ton of soldiers to like force it if he needed to.

So he just kind of sat in Khartoum trying to figure out how exactly he was going to pull this off.

And to make matters worse, there was, you know, Sudanese loyalists in Khartoum, of course, the administrators, military officers, things like that.

And he just told them straight up like, I'm here to get the Egyptians out and then we're going to leave you guys.

So that meant that all of these guys just found out they're about to be on the wrong side of this whole rebellion thing.

And they quickly run off to join the modest.

To try to win everybody back over, Gordon sat down behind his desk and thought, how can I win the hearts and minds of the people who want to kill me?

He came up with a very simple phrase.

Call me Yao Ming the way I'm lethal with that rock.

He re-legalized slavery.

Ah, that's much worse.

Yeah.

Which is pure evil and also did not work.

People really did not like him.

There's some letters that survived.

We'll get to the reason why I said survived here in a little bit.

but the Sudanese really did not like Gordon because he was really fucking racist, which is not surprising.

The rebellion continued to grow, and within the month, the Modest had surrounded the capital, trapping Gordon and his staff inside Khartoum.

Kind of.

See, the thing is, and this is important to remember going forward for the rest of this episode.

He was never trapped.

He had a squadron of armed steamships in Khartoum's port and could have left at any point during this period.

He just chose not to, deciding that he was not going to leave until he finished his job because anything else would just be dishonorable.

Soon, word got back to London that Gordon and his staff were under siege, and virtually everyone in government demanded some kind of rescue force be sent for him.

Again, he did not need to be rescued.

He could just leave.

But Prime Minister William Gladstone refused, not wanting to get a British army bogged down in a shitstorm, especially one with no monetary gain in a territory that they did not want to take over.

Gordon, left on his own, again, by choice, organized the defense of Khartoum with the little that he had, constantly sending requests after request to London for assistance, but each one was denied.

While the people who wanted to send a rescue force argued over the best way to actually get a military there at all, they kind of came up with the fact that there's no good options here.

The one option, the least shitty, I guess, is a way to rank these, was landing a force on the Red Sea and having them march over open desert nearly 250 miles to the town of Berber, where they then could board boats and finish the journey down the Nile.

One proponent of this route was Sir Garnet Woesley, who you might remember from multiple different episodes now.

By the time Gladstone was overruled and Wolseley was given command of a relief force, Gord had been under siege for six months, which again, he could have left.

Because, okay, by the time Wolseley is greenlighted to do this operation where he is going to kind of leapfrog down the Nile and then have to a final overland march of a couple hundred miles, right?

By the time that happens, London's whole mission has shifted from evacuating the Egyptians to saving Gordon, which again, Gordon could have saved himself.

There comes a point where that's no longer possible, but up until now, he could have gotten on those steamboats and simply left.

When the expedition was officially authorized, everyone flocked to join it.

This was like the heroic, heroic adventurous thing to join it was in the newspapers every military unit was sending volunteers every like person with a noble title wanted to be part of it including the prince of wales but the queen literally was like shut the fuck up and go back to your room uh and so he didn't go there was another guy gustav barnaby name alone

wow solid name uh he was a military officer of no renown really and he was more well known of being a balloonist like as in flying them or contorting them into the shapes of animals.

Well, now I want to believe that he's just really good at making balloon dogs.

What if it's both?

What if he makes balloon dogs wow in like a comical 19th-century hot air balloon and then rains them down on people who are like, I'm going to die of scurvy or something like that?

Could you maybe give me some vitamin C instead?

I got you some vitamin D.

You have a balloon dog, bitch.

So for going forward, I want everybody to think of him as constantly making little balloon hats for all the soldiers because that makes everything a lot more enjoyable.

He pulls out a balloon sword.

Everybody's marching with their Lee infield.

He's like, squeak, squeak, squeak, squeak.

Because he sees a banana gun.

Or it's like, because he has a balloon gun.

But he was completely underqualified for any command.

But he kind of just camped out at Wolseley's office, refusing to leave until Wolseley allowed him to take a command inside of his expedition.

And Wolseley also had experience crushing.

the Red River Rebellion in Canada.

So he thought, because this is going to be a Riverine-based operation, he's like, who's really good at rivers and would be able to navigate the Nile?

Canadians.

Okay.

So he asked Canada, which of course is under the Crown, to send Rivermen.

Canada agreed, but only if Canadians volunteered and the British paid for it.

And they did.

They get about 400 Canadian Rivermen to suddenly decide they're going to forward the Nile.

Yeah, I mean, look, these are people who were waiting for the right opportunity to emerge for their true genetic expression of being the guy who, like, 12 molsons deep, is like, I guarantee you that I can drive my truck onto the ice and it'll hold.

And then it doesn't and they drown.

It's like, that's the, these guys are the progenitor of that.

These guys are going to be the first people in history to get a DUI.

And they're doing it on the Nile.

DUI on the Nile sounds, I don't know.

This is like.

That's a boss tone song.

Charlie Wilson just stopped being a congressman.

He would have found a way to do that before he died of cancer.

They joined a force for around around 9,000 soldiers from around the British Empire.

And though Wolseley was smart enough to know that he would need a fuckload of logistical support, from food to virtually all of the water the expedition would use, since part of it required them to, again, march across hundreds of miles of barren desert.

So he began to stockpile things that he would need, as well as the beast of burden he would use.

Camels.

Nobody in his army had any experience with camels,

but Wolseley also knew he would need a cavalry.

He needed mounted troopers.

Well, there was cavalry in his army, but they couldn't use horses now.

So he just said, well, here's your steed and pointed at the camels, an animal that these men had never seen before.

As someone who has rode a camel, it is very different from riding a horse.

Woolseley just kind of doing the used car salesman, slapping the top of the camel.

Slapping the homes.

And they got no training really at all on these things.

It's like, well, you see how the Egyptians do it.

Just do that.

Just simply climb up there and ride this fucking strange desert monster.

When I was a little kid, I went to a petting zoo and there's a camel and I tried to feed it and it just used its nose to knock me over.

Like it just went over and it was like

it was spitting in my face practically, but it literally just nudged me over.

And I was just like, okay, horses are pieces of shit.

I know this because a horse bit me when I tried to feed it an apple when I was like five.

But now camels are also bastards, but in a different way.

Camels are bullies and horses are just sociopaths.

Horses want to murder you and camels, they're going to find a way to use their weird camel proportions to give you a wedgie because that's just

the horses want to kill you, camels want to steal your shoes.

The camel is using its camels.

The camel is stole by all black forces.

No, the camel is wearing all four

black forces and using its lips to like take your wallet out of your pocket.

Special cutaway, so what the camel makes you run them through your starter jacket and fucking like fit the humps.

It becomes like an apron, like an apron with a cutaway.

I can't believe this camel stole my Detroit piston starter jacket.

Oh, Christ alone.

There's another problem, though.

Wolseley had to buy so many camels.

He literally created a camel shortage in Alexandria and still did not have enough of them.

He just assumed without any prior knowledge that there would be more than enough camels to go around in Egypt.

But there wasn't.

His force bought, I need to point out here, thousands of camels, but still needed thousands more, and decided to just go without the half of them that they were missing.

So with that, this force was loaded into boats and began to make for the town of Korty, the halfway point.

The problem was this is taking way too long.

It was now December 1884, and almost no word had got out of Khartoum in like weeks at this point.

Woesley was getting worried that by the time he got there, it would be too late and the city would have fallen.

So he decided to put together a desert column to make an overland push towards the town of of Mahedima.

This would allow one of their forces to get around what was known as the Great Bend of the Nile because it would take so long for the boats to make the journey.

He selected General Herbert Stewart and was given command of the desert column.

It was made up of around 1,800 Brits, about 300 or so local auxiliaries, and 3,000 camels, as well as a couple cannons.

and a very shitty old-timey machine gun, which we'll talk about later.

The march to Mahedima was about 175 miles, and this would have been easy, but these guys did not have nearly as much camels to haul the supplies.

Though 3,000 camels does seem like a surplus of camels.

Remember, you can't load down every camel with a ton of supplies, and they could not drag wagons like a horse could.

It meant that each camel would need to load all of these supplies directly on their back.

And in order not to overwork the animals to the point of sickness or death, they need to be rotated in and out.

Meaning, in reality, he only had about half as many camels as he really did, and he already needed about 2,000 more than he had.

For everyone at home, rotate a camel in your mind.

It's a slowly rotating CGI camel.

I don't know why I'm finding this so amusing.

The Z axis for a three, there's actually a fourth axis.

There's the X, Y, and Z axis, and there's like the top of the hump becomes the fulcrum of the world.

The camel spins around like a fucking vinyl record.

Whenever you're feeling a little stressed, do what we do here at the show.

Slowly rotate a camel in your mind.

To make the supply haul easier, Stewart decided not to bring any water.

Now, this does sound insane, but he does have a solid plan here.

On the way to Mehedabah, there are two places that are known to have large wells, Jukdul and Abu Kalaya.

So these are easily achievable to get water there.

Because of this, a desert column got to the town of Jukdul and began to pause and send camels back and forth to the river where the fleet still was.

Because remember, they can't carry everything they need.

So there's a constant convoy of camels going back and forth, slowing them down even more.

This might come as a surprise to some.

This is a massive, mostly empty desert.

But suddenly when there's several thousand camels and about 2,000 dudes marching through it, they're kind of easy to see.

They're kicking up a lot of dust.

You could be like, hey, who are those assholes in the desert?

Things of that nature.

And it did not take long for the local modists to to see that they were marching through.

The modest moved their men into Abu Kalea with a force of around 12,000 men.

This is discovered by Stewart late the next day as they were marching towards Abu Kalea.

Normally, when you rock up to a place with about 1,500 or so men and find yourself outnumbered by, say, 10,000, you pack up your shit and you go home.

But at this point, Stewart realized he didn't have a choice.

If he turned around and marched back towards the dial, the boats wouldn't be there anymore.

And then the Modests, which outnumbered him vastly, would catch him in the open and on the march, which is also a horrible idea.

Stewart knew that the Modests, despite having pretty modern weaponry, lacked modern training.

They had a tendency to fire off their rifles, ditch them, and pick up hand-to-hand weapons.

So he came up with an idea.

He would create what's called the Zariba, which is like an impromptu fort of rocks and thorn bushes and dirt.

I guess of this situation, it'd be mostly a sand castle.

To ward off any attack, they didn't attack that night, but the next morning, he forms a square.

Now, the infantry square is simultaneously the hardest infantry formation of train men to pull off correctly, as well as the best position for an outnumbered unit caught in the open.

The square forms into a square.

There's no better way to explain it that.

It makes it so there's no flank or rear to attack.

And the center is shallow, allowing a command element, wounded, your baggage train, whatever, to hide out what is effectively a fortress made out of people.

Breaking an infantry square was considered just about one of the hardest things for any attacking force to pull off back in the day, because it turns into assaulting a fortified position in the open.

The real reason why the square is the hardest formation for soldiers to pull off is that it required a ton of drilling and practice to do.

The square was not static.

Soldiers would have to march in that formation.

Getting a group of soldiers to march in any formation correctly, as Nate and I can attest to, is pretty fucking hard.

Especially the larger the number it is, just becomes more and more difficult.

And the square had to stay perfectly in line, lest they open a gap somewhere.

And once a gap is open, the square is defeated.

You can't have any opening.

We all love it when we got our homies together and built a human Kaaba.

They say it's always a bad time to go copying with 10,000 of your homies.

What about building a square with your homies?

Yeah, I mean, that's what when we do our podcast version of the gathering of the juggalos in the woods somewhere in Illinois, we're all just going to go stand in a square.

If you stand in a cube and you build layers, and then people run around you and throw rocks.

That's basically the shit that happened in the first half of this episode.

In sci-fi, you have to build the cube because you have 360 degrees of warfare.

You got to build the cube in space.

Made out of red coats still with muskets.

Two whoop cube and with dihomies.

You don't have to have the cube be fully, it has to have to be filled in the inside.

You just get the frame, enough room inside the frame of people standing in a weird human ladder so that a camel can rotate in a circle.

He's got to rotate the camel.

On the morning of January 17th, 1885, Stewart ordered the square to begin marching towards the modests.

At first, the modest started firing pot shots from too far away to actually hit anything, but then a cry went up.

Thousands of modists launched a frontal assault directly at the square.

But then, as they're running, getting gunned down, I should point out by the dozens, they bust to the left, looping around the square, rifles constantly being dumped into them at close quarters.

To Stewart, this is fine.

This is what everybody expected.

This is what a normal defense of a square looks like.

His soldiers opened fire and disciplined ranks, cutting them down like crazy.

But then the modest charge for the left after looping around, and they did not pull back.

They hit the left as another group of modests looped all the way around and hit from the rear.

Then The modest in the rear found, on accident, I should point out, they did not know this.

They found the one weakness that the square had.

Remember how I said that how hard it is to maintain the square, how soldiers, infantry soldiers would have to train very hard to make it work?

Well, not everybody in the square was an infantry soldier.

Stewart's column was made up of cavalrymen who had dismounted their camels, which I should point out here, they fucking hated, as well as a detachment of sailors.

Now, the sailors were there.

to man their small cannons, as well as their machine gun, which is known as a Gardner gun.

None of them would have training on the square.

So, if and when a gap formed between them and the line next to them, they wouldn't know it as a deadly fuck-up like an infantryman would.

In front of this part of the line was a group of skirmishers, or men outside the square, there to break up any incoming attack.

But most importantly, never to retreat inside the square, because that would require the square to open up, and the square can never open.

Cowards do not belong inside the square.

That's right.

But as the modest charged right at the skirmishers, they broke and ran for the left quarter of the square.

That's fine.

In the best case, the square doesn't open.

You simply join the front rank of the square.

That's how it's supposed to work.

But the captain of the naval brigade with the column, Charles Beresford, immediately ordered his soldiers with the Gardner gun to break away from the square and support the skirmishers.

Because he didn't know any better.

All this work to build the square, then you immediately, what if we fucked the square up?

What if we just fucking ruined this shit this maybe could have worked if they were using say a better machine gun but the gardener gun was a piece of shit and had never been tested in the desert as soon as these guys tried to fire it it immediately gunned up and died with sand they fired maybe 10 rounds seeing this everyone's favorite balloonist barnaby ordered the cavalrymen to leave the square and support the gardener gun team further opening the square can i just say that barnaby the balloonist sounds like a character in a children's book?

It's like an anthropomorphic walrus who wears a monocle.

And also rides around in a hot air balloon.

But for some, I mean, just, I'm just saying, like, Barnaby the balloonist is just...

We've somehow managed to make Victorian slaughter twee.

Like, I don't know.

Oh, it's about to get even more twee because there's a poem involved.

The modests fell upon these guys.

The Gardner gun team was slaughtered with the only survivor being their commander, Beresford.

Barnaby was killed via flying spear to the throat.

And we do have a fun little twee poem about it written by someone named William McGonagall, poet and grandfather of a future transphobic wizard.

Oh, it was exciting and a terrible sight to see Colonel Barnaby engaged in the fight with sword in hand, fighting with might and main until killed by a spear thrust to the jugular vein.

Bars.

Bars.

Guys, push a tea in Milos Bars.

No, shut the fuck up.

Don't stop.

That's like an anti-trick driving poem until the last line.

Just because it's so goddamn cack-handed that it wants to be like, like, yo, this starts being like the lyrics to what is it?

The fucking Jim Carroll.

I wanted to say the Jay Giles band who wrote fucking Centerfold.

That would be a mashup.

But no, the Jim Carroll band, where he's talking about all his friends, you know, like Eddie got slit in his slut, Doug Yoga Lervaine, fucking someone

just stored a Draino on the night that he was wed or whatever.

No, so classic Midwestern bash.

Yeah, it's basically a song about all my friends who got fucked up from when I was like 11 until now and most of us drugs and being getting killed in the bar or some shit.

Basically, yeah, it goes from poem they would have made us read in like homeroom class about why you shouldn't drive drunk during homecoming.

And then the last line is just by Jim Carroll for some reason.

The square was left wide open, and the modest charged in, being led by an old man on horseback, armed only with a Quran in one hand and a large white banner in the other.

Oh, hell yeah.

This is Iron Sultanate.

Yep.

Yep.

He charged all of the way into the middle of the square, running over several soldiers, scattering the terrified camels, who then stamped through the soldiers at various points.

The old man planted his banner at the center of the square, began shouting lines from the Quran until someone shot him in the face.

More and more modest poured into the center because the square was now open.

So many that they effectively fucked up in a way they could have never seen coming.

Yeah.

See, when they burst into the square, So many people tried to rush in through the gap.

They kind of created the all-human version of why Mr.

Burns can't get sick.

Yeah.

Because the soldiers on either side of the breach refused to budge, despite the fact they're getting bayoneted, they're getting clubbed, they're getting whatever.

They had been trained to never break the square no matter what, and they didn't.

This meant the modest had kettled themselves inside the square

as the British soldiers around them did not break.

So the men on the outside of the square and the rear rank simply turned around and began shooting into the center.

Fuck.

Now you might be wondering, how do you do that without gunning down the British soldier on the other side?

Well, you do.

You just shoot the shit out of your buddy.

But the majority of the bullets are going directly into the Modests.

According to a witness account, so many Modests were trapped inside of the British square formation.

They created a human crush.

All while, of course, being shot at point-blank range, which is a problem.

Now, virtually all the modest that broke into the square are killed this way, and the rest of the attacking force breaks off and retreats.

All of this, from beginning to end, lasts only 15 minutes.

No one's entirely sure how many modests die.

It's thought to be like a thousand or so.

The British lost 75 men.

A weird amount of officers died as well.

Though, the majority of the casualties were from technically the navy.

In the middle of a desert.

However, the desert columns ordeal was not finished.

They still needed to resupply water at Abu Kalaya and continue their march till they got to the meeting point with the river column.

Stuart knew they'd have to march hard to make it to Mehedimah and not get caught by the still thousands of modists who they'd only temporarily driven away.

So after getting water, they marched hard the next day.

The day after that, the modest found them again, and again Stewart did the same thing, ordered them into a square, slowly inching forwards towards Mehedimah, in what became known as the Battle of Abu Kru.

This time the square held, but the losses were even more.

122 British soldiers died, and Stewart himself caught a flying spear straight to the gut, killing him.

They eventually did make it to Mahedima and boarded two steamers.

Now you might be wondering, those must have been from the River Column, right?

No, those were Gordon's steamers.

Okay, so

he just had steamboats on, calling it Steamboat Uber.

Yeah, so what happened was things were going so bad in Khartoum, rather than boarding the steamers at the last second, He ordered them away to preserve them.

Again, he could have stopped all of this from happening, and he didn't.

So these guys climb aboard General Gordon's steamers, and, well, what happens next?

They get exploded.

That would probably make more sense.

So for starters, the Canadians all leave.

Their contracts had been for six months, and this had taken way longer than that.

The vast majority of Canadians say, fuck this shit, and they go back to Canada.

Then, the surviving men of the desert column, now on the steamships, pull up to Khartoum, heroes to save Gordon.

Small problem.

Khartoum had fallen two days before.

Gordon was dead.

All of this was for nothing.

I hate it when that happens.

By all accounts, Gordon's death in Khartoum is like he put on his white dress uniform and like walked out to meet the bodice and was promptly butchered on the stairs.

Yeah,

the whole city fell two days before.

No more fitting end for a British officer in the satanic zone than putting on your your dress whites and being butchered alive.

Now, most of the blame of this failure, what became known as the Gordon Relief Expedition, fell on the shoulders of Prime Minister Gladstone, who lost power shortly thereafter.

Some of that is true, you know, seeing somehow maybe if he authorized the expedition from the very beginning, it would have gotten there on time, hypothetically.

However, an argument could also be made that this expedition was doomed to failure from the very start because it was a logistical nightmare.

And even if it had gotten there, Khartoum is under siege by like tens of thousands of modests.

If this army got there, they would have been outnumbered like like 50 to 1.

So, you know, and another issue here that is the fault of the British government rather than the soldiers is they appointed Gordon at all.

Remember, this whole mission, this whole expedition was to save Gordon, not liberate Khartoum, not steal Sudan back, none of that.

Gordon could have just left.

If he, you know, simply got on his steamship and steamed away, none of this would have happened.

But he didn't.

But the blame that goes back to the British government is twofold.

Namely, they never ordered Gordon to leave.

And they appointed Gordon in the first place.

A man they knew was so apt to ignore orders, they had to send a different guy to make sure that he did.

Just station a guy there, Jon Stewart, let's say, who you know would follow orders, and then give him an order to leave.

Never did.

Or get Barnaby the balloon man.

Barnaby the balloon guy.

Who is dead with a spear to the throat.

He would have escaped.

He would have tied balloons to himself and floated away.

Do you think after he got stabbed, he tried to staunch the bleeding with another balloon?

No, he just like deflated like a balloon.

Gets stabbed in the throat, just starts hissing air and flying around.

Trying to invent the first organ transplant by making a balloon heart for yourself.

Now, the badas won, but the Mahdi himself was not long for this world.

He died a few months after this victory.

But Sedan remained de facto independent until 1898, until the Brits ruined all that, as they tend to do.

But the end.

Oh,

you know, what can you say?

This sounds like they probably found some way to make the like a historic, heroic object lesson out of this.

That's what came in the decades since was like Gordon was such a hero and you know went down like a gentleman.

I was like, no, he went down like a fucking idiot.

Yeah.

Just leave.

Kick rocks.

Get on your steamship.

Get the fuck out of there, bro.

I'm doing donuts on a camel outside your baby body's crib.

Whipping shitties of my camel in your mind.

Having them pull up the steamboats and you hop on and get out before things get bad is basically one step removed from like doing like 19th century silent movie villain shit where you fly away on a zeppelin.

Like flat out.

And they even brought a balloon guy.

You could have done it.

You could have gotten away.

But fellas, we do a thing on the show called Questions from the Legion.

If you would like to ask us a question, support the show on Patreon.

You can ask us in our Patreon DMs or in the Discord you'll also have access to.

Or you can attach your letter to a camel and rotate it in your mind, and we might answer on the show.

And today's question is, what is the jankiest car you've ever owned and or seen that, most importantly, still ran?

Ooh,

I have a simple answer.

There's a guy who lives in my area who drives what I can only describe as the bubble car.

Bubble car.

It's like, it's one of those like little tiny, it's not a smart car.

I don't even know what brand it is, but when he drives past, the max he can go is like maybe 30 miles an hour, but it sounds like the exhaust is blowing bubbles.

I feel like cars shouldn't make that noise.

Yeah, it's like it's like a car that Spongebob would drive.

I,

when I was still with my first unit before I left to go to the captain's career course when I was a captain, uh, we went to this great big training exercise up at, uh, Joe, I don't think you ever went there, but there's a training area in Alaska called Donnelly Training Area, and it's like they built like a Mount Village, coin village thing.

But because it's Alaska, interior Alaska, the distances are huge.

So they're like, oh, go to X village.

It takes the platoons that are training like 20 minutes to drive there because it's fucking far away.

So it's actually kind of more simulating of what it's going to be like in combat than your normal, you know, Mount Site, Mount Village, whatever.

And they had a bunch of wrecked old cars, but one of the guys I was there with, he was the platoon sergeant for the brigade human intelligence platoon.

Was like, he was a really nice guy and he was a car head gearhead dude and he managed i have no idea how with just what he could find in the sort of car graveyard and his gerber to resurrect a like 1980 mercedes c class that looked like a fucking african dictator mercedes and he was playing the role of the police chief in like the coin exercise so he and another guy would roll around he'd just be holding a gun out the window the whole time

it's so fucking badass dude i have a photo of me just basically trying to look hard but just pissed off basically i'm stuck in the goddamn Donnelly for, you know, a month.

I have to make this very clear.

It's like the opening line of a Christmas carol, you know, that old Marley was dead as a doornail.

That has to be understood for any of this, whatever, whatever.

This car was a piece of shit.

It wasn't on blocks, but it didn't work.

And this guy brought it back to life.

And if we had more time.

Every unit's got a guy.

Every unit's got a guy that can do that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And he had.

Was he from Texas?

This feels like.

Oh, he was.

I think he was from California, actually.

And if we'd had more time, he would have resurrected this 1978 Honda Civic.

And I was so excited because they're such fucking weird cars, but he wouldn't have time.

So mine is my first car.

I bought my mom's car from her as my first car.

It was surprise, surprise, Buick Skylark.

Late 80s, early 90s.

I don't remember those big fucking pontoon-ass cars.

There was so many things wrong with it.

Like it had bench seats, but for some reason, my mom's never been able to explain to me entirely why.

Most of the bench bench seats were missing bolts on the ground.

So if you hit the gas, the whole bench seat would rock.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It had an electrical issue.

So if you hit the turn signal, every light in the cab would blink too.

Cars going super psion.

It was like fucking rusted through, rusted, rusted through.

There's like full-on holes punched through it.

She had gotten it from a police auction.

Because like she got the car for like $300 or whatever.

Every time you started it up, it like coughed out this horrible cloud of pollution.

It sounded like it was actively falling apart when I drove it.

It leaked fluid everywhere it went.

And I finally got rid of it.

I drove it for like two years.

And it was like the hot box car that me and my friend smoked weed in because it was a Buick Skylark after that.

And it had ventilation with all the holes and shit.

Exactly.

Oh,

classic as well.

The, because this is a late 80s, early 90s car.

It had like the one piece of fabric as a roof as a ceiling, and the ceiling had all just kind of separated from the metal.

Please tell me it had all sorts of like fucking like speed holes of people burning cigarettes in the ceiling.

Yeah, it was full of cigarette holes, both from me, my mom, and all of the stuff.

See, that's me and Joe.

We didn't know each other if you know to doing this, but we speak the same language.

Like, it's in the blood, man, for real.

Like, I know, I know a fucked-up car.

What a fucked up.

You've smoked a lot of stuff.

I was reading a car like that.

I know what kind of fucked-up things you're going to find in a car like that.

I one time bought a used car and I opened it up.

The ashtray was packed full of cigarettes.

The dealership hadn't looked.

And I was just like, someone who knows me and my heart fucking drove this thing before it was never registered or insured and i eventually got rid of it because uh after like a year two years i was driving it in winter i was driving on the roads hit a patch of black ice spun off the road it crashed into a tree and i just walked away from it

I left that bitch there, just walked over.

I went over the sidewalk so many times in bat and black ice.

Like even with analog brakes, it's just like, what are you supposed to do?

Your car, your car just goes into moon gravity mode.

It just goes wherever it fucking wants.

It rotates like a champion.

No, man.

Jesus.

But yeah, that's how my Skylark died, abandoned somewhere off of Grashett Road in Detroit.

And then nature took its course.

Someone else grabbed it, fixed it up, put it back down the road.

The catalytic converter was still good, and a guy used it to pay his way home.

No, somebody stole that a long time before, and I just never replaced it.

Just like worsening the air quality of Detroit.

Like by exponential amount.

Like you can watch the pollution map and it's like a GPS tracker following you.

That car sucked.

It leaked so much fluid that my school that I drove to said I couldn't park it there anymore.

Yes.

So I parked it right off school grounds.

Joe Casapians already left his mark on the world.

Everywhere he's gone has become a super fun site.

Rest in peace viewing Skylark.

Joe and Taylor Swift destroying the Ozone lair together.

One Skylark at a time.

But fellas, I believe that is a podcast, but you host other podcasts.

Plug those podcasts.

What a hell of a way to dad.

Kill James Bond.

No gods, no mares.

I'm involved in some way.

They have free feeds.

They have Patreon feeds.

They're fun.

Please listen to them.

Beneath Skin.

Show about the history of everything told through the history of tattooing.

I might be restocking some of my books soon and keep an eye out for some projects that I am working on that are going to be announced very soon.

This is still the only show that I host.

Thank you for listening to it.

Consider supporting us on Patreon.

You make everything we do possible.

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And we also have a live show coming up on October 4th.

In-person tickets are sold out, but we are streaming it.

And you can get those tickets in the show notes.

It has video on demand.

So if your time zone is awful and you can't watch us in Scotland, you can save it for later for a nice rainy, cold evening on a date night.

If you don't want there to be a second date, do with it what you want.

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Until next time, rotate a camel in your mind.

It brings you inner peace.

Especially if it has a starter jacket.