Lord Kitchener commanded the victorious British troops in the Battle of Omdurman, but he wasn't involved in the Battle of Khartoum (better known as the Siege of Khartoum). He took part in an expedition that was sent to relieve the siege, but failed to arrive in time.
After the Anglo–Egyptian War of 1882, Britain maintained a military presence in Egypt, effectively making it a British protectorate. The siege was part of the Mahdist revolt in Sudan, which was led by Muhammad Ahmad bin Abd Allah, who had proclaimed himself the saviour of Islam (the Mahdi, or Chosen One). Sudan was controlled by Egypt, but the British government (under Prime Minister W. E. Gladstone) considered Sudan a domestic Egyptian matter, and they left the Khedive to subdue the revolt. General Charles Gordon disagreed; he feared that without British military intervention the Mahdi would gain control of Sudan and from there sweep through Egypt.
The British representative in Egypt, Sir Evelyn Baring, persuaded the Egyptian government that all their garrisons in Sudan should be evacuated. Gordon was then a popular figure in Great Britain and, having already held the Governor–Generalship of Sudan in 1876–79, he was appointed to accomplish this task.
On arrival in Khartoum, on 18 February 1884, Gordon set about reducing the injustices caused by the Egyptian colonial administration. His request for military support from the Ottoman Empire (of which Egypt was still officially a province) was rejected, and so was a similar request to Gladstone's government.
The Mahdi began his siege of Khartoum on 13 March 1884. Through the months of April, May, June, and July, food stores dwindled and starvation began to set in for both the garrison and the civilian population. By the end of September, the Mahdi moved the bulk of his army to Khartoum.
Gordon's plight excited great concern in the British press, and even Queen Victoria intervened on his behalf. The government ordered him to return, but Gordon refused, saying he was honour bound to defend the city. By July 1884, Gladstone reluctantly agreed to send an expedition to Khartoum. The expedition, led by Sir Garnet Wolseley, took several months to organise and entered Sudan in January 1885.
The Mahdi, hearing of the British advance, decided to press the attack on Khartoum. On 25 January, just before midnight, an estimated 50,000 Mahdists attacked the city wall. The garrison, physically weakened by starvation, offered only patchy resistance and were slaughtered to the last man within a few hours, as were 4,000 of the town's inhabitants. Many others were carried into slavery. General Gordon was killed (nobody really knows quite how); his head was cut off and put on a pike. His body was said to have been dumped in the Nile, but his remains were never found.
The Mahdi established a religious state in Sudan, which was governed by a harsh enforcement of Sharia law. He died in June 1885, possibly from typhoid. The state that the Mahdi had founded survived his death, but Anglo–Egyptian forces gradually regained control of Sudan.
In Britain, Gordon came to be seen as a martyr and a hero. The British press blamed his death on Gladstone, charging him with excessive slowness in sending relief to Khartoum. Gladstone was rebuked by Queen Victoria in a telegram which became known to the public. His government fell in June 1885, though he was back in office the next year.
In reality, Gladstone had always viewed the Egyptian–Sudanese imbroglio with distaste and had felt some sympathy for the Sudanese striving to throw off the Egyptian colonial rule. Also, Gordon's arrogant and insubordinate manner did nothing to endear him to Gladstone's government.
As already stated, Horatio Herbert Kitchener had taken part in the expedition that failed to relieve General Gordon at Khartoum. On hearing of Gordon's death Kitchener swore to avenge it, and in 1896 he was appointed to lead an expedition to reconquer Sudan.
During the siege, the Mahdi had chosen the village of Omdurman, on the opposite bank of the Nile from Khartoum, as the base of his operations, and his successor Abdallahi ibn Muhammad (known as the Khalifa) had retained it as his capital. On 2 September 1898, Kitchener's troops defeated the bulk of the Mahdist army, in the Battle of Omdurman, and two days later a memorial service for General Gordon was held in front of the ruins of the palace where he had died.
On 31 October 1898, Kitchener was created Baron Kitchener, of Khartoum and of Aspall in the County of Suffolk.
On 25 November 1899, in the Battle of Umm Diwaykarat, Anglo–Egyptian forces under Kitchener defeated what was left of the Mahdist armies, commanded by the Khalifa. This marked the final defeat of the Mahdist revolt in Sudan.
Kitchener was Chief of Staff during the Boer War (1900–2). On 28 July 1902 he was created Viscount Kitchener, of Khartoum and of the Vaal in the Colony of Transvaal and of Aspall in the County of Suffolk.
In June 1911 he returned to Egypt as British Agent and Consul–General. On 29 June 1914 he was created Earl Kitchener, of Khartoum and of Broome in the County of Kent.
He was appointed War Minister on the outbreak of World War I. In May 1916 the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Reginald Mckenna, suggested that Kitchener should head a special and confidential mission to Russia to discuss munition shortages, military strategy and financial difficulties – and the tribulations of Russian forces on the Eastern Front, to which Kitchener had devoted personal attention. On 5 June 1916, while steaming towards Archangel in a Force 9 gale, the armoured cruiser HMS Hampshire struck a mine and sank west of the Orkney Islands. Recent research has set the death toll of those aboard Hampshire at 737. Only twelve survived. Amongst the dead were all ten members of Kitchener's entourage. Kitchener himself was seen standing on the quarterdeck during the approximately twenty minutes that it took the ship to sink. His body was never recovered.
Kitchener's great fame, the circumstances of his death, and its apparently convenient timing for a number of parties, gave rise almost immediately to a number of conspiracy theories. One in particular was posited by Lord Alfred Douglas (Oscar Wilde's 'Bosie'), positing a connection between Kitchener's death, the recent Battle of Jutland, Winston Churchill, and a Jewish conspiracy. Churchill successfully sued Douglas in what proved to be the last successful case of criminal libel in British legal history, and Douglas spent six months in prison. Another claimed that the Hampshire did not strike a mine at all, but was sunk by explosives secreted in the vessel by Irish Republicans.
General Erich Ludendorff, the officer in charge of supplies to German forces during World War I and joint head (with von Hindenburg) of Germany's war effort in the 1920s, claimed that Kitchener's visit to Russia had been betrayed to the German command by Russian communists working against the Tsar. According to Ludendorff, Kitchener was killed "because of his ability"; it was feared he would help the tsarist Russian Army to recover.
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