...the Mahdi had started to raise an army in Darfur and in Kordofan following his retreat there in 1881.

The Mahdists are joined also by the Hadendoa Beja, who have been rallied to the Mahdi by an Ansār captain in east of Sudan in 1883, Osman Digna.

The Mahdi's forces have grown spectacularly, and by 1883 British sources placed their size at two hundred thousand, although that is almost certainly an overestimate.

Early in 1883, the Ansār, armed only with spears and swords, overwhelm a four thousand-man Egyptian force not far from Al Ubayyid ("El Obeid"), and seize their rifles and ammunition.

The Egyptian Governor, Raouf Pasha, has decided that the only solution to the growing rebellion is a fight, and against the advice of his British advisors, has started to raise an army of his own.

He hires a number of European officers to lead his force, placing them under the command of William "Billy" Hicks, a retired Colonel who has had experience in India and Abyssinia.

Hicks' force is composed mostly of Egyptian soldiers who had been imprisoned after fighting in the Urabi Revolt.

Released for service in Sudan, they accordingly show little inclination to fight.

They initially stay near Khartoum and meet small portions of the Mahdist forces on April 29, near the fort of Kawa, on the Nile, beating them off without too much trouble.

Similar skirmishes follow over the next few weeks.

Later in the summer, they heard that the Mahdi himself is besieging El Obeid, a small town set up by the Egyptians some years earlier and now the capital of the Kordofan.

The Egyptian officials decide to capture him, and, despite Hicks' reluctance, plan an expedition from their current location at Duem on the Nile to El Obeid, about two hundred miles away.

The Kordofan expedition, made up of about eight thousand Egyptian regulars, one thousand bashi-bazouk cavalry, one hundred tribal irregulars, and two thousand camp followers, carries supplies for fifty days on an immense baggage train consisting of five thousand camels.

The army also carries some ten mountain guns, four Krupp field guns, and six Nordenfeldt machine guns.

By the time the expedition started, El Obeid had fallen, but the operation is maintained to relieve Slatin Bey, the Governor of Darfur.

The force is, in the words of Winston Churchill, "perhaps the worst army that has ever marched to war"—unpaid, untrained, undisciplined and whose soldiers had more in common with their enemies than with their officers.

Either by mistake or by design, their guides lead them astray, and they soon find themselves surrounded.

The regulars' morale plummets and they start to desert en masse.

After marching for some time, they are set upon by the entire Mahdist army on November 3.

The Egyptian forces quickly form into a defensive square.

According to reports published in England soon after, the square holds for two days before finally collapsing.

About one-third of the Egyptian soldiers surrender and are later freed, while all the officers are killed.

Only about five hundred Egyptian troops manage to escape and make it back to Khartoum.

Neither Hicks nor any of his senior officers are among them.

Apparently only two or three Europeans survive.

After the battle, the Mahdist army makes El Obeid a center for operations.

Their success also emboldens Osman Digna, whose Hadendoa tribesmen, the so-called fuzzy-wuzzies, join the rebellion from their lands on the Red Sea coast.