The men of the Royal Berkshires wore red, and they knew it was probably the last time. At 5 AM on December 30, 1885, in the cold desert predawn near a Nile village called Ginnis, two British infantry brigades marched out of their bivouac in uniforms that had been the visual signature of the British Army for over two centuries. The Durham Light Infantry had already switched to khaki before heading south from Cairo. The Berkshires kept their scarlet. Over the next few hours of fighting against the Mahdist forces that had besieged the Ginnis-Kosha fort, the red coats took their last confirmed casualties on a battlefield. After Ginnis, the British Army would go quietly and permanently into khaki.
The Battle of Ginnis was a small action in the larger Mahdist War, which had begun in 1881 when a Sudanese religious leader named Muhammad Ahmad declared himself the Mahdi, the prophesied redeemer of Islam, and launched a revolt against Anglo-Egyptian rule in Sudan. In 1884 his forces annihilated a British-led Egyptian army under William Hicks. The British government sent General Charles Gordon to Khartoum with orders to evacuate the Egyptian garrison. Gordon refused, fortified the city, and held out through a ten-month siege. Two relief columns fought their way toward Khartoum in early 1885, winning hard battles at Kirbekan and Abu Klea. They arrived two days too late. The city had fallen. Gordon had been killed on the palace steps. The relief columns retreated and left a chain of small forts along the Nile, including the one at Ginnis-Kosha where Cameron Highlanders and Egyptian-Sudanese troops from the Ninth Sudanese Battalion dug in.
Thousands of Mahdist warriors under their provincial amirs began raiding around Ginnis through the autumn of 1885. They besieged the fort, and at one point a Mahdist artillery barrage dismounted the garrison's Gardner gun, a hand-cranked machine gun that was the fort's main heavy weapon. General Evelyn Wood, the British commander in Egypt, ordered Major General Francis Grenfell to take two infantry brigades and a cavalry brigade and break the siege. Grenfell's force included the First Berkshires, the West Kent Regiment, the Durham Light Infantry, the Yorkshire Regiment, six companies of Cameron Highlanders, 152 Sudanese soldiers, 278 Egyptians of the 1st Egyptian Battalion, a Royal Artillery mule battery, three Gardner guns, British and Egyptian Camel Corps detachments, and 57 Egyptian cavalrymen. Some wore scarlet. Most wore khaki. The Egyptians wore white or khaki, some officers in traditional blue, all with red fezzes.
Grenfell's column moved out before dawn on December 30. The steamer Lotus, gun-mounted, tracked them on the Nile. The fort's garrison, seeing the relief force arrive, sortied out and seized the town of Kosha. On the river the Lotus reported a large Mahdist formation moving out of Ginnis toward the British column. The Second Brigade pivoted to meet the threat through palm groves that fringed the Nile. Mahdist riflemen fired several ragged volleys at the First Brigade. The smoke was thick enough that Mahdist spearmen used it to slip close and surprise the Camel Corps, forcing a brief withdrawal before the Durham Light Infantry pushed forward and drove them back. It was close, confused, and short. The kind of fight that decides nothing but gets people killed.
The main Mahdist force pulled back into a rocky defile called the Atab, where the ground favored defenders. Grenfell sent Colonel Blake's cavalry brigade in. British Mounted Infantry took the defile with a bayonet charge, and a general pursuit began, though Blake halted before it could turn into a rout. The Mahdists escaped into the desert. Back in Kosha, the First Egyptian Battalion discovered that a group of Mahdist soldiers had holed up in a house with their weapons. A screw gun from the Mule Battery covered the Egyptians as they stormed the building, ending the battle. Casualties on both sides were relatively light by the standards of the war, but the Mahdist siege had been broken and the forts were safe.
Ginnis closed out what historians call the First Sudan Campaign. It was followed by a decade of quieter operations until Sirdar Herbert Kitchener led an Anglo-Egyptian army back into Sudan in 1896, culminating in the Battle of Omdurman in 1898 and the crushing of the Mahdist state. By the time Kitchener's army marched, khaki was universal. A Maxim battery from the Connaught Rangers may have worn red at the Battle of Ferkeh in 1896, but it is not confirmed. Ginnis is the last battle in which British troops certainly fought in their traditional red coats. From the Crimea to this palm grove, scarlet had been the color of British infantry for two hundred and thirty years. After the thirtieth of December, 1885, it belonged to parade grounds and portraits. The soldiers who had worn it for the last time on campaign probably knew, as they marched back to camp at Kosha, that something had ended that could not be brought back.
Located at 20.82 N, 30.49 E on the Nile in Northern Sudan, near the Third Cataract. Nearest airport: Dongola Airport (ICAO HSDN), approximately 150 km south. Active Sudanese civil war creates hazardous airspace. From cruise altitude the Nile's path through the Dongola Reach is the defining feature, with palm-fringed islands and alluvial flats visible along the river.