On 2 September 1898, at Kerreri eleven kilometres north of Omdurman, Kitchener put 25,800 men — 8,200 British, 17,600 Egyptian and Sudanese — behind fifty-two quick-firing guns, Maxims and a line of gunboats, and waited for the Khalifa's army of some fifty thousand to come to him. It did. By the end of the day around 12,000 Mahdists were dead, 13,000 wounded and 5,000 taken prisoner; Kitchener had lost 47 killed and 382 wounded. Somewhere in that morning the 400 men of the 21st Lancers charged what looked like a few hundred of the enemy and turned out to be 2,500 infantry waiting in a dry watercourse — a scramble that produced four Victoria Crosses — and one of the troop commanders, twenty-five lancers under him, was Lieutenant Winston Churchill. What he did afterwards is the more interesting half. The River War, published in 1899 in two volumes and over a thousand pages, is not a victory lap. It attacked Kitchener for ordering the desecration of the Mahdi's tomb and carrying off his head as a trophy, an affair Lord Cromer had to put right by sending the head back once he learned of it, and it complained about boots made largely of cardboard and ammunition that did not arrive. Then in 1902 the book was cut to a single volume, a third of the text went, and every reference to the tomb went with it — the year Churchill entered Parliament, when observations about senior men had become inconvenient. He was twenty-three when he wrote the first version and twenty-seven when he trimmed it, and both decisions tell you something.

The figure is that subaltern: khaki field dress, Sam Browne belt, riding breeches and boots, sword at the hip, sun helmet held in one hand, on Sudanese sand. He was in the country partly to fight and mostly to write — he had a commission from the Morning Post at fifteen pounds an article, and a first book already behind him. The army was Queen Victoria's, and 1898 falls three years short of the end of her reign, so this is very nearly the last shape of the Victorian army. Forty-two years later the same man is in this collection again, older and in a different fight, as Prime Minister Winston Churchill. And for the other British officer who made his reputation as much by writing about a desert war as by fighting in one, see T.E. Lawrence.

Model: 10127 / W. Britain / 1/30 scale / matte finish / 1 piece set