The Battle of Omdurman (1898):

In 1898 Kitchener led a force of 8,200 British troops, 17,600 Sudanese and Egyptians up the Nile to capture a city in the Sudan called Omdurman, the Dervish capital across the river from Khartoum. The British force attacked the superior numbers of Sudanese Dervishes. totalling nearly 52,000.
 
Winston Churchill was there too, as a young cavalry officer, and took part in the British Army's last great cavalry charge. He likened the Dervish army to a scene from the Bayeux Tapestry, although in 1066 the Normans didn't have repeater rifles. Churchill wrote how "thrilling it was to be fired upon without any effect".

British forces had superior Lee-Enfield rifles, maxim guns and gunboats against the swords, spears and single-loading muskets of the Dervishes. The bulk of the Dervish force was made up of poorly armed civilians.

Churchill wrote the following in his book "My Early Life":

"The next day all the male population of the city were compelled to join the army in the field, and only the gunners and garrisons on the river-face remained within. In spite, however, of his [the Khalifa's] utmost vigilance, nearly 6,000 men deserted during the nights of the 31st of August and the 1st of September."

The result was inevitable - the Dervishes were completely routed. The Dervish Army, approximately 52,000 strong, suffered losses of 20,000 dead, 22,000 wounded, and some 5,000 taken prisoner--an unbelievable 90% casualty rate! By contrast, the Anglo-Egyptian Army, some 25,000 strong, suffered losses of 48 dead, and 382 wounded--an equally unbelievable 2% casualty rate. Kitchener called this "a good dusting". (The Dervish leader, the Khalifa, escaped but only to be hunted down and killed by Sir Francis Reginald on November 24th 1899.)

Winston Churchill's description of the slaughter:

"The white flags [of the Mahdi's army] were nearly over the crest. In another minute they would become visible to the batteries. Did they realize what would come to meet them? They were in a dance mass, 2,800 yards from the 32nd Field Battery and the gunboats. The ranges were known. It was a matter of machinery… About twenty shells struck them in the first minute. Some burst high in the air, others exactly in their faces. Others, again, plunged into the sand, and, exploding, dashed clouds of red dust, splinters, and bullets amid the ranks… It was a terrible sight, for as yet they had not hurt us at all, and it seemed an unfair advantage to strike thus cruelly when they could not reply."

Desecrating the Tomb of the Mahdi
On the death in 1885 of the first leader of independent Sudan, called the "Mahdi", his body was entombed in a silver-domed mosque in Omdurman. This was completely destroyed by Kitchener in 1898, when the Mahdi's body was burned and his ashes thrown into the river. In 1947 the Mahdi's son had the mosque and tomb rebuilt. Not surprisingly, it is closed to foreigners, but can be viewed from the outside.

Killing the Wounded
Sven Lindqvist, a Swedish historian, has pointed out that the decisive battle of Omdurman was fought in the name of civilisation, but nobody in Europe asked how it came about that 15,000 Sudanese were killed while the British lost only 48 men. Nor did anyone question why almost none of the 16,000 Sudanese wounded survived. In "Exterminate All the Brutes", Lindqvist turns up 19th-century newspaper accounts of British massacres of wounded Sudanese after the battle.
At the battle's conclusion, Churchill wept. He wrote to his mother on the 26th of January 1899: 'Our victory was disgraced by the inhuman slaughter of the wounded and Lord Kitchener was responsible for this.'


The Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902):

Some 28,000 Boers perished in Kitchener's concentration camps -- nearly all of them women and children.

The war's non-human costs were similarly appalling. As part of Kitchener's "scorched-earth" campaign, British troops wrought terrible destruction throughout the rural Boer areas, especially in the Orange Free State. Outside of the largest towns, hardly a building was left intact. Perhaps a tenth of the pre-war horses, cows and other farm stock remained. In much of the Boer lands, no crops had been sown for two years.

Even by the standards of the time (and certainly by those of today), British political and military leaders committed frightful war crimes and crimes against humanity against the Boers of South Africa -- crimes for which no one was ever brought to account. General Kitchener, for one, was never punished for introducing measures that even a future prime minister called "methods of barbarism." To the contrary, after concluding his South African service he was named a viscount and a field marshal, and then, at the outbreak of the First World War, was appointed Secretary of War. Upon his death in 1916, he was remembered not as a criminal, but rather idolized as a personification of British virtue and rectitude.

A report after the war concluded that 27,927 Boers (of whom 22,074 were children under 16) and 14,154 black Africans had died of starvation, disease and exposure in the concentration camps. In all, about 25% of the Boer inmates and 12% of the black Africans died (although recent research suggests that the black African deaths were underestimated and may have actually been around 20,000). However the precise number of deaths is unknown. Reports have stated that the number of Boers killed was 18,000-28,000 and no one bothered to keep records on the number of deaths of the 107,000 Black Africans who were interned in Concentration Camps.

The British system of waging war was summarized in a report made in January 1902 by Boer General J.C. Smuts, later Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa:

"Lord Kitchener has begun to carry out a policy in both (Boer) republic of unbelievable barbarism and gruesomeness which violates the most elementary principles of the international rules of war. Almost all farmsteads and villages in both republics have been burned down and destroyed. All crops have been destroyed. All livestock which had fallen into the hands of the enemy has been killed or slaughtered.

The basic principle behind Lord Kitchener's tactics had been to win, not so much through direct operations against fighting commandos, but rather indirectly by bringing the pressure of war against defenceless women and children."

"... This violation of every international law is really very characteristic of the nation which always plays the role of chosen judge over the customs and behaviour of all other nations."

Even in Britain, prominent voices began speaking out against the slaughter. Lloyd George, who later served as Prime Minister during the First World War, vehemently denounced the carnage. During a speech in Parliament on February 18, 1901, he quoted from a letter by a British officer: "We move from valley to valley, lifting cattle and sheep, burning and looting, and turning out women and children to weep in despair beside the ruin of their once beautiful homesteads."

Lloyd George commented: "It is a war not against men, but against women and children."

Another future Prime Minister, Henry Campbell-Bannerman, declared in Parliament on June 14, 1901: "When is a war not a war? When it is waged in South Africa by methods of barbarism."

In the end it took half a million men (the largest army Britain had ever sent overseas) and two and a half years for the mightiest power on earth, using everything it had, to "defeat" the Boer farmers, in a war that marked the transition from 19th to 20th Century warfare, that some called the "Last Gentleman's War", and others called the "First of the Modern Total Wars". But the Anglo-Boer War is now more often described as the "War that Never should have Happened".

It not only irreparably damaged the British Empire and destroyed the economies of two independent countries, but directly led to the establishment of Apartheid in South Africa, by a paranoid Afrikaner nation.