winterbadger | so this is what it feels like

I have found the book that I want to write some day.

I'm reading up in preparation for running a game that will deal with British military operations in the Sudan in the 1880s. I've been trying to put together character sketches for the players about the senior officers that they will be role-playing.

The group of officers who came together to command this expedition were all hand-picked by Sir Garnet Wolseley, the senior British general in the region. Wolseley was an amazing figure, the star of the British Army of his day. To make an American comparison, if you combined George Marshall, Dwight Eisenhower, and Douglas MacArthur into one man, you might reach the level of skill, intellect, bravery, and celebrity that Wolseley achieved in his 50 years of service.

But there have been several biographies of Wolseley; writing that would be interesting, but nothing new. What fascinates me is reading about this group of men and the different paths they took to get to the eastern Sudan in 1884. It's compelling, the way those paths moved through the history of the army and the empire, touching at certain points, then veering apart, all encountering Wolseley at different times and places where he recognized what made these men singular and valuable. They were anywhere and everywhere that the British Army made famous during the preceding 30 years, and some places that were probably just as well known then that are less famous now.

Like the Suakin campaign. It's almost a sideshow little affair, overshadowed by the subsequent ascent of the Nile commanded by Wolseley himself, the race to Khartoum to save the even more rock-star-like hero Charles Gordon, governor general for Egypt of the Sudan. But this little sideshow brought together some men who were, or would become, or could have become if they had survived, the rising stars of the British Army in one of its last great bursts of (popularly conceived) glory and heroism before the grim darkness and brutality of the Second Boer War and then the grim, bitter, ashen destruction of the Great War. Men who are *not* famous names today but who were the acme of command in their day, gathered together by the talent-spotting genius of Wolseley for this one expedition.

Someone should tell this story. Someone should explore their lives, their connections, their personalities. Graham, the towering, quiet engineer, plucked from obscure administrative makework in England. Buller, the gruff, shy, workaholic who hid his sense of humour, self-deprecating because he *knew* the level of his ability but doomed at the height of his career to be pushed beyond it. Stewart, the bright, dashing cavalryman who loved cricket, who had bluffed an Egyptian general to surrender 20,000 men to his escort of 30 horsemen, who had enough nous at espionage to find a rebel leader's hideout in the midst of a hostile population. And all the others, the surface of whom I've just begun to scratch: "Keggy" Slade, Baker Pasha, Andrew Wauchope, the eccentric Burnaby, the "fighting admiral" Hewett.

I don't know when, but someday, I *have* to write this book.