Battle of El Obeid The Battle of El Obeid was fought between Anglo - Egyptian forces under the command of Hicks Pasha and forces of Mohammed Ahmed , the self - proclaimed Mahdi , on a plain near the town of El Obeid on November 3 – 5 , 1883 . Background . After the Mahdi retreated into Kordofan in 1881 he started to raise an army there and in Darfur . A force of 4 , 000 was sent to capture him , but it was ambushed near El Obeid and destroyed , and all of its equipment captured . The Mahdi ' s forces had grown spectacularly , and by 1883 British sources placed their size at 200 , 000 , although that is almost certainly an overestimate . The Egyptian Governor , Raouf Pasha , decided that the only solution to the growing rebellion was a fight , and against the advice of his British advisors started to raise an army of his own . He hired a number of European officers to lead his force , placing them under the command of William " Billy " Hicks , a retired Colonel who had experience in India and Abyssinia . Hicks ' force was composed mostly of Egyptian soldiers who had been imprisoned after fighting in the Urabi Revolt . They were released for service in Sudan and accordingly showed little inclination to fight . They initially stayed near Khartoum and met 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 skimishes followed over the next few weeks . Later that summer they heard that the Mahdi himself was besieging El Obeid , a small town set up by the Egyptians some years earlier and now the capital of Kordofan . The Egyptian officials decided to capture him and , despite Hicks ' reluctance , planned an expedition from their current location at Duem on the Nile to El Obeid , about 200 miles away . Battle . The Kordofan expedition was made up of about 8 , 000 Egyptian regulars , 1 , 000 bashi - bazouk cavalry , 100 tribal irregulars , and 2 , 000 camp followers . They carried supplies for 50 days on an immense baggage train consisting of 5 , 000 camels . The army also carried 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 was maintained to relieve Slatin Bey , the Governor of Darfur . The force was , in the words of Winston Churchill , " perhaps the worst army that has ever marched to war " - unpaid , untrained , undisciplined , its soldiers having more in common with their enemies than with their officers . Either by mistake or by design , their guides led them astray , and they soon found themselves surrounded . The regulars ' morale plummeted and they started to desert en masse . After marching for some time they were set upon by the entire Mahdist army on November 3 . The Egyptian forces quickly formed into a defensive square . According to reports published in England soon after , the square held for two days before finally collapsing . About one - third of the Egyptian soldiers surrendered and were later freed , while all the officers were killed . Only about 500 Egyptian troops managed to escape and make it back to Khartoum . Neither Hicks nor any of his senior officers were among them . Apparently only two or three Europeans survived . One survivor was newspaper artist Frank Powers , who at the time was working for a German - language publication . After the battle the Mahdist army made El Obeid a centre for operations for some time . Their success also emboldened Osman Digna , whose Hadendoa tribesmen , the so - called " fuzzy - wuzzies " , joined the rebellion from their lands on the Red Sea coast .