Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"But in 1898 the Sirdar (commander) of the Anglo-Egyptian army, Sir Herbert Kitchener, moved with 27,600 Egyptian troops and 8000 British regulars, supported by a flotilla of 12 Nile gunboats, on the Mahdist capital Omdurman, outside Khartoum, where the Mahdi's successor Khalifa Abd Allah had established his capital. . . . They were mown down by newly delivered Maxim machine guns, and the rout was completed by a charge--the last large-scale cavalry charge by a European army--of the Twenty-First Lancers, including the young Winston Churchill." [Furtado: 1001 Days]