Fashoda Incident

September 19, 1898

A French expedition under Captain Marchand, which had walked across Africa from the Atlantic, met Kitchener's Anglo-Egyptian flotilla coming up the Nile at the mud fort of Fashoda in southern Sudan. Europe held its breath. Paris, still shaken by the Dreyfus Affair, backed down. It was the closest Britain and France came to war before entering one together in 1914.