Recently the United Nations High Commission for Refugees reported a phenomenon in the Sudanese refugees camps that may warn of much worse to come in Africa than the so far unacceptable depredations of two million people during three years of anarchy in the Darfur region. The UNHCR said nearly 5,000 young men had been abducted by press gangs to be forced and beaten into small-arms training for immediate deployment to the front lines to kill and be killed.

At first, this appears a futile effort by both the rebels of the Sudanese Liberation Army and the Khartoum-backed marauders of the Janjaweed to raise fighters before the threatened arrival of a U.N. peacekeeping force next fall. However, in my reconnoitering way of looking for patterns in history, I read this report of organized brutality as the opposite of desperation or retreat. I read it as a warning to the United Nations Security Council and to the Western powers now assembled in an effort to seek out and destroy trouble in the Sudan that there may be a power rising in Darfur that is unconquered and unconquerable. I am thinking of the myth of the Mahdi and the dumbfounding ferocity of the Dervishes.

My memory connects the dot of the refugee camp abductions in the spring of 2006 to the dot of a quick, nasty battle more than a century ago, in the spring of 1896. Then, the United Nations peacekeepers and African Union mission in the Sudan were called the British Empire and its colonial Egyptian Army, marching under the command of the iron-fisted Lord Kitchener; then the rebels and Janjaweed were called the Dervishes, marching under the command of Khalifa Abdulla at Khartoum. Mr. Kitchener advanced up the Nile with orders from Whitehall to secure the vast Sudan from the appetites of rival European powers. On the other hand, the Khalifa had inherited the Dervish empire from Mohammed Abdulah, the Nile River Valley warlord whose startling victories had identified him as “the Guided One,” or the Mahdi, and who would massacre General Charles Gordon and the British garrison at Khartoum in 1884.

The Mahdi had died undefeated in 1885. British power had nursed its pride for a dozen years. Mr. Kitchener meant to avenge Mr. Gordon and humiliate the Dervishes now called the Mahdists. The Khalifa meant to crush the British invaders again in order to demonstrate the Mahdist authority from the Red Sea to Darfur.

My warning incident was at the dry river bed of Atbara, where the commander Mahmoud, a Dervish, had constructed a semi-circle fortification of thorn bush hedges and trenches for his superhumanly brave Dervishes. Mr. Kitchener arrayed his forces cautiously: the intimidated Egyptian battalions on the perimeter, the British regulars in the center for the final assault. After a brief bombardment, the bayonet tipped Camerons advanced into the trenches of the Dervishes to kill in the thousands.

And here is the awful moment where I connected the dots from the UNHCR report to Atbara. A war correspondent wrote of the Dervish bravery with a stunning, confounding detail: “The coolness and pluck with which the enemy contained themselves during the bombardment proved that the Dervish was truly brave . . . Many unfortunate blacks were found chained by both hands and legs in the trenches, with a gun in their hands and with their faces to their foes – some with forked sticks behind their backs.”

Chained. Forked sticks. Ordinarily this would appear an explanation for the victims to surrender or to die cowering. Instead, the Dervishes fought to the death, some rising in their chains from the heaped dead to shoot the British in ambush.

When I read this, and when I read of the pressing of boys to go to the front and slaughter in the thousands, a century disappears in between and I see that the foe in Sudan might not be the viciously marauding Janjaweed, or the equally cruel Sudanese Liberation Army. I see that the foe might be the undying power of the Mahdi come again. The Sudan is a mysteriously potent land of courageous bloody-mindedness in the service of a supernatural allegiance to “the Guided One.” The warlords there, inspired by Sharia law Jeremiahs such as the recently released from prison Hassan Al-Turbai (whose niece is married to Osama bin Laden), can dragoon and deploy fearless, faithful, suicidal, paradise-bound Dervishes who do not, will not, quit in the face of us, we Kitcheners, no matter the century.

Mr. Batchelor is host of the John Batchelor Show on the ABC radio network. The show airs in New York on 770 AM from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m.