GORDON’S WORK ON THE WHITE NILE
AND here, before I go further, it will, I think, make matters still
clearer in regard to the history of the next twelve months in Egypt,
including, as it must, Gordon’s heroic defence of Khartoum, if I break
off my personal narrative and devote a chapter or two to a critical
examination of that truly wonderful man’s character. I propose to do so
not in the spirit of mere hero-worship, though I hold him to have been
by far the most chivalric figure among Englishmen of our generation; and
still less of belittlement; but in the spirit of a sane historian,
reconstructing from the many records we have of his inner spiritual life
no less than of his public actions, and from some sources, too, of
private knowledge and my own recollection of him, a picture of the
living man he was.
To appreciate Gordon’s character at all accurately, and thereby to judge
his career at its true value, it is essential to recognize him as a man
of many contradictions and a singularly complex character. He himself,
in one of those intimate letters which through life he was in the habit
of writing to his sister, and which form the most complete self-
revelation made in any letters that have been published in our time,
says: “Talk of two natures in one! I have a hundred, and none think
alike and all want to rule”; and, again: “No man in the world is more
changeable than I”—an exaggeration of the truth yet no less strictly
true. Gordon had at least two distinctly antagonistic features in his
nature—the one, that of a man of action, with an imperative need of
strong practical work, the instinct of a soldier who saw the thing he
had it in his mind to do with absolute clearness of vision, and as
clearly the way to do it—the other, that of a religious mystic, occupied
not with this world but with spiritual forces in a world unseen;
perplexed perpetually, and perpetually in doubt as to the precise will
of God with him, a fatalist, a disbeliever in his own free will, and
consequently liable to sudden changes of plan; a seeker of omens and
supernatural directions; at times (as he also himself says) a “religious
fanatic,” perhaps hardly on this one point sane. Not that Gordon was in
the smallest degree a fanatic in the sense of one who hated another for
his creed. His mind was large on this as on all other matters; but he
was imbued with the belief in God’s direct dealings with man and with
his own interpretation of them, as suited to his own spiritual and
temporal case, and with the nothingness of worldly affairs or of life
and death for himself and others in view of a life to come.
Entering the army early he saw service for the first time at the siege
of Sebastopol, and remained on in Turkey when the war was over as one of
the officers on the Commission of frontier delimitation in Bessarabia
and Armenia. This gave him his first experience of the Mohammedan East.
In 1860 he joined the British forces in China, where he took part in the
capture of Pekin, and again stayed on, specially employed. Shanghai, one
of the Treaty Ports, was just then threatened by the Taiping rebellion,
and for its protection an Imperial Chinese force had been raised under
European officers, and the command of it was given to Gordon. With the
permission of his superiors he thus entered a foreign service, and found
himself, at the early age of twenty-nine, commanding an army of Asiatics
under the Chinese Emperor. His military authority was practically
absolute, and by a display of strategy of the highest order and lavish
personal courage he succeeded in breaking the Taiping rebellion, and
restoring one of the richest provinces of China and some of its most
populous cities to the Imperial Government. The Emperor, in gratitude
for so great a service, loaded him with honours, and would have enriched
him if Gordon had been willing. But with a fine contempt for wealth he
would take nothing but his stipulated pay, and, the work done, returned
to his ordinary duties in England without further remark or claim on his
own Government.
This stamps him as a man entirely above the rank of the common soldier
of fortune. That he was also a man of immense natural military genius
cannot be doubted, with a power of exerting influence over the soldiers
he commanded, and turning the rawest material into good fighting stuff,
and in this he compares favourably with any of the great European
leaders of Asiatics that can be named in history. It is by no means
certain, however, to my mind that in this first brilliant episode of
Gordon’s life, any more than in his latest at Khartoum, he was fighting
on what I should consider the right side, the side that is of those who
had the better right in justice. Indeed the Taipings, though the methods
of their insurrection were barbarous in the extreme, represented what
was more probably the juster cause of the Chinese people than that of
the Man Chu Emperors, in whose service Gordon was. Gordon, however, did
not often stop to consider points like these when he accepted foreign
employment, and only discovered his mistake when it was too late to
retire from it. This was the case with him, as he found to his cost,
when serving the Khedive Ismaïl, and so, too, he discovered and would
have avowed it if he had survived his last campaign against the Mahdi.
What is important about the Chinese episode is the strong effect it had
upon his character. The terrible sights which he there witnessed in the
lands laid waste by the Taipings, the appalling incidents of an Eastern
civil war, the cruelties inflicted on the weak, the outraged women and
the starving children, famine, pestilence, and death spread over
immensely populous areas, joined with the almost miraculous victories
achieved by the army he commanded, the huge personal risks daily run,
and his unvarying success, bred in him a conviction that he was under
immediate divine direction, and had for his special mission in life the
redressing of wrongs and the protection of the helpless. His attitude
thenceforth, though he made mistakes, was that of the Christian knight
errant, seeking service through the world wherever there were dragons of
iniquity to fight, or distressed persons to be rescued by feats of arms.
It is necessary to remember this if we are to understand rightly the
spirit of his early Egyptian service.
For a while, however, Gordon’s humanitarian impulse was to be turned
into more peaceful channels. In 1865 he returned to England and was
given a command at Gravesend with the engineering task of fortifying the
entrance to the Thames. Here he had much spare time, and devoted it to
works of mercy among the poor, especially to the rescuing of the waifs
and strays of the London streets, boys for whom he found employment, and
whom he befriended with money and advice. Gordon had, from his youth up,
been deeply religious. He belonged to no church or sect, unless it were
that of what is called Bible Christianity, a form of belief based solely
on the Old and New Testaments as interpreted, each man, by the light of
his own spiritual conscience. He owed this to his mother. It is a little
difficult, now in the twentieth century, when the higher criticism has
permeated all theology and when science has accepted evolution as its
recognized basis, to realize how at the beginning of Queen Victoria’s
reign the great body of educated Englishmen were brought up to believe
with an implicit faith in the text of the authorized English version of
the Holy Scriptures as the literal word of God containing all direction
needed for the spiritual wants of man. This was specially the case in
the middle rank of society, that of Gordon’s mother, which for the most
part had nonconformist traditions and had remained equally unaffected by
the scepticism of the eighteenth century and by the Oxford Church
movement of the nineteenth in the direction of authority. Nor was it
till some years after Gordon’s education was over, and he was well
launched on his military career, that the publication of Darwin’s
“Origin of Species” prevailed at last in dissociating scientific
training from the simpler English creeds.
Gordon therefore carried with him untouched into his active life the
Biblical foundation of his childhood. He held the text of Scripture from
the first verse of Genesis to the last of Revelations to be God’s
written word, and that it was given to every man by faith and prayer and
constant study to find in it all necessary direction both for his
temporal and his eternal needs. He spent a certain portion of every day
in studying the Book, and, being of a logical mind, in seeking counsel
in its pages for each morrow as it came. His certainty that the text was
inspired induced him by a further logic to believe that, relying on it,
he, too, was inspired. This is the real key to much that otherwise would
be inexplicable in his public career.
In his moral life Gordon stood on the highest possible plane. Apart from
a few boyish escapades at school—and he was all his life high-
spirited—there is no record of his ever having transgressed the
straitest rules of exemplary conduct. He seems never to have been in
love, or to have indulged even for a moment in any dream of earthly
happiness to be found in domestic joys. These he regarded as not
intended for him, and he was as far from the thought of marriage as
though he had renounced the possibility of it by vow. “What a blessing,”
he exclaims in one of his letters to his sister, “one was never married!
Marriage spoils human beings.” Even the sentimental regard in which many
women held him was distasteful to him. “What I dislike,” he says, “in
——’s letters is the sentimental part; it is to me quite painful; she is
so impressive. I do hope you will try and quiet her. I am torn in two
with the wish not to be unkind, and yet I wish her not to bother me.”
That was his general attitude toward women other than the old and
helpless. Dr. Barnes, who was in some measure Gordon’s spiritual adviser
in the last five years of his life, says of him: “Gordon was much less
at ease in talking to women than in talking to men. While conversing
with women he seemed to exercise even more than his usual self-control
in the expression of his thought and feeling. His sympathy, geniality,
and attractiveness became as it were veiled, and he was ‘himself again’
only when the restraint was removed. He was seen at his best in the
society of young children, his keen interest for whom had not been
dulled either by solitude or by the necessity—which had often been
imposed on him in other relations—for strictly-guarded intercourse. With
children he was quite at home.”
In all things he was abstemious. Even the poor pleasures of the table
were generally denied. He hated feasts and entertainments, and at
Greenwich allowed his uncomfortable meals to be freely interrupted by
any caller on however trifling a business. “His meals,” says his brother
of him, “were of the most frugal kind, and his arrangements were such
that no one was ever prevented seeing him in consequence of his being
engaged at any of them, for he had a table with a deep drawer in which
when drawn out, the food was deposited, and so if any one came the
drawer was shut and there were no signs that he had been engaged
otherwise than at his ordinary work.” In his evenings, instead of
enjoying rest or talk, he would go out to ragged schools or on some
other work of mercy. His money he would give away as long as he had any
available, and he would even borrow to give, this not in small driblets,
but in considerable sums of £50 and £100 and £200 at a time. On himself
he would spend nothing. Speaking to Sir Rivers Wilson about him in 1878,
the Catholic Bishop of Khartoum explained the wonderful influence he
then enjoyed among the Soudanese as due to his alms-giving and his
chastity. It astonished all men that he should care nothing for the two
things those in power mostly indulged in, the love of money and the love
of women. In all this Gordon was a saint.
Seven years of his life were passed in this way at Gravesend, and there
grew up around him a little band of religious admirers which gradually
made for him a name in the English humanitarian world. He was willing
always to talk on the things of the spirit with the spiritually-minded,
and to write to those who sought his opinion or counsel by letter,
whether it was on a public or a private matter. It was with the poor and
unimportant that he preferred to correspond rather than with those in
high places, though among these also he had friends. Thus on a
foundation of general esteem gradually acquired, the power came to him
which he was to wield in public affairs, and was steadily built up. His
worth in his own profession was acknowledged, for he had done mighty
deeds in war,—that could not be denied, though by many of his fellow
soldiers he was accounted “insubordinate,” by others mad. It seemed
enough to them to prove his insanity that he did not ask promotions or
rewards and that he was careless of his pay.
The only failing I can really find in him—for that of drink with which
he has been charged was not a serious one—was a certain tendency to
court publicity, which he himself acknowledged as a snare to his
generally humble attitude. His sister seems at one time to have pointed
this out to him, and his reply shows that he felt her reproach as true.
“Newspapers,” he says in answer to her, “feed a passion I have for
giving my opinion . . . You drew a bow at a venture with your full
strength and you have done for your brother; the arrow has gone in up to
its feathers! He that speaketh of himself seeketh his own glory! Why,
you have knocked down the work of years; what have I ever been talking
of but self? . . . I have a sort of wish that I could get rid of
_Colonel Gordon_.” He called this craving for publicity “Agag; a
catering for notice and praise; hailing the tram of the world!” a thing
which must be “hewn in pieces before the Lord”—and yet he yields over
and over again to it, while he torments himself for his weakness, a
point in his character which he shares with many saints who have been
canonized by popular acclaim, and which must not be missed, for it, too,
explains much.
Such was Gordon at the time of his first entrance on the Egyptian scene
in 1874, and it is with the Egyptian period only of his life that we
need concern ourselves in any detail. His connection with the Khedivial
service came about in this way. In 1871 he was sent on special service
once more to Turkey, and finding himself at Constantinople in connection
with the Danube commission, to which he had been appointed, it chanced
that he met Nubar Pasha at the English Embassy and had a talk with him,
which determined his after life. The Egyptian Government was in search
of an engineer officer who would undertake, in succession to Sir Samuel
Baker, the administration of the Equatorial Province of the Upper Nile,
and Nubar consulted him as to the securing of such an officer; and this
led a year later to Gordon’s agreeing to go there himself as the Khedive
Ismaïl’s servant. What tempted him to the work was, I think, a certain
natural restlessness and a desire for useful professional employment.
English military life at home, with its constant round of unreal duties
and of social inanities, was thoroughly distasteful to him, and the
freedom of an independent command abroad in however wild a region was
always preferred by him to ordinary employment at home. Also he had
become interested in the suppression of the slave trade on the Nile and
Congo, which was being much discussed at the time, and this was probably
what decided him. Be this as it may, he visited Cairo on his way back
from the Danube in 1873 and, having received permission from the War
Office in London, was named Governor of the Equatorial Province at the
beginning of the following year, his instructions on leaving Cairo for
the seat of his new government at Gondokoro being to open a trade route
by river to the Equatorial Lakes, to establish the Khedive’s authority
on these to the Nile sources, and also to put a stop to the slave
raiding in the upper provinces, which had become a scandal in Europe,
and was injuring the Khedive’s credit. Gordon’s idea at starting on his
mission was that the first half of his instructions would, when
accomplished, bring about the second half. “Open out the country,” he
says in one of his letters of the time, “and it [the slave trade] will
fall of itself.” It was the general idea held by English humanitarians
of the day, but one which Gordon found reason to distrust later.
There are two ways of looking at this question. The slave raiding which
prevailed along the whole border line between Equatorial Africa and the
waterless northern deserts which extend from the White Nile to the
Atlantic had for many centuries been a terrible scourge upon the
indigenous black race. It was carried on by the Bedouin tribes, more or
less Arab in their origin and Mohammedan in their religion, who had
invaded and conquered North Africa in the early centuries of Islam.
These considered the Pagan negroes their lawful booty wherever they
could capture them, and made a trade of bringing them with other
equatorial produce to the sea coasts of Morocco and the rest of the
Mohammedan States bordering the Mediterranean and Red Seas. It was a
yearly tithe of many thousands taken from the unwarlike agricultural
villagers, and may justly be likened to the depredation inflicted on the
antelope herds of the same borderland by lions living on the desert
outskirts. At first sight, and from a humanitarian point of view, it
would seem that the destruction of these human lions was the beneficent
duty of any one who would undertake it, and the extirpation of the slave
raiders by force of arms the surest way of bringing prosperity to the
negro inhabitants. And such was the view taken by most of our European
explorers of the nineteenth century, Schweinfurth, Baker, Stanley, and
the rest, who were in correspondence with the anti-slavery association
in London and were constantly urging the duty of the penetration and
civilizing of Central Africa by the states of Europe. Africa once
Europeanized, they argued, slave-raiding must necessarily be made to
cease and the negroes be freed from an immemorial misfortune. The
reasoning harmonized well with the commercial ideas of the day, which
saw in Central Africa new fields for its enterprise; and the civilized
occupation of the two lines of waterway by which the Soudan could most
easily be reached, the Nile and the Congo, was pushed on by the
societies as a duty of humanity. I remember attending a meeting of the
Royal Geographical Society under Sir Roderick Murchison, to which I had
just been elected in 1862, in which our then Consul Petherick at
Khartoum was praised for his exploration of the White Nile, as yet an
unknown region, on this very ground, that benefit must necessarily
accrue to the negroes from the opening up of their country through
Englishmen acting in conjunction with the Viceroy of Egypt. Yet this
very exploration of Petherick’s turned out to be the beginning of far
worse evils to the negroes of the White Nile than any they had during
all the centuries of their unexplored history experienced, even to the
total destruction of some of their communities.
The truth is—and this Gordon came to understand at Khartoum, as we to-
day are coming to understand it on the Congo—though European
civilization is able to deal with certain evils incidental to
uncivilized life, it brings with it other evils ten times more
destructive than those it cures. It destroys the lions, but the
antelopes are not found thereby to increase. On the contrary they become
a prey, all of them, to the newcomer, their far more scientific and
unsparing friend. And so it is also with the negroes who are ten times
worse ruined by European conquest. Of the reality of this truth Gordon
gained at least occasional glimpses during the years he served the
Khedive Ismaïl in the Soudan. For myself I have never been in any doubt,
since I have had an opinion at all on the matter, that the only true
humanity towards the negroes of Equatorial Africa would have been to
leave them unvisited, uncivilized, and severely alone with their own
local troubles. The alternative policy to that of force applied to the
slave raiders was that of the encouragement of Mohammedan reform in the
Mediterranean Moslem states, and with it to secure the abolition of
slavery as a legal institution and so the demand of slaves from the
interior. This policy, however, was never one at all popular with the
anti-slave-trade associations. Our professional humanitarians were no
more anxious to abolish slavery altogether than masters of foxhounds are
anxious to abolish foxes; and Mohammedan reformers were generally
discouraged by the societies and reminded that slavery was recognized by
the Koran, and so could not be legally condemned by any reformers
professing themselves Moslems. This was certainly the case in 1882 when
Sheykh Mohammed Abdu and Arabi included the complete abolition of
slavery in their programme of national reform. Sir William Muir and
Allen, the anti-slavery secretary, at once took up the cudgels against
them in the “Times,” and their anger knew no bounds. It was an unheard-
of thing, they said, that a Mohammedan reformer should dare to strike at
the roots of a time-honoured Oriental institution to which their English
society owed its _raison d’être_.
Yet the Egyptian reformers of that day were perfectly sincere in their
intention. They were poor men, representing a community too humble to be
slave owning itself, arrayed against a wealthy ruling class possessed of
slaves. Their interests did not warp their judgement, and their
judgement on this, as on other things, was humanitarian. The Khedive and
the Turkish Pashas, however, were infinitely preferred by Allen and the
agents of the society in Egypt, whose salaries would have ceased had
slavery and slave dealing really disappeared from the Nile. As to our
diplomatic representatives, at Cairo as elsewhere, they hated the worry
of the whole slavery question and resented anything that raised its
abolition in practical form. It meant for them the tiresome duty of
presenting remonstrances to Mohammedan princes who all possessed slaves
and who wished to keep them and not to be deprived of the means of
getting new ones when required. I remember well the disgust with which
dispatches from the Slave Trade department of the Foreign Office were
regarded in our Chancelleries. All the same, the method of dealing with
them as I have just indicated would have been the true line for our
humanitarians to take if the interests of the raided black villagers of
the Upper Nile had been alone in question. A pronouncement against
slavery at Cairo by a Nationalist Sheykh el Islam, would have been worth
more to them than a whole army of civilized protectors sent to guard
their desert frontier against _jellabat_.
It will be interesting to give some extracts from Gordon’s letters to
his sister and others bearing on these points, letters written while in
Ismaïl’s service, for they are infinitely instructive, and as human
documents unsurpassed in the political history of our time. They were
begun immediately on his arrival at Cairo at the beginning of 1874, and
continued without interruption during the whole period of his Soudan
service. It must be remembered that the official world of Cairo of that
day represented a society as pecuniarily corrupt and as destitute of all
public virtue as could well be found upon the face of the globe. The
Khedive Ismaïl, who had all the vices of the East overlaid with a veneer
of Western civilization, plausible, unscrupulous, and profoundly
immoral, had gathered round him a gang of European speculators whose one
object was to extract money from his coffers by contracts, loans, and
services rendered at extravagant rates in every branch of the
administration. Among the highest paid were those that took service in
the Soudan and ministered to Ismaïl’s ambition of conquering the Upper
Nile to its sources, and on the pretence of putting down the slave trade
adding province after province to his African empire. Gordon’s
predecessor as Governor of the Equatorial Provinces, Sir Samuel Baker,
had been paid at the extravagant rate of £10,000 a year, exclusive of
all his expenses, and had left Egypt at the close of his four years’
engagement with a solid sum of £40,000 untouched at his banker’s. The
arrival therefore of Gordon with his unself-seeking ways was a wholly
disturbing element for the official mind, and made him enemies from the
beginning not only among his fellow Europeans who considered that he was
underselling them in the administrative market, but by the Turco-
Circassian and Armenian Pashas who were amassing large fortunes in the
general reign of extravagance. The allusion made in one of the first
extracts given is to an interview between Gordon and Sherif Pasha, then
Prime Minister, in which there had been a characteristic
misunderstanding between the two, Gordon refusing the £10,000 salary of
his predecessor, and protesting that £2,000 would be ample, Sherif
imagining that his refusal was only the coyness of a rogue who wanted a
still huger sum. It was difficult, too, for any one at Cairo to
understand that Gordon had the suppression of the slave trade really at
heart or that his acceptance of the mission to the Equatorial Nile would
be followed by any practical result in a humanitarian direction. Ismaïl,
as little as the rest, was sincere in this, but affected a zeal in
suppressing the slave trade, which at first took in the not very
discerning mind of Gordon, who with all his power of managing Orientals
_en masse_ was far from being a good judge of individual character,[15]
thinking to gain thereby a prop in humanitarian England to his failing
commercial credit. The process of Gordon’s undeception both as to Ismaïl
and as to the reality of the good he was doing or could possibly do in
the Soudan is to me the most interesting feature of the letters, and I
will give such extracts from them as seem to bear most directly on this
feature of his character, with others exemplifying the strange religious
mysticism which was to play so important a part in the drama of his
later exploits at Khartoum. Incidentally, too, the extracts will explain
much of the official ill-will manifested towards Gordon in 1884 not only
by Nubar and the Court clique of ministerial Pashas, but by our own
English diplomatists at the British Consulate-General, including Lord
Cromer. These are my quotations:
“I believe if the Soudan was settled the Khedive would prevent the slave
trade; but he does not see his way to do so till he can move about the
country. . . . My object is to show the Khedive and his people that gold
and silver idols are not worshipped by all the world. They are very
powerful gods, but not so powerful as our God; so if I refuse a large
sum you will not be angry at my doing so. From whom does all the money
come? From poor miserable creatures who are ground down to produce it.
Of course these ideas are outrageous. ‘Pillage the Egyptians’ is still
the cry. . . .
“I remember that God has at all times worked by weak and small means.
All history shows this to be His mode, and so I believe if He will He
may work by me. . . . I paid a visit to Sherif Pasha, the Minister of
Justice, and let him understand that your brother was not an hireling. I
did this rather sharply. . . . I think I can see the true motive now of
the expedition, and believe it to be a sham, to catch the attention of
the English people. As Baker said: I think the Khedive is quite innocent
(or nearly so) of it, but Nubar is the chief man. Now what has happened?
There has been a mutual disappointment. Nubar thought he had a rash
fellow to deal with, who could be persuaded to cut a dash, etc., etc.,
and he found he had one of the Gordon race. This latter thought the
thing real, and found it a sham and felt like a Gordon who has been
humbugged. . . . Though I do not credit myself with anything, it cannot
be denied but that your brother’s conduct [in wishing to cut down
expenses] is a silent reproach to the usual mode of doing things in this
country and is the more cutting from its silence. It is Greek and Hebrew
to them to reason that all the coin one takes is wrung out of poor
people. . . . Nubar and your brother do not hit it off, and the other
evening So-and-so said foolishly, ‘Do not make an enemy of Nubar. He
will or may do you mischief.’ It was too much, and your brother replied,
in the midst of a circle of guests, that there was no one living who
could do him the slightest injury which he could feel, and that he would
not shape his face to suit any one beyond acting loyally. . . . I think
they think me very queer, and I am, I dare say. . . . You have no idea
of the intrigues here; it is a regular hot bed, and things cannot last
long like this. They are paying 36 per cent. for money. . . . I think
the Khedive likes me, but no one else does; and I do not like them—I
mean the swells whose corns I tread on in all manner of ways. I saw so
and so at Suez. He agrees with me in our opinion of the rottenness of
Egypt: it is all for the flesh, and in no place is human nature to be
studied with such advantage. Duke of This wants steamer—say £600. Duke
of That wants house, etc. All the time the poor people are ground down
to get money for all this. Who art thou to be afraid of a man? If He
wills, I will shake all this in some way not clear to me now. Do not
think I am an egoist. I am like Moses who despised the riches of Egypt.
We have a king mightier than these, and more enduring riches and power
in Him than we can have in this world. I will not bow to Haman.”[16]
Arrived at the seat of his labours and engaged in the work set him by
the Khedive of opening up the White Nile to the Equatorial Lakes, we
find him speedily disgusted with the methods in use for the spreading of
civilization in those remote regions, the petty warfare waged by the
troops he was given to command against the primitive negro tribes which
were living happily without him, and whose only wish was to be left
alone. Baker had been brutal with these poor blacks; Gordon’s heart went
out towards them. He speedily saw the fallacy of the pretence that he
was sent there to do them good.
“They (the native blacks) have had no communication with the world. They
would seem to get on well without any regular laws and to live out their
span in comparative quiet. . . . No country presents such a field for a
philosopher as this country does with its dense population quite
innocent of the least civilization. I should say that they are
singularly free from vice; their wars are generally very harmless
affairs and seldom cause bloodshed. . . . Is it not remarkable that you
never find anything like ambition in a native sheikh? They will readily
agree to plunder their neighbour, but would never think of annexing his
tribe to theirs. . . . They are in tribes of 100 or 300 families, and I
expect have been so for ages. . . . The natives suffered in their attack
to-day and I do not think they will trouble us again. . . . If they are
to be put down it is better I should do it than an exterminating pasha
who would have no mercy. . . . I wish the whole of this business was
over. I do not want to hurt these people, but we must defend ourselves.”
And later, a detachment of his soldiers having been surprised by the
blacks and destroyed: “We derided the poor blacks who fought for their
independence, and now God gave them the victory. I declare, in spite of
the expressions you may note in my letters, I truly sympathize with
them. They say, ‘We do not want your cloth and beads; you go your way
and we will go ours; we do not want to see your chief. . . . This land
is ours, and you shall not have it, neither its bread nor its flocks.’
Poor fellows! You will say I am most inconsistent, and so I am, and so
are you. We are dead against our words when it comes to action. . . . I
have a number of Niam-Niam soldiers. . . . The Niam-Niam warriors are
fearful objects; they do look very fierce. They are thick set, sturdy
fellows, and they look brave and fearless. I declare it is rather a
trial to me to set them on the satin-skinned Baris, but these latter
will not leave me alone. . . . Did I not mention the incantations made
against us by the magicians on the other side, and how somehow, from the
earnestness that they made them with, I had some thought of misgiving on
account of them? It were odd their repulse was so soon to follow. These
prayers were earnest prayers for celestial aid in which the prayer knew
he would need help from some unknown power to avert a danger. That the
native knows not the true God is true, but God knows him and moved him
to pray and answered his prayer. ‘The horse is prepared for the day of
battle, but the victory is of the Lord.’ . . . The tax-gatherers are out
and there is immense excitement among the natives on the other side. Six
or seven hundred are collected on the hill tops. . . . We cannot see
what the tax-gatherers are doing. . . . The taxes are in sight . . . 200
cows and 1,500 sheep. . . . The daughter of the Sheykh was taken: I have
now sent to him to say if he will submit I will leave him alone and that
he is to come for his daughter. I hope sincerely to make friends with
him and end this miserable work, for it is just that.
“I wish they would submit now and save any more of these wars or rather
miserable cattle raids; but it is no use wishing—you must take their
cows, otherwise they will never give in. . . . To-day on a bare rock a
mile off stood a man with two attendants. He held his hands clasped
together at the back of his head, and turned to all quarters, putting
them down sometimes straight to his sides. I watched him with my glass.
‘Come, curse me this people: for they are too mighty for me.’ I can
quite enter into these poor people’s misery at their impotency. ‘We do
not want beads. We do not want the Pasha. . . . We want our own lands
and you to go away.’ Their poor minds never conceived such a trial as
this before. Rain was their only care, now _civilization_ (?) is to
begin with them. They are to be brought into the family of nations. . .
. There are a great number of natives on Balak’s hill to-day. . . .
Balaam is there with his hands in the same position; the kings and
princes of Midian are sitting like apes behind him. . . . How I hate
this country and all the work. . . . I am thoroughly disgusted. These
(the Khedive’s) people are unfit to acquire the country . . . incapable
of civilizing the natives. . . . They are conies, a feeble race. . . . I
cannot help it, but I have taken such a dislike to these blacks that I
cannot bear their sight. I do not mean the natives, but these soldiers.
They are nothing but a set of pillagers, and are about as likely to
civilize these parts as to civilize the moon. Though it tells against my
operations, I am glad in my heart that they are afraid of the natives.
God permits me to open the road to the interior, but, humanly speaking,
I see nothing to encourage the hope that this occupation of their lands
will be of any advantage towards civilizing them. In excuse for taking
this employ I can only say that I think I have accomplished a work with
the nearly minimum amount of suffering to natives and soldiery which
would have been done by an Arab Pasha with a great amount of suffering
to soldiery and natives. . . . Some philanthropic people write to me
about ‘noble work,’ ‘poor blacks,’ etc. I have I think stopped their
writings by acknowledging ourselves to be a pillaging horde of
brigands.”
Such, as seen in these intimate letters, was Gordon’s own opinion of his
work down to the end of his two years as Governor of the Equator. He
reconciled it to his conscience only by the reflection that, if another
had been entrusted with it than himself, the injury inflicted on the
negro tribes would have been greater than it was.
At this time, October 1876, he was so little in love with his exhausting
and thankless work, and in so great despair of doing real good in the
Soudan, that he resolved to throw it up. “I want to see my way clear
first,” he writes. “Comfort of the body, a very strong gentleman says,
‘What is the use of opening more country to such a Government? There is
more now under their power than they can ever manage. Retire now.’ But
Mr. (I do not know what) says, ‘Shut your eyes to what may happen in
future; leave that to God, and do what you think will open the country
thoroughly to both lakes. Do this not for His Highness or for his
Government, but do it blindly and in faith.’” And a few days later, “To-
day Reason says strongly, ‘Do not stay and aid such a Government.’ But I
do not like to be beaten, which I am if I retire; and by retiring I do
not remedy anything. By staying I keep my province safe from injustice
and cruelty in some degree. . . . When a house gives ominous cracks
prior to a fall one’s desire is—the rule in ships—to leave it. . . . But
I do not like the idea, even if the cracks are serious. Why should I
fear? Is man more strong than God? Things have come to such a pass in
these Mussulman countries that a crisis must come about soon.”
He had come, too, to persuade himself that he was an instrument in God’s
hands for purposes, obscure at present, but ultimately to be made
manifest, which would more than counterbalance the immediate evil. The
idea recurs perpetually in his letters, joined with that of a fatalism
as absolute as that of any Moslem. Indeed, it is evident that the long
years spent with none but Moslems on the Upper Nile, where he was cut
off from all communication with men of his own Christian creed,
heightened, if it did not initiate, the predestinarian tone of his
religious thought. It is a point in his character of the highest
importance if we are to understand his action when later he was called
upon to rescue the Soudan garrisons. It seems to have grown upon him
that he was one pre-ordained to do God’s work as was Joshua when leading
the armies of Israel as conquerors into the promised land. The
uncompromising logic of his mind made him accept this inference from
results, and he refused to acknowledge that the same faith which had
inspired Joshua and Moses to deeds that were miraculous should be
lacking to his own as absolute faith. All were but instruments in the
hands of the same God—all were under equal direction. It will be worth
while to collect the passages in his letters which most clearly
illustrate this belief, a belief founded on Bible teaching, and
intensified in the Soudan by the solitude in which he lived. What the
Koran was to his Moslem companions, that the Bible was to him, with the
Islamic doctrine of submission to God’s providence for good and for
evil, the fatalism which believes in all things as pre-ordained. Each
year spent in the Soudan added to the illusion of his divine
instrumentality, especially in the suppression of the slave trade, which
signalized the second period of his work when he had become Governor-
General, a position to which he was promoted in 1877.
“Has it ever struck you,” he writes from Kordofan to his sister, “that
if man’s birth and death are predetermined by God to happen at certain
epochs, so every intervening event must be also predetermined? Few are
atheistical enough to say either man’s birth or death are things of
chance; and how can they therefore dispute that the intervening events
are not preordained. In governing these countries I wish I could realize
this truth more than I do. . . . The more I live in this country and the
more God prospers me, the more I despise myself and feel despicable;
some of the _coups_ I have made, and which have been successful, have
been such flukes, or chances, as the world calls them, as to astonish me
quite as much as they have astonished others, and I cannot feed myself
with the thought of ‘How clever I am,’ for impressed on my mind is the
fact, ‘You know you had no idea of what would happen on your so acting.’
. . . I have really no troops with me, but I have the Shekinah (the
Lord) and I do like trusting to Him and not to man. . . . Had I not got
this Almighty Power to back me, with His infinite wisdom, I do not know
how I could even think of what is to be done. . . . I do not believe in
man’s free will; therefore, if my actions are right they are His
actions; if evil, they are the inevitable produce of the corrupt body in
which I am placed by Him. . . . Those who hold by man’s free will must
consequently be more or less elated if they do well. Now, if you
accepted what I think the truth, namely, that man has no free will, you
would never be elated, for you would not arrogate to yourself your
actions; neither would you be depressed by your evil acts. . . . I own I
feared to trust God in this slave dealer’s business; I was tossed up and
down. Perhaps physical fatigue may have been the cause. I hold to ‘Trust
in the Lord and lean not on thine own understanding.’ And He has brought
me through. . . . You and I are flies on the wheel; try and realize
this, that you do not move the wheel. . . . All this points to the
absolute rule God has over events, good or evil. As I said before ‘Be a
fool’ in the world’s language.”
And again: “I wonder if I look ambitious in your eyes. Do you think I
sought this place? You should know more than most people, for you have
all my thoughts in my letters. Judging myself, I fear it was so when I
took the work in hand; not that I cared for the money or the honours to
come from it. I think, however, my main idea was a quixotic one—to help
the Khedive, mixed with the feeling that I could with God’s direction
accomplish this work. . . . If God puts ten pounds on a man He will give
him strength to bear twenty pounds. And if He puts twenty tons on a man
He will (if He wills) give him power to carry sixty tons. This He has
done for me; and I in saying this do not seek the praise of any man or
society, or king or power. I would have your prayers—they will be
heard—but no praise, for He is the GOVERNOR-GENERAL, and I am only His
useless agent, by whom He deigns to work His will. . . . I feel I am
only a straw, yet God gave the men in Darfour courage under me. I cannot
look back or forward to ever having done or to ever doing anything
worthy of commendation. . . . I do not and cannot chew the cud of self-
complacency. . . . I no more believe in the foresight of Napoleon or the
Duke. People made out their talent as foresight after the thing was
done. God gives the thought, man carries it out, for the thought is
given so strongly as to force him to act thus.”
“I am now, thank God, so far from the least thought of man’s free will
that it never enters into my calculation in these thoughts, however it
may guide me as Governor-General or as fellow-man. . . . I feel so
strongly that death is not an evil to man that, if I thought the
shooting of any number of slave dealers would be of avail in stopping
the slave trade, I would shoot them without the least compunction,
though if a slave dealer was ill and it was in my power to cure him I
would do my best to do so. . . . I believe entirely in the Old and New
Testaments as being inspired by God. . . . I base my belief on the
Scripture entirely; it is there distinctly laid down that God rules all
things. . . . To accept the doctrine of man having no free will we must
acknowledge his utter insignificance. For my part I can give myself no
credit for anything I ever did; and further I credit no man with
talents, etc., etc., in anything he may have done. Napoleon,
Luther—indeed, all men—I consider were directly worked on and directed
to work out God’s great scheme. Everything that happens to-day, good or
evil, is settled and fixed. . . . No comfort is equal to that which he
has who has God for his stay, but believes, not in words but in fact,
that all things are ordained to happen and must happen.”
Again, when worn out with work and loneliness: “Long before you get this
I shall be out of my troubles; so do not pity me, for I have the
Almighty to guide me and death is no terror. I only wish you to know how
worn I am through having to lean on GOD ALONE. It seems odd but it is
diametrically opposed to our flesh to do so, and it is very trying. My
flesh says, ‘I should like 1,000 good, trustworthy soldiers, and not His
promise.’ It is utterly wrong, but a widow would prefer £15,000 in the 3
per cent. consols to the promise that God will provide for her. After my
spirit I prefer the promise; after my flesh I prefer the 1,000 soldiers;
not having them my spirit lords it over my flesh and conquers; but the
flesh suffers all the same, and I see the deep lines in my face getting
deeper and deeper day by day. _Why did you go?_ Well, He sent me, for I
went on a toss up. He is the GOVERNOR-GENERAL, I am only His agent.”
All these are passages from Gordon’s letters written to his sister
during his service under the Khedive Ismaïl between 1874 and 1879. They
explain the man. With regard to its results from a humanitarian point of
view he was, as I have said, conscious of failure, even when his friends
in England were loudest in their praise of his success. He knew it had
no permanence.
The work indeed that he had undertaken was one which could not be
achieved under the circumstances which then ruled the Soudan. At
Khartoum and throughout the whole country slavery was the recognized
basis of social and industrial life. The slave was as much property as
the ox or the sheep, and though his lot was less hard than it had been
in Christian lands a few decades before—for the slave was not put to
field labour, as in the West Indies, and was admitted to a certain
filial position in the household of his master—the thought of his having
any natural right to freedom had not yet penetrated the humanest local
brain. The Egyptian officials at Khartoum were, as a rule, the very
worst section of their class, men exiled for their misdemeanours from
the lower Nile, while the army was, to a large extent, recruited from
convicted criminals. The native Soudanese of Arab origin were wholly
disaffected to the Government, and many of them, driven from their homes
by its exactions, had formed themselves into bands of robber slave
hunters, and were in revolt against it. No real help was to be had from
Cairo. Gordon had some nine or ten Europeans with him in all, scattered
through the country, and the Christian population of Khartoum, mostly
Greeks, were hardly less interested in the slave trade than their Moslem
neighbours, many of them being themselves slave owners. There were a few
Catholic missionaries, and a bishop, but they exercised little
influence, and Gordon, as an Englishman determined to stop the trade,
was practically alone. The Soudan was an immense territory with no
natural frontiers, few means of communication, and a population of
several warlike millions, unamalgamated except by the tie of a somewhat
fanatical anti-Christian creed. He thus describes the western regions,
where the raids were chiefly organized: “These countries are very
curious; they seem to be peopled with huge tribes of Bedouin Arabs, with
a small nucleus of more settled people who congregate in the larger
villages. . . . Some of them can put from 2,000 to 6,000 horse or camel
men into the field. . . . Now these tribes raid on the negro tribes to
the south, or else exchange cloth for slaves with the Bedouin tribes
beyond even the pretended boundary of Egypt. . . . The tribes sell the
slaves to the little merchants, _jellabat_, of all kinds, who flock into
these lands. The merchants, who come from all parts of Egypt, then come
down to the more populous places . . . and sell them to others. Even
with the British Government in possession, I do not know how this slave
trade could be stopped.”
Nevertheless, as a soldier, and he was a dogged one, Gordon fought on,
though conscious of its being morally a losing battle. As a soldier he
was successful and accomplished the work given him of subduing the
revolted slave dealers; though the slave trade itself he could not stop,
much less slavery in the Soudan. The caravans were too intangible on the
open western frontier, and he had no means of setting the recaptured
slaves at liberty. In order at all to deal with the case he was obliged
himself to purchase slaves, for which he accuses himself thus to
imaginary humanitarians sitting in their easy chairs at home: “The
slaves I buy are already torn from their homes, and whether I buy them
or not they will remain slaves. . . . It is not as if I encouraged raids
for the purpose of getting slaves as soldiers. But people will say, ‘By
buying slaves you increase the demand and indirectly encourage raids.’ I
say, ‘Yes, I should do so, if after buying them I still allowed the
raids to continue.’ . . . This slave question is most troublesome and
difficult to manage. A number of slaves taken in the last raid made near
here (in Darfour) refuse to go back, for they find they are better fed
with their new masters than they were with the old. . . . Darfour is a
regular cockpit. One thing troubles me. What am I to do with the two or
three thousand slaves that are now at Shaka, if we take it? I cannot
take them back into their own country; I cannot feed them. Solve this
problem for me. I must let them be taken by my auxiliaries, or by my
soldiers, or by the merchants. There is no help for it. If I let them
loose they will be picked up in every direction, for an escaped slave is
like an escaped sheep, the property of him who finds him or her. . . .
If I let the slaves be taken by my soldiers, by the tribes, or by the
merchants, instead of there being a cessation of the slave caravans
there will be a great increase of them for two or three months and a
corresponding outcry against me. But at any rate the slaves will go by
frequented routes and will not die on the road. . . . Shall I be
cowardly for fear of what ill-informed Europe may say?”
This was written in the early days of his Darfour campaign. As it
proceeded, the horrors of the midsummer warfare in a waterless
wilderness oppressed him as a nightmare, the necessity of reducing all,
tribes, slave raiders, and slaves alike, by thirst and hunger, seizing
the wells and the hidden supplies of corn. “The men find the corn by
probing the ground, and by the ‘question’ applied to captives, which I
cannot prevent. The detachment of the Leopard tribe are without water,
and have been so for a day. I am sorry for it. Consider it as we may,
war is a brutal, cruel affair. . . . You see the people coming over the
sand, like flies on a wall. The poor fugitives cannot stand the thirst,
and are coming down one by one to water. You have not the very least
idea of the fearful effect of want of water in this scorched-up country.
. . . Hunger is nothing to thirst; the one can be eased by eating grass,
the other is swift and insupportable.”
And all—though he succeeded with the help of his Italian Lieutenant,
Gessi, in breaking up the chief slave trading band under Suliman
Zebehr—for almost nothing. He finds he cannot solve the problem. “There
are some 6,000 more slave dealers in the interior who will obey me now
they have heard that Zebehr’s son and the other chiefs have given in.
You can imagine what a difficulty there is in dealing with all these
armed men. I have separated them here and there, and in course of time
will rid myself of the mass. Would you shoot them all? Have they no
rights? Are they not to be considered? Had the planters no rights? Did
not our Government once allow slave-trading? Do you know that cargoes of
slaves came into Bristol Harbour in the time of our fathers? . . . I
must notice to you one thing which is very different among the society
here and that of the planters in the Colonies. One never hears of owners
of slaves keeping gangs of them for field labour, or for cultivation.
They are kept for slave servants, or by the slave dealers as slave
troops. . . . Certain Greeks are now at Katarif on whom I have my eye,
who have gangs of slaves cultivating cotton. I mean to make a swoop on
them. In fact the condition of the negro is incomparably better in these
lands than ever it was in the West Indies, and I therefore claim for my
people a greater kindness of heart than was possessed by the planters,
with all their Christian profession and civilization. You speak of
Mohammedanism being imperilled [he means in peril of damnation]. Not so.
I find the Mussulman quite as good a Christian as many a Christian, and
do not believe he is in any peril. All of us are more or less pagans. I
like the Mussulman; he is not ashamed of his God; his life is a fairly
pure one. Certainly he gives himself a good margin in the wife line, but
at any rate he never poaches on others. Can our Christian people say the
same?”
It is of importance to consider these sayings of Gordon’s in connection
with his subsequent action, which so surprised and shocked his English
friends six years later.
“This morning I came on a caravan of slaves which is accompanying
me—some sixty or eighty men, women and children chained. What am I to do
with them? Their homes are too far off to send them to; so I decided to
make the slave merchant take off their chains as scandalous, and then to
leave them with him. He, looking on them as valuable cows, will look
well after them. Don Quixote would have liberated them, and made an
attempt to send them back some forty days march through hostile tribes
to their homes—which they would have never reached. The only remedy is
to stop slave raids on the frontier. . . . You must stop it at its
source. Once the slaves have left the source it is useless to try. . . .
In all previous emancipations, either there has been a strong government
to enforce obedience, or a majority of the nation wished it. Here in
this country there is not one that wishes it, or who would aid it even
by advice. . . . _No one_ is uninterested in the matter.” And he could
not stop the trade. It was like the hydra with a hundred heads. As soon
as he cut off one band another took its place. As soon as he closed one
entrance to the slave caravans another entrance was discovered. What he
achieved was a miracle, for all depended on himself and his one European
Lieutenant, Gessi. No one else either in the Soudan or Cairo cared for
or wished to see the traffic stopped.
The last year of Gordon’s Governor-Generalship was one of harassing
disappointments. The Khedive had failed him. He received no more
support. There was a new regime at Cairo, the Nubar-Wilson one. He was
at loggerheads with it, and talks of it in his letters as a
“Hermaphrodite government.” They did not understand him, and he had no
respect for them. It was a constant exchange of telegrams between Cairo
and Khartoum in which Cairo made impossible demands for money, and
Khartoum responded with bitter refusals. He was left quite unaided in
regard to the slave trade. “I have no belief,” he wrote, “in the Cairo
Government acting against slavery. . . . Nubar never helped me at the
equator, though I wrote to him frequently, waste of time as it was!” It
was the same with the Khedive, though he still pitied him, for Ismaïl
was now at bay surrounded by the financial wolves that were on the point
of devouring him.
“I can say truly,” he writes in 1879; “that my life is one long series
of flesh-vexing telegrams, of rows, of disputes—a regular Ishmaelite
existence—I am at war with nearly every one at Cairo, and my crest is a
thistle.” “I am exceedingly weary, and wish with a degree of bitterness
that it was all over. I am cooped up here (at Khartoum) now, and am much
occupied with the finances, which are in a very low state. . . . I am
striking daily deadly blows against the slave trade, and am establishing
a sort of Government of Terror about it.” “I am stronger than ever in my
belief that if H. H. had taken my advice he would be in a better plight
than he is now, and at any rate would have fallen with dignity. Now I
see by the paper he is offering to abdicate. This sort of thing cannot
last, and I fear for him. He cannot go straight—even his dispatches to
me are all evasive. . . . The continual wars that I carry on, and cannot
help, are very wearisome; and I feel more and more daily ‘How long? how
long?’”
It was in this state of despair, and weary of his life that Gordon threw
himself into the excitement of his last campaign against the Darfour
slave raiders, a campaign he was not destined to finish, for he was
recalled in the midst of it once more to Cairo, and had to leave the
final capture of the chief raider, Suliman Zebehr, to his Lieutenant
Gessi. He had lost, however, his zest for fighting. “I no longer delight
in war,” he writes, “or fights like this one before me. I look on the
accounts one reads of wars as so much romance writing, and, somewhat
like the Chinese people, I have rather a contempt for the warrior. . . .
Eminent services, etc., are eminent nonsense.” His iron health, too, was
breaking down. “I have almost entirely given up smoking, for I am much
affected in my circulation. If I had gone on with it much longer I
believe my heart would have stopped altogether. I may indeed say that I
have lost every desire in a material way for the things of this life,
and I have no wish for eating, drinking, or comforts. If I have a wish
for anything, it would be for a dreamless sleep.” It was a terrible
oppression to him, too, to find that in spite of all he could do the
slave trade was only “scotched not killed.” Indeed it flourished still,
despite the cost. “I have just made a calculation of the loss of life in
Darfour during the years 1875-1879. It comes to 16,000 Egyptians, and
some 50,000 natives of Darfour—add to this the loss of life on the Bahr
Gazelle some 15,000, and you will have a fine total of 81,000; and this
exclusive of the slave trade which one may put down for three years at
from 80,000 to 100,000. Upwards of 470 slave dealers have been driven
out of this place since I came here two days ago. This evening we were
surprised at a caravan coming in. The slave dealers had come on here
with them, and hearing I was here, and having no water, they abandoned
their slaves and fled. The slaves were sadly distressed by thirst,
thirty had died on the road. Though the water here is putrid, and
everything is wretched enough, I am revived when I make these captures.
You must count them up. From Oomchanga to Toashia, during, say, a week,
we must have caught from 500 to 600. I suppose we may consider that
nearly that number must have been passing every week for the last year
and a half or two years along this road!!! and this during my tenure of
office!!!—which is very creditable to me. These slaves just captured
have been four to five days without water. They were in the most
terrible distress.” A few days later, 21st July, he takes what was to be
his final leave of Khartoum, till his last fatal return to it in 1884.
“I shall D.V. leave for Cairo in ten days. . . . I am a wreck, like the
portion of the ‘Victory,’ towed into Gibraltar after Trafalgar; but God
has enabled me, or rather has used me, to do what I wished to do—that is
to break down the slave trade.”
It was his last word of comfort to his sick soul. At Cairo, when he
arrived there, he found a new order of things established still less to
his mind than the old one had been. The Khedive Ismaïl had made his exit
from the scene, and his place was occupied, not filled, by the poor
dummy Tewfik, with the Anglo-French financial control for tutor and
guardian. He did not long consent to serve it. After finding himself
sent on a fool’s errand to Abyssinia, where he nearly met his death, he
folded his tent and, shaking the dust of Egypt from his feet, once more
returned to England. Nothing then was further from his mind than that he
should ever see the Nile again. Body and soul he had been overwrought.
The British surgeon who examined him at Alexandria before he left found
him suffering from “symptoms of nervous exhaustion and alteration of the
blood.” He recommended “several months of complete rest and quiet,” and
insisted strongly on his “abstaining from all exciting work, especially
such as implies business or political excitement.”