WAS GORDON DISOBEDIENT?
IT is said that Gordon drafted his own instructions at the Foreign
Office, but I find it hard to believe this, for, if true, it would go
near to proving him as great a diplomatic rogue as those who sent him.
The instructions are a very crafty document. They begin with a manifest
insincerity about Gordon’s going to Egypt “to report on the measures it
may be advisable to take for the security of the Egyptian garrisons and
the European population in Khartoum,” and he is also “to consider and
report upon the best mode of effecting the evacuation of the Interior
and upon the manner in which the safety and good administration of the
Red Sea Ports can be secured.” Then there is a paragraph about the slave
trade as manifestly insincere, introduced for the satisfaction of the
Anti-Slavery Association in London, and he is to send his reports on
these subjects under flying seal through Cromer. In all this it is
impossible to find more than a hint of the true object of the mission.
It is contained in the document, but hidden away in the two unobtrusive
concluding paragraphs. These are: “You will consider yourself authorized
and instructed to perform such other duties as the Egyptian Government
may desire to entrust to you, and as may be communicated to you by Sir
E. Baring. You will be accompanied by Colonel Stewart, who will assist
you in the duties thus confided to you.” (Gordon afterwards described
Stewart as having been sent with him as his dry nurse to keep him out of
mischief.) “On your arrival in Egypt you will at once communicate with
Sir E. Baring, who will arrange to meet you and will settle with you
whether you should proceed direct to Suakin, or should go yourself or
dispatch Colonel Stewart to Khartoum _via_ the Nile.”
These instructions, I say, are a model of how to conceal an intention,
and have the true Foreign Office ring. They really amount to _carte
blanche_ to propose or do anything that the missioner could get Cromer
to consent to, and, in fact, cover all and more than all that Gordon
eventually tried to perform. “Such other duties as the Egyptian
Government might entrust to you” would have included either his handing
over the whole Soudan to the Mahdi, or his determination to smash the
Mahdi, or again to Sarawak the Soudan on his own account or King
Leopold’s or the Queen’s. Cromer was made responsible for all, and the
Government at home retained the ordinary parliamentary privilege of
disavowing their own responsibility for things if things went wrong.
Above all, it enabled Granville to telegraph to Gladstone with a free
conscience that Gordon had been sent by the War Office simply “to
report.”
I confess that, though I have blamed and still blame Gladstone for
nearly all the misfortunes that have happened since 1882 in Egypt, I
here feel some sympathy with him as with a man duped and deceived. He
certainly would never have consented to the Gordon mission in its full
sense if he had been allowed to understand the full meaning of the
instructions. He would have known, not only that the sending of Gordon
“to report” would make it very difficult not to accept and act upon his
report—this point he noticed in a letter written by him at the time—but
also that sending Gordon, who was a fighter born, on a merely peaceful
mission to carry out a military plan which he had himself declared to be
impossible except with the aid of a large body of troops, would make the
sending of troops also a certainty. Gordon was in the eyes of the
British public a Christian hero starting on a crusade, and it was
inconceivable that he should be left to perish for want of Christian
help. It is true that, when Gladstone arrived three days later in
London, a Cabinet was held, where the thing was more or less explained
to him, and that he consented to what had been done; but it was by this
time a _fait accompli_, and too late to stop Gordon, who had already
reached Brindisi and was on the high seas on his way to Port Said. His
mission could no longer be cancelled. All the religious press of England
had risen like one man to the occasion, and were rejoicing over Gordon
as the champion of Christendom. It was too late to recall him.
What the choice of such a missioner meant for the Government in the way
of new astonishing responsibilities may be gathered from Stead’s scream
of triumph printed in the “Pall Mall Gazette” on the day after his
departure. It is headed “At Last.” It began: “The whole Egyptian
question has been revolutionized in an hour. At yesterday’s informal
meeting of the Ministers at the War Office there was taken one of those
decisive steps that make or mar the destinies of Empires. . . . The
question called for immediate decision. After some consultation
Ministers determined to accept General Gordon’s conditions. The decision
was arrived at between 3 and 4 yesterday afternoon. At 8 General Gordon
had left London for Khartoum. The die was cast. Henceforth we have the
full and undivided responsibility for affairs in the Soudan. Whether we
evacuate the country or whether we retain it, as soon as General Gordon
takes command, and for so long as General Gordon’s commission holds,
England is directly responsible for whatever is done in the name of the
Egyptian Government between the third Cataract and the Equatorial Lakes.
That is an enormous extension of our responsibilities, but vast as it is
it is not all. Whether the public realizes it or not, the dispatch of
General Gordon to the Soudan, exercising practically unlimited powers
not as Governor-General of the Khedive, but as the accredited
representative of the British Government, must entail as a natural and
inevitable corollary the assumption sooner or later of a similar
responsibility as direct and as unlimited for the affairs of Egypt
proper.”
Gladstone after this was powerless to draw back, and, putting a good
face on the matter as long as the sun shone, he went in for the gamble
with the rest. An immense gamble it certainly was, and one for which he
was destined to pay heavily.
As for Gordon himself he started in the highest possible spirits. He had
got the secret wish of his heart thrust upon him without his seeking it;
he had not “hailed the tram of the world”; it was “the tram of the
world” that had hailed him, and his conscience was at rest. He was
certain now that God was with him and that the service imposed on him
was God’s service, and so could not but succeed. His very first act
after seeing the Ministers was to telegraph to Barnes from the War
Office at five o’clock: “I go to the Soudan to-night; if He goes with me
all must be well.” And in a letter to the same Barnes on his way to
Brindisi, he says: “I am quite restored to my peace, thank God, and in
His hand He will hide me. . . . The Hosts are with me. Mahanaim.” He
counted much upon the prayers that were being offered for him in every
church and chapel in England. “If people ask after me, tell them they
can greatly help me with their prayers, not for my earthly success, but
that my mission may be for God’s glory, the welfare of the poor and
wretched, and for me what He wills, above all for a humble heart.” And
again, 26th January: “I leave for the Soudan to-night. I feel quite
happy for I say if God is with me who can or will be hurtful to me? May
He be glorified, the world and people of the Soudan be blessed, and may
I be the dust under His feet.”
That Gordon was absolutely sincere in this estimate of his mission we
cannot doubt. Yet what a self-delusion! What a blindness! He did not
perceive that those who were sending him on this last great adventure of
his life were no angels of the Lord, but four wily statesmen doing the
work mainly of the London Stock Exchange, and interested far more in
perpetuating England’s robber hold on Egypt than in any humanitarian
scheme which might be imagined for the Soudan—he himself a useful pawn
in their not very noble game, and some of them ready enough already to
sacrifice and betray him. He did not perceive this or understand that,
if it were a question of God being on one side or the other, it could
hardly be with these, but with the poor fanatic Soudanese who really did
believe in Him and counted on Him to hear their vociferous prayers and
praises, and give them the victory. He did not understand that all the
men of good in the Soudan would be found on the Mahdi’s side, and all
the men of Belial, the scoundrel refuse of the corrupt city of Khartoum,
on his own, leaving him with only the least godly weapons of the flesh
wherewith to fight, some modern superiority of weapons, money to buy a
faithless fidelity, and his own skill and courage as a fighting man.
It was an instinct of his self-delusion and a knowledge of the base ends
of those that sent him that caused me to write to him as I did from
Delhi. I knew that this time he must be wrong, that he was being sent on
a fool’s errand, and that he would be betrayed and defeated.
Of the many things with which Gordon has been reproached officially in
the conduct of his mission by those who would shift the blame of his
failure from their own backs on to his, I will endeavour to deal with
the chief and especially with those brought against him by Lord Cromer,
only premising once again that the mission itself was according to my
ideas a bad one and doomed from the first to failure. Lord Cromer, his
chief assailant, has reproached him with a constant change of plan, with
insubordination, with failure to do his duty, and with being the cause
of his own defeat. I will endeavour to set these matters in their true
light.
Gordon’s idea when he left London seems to have been a clear one as to
the general lines of what he was to do. He was to make his way to
Khartoum as he best could, take over the military command of the place
from Coetlogon, withdraw the Egyptian garrisons from their outlying
posts in the interior, and make what arrangements he could for a
government at Khartoum to take the place of the Khedive’s. It was to be
a government which was not to be an Egyptian Government, and for which
Her Majesty’s Government was not to be responsible. These two conditions
had been imposed on him, and he had accepted them. All the rest was left
to his discretion, subject only to Cromer’s official approval.
A point he on his side had insisted on at the outset was that he should
go under orders from his own Government, and not merely as taking
foreign service with his Government’s permission. His insistence about
this was, I believe, primarily with him a matter of honour. He had
engaged himself to King Leopold, and he could not with any decency throw
him over to enter the service of another foreign prince unless it was in
compliance with an order he as a soldier was bound to obey from his own
Government. Also it would ease his conscience, as signifying to him more
clearly the command of God, and not the gratification of his own secret
wish. This is how I read the matter. It could not have been with him a
rooted objection to re-entering a foreign service or in particular the
Khedive’s service, for as we have seen he recommended Baker, if he went
to the Soudan, to go there as the Khedive’s Governor-General. What would
have been the right course for Baker must have been the right course
also for himself. As a matter of fact he would have found himself even
more powerless than he proved to be at Khartoum if he had gone there
simply as a British officer. Stewart had gone there as such, but his had
been no executive mission. Gordon’s was to be essentially executive, and
it was imperative with him to have local authority from the local
sovereign, if only to treat with the tribes for the withdrawal of the
garrisons. The English Government could not give him this—it must of
necessity be given him by the Khedive. It argues therefore no change of
plan that Gordon, on his way to Egypt, should have proposed that if he
went to Khartoum it should be in his old capacity as Governor-General.
He had gained all that he wanted for his soldier’s honour once he had
received his own Government’s order to undertake the service. The
Governor-Generalship was a means to an end, and in his view the only
means.
A more reasonable reproach which might be made to him—but it has not
been officially made—is that he abandoned the idea he certainly had at
the outset of going straight on a peaceful errand to the Mahdi at El
Obeyd and treating with him personally for the withdrawal of the
Egyptian garrisons. I have always been of opinion that that would have
been his wisest course; and it certainly was in his mind when he started
from London, for passing through Paris the next morning he saw Sheffield
at the Embassy and told him of his intention so to do. There was, of
course, considerable risk in the matter, but it was just one of those
risks Gordon had over and again run successfully in the Soudan, and
there is good reason to believe that, properly accompanied, he would
have been courteously received at El Obeyd, and that, if he had
negotiated on the basis of withdrawing the garrisons peaceably and
handing over Khartoum at once to the Mahdi, the Mahdi would have
provided the necessary escorts. At any rate, it was his best chance. But
that was not what either our Government or the Government at Cairo
wanted; and, once at Cairo and in the Khedive’s service, this course was
formally forbidden him, nor did Gordon persist in it. It cannot be too
strongly repeated that what Gordon was intended to do was not merely to
evacuate the Soudan, but to establish a Government at Khartoum and in
the eastern provinces which should take the place of the Khedive’s
Government and serve as a barrier between Egypt proper, including the
Red Sea coast, and the Mahdi’s fanatical advance. To hand over Khartoum
to the Mahdi was not, at that time, whatever Lord Cromer may now
pretend, in his more than in the Khedive’s plan. I think, nevertheless,
that if Gordon had understood the full political power and religious
position acquired by Mohammed Ahmed since the fall of El Obeyd and the
destruction of Hicks’s army, he would have held to the idea of treating
with the Mahdi personally. Unfortunately he throughout underrated his
opponent and allowed himself to be persuaded that through the power of
money and a display of vigour, joined with reforms in the way of more
freedom, less taxation, and better justice, he could build up a counter
popularity to that possessed by the Mahdi. It was a snare into which he
too easily fell.
Another sudden change of plan, which Lord Fitzmaurice says surprised and
disturbed the Government soon after Gordon had been despatched upon his
mission, and in regard to which he is severe, calling it a plan
“fantastic in the extreme,” is that which Gordon announced of re-
establishing the family of the Sultans of Darfur in their hereditary
possessions. It was, perhaps, not a very practical idea, but that the
Foreign Office should have been surprised at it only shows its ignorance
of its own records, for it is to be found in no less conspicuous a
document than Stewart’s Soudan Report of February 1883, to say nothing
of its having been repeatedly put forward unofficially by Gordon in
print and officially by Abd-el-Kader Pasha in December at Cairo. The
whole conception of the re-establishment of independent native states in
opposition to the Mahdi was, in my opinion, one unsuited to the
circumstances of the case, however desirable in itself; but, at any
rate, there was nothing new in it nothing to “surprise or disturb” Lord
Granville. Gordon had hardly arrived at Khartoum before he found the
whole scheme impracticable, and it was heard of no more. Even under the
most favourable circumstances it would have been very difficult of
accomplishment, and, as a move counter to the Mahdi, could not possibly
have succeeded.
Much the same may be said about the idea of employing Zebehr. Here, too,
the “surprise and disturbance” of the Foreign Office were entirely
gratuitous. When Gordon arrived at Cairo Zebehr had already been engaged
there for some weeks recruiting and drilling a black force from among
the Soudanese, and had got together 200 ex-soldiers and ex-slaves
impressed in Egypt proper. These were destined to be sent with Zebehr
for service in the Soudan, and had been regularly enlisted by Zebehr for
the Government. It was therefore gratuitous on the part of the Foreign
Office to affect surprise that it should be proposed by Gordon to take
Zebehr and his men with him. There was, of course, reason for comment
that it should have been Gordon, and no other, who made the request, for
Gordon had quarrelled with Zebehr and had been responsible for his son’s
death, and Zebehr had been the head and front of the slave trade
rebellion in the Soudan. But Gordon was no longer on an anti-slavery
war-path. He had lived long enough to understand that battling in the
Bahr el Gazal against the slave-hunters was not the surest way of
dealing with the evil of slavery or stopping the trade. And his present
mission was of an entirely different kind, one which needed Zebehr’s
help, not a continuance of his hostility. Gordon was a man who never
pursued his resentments far, and he was always ready to forget a quarrel
and to believe once more in the man’s friendship who had wronged him or
whom he had wronged. He had buried the hatchet with Tewfik and Nubar and
Cromer. Why not also with Zebehr? There was nothing really to be
surprised at, nothing to blame or to forbid.
As to the policy of enlisting Zebehr as an ally I am not of opinion that
it would have led to much profit in the way of helping Gordon to
establish a buffer state against the Mahdi. Zebehr had been too long
absent from the Soudan to be of use to him in that way. His influence
was dead, and it is all but certain that he would have yielded to the
new influence abroad among his people and thrown in his lot with the
Mahdi. I do not think he would have betrayed Gordon. He was a man of old
Arab nobility and chivalrous traditions, and he had no actual blood feud
with Gordon, for it was Gessi, not Gordon himself, who had had Suliman
Zebehr shot. In after years I have talked these matters over with
Zebehr, and am convinced that he would not have betrayed Gordon, only
that he could not have stemmed the tide which was then so strongly
flowing in the Mahdi’s favour. All that he could have done would have
been to serve as intermediary between Gordon and the Mahdi, and to warn
Gordon against some of the worst mistakes he made.
The great weakness of Gordon’s position at Khartoum was that, being
almost ignorant of Arabic and without any dependable native interpreter
(for his old secretary Berzati had accompanied Hicks on his fatal
campaign and there lost his life), he was left to the tender mercies of
Greek merchants and other Christian informants as to what was going on.
Zebehr would, at any rate, have supplied him with reliable news and a
correct interpretation of the letters he received from the Mahdi. As it
was, with no one near him to explain the exact truth, Gordon was as a
blind man at Khartoum and became the tool of rogues who betrayed him
with false tales and prevented him from seeing what otherwise he could
not but have recognized, the sincerity and high character of the Mahdi.
With Zebehr at his side he could not have committed his last crowning
mistake of offering Mohammed Ahmed a tarboosh and a Sultanate, an insult
which more than any other sealed his doom.
Lastly, as to Gordon’s pretended insubordination and disobedience to his
instructions, the case against him is really not maintainable. Even
admitting that his instructions on leaving London, and the free hand
accorded him, were nothing more than are contained within the four
corners of the written memorandum drawn up at the Foreign Office, he
must stand personally absolved. The paragraph, “You will consider
yourself authorized and instructed to perform such other duties as the
Egyptian Government may desire to intrust to you and as may be
communicated to you by Sir E. Baring,” covers him entirely from any
blame there might be in the extension of his duty in Egypt. Lord Cromer
tries in his “Modern Egypt” to evade his own responsibility in regard to
such extensions of duty by pleading that it was Gordon himself who
initiated them; thus he instances a telegram he received from Granville
dated the 18th: “Gordon suggests that it may be announced in Egypt that
he is on his way to Khartoum to arrange for the future settlement of the
Soudan for the best advantage of the people.” This telegram, Cromer
points out, says nothing of his duty of reporting, and he adds, “if
General Gordon was to arrange for the future settlement of the Soudan, I
fail to see how he could do so without exercising some executive
authority.” On this ground he protests that “the idea of Gordon’s going
as Governor-General to the Soudan did not emanate from any one in Cairo,
it was made by General Gordon himself.” Lord Cromer seems, however, to
have forgotten that the suggestion about the future settlement of the
Soudan was, in fact, his own of 22nd December, and he has also forgotten
that, if Gordon was sent in order to arrange such a settlement, his
appointment as Governor-General was a necessary part of what he himself
had approved before ever Gordon arrived at Cairo. Lord Cromer’s answer,
23rd January, to the telegram of the 18th, says distinctly: “All
Gordon’s suggestions are excellent and quite in harmony with the lines
on which we have been working. A message was sent by the Khedive some
while ago to the leading men at Khartoum which was in the sense and
almost in the words suggested by Gordon.” This proves that all that had
not at that time been contemplated at Cairo was that the English officer
expected to arrange the new settlement was to be Gordon and not another,
and that he was to go to Khartoum with the full authority of Governor-
General.
If, however, there remains any doubt as to Cromer’s initiative in the
extension of Gordon’s duties, I am in a position to supply an important
link of evidence by giving the text of a hitherto unpublished letter
written by Cromer to Gordon the day before he landed at Port Said.
Though a most important letter in the controversy, it is not to be found
in any Blue Book, and Cromer in his “Modern Egypt” ignores it entirely.
The circumstances under which it was written were these. Gordon’s idea
in leaving London had been to go straight through the Suez Canal without
visiting Cairo, and to proceed at once to Suakin, where he expected to
be able to put himself into communication with certain Sheykhs of the
Hadendowa tribe to whom he had formerly rendered a service while he was
Governor-General, and through whom he counted on being able to reach
Khartoum, and eventually El Obeyd, for his proposed visit to the Mahdi.
In the Mahdi himself he thought he had recognized the uncle of a young
man who had been formerly in his service, and who had been kindly
treated by him, and so hoped to establish initial good relations with
him. He had come, however, to see that authority from the Khedive was a
necessity of the case, and he expected his Firman of appointment to be
delivered to him by Cromer on his passage through the Canal. Such a
course, however, was not exactly in Cromer’s plan, who wished to get
Gordon to Cairo, and so have him from the start more closely under his
authority, and to talk over with him and Nubar the further instructions
he was to receive. He pretexted, therefore, an inability to spare time
for a journey to Port Said (there was no railway further than Ismailia
at that time) and instead of going himself, he wrote this letter and
sent it by the hand of Sir Evelyn Wood to be delivered to Gordon on
landing, with instructions to intercept him and bring him on to Cairo.
“Cairo, _22nd January_, 1884.
“MY DEAR GORDON,
“I was exceedingly glad to receive Lord Granville’s telegram informing
me that you and Stewart were coming to Egypt. I feel confident that you
may both render very great services as regards Soudan affairs. I need
hardly assure you that you can rely on my most cordial support and
assistance.
“Wood, accompanied by Watson, is going to Port Said to meet you. He is
thoroughly acquainted with all the most recent facts of the situation
and with the views entertained by myself and others. Under these
circumstances I will not dwell at any length on the course of action
which, as it appears to me, had better be adopted. I will only say
briefly that I think you had better go to Khartoum and arrange for the
withdrawal of the Egyptian garrisons etc. as rapidly as is consistent
with (1) the saving of life and so far as is possible, property; (2) the
establishment of some rough form of Government which will prevent, so
far as is possible, anarchy and confusion arising on the withdrawal of
the Egyptian troops. The task, though very difficult, will not I believe
in your hands be impossible.
“I hope very shortly to discuss the whole question with you personally
and my views are of course liable to modification by the light of your
greater experience in Soudan matters.
“Lord Granville told me that you were unwilling to come to Cairo. It is
not, on public grounds, desirable that I should leave Cairo at present,
although of course I would do so for a very short time if it were
absolutely necessary. I hope, however, to convince you that it is
absolutely necessary that you should come to Cairo. The valley of the
Nile is indeed at present the only route by which you can reach
Khartoum. The Souakin-Berber route is closed and, so far as our latest
information goes, there does not appear to be much prospect of its being
opened. It is also, I think, very desirable that before you start you
should discuss the whole situation not only with myself, but with Nubar
and others, so that we may arrange a common plan of action and prevent
any risk of working at cross purposes. For these and other reasons I am
very strongly of opinion that you should come to Cairo. I need hardly
say that I should not propose a course of action, which I believe to be
personally distasteful to yourself, unless I thought that there were
strong public grounds for doing so. Wood has arranged about Ibrahim Bey
Fowzi.
“Believe me very truly yours,
“EVELYN BARING.”
It will be noted in this letter, which was written before Cromer had
seen Gordon and therefore entirely on his own initiative, that he
suggests a new course of action to be adopted far in advance of anything
the original written instructions drawn up at the Foreign Office
contained. In the first place, there is no mention whatever of
reporting; secondly, Gordon is to go to Khartoum by way of Cairo and the
Nile instead of by Suakin. He is also to go himself and not merely to
send Stewart. Thirdly, he is to withdraw the Egyptian garrisons as
rapidly as is consistent with the saving of _property_ as well as life,
an entirely new condition to be found in no previous suggestion
connected with the mission and one necessarily entailing far greater
time and labour to effect. Lastly, he is to establish “some rough form
of government which will prevent anarchy and confusion arising on the
withdrawal of Egyptian troops.” This, although as we have seen it was in
the spirit and intention of the instructions, was an immense extension
of anything that had been actually written or telegraphed, of which we
have any knowledge; and the writer of the letter could hardly have
contemplated, in proposing such an extension, a work which would occupy
less than many months to execute, if not a whole year. It is, moreover,
absolutely at variance with the pretence afterwards made at the Foreign
Office that Gordon’s mission was simply to withdraw the Khartoum
garrison. And lastly, its date proves the idea to be Cromer’s and not
Gordon’s.
As we know, Sir Evelyn Wood met Gordon at Port Said with this letter in
his hand, and its effect was an entire change of plan on Gordon’s part.
Instead of going on to Suakin, he went back with Wood and Watson to
Cairo, saw Cromer, who took him to Nubar and later to the Khedive both
of whom received him graciously. Cromer then obtained the necessary
Firman (he probably drew it up himself) assigning to Gordon his new
duties. This Firman, be it observed, although it is by far the most
important document of the whole case, is suppressed by Cromer in his
“Modern Egypt;” and instead of it he gives a letter he wrote to Gordon
containing not the instructions themselves but certain remarks about the
way in which the instructions were understood by himself. The
instructions themselves are to be found in Blue Book, Egypt, No. 12,
1884. They amount practically to a _carte blanche_ commission to do
whatsoever Gordon would with the Soudan without restriction of time and
without limit to his authority. They run as follows:
“HIS HIGHNESS THE KHEDIVE TO GORDON PASHA.
“_January_ 26, 1884.
“EXCELLENCY,
“HAVING confidence in your tact and experience, and being aware that the
excellent services rendered by you in the Soudan have endeared you to
the people of those provinces, and made them acknowledge the good
derived from your efforts to introduce among them tranquillity and good
government; and seeing that the present state of affairs in those
territories requires a person capable of grappling with the difficulties
of the situation, and of ameliorating the condition of the inhabitants
by restoring public tranquillity on a sure basis, as it is our earnest
desire to do what is just and right, to remove all sources of discontent
and to observe equity towards the native populations, we do hereby
appoint you Governor-General of the Soudan by reason of your perfect
knowledge of that country, and we trust that you will carry out our good
intentions for the establishment of justice and order, and that you will
assure the peace and prosperity of the peoples of the Soudan by
maintaining the security of the roads open to commerce.
“Now by these presents we make known to you our desire, and urge upon
you a speedy departure for those provinces, so that good government may
be restored by your tact and experience.”
This document, which is of the widest conceivable scope, covers
absolutely all that Gordon did at Khartoum, all that he designed to do
and all that he might have done. It included his decree permitting
slavery; it included all his military operations; it included his
refusals to retire before the accomplishment of his full work unless his
Firman were revoked; it included his attempt to smash the Mahdi, and it
would have included, if he had succeeded in so doing, his remaining on
at Khartoum and “Sarawaking” the Soudan to the end of his days; or he
might have ceded the whole Soudan to the Mahdi, or, as far as I can see,
made any other arrangement for its future he might think fit. I repeat
that thus enlarged I do not approve of the mission. Also it was one
bound to fail. But I affirm that Cromer, who was the man responsible for
the enlargement of the mission, who procured the Firman’s signature
authorizing it, and who almost certainly dictated the instructions it
contained, should have been of all men the last to blame Gordon because
he held these instructions binding on him and refused to obey anything
less direct than a counter-firman ordering him not to carry them out.
Cromer’s dispatch to the Foreign Office, enclosing the Firman, admits
his responsibility and the largeness of its scope. “It was thought
desirable,” he says, “after full discussion here that the widest
discretionary powers should be given to General Gordon as regards the
manner of carrying out the policy and as to the best time and mode for
announcing it at Khartoum. . . . Although he takes his instructions from
me, the widest discretionary power has been left to him. His visit to
Cairo was most useful as it will enable the Egyptian authorities to be
of much greater service to him than would have been otherwise possible.
His views differ in no sort of way from those entertained by Nubar Pasha
and myself.”
Yet Lord Cromer to-day has the face now to come forward and charge
Gordon with overstepping his authorized programme! That he was so
understood to have overstepped them in the summer of 1884 I know, for I
myself thought he had done so, but the full facts had not yet been made
public, and we knew only what the Government chose to tell us. But the
Government itself already knew all, and yet it accused him; and Cromer,
who knew and knows the truth better than any one, accuses him still!
As to what happened after the mission left Cairo the history is too well
known for there to be any necessity for my recapitulating it here. All
now depended on Gordon’s being able to inspire such confidence in the
Khartoum garrison as to hold the fort till succour should come. This was
expected to be, if at all, from Valentine Baker at Souakin, Sir Samuel’s
brother. The position at Souakin was this. The sending of Hicks to
Khartoum to take command of the Khedivial troops in the spring of 1883
had been answered by the Mahdi by the dispatch of emissaries into the
provinces between the Nile and the Red Sea to preach a religious war
against the infidel; and the war broke out early in the autumn under the
afterwards celebrated leader Osman Digna, who, with the fighting tribe
of the Hadendowa, set themselves to occupy the caravan road from Berber
to Souakin and lay siege to that seaport and to the fortified places
near it. In October a force of 500 Egyptian troops sent to relieve one
of these last was surprised and routed, and the English Consul,
Moncrieff, a young naval officer who had gone with them, was killed by
the Mahdists. The defeat of Hicks in Kordofan speedily followed, and
Khartoum began to be threatened. The Souakin-Berber route was at that
time the speediest mode of communication between Cairo and Khartoum, and
after one or two more misadventures near the Red Sea coast it became
completely blocked, and it was found necessary to attempt to reopen it,
and thus towards the end of the year, there being no more regular
Egyptian troops to send, Baker Pasha, who had been organizing a corps of
military police at Cairo, was entrusted with the duty, his police
accompanying him, strengthened with the scratch force of Turks and
negroes impressed by Zebehr in Lower Egypt. Baker’s duty, as defined in
the Khedive’s Firman appointing him, was to “take command of the
operations which have for their object the pacification of the regions
lying between Berber and Souakin and the maintenance of communication
between these two points. . . . You should use every means of
conciliation and diplomacy, with a view to secure the obedience and
submission of the Sheikhs of the different tribes before having recourse
to force.”
Valentine Baker’s character was one that in this double duty inspired
confidence at the War Office. I remember him as long ago as the winter
of 1860-61, when he was in command of the 10th Hussars at York, the
hard-riding popular Colonel of a hard-riding popular cavalry regiment,
the smartest in the British army, hunting, every officer of them, four
days a week with the York and Ainsty or the Bramham Moor hounds—the
ideal man of his cavalry type. Then he fell into trouble, and in the
midst of a promising career had to leave the British army. The campaign
of Plevna was just beginning in the Balkans, and he took service with
the Turks and greatly distinguished himself in the famous retreat after
the fall of that fortress, and thus he had become a Pasha in the
Sultan’s service. But, on receiving the news of Tel-el-Kebir, nothing
would satisfy him but an attempt to get back into the British army, and
he unceremoniously left Constantinople and came to Cairo, where he was
made welcome by his former fellow soldiers and obtained from Sir Evelyn
Wood the command of the _gens d’armerie_, a quasi-military duty under
the Khedive. Valentine Baker was essentially a soldier of fortune and a
fighting man, and was burning with the desire of distinguishing himself
by some action of _éclat_ and so being restored to Her Majesty’s
service. That was his position and that the service he had been sent on,
and he had taken command at Souakin on the last day of the year.
Gordon was expected to co-operate with him and do the same at Khartoum,
and his original plan of passing through Souakin was in order that they
might make their plans together. Gordon was to help Baker to conciliate
and buy up the Souakin tribes, and he was himself to make his way to
Khartoum and re-establish order there and hold the fort till the
communications were free for both of them between the two places. It was
a plan in which common action was essential; and then the Egyptian
garrisons of the interior were to be sent down to the sea coast and
Gordon was to organize his new government at Khartoum.
The success of the whole plan as a military one of evacuation depended
on the possibility of a double success in reopening the Souakin-Berber
route and keeping it open, the other line of retreat down the Nile to
Egypt being too long and too difficult, in face of the disturbed state
of the country and the absence of transport, for it to have been
possible to convey the garrisons and the civilians who were to accompany
them in safety northwards. It was an essential part of Gordon’s mission
of evacuation that the road to the coast should be cleared, and, as we
have seen, Gordon, in his letter to Sir Samuel Baker, had made co-
operation between him and Sir Samuel’s brother a first necessity of the
position. No soldier could have been blind to this.
I am inclined therefore to think that Gordon’s original plan of going to
Souakin to take counsel with Baker would have given Gordon a better
chance of ultimate success than by changing it, as Cromer insisted on
his doing, to the Nile route. Also Gordon had a perfect soldier’s right
to expect that, if according to the new plan he was to play his own part
unassisted at Berber and Khartoum, the Government that sent him should
at least have helped Baker at the other end of the evacuating line, that
between the sea and the Nile, to keep this line open. There is a passage
indicative of the acknowledgement of such an obligation on the part of
the Foreign Office in Fitzmaurice’s “Life of Granville,” to which I
shall return later, a passage which would show that the British
Government at the time of their dispatch of Gordon intended to defend
not only the Red Sea coast against the Mahdi, but also the whole of the
eastern provinces as far inland as the Nile. Had they adhered to this
intention the necessary support would have been given to Gordon, and it
was thus that Gordon understood the position.
The whole plan, however, lost any chance of success it might have had by
the total and inglorious defeat of Baker at Teb on the 5th February.
Gordon ought then, according to all strategic rule, either to have been
recalled or troops of some sort ought to have been provided to reinforce
him and open the road which Baker had failed to open, the road now more
than ever closed for his retreat. It should have been done at once, if
at all, for on the 19th of May Berber declared for the Mahdi and the
chance was gone. The Government at home, however, could not make up its
mind either to recall Gordon or to send the assistance needed. There was
a conflict of feeling in the Cabinet which prevented anything being
decided. General Graham was sent indeed to Suakin with a British force
in February, but after fighting a battle or two with Osman Digna he was
forbidden to go further and his force was withdrawn. Hartington and
Wolseley at the War Office wanted Gordon supported, but Gladstone stuck
to it that he had always understood Gordon’s mission to be a mission of
peace and would not consent to Graham’s advance. On the other hand,
nobody in the Cabinet or at Cairo seems to have had his wits
sufficiently about him to get Gordon’s Firman revoked, or to have
understood that without such revocation he could not in honour abandon
his mission. Had he been released from his instructions, Gordon could
have left the garrisons to make the best terms they could with the
Mahdi, and gone on, as was his original intention, by way of the White
Nile to the Congo. This would have been, if not a very glorious, at
least a simple solution of the difficulty, and indeed, if troops were
not to be sent, it was the only rational one.
Lastly, as to the English help promised Gordon which he is blamed for
having counted on, I think it cannot be doubted that when he left London
in February some such promise was made him, or at least that there was
an understanding to that effect between him and the War Office. It may
be gathered from his speeches that Hartington so considered it, and it
is notorious that such was Wolseley’s view. Gordon was to go to
Khartoum, in the first place, to try his luck single-handed, but
Wolseley always counted on helping him if his luck should fail. Whether
the full conclave of the four Ministers who dispatched him on his
mission so understood the case is open to doubt; certainly Gladstone was
not a party to any such promise; and yet it must necessarily have been
present in their minds if not upon their lips. The contrary is
inconceivable.
Also the Queen, who cannot but have been informed of all at the time,
unquestionably considered her Ministers to have promised Gordon armed
support. Her view of the obligation is to be found in the letter she
wrote to Gordon’s sister a few days after the news of his death reached
England, and which has been published. Queen Victoria’s letter begins
thus:
“How shall I write to you or how shall I attempt to express _what I
feel_! To _think_ of your dear noble heroic brother, who served his
country and his Queen so truly, so heroically, with a self-sacrifice so
edifying to the world, not having been rescued; that the promises of
support were not fulfilled—which I so frequently and constantly pressed
on those who asked him to go—is to me _grief inexpressible_!”
This letter, drafted by no secretary, but written with the Queen’s own
royal hand, seems to me conclusive. Its very indignation is the best
proof of its truth, its anger at a betrayal known by the writer to have
been such. It is impossible that the Queen should have used the words
“the promises of support were not fulfilled” without any such having
been understood by her at the time to have been made. There is, of
course, no written record of them in any of the papers presented to
Parliament, and the promises probably were verbal only, as indeed were
all the details of the mission treated departmentally between Wolseley
and Gordon. But it makes it almost certain that the War Office, if not
the Government as a body, had intended military support, if such should
be required, and had spoken of it to Gordon. Gordon certainly counted on
military help, for he alludes to it repeatedly in his diaries.
Who then, if not her Ministers, can have conveyed to the Queen the idea
of a promise having been given? Who gave or implied an assurance that
the mission would, if necessary, have outside help? Between Wolseley and
Gordon it was certainly understood that the War Office would do its best
to see that he was properly backed when the time came. It might be
difficult to get Gladstone to consent, but pressure would be put. The
Duke of Cambridge also, in all probability, said more than this. He saw
Gordon off at the station, and cannot but have recounted all to Her
Majesty afterwards. However silent Granville and the rest may have been,
these two, Wolseley and the Duke of Cambridge, must have promised. The
Queen’s letter remains its certain proof.
For the rest of the incidents of Gordon’s tragic mission, having said my
say on the principal points in dispute regarding it, I will now return
to my interrupted diary. It will show how I at the time regarded the
mission, not in the light of my now better knowledge, but as it was
presented to me in part by the public voice, in part by what I learned
privately from those that knew.