There are other faults of a similar sort for which these men will be
arraigned at the bar of History, but the fate of the lonely, betrayed
man, who day after day left his starving and ever-diminishing garrison
to look out across the desert from the battlements of Khartoum for
the help which, for him, never came, will certainly be considered the
blackest if not the greatest of them all.
But there is another and very practical sense in which Gordon was
a British Empire-Maker. This realm of ours is what it is, not only
because we have fought for some parts of it and successfully stolen
others. It is ours because we knew how to make use of it after we got
it; because of all other men now existing on the face of the earth the
Anglo-Saxon is the best leader and governor of savage and semi-savage
men that has so far been evolved, and of such leaders and governors
Gordon plainly proved himself to be one of the very best.
Under the British flag he never won a battle for Britain. The genius
which his Motherland might have made such splendid use of did its best
work under the dragon-flag of China and the crescent-flag of Egypt, but
nevertheless on the day when the last mile of the British high road
from Cairo to Cape Town is thrown open, and the _Pax Britannica_ is
proclaimed from north to south of Africa, men will remember Gordon and
confess that without him this might never have been done.
It will have been noticed by those who have read between the lines
here printed that where Empire-Makers are concerned the old-fashioned
idea of ancestry seems to be not altogether the fiction that certain
latter-day theorists, men of words to a man, have sought to make it,
and Gordon was no exception to this rule.
His lineage stretches away back into the dim mists which lie behind the
history of all these islands into the days when Englishmen, Scotsmen,
and Irishmen had yet to be thought of, and when the divisions of
mankind were racial rather than national.
Of course the Gordons of last century were for the most part desperate
Jacobites, and as such were hinderers rather than doers of the work
of empire-making. But, curiously enough, this particular Gordon did
not come from these. On the contrary, there was a fight during that
miserable business of 1745 in which, on the field of Gladsmuir,
a couple of thousand Highland clansmen played havoc with some
English regiments fresh back from the Flemish wars, and after the
slaughter they took many prisoners, one of whom was David Gordon,
great-grandfather of the hero and martyr of Khartoum.
From this it will be seen that, whether by design or accident, his
branch of the ancient and widespread stock had managed to get upon the
right side--that is to say, the side which was to fight for imperialism
as distinguished from mere nationalism, which in many cases is only
another way of spelling parochialism.
It is noteworthy, by the way, that Gordon’s grandfather, William
Augustus, so named after “Butcher Cumberland,” fought at Louisburg and
on the Heights of Abraham, after Captain Cook had taken those soundings
on the St. Lawrence. His son, William Henry, fought as an officer of
artillery at Maida, and it was his grandson who won the yellow jacket
and mandarin’s button in suppressing the Taiping rebellion, who refused
a roomful of gold as a bribe, and who, after carefully scratching out
the inscription, gave the huge gold medal which he had received from
the Emperor of China anonymously to the Coventry Relief Fund.
This “give away your medal,” to use his own words, is the keynote of
his whole life. Gordon worked “for honour, not honours,” and that one
letter makes a great deal of difference. We see here, too, the sign of
his kinship with other Empire-Makers, the faculty of seeing what work
had to be done and the power of doing it for its own sake, whatever
difficulties there might lie in the way.
As a boy he seemed to combine in the most curious fashion a
constitutional sensitiveness amounting almost to timidity, with a
contempt for personal danger, and an equal contempt for authority which
individually he was unable to respect.
Altogether, in fact, his was a nature which had very little to expect
in the way of promotion or favour from conventional officialdom, and
it was very little that he got. This view was no doubt amply justified
by his first experience in warfare in the trenches before Sebastopol,
for if ever heroism and devotion abroad were crucified by authority at
home, this was the case during the Crimean War.
From the Crimea the scene shifts somewhat suddenly to China. And yet
here we may note that this is not the place to stop and worry about the
morality or otherwise of those so-called opium wars which led up to the
trouble of 1860. If the opium trade was bad, the opening of the Flowery
Land to European commerce was good, and one usually does find good and
bad mixed up in the most extraordinary manner in matters of this sort.
The point here is that the brief war which ended with the taking of the
Taku forts in the August of 1860, and the capture of Pekin, was the
beginning of the career of “Chinese Gordon.”
He did not see the taking of the forts, but he did see the destruction
of the Summer Palace, “the Garden of Perpetual Brightness,” which was
destroyed as an act of revenge at the order of a British envoy who may
here be left nameless in the infamy that he earned by it. Gordon was
one of the involuntary Vandals, and this is what he said about the
business when writing home:
“You can scarcely imagine the beauty and magnificence of the palaces
we burnt. It made one’s heart sore to destroy them. It was wretchedly
demoralising work.”
After this for a year and a half he fulfilled the duties of a Captain
of Engineers in the camp at Tien-Tsin in the midst of a vast dreary
plain. During this time the Taiping rebels had been industriously
employing fire and sword to make one of the most fertile portions of
the Flowery Land the reverse of worthy of the name and, at length
Shanghai itself, the headquarters of the foreign traders, was
threatened by the ever-advancing wave of barbarism.
A defensive force was hurriedly raised by an American named Ward, who
for nearly two years led it to constant victory and earned for it the
somewhat magniloquent title of the Ever-Victorious Army.
Then a chance bullet killed Ward at the beginning of what might have
been a most brilliant career. Under his successor everything went
wrong. Victory was replaced by defeat and success by disaster. This
incompetent person being removed, the hitherto obscure officer of
Engineers stepped into his place. It was a time when a leader of men
was badly wanted. It was also the moment when Fate knocked at the door
of Charles George Gordon and found him in.
Within a very short time disorganisation was replaced by discipline,
despair by confidence, and the Ever-Victorious Army was once more made
worthy of its name. It was here that Gordon really began his career
as a soldier of fortune. When he took command he told Li-Hung-Chang
that he would turn the rebels out of the score of walled cities which
they had captured and strengthened, and put the rebellion down within
eighteen months. As a matter of fact he did it in fifteen.
The story of the doing of this so clearly shows the extraordinary
capacity that Gordon possessed for both the organisation and the
execution of a military campaign, as well as the faculty of inspiring
confidence in all sorts and conditions of men, that it is simply
amazing that the home authorities did not immediately recognise the
fact that he was something a good deal more than they had hitherto
taken him for. This, however, it was to take them some twenty years
more to find out.
Still there was one incident at the close of the rebellion which
might have shown even the official mind very clearly what sort of
man this Major of Engineers was. The last incident of the war was
the surrender of the great lake-city of Soo-Chow, and the Wangs, or
chiefs of the rebels, laid down their arms on a guarantee of safety and
good treatment. The Chinese way of acting up to this was to chop the
heads off the whole lot. Now Gordon considered himself in a measure
responsible for this guarantee, and the way in which he marked his
sense of the breach of faith was characteristically unique.
The brilliancy of his services was recognised by a money gift of 10,000
taels (between three and four thousand pounds of English money).
Gordon acknowledged it by writing on the back of the Imperial letter:
“Major Gordon regrets that, owing to the circumstances which occurred
since the capture of Soo-Chow, he is unable to receive any mark of his
Majesty the Emperor’s recognition.”
If ever a sceptred monarch got the snub direct the Son of Heaven must
have got it then, although the probability is that the 10,000 taels
never found their way back to the Imperial treasury. Gordon also wanted
to throw up the whole business, but the rebellion suddenly broke out
again in another place, and so he went on with his work until it was
finally crushed, for he was not the sort of man who liked to begin a
thing and not get through with it.
His brilliant success in every single operation that he conducted
clearly proved, as I have said, that in Gordon Britain possessed a true
leader of men and master of affairs; in other words an Empire-Maker of
the first order. And yet she first ignored and undervalued him, and
then, as David did with Uriah, put him in the forefront of the battle
and left him there to die.
For twenty years after we had wars in many places--in South and West
Africa, in Egypt, Abyssinia, and Afghanistan. In some we gained credit
and in some disgrace, but during all that twenty years the leaden eye
of officialdom never seems to have fallen upon Gordon. The Chinamen
were quicker sighted. He was the first and I believe the only “foreign
devil” who was endowed with the Yellow Jacket and made one of the
bodyguard of the Son of Heaven.
If he had chosen he might have made an enormous fortune and risen to
any dignity short of the throne that the Flowery Land had to offer,
but as a matter of fact he left China poorer than he went into it,
bringing away with him only that big gold medal which he afterwards
gave anonymously to charity.
And all this time he was, as one of his biographers and a fellow
soldier has truly said, “not only without honour in his own country,
but was regarded by many of the mandarins and ruling classes of his
fellow countymen as a madman.” The use of the word “mandarin” there
will be understood if we remember that his brother mandarins of China
held him in the highest honour.
He came back to England in 1865, and was given the command of the Royal
Engineers at Gravesend, and there for six years he did the routine work
of a soldier, and in his spare time won a reputation for missionary
work of the unofficial and unassuming sort which will live as long as
his fame as a soldier and leader of men.
Here in the interval between his two careers we may take a glance at
the physical man as he was just about now. This is how his comrade Sir
William Butler describes him: “In figure Gordon, at forty years of
age, stood somewhat under middle height, slight but strong, active,
and muscular. A profusion of thick, brown hair clustered above a
broad, open forehead. His features were regular, his mouth firm, and
his expression when silent had a certain undertone of sadness which
instantly vanished when he spoke.
“But it was the clear, grey-blue eyes, and the low, soft, and very
distinct voice that left the most lasting impression on the memory of
the man who had seen and spoken with Charles Gordon, and an eye that
seemed to have looked at great distances and seen the load of life
carried on men’s shoulders, and a voice that, like the clear chime of
some Flemish belfry, had in it fresh music to welcome the newest hour,
even though it had rung out the note of many a vanished day.”
Such was, then, the outer aspect of the man who at length went to Egypt
at the invitation of Nubar Pasha and the Khedive Ismael, to begin that
work which in the end cost one of the most valuable of British lives,
and made the delta and valley of the Nile what they are to-day in
everything but name--a British province.
In this sense Gordon was _de facto_ an Empire-Maker. The mendacious
amenities of Diplomacy may lisp out meaningless phrases about the
evacuation of Egypt, but the fact is that we have re-created the land
of the Pharaohs, we have brought it from bankruptcy to prosperity, we
have released the fellah from the terror of the lash and the servitude
of forced labour. We have raised a downtrodden peasantry to the
position of self-respecting citizens, and we have turned slaves into
soldiers. This was the work that Gordon began for us, although we did
not employ him to do it, or recognise that he was doing it; but, having
taken it over and carried it so far, it is hardly likely that even
British officialdom will commit such a crime against civilisation as
the surrender of the almost completed task would now be.
Gordon went south from Cairo by way of Suakin and Berber to Khartoum,
taking with him the somewhat curious title of Governor of the
Equator--which of course meant the Equatorial Provinces--and a very
distinct conception of a Central African Dominion which the soldiers
and statesmen of other generations will realise in due course,
provided always that the onward march of the Anglo-Saxon is not turned
aside or stopped by faint-heartedness within or disaster without.
His headquarters or capital was a place called Gondokoro, situate in
the midst of a ghastly region of river, lake, and swamp, sunbaked by
day, and miasma-haunted by night. He went up by steamer from Khartoum
and, some two hundred miles above the city, he passed the island of
Abba in the White Nile, and in one of his letters home he wrote these
words which read somewhat weirdly in the lurid light of the camp-fires
which seven years later closed round Khartoum:
“Last night, March 26th, we were going slowly along in the moonlight
and I was thinking of you all and of the expeditions and Nubar and Co.,
when all of a sudden from a large bush came peals of laughter. I felt
put out, but it turned out to be birds, who laughed at us from the
bushes for some time in a very rude way. They are a species of stork,
and seemed in capital spirits and highly amused at anybody thinking of
going to Gondokoro with the hope of doing anything.”
But the laughing storks were not the only inhabitants of the Island
of Abba, for, in a cave among its rocks, there was dwelling at that
very moment a certain Moslem monk, or dervish, named Mohammed Achmet,
who had already won some reputation for sanctity among his fellow
tribesmen.
It would have been a most unwarrantable and, for Gordon, quite an
impossible thing to do, and yet, so far is fact stranger than fiction,
that the whole history of about a quarter of a continent would have
been changed for the better, and the march of civilisation and humanity
in Northern Africa would have been incalculably accelerated if the
Governor-General of the Equator had stopped his boat just at that
point, landed his men on the island, routed the holy man out of his
cave, and either put a bullet through his head or drowned him in the
Nile; for this recluse, then unknown beyond the confines of his native
desert, was destined seven years later to be hailed by the Soudan
tribesmen as the Mahdi--a word which to us means so much disgrace and
disaster as well as hard and tardily won triumph that there is no need
here to further elaborate the coincidence.
It was not a pleasant land, this scene of Gordon’s first government.
As he himself says of the wilderness: “No one can conceive the utter
misery of these lands. Heat and mosquitoes day and night all the
year round.” These are few words, but I am able to say from personal
experience that to those who know what African heat and African
mosquitoes _are_ they speak very eloquently.
Here, until October, 1876, Gordon lived and worked and suffered, making
maps, building forts, enticing traders to come to him, teaching his
soldiers to work and to till the ground and raise crops instead of
plundering the natives. One by one his staff died about him, but still
somehow the work went on.
When he first arrived he wrote: “the only possessions Egypt has in my
province are two forts, one here at Gondokoro and the other at Fatiko.
There are three hundred men in one and two hundred in the other. You
can’t go out in safety half a mile.”
But towards the end of ’76 the line of posts had been pushed to Duffli,
a place on the Nile only three degrees north of the Equator itself.
Lake Albert Nyanza had been circumnavigated for the first time by a
steamboat and mapped out--not by Gordon himself, who declined the
honour of first steaming on its waters, but by an Italian lieutenant
of his, named Gessi, and his reason for doing this was “to give a
practical proof of what I think regarding the inordinate praise which
is given to an explorer.”
His idea was that those who did the hard work, the getting up of
stores and boats and other impedimenta over rapids and across deserts,
were the real men who deserved the honour. “But all this would go for
nothing in comparison with the fact of going on the lake, which you
may say is a small affair when you have the boats ready for you”--from
which certain much-boomed and belauded explorers known to latter-day
fame might well learn wisdom as well as a little becoming modesty.
The farther south the bounds of Equatoria were pushed the more dismal
the country seems to have become. He calls it “a dead, mournful spot,
with a heavy, damp dew penetrating everywhere. It is as if the angel
Azrael had spread his wings over this land. You have little idea of the
silence and solitude. I am sure no one whom God did not support could
bear up. It is simply killing.”
At length the three years of his miserable service came to an end. In
October he set his face northward from Khartoum and ate his Christmas
dinner in London.
It was in those days that Britain woke up to some sense of her
opportunities and responsibilities. She had begun what was then called
the “forward” policy, and which to-day with wider vision and sounder
wisdom we call the Imperial policy.
Unhappily the fickle breath of popular favour soon blew the other way
for a space; a halt was called, then a retreat was sounded, and of
course with the inevitable result. The arms of Britain were sullied
by defeat, and her ancient honour was stained by the breach of her
plighted word and the desertion of those who had trusted to her faith.
This was the dark and disgraceful period which lasted from the end
of 1880 to the beginning of 1885. It began with the desertion of the
heroic British garrisons in the Transvaal and the everlasting shame
of Majuba Hill, and it ended with the political betrayal and the
constructive murder of Charles George Gordon.
It was on January 31, 1877, that Gordon went back to Africa as
Governor-General of the Soudan. On May 5th he was installed at
Khartoum; on the 19th he left to strike his first blow against slavery;
by June 7th he had crossed four hundred miles of wilderness and passed
the frontier of Dafour.
His movements during this time, amazing as they are now to us, were
absolutely paralysing to the chiefs and officials of the country. To
them a Pasha of Egypt was a portly gentleman, never in a hurry, never
inclined to leniency or mercy, a staunch upholder of the slave trade in
its worst as well as its best aspects, and possessing a very keen eye
indeed to the main chance.
But the quite phenomenal Pasha who now flits across their astonished
vision is a lean, yellow-faced little man, clad in the gorgeous but
dusty and travel-stained uniform of a Marshal of Turkey, mounted on a
swift dromedary which out-distances every other animal of the desert
save the beast ridden by the Arab sheikh who accompanies him. The two
fly from point to point with incredible rapidity; the words of the
Pasha are sometimes stern and sometimes mild, but always just and
always dead against slavery. There is no talk of what he wants for
himself, but only of what he wants done or left undone, because this or
that is right or wrong--and what he wants he gets.
The troops that came labouring after him were of such miserable
material that they deserved only to be made slaves themselves, and such
the Arabs would speedily have made them but for this yellow-faced,
bright-eyed man, who set them one against another, played off their
jealousies and hatreds, and generally out-manœuvred them with such
consummate and incomprehensible skill, striking at such vast distances
with such incredible rapidity, that in four months a seemingly
impossible feat had been accomplished, and the rebellion of the
slave-kings put down.
And yet it was all hopeless. The slave trade was too much for him, as
it has so far been too much for every one else. “I declare I see no
human way to stop it!” he writes in one of his letters. “When you have
got the ink that has soaked into blotting-paper out of it, then slavery
will cease in these lands.”
In the November of 1877 there occurred an incident which was destined
in after years to bear terrible fruit. He travelled from Kordofan
_viâ_ Khartoum to Merawy. He was on his way to Wadi Halfa to see about
pushing on the railway from there to Dongola. But before he got there
a dispatch reached him saying that the Abyssinians had invaded the
Eastern Soudan. Back he went, post-haste, only to find the news was
false.
If it had not been for this the railway would have been completed, and
the cataracts of the Nile would not have delayed the tardily-sent
Relief Expedition until the Arab bullets had done their work and
gallant Gordon’s busy head had rolled to the foot of the Mahdi’s throne.
A few weeks after this he is once more in Cairo in obedience to an
urgent summons from the Khedive. The work was this time financial. The
grip of the foreign bondholder was closing round the throat of the
fellaheen, and the bill for official extravagance and incompetence had
to be paid. It was characteristic of Gordon that his first financial
reform was the cutting down of his own salary from six thousand to
three thousand a year.
This was all very well, but when he proposed to apply the same methods
to other people’s salaries he was very soon given to understand that
he was not the kind of man who was wanted in Cairo just then, so he
promptly threw up his presidency of the Committee of Inquiry and
went back to two years’ more work in the Soudan, to fight the slave
trade again in the old heroic, hopeless fashion, and to make maps and
plans; to fly hither and thither over the ghastly, waterless country,
sometimes riding for as much as two months at a time, till at last the
replacement of his old friend Ismael by Tewfik Pasha once more called
him back to Cairo.
This time he went to Abyssinia also, and got arrested twice, a
circumstance which enabled him to give us the following word picture of
King Johannes. “He is of the strictest sect of the Pharisees. He talks
like the Old Testament. Drunk overnight, he is up at dawn reading the
psalms. If he were in England he would never miss a prayer-meeting, and
would have a Bible as big as a portmanteau.”
After his release he came home again to rest, as he thought, but as a
fact to be called after a few weeks’ run on the Continent to take the
command of the Colonial Forces at the Cape of Good Hope.
It was the eve of the Transvaal War, and now Gordon made the first and
the greatest mistake of his life. He refused the command. If he had
taken it there might have been no Transvaal War; certainly there would
have been no Ingogo or Majuba Hill. He started instead to India to be
Secretary to Lord Ripon, the new Liberal Viceroy.
Three days after he landed he threw up his appointment, and two days
later he received an urgent invitation from China. He asked for leave,
and the War Office refused. He threw up his commission, making a
present of its value, about £6,000, to his stupid and graceless masters.
He stopped the war with Russia, and sped back again to London,
receiving a telegram on the way telling him that his leave had been
cancelled and his resignation refused.