Produced by Al Haines
[Frontispiece: He would lead the troops onwards with the little cane he
nearly always carried.]
THE CHILDREN'S HEROES SERIES
THE STORY OF
GENERAL GORDON
BY
JEANIE LANG
LONDON: T. C. & E. C. JACK, LTD.,
35 and 36 Paternoster Row, E.C.
AND EDINBURGH
1906
TO
ARCHIE AND BERTIE DICKSON
AND ALL BOYS WHO ARE GOING
TO SERVE THEIR KING
ON LAND OR SEA
PREFACE
DEAR ARCHIE AND BERTIE,
When boys read the old fairy tales, and the stories of King Arthur's
Round Table, and the Knights of the Faerie Queen, they sometimes wonder
sadly why the knights that they see are not like those of the olden
days.
Knights now are often stout old gentlemen who never rode horses or had
lances in their hands, but who made much money in the City, and who
have no more furious monsters near them than their own motor-cars.
Only a very few knights are like what your own grandfather was.
"I wish I had lived long ago," say some of the boys. "Then I might
have killed dragons, and fought for my Queen, and sought for the Holy
Grail. Nobody does those things now. Though I can be a soldier and
fight for the King, that is a quite different thing."
But if the boys think this, it is because they do not quite understand.
Even now there live knights as pure as Sir Galahad, as brave and true
as St. George. They may not be what the world calls "knights"; yet
they are fighting against all that is not good, and true, and honest,
and clean, just as bravely as the knights fought in days of old.
And it is of one of those heroes, who sought all his life to find what
was holy, who fought all his life against evil, and who died serving
his God, his country, and his Queen, that I want to tell you now.
Your friend,
JEANIE LANG.
CONTENTS
Chapter
I. "Charlie Gordon"
II. Gordon's First Battles
III. "Chinese Gordon"
IV. "The Kernel"
V. Gordon and the Slavers
VI. Khartoum
ILLUSTRATIONS
He would lead the troops onwards with the little cane
he nearly always carried . . . . . . . . . _Frontispiece_
The Corporal was butted downstairs
The shell struck the ground five yards in front of him
With his own hands he dragged him from the ranks
Gordon appeared with soap, towels, a brush, a sponge,
and a fresh suit of clothes
In the Soudan buying two children for a basketful of dhoora
There rode into their camp Gordon Pasha
Looking for the help that never came
THE STORY OF
GENERAL GORDON
CHAPTER I
"CHARLIE GORDON"
Sixty years ago, at Woolwich, the town on the Thames where the gunners
of our army are trained, there lived a mischievous, curly-haired,
blue-eyed boy, whose name was Charlie Gordon.
The Gordons were a Scotch family, and Charlie came of a race of
soldiers. His great-grandfather had fought for King George, and was
taken prisoner at the battle of Prestonpans, when many other Gordons
were fighting for Prince Charlie. His grandfather had served bravely
in different regiments and in many lands. His father was yet another
gallant soldier, who thought that there was no life so good as the
soldier's life, and nothing so fine as to serve in the British army.
Of him it is said that he was "kind-hearted, generous, cheerful, full
of humour, always just, living by the code of honour," and "greatly
beloved." His wife belonged to a family of great merchant adventurers
and explorers, the Enderbys, whose ships had done many daring things on
far seas.
Charlie Gordon's mother was one of the people who never lose their
tempers, who always make the best of everything, and who are always
thinking of how to help others and never of themselves.
So little Charlie came of brave and good people, and when he was a very
little boy he must have heard much of his soldier uncles and cousins
and his soldier brother, and must even have seen the swinging kilts and
heard the pipes of the gallant regiment that is known as the Gordon
Highlanders.
Charles George Gordon was born at Woolwich on the 28th January 1833,
but while he was still a little child his father, General Gordon, went
to hold a command in Corfu, an island off the coast of Turkey, at the
mouth of the Adriatic Sea. The Duke of Cambridge long afterwards spoke
of the bright little boy who used to be in the room next his in that
house in Corfu, but we know little of Charles Gordon until he was ten
years old. His father was then given an important post at Woolwich,
and he and his family returned to England.
Then began merry days for little Charlie.
In long after years he wrote to one of his nieces about the great
building at Woolwich where firearms for the British army are made and
stored: "You never, any of you, made a proper use of the Arsenal
workmen, as we did. They used to neglect their work for our orders,
and turned out some splendid squirts--articles that would wet you
through in a minute. As for the cross-bows they made, they were grand
with screws."
There were five boys and six girls in the Gordon family. Charlie was
the fourth son, and two of his elder brothers were soldiers while he
was still quite a little lad.
It was in his holidays that the Arsenal was his playground, for on the
return from Corfu he was sent to school at Taunton, where you may still
see his initials, "C.G.G.", carved deep on the desk he used.
At school he did not seem to be specially clever. He was not fond of
lessons, but he drew very well, and made first-rate maps. He was
always brimful of high spirits and mischief, and ready for any sort of
sport, and the people of Woolwich must have sighed when Charlie came
home for his holidays.
One time when he came he found that his father's house was overrun with
mice. This was too good a chance to miss. He and one of his brothers
caught all the mice they could, carried them to the house of the
commandant of the garrison, which was opposite to theirs, gently opened
the door, and let the mice loose in their new home.
Once, with the screw-firing cross-bows that the workmen at the Arsenal
had made for them, the wild Gordon boys broke twenty-seven panes of
glass in one of the large warehouses of the Arsenal. A captain who was
in the room narrowly escaped being shot, one of the screws passing
close to his head and fixing itself into the wall as if it had been
placed there by a screwdriver.
Freddy, the youngest of the five boys, had an anxious, if merry, time
when his big brothers came back from school. With them he would ring
the doorbells of houses till the angry servants of Woolwich seemed for
ever to be opening doors to invisible ringers. Often, too, little
Freddy would be pushed into a house, the bell rung by his mischievous
brothers, and the door held, so that Freddy alone had to face the
surprised people inside.
But the wildest of their tricks was one that they played on the cadets
at Woolwich--the big boys who were being trained to be officers of
artillery. "The Pussies" was the name they went by, and it was on the
most grown up of the Pussies that they directed their mischief. The
senior class of cadets was then stationed in the Royal Arsenal, in
front of which were earthworks on which they learned how to defend and
fortify places in time of war. All the ins and outs of these
earthworks were known to Charlie Gordon and his brothers. One dark
night, when a colonel was lecturing to the cadets, a crash as of a
fearful explosion was heard. The cadets, thinking that every pane of
glass in the lecture hall was broken, rushed out like bees from a hive.
They soon saw that the terrific noise had been made by round shot being
thrown at the windows, and well they knew that Charlie Gordon was sure
to be at the bottom of the trick. But the night was dark, and Charlie
knew every passage of the earthworks better than any big cadet there.
Although there were many big boys as hounds and only two little boys as
hares, the Gordons easily escaped from the angry cadets. For some time
afterwards they carefully kept away from the Arsenal, for they knew
that if the "Pussies" should catch them they need expect no mercy.
From Taunton Charlie went for one year to be coached for the army at a
school at Shooters Hill. From there, when he was not quite sixteen, he
passed into the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich.
As a cadet, Charlie Gordon was no more of a book-worm than he had been
as a schoolboy. There was no piece of mischief, no wild prank, that
that boy with the curly fair hair and merry blue eyes did not have a
share in. But if he fairly shared the fun, Charlie would sometimes
take more than his fair share of blame or punishment. He was never
afraid to own up, and he was always ready to bear his friends'
punishment as well as his own for scrapes they had got into together.
Of course he got into scrapes. There was never a boy that was full of
wild spirits who did not. But Charlie Gordon never got into a scrape
for any thoughtless mischief and naughtiness. He never did anything
mean, never anything that was not straight, and true, and honourable.
He had been at the Academy for some time, and had earned many
good-conduct badges, when complaint was made of the noise and roughness
with which the cadets rushed down the narrow staircase from their
dining-room. One of the senior cadets, a corporal, was stationed at
the head of this staircase, his arms outstretched, to prevent the usual
wild rush past. The sight of this severe little officer was too great
a temptation for Charlie Gordon. Down went his head, forward he
rushed, and the corporal was butted not only downstairs, but right
through the glass door beyond. The corporal's body escaped unhurt, but
his feelings did not, and Charlie was placed under arrest, and very
nearly expelled from the College.
[Illustration: The Corporal was butted downstairs]
When his term at Woolwich was nearly over, a great deal of bullying was
found to be going on, and the new boys were questioned about it by the
officers in charge. One new boy said that Charlie Gordon had hit him
on the head with a clothes-brush--"not a severe blow," he had to own.
But Charlie's bear-fighting had this time a hard punishment, for he was
put back six months for his commission.
Until then he had meant to be an officer of Artillery--a "gunner," as
they are called. Now he knew that he would always be six months behind
his gunner friends, and so decided to work instead for the Engineers,
and get his commission as a "sapper."
At college, as well as at school, his map-drawing was very good, and
his mother was very proud of what he did. One day he found her showing
some visitors a map he had made. His hatred of being praised for what
he thought he did not deserve, and his hot temper, sprang out together,
and he tore up the map and threw it in the grate.
But almost at once he was sorry for his rudeness and unkindness, and
afterwards he carefully pasted the torn pieces of the map together for
his mother.
"How my mother loved me!" he wrote of her long years afterwards.
His hot temper was sometimes shown to his officers. He would bear more
than his share of blame when he felt that he deserved it, but when he
felt that blame was undeserved, his temper would flash out in a sudden
storm.
One of his superiors at Woolwich once said, scolding him,--"You will
never make an officer."
Charlie's honour was touched. His temper blazed out, and he tore off
his epaulettes and threw them at the officer's feet.
He always hated his examinations, yet he never failed to pass them.
When he was fifty years old, he wrote to his sister,--"I had a fearful
dream last night: I was back at the Academy, and had to pass an
examination! I was wide awake enough to know I had forgotten all I had
ever learnt, and it was truly some time ere I could collect myself and
realise I was a general, so completely had I become a cadet again.
What misery those examinations were!"
When he was nineteen, Charlie Gordon became Sub-Lieutenant Charles
Gordon of the Royal Engineers.
From Woolwich he went to Chatham, the headquarters of the Royal
Engineers, to have some special training as an Engineer officer.
There he found his cleverness at map-drawing a great help in his work,
and for nearly two years he worked hard at all that an officer of
Engineers must know, and soon he was looked on as a very promising
young officer.
In February 1854, he gained the rank of full lieutenant, and was sent
to Pembroke Dock to help with the new fortifications and batteries that
were being made there.
Whatever Charlie Gordon did, he did with all his might, and he was now
as keen on making plans and building fortifications, as he had once
been in planning and playing mischievous tricks.
When he returned to Pembroke thirty years later, an old ferryman there
remembered him.
"Are you the gent who used to walk across the stream right through the
water?" he asked.
And all through his life no stream was too strong for Gordon to face.
Gordon had not been long at Pembroke when a great war broke out between
Russia on one side, and England, France, and Turkey on the other. It
was fought in a part of Russia called the Crimea, and is known as the
Crimean War.
The two elder Gordons, Henry and Enderby, were out there with their
batteries, and, like every other keen young soldier, Charlie Gordon was
wild to go.
After a few months at Pembroke, orders came for him to go to Corfu. He
suspected his father of having managed to get him sent there to be out
of harm's way.
"It is a great shame of you," he wrote. But very shortly afterwards
came fresh orders, telling him to go to the Crimea without delay.
A general whom he had told how much he longed to go where the fighting
was, had had the orders changed.
On the 4th December 1854 his orders came to Pembroke. Two days later
he reported himself at the War Office in London, and on the evening of
the same day he was at Portsmouth, ready to sail. At first it was
intended that he should go out in a collier, but that arrangement was
altered. Back he came to London, and went from there to France.
At Marseilles he got a ship to Constantinople, and just as fearlessly
and as happily as he had ever gone on one of his mischievous
expeditions as a little boy, Charlie Gordon went off to face hardships,
and dangers, and death in the Crimea, and to learn his first lessons in
war.