Though Suleiman had been killed and his
power broken, the slave-trade still flourished in the Sudan.
power broken, the slave-trade still flourished in the Sudan.
Strachey - Eminent Victorians
.
.
He is superior in manner and bearing
to any of the foreigners whom I have come into contact with, and does
not show outwardly that conceit which makes most of them repugnant in my
sight. '
A few months later, after he had accompanied Gordon on a victorious
expedition, the Mandarin's enthusiasm burst forth.
'What a sight for tired eyes,' he wrote, 'what an elixir for a heavy
heart--to see this splendid Englishman fight! . . . If there is anything
that I admire nearly as much as the superb scholarship of Tseng Kuofan,
it is the military qualities of this fine officer. He is a glorious
fellow! ' In his emotion, Li Hung Chang addressed Gordon as his brother,
declaring that he 'considered him worthy to fill the place of the
brother who is departed. Could I have said more in all the words of the
world? ' Then something happened which impressed and mystified the
sensitive Chinaman.
'The Englishman's face was first filled with a deep pleasure, and then
he seemed to be thinking of something depressing and sad; for the
smile went from his mouth and there were tears in his eyes when he
thanked me for what I had said. Can it be that he has, or has had, some
great trouble in his life, and that he fights recklessly to forget it,
or that Death has no terrors for him? '
But, as time went on, Li Hung Chang's attitude began to change. 'General
Gordon,' he notes in July, 'must control his tongue, even if he lets his
mind run loose. ' The Englishman had accused him of intriguing with the
Chinese general, and of withholding money due to the Ever Victorious
Army. 'Why does he not accord me the honours that are due to me, as head
of the military and civil authority in these parts? ' By September, the
Governor's earlier transports have been replaced by a more judicial
frame of mind.
'With his many faults, his pride, his temper, and his never-ending
demand for money, (for one is a noble man, and in spite of all I have
said to him or about him) I will ever think most highly of him. . . . He is
an honest man, but difficult to get on with. '
Disagreements of this kind might perhaps have been tided over until the
end of the campaign; but an unfortunate incident suddenly led to a more
serious quarrel. Gordon's advance had been fiercely contested, but it
had been constant; he had captured several important towns; and in
October he laid siege to the city of Soo-chow, once one of the most
famous and splendid in China. In December, its fall being obviously
imminent, the Taiping leaders agreed to surrender it on condition that
their lives were spared. Gordon was a party to the agreement, and laid
special stress upon his presence with the Imperial forces as a pledge of
its fulfilment. No sooner, however, was the city surrendered than the
rebel 'Wangs' were assassinated. In his fury, it is said that Gordon
searched everywhere for Li Hung Chang with a loaded pistol in his hand.
He was convinced of the complicity of the Governor, who, on his side,
denied that he was responsible for what had happened.
'I asked him why I should plot, and go around a mountain, when a mere
order, written with five strokes of the quill, would have accomplished
the same thing. He did not answer, but he insulted me, and said he would
report my treachery, as he called it, to Shanghai and England. Let him
do so; he cannot bring the crazy Wangs back. '
The agitated Mandarin hoped to placate Gordon by a large gratuity and an
Imperial medal; but the plan was not successful.
'General Gordon,' he writes, 'called upon me in his angriest mood. He
repeated his former speeches about the Wangs. I did not attempt to argue
with him . . . He refused the 10,000 taels, which I had ready for him,
and, with an oath, said that he did not want the Throne's medal. This is
showing the greatest disrespect. '
Gordon resigned his command; and it was only with the utmost reluctance
that he agreed at last to resume it. An arduous and terrible series of
operations followed; but they were successful, and by June, 1864, the
Ever Victorious Army, having accomplished its task, was disbanded. The
Imperial forces now closed round Nankin; the last hopes of the Tien Wang
had vanished. In the recesses of his seraglio, the Celestial King,
judging that the time had come for the conclusion of his mission,
swallowed gold leaf until he ascended to Heaven. In July, Nankin was
taken, the remaining chiefs were executed, and the rebellion was at an
end. The Chinese Government gave Gordon the highest rank in its military
hierarchy, and invested him with the yellow jacket and the peacock's
feather. He rejected an enormous offer of money; but he could not refuse
a great gold medal, specially struck in his honour by order of the
Emperor. At the end of the year he returned to England, where the
conqueror of the Taipings was made a Companion of the Bath.
That the English authorities should have seen fit to recognise Gordon's
services by the reward usually reserved for industrious clerks was
typical of their attitude towards him until the very end of his career.
Perhaps if he had been ready to make the most of the wave of popularity
which greeted him on his return--if he had advertised his fame and, amid
high circles, played the part of Chinese Gordon in a becoming
manner--the results would have been different. But he was by nature
farouche; his soul revolted against dinner parties and stiff shirts; and
the presence of ladies--especially of fashionable ladies--filled him
with uneasiness. He had, besides, a deeper dread of the world's
contaminations. And so, when he was appointed to Gravesend to supervise
the erection of a system of forts at the mouth of the Thames, he
remained there quietly for six years, and at last was almost forgotten.
The forts, which were extremely expensive and quite useless, occupied
his working hours; his leisure he devoted to acts of charity and to
religious contemplation. The neighbourhood was a poverty-stricken one,
and the kind Colonel, with his tripping step and simple manner, was soon
a familiar figure in it, chatting with the seamen, taking provisions to
starving families, or visiting some bedridden old woman to light her
fire. He was particularly fond of boys. Ragged street arabs and rough
sailor-lads crowded about him. They were made free of his house and
garden; they visited him in the evenings for lessons and advice; he
helped them, found them employment, corresponded with them when they
went out into the world. They were, he said, his Wangs. It was only by a
singular austerity of living that he was able to afford such a variety
of charitable expenses. The easy luxuries of his class and station were
unknown to him: his clothes verged upon the shabby; and his frugal meals
were eaten at a table with a drawer, into which the loaf and plate were
quickly swept at the approach of his poor visitors. Special occasions
demanded special sacrifices. When, during the Lancashire famine, a
public subscription was opened, finding that he had no ready money, he
remembered his Chinese medal, and, after effacing the inscription,
dispatched it as an anonymous gift.
Except for his boys and his paupers, he lived alone. In his solitude, he
ruminated upon the mysteries of the universe; and those religious
tendencies, which had already shown themselves, now became a fixed and
dominating factor in his life. His reading was confined almost entirely
to the Bible; but the Bible he read and re-read with an untiring,
unending assiduity. There, he was convinced, all truth was to be found;
and he was equally convinced that he could find it. The doubts of
philosophers, the investigations of commentators, the smiles of men of
the world, the dogmas of Churches--such things meant nothing to the
Colonel. Two facts alone were evident: there was the Bible, and there
was himself; and all that remained to be done was for him to discover
what were the Bible's instructions, and to act accordingly. In order to
make this discovery it was only necessary for him to read the Bible over
and over again; and therefore, for the rest of his life, he did so.
The faith that he evolved was mystical and fatalistic; it was also
highly unconventional. His creed, based upon the narrow foundations of
Jewish Scripture, eked out occasionally by some English evangelical
manual, was yet wide enough to ignore every doctrinal difference, and
even, at moments, to transcend the bounds of Christianity itself. The
just man was he who submitted to the Will of God, and the Will of God,
inscrutable and absolute, could be served aright only by those who
turned away from earthly desires and temporal temptations, to rest
themselves whole-heartedly upon the in-dwelling Spirit. Human beings
were the transitory embodiments of souls who had existed through an
infinite past, and would continue to exist through an infinite future.
The world was vanity; the flesh was dust and ashes.
'A man,' Gordon wrote to his sister, 'who knows not the secret, who has
not the in-dwelling of God revealed to him, is like this--[picture of a
circle with Body and Soul written within it]. He takes the promises and
curses as addressed to him as one man, and will not hear of there being
any birth before his natural birth, in any existence except with the
body he is in. The man to whom the secret (the indwelling of God) is
revealed is like this: [picture of a circle with soul and body enclosed
in two separate circles].
He applies the promises to one and the curses to the other, if
disobedient, which he must be, except the soul is enabled by God to
rule. He then sees he is not of this world; for when he speaks of
himself he quite disregards the body his soul lives in, which is
earthly. '
Such conceptions are familiar enough in the history of religious
thought: they are those of the hermit and the fakir; and it might have
been expected that, when once they had taken hold upon his mind, Gordon
would have been content to lay aside the activities of his profession,
and would have relapsed at last into the complete retirement of holy
meditation. But there were other elements in his nature which urged him
towards a very different course. He was no simple quietist. He was an
English gentleman, an officer, a man of energy and action, a lover of
danger and the audacities that defeat danger; a passionate creature,
flowing over with the self-assertiveness of independent judgment and the
arbitrary temper of command.
Whatever he might find in his pocket-Bible, it was not for such as he to
dream out his days in devout obscurity. But, conveniently enough, he
found nothing in his pocket-Bible indicating that he should. What he did
find was that the Will of God was inscrutable and absolute; that it was
man's duty to follow where God's hand led; and, if God's hand led
towards violent excitements and extraordinary vicissitudes, that it was
not only futile, it was impious to turn another way. Fatalism is always
apt to be a double-edged philosophy; for while, on the one hand, it
reveals the minutest occurrences as the immutable result of a rigid
chain of infinitely predestined causes, on the other, it invests the
wildest incoherences of conduct or of circumstance with the sanctity of
eternal law. And Gordon's fatalism was no exception. The same doctrine
that led him to dally with omens, to search for prophetic texts, and to
append, in brackets, the apotropaic initials D. V. after every statement
in his letters implying futurity, led him also to envisage his moods and
his desires, his passing reckless whims and his deep unconscious
instincts, as the mysterious manifestations of the indwelling God. That
there was danger lurking in such a creed he was very well aware. The
grosser temptations of the world--money and the vulgar attributes of
power--had, indeed, no charms for him; but there were subtler and more
insinuating allurements which it was not so easy to resist. More than
one observer declared that ambition was, in reality, the essential
motive in his life: ambition, neither for wealth nor titles, but for
fame and influence, for the swaying of multitudes, and for that kind of
enlarged and intensified existence 'where breath breathes most even in
the mouths of men'. Was it so? In the depths of Gordon's soul there were
intertwining contradictions--intricate recesses where egoism and
renunciation melted into one another, where the flesh lost itself in the
spirit, and the spirit in the flesh. What was the Will of God? The
question, which first became insistent during his retirement at
Gravesend, never afterwards left him; it might almost be said that he
spent the remainder of his life in searching for the answer to it. In
all his Odysseys, in all his strange and agitated adventures, a day
never passed on which he neglected the voice of eternal wisdom as it
spoke through the words of Paul or Solomon, of Jonah or Habakkuk. He
opened his Bible, he read, and then he noted down his reflections upon
scraps of paper, which, periodically pinned together, he dispatched to
one or other of his religious friends, and particularly his sister
Augusta. The published extracts from these voluminous outpourings lay
bare the inner history of Gordon's spirit, and reveal the pious
visionary of Gravesend in the restless hero of three continents.
His seclusion came to an end in a distinctly providential manner. In
accordance with a stipulation in the Treaty of Paris, an international
commission had been appointed to improve the navigation of the Danube;
and Gordon, who had acted on a similar body fifteen years earlier, was
sent out to represent Great Britain. At Constantinople, he chanced to
meet the Egyptian minister, Nubar Pasha. The Governorship of the
Equatorial Provinces of the Sudan was about to fall vacant; and Nubar
offered the post to Gordon, who accepted it.
'For some wise design,' he wrote to his sister, 'God turns events one
way or another, whether man likes it or not, as a man driving a horse
turns it to right or left without consideration as to whether the horse
likes that way or not. To be happy, a man must be like a well-broken,
willing horse, ready for anything. Events will go as God likes. '
And then followed six years of extraordinary, desperate, unceasing, and
ungrateful labour. The unexplored and pestilential region of Equatoria,
stretching southwards to the Great Lakes and the sources of the Nile,
had been annexed to Egypt by the Khedive Ismail, who, while he
squandered his millions on Parisian ballet-dancers, dreamt strange
dreams of glory and empire. Those dim tracts of swamp and forest in
Central Africa were--so he declared--to be 'opened up'; they were to
receive the blessings of civilisation, they were to become a source of
eternal honour to himself and Egypt. The slave-trade, which flourished
there, was to be put down; the savage inhabitants were to become
acquainted with freedom, justice, and prosperity. Incidentally, a
government monopoly in ivory was to be established, and the place was to
be made a paying concern. Ismail, hopelessly in debt to a horde of
European creditors, looked to Europe to support him in his schemes.
Europe, and, in particular, England, with her passion for extraneous
philanthropy, was not averse. Sir Samuel Baker became the first Governor
of Equatoria, and now Gordon was to carry on the good work. In such
circumstances it was only natural that Gordon should consider himself a
special instrument in God's band. To put his disinterestedness beyond
doubt, he reduced his salary, which had been fixed at L10,000, to
L2,000. He took over his new duties early in 1874, and it was not long
before he had a first hint of disillusionment. On his way up the Nile,
he was received in state at Khartoum by the Egyptian Governor-General of
the Sudan, his immediate official superior.
The function ended in a prolonged banquet, followed by a mixed ballet of
soldiers and completely naked young women, who danced in a circle, beat
time with their feet, and accompanied their gestures with a curious
sound of clucking. At last the Austrian Consul, overcome by the
exhilaration of the scene, flung himself in a frenzy among the dancers;
the Governor-General, shouting with delight, seemed about to follow
suit, when Gordon abruptly left the room, and the party broke up in
confusion.
When, 1,500 miles to the southward, Gordon reached the seat of his
government, and the desolation of the Tropics closed over him, the
agonising nature of his task stood fully revealed. For the next three
years he struggled with enormous difficulties--with the confused and
horrible country, the appalling climate, the maddening insects and the
loathsome diseases, the indifference of subordinates and superiors, the
savagery of the slave-traders, and the hatred of the inhabitants. One by
one the small company of his European staff succumbed. With a few
hundred Egyptian soldiers he had to suppress insurrections, make roads,
establish fortified posts, and enforce the government monopoly of ivory.
All this he accomplished; he even succeeded in sending enough money to
Cairo to pay for the expenses of the expedition. But a deep gloom had
fallen upon his spirit. When, after a series of incredible obstacles had
been overcome, a steamer was launched upon the unexplored Albert Nyanza,
he turned his back upon the lake, leaving the glory of its navigation to
his Italian lieutenant, Gessi. 'I wish,' he wrote, 'to give a practical
proof of what I think regarding the inordinate praise which is given to
an explorer. ' Among his distresses and self-mortifications, he loathed
the thought of all such honours, and remembered the attentions of
English society with a snarl.
'When, D. V. , I get home, I do not dine out. My reminiscences of these
lands will not be more pleasant to me than the China ones. What I shall
have done, will be what I have done. Men think giving dinners is
conferring a favour on you . . . Why not give dinners to those who need
them? '
No! His heart was set upon a very different object.
'To each is allotted a distinct work, to each a destined goal; to some
the seat at the right hand or left hand of the Saviour. (It was not His
to give; it was already given--Matthew xx, 23. Again, Judas went to "HIS
OWN PLACE"--Acts i, 25. ) It is difficult for the flesh to accept: "Ye
are dead, ye have naught to do with the world". How difficult for anyone
to be circumcised from the world, to be as indifferent to its pleasures,
its sorrows, and its comforts as a corpse is! That is to know the
resurrection. '
But the Holy Bible was not his only solace. For now, under the parching
African sun, we catch glimpses, for the first time, of Gordon's hand
stretching out towards stimulants of a more material quality. For months
together, we are told, he would drink nothing but pure water; and then
. . . water that was not so pure. In his fits of melancholy, he would shut
himself up in his tent for days at a time, with a hatchet and a flag
placed at the door to indicate that he was not to be disturbed for any
reason whatever; until at last the cloud would lift, the signals would
be removed, and the Governor would reappear, brisk and cheerful.
During, one of these retirements, there was grave danger of a native
attack upon the camp. Colonel Long, the Chief of Staff, ventured, after
some hesitation, to ignore the flag and hatchet, and to enter the
forbidden tent. He found Gordon seated at a table, upon which were an
open Bible and an open bottle of brandy. Long explained the
circumstances, but could obtain no answer beyond the abrupt words--'You
are commander of the camp'--and was obliged to retire, nonplussed, to
deal with the situation as best he could. On the following morning,
Gordon, cleanly shaven, and in the full-dress uniform of the Royal
Engineers, entered Long's hut with his usual tripping step, exclaiming
'Old fellow, now don't be angry with me. I was very low last night.
Let's have a good breakfast--a little b. and s. Do you feel up to it? '
And, with these veering moods and dangerous restoratives, there came an
intensification of the queer and violent elements in the temper of the
man.
His eccentricities grew upon him. He found it more and more
uncomfortable to follow the ordinary course. Official routine was an
agony to him. His caustic and satirical humour expressed itself in a
style that astounded government departments. While he jibed at his
superiors, his subordinates learned to dread the explosions of his
wrath. There were moments when his passion became utterly ungovernable;
and the gentle soldier of God, who had spent the day in quoting texts
for the edification of his sister, would slap the face of his Arab
aide-de-camp in a sudden access of fury, or set upon his Alsatian
servant and kick him until he screamed.
At the end of three years, Gordon resigned his post in Equatoria, and
prepared to return home. But again Providence intervened: the Khedive
offered him, as an inducement to remain in the Egyptian service, a
position of still higher consequence--the Governor-Generalship of the
whole Sudan; and Gordon once more took up his task. Another three years
were passed in grappling with vast revolting provinces, with the
ineradicable iniquities of the slave-trade, and with all the
complications of weakness and corruption incident to an oriental
administration extending over almost boundless tracts of savage
territory which had never been effectively subdued. His headquarters
were fixed in the palace at Khartoum; but there were various interludes
in his government. Once, when the Khedive's finances had become
peculiarly embroiled, he summoned Gordon to Cairo to preside over a
commission which should set matters to rights. Gordon accepted the post,
but soon found that his situation was untenable. He was between the
devil and the deep sea--between the unscrupulous cunning of the Egyptian
Pashas, and the immeasurable immensity of the Khedive's debts to his
European creditors. The Pashas were anxious to use him as a respectable
mask for their own nefarious dealings; and the representatives of the
European creditors, who looked upon him as an irresponsible intruder,
were anxious simply to get rid of him as soon as they could. One of
these representatives was Sir Evelyn Baring, whom Gordon now met for the
first time. An immediate antagonism flashed out between the two men. But
their hostility had no time to mature; for Gordon, baffled on all sides,
and deserted even by the Khedive, precipitately returned to his
Governor-Generalship. Whatever else Providence might have decreed, it
had certainly not decided that he should be a financier.
His tastes and his talents were indeed of a very different kind. In his
absence, a rebellion had broken out in Darfur--one of the vast outlying
provinces of his government--where a native chieftain, Zobeir, had
erected, on a basis of slave-traffic, a dangerous military power. Zobeir
himself had been lured to Cairo, where he was detained in a state of
semi-captivity; but his son, Suleiman, ruled in his stead, and was now
defying the Governor-General. Gordon determined upon a hazardous stroke.
He mounted a camel, and rode, alone, in the blazing heat, across
eighty-five miles of desert, to Suleiman's camp. His sudden apparition
dumbfounded the rebels; his imperious bearing overawed them; he
signified to them that in two days they must disarm and disperse; and
the whole host obeyed. Gordon returned to Khartoum in triumph. But he
had not heard the last of Suleiman. Flying southwards from Darfur to the
neighbouring province of Bahr-el-Ghazal, the young man was soon once
more at the head of a formidable force. A prolonged campaign of extreme
difficulty and danger followed. Eventually, Gordon, summoned again to
Cairo, was obliged to leave to Gessi the task of finally crushing the
revolt. After a brilliant campaign, Gessi forced Suleiman to surrender,
and then shot him as a rebel. The deed was to exercise a curious
influence upon Gordon's fate.
Though Suleiman had been killed and his
power broken, the slave-trade still flourished in the Sudan. Gordon's
efforts to suppress it resembled the palliatives of an empiric treating
the superficial symptoms of some profound constitutional disease. The
root of the malady lay in the slave-markets of Cairo and Constantinople:
the supply followed the demand. Gordon, after years of labour, might
here and there stop up a spring or divert a tributary, but, somehow or
other the waters would reach the river-bed. In the end, he himself came
to recognise this. 'When you have got the ink that has soaked into
blotting-paper out of it,' he said, 'then slavery will cease in these
lands. ' And yet he struggled desperately on; it was not for him to
murmur. 'I feel my own weakness, and look to Him who is Almighty, and I
leave the issue without inordinate care to Him. '
Relief came at last. The Khedive Ismail was deposed; and Gordon felt at
liberty to send in his resignation. Before he left Egypt, however, he
was to experience yet one more remarkable adventure. At his own request,
he set out on a diplomatic mission to the Negus of Abyssinia. The
mission was a complete failure. The Negus was intractable, and, when his
bribes were refused, furious. Gordon was ignominiously dismissed; every
insult was heaped on him; he was arrested, and obliged to traverse the
Abyssinian Mountains in the depth of winter under the escort of a savage
troop of horse. When, after great hardships and dangers, he reached
Cairo, he found the whole official world up in arms against him. The
Pashas had determined at last that they had no further use for this
honest and peculiar Englishman. It was arranged that one of his
confidential dispatches should be published in the newspapers;
naturally, it contained indiscretions; there was a universal outcry--the
man was insubordinate, and mad. He departed under a storm of obloquy. It
seemed impossible that he should ever return to Egypt. On his way home
he stopped in Paris, saw the English Ambassador, Lord Lyons, and
speedily came into conflict with him over Egyptian affairs. There ensued
a heated correspondence, which was finally closed by a letter from
Gordon, ending as follows:
'I have some comfort in thinking that in ten or fifteen years' time it
will matter little to either of us. A black box, six feet six by three
feet wide, will then contain all that is left of Ambassador, or Cabinet
Minister, or of your humble and obedient servant. '
He arrived in England early in 1880 ill and exhausted; and it might have
been supposed that after the terrible activities of his African exile he
would have been ready to rest. But the very opposite was the case; the
next three years were the most momentous of his life. He hurried from
post to post, from enterprise to enterprise, from continent to
continent, with a vertiginous rapidity. He accepted the Private
Secretaryship to Lord Ripon, the new Viceroy of India, and, three days
after his arrival at Bombay, he resigned. He had suddenly realised that
he was not cut out for a Private Secretary, when, on an address being
sent in from some deputation, he was asked to say that the Viceroy had
read it with interest. 'You know perfectly,' he said to Lord William
Beresford, 'that Lord Ripon has never read it, and I can't say that sort
of thing; so I will resign, and you take in my resignation. ' He
confessed to Lord William that the world was not big enough for him,
that there was 'no king or country big enough'; and then he added,
hitting him on the shoulder, 'Yes, that is flesh, that is what I hate,
and what makes me wish to die. '
Two days later, he was off for Pekin. 'Every one will say I am mad,'
were his last words to Lord William Beresford; 'but you say I am not. '
The position in China was critical; war with Russia appeared to be
imminent; and Gordon had been appealed to in order to use his influence
on the side of peace. He was welcomed by many old friends of former
days, among them Li Hung Chang, whose diplomatic views coincided with
his own. Li's diplomatic language, however, was less unconventional. In
an interview with the Ministers, Gordon's expressions were such that the
interpreter shook with terror, upset a cup of tea, and finally refused
to translate the dreadful words; upon which Gordon snatched up a
dictionary, and, with his finger on the word 'idiocy', showed it to the
startled Mandarins. A few weeks later, Li Hung Chang was in power, and
peace was assured. Gordon had spent two and a half days in Pekin, and
was whirling through China, when a telegram arrived from the home
authorities, who viewed his movements with uneasiness, ordering him to
return at once to England. 'It did not produce a twitter in me,' he
wrote to his sister; 'I died long ago, and it will not make any
difference to me; I am prepared to follow the unrolling of the scroll. '
The world, perhaps, was not big enough for him; and yet how clearly he
recognised that he was 'a poor insect! ' 'My heart tells me that, and I
am glad of it. '
On his return to England, he telegraphed to the Government of the Cape
of Good Hope, which had become involved in a war with the Basutos,
offering his services; but his telegram received no reply. Just then,
Sir Howard Elphinstone was appointed to the command of the Royal
Engineers in Mauritius. It was a thankless and insignificant post; and,
rather than accept it, Elphinstone was prepared to retire from the
Army--unless some other officer could be induced, in return for L800, to
act as his substitute. Gordon, who was an old friend, agreed to
undertake the work upon one condition: that he should receive nothing
from Elphinstone; and accordingly, he spent the next year in that remote
and unhealthy island, looking after the barrack repairs and testing the
drains.
While he was thus engaged, the Cape Government, whose difficulties had
been increasing, changed its mind, and early in 1882, begged for
Gordon's help. Once more he was involved in great affairs: a new field
of action opened before him; and then, in a moment, there was another
shift of the kaleidoscope, and again he was thrown upon the world.
Within a few weeks, after a violent quarrel with the Cape authorities,
his mission had come to an end. What should he do next? To what remote
corner or what enormous stage, to what self-sacrificing drudgeries or
what resounding exploits, would the hand of God lead him now? He waited,
in an odd hesitation. He opened the Bible, but neither the prophecies of
Hosea nor the epistles to Timothy gave him any advice. The King of the
Belgians asked if he would be willing to go to the Congo. He was
perfectly willing; he would go whenever the King of the Belgians sent
for him; his services, however, were not required yet. It was at this
juncture that he betook himself to Palestine. His studies there were
embodied in a correspondence with the Rev. Mr. Barnes, filling over
2,000 pages of manuscript--a correspondence which was only put an end to
when, at last, the summons from the King of the Belgians came. He
hurried back to England; but it was not to the Congo that he was being
led by the hand of God.
Gordon's last great adventure, like his first, was occasioned by a
religious revolt. At the very moment when, apparently forever, he was
shaking the dust of Egypt from his feet, Mahommed Ahmed was starting
upon his extraordinary career in the Sudan. The time was propitious for
revolutions. The effete Egyptian Empire was hovering upon the verge of
collapse. The enormous territories of the Sudan were seething with
discontent. Gordon's administration had, by its very vigour, only helped
to precipitate the inevitable disaster. His attacks upon the
slave-trade, his establishment of a government monopoly in ivory, his
hostility to the Egyptian officials, had been so many shocks, shaking to
its foundations the whole rickety machine. The result of all his efforts
had been, on the one hand, to fill the most powerful classes in the
community--the dealers in slaves and, ivory--with a hatred of the
government, and on the other to awaken among the mass of the inhabitants
a new perception of the dishonesty and incompetence of their Egyptian
masters. When, after Gordon's removal, the rule of the Pashas once more
asserted itself over the Sudan, a general combustion became inevitable:
the first spark would set off the blaze. Just then it happened that
Mahommed Ahmed, the son of an insignificant priest in Dongola, having
quarrelled with the Sheikh from whom he was receiving religious
instruction, set up as an independent preacher, with his headquarters at
Abba Island, on the Nile, 150 miles above Khartoum. Like Hong-siu-tsuen,
he began as a religious reformer, and ended as a rebel king. It was his
mission, he declared, to purge the true Faith of its worldliness and
corruptions, to lead the followers of the prophet into the paths of
chastity, simplicity, and holiness; with the puritanical zeal of a
Calvin, be denounced junketings and merrymakings, songs and dances, lewd
living and all the delights of the flesh. He fell into trances, he saw
visions, he saw the prophet and Jesus, and the Angel Izrail accompanying
him and watching over him forever. He prophesied and performed miracles,
and his fame spread through the land.
There is an ancient tradition in the Mohammedan world, telling of a
mysterious being, the last in succession of the twelve holy Imams, who,
untouched by death and withdrawn into the recesses of a mountain, was
destined, at the appointted hour, to come forth again among men. His
title was the Mahdi, the guide; some believed that he would be the
forerunner of the Messiah; others believed that he would be Christ
himself. Already various Mahdis had made their appearance; several had
been highly successful, and two, in medieval times, had founded
dynasties in Egypt. But who could tell whether all these were not
impostors? Might not the twelfth Imam be still waiting, in mystical
concealment, ready to emerge, at any moment, at the bidding of God?
There were signs by which the true Mahdi might be recognised--unmistakable
signs, if one could but read them aright. He must be of the family of
the prophet; he must possess miraculous powers of no common kind; and
his person must be overflowing with a peculiar sanctity. The pious
dwellers beside those distant waters, where holy men by dint of a
constant repetition of one of the ninety-nine names of God, secured the
protection of guardian angels, and where groups of devotees, shaking
their heads with a violence which would unseat the reason of less
athletic worshippers, attained to an extraordinary beatitude, heard with
awe of the young preacher whose saintliness was almost more than mortal
and whose miracles brought amazement to the mind. Was he not also of the
family of the prophet? He himself had said so, and who would disbelieve
the holy man? When he appeared in person, every doubt was swept away.
There was a strange splendour in his presence, an overpowering passion
in the torrent of his speech. Great was the wickedness of the people,
and great was their punishment! Surely their miseries were a visible
sign of the wrath of the Lord. They had sinned, and the cruel tax
gatherers had come among them, and the corrupt governors, and all the
oppressions of the Egyptians. Yet these things, 'Too, should have an
end. The Lord would raise up his chosen deliverer; the hearts of the
people would be purified, and their enemies would be laid low. The
accursed Egyptian would be driven from the land. Let the faithful take
heart and make ready. How soon might not the long-predestined hour
strike, when the twelfth Imam, the guide, the Mahdi, would reveal
himself to the world? ' In that hour, the righteous 'Would triumph and
the guilty be laid low forever. ' Such was the teaching of Mohammed
Ahmed. A band of enthusiastic disciples gathered round him, eagerly
waiting for the revelation which would crown their hopes. At last, the
moment came. One evening, at Abba Island, taking aside the foremost of
his followers, the Master whispered the portentous news. He was the
Mahdi.
The Egyptian Governor-General at Khartoum, hearing that a religious
movement was afoot, grew disquieted, and dispatched an emissary to Abba
Island to summon the impostor to his presence. The emissary was
courteously received. Mohammed Ahmed, he said, must come at once to
Khartoum. 'Must! ' exclaimed the Mahdi, starting to his feet, with a
strange look in his eyes. The look was so strange that the emissary
thought it advisable to cut short the interview and to return to
Khartoum empty-handed. Thereupon, the Governor-General sent 200 soldiers
to seize the audacious rebel by force. With his handful of friends, the
Mahdi fell upon the soldiers and cut them to pieces. The news spread
like wild-fire through the country: the Mahdi had arisen, the Egyptians
were destroyed. But it was clear to the little band of enthusiasts at
Abba Island that their position on the river was no longer tenable. The
Mahdi, deciding upon a second Hegira, retreated south-westward, into the
depths of Kordofan.
The retreat was a triumphal progress. The country, groaning under alien
misgovernment and vibrating with religious excitement, suddenly found in
this rebellious prophet a rallying-point, a hero, a deliverer. And now
another element was added to the forces of insurrection. The Baggara
tribes of Kordofan, cattle-owners and slave-traders, the most warlike
and vigorous of the inhabitants of the Sudan, threw in their lot with
the Mahdi. Their powerful Emirs, still smarting from the blows of
Gordon, saw that the opportunity for revenge had come. A holy war was
proclaimed against the Egyptian misbelievers. The followers of the
Mahdi, dressed, in token of a new austerity of living, in the 'jibbeh',
or white smock of coarse cloth, patched with variously shaped and
coloured patches, were rapidly organised into a formidable army. Several
attacks from Khartoum were repulsed; and at last, the Mahdi felt strong
enough to advance against the enemy. While his lieutenants led
detachments into the vast provinces lying to the west and the
south--Darfur and Bahr-el-Ghazal--he himself marched upon El Obeid, the
capital of Kordofan. It was in vain that reinforcements were hurried
from Khartoum to the assistance of the garrison: there was some severe
fighting; the town was completely cut off; and, after a six months'
siege, it surrendered. A great quantity of guns and ammunition and
L100,000 in spices fell into the hands of the Mahdi. He was master of
Kordofan: he was at the head of a great army; he was rich; he was
worshipped. A dazzling future opened before him. No possibility seemed
too remote, no fortune too magnificent. A vision of universal empire
hovered before his eyes. Allah, whose servant he was, who had led him
thus far, would lead him onward still, to the glorious end.
For some months he remained at El Obeid, consolidating his dominion. In
a series of circular letters, he described his colloquies with the
Almighty and laid down the rule of living which his followers were to
pursue. The faithful, under pain of severe punishment, were to return to
the ascetic simplicity of ancient times. A criminal code was drawn up,
meting out executions, mutilations, and floggings with a barbaric zeal.
The blasphemer was to be instantly hanged, the adulterer was to be
scourged with whips of rhinoceros hide, the thief was to have his right
hand and his left foot hacked off in the marketplace. No more were
marriages to be celebrated with pomp and feasting, no more was the
youthful warrior to swagger with flowing hair; henceforth, the believer
must banquet on dates and milk, and his head must be kept shaved. Minor
transgressions were punished by confiscation of property or by
imprisonment and chains. But the rhinoceros whip was the favourite
instrument of chastisement. Men were flogged for drinking a glass of
wine, they were flogged for smoking; if they swore, they received eighty
lashes for every expletive; and after eighty lashes it was a common
thing to die. Before long, flogging grew to be so everyday an incident
that the young men made a game of it, as a test of their endurance of
pain.
With this Spartan ferocity there was mingled the glamour and the mystery
of the East. The Mahdi himself, his four Khalifas, and the principal
Emirs, masters of sudden riches, surrounded themselves with slaves and
women, with trains of horses and asses, with body guards and glittering
arms. There were rumours of debaucheries in high places--of the Mahdi,
forgetful of his own ordinances, revelling in the recesses of his harem,
and quaffing date syrup mixed with ginger out of the silver cups looted
from the church of the Christians. But that imposing figure had only to
show itself for the tongue of scandal to be stilled. The tall,
broad-shouldered, majestic man, with the dark face and black beard and
great eyes--who could doubt that he was the embodiment of a superhuman
power? Fascination dwelt in every movement, every glance. The eyes,
painted with antimony, flashed extraordinary fires; the exquisite smile
revealed, beneath the vigorous lips, white upper teeth with a V-shaped
space between them--the certain sign of fortune. His turban was folded
with faultless art, his jibbeh, speckless, was perfumed with
sandal-wood, musk, and attar of roses. He was at once all courtesy and
all command. Thousands followed him, thousands prostrated themselves
before him; thousands, when he lifted up his voice in solemn worship,
knew that the heavens were opened and that they had come near to God.
Then all at once the onbeia--the elephant's-tusk trumpet--would give out
its enormous sound. The nahas--the brazen wardrums--would summon, with
their weird rolling, the whole host to arms. The green flag and the red
flag and the black flag would rise over the multitude. The great army
would move forward, coloured, glistening, dark, violent, proud,
beautiful. The drunkenness, the madness of religion would blaze on every
face; and the Mahdi, immovable on his charger, would let the scene grow
under his eyes in silence.
El Obeid fell in January, 1883. Meanwhile, events of the deepest
importance had occurred in Egypt. The rise of Arabi had synchronised
with that of the Mahdi. Both movements were nationalist; both were
directed against alien rulers who had shown themselves unfit to rule.
While the Sudanese were shaking off the yoke of Egypt, the Egyptians
themselves grew impatient of their own masters--the Turkish and
Circassian Pashas who filled with their incompetence all the high
offices of state. The army led by Ahmed Arabi, a Colonel of fellah
origin, mutinied, the Khedive gave way, and it seemed as if a new order
were about to be established. A new order was indeed upon the point of
appearing: but it was of a kind undreamt of in Arabi's philosophy. At
the critical moment, the English Government intervened. An English fleet
bombarded Alexandria, an English army landed under Lord Wolseley, and
defeated Arabi and his supporters at Tel-el-kebir. The rule of the
Pashas was nominally restored; but henceforth, in effect, the English
were masters of Egypt.
Nevertheless, the English themselves were slow to recognise this fact:
their Government had intervened unwillingly; the occupation of the
country was a merely temporary measure; their army was to be withdrawn
as soon as a tolerable administration had been set up. But a tolerable
administration, presided over by the Pashas, seemed long in coming, and
the English army remained. In the meantime, the Mahdi had entered El
Obeid, and his dominion was rapidly spreading over the greater part of
the Sudan.
Then a terrible catastrophe took place. The Pashas, happy once more in
Cairo, pulling the old strings and growing fat over the old flesh-pots,
decided to give the world an unmistakable proof of their renewed vigour.
They would tolerate the insurrection in the Sudan no longer; they would
destroy the Mahdi, reduce his followers to submission, and re-establish
their own beneficent rule over the whole country. To this end they
collected together an army of 10,000 men, and placed it under the
command of Colonel Hicks, a retired English officer. He was ordered to
advance and suppress the rebellion. In these proceedings the English
Government refused to take any part. Unable, or unwilling, to realise
that, so long as there was an English army in Egypt they could not avoid
the responsibilities of supreme power, they declared that the domestic
policy of the Egyptian administration was no concern of theirs. It was a
fatal error--an error which they themselves, before many weeks were
over, were to be forced by the hard logic of events to admit. The
Pashas, left to their own devices, mismanaged the Hicks expedition to
their hearts' content. The miserable troops, swept together from the
relics of Arabi's disbanded army, were dispatched to Khartoum in chains.
After a month's drilling, they were pronounced to be fit to attack the
fanatics of the Sudan. Colonel Hicks was a brave man; urged on by the
authorities in Cairo, he shut his eyes to the danger ahead of him, and
marched out from Khartoum in the direction of El Obeid at the beginning
of September, 1883. Abandoning his communications, he was soon deep in
the desolate wastes of Kordofan. As he advanced, his difficulties
increased; the guides were treacherous, the troops grew exhausted, the
supply of water gave out. He pressed on, and at last, on November 5th,
not far from El Obeid, the harassed, fainting, almost desperate army
plunged into a vast forest of gumtrees and mimosa scrub. There was a
sudden, appalling yell; the Mahdi, with 40,000 of his finest men, sprang
from their ambush. The Egyptians were surrounded, and immediately
overpowered. It was not a defeat, but an annihilation. Hicks and his
European staff were slaughtered; the whole army was slaughtered; 300
wounded wretches crept away into the forest.
The consequences of this event were felt in every part of the Sudan. To
the westward, in Darfur, the Governor, Slatin Pasha, after a prolonged
and valiant resistance, was forced to surrender, and the whole province
fell into the hands of the rebels. Southwards, in the Bahr-el-Ghazal,
Lupton Bey was shut up in a remote stronghold, while the country was
overrun. The Mahdi's triumphs were beginning to penetrate even into the
tropical regions of Equatoria; the tribes were rising, and Emir Pasha
was preparing to retreat towards the Great Lakes. On the East, Osman
Digna pushed the insurrection right up to the shores of the Red Sea and
laid siege to Suakin. Before the year was over, with the exception of a
few isolated and surrounded garrisons, the Mahdi was absolute lord of a
territory equal to the combined area of Spain, France, and Germany; and
his victorious armies were rapidly closing round Khartoum.
When the news of the Hicks disaster reached Cairo, the Pashas calmly
announced that they would collect another army of 10,000 men, and again
attack the Mahdi; but the English Government understood at last the
gravity of the case. They saw that a crisis was upon them, and that they
could no longer escape the implications of their position in Egypt. What
were they to do? Were they to allow the Egyptians to become more and
more deeply involved in a ruinous, perhaps ultimately a fatal, war with
the Mahdi? And, if not, what steps were they to take?
A small minority of the party then in power in England--the Liberal
Party--were anxious to withdraw from Egypt altogether and at once. On
the other hand, another and a more influential minority, with
representatives in the Cabinet, were in favour of a more active
intervention in Egyptian affairs--of the deliberate use of the power of
England to give to Egypt internal stability and external security; they
were ready, if necessary, to take the field against the Mahdi with
English troops. But the great bulk of the party, and the Cabinet, with
Mr. Gladstone at their head, preferred a middle course. Realising the
impracticality of an immediate withdrawal, they were nevertheless
determined to remain in Egypt not a moment longer than was necessary,
and, in the meantime, to interfere as little as possible in Egyptian
affairs.
From a campaign in the Sudan conducted by an English army they were
altogether averse. If, therefore, the English army was not to be used,
and the Egyptian army was not fit to be used against the Mahdi, it
followed that any attempt to reconquer the Sudan must be abandoned; the
remaining Egyptian troops must be withdrawn, and in future military
operations must be limited to those of a strictly defensive kind.
to any of the foreigners whom I have come into contact with, and does
not show outwardly that conceit which makes most of them repugnant in my
sight. '
A few months later, after he had accompanied Gordon on a victorious
expedition, the Mandarin's enthusiasm burst forth.
'What a sight for tired eyes,' he wrote, 'what an elixir for a heavy
heart--to see this splendid Englishman fight! . . . If there is anything
that I admire nearly as much as the superb scholarship of Tseng Kuofan,
it is the military qualities of this fine officer. He is a glorious
fellow! ' In his emotion, Li Hung Chang addressed Gordon as his brother,
declaring that he 'considered him worthy to fill the place of the
brother who is departed. Could I have said more in all the words of the
world? ' Then something happened which impressed and mystified the
sensitive Chinaman.
'The Englishman's face was first filled with a deep pleasure, and then
he seemed to be thinking of something depressing and sad; for the
smile went from his mouth and there were tears in his eyes when he
thanked me for what I had said. Can it be that he has, or has had, some
great trouble in his life, and that he fights recklessly to forget it,
or that Death has no terrors for him? '
But, as time went on, Li Hung Chang's attitude began to change. 'General
Gordon,' he notes in July, 'must control his tongue, even if he lets his
mind run loose. ' The Englishman had accused him of intriguing with the
Chinese general, and of withholding money due to the Ever Victorious
Army. 'Why does he not accord me the honours that are due to me, as head
of the military and civil authority in these parts? ' By September, the
Governor's earlier transports have been replaced by a more judicial
frame of mind.
'With his many faults, his pride, his temper, and his never-ending
demand for money, (for one is a noble man, and in spite of all I have
said to him or about him) I will ever think most highly of him. . . . He is
an honest man, but difficult to get on with. '
Disagreements of this kind might perhaps have been tided over until the
end of the campaign; but an unfortunate incident suddenly led to a more
serious quarrel. Gordon's advance had been fiercely contested, but it
had been constant; he had captured several important towns; and in
October he laid siege to the city of Soo-chow, once one of the most
famous and splendid in China. In December, its fall being obviously
imminent, the Taiping leaders agreed to surrender it on condition that
their lives were spared. Gordon was a party to the agreement, and laid
special stress upon his presence with the Imperial forces as a pledge of
its fulfilment. No sooner, however, was the city surrendered than the
rebel 'Wangs' were assassinated. In his fury, it is said that Gordon
searched everywhere for Li Hung Chang with a loaded pistol in his hand.
He was convinced of the complicity of the Governor, who, on his side,
denied that he was responsible for what had happened.
'I asked him why I should plot, and go around a mountain, when a mere
order, written with five strokes of the quill, would have accomplished
the same thing. He did not answer, but he insulted me, and said he would
report my treachery, as he called it, to Shanghai and England. Let him
do so; he cannot bring the crazy Wangs back. '
The agitated Mandarin hoped to placate Gordon by a large gratuity and an
Imperial medal; but the plan was not successful.
'General Gordon,' he writes, 'called upon me in his angriest mood. He
repeated his former speeches about the Wangs. I did not attempt to argue
with him . . . He refused the 10,000 taels, which I had ready for him,
and, with an oath, said that he did not want the Throne's medal. This is
showing the greatest disrespect. '
Gordon resigned his command; and it was only with the utmost reluctance
that he agreed at last to resume it. An arduous and terrible series of
operations followed; but they were successful, and by June, 1864, the
Ever Victorious Army, having accomplished its task, was disbanded. The
Imperial forces now closed round Nankin; the last hopes of the Tien Wang
had vanished. In the recesses of his seraglio, the Celestial King,
judging that the time had come for the conclusion of his mission,
swallowed gold leaf until he ascended to Heaven. In July, Nankin was
taken, the remaining chiefs were executed, and the rebellion was at an
end. The Chinese Government gave Gordon the highest rank in its military
hierarchy, and invested him with the yellow jacket and the peacock's
feather. He rejected an enormous offer of money; but he could not refuse
a great gold medal, specially struck in his honour by order of the
Emperor. At the end of the year he returned to England, where the
conqueror of the Taipings was made a Companion of the Bath.
That the English authorities should have seen fit to recognise Gordon's
services by the reward usually reserved for industrious clerks was
typical of their attitude towards him until the very end of his career.
Perhaps if he had been ready to make the most of the wave of popularity
which greeted him on his return--if he had advertised his fame and, amid
high circles, played the part of Chinese Gordon in a becoming
manner--the results would have been different. But he was by nature
farouche; his soul revolted against dinner parties and stiff shirts; and
the presence of ladies--especially of fashionable ladies--filled him
with uneasiness. He had, besides, a deeper dread of the world's
contaminations. And so, when he was appointed to Gravesend to supervise
the erection of a system of forts at the mouth of the Thames, he
remained there quietly for six years, and at last was almost forgotten.
The forts, which were extremely expensive and quite useless, occupied
his working hours; his leisure he devoted to acts of charity and to
religious contemplation. The neighbourhood was a poverty-stricken one,
and the kind Colonel, with his tripping step and simple manner, was soon
a familiar figure in it, chatting with the seamen, taking provisions to
starving families, or visiting some bedridden old woman to light her
fire. He was particularly fond of boys. Ragged street arabs and rough
sailor-lads crowded about him. They were made free of his house and
garden; they visited him in the evenings for lessons and advice; he
helped them, found them employment, corresponded with them when they
went out into the world. They were, he said, his Wangs. It was only by a
singular austerity of living that he was able to afford such a variety
of charitable expenses. The easy luxuries of his class and station were
unknown to him: his clothes verged upon the shabby; and his frugal meals
were eaten at a table with a drawer, into which the loaf and plate were
quickly swept at the approach of his poor visitors. Special occasions
demanded special sacrifices. When, during the Lancashire famine, a
public subscription was opened, finding that he had no ready money, he
remembered his Chinese medal, and, after effacing the inscription,
dispatched it as an anonymous gift.
Except for his boys and his paupers, he lived alone. In his solitude, he
ruminated upon the mysteries of the universe; and those religious
tendencies, which had already shown themselves, now became a fixed and
dominating factor in his life. His reading was confined almost entirely
to the Bible; but the Bible he read and re-read with an untiring,
unending assiduity. There, he was convinced, all truth was to be found;
and he was equally convinced that he could find it. The doubts of
philosophers, the investigations of commentators, the smiles of men of
the world, the dogmas of Churches--such things meant nothing to the
Colonel. Two facts alone were evident: there was the Bible, and there
was himself; and all that remained to be done was for him to discover
what were the Bible's instructions, and to act accordingly. In order to
make this discovery it was only necessary for him to read the Bible over
and over again; and therefore, for the rest of his life, he did so.
The faith that he evolved was mystical and fatalistic; it was also
highly unconventional. His creed, based upon the narrow foundations of
Jewish Scripture, eked out occasionally by some English evangelical
manual, was yet wide enough to ignore every doctrinal difference, and
even, at moments, to transcend the bounds of Christianity itself. The
just man was he who submitted to the Will of God, and the Will of God,
inscrutable and absolute, could be served aright only by those who
turned away from earthly desires and temporal temptations, to rest
themselves whole-heartedly upon the in-dwelling Spirit. Human beings
were the transitory embodiments of souls who had existed through an
infinite past, and would continue to exist through an infinite future.
The world was vanity; the flesh was dust and ashes.
'A man,' Gordon wrote to his sister, 'who knows not the secret, who has
not the in-dwelling of God revealed to him, is like this--[picture of a
circle with Body and Soul written within it]. He takes the promises and
curses as addressed to him as one man, and will not hear of there being
any birth before his natural birth, in any existence except with the
body he is in. The man to whom the secret (the indwelling of God) is
revealed is like this: [picture of a circle with soul and body enclosed
in two separate circles].
He applies the promises to one and the curses to the other, if
disobedient, which he must be, except the soul is enabled by God to
rule. He then sees he is not of this world; for when he speaks of
himself he quite disregards the body his soul lives in, which is
earthly. '
Such conceptions are familiar enough in the history of religious
thought: they are those of the hermit and the fakir; and it might have
been expected that, when once they had taken hold upon his mind, Gordon
would have been content to lay aside the activities of his profession,
and would have relapsed at last into the complete retirement of holy
meditation. But there were other elements in his nature which urged him
towards a very different course. He was no simple quietist. He was an
English gentleman, an officer, a man of energy and action, a lover of
danger and the audacities that defeat danger; a passionate creature,
flowing over with the self-assertiveness of independent judgment and the
arbitrary temper of command.
Whatever he might find in his pocket-Bible, it was not for such as he to
dream out his days in devout obscurity. But, conveniently enough, he
found nothing in his pocket-Bible indicating that he should. What he did
find was that the Will of God was inscrutable and absolute; that it was
man's duty to follow where God's hand led; and, if God's hand led
towards violent excitements and extraordinary vicissitudes, that it was
not only futile, it was impious to turn another way. Fatalism is always
apt to be a double-edged philosophy; for while, on the one hand, it
reveals the minutest occurrences as the immutable result of a rigid
chain of infinitely predestined causes, on the other, it invests the
wildest incoherences of conduct or of circumstance with the sanctity of
eternal law. And Gordon's fatalism was no exception. The same doctrine
that led him to dally with omens, to search for prophetic texts, and to
append, in brackets, the apotropaic initials D. V. after every statement
in his letters implying futurity, led him also to envisage his moods and
his desires, his passing reckless whims and his deep unconscious
instincts, as the mysterious manifestations of the indwelling God. That
there was danger lurking in such a creed he was very well aware. The
grosser temptations of the world--money and the vulgar attributes of
power--had, indeed, no charms for him; but there were subtler and more
insinuating allurements which it was not so easy to resist. More than
one observer declared that ambition was, in reality, the essential
motive in his life: ambition, neither for wealth nor titles, but for
fame and influence, for the swaying of multitudes, and for that kind of
enlarged and intensified existence 'where breath breathes most even in
the mouths of men'. Was it so? In the depths of Gordon's soul there were
intertwining contradictions--intricate recesses where egoism and
renunciation melted into one another, where the flesh lost itself in the
spirit, and the spirit in the flesh. What was the Will of God? The
question, which first became insistent during his retirement at
Gravesend, never afterwards left him; it might almost be said that he
spent the remainder of his life in searching for the answer to it. In
all his Odysseys, in all his strange and agitated adventures, a day
never passed on which he neglected the voice of eternal wisdom as it
spoke through the words of Paul or Solomon, of Jonah or Habakkuk. He
opened his Bible, he read, and then he noted down his reflections upon
scraps of paper, which, periodically pinned together, he dispatched to
one or other of his religious friends, and particularly his sister
Augusta. The published extracts from these voluminous outpourings lay
bare the inner history of Gordon's spirit, and reveal the pious
visionary of Gravesend in the restless hero of three continents.
His seclusion came to an end in a distinctly providential manner. In
accordance with a stipulation in the Treaty of Paris, an international
commission had been appointed to improve the navigation of the Danube;
and Gordon, who had acted on a similar body fifteen years earlier, was
sent out to represent Great Britain. At Constantinople, he chanced to
meet the Egyptian minister, Nubar Pasha. The Governorship of the
Equatorial Provinces of the Sudan was about to fall vacant; and Nubar
offered the post to Gordon, who accepted it.
'For some wise design,' he wrote to his sister, 'God turns events one
way or another, whether man likes it or not, as a man driving a horse
turns it to right or left without consideration as to whether the horse
likes that way or not. To be happy, a man must be like a well-broken,
willing horse, ready for anything. Events will go as God likes. '
And then followed six years of extraordinary, desperate, unceasing, and
ungrateful labour. The unexplored and pestilential region of Equatoria,
stretching southwards to the Great Lakes and the sources of the Nile,
had been annexed to Egypt by the Khedive Ismail, who, while he
squandered his millions on Parisian ballet-dancers, dreamt strange
dreams of glory and empire. Those dim tracts of swamp and forest in
Central Africa were--so he declared--to be 'opened up'; they were to
receive the blessings of civilisation, they were to become a source of
eternal honour to himself and Egypt. The slave-trade, which flourished
there, was to be put down; the savage inhabitants were to become
acquainted with freedom, justice, and prosperity. Incidentally, a
government monopoly in ivory was to be established, and the place was to
be made a paying concern. Ismail, hopelessly in debt to a horde of
European creditors, looked to Europe to support him in his schemes.
Europe, and, in particular, England, with her passion for extraneous
philanthropy, was not averse. Sir Samuel Baker became the first Governor
of Equatoria, and now Gordon was to carry on the good work. In such
circumstances it was only natural that Gordon should consider himself a
special instrument in God's band. To put his disinterestedness beyond
doubt, he reduced his salary, which had been fixed at L10,000, to
L2,000. He took over his new duties early in 1874, and it was not long
before he had a first hint of disillusionment. On his way up the Nile,
he was received in state at Khartoum by the Egyptian Governor-General of
the Sudan, his immediate official superior.
The function ended in a prolonged banquet, followed by a mixed ballet of
soldiers and completely naked young women, who danced in a circle, beat
time with their feet, and accompanied their gestures with a curious
sound of clucking. At last the Austrian Consul, overcome by the
exhilaration of the scene, flung himself in a frenzy among the dancers;
the Governor-General, shouting with delight, seemed about to follow
suit, when Gordon abruptly left the room, and the party broke up in
confusion.
When, 1,500 miles to the southward, Gordon reached the seat of his
government, and the desolation of the Tropics closed over him, the
agonising nature of his task stood fully revealed. For the next three
years he struggled with enormous difficulties--with the confused and
horrible country, the appalling climate, the maddening insects and the
loathsome diseases, the indifference of subordinates and superiors, the
savagery of the slave-traders, and the hatred of the inhabitants. One by
one the small company of his European staff succumbed. With a few
hundred Egyptian soldiers he had to suppress insurrections, make roads,
establish fortified posts, and enforce the government monopoly of ivory.
All this he accomplished; he even succeeded in sending enough money to
Cairo to pay for the expenses of the expedition. But a deep gloom had
fallen upon his spirit. When, after a series of incredible obstacles had
been overcome, a steamer was launched upon the unexplored Albert Nyanza,
he turned his back upon the lake, leaving the glory of its navigation to
his Italian lieutenant, Gessi. 'I wish,' he wrote, 'to give a practical
proof of what I think regarding the inordinate praise which is given to
an explorer. ' Among his distresses and self-mortifications, he loathed
the thought of all such honours, and remembered the attentions of
English society with a snarl.
'When, D. V. , I get home, I do not dine out. My reminiscences of these
lands will not be more pleasant to me than the China ones. What I shall
have done, will be what I have done. Men think giving dinners is
conferring a favour on you . . . Why not give dinners to those who need
them? '
No! His heart was set upon a very different object.
'To each is allotted a distinct work, to each a destined goal; to some
the seat at the right hand or left hand of the Saviour. (It was not His
to give; it was already given--Matthew xx, 23. Again, Judas went to "HIS
OWN PLACE"--Acts i, 25. ) It is difficult for the flesh to accept: "Ye
are dead, ye have naught to do with the world". How difficult for anyone
to be circumcised from the world, to be as indifferent to its pleasures,
its sorrows, and its comforts as a corpse is! That is to know the
resurrection. '
But the Holy Bible was not his only solace. For now, under the parching
African sun, we catch glimpses, for the first time, of Gordon's hand
stretching out towards stimulants of a more material quality. For months
together, we are told, he would drink nothing but pure water; and then
. . . water that was not so pure. In his fits of melancholy, he would shut
himself up in his tent for days at a time, with a hatchet and a flag
placed at the door to indicate that he was not to be disturbed for any
reason whatever; until at last the cloud would lift, the signals would
be removed, and the Governor would reappear, brisk and cheerful.
During, one of these retirements, there was grave danger of a native
attack upon the camp. Colonel Long, the Chief of Staff, ventured, after
some hesitation, to ignore the flag and hatchet, and to enter the
forbidden tent. He found Gordon seated at a table, upon which were an
open Bible and an open bottle of brandy. Long explained the
circumstances, but could obtain no answer beyond the abrupt words--'You
are commander of the camp'--and was obliged to retire, nonplussed, to
deal with the situation as best he could. On the following morning,
Gordon, cleanly shaven, and in the full-dress uniform of the Royal
Engineers, entered Long's hut with his usual tripping step, exclaiming
'Old fellow, now don't be angry with me. I was very low last night.
Let's have a good breakfast--a little b. and s. Do you feel up to it? '
And, with these veering moods and dangerous restoratives, there came an
intensification of the queer and violent elements in the temper of the
man.
His eccentricities grew upon him. He found it more and more
uncomfortable to follow the ordinary course. Official routine was an
agony to him. His caustic and satirical humour expressed itself in a
style that astounded government departments. While he jibed at his
superiors, his subordinates learned to dread the explosions of his
wrath. There were moments when his passion became utterly ungovernable;
and the gentle soldier of God, who had spent the day in quoting texts
for the edification of his sister, would slap the face of his Arab
aide-de-camp in a sudden access of fury, or set upon his Alsatian
servant and kick him until he screamed.
At the end of three years, Gordon resigned his post in Equatoria, and
prepared to return home. But again Providence intervened: the Khedive
offered him, as an inducement to remain in the Egyptian service, a
position of still higher consequence--the Governor-Generalship of the
whole Sudan; and Gordon once more took up his task. Another three years
were passed in grappling with vast revolting provinces, with the
ineradicable iniquities of the slave-trade, and with all the
complications of weakness and corruption incident to an oriental
administration extending over almost boundless tracts of savage
territory which had never been effectively subdued. His headquarters
were fixed in the palace at Khartoum; but there were various interludes
in his government. Once, when the Khedive's finances had become
peculiarly embroiled, he summoned Gordon to Cairo to preside over a
commission which should set matters to rights. Gordon accepted the post,
but soon found that his situation was untenable. He was between the
devil and the deep sea--between the unscrupulous cunning of the Egyptian
Pashas, and the immeasurable immensity of the Khedive's debts to his
European creditors. The Pashas were anxious to use him as a respectable
mask for their own nefarious dealings; and the representatives of the
European creditors, who looked upon him as an irresponsible intruder,
were anxious simply to get rid of him as soon as they could. One of
these representatives was Sir Evelyn Baring, whom Gordon now met for the
first time. An immediate antagonism flashed out between the two men. But
their hostility had no time to mature; for Gordon, baffled on all sides,
and deserted even by the Khedive, precipitately returned to his
Governor-Generalship. Whatever else Providence might have decreed, it
had certainly not decided that he should be a financier.
His tastes and his talents were indeed of a very different kind. In his
absence, a rebellion had broken out in Darfur--one of the vast outlying
provinces of his government--where a native chieftain, Zobeir, had
erected, on a basis of slave-traffic, a dangerous military power. Zobeir
himself had been lured to Cairo, where he was detained in a state of
semi-captivity; but his son, Suleiman, ruled in his stead, and was now
defying the Governor-General. Gordon determined upon a hazardous stroke.
He mounted a camel, and rode, alone, in the blazing heat, across
eighty-five miles of desert, to Suleiman's camp. His sudden apparition
dumbfounded the rebels; his imperious bearing overawed them; he
signified to them that in two days they must disarm and disperse; and
the whole host obeyed. Gordon returned to Khartoum in triumph. But he
had not heard the last of Suleiman. Flying southwards from Darfur to the
neighbouring province of Bahr-el-Ghazal, the young man was soon once
more at the head of a formidable force. A prolonged campaign of extreme
difficulty and danger followed. Eventually, Gordon, summoned again to
Cairo, was obliged to leave to Gessi the task of finally crushing the
revolt. After a brilliant campaign, Gessi forced Suleiman to surrender,
and then shot him as a rebel. The deed was to exercise a curious
influence upon Gordon's fate.
Though Suleiman had been killed and his
power broken, the slave-trade still flourished in the Sudan. Gordon's
efforts to suppress it resembled the palliatives of an empiric treating
the superficial symptoms of some profound constitutional disease. The
root of the malady lay in the slave-markets of Cairo and Constantinople:
the supply followed the demand. Gordon, after years of labour, might
here and there stop up a spring or divert a tributary, but, somehow or
other the waters would reach the river-bed. In the end, he himself came
to recognise this. 'When you have got the ink that has soaked into
blotting-paper out of it,' he said, 'then slavery will cease in these
lands. ' And yet he struggled desperately on; it was not for him to
murmur. 'I feel my own weakness, and look to Him who is Almighty, and I
leave the issue without inordinate care to Him. '
Relief came at last. The Khedive Ismail was deposed; and Gordon felt at
liberty to send in his resignation. Before he left Egypt, however, he
was to experience yet one more remarkable adventure. At his own request,
he set out on a diplomatic mission to the Negus of Abyssinia. The
mission was a complete failure. The Negus was intractable, and, when his
bribes were refused, furious. Gordon was ignominiously dismissed; every
insult was heaped on him; he was arrested, and obliged to traverse the
Abyssinian Mountains in the depth of winter under the escort of a savage
troop of horse. When, after great hardships and dangers, he reached
Cairo, he found the whole official world up in arms against him. The
Pashas had determined at last that they had no further use for this
honest and peculiar Englishman. It was arranged that one of his
confidential dispatches should be published in the newspapers;
naturally, it contained indiscretions; there was a universal outcry--the
man was insubordinate, and mad. He departed under a storm of obloquy. It
seemed impossible that he should ever return to Egypt. On his way home
he stopped in Paris, saw the English Ambassador, Lord Lyons, and
speedily came into conflict with him over Egyptian affairs. There ensued
a heated correspondence, which was finally closed by a letter from
Gordon, ending as follows:
'I have some comfort in thinking that in ten or fifteen years' time it
will matter little to either of us. A black box, six feet six by three
feet wide, will then contain all that is left of Ambassador, or Cabinet
Minister, or of your humble and obedient servant. '
He arrived in England early in 1880 ill and exhausted; and it might have
been supposed that after the terrible activities of his African exile he
would have been ready to rest. But the very opposite was the case; the
next three years were the most momentous of his life. He hurried from
post to post, from enterprise to enterprise, from continent to
continent, with a vertiginous rapidity. He accepted the Private
Secretaryship to Lord Ripon, the new Viceroy of India, and, three days
after his arrival at Bombay, he resigned. He had suddenly realised that
he was not cut out for a Private Secretary, when, on an address being
sent in from some deputation, he was asked to say that the Viceroy had
read it with interest. 'You know perfectly,' he said to Lord William
Beresford, 'that Lord Ripon has never read it, and I can't say that sort
of thing; so I will resign, and you take in my resignation. ' He
confessed to Lord William that the world was not big enough for him,
that there was 'no king or country big enough'; and then he added,
hitting him on the shoulder, 'Yes, that is flesh, that is what I hate,
and what makes me wish to die. '
Two days later, he was off for Pekin. 'Every one will say I am mad,'
were his last words to Lord William Beresford; 'but you say I am not. '
The position in China was critical; war with Russia appeared to be
imminent; and Gordon had been appealed to in order to use his influence
on the side of peace. He was welcomed by many old friends of former
days, among them Li Hung Chang, whose diplomatic views coincided with
his own. Li's diplomatic language, however, was less unconventional. In
an interview with the Ministers, Gordon's expressions were such that the
interpreter shook with terror, upset a cup of tea, and finally refused
to translate the dreadful words; upon which Gordon snatched up a
dictionary, and, with his finger on the word 'idiocy', showed it to the
startled Mandarins. A few weeks later, Li Hung Chang was in power, and
peace was assured. Gordon had spent two and a half days in Pekin, and
was whirling through China, when a telegram arrived from the home
authorities, who viewed his movements with uneasiness, ordering him to
return at once to England. 'It did not produce a twitter in me,' he
wrote to his sister; 'I died long ago, and it will not make any
difference to me; I am prepared to follow the unrolling of the scroll. '
The world, perhaps, was not big enough for him; and yet how clearly he
recognised that he was 'a poor insect! ' 'My heart tells me that, and I
am glad of it. '
On his return to England, he telegraphed to the Government of the Cape
of Good Hope, which had become involved in a war with the Basutos,
offering his services; but his telegram received no reply. Just then,
Sir Howard Elphinstone was appointed to the command of the Royal
Engineers in Mauritius. It was a thankless and insignificant post; and,
rather than accept it, Elphinstone was prepared to retire from the
Army--unless some other officer could be induced, in return for L800, to
act as his substitute. Gordon, who was an old friend, agreed to
undertake the work upon one condition: that he should receive nothing
from Elphinstone; and accordingly, he spent the next year in that remote
and unhealthy island, looking after the barrack repairs and testing the
drains.
While he was thus engaged, the Cape Government, whose difficulties had
been increasing, changed its mind, and early in 1882, begged for
Gordon's help. Once more he was involved in great affairs: a new field
of action opened before him; and then, in a moment, there was another
shift of the kaleidoscope, and again he was thrown upon the world.
Within a few weeks, after a violent quarrel with the Cape authorities,
his mission had come to an end. What should he do next? To what remote
corner or what enormous stage, to what self-sacrificing drudgeries or
what resounding exploits, would the hand of God lead him now? He waited,
in an odd hesitation. He opened the Bible, but neither the prophecies of
Hosea nor the epistles to Timothy gave him any advice. The King of the
Belgians asked if he would be willing to go to the Congo. He was
perfectly willing; he would go whenever the King of the Belgians sent
for him; his services, however, were not required yet. It was at this
juncture that he betook himself to Palestine. His studies there were
embodied in a correspondence with the Rev. Mr. Barnes, filling over
2,000 pages of manuscript--a correspondence which was only put an end to
when, at last, the summons from the King of the Belgians came. He
hurried back to England; but it was not to the Congo that he was being
led by the hand of God.
Gordon's last great adventure, like his first, was occasioned by a
religious revolt. At the very moment when, apparently forever, he was
shaking the dust of Egypt from his feet, Mahommed Ahmed was starting
upon his extraordinary career in the Sudan. The time was propitious for
revolutions. The effete Egyptian Empire was hovering upon the verge of
collapse. The enormous territories of the Sudan were seething with
discontent. Gordon's administration had, by its very vigour, only helped
to precipitate the inevitable disaster. His attacks upon the
slave-trade, his establishment of a government monopoly in ivory, his
hostility to the Egyptian officials, had been so many shocks, shaking to
its foundations the whole rickety machine. The result of all his efforts
had been, on the one hand, to fill the most powerful classes in the
community--the dealers in slaves and, ivory--with a hatred of the
government, and on the other to awaken among the mass of the inhabitants
a new perception of the dishonesty and incompetence of their Egyptian
masters. When, after Gordon's removal, the rule of the Pashas once more
asserted itself over the Sudan, a general combustion became inevitable:
the first spark would set off the blaze. Just then it happened that
Mahommed Ahmed, the son of an insignificant priest in Dongola, having
quarrelled with the Sheikh from whom he was receiving religious
instruction, set up as an independent preacher, with his headquarters at
Abba Island, on the Nile, 150 miles above Khartoum. Like Hong-siu-tsuen,
he began as a religious reformer, and ended as a rebel king. It was his
mission, he declared, to purge the true Faith of its worldliness and
corruptions, to lead the followers of the prophet into the paths of
chastity, simplicity, and holiness; with the puritanical zeal of a
Calvin, be denounced junketings and merrymakings, songs and dances, lewd
living and all the delights of the flesh. He fell into trances, he saw
visions, he saw the prophet and Jesus, and the Angel Izrail accompanying
him and watching over him forever. He prophesied and performed miracles,
and his fame spread through the land.
There is an ancient tradition in the Mohammedan world, telling of a
mysterious being, the last in succession of the twelve holy Imams, who,
untouched by death and withdrawn into the recesses of a mountain, was
destined, at the appointted hour, to come forth again among men. His
title was the Mahdi, the guide; some believed that he would be the
forerunner of the Messiah; others believed that he would be Christ
himself. Already various Mahdis had made their appearance; several had
been highly successful, and two, in medieval times, had founded
dynasties in Egypt. But who could tell whether all these were not
impostors? Might not the twelfth Imam be still waiting, in mystical
concealment, ready to emerge, at any moment, at the bidding of God?
There were signs by which the true Mahdi might be recognised--unmistakable
signs, if one could but read them aright. He must be of the family of
the prophet; he must possess miraculous powers of no common kind; and
his person must be overflowing with a peculiar sanctity. The pious
dwellers beside those distant waters, where holy men by dint of a
constant repetition of one of the ninety-nine names of God, secured the
protection of guardian angels, and where groups of devotees, shaking
their heads with a violence which would unseat the reason of less
athletic worshippers, attained to an extraordinary beatitude, heard with
awe of the young preacher whose saintliness was almost more than mortal
and whose miracles brought amazement to the mind. Was he not also of the
family of the prophet? He himself had said so, and who would disbelieve
the holy man? When he appeared in person, every doubt was swept away.
There was a strange splendour in his presence, an overpowering passion
in the torrent of his speech. Great was the wickedness of the people,
and great was their punishment! Surely their miseries were a visible
sign of the wrath of the Lord. They had sinned, and the cruel tax
gatherers had come among them, and the corrupt governors, and all the
oppressions of the Egyptians. Yet these things, 'Too, should have an
end. The Lord would raise up his chosen deliverer; the hearts of the
people would be purified, and their enemies would be laid low. The
accursed Egyptian would be driven from the land. Let the faithful take
heart and make ready. How soon might not the long-predestined hour
strike, when the twelfth Imam, the guide, the Mahdi, would reveal
himself to the world? ' In that hour, the righteous 'Would triumph and
the guilty be laid low forever. ' Such was the teaching of Mohammed
Ahmed. A band of enthusiastic disciples gathered round him, eagerly
waiting for the revelation which would crown their hopes. At last, the
moment came. One evening, at Abba Island, taking aside the foremost of
his followers, the Master whispered the portentous news. He was the
Mahdi.
The Egyptian Governor-General at Khartoum, hearing that a religious
movement was afoot, grew disquieted, and dispatched an emissary to Abba
Island to summon the impostor to his presence. The emissary was
courteously received. Mohammed Ahmed, he said, must come at once to
Khartoum. 'Must! ' exclaimed the Mahdi, starting to his feet, with a
strange look in his eyes. The look was so strange that the emissary
thought it advisable to cut short the interview and to return to
Khartoum empty-handed. Thereupon, the Governor-General sent 200 soldiers
to seize the audacious rebel by force. With his handful of friends, the
Mahdi fell upon the soldiers and cut them to pieces. The news spread
like wild-fire through the country: the Mahdi had arisen, the Egyptians
were destroyed. But it was clear to the little band of enthusiasts at
Abba Island that their position on the river was no longer tenable. The
Mahdi, deciding upon a second Hegira, retreated south-westward, into the
depths of Kordofan.
The retreat was a triumphal progress. The country, groaning under alien
misgovernment and vibrating with religious excitement, suddenly found in
this rebellious prophet a rallying-point, a hero, a deliverer. And now
another element was added to the forces of insurrection. The Baggara
tribes of Kordofan, cattle-owners and slave-traders, the most warlike
and vigorous of the inhabitants of the Sudan, threw in their lot with
the Mahdi. Their powerful Emirs, still smarting from the blows of
Gordon, saw that the opportunity for revenge had come. A holy war was
proclaimed against the Egyptian misbelievers. The followers of the
Mahdi, dressed, in token of a new austerity of living, in the 'jibbeh',
or white smock of coarse cloth, patched with variously shaped and
coloured patches, were rapidly organised into a formidable army. Several
attacks from Khartoum were repulsed; and at last, the Mahdi felt strong
enough to advance against the enemy. While his lieutenants led
detachments into the vast provinces lying to the west and the
south--Darfur and Bahr-el-Ghazal--he himself marched upon El Obeid, the
capital of Kordofan. It was in vain that reinforcements were hurried
from Khartoum to the assistance of the garrison: there was some severe
fighting; the town was completely cut off; and, after a six months'
siege, it surrendered. A great quantity of guns and ammunition and
L100,000 in spices fell into the hands of the Mahdi. He was master of
Kordofan: he was at the head of a great army; he was rich; he was
worshipped. A dazzling future opened before him. No possibility seemed
too remote, no fortune too magnificent. A vision of universal empire
hovered before his eyes. Allah, whose servant he was, who had led him
thus far, would lead him onward still, to the glorious end.
For some months he remained at El Obeid, consolidating his dominion. In
a series of circular letters, he described his colloquies with the
Almighty and laid down the rule of living which his followers were to
pursue. The faithful, under pain of severe punishment, were to return to
the ascetic simplicity of ancient times. A criminal code was drawn up,
meting out executions, mutilations, and floggings with a barbaric zeal.
The blasphemer was to be instantly hanged, the adulterer was to be
scourged with whips of rhinoceros hide, the thief was to have his right
hand and his left foot hacked off in the marketplace. No more were
marriages to be celebrated with pomp and feasting, no more was the
youthful warrior to swagger with flowing hair; henceforth, the believer
must banquet on dates and milk, and his head must be kept shaved. Minor
transgressions were punished by confiscation of property or by
imprisonment and chains. But the rhinoceros whip was the favourite
instrument of chastisement. Men were flogged for drinking a glass of
wine, they were flogged for smoking; if they swore, they received eighty
lashes for every expletive; and after eighty lashes it was a common
thing to die. Before long, flogging grew to be so everyday an incident
that the young men made a game of it, as a test of their endurance of
pain.
With this Spartan ferocity there was mingled the glamour and the mystery
of the East. The Mahdi himself, his four Khalifas, and the principal
Emirs, masters of sudden riches, surrounded themselves with slaves and
women, with trains of horses and asses, with body guards and glittering
arms. There were rumours of debaucheries in high places--of the Mahdi,
forgetful of his own ordinances, revelling in the recesses of his harem,
and quaffing date syrup mixed with ginger out of the silver cups looted
from the church of the Christians. But that imposing figure had only to
show itself for the tongue of scandal to be stilled. The tall,
broad-shouldered, majestic man, with the dark face and black beard and
great eyes--who could doubt that he was the embodiment of a superhuman
power? Fascination dwelt in every movement, every glance. The eyes,
painted with antimony, flashed extraordinary fires; the exquisite smile
revealed, beneath the vigorous lips, white upper teeth with a V-shaped
space between them--the certain sign of fortune. His turban was folded
with faultless art, his jibbeh, speckless, was perfumed with
sandal-wood, musk, and attar of roses. He was at once all courtesy and
all command. Thousands followed him, thousands prostrated themselves
before him; thousands, when he lifted up his voice in solemn worship,
knew that the heavens were opened and that they had come near to God.
Then all at once the onbeia--the elephant's-tusk trumpet--would give out
its enormous sound. The nahas--the brazen wardrums--would summon, with
their weird rolling, the whole host to arms. The green flag and the red
flag and the black flag would rise over the multitude. The great army
would move forward, coloured, glistening, dark, violent, proud,
beautiful. The drunkenness, the madness of religion would blaze on every
face; and the Mahdi, immovable on his charger, would let the scene grow
under his eyes in silence.
El Obeid fell in January, 1883. Meanwhile, events of the deepest
importance had occurred in Egypt. The rise of Arabi had synchronised
with that of the Mahdi. Both movements were nationalist; both were
directed against alien rulers who had shown themselves unfit to rule.
While the Sudanese were shaking off the yoke of Egypt, the Egyptians
themselves grew impatient of their own masters--the Turkish and
Circassian Pashas who filled with their incompetence all the high
offices of state. The army led by Ahmed Arabi, a Colonel of fellah
origin, mutinied, the Khedive gave way, and it seemed as if a new order
were about to be established. A new order was indeed upon the point of
appearing: but it was of a kind undreamt of in Arabi's philosophy. At
the critical moment, the English Government intervened. An English fleet
bombarded Alexandria, an English army landed under Lord Wolseley, and
defeated Arabi and his supporters at Tel-el-kebir. The rule of the
Pashas was nominally restored; but henceforth, in effect, the English
were masters of Egypt.
Nevertheless, the English themselves were slow to recognise this fact:
their Government had intervened unwillingly; the occupation of the
country was a merely temporary measure; their army was to be withdrawn
as soon as a tolerable administration had been set up. But a tolerable
administration, presided over by the Pashas, seemed long in coming, and
the English army remained. In the meantime, the Mahdi had entered El
Obeid, and his dominion was rapidly spreading over the greater part of
the Sudan.
Then a terrible catastrophe took place. The Pashas, happy once more in
Cairo, pulling the old strings and growing fat over the old flesh-pots,
decided to give the world an unmistakable proof of their renewed vigour.
They would tolerate the insurrection in the Sudan no longer; they would
destroy the Mahdi, reduce his followers to submission, and re-establish
their own beneficent rule over the whole country. To this end they
collected together an army of 10,000 men, and placed it under the
command of Colonel Hicks, a retired English officer. He was ordered to
advance and suppress the rebellion. In these proceedings the English
Government refused to take any part. Unable, or unwilling, to realise
that, so long as there was an English army in Egypt they could not avoid
the responsibilities of supreme power, they declared that the domestic
policy of the Egyptian administration was no concern of theirs. It was a
fatal error--an error which they themselves, before many weeks were
over, were to be forced by the hard logic of events to admit. The
Pashas, left to their own devices, mismanaged the Hicks expedition to
their hearts' content. The miserable troops, swept together from the
relics of Arabi's disbanded army, were dispatched to Khartoum in chains.
After a month's drilling, they were pronounced to be fit to attack the
fanatics of the Sudan. Colonel Hicks was a brave man; urged on by the
authorities in Cairo, he shut his eyes to the danger ahead of him, and
marched out from Khartoum in the direction of El Obeid at the beginning
of September, 1883. Abandoning his communications, he was soon deep in
the desolate wastes of Kordofan. As he advanced, his difficulties
increased; the guides were treacherous, the troops grew exhausted, the
supply of water gave out. He pressed on, and at last, on November 5th,
not far from El Obeid, the harassed, fainting, almost desperate army
plunged into a vast forest of gumtrees and mimosa scrub. There was a
sudden, appalling yell; the Mahdi, with 40,000 of his finest men, sprang
from their ambush. The Egyptians were surrounded, and immediately
overpowered. It was not a defeat, but an annihilation. Hicks and his
European staff were slaughtered; the whole army was slaughtered; 300
wounded wretches crept away into the forest.
The consequences of this event were felt in every part of the Sudan. To
the westward, in Darfur, the Governor, Slatin Pasha, after a prolonged
and valiant resistance, was forced to surrender, and the whole province
fell into the hands of the rebels. Southwards, in the Bahr-el-Ghazal,
Lupton Bey was shut up in a remote stronghold, while the country was
overrun. The Mahdi's triumphs were beginning to penetrate even into the
tropical regions of Equatoria; the tribes were rising, and Emir Pasha
was preparing to retreat towards the Great Lakes. On the East, Osman
Digna pushed the insurrection right up to the shores of the Red Sea and
laid siege to Suakin. Before the year was over, with the exception of a
few isolated and surrounded garrisons, the Mahdi was absolute lord of a
territory equal to the combined area of Spain, France, and Germany; and
his victorious armies were rapidly closing round Khartoum.
When the news of the Hicks disaster reached Cairo, the Pashas calmly
announced that they would collect another army of 10,000 men, and again
attack the Mahdi; but the English Government understood at last the
gravity of the case. They saw that a crisis was upon them, and that they
could no longer escape the implications of their position in Egypt. What
were they to do? Were they to allow the Egyptians to become more and
more deeply involved in a ruinous, perhaps ultimately a fatal, war with
the Mahdi? And, if not, what steps were they to take?
A small minority of the party then in power in England--the Liberal
Party--were anxious to withdraw from Egypt altogether and at once. On
the other hand, another and a more influential minority, with
representatives in the Cabinet, were in favour of a more active
intervention in Egyptian affairs--of the deliberate use of the power of
England to give to Egypt internal stability and external security; they
were ready, if necessary, to take the field against the Mahdi with
English troops. But the great bulk of the party, and the Cabinet, with
Mr. Gladstone at their head, preferred a middle course. Realising the
impracticality of an immediate withdrawal, they were nevertheless
determined to remain in Egypt not a moment longer than was necessary,
and, in the meantime, to interfere as little as possible in Egyptian
affairs.
From a campaign in the Sudan conducted by an English army they were
altogether averse. If, therefore, the English army was not to be used,
and the Egyptian army was not fit to be used against the Mahdi, it
followed that any attempt to reconquer the Sudan must be abandoned; the
remaining Egyptian troops must be withdrawn, and in future military
operations must be limited to those of a strictly defensive kind.
