It is no
laughing
matter; THAT
ABOMINABLE MAHDI!
ABOMINABLE MAHDI!
Strachey - Eminent Victorians
In the
Bahr-el-Ghazal, the last embers of resistance were stamped out with the
capture of Lupton Bey, and through the whole of that vast province three
times the size of England--every trace of the Egyptian Government was
obliterated. Still farther south the same fate was rapidly overtaking
Equatoria, where Emir Pasha, withdrawing into the unexplored depths of
Central Africa, carried with him the last vestiges of the old order. The
Mahdi himself still lingered in his headquarters at El Obeid; but, on
the rising of the tribes round Khartoum, he had decided that the time
for an offensive movement had come, and had dispatched an arm of 30,000
men to lay siege to the city. At the same time, in a long and elaborate
proclamation, in which he asserted, with all the elegance of oriental
rhetoric, both the sanctity of his mission and the invincibility of his
troops, he called upon the inhabitants to surrender. Gordon read aloud
the summons to the assembled townspeople; with one voice they declared
that they were ready to resist. This was a false Mahdi, they said; God
would defend the right; they put their trust in the Governor-General.
The most learned Sheikh in the town drew up a theological reply,
pointing out that the Mahdi did not fulfil the requirements of the
ancient prophets. At his appearance, had the Euphrates dried up and
revealed a hill of gold? Had contradiction and difference ceased upon
the earth? And, moreover, did not the faithful know that the true Mahdi
was born in the year of the Prophet 255, from which it surely followed
that he must be now 1,046 years old? And was it not clear to all men
that this pretender was not a tenth of that age?
These arguments were certainly forcible; but the Mahdi's army was more
forcible still. The besieged sallied out to the attack; they were
defeated; and the rout that followed was so disgraceful that two of the
commanding officers were, by Gordon's orders, executed as traitors. From
that moment the regular investment of Khartoum began. The Arab generals
decided to starve the town into submission. When, after a few weeks of
doubt, it became certain that no British force was on its way from
Suakin to smash up the Mahdi, and when, at the end of May, Berber, the
last connecting link between Khartoum and the outside world, fell into
the hands of the enemy, Gordon set his teeth, and sat down to wait and
to hope, as best he might. With unceasing energy he devoted himself to
the strengthening of his defences and the organisation of his
resources--to the digging of earthworks, the manufacture of ammunition,
the collection and the distribution of food. Every day there were
sallies and skirmishes; every day his little armoured steamboats paddled
up and down the river, scattering death and terror as they went.
Whatever the emergency, he was ready with devices and expedients. When
the earthworks were still uncompleted he procured hundreds of yards of
cotton, which he dyed the colour of earth, and spread out in long,
sloping lines, so as to deceive the Arabs, while the real works were
being prepared farther back. When a lack of money began to make itself
felt, he printed and circulated a paper coinage of his own. To combat
the growing discontent and disaffection of the townspeople, he
instituted a system of orders and medals; the women were not forgotten;
and his popularity redoubled. There was terror in the thought that harm
might come to the Governor-General. Awe and reverence followed him;
wherever he went he was surrounded by a vigilant and jealous guard, like
some precious idol, some mascot of victory. How could he go away? How
could he desert his people? It was impossible. It would be, as he
himself exclaimed in one of his latest telegrams to Sir Evelyn Baring,
'the climax of meanness', even to contemplate such an act. Sir Evelyn
Baring thought differently. In his opinion it was General Gordon's plain
duty to have come away from Khartoum. To stay involved inevitably a
relief expedition--a great expense of treasure and the loss of valuable
lives; to come away would merely mean that the inhabitants of Khartoum
would be 'taken prisoner by the Mahdi'. So Sir Evelyn Baring put it; but
the case was not quite so simple as that. When Berber fell, there had
been a massacre lasting for days--an appalling orgy of loot and lust and
slaughter; when Khartoum itself was captured, what followed was still
more terrible. Decidedly, it was no child's play to be 'taken prisoner
by the Mahdi'. And Gordon was actually there, among those people, in
closest intercourse with them, responsible, beloved. Yes; no doubt. But
was that in truth, his only motive? Did he not wish in reality, by
lingering in Khartoum, to force the hand of the Government? To oblige
them, whether they would or no, to send an army to smash up the Mahdi?
And was that fair? Was THAT his duty? He might protest, with his last
breath, that he had 'tried to do his duty'; Sir Evelyn Baring, at any
rate, would not agree.
But Sir Evelyn Baring was inaudible, and Gordon now cared very little
for his opinions. Is it possible that, if only for a moment, in his
extraordinary predicament, he may have listened to another and a very
different voice--a voice of singular quality, a voice which--for so one
would fain imagine--may well have wakened some familiar echoes in his
heart? One day, he received a private letter from the Mahdi. The letter
was accompanied by a small bundle of clothes.
'In the name of God! ' wrote the Mahdi, 'herewith a suit of clothes,
consisting of a coat (jibbeh), an overcoat, a turban, a cap, a girdle,
and beads. This is the clothing of those who have given up this world
and its vanities, and who look for the world to come, for everlasting
happiness in Paradise. If you truly desire to come to God and seek to
live a godly life, you must at once wear this suit, and come out to
accept your everlasting good fortune. '
Did the words bear no meaning to the mystic of Gravesend? But he was an
English gentleman, an English officer. He flung the clothes to the
ground, and trampled on them in the sight of all. Then, alone, he went
up to the roof of his high palace, and turned the telescope once more,
almost mechanically, towards the north.
But nothing broke the immovability of that hard horizon; and, indeed,
how was it possible that help should come to him now? He seemed to be
utterly abandoned. Sir Evelyn Baring had disappeared into his financial
conference. In England, Mr. Gladstone had held firm, had outfaced the
House of Commons, had ignored the Press. He appeared to have triumphed.
Though it was clear that no preparations of any kind were being made for
the relief of Gordon, the anxiety and agitation of the public, which had
risen so suddenly to such a height of vehemence, had died down. The
dangerous beast had been quelled by the stern eye of its master. Other
questions became more interesting--the Reform Bill, the Russians, the
House of Lords. Gordon, silent in Khartoum, had almost dropped out of
remembrance. And yet, help did come after all. And it came from an
unexpected quarter. Lord Hartington had been for some time convinced
that he was responsible for Gordon's appointment; and his conscience was
beginning to grow uncomfortable.
Lord Hartington's conscience was of a piece with the rest of him. It was
not, like Mr. Gladstone's, a salamander-conscience--an intangible,
dangerous creature, that loved to live in the fire; nor was it, like
Gordon's, a restless conscience; nor, like Sir Evelyn Baring's, a
diplomatic conscience; it was a commonplace affair. Lord Hartington
himself would have been disgusted by any mention of it. If he had been
obliged, he would have alluded to it distantly; he would have muttered
that it was a bore not to do the proper thing. He was usually bored--for
one reason or another; but this particular form of boredom he found more
intense than all the rest. He would take endless pains to avoid it. Of
course, the whole thing was a nuisance--an obvious nuisance; and
everyone else must feel just as he did about it. And yet people seemed
to have got it into their heads that he had some kind of special faculty
in such matters--that there was some peculiar value in his judgment on a
question of right and wrong. He could not understand why it was; but
whenever there was a dispute about cards in a club, it was brought to
him to settle. It was most odd. But it was trite. In public affairs, no
less than in private, Lord Hartington's decisions carried an
extraordinary weight. The feeling of his idle friends in high society
was shared by the great mass of the English people; here was a man they
could trust. For indeed he was built upon a pattern which was very dear
to his countrymen. It was not simply that he was honest: it was that his
honesty was an English honesty--an honest which naturally belonged to
one who, so it seemed to them, was the living image of what an
Englishman should be.
In Lord Hartington they saw, embodied and glorified, the very qualities
which were nearest to their hearts--impartiality, solidity, common
sense--the qualities by which they themselves longed to be
distinguished, and by which, in their happier moments, they believed
they were. If ever they began to have misgivings, there, at any rate,
was the example of Lord Hartington to encourage them and guide
them--Lord Hartington who was never self-seeking, who was never excited,
and who had no imagination at all. Everything they knew about him fitted
into the picture, adding to their admiration and respect. His fondness
for field sports gave them a feeling of security; and certainly there
could be no nonsense about a man who confessed to two ambitions--to
become Prime Minister and to win the Derby--and who put the second above
the first. They loved him for his casualness--for his inexactness--for
refusing to make life a cut-and-dried business--for ramming an official
dispatch of high importance into his coat-pocket, and finding it there,
still unopened, at Newmarket, several days later. They loved him for his
hatred of fine sentiments; they were delighted when they heard that at
some function, on a florid speaker's avowing that 'this was the proudest
moment of his life', Lord Hartington had growled in an undertone 'the
proudest moment of my life was when MY pig won the prize at Skipton
Fair'. Above all, they loved him for being dull. It was the greatest
comfort--with Lord Hartington they could always be absolutely certain
that he would never, in any circumstances, be either brilliant, or
subtle, or surprising, or impassioned, or profound. As they sat,
listening to his speeches, in which considerations of stolid plainness
succeeded one another with complete flatness, they felt, involved and
supported by the colossal tedium, that their confidence was finally
assured. They looked up, and took their fill of the sturdy, obvious
presence. The inheritor of a splendid dukedom might almost have passed
for a farm hand. Almost, but not quite. For an air that was difficult to
explain, of preponderating authority, lurked in the solid figure; and
the lordly breeding of the House of Cavendish was visible in the large,
long, bearded, unimpressionable face.
One other characteristic--the necessary consequence, or, indeed, it
might almost be said, the essential expression, of all the
rest--completes the portrait: Lord Hartington was slow. He was slow in
movement, slow in apprehension, slow in thought and the communication of
thought, slow to decide, and slow to act. More than once this
disposition exercised a profound effect upon his career. A private
individual may, perhaps, be slow with impunity; but a statesman who is
slow--whatever the force of his character and the strength of his
judgment--can hardly escape unhurt from the hurrying of Time's winged
chariot, can hardly hope to avoid some grave disaster or some
irretrievable mistake. The fate of General Gordon, so intricately
interwoven with such a mass of complicated circumstance with the
policies of England and of Egypt, with the fanaticism of the Mahdi, with
the irreproachability of Sir Evelyn Baring, with Mr. Gladstone's
mysterious passions--was finally determined by the fact that Lord
Hartington was slow. If he had been even a very little quicker--if he
had been quicker by two days . . . but it could not be. The ponderous
machinery took so long to set itself in motion; the great wheels and
levers, once started, revolved with such a laborious, such a painful
deliberation, that at last their work was accomplished--surely, firmly,
completely, in the best English manner, and too late.
Seven stages may be discerned in the history of Lord Hartington's
influence upon the fate of General Gordon. At the end of the first
stage, he had become convinced that he was responsible for Gordon's
appointment to Khartoum. At the end of the second, he had perceived that
his conscience would not allow him to remain inactive in the face of
Gordon's danger. At the end of the third, he had made an attempt to
induce the Cabinet to send an expedition to Gordon's relief. At the end
of the fourth, he had realised that the Cabinet had decided to postpone
the relief of Gordon indefinitely. At the end of the fifth, he had come
to the conclusion that he must put pressure upon Mr. Gladstone. At the
end of the sixth, he had attempted to put pressure upon Mr. Gladstone,
and had not succeeded. At the end of the seventh, he had succeeded in
putting pressure upon Mr. Gladstone; the relief expedition had been
ordered; he could do no more.
The turning-point in this long and extraordinary process occurred
towards the end of April, when the Cabinet, after the receipt of Sir
Evelyn Baring's final dispatch, decided to take no immediate measures
for Gordon's relief. From that moment it was clear that there was only
one course open to Lord Hartington--to tell Mr. Gladstone that he would
resign unless a relief expedition was sent. But it took him more than
three months to come to this conclusion. He always found the proceedings
at Cabinet meetings particularly hard to follow. The interchange of
question and answer, of proposal and counterproposal, the crowded
counsellors, Mr. Gladstone's subtleties, the abrupt and complicated
resolutions--these things invariably left him confused and perplexed.
After the crucial Cabinet at the end of April, he came away in a state
of uncertainty as to what had occurred; he had to write to Lord
Granville to find out; and by that time, of course, the Government's
decision had been telegraphed to Egypt. Three weeks later, in the middle
of May, he had grown so uneasy that he felt himself obliged to address a
circular letter to the Cabinet proposing that preparations for a relief
expedition should be set on foot at once. And then he began to
understand that nothing would ever be done until Mr. Gladstone, by some
means or other, had been forced to give his consent. A singular combat
followed. The slippery old man perpetually eluded the cumbrous grasp of
his antagonist. He delayed, he postponed, he raised interminable
difficulties, he prevaricated, he was silent, he disappeared. Lord
Hartington was dauntless. Gradually, inch by inch, he drove the Prime
Minister into a corner. But in the meantime many weeks had passed. On
July 1st, Lord Hartington was still remarking that he 'really did not
feel that he knew the mind or intention of the Government in respect of
the relief of General Gordon'. The month was spent in a succession of
stubborn efforts to wring from Mr. Gladstone some definite statement
upon the question. It was useless. On July 31st, Lord Hartington did the
deed. He stated that, unless an expedition was sent, he would resign. It
was, he said, 'a question of personal honour and good faith, and I don't
see how I can yield upon it'. His conscience had worked itself to rest
at last.
When Mr. Gladstone read the words, he realised that the game was over.
Lord Hartington's position in the Liberal Party was second only to his
own; he was the leader of the rich and powerful Whig aristocracy; his
influence with the country was immense. Nor was he the man to make idle
threats of resignation; he had said he would resign, and resign he
would: the collapse of the Government would be the inevitable result. On
August 5th, therefore, Parliament was asked to make a grant of L300,000,
in order 'to enable Her Majesty's Government to undertake operations for
the relief of General Gordon, should they become necessary'. The money
was voted; and even then, at that last hour, Mr. Gladstone made another,
final, desperate twist. Trying to save himself by the proviso which he
had inserted into the resolution, he declared that he was still
unconvinced of the necessity of any operations at all. 'I nearly,' he
wrote to Lord Hartington, 'but not quite, adopt words received today
from Granville. "It is clear, I think, that Gordon has our messages, and
does not choose to answer them. "' Nearly, but not quite! The
qualification was masterly; but it was of no avail. This time, the
sinuous creature was held by too firm a grasp. On August 26th, Lord
Wolseley was appointed to command the relief expedition; and on
September 9th, he arrived in Egypt.
The relief expedition had begun, and at the same moment a new phase
opened at Khartoum. The annual rising of the Nile was now sufficiently
advanced to enable one of Gordon's small steamers to pass over the
cataracts down to Egypt in safety. He determined to seize the
opportunity of laying before the authorities in Cairo and London, and
the English public at large, an exact account of his position. A cargo
of documents, including Colonel Stewart's Diary of the siege and a
personal appeal for assistance addressed by Gordon to all the European
powers, was placed on board the Abbas; four other steamers were to
accompany her until she was out of danger from attacks by the Mahdi's
troops; after which, she was to proceed alone into Egypt. On the evening
of September 9th, just as she was about to start, the English and French
Consuls asked for permission to go with her--a permission which Gordon,
who had long been anxious to provide for their safety, readily granted.
Then Colonel Stewart made the same request; and Gordon consented with
the same alacrity.
Colonel Stewart was the second-in-command at Khartoum; and it seems
strange that he should have made a proposal which would leave Gordon in
a position of the gravest anxiety without a single European subordinate.
But his motives were to be veiled forever in a tragic obscurity. The
Abbas and her convoy set out. Henceforward the Governor-General was
alone. He had now, definitely and finally, made his decision. Colonel
Stewart and his companions had gone, with every prospect of returning
unharmed to civilisation. Mr. Gladstone's belief was justified; so far
as Gordon's personal safety was concerned, he might still, at this late
hour, have secured it. But he had chosen--he stayed at Khartoum.
No sooner were the steamers out of sight than he sat down at his
writing-table and began that daily record of his circumstances, his
reflections, and his feelings, which reveals to us, with such an
authentic exactitude, the final period of his extraordinary destiny. His
Journals, sent down the river in batches to await the coming of the
relief expedition, and addressed, first to Colonel Stewart, and later to
the 'Chief of Staff, Sudan Expeditionary Force', were official
documents, intended for publication, though, as Gordon himself was
careful to note on the outer covers, they would 'want pruning out'
before they were printed. He also wrote, on the envelope of the first
section, 'No secrets as far as I am concerned'. A more singular set of
state papers was never compiled. Sitting there, in the solitude of his
palace, with ruin closing round him, with anxieties on every hand, with
doom hanging above his head, he let his pen rush on for hour after hour
in an ecstasy of communication, a tireless unburdening of the spirit,
where the most trivial incidents of the passing day were mingled
pell-mell with philosophical disquisitions; where jests and anger, hopes
and terrors, elaborate justifications and cynical confessions, jostled
one another in reckless confusion. The impulsive, demonstrative man had
nobody to talk to any more, and so he talked instead to the pile of
telegraph forms, which, useless now for perplexing Sir Evelyn Baring,
served very well--for they were large and blank--as the repositories of
his conversation. His tone was not the intimate and religious tone which
he would have used with the Rev. Mr. Barnes or his sister Augusta; it
was such as must have been habitual with him in his intercourse with old
friends or fellow-officers, whose religious views were of a more
ordinary caste than his own, but with whom he was on confidential terms.
He was anxious to put his case to a select and sympathetic audience--to
convince such a man as Lord Wolseley that he was justified in what he
had done; and he was sparing in his allusions to the hand of Providence,
while those mysterious doubts and piercing introspections, which must
have filled him, he almost entirely concealed. He expressed himself, of
course, with eccentric ABANDON--it would have been impossible for him to
do otherwise; but he was content to indicate his deepest feelings with a
fleer. Yet sometimes--as one can imagine happening with him in actual
conversation--his utterance took the form of a half-soliloquy, a copious
outpouring addressed to himself more than to anyone else, for his own
satisfaction. There are passages in the Khartoum Journals which call up
in a flash the light, gliding figure, and the blue eyes with the candour
of childhood still shining in them; one can almost hear the low voice,
the singularly distinct articulation, the persuasive--the
self-persuasive--sentences, following each other so unassumingly between
the puffs of a cigarette.
As he wrote, two preoccupations principally filled his mind. His
reflections revolved around the immediate past and the impending future.
With an unerring persistency he examined, he excused, he explained, his
share in the complicated events which had led to his present situation.
He rebutted the charges of imaginary enemies; he laid bare the
ineptitude and the faithlessness of the English Government. He poured
out his satire upon officials and diplomatists. He drew caricatures, in
the margin, of Sir Evelyn Baring, with sentences of shocked pomposity
coming out of his mouth. In some passages, which the editor of the
Journals preferred to suppress, he covered Lord Granville with his
raillery, picturing the Foreign Secretary, lounging away his morning at
Walmer Castle, opening The Times and suddenly discovering, to his
horror, that Khartoum was still holding out. 'Why, HE SAID DISTINCTLY he
could ONLY hold out SIX MONTHS, and that was in March (counts the
months). August! why, he ought to have given in! What is to be done?
They'll be howling for an expedition. . . .
It is no laughing matter; THAT
ABOMINABLE MAHDI! Why on earth does he not guard his roads better? WHAT
IS to be done? ' Several times in his bitterness he repeats the
suggestion that the authorities at home were secretly hoping that the
fall of Khartoum would relieve them of their difficulties.
'What that Mahdi is about, Lord Granville is made to exclaim in another
deleted paragraph, 'I cannot make out. Why does he not put all his guns
on the river and stop the route? Eh what? "We will have to go to
Khartoum! " Why, it will cost millions, what a wretched business! What!
Send Zobeir? Our conscience recoils from THAT; it is elastic, but not
equal to that; it is a pact with the Devil. . . . Do you not think there is
any way of getting hold of H I M, in a quiet way? '
If a boy at Eton or Harrow, he declared, had acted as the Government had
acted, 'I THINK he would be kicked, and I AM SURE he would deserve it'.
He was the victim of hypocrites and humbugs. There was 'no sort of
parallel to all this in history--except David with Uriah the Hittite';
but then 'there was an Eve in the case', and he was not aware that the
Government had even that excuse.
From the past, he turned to the future, and surveyed, with a disturbed
and piercing vision, the possibilities before him. Supposing that the
relief expedition arrived, what would be his position? Upon one thing he
was determined: whatever happened, he would not play the part of 'the
rescued lamb'. He vehemently asserted that the purpose of the expedition
could only be the relief of the Sudan garrisons; it was monstrous to
imagine that it had been undertaken merely to ensure his personal
safety. He refused to believe it. In any case,
'I declare POSITIVELY,' he wrote, with passionate underlinings. 'AND
ONCE FOR ALL, THAT I WILL NOT LEAVE THE SUDAN UNTIL EVERY ONE WHO WANTS
TO GO DOWN IS GIVEN THE CHANCE TO DO SO, UNLESS a government is
established which relieves me of the charge; therefore, if any emissary
or letter comes up here ordering me to comedown, I WILL NOT OBEY IT, BUT
WILL STAY HERE AND FALL WITH THE TOWN, AND RUN ALL RISKS'.
This was sheer insubordination, no doubt; but he could not help that; it
was not in his nature to be obedient. 'I know if I was chief, I would
never employ myself, for I am incorrigible. ' Decidedly, he was not
afraid to be 'what club men call insubordinate, though, of all
insubordinates, the club men are the worst'.
As for the government which was to replace him, there were several
alternatives: an Egyptian Pasha might succeed him as Governor-General,
or Zobeir might be appointed after all, or the whole country might be
handed over to the Sultan. His fertile imagination evolved scheme after
scheme; and his visions of his own future were equally various. He would
withdraw to the Equator; he would be delighted to spend Christmas in
Brussels; he would . . . at any rate he would never go back to England.
That was certain.
'I dwell on the joy of never seeing Great Britain again, with its
horrid, wearisome dinner-parties and miseries. How we can put up with
those things, passes my imagination! It is a perfect bondage . . . I would
sooner live 'like a Dervish with the Mahdi, than go out to dinner every
night in London. I hope, if any English general comes to Khartoum, he
will not ask me to dinner. Why men cannot be friends without bringing
the wretched stomachs in, is astounding. '
But would an English general ever have the opportunity of asking him to
dinner in Khartoum? There were moments when terrible misgivings assailed
him. He pieced together his scraps of intelligence with feverish
exactitude; he calculated times, distances, marches. 'If,' he wrote on
October 24th, they do not come before 30th November, the game is up, and
Rule Britannia. ' Curious premonitions came into his mind. When he heard
that the Mahdi was approaching in person, it seemed to be the fulfilment
of a destiny, for he had 'always felt we were doomed to come face to
face'. What would be the end of it all? 'It is, of course, on the
cards,' he noted, 'that Khartoum is taken under the nose of the
Expeditionary Force, which will be JUST TOO LATE. ' The splendid hawks
that swooped about the palace reminded him of a text in the Bible: 'The
eye that mocketh at his father and despiseth to obey his mother, the
ravens of the valley shall pick it out, and the young eagles shall eat
it. ' 'I often wonder,' he wrote, 'whether they are destined to pick my
eyes, for I fear I was not the best of sons. '
So, sitting late into the night, he filled the empty telegraph forms
with the agitations of his spirit, overflowing ever more hurriedly, more
furiously, with lines of emphasis, and capitals, and exclamation-marks
more and more thickly interspersed, so that the signs of his living
passion are still visible to the inquirer of today on those thin sheets
of mediocre paper and in the torrent of the ink. But he was a man of
elastic temperament; he could not remain forever upon the stretch; he
sought, and he found, relaxation in extraneous matters--in metaphysical
digressions, or in satirical outbursts, or in the small details of his
daily life. It amused him to have the Sudanese soldiers brought in and
shown their 'black pug faces' in the palace looking-glasses. He watched
with a cynical sympathy the impertinence of a turkey-cock that walked in
his courtyard. He made friends with a mouse who, 'judging from her
swelled-out appearance', was a lady, and came and ate out of his plate.
The cranes that flew over Khartoum in their thousands, and with their
curious cry, put him in mind of the poems of Schiller, which few ever
read, but which he admired highly, though he only knew them in Bulwer's
translation. He wrote little disquisitions on Plutarch and purgatory, on
the fear of death and on the sixteenth chapter of the Koran. Then the
turkey-cock, strutting with 'every feather on end, and all the colours
of the rainbow on his neck', attracted him once more, and he filled
several pages with his opinions upon the immortality of animals,
drifting on to a discussion of man's position in the universe, and the
infinite knowledge of God. It was all clear to him. And yet--'what a
contradiction, is life! I hate Her Majesty's Government for their
leaving the Sudan after having caused all its troubles, yet I believe
our Lord rules heaven and earth, so I ought to hate Him, which I
(sincerely) do not. '
One painful thought obsessed him. He believed that the two Egyptian
officers, who had been put to death after the defeat in March, had been
unjustly executed. He had given way to 'outside influences'; the two
Pashas had been 'judicially murdered'. Again and again he referred to
the incident with a haunting remorse. "The Times", perhaps, would
consider that he had been justified; but what did that matter? 'If The
Times saw this in print, it would say, "Why, then, did you act as you
did? " to which I fear I have no answer. ' He determined to make what
reparation he could, and to send the families of the unfortunate Pashas
L1,000 each.
On a similar, but a less serious, occasion, he put the same principle
into action. He boxed the ears of a careless telegraph clerk--'and then,
as my conscience pricked me, I gave him $5. He said he did not mind if I
killed him--I was his father (a chocolate-coloured youth of twenty). '
His temper, indeed, was growing more and more uncertain, as he himself
was well aware. He observed with horror that men trembled when they came
into his presence--that their hands shook so that they could not hold a
match to a cigarette.
He trusted no one. Looking into the faces of those who surrounded him,
he saw only the ill-dissimulated signs of treachery and dislike. Of the
40,000 inhabitants of Khartoum he calculated that two-thirds were
willing--were perhaps anxious--to become the subjects of the Mahdi.
'These people are not worth any great sacrifice,' he bitterly observed.
The Egyptian officials were utterly incompetent; the soldiers were
cowards. All his admiration was reserved for his enemies. The meanest of
the Mahdi's followers was, he realised, 'a determined warrior, who could
undergo thirst and privation, who no more cared for pain or death than
if he were stone'. Those were the men whom, if the choice had lain with
him, he would have wished to command. And yet, strangely enough, he
persistently underrated the strength of the forces against him. A
handful of Englishmen--a handful of Turks would, he believed, be enough
to defeat the Mahdi's hosts and destroy his dominion. He knew very
little Arabic, and he depended for his information upon a few ignorant
English-speaking subordinates. The Mahdi himself he viewed with
ambiguous feelings. He jibed at him as a vulgar impostor; but it is easy
to perceive, under his scornful jocularities, the traces of an uneasy
respect.
He spent long hours upon the palace roof, gazing northwards; but the
veil of mystery and silence was unbroken. In spite of the efforts of
Major Kitchener, the officer in command of the Egyptian Intelligence
Service, hardly any messengers ever reached Khartoum; and when they did,
the information they brought was tormentingly scanty. Major Kitchener
did not escape the attentions of Gordon's pen. When news came at last,
it was terrible: Colonel Stewart and his companions had been killed. The
Abbas, after having passed uninjured through the part of the river
commanded by the Mahdi's troops, had struck upon a rock; Colonel Stewart
had disembarked in safety; and, while he was waiting for camels to
convey the detachment across the desert into Egypt, had accepted the
hospitality of a local Sheikh. Hardly had the Europeans entered the
Sheikh's hut when they were set upon and murdered; their native
followers shared their fate. The treacherous Sheikh was an adherent of
the Mahdi, and to the Mahdi all Colonel Stewart's papers, filled with
information as to the condition of Khartoum, were immediately sent. When
the first rumours of the disaster reached Gordon, he pictured, in a
flash of intuition, the actual details of the catastrophe. 'I feel
somehow convinced,' he wrote, they were captured by treachery . . .
Stewart was not a bit suspicious (I am made up of it). I can see in
imagination the whole scene, the Sheikh inviting them to land . . . then a
rush of wild Arabs, and all is over! ' 'It is very sad,' he added, 'but
being ordained, we must not murmur. ' And yet he believed that the true
responsibility lay with him; it was the punishment of his own sins. 'I
look on it,' was his unexpected conclusion, 'as being a Nemesis on the
death of the two Pashas. '
The workings of his conscience did indeed take on surprising shapes. Of
the three ex-governors of Darfur, Bahr-el-Ghazal, and Equatoria, Emin
Pasha had disappeared, Lupton Bey had died, and Slatin Pasha was held in
captivity by the Mahdi. By birth an Austrian and a Catholic, Slatin, in
the last desperate stages of his resistance, had adopted the expedient
of announcing his conversion to Mohammedanism, in order to win the
confidence of his native troops. On his capture, the fact of his
conversion procured him some degree of consideration; and, though he
occasionally suffered from the caprices of his masters, he had so far
escaped the terrible punishment which had been meted out to some other
of the Mahdi's European prisoners--that of close confinement in the
common gaol. He was now kept prisoner in one of the camps in the
neighbourhood of Khartoum. He managed to smuggle through a letter to
Gordon, asking for assistance, in case he could make his escape. To this
letter Gordon did not reply. Slatin wrote again and again; his piteous
appeals, couched in no less piteous French, made no effect upon the
heart of the Governor-General.
'Excellence! ' he wrote, 'J'ai envoye deux lettres, sans avoir recu une
reponse de votre excellence. . . . Excellence! j'ai me battu 27 FOIS pour
le gouvernement contre l'ennemi--on m'a feri deux fois, et j'ai rien
fait contre l'honneur--rien de chose qui doit empeche votre excellence
de m'ecrir une reponse que je sais quoi faire. JE VOUS PRIE, Excellence,
de m'honore avec une reponse. P. S. Si votre Excellence ont peutetre
entendu que j'ai fait quelque chose contre l'honneur d'un officier et
cela vous empeche de m'ecrir, je vous prie de me donner l'occasion de me
defendre, et jugez apres la verite. '
The unfortunate Slatin understood well enough the cause of Gordon's
silence. It was in vain that he explained the motives of his conversion,
in vain that he pointed out that it had been made easier for him since
he had, 'PERHAPS UNHAPPILY, not received a strict religious education at
home'. Gordon was adamant. Slatin had 'denied his Lord', and that was
enough. His communications with Khartoum were discovered and he was put
in chains. When Gordon heard of it, he noted the fact grimly in his
diary, without a comment.
A more ghastly fate awaited another European who had fallen into the
hands of the Mahdi. Clavier Pain, a French adventurer, who had taken
part in the Commune, and who was now wandering, for reasons which have
never been discovered, in the wastes of the Sudan, was seized by the
Arabs, made prisoner, and hurried from camp to camp. He was attacked by
fever; but mercy was not among the virtues of the savage soldiers who
held him in their power. Hoisted upon the back of a camel, he was being
carried across the desert, when, overcome by weakness, he lost his hold,
and fell to the ground. Time or trouble were not to be wasted upon an
infidel. Orders were given that he should be immediately buried; the
orders were carried out; and in a few moments the cavalcade had left the
little hillock far behind. But some of those who were present believed
that Olivier Pain had been still breathing when his body was covered
with the sand.
Gordon, on hearing that a Frenchman had been captured by the Mahdi,
became extremely interested. The idea occurred to him that this
mysterious individual was none other than Ernest Renan, 'who,' he wrote,
in his last publication 'takes leave of the world, and is said to have
gone into Africa, not to reappear again'. He had met Renan at the rooms
of the Royal Geographical Society, had noticed that he looked bored--the
result, no doubt, of too much admiration--and had felt an instinct that
he would meet him again. The instinct now seemed to be justified. There
could hardly be any doubt that it WAS Renan; who else could it be? 'If
he comes to the lines,' he decided, 'and it is Renan, I shall go and see
him, for whatever one may think of his unbelief in our Lord, he
certainly dared to say what he thought, and he has not changed his creed
to save his life. ' That the mellifluous author of the Vie de Jesus
should have determined to end his days in the depths of Africa, and have
come, in accordance with an intuition, to renew his acquaintance with
General Gordon in the lines of Khartoum, would indeed have been a
strange occurrence; but who shall limit the strangeness of the
possibilities that lie in wait for the sons of men? At that very moment,
in the south-eastern corner of the Sudan, another Frenchman, of a
peculiar eminence, was fulfilling a destiny more extraordinary than the
wildest romance. In the town of Harrar, near the Red Sea, Arthur Rimbaud
surveyed with splenetic impatience the tragedy of Khartoum.
'C'est justement les Anglais,' he wrote, 'avec leur absurde politique,
qui minent desormais le commerce de toutes ces cotes. Ils ont voulu tout
remanier et ils sont arrives a faire pire que les Egyptiens et les
Turcs, ruines par eux. Leur Gordon est un idiot, leur Wolseley un ane,
et toutes leurs entreprises une suite insensee d'absurdites et de
depredations. '
So wrote the amazing poet of the Saison d'Enfer amid those futile
turmoils of petty commerce, in which, with an inexplicable deliberation,
he had forgotten the enchantments of an unparalleled adolescence,
forgotten the fogs of London and the streets of Brussels, forgotten
Paris, forgotten the subtleties and the frenzies of inspiration,
forgotten the agonised embraces of Verlaine.
When the contents of Colonel Stewart's papers had been interpreted to
the Mahdi, he realised the serious condition of Khartoum, and decided
that the time had come to press the siege to a final conclusion. At the
end of October, he himself, at the head of a fresh army, appeared
outside the town. From that moment, the investment assumed a more and
more menacing character. The lack of provisions now for the first time
began to make itself felt. November 30th--the date fixed by Gordon as
the last possible moment of his resistance--came and went; the
Expeditionary Force had made no sign. The fortunate discovery of a large
store of grain, concealed by some merchants for purposes of speculation,
once more postponed the catastrophe. But the attacking army grew daily
more active; the skirmishes around the lines and on the river more
damaging to the besieged; and the Mahdi's guns began an intermittent
bombardment of the palace. By December 10th it was calculated that there
was not fifteen days' food in the town; 'truly I am worn to a shadow
with the food question', Gordon wrote; 'it is one continuous demand'. At
the same time he received the ominous news that five of his soldiers had
deserted to the Mahdi. His predicament was terrible; but he calculated,
from a few dubious messages that had reached him, that the relieving
force could not be very far away. Accordingly, on the 14th, he decided
to send down one of his four remaining steamers, the Bordeen, to meet it
at Metemmah, in order to deliver to the officer in command the latest
information as to the condition of the town. The Bordeen carried down
the last portion of the Journals, and Gordon's final messages to his
friends. Owing to a misunderstanding, he believed that Sir Evelyn Baring
was accompanying the expedition from Egypt, and some of his latest and
most successful satirical fancies played around the vision of the
distressed Consul-General perched for days upon the painful eminence of
a camel's hump. 'There was a slight laugh when Khartoum heard Baring was
bumping his way up here--a regular Nemesis. ' But, when Sir Evelyn Baring
actually arrived--in whatever condition--what would happen? Gordon lost
himself in the multitude of his speculations. His own object, he
declared, was, 'of course, to make tracks'. Then in one of his strange
premonitory rhapsodies, he threw out, half in jest and half in earnest,
that the best solution of all the difficulties of the future would be
the appointment of Major Kitchener as Governor-General of the Sudan. The
Journal ended upon a note of menace and disdain:
'Now MARK THIS, if the Expeditionary Force, and I ask for no more than
200 men, does not come in ten days, the town may fall; and I have done
my best for the honour of our country. Good-bye. --C. G. GORDON.
'You send me no information, though you have lots of money. C. G. G. '
To his sister Augusta he was more explicit.
'I decline to agree,' he told her, 'that the expedition comes for my
relief; it comes for the relief of the garrisons, which I failed to
accomplish. I expect Her Majesty's Government are in a precious rage
with me for holding out and forcing their hand. '
The admission is significant. And then came the final adieux.
'This may be the last letter you will receive from me, for we are on our
last legs, owing to the delay of the expedition. However, God rules all,
and, as He will rule to His glory and our welfare, His will be done. I
fear, owing to circumstances, that my affairs are pecuniarily not over
bright . . . your affectionate brother, C. G. GORDON.
'P. S. I am quite happy, thank God, and, like Lawrence, I have TRIED to
do my duty. '
The delay of the expedition was even more serious than Gordon had
supposed. Lord Wolseley had made the most elaborate preparations. He had
collected together a picked army of 10,000 of the finest British troops;
he had arranged a system of river transports with infinite care.
Bahr-el-Ghazal, the last embers of resistance were stamped out with the
capture of Lupton Bey, and through the whole of that vast province three
times the size of England--every trace of the Egyptian Government was
obliterated. Still farther south the same fate was rapidly overtaking
Equatoria, where Emir Pasha, withdrawing into the unexplored depths of
Central Africa, carried with him the last vestiges of the old order. The
Mahdi himself still lingered in his headquarters at El Obeid; but, on
the rising of the tribes round Khartoum, he had decided that the time
for an offensive movement had come, and had dispatched an arm of 30,000
men to lay siege to the city. At the same time, in a long and elaborate
proclamation, in which he asserted, with all the elegance of oriental
rhetoric, both the sanctity of his mission and the invincibility of his
troops, he called upon the inhabitants to surrender. Gordon read aloud
the summons to the assembled townspeople; with one voice they declared
that they were ready to resist. This was a false Mahdi, they said; God
would defend the right; they put their trust in the Governor-General.
The most learned Sheikh in the town drew up a theological reply,
pointing out that the Mahdi did not fulfil the requirements of the
ancient prophets. At his appearance, had the Euphrates dried up and
revealed a hill of gold? Had contradiction and difference ceased upon
the earth? And, moreover, did not the faithful know that the true Mahdi
was born in the year of the Prophet 255, from which it surely followed
that he must be now 1,046 years old? And was it not clear to all men
that this pretender was not a tenth of that age?
These arguments were certainly forcible; but the Mahdi's army was more
forcible still. The besieged sallied out to the attack; they were
defeated; and the rout that followed was so disgraceful that two of the
commanding officers were, by Gordon's orders, executed as traitors. From
that moment the regular investment of Khartoum began. The Arab generals
decided to starve the town into submission. When, after a few weeks of
doubt, it became certain that no British force was on its way from
Suakin to smash up the Mahdi, and when, at the end of May, Berber, the
last connecting link between Khartoum and the outside world, fell into
the hands of the enemy, Gordon set his teeth, and sat down to wait and
to hope, as best he might. With unceasing energy he devoted himself to
the strengthening of his defences and the organisation of his
resources--to the digging of earthworks, the manufacture of ammunition,
the collection and the distribution of food. Every day there were
sallies and skirmishes; every day his little armoured steamboats paddled
up and down the river, scattering death and terror as they went.
Whatever the emergency, he was ready with devices and expedients. When
the earthworks were still uncompleted he procured hundreds of yards of
cotton, which he dyed the colour of earth, and spread out in long,
sloping lines, so as to deceive the Arabs, while the real works were
being prepared farther back. When a lack of money began to make itself
felt, he printed and circulated a paper coinage of his own. To combat
the growing discontent and disaffection of the townspeople, he
instituted a system of orders and medals; the women were not forgotten;
and his popularity redoubled. There was terror in the thought that harm
might come to the Governor-General. Awe and reverence followed him;
wherever he went he was surrounded by a vigilant and jealous guard, like
some precious idol, some mascot of victory. How could he go away? How
could he desert his people? It was impossible. It would be, as he
himself exclaimed in one of his latest telegrams to Sir Evelyn Baring,
'the climax of meanness', even to contemplate such an act. Sir Evelyn
Baring thought differently. In his opinion it was General Gordon's plain
duty to have come away from Khartoum. To stay involved inevitably a
relief expedition--a great expense of treasure and the loss of valuable
lives; to come away would merely mean that the inhabitants of Khartoum
would be 'taken prisoner by the Mahdi'. So Sir Evelyn Baring put it; but
the case was not quite so simple as that. When Berber fell, there had
been a massacre lasting for days--an appalling orgy of loot and lust and
slaughter; when Khartoum itself was captured, what followed was still
more terrible. Decidedly, it was no child's play to be 'taken prisoner
by the Mahdi'. And Gordon was actually there, among those people, in
closest intercourse with them, responsible, beloved. Yes; no doubt. But
was that in truth, his only motive? Did he not wish in reality, by
lingering in Khartoum, to force the hand of the Government? To oblige
them, whether they would or no, to send an army to smash up the Mahdi?
And was that fair? Was THAT his duty? He might protest, with his last
breath, that he had 'tried to do his duty'; Sir Evelyn Baring, at any
rate, would not agree.
But Sir Evelyn Baring was inaudible, and Gordon now cared very little
for his opinions. Is it possible that, if only for a moment, in his
extraordinary predicament, he may have listened to another and a very
different voice--a voice of singular quality, a voice which--for so one
would fain imagine--may well have wakened some familiar echoes in his
heart? One day, he received a private letter from the Mahdi. The letter
was accompanied by a small bundle of clothes.
'In the name of God! ' wrote the Mahdi, 'herewith a suit of clothes,
consisting of a coat (jibbeh), an overcoat, a turban, a cap, a girdle,
and beads. This is the clothing of those who have given up this world
and its vanities, and who look for the world to come, for everlasting
happiness in Paradise. If you truly desire to come to God and seek to
live a godly life, you must at once wear this suit, and come out to
accept your everlasting good fortune. '
Did the words bear no meaning to the mystic of Gravesend? But he was an
English gentleman, an English officer. He flung the clothes to the
ground, and trampled on them in the sight of all. Then, alone, he went
up to the roof of his high palace, and turned the telescope once more,
almost mechanically, towards the north.
But nothing broke the immovability of that hard horizon; and, indeed,
how was it possible that help should come to him now? He seemed to be
utterly abandoned. Sir Evelyn Baring had disappeared into his financial
conference. In England, Mr. Gladstone had held firm, had outfaced the
House of Commons, had ignored the Press. He appeared to have triumphed.
Though it was clear that no preparations of any kind were being made for
the relief of Gordon, the anxiety and agitation of the public, which had
risen so suddenly to such a height of vehemence, had died down. The
dangerous beast had been quelled by the stern eye of its master. Other
questions became more interesting--the Reform Bill, the Russians, the
House of Lords. Gordon, silent in Khartoum, had almost dropped out of
remembrance. And yet, help did come after all. And it came from an
unexpected quarter. Lord Hartington had been for some time convinced
that he was responsible for Gordon's appointment; and his conscience was
beginning to grow uncomfortable.
Lord Hartington's conscience was of a piece with the rest of him. It was
not, like Mr. Gladstone's, a salamander-conscience--an intangible,
dangerous creature, that loved to live in the fire; nor was it, like
Gordon's, a restless conscience; nor, like Sir Evelyn Baring's, a
diplomatic conscience; it was a commonplace affair. Lord Hartington
himself would have been disgusted by any mention of it. If he had been
obliged, he would have alluded to it distantly; he would have muttered
that it was a bore not to do the proper thing. He was usually bored--for
one reason or another; but this particular form of boredom he found more
intense than all the rest. He would take endless pains to avoid it. Of
course, the whole thing was a nuisance--an obvious nuisance; and
everyone else must feel just as he did about it. And yet people seemed
to have got it into their heads that he had some kind of special faculty
in such matters--that there was some peculiar value in his judgment on a
question of right and wrong. He could not understand why it was; but
whenever there was a dispute about cards in a club, it was brought to
him to settle. It was most odd. But it was trite. In public affairs, no
less than in private, Lord Hartington's decisions carried an
extraordinary weight. The feeling of his idle friends in high society
was shared by the great mass of the English people; here was a man they
could trust. For indeed he was built upon a pattern which was very dear
to his countrymen. It was not simply that he was honest: it was that his
honesty was an English honesty--an honest which naturally belonged to
one who, so it seemed to them, was the living image of what an
Englishman should be.
In Lord Hartington they saw, embodied and glorified, the very qualities
which were nearest to their hearts--impartiality, solidity, common
sense--the qualities by which they themselves longed to be
distinguished, and by which, in their happier moments, they believed
they were. If ever they began to have misgivings, there, at any rate,
was the example of Lord Hartington to encourage them and guide
them--Lord Hartington who was never self-seeking, who was never excited,
and who had no imagination at all. Everything they knew about him fitted
into the picture, adding to their admiration and respect. His fondness
for field sports gave them a feeling of security; and certainly there
could be no nonsense about a man who confessed to two ambitions--to
become Prime Minister and to win the Derby--and who put the second above
the first. They loved him for his casualness--for his inexactness--for
refusing to make life a cut-and-dried business--for ramming an official
dispatch of high importance into his coat-pocket, and finding it there,
still unopened, at Newmarket, several days later. They loved him for his
hatred of fine sentiments; they were delighted when they heard that at
some function, on a florid speaker's avowing that 'this was the proudest
moment of his life', Lord Hartington had growled in an undertone 'the
proudest moment of my life was when MY pig won the prize at Skipton
Fair'. Above all, they loved him for being dull. It was the greatest
comfort--with Lord Hartington they could always be absolutely certain
that he would never, in any circumstances, be either brilliant, or
subtle, or surprising, or impassioned, or profound. As they sat,
listening to his speeches, in which considerations of stolid plainness
succeeded one another with complete flatness, they felt, involved and
supported by the colossal tedium, that their confidence was finally
assured. They looked up, and took their fill of the sturdy, obvious
presence. The inheritor of a splendid dukedom might almost have passed
for a farm hand. Almost, but not quite. For an air that was difficult to
explain, of preponderating authority, lurked in the solid figure; and
the lordly breeding of the House of Cavendish was visible in the large,
long, bearded, unimpressionable face.
One other characteristic--the necessary consequence, or, indeed, it
might almost be said, the essential expression, of all the
rest--completes the portrait: Lord Hartington was slow. He was slow in
movement, slow in apprehension, slow in thought and the communication of
thought, slow to decide, and slow to act. More than once this
disposition exercised a profound effect upon his career. A private
individual may, perhaps, be slow with impunity; but a statesman who is
slow--whatever the force of his character and the strength of his
judgment--can hardly escape unhurt from the hurrying of Time's winged
chariot, can hardly hope to avoid some grave disaster or some
irretrievable mistake. The fate of General Gordon, so intricately
interwoven with such a mass of complicated circumstance with the
policies of England and of Egypt, with the fanaticism of the Mahdi, with
the irreproachability of Sir Evelyn Baring, with Mr. Gladstone's
mysterious passions--was finally determined by the fact that Lord
Hartington was slow. If he had been even a very little quicker--if he
had been quicker by two days . . . but it could not be. The ponderous
machinery took so long to set itself in motion; the great wheels and
levers, once started, revolved with such a laborious, such a painful
deliberation, that at last their work was accomplished--surely, firmly,
completely, in the best English manner, and too late.
Seven stages may be discerned in the history of Lord Hartington's
influence upon the fate of General Gordon. At the end of the first
stage, he had become convinced that he was responsible for Gordon's
appointment to Khartoum. At the end of the second, he had perceived that
his conscience would not allow him to remain inactive in the face of
Gordon's danger. At the end of the third, he had made an attempt to
induce the Cabinet to send an expedition to Gordon's relief. At the end
of the fourth, he had realised that the Cabinet had decided to postpone
the relief of Gordon indefinitely. At the end of the fifth, he had come
to the conclusion that he must put pressure upon Mr. Gladstone. At the
end of the sixth, he had attempted to put pressure upon Mr. Gladstone,
and had not succeeded. At the end of the seventh, he had succeeded in
putting pressure upon Mr. Gladstone; the relief expedition had been
ordered; he could do no more.
The turning-point in this long and extraordinary process occurred
towards the end of April, when the Cabinet, after the receipt of Sir
Evelyn Baring's final dispatch, decided to take no immediate measures
for Gordon's relief. From that moment it was clear that there was only
one course open to Lord Hartington--to tell Mr. Gladstone that he would
resign unless a relief expedition was sent. But it took him more than
three months to come to this conclusion. He always found the proceedings
at Cabinet meetings particularly hard to follow. The interchange of
question and answer, of proposal and counterproposal, the crowded
counsellors, Mr. Gladstone's subtleties, the abrupt and complicated
resolutions--these things invariably left him confused and perplexed.
After the crucial Cabinet at the end of April, he came away in a state
of uncertainty as to what had occurred; he had to write to Lord
Granville to find out; and by that time, of course, the Government's
decision had been telegraphed to Egypt. Three weeks later, in the middle
of May, he had grown so uneasy that he felt himself obliged to address a
circular letter to the Cabinet proposing that preparations for a relief
expedition should be set on foot at once. And then he began to
understand that nothing would ever be done until Mr. Gladstone, by some
means or other, had been forced to give his consent. A singular combat
followed. The slippery old man perpetually eluded the cumbrous grasp of
his antagonist. He delayed, he postponed, he raised interminable
difficulties, he prevaricated, he was silent, he disappeared. Lord
Hartington was dauntless. Gradually, inch by inch, he drove the Prime
Minister into a corner. But in the meantime many weeks had passed. On
July 1st, Lord Hartington was still remarking that he 'really did not
feel that he knew the mind or intention of the Government in respect of
the relief of General Gordon'. The month was spent in a succession of
stubborn efforts to wring from Mr. Gladstone some definite statement
upon the question. It was useless. On July 31st, Lord Hartington did the
deed. He stated that, unless an expedition was sent, he would resign. It
was, he said, 'a question of personal honour and good faith, and I don't
see how I can yield upon it'. His conscience had worked itself to rest
at last.
When Mr. Gladstone read the words, he realised that the game was over.
Lord Hartington's position in the Liberal Party was second only to his
own; he was the leader of the rich and powerful Whig aristocracy; his
influence with the country was immense. Nor was he the man to make idle
threats of resignation; he had said he would resign, and resign he
would: the collapse of the Government would be the inevitable result. On
August 5th, therefore, Parliament was asked to make a grant of L300,000,
in order 'to enable Her Majesty's Government to undertake operations for
the relief of General Gordon, should they become necessary'. The money
was voted; and even then, at that last hour, Mr. Gladstone made another,
final, desperate twist. Trying to save himself by the proviso which he
had inserted into the resolution, he declared that he was still
unconvinced of the necessity of any operations at all. 'I nearly,' he
wrote to Lord Hartington, 'but not quite, adopt words received today
from Granville. "It is clear, I think, that Gordon has our messages, and
does not choose to answer them. "' Nearly, but not quite! The
qualification was masterly; but it was of no avail. This time, the
sinuous creature was held by too firm a grasp. On August 26th, Lord
Wolseley was appointed to command the relief expedition; and on
September 9th, he arrived in Egypt.
The relief expedition had begun, and at the same moment a new phase
opened at Khartoum. The annual rising of the Nile was now sufficiently
advanced to enable one of Gordon's small steamers to pass over the
cataracts down to Egypt in safety. He determined to seize the
opportunity of laying before the authorities in Cairo and London, and
the English public at large, an exact account of his position. A cargo
of documents, including Colonel Stewart's Diary of the siege and a
personal appeal for assistance addressed by Gordon to all the European
powers, was placed on board the Abbas; four other steamers were to
accompany her until she was out of danger from attacks by the Mahdi's
troops; after which, she was to proceed alone into Egypt. On the evening
of September 9th, just as she was about to start, the English and French
Consuls asked for permission to go with her--a permission which Gordon,
who had long been anxious to provide for their safety, readily granted.
Then Colonel Stewart made the same request; and Gordon consented with
the same alacrity.
Colonel Stewart was the second-in-command at Khartoum; and it seems
strange that he should have made a proposal which would leave Gordon in
a position of the gravest anxiety without a single European subordinate.
But his motives were to be veiled forever in a tragic obscurity. The
Abbas and her convoy set out. Henceforward the Governor-General was
alone. He had now, definitely and finally, made his decision. Colonel
Stewart and his companions had gone, with every prospect of returning
unharmed to civilisation. Mr. Gladstone's belief was justified; so far
as Gordon's personal safety was concerned, he might still, at this late
hour, have secured it. But he had chosen--he stayed at Khartoum.
No sooner were the steamers out of sight than he sat down at his
writing-table and began that daily record of his circumstances, his
reflections, and his feelings, which reveals to us, with such an
authentic exactitude, the final period of his extraordinary destiny. His
Journals, sent down the river in batches to await the coming of the
relief expedition, and addressed, first to Colonel Stewart, and later to
the 'Chief of Staff, Sudan Expeditionary Force', were official
documents, intended for publication, though, as Gordon himself was
careful to note on the outer covers, they would 'want pruning out'
before they were printed. He also wrote, on the envelope of the first
section, 'No secrets as far as I am concerned'. A more singular set of
state papers was never compiled. Sitting there, in the solitude of his
palace, with ruin closing round him, with anxieties on every hand, with
doom hanging above his head, he let his pen rush on for hour after hour
in an ecstasy of communication, a tireless unburdening of the spirit,
where the most trivial incidents of the passing day were mingled
pell-mell with philosophical disquisitions; where jests and anger, hopes
and terrors, elaborate justifications and cynical confessions, jostled
one another in reckless confusion. The impulsive, demonstrative man had
nobody to talk to any more, and so he talked instead to the pile of
telegraph forms, which, useless now for perplexing Sir Evelyn Baring,
served very well--for they were large and blank--as the repositories of
his conversation. His tone was not the intimate and religious tone which
he would have used with the Rev. Mr. Barnes or his sister Augusta; it
was such as must have been habitual with him in his intercourse with old
friends or fellow-officers, whose religious views were of a more
ordinary caste than his own, but with whom he was on confidential terms.
He was anxious to put his case to a select and sympathetic audience--to
convince such a man as Lord Wolseley that he was justified in what he
had done; and he was sparing in his allusions to the hand of Providence,
while those mysterious doubts and piercing introspections, which must
have filled him, he almost entirely concealed. He expressed himself, of
course, with eccentric ABANDON--it would have been impossible for him to
do otherwise; but he was content to indicate his deepest feelings with a
fleer. Yet sometimes--as one can imagine happening with him in actual
conversation--his utterance took the form of a half-soliloquy, a copious
outpouring addressed to himself more than to anyone else, for his own
satisfaction. There are passages in the Khartoum Journals which call up
in a flash the light, gliding figure, and the blue eyes with the candour
of childhood still shining in them; one can almost hear the low voice,
the singularly distinct articulation, the persuasive--the
self-persuasive--sentences, following each other so unassumingly between
the puffs of a cigarette.
As he wrote, two preoccupations principally filled his mind. His
reflections revolved around the immediate past and the impending future.
With an unerring persistency he examined, he excused, he explained, his
share in the complicated events which had led to his present situation.
He rebutted the charges of imaginary enemies; he laid bare the
ineptitude and the faithlessness of the English Government. He poured
out his satire upon officials and diplomatists. He drew caricatures, in
the margin, of Sir Evelyn Baring, with sentences of shocked pomposity
coming out of his mouth. In some passages, which the editor of the
Journals preferred to suppress, he covered Lord Granville with his
raillery, picturing the Foreign Secretary, lounging away his morning at
Walmer Castle, opening The Times and suddenly discovering, to his
horror, that Khartoum was still holding out. 'Why, HE SAID DISTINCTLY he
could ONLY hold out SIX MONTHS, and that was in March (counts the
months). August! why, he ought to have given in! What is to be done?
They'll be howling for an expedition. . . .
It is no laughing matter; THAT
ABOMINABLE MAHDI! Why on earth does he not guard his roads better? WHAT
IS to be done? ' Several times in his bitterness he repeats the
suggestion that the authorities at home were secretly hoping that the
fall of Khartoum would relieve them of their difficulties.
'What that Mahdi is about, Lord Granville is made to exclaim in another
deleted paragraph, 'I cannot make out. Why does he not put all his guns
on the river and stop the route? Eh what? "We will have to go to
Khartoum! " Why, it will cost millions, what a wretched business! What!
Send Zobeir? Our conscience recoils from THAT; it is elastic, but not
equal to that; it is a pact with the Devil. . . . Do you not think there is
any way of getting hold of H I M, in a quiet way? '
If a boy at Eton or Harrow, he declared, had acted as the Government had
acted, 'I THINK he would be kicked, and I AM SURE he would deserve it'.
He was the victim of hypocrites and humbugs. There was 'no sort of
parallel to all this in history--except David with Uriah the Hittite';
but then 'there was an Eve in the case', and he was not aware that the
Government had even that excuse.
From the past, he turned to the future, and surveyed, with a disturbed
and piercing vision, the possibilities before him. Supposing that the
relief expedition arrived, what would be his position? Upon one thing he
was determined: whatever happened, he would not play the part of 'the
rescued lamb'. He vehemently asserted that the purpose of the expedition
could only be the relief of the Sudan garrisons; it was monstrous to
imagine that it had been undertaken merely to ensure his personal
safety. He refused to believe it. In any case,
'I declare POSITIVELY,' he wrote, with passionate underlinings. 'AND
ONCE FOR ALL, THAT I WILL NOT LEAVE THE SUDAN UNTIL EVERY ONE WHO WANTS
TO GO DOWN IS GIVEN THE CHANCE TO DO SO, UNLESS a government is
established which relieves me of the charge; therefore, if any emissary
or letter comes up here ordering me to comedown, I WILL NOT OBEY IT, BUT
WILL STAY HERE AND FALL WITH THE TOWN, AND RUN ALL RISKS'.
This was sheer insubordination, no doubt; but he could not help that; it
was not in his nature to be obedient. 'I know if I was chief, I would
never employ myself, for I am incorrigible. ' Decidedly, he was not
afraid to be 'what club men call insubordinate, though, of all
insubordinates, the club men are the worst'.
As for the government which was to replace him, there were several
alternatives: an Egyptian Pasha might succeed him as Governor-General,
or Zobeir might be appointed after all, or the whole country might be
handed over to the Sultan. His fertile imagination evolved scheme after
scheme; and his visions of his own future were equally various. He would
withdraw to the Equator; he would be delighted to spend Christmas in
Brussels; he would . . . at any rate he would never go back to England.
That was certain.
'I dwell on the joy of never seeing Great Britain again, with its
horrid, wearisome dinner-parties and miseries. How we can put up with
those things, passes my imagination! It is a perfect bondage . . . I would
sooner live 'like a Dervish with the Mahdi, than go out to dinner every
night in London. I hope, if any English general comes to Khartoum, he
will not ask me to dinner. Why men cannot be friends without bringing
the wretched stomachs in, is astounding. '
But would an English general ever have the opportunity of asking him to
dinner in Khartoum? There were moments when terrible misgivings assailed
him. He pieced together his scraps of intelligence with feverish
exactitude; he calculated times, distances, marches. 'If,' he wrote on
October 24th, they do not come before 30th November, the game is up, and
Rule Britannia. ' Curious premonitions came into his mind. When he heard
that the Mahdi was approaching in person, it seemed to be the fulfilment
of a destiny, for he had 'always felt we were doomed to come face to
face'. What would be the end of it all? 'It is, of course, on the
cards,' he noted, 'that Khartoum is taken under the nose of the
Expeditionary Force, which will be JUST TOO LATE. ' The splendid hawks
that swooped about the palace reminded him of a text in the Bible: 'The
eye that mocketh at his father and despiseth to obey his mother, the
ravens of the valley shall pick it out, and the young eagles shall eat
it. ' 'I often wonder,' he wrote, 'whether they are destined to pick my
eyes, for I fear I was not the best of sons. '
So, sitting late into the night, he filled the empty telegraph forms
with the agitations of his spirit, overflowing ever more hurriedly, more
furiously, with lines of emphasis, and capitals, and exclamation-marks
more and more thickly interspersed, so that the signs of his living
passion are still visible to the inquirer of today on those thin sheets
of mediocre paper and in the torrent of the ink. But he was a man of
elastic temperament; he could not remain forever upon the stretch; he
sought, and he found, relaxation in extraneous matters--in metaphysical
digressions, or in satirical outbursts, or in the small details of his
daily life. It amused him to have the Sudanese soldiers brought in and
shown their 'black pug faces' in the palace looking-glasses. He watched
with a cynical sympathy the impertinence of a turkey-cock that walked in
his courtyard. He made friends with a mouse who, 'judging from her
swelled-out appearance', was a lady, and came and ate out of his plate.
The cranes that flew over Khartoum in their thousands, and with their
curious cry, put him in mind of the poems of Schiller, which few ever
read, but which he admired highly, though he only knew them in Bulwer's
translation. He wrote little disquisitions on Plutarch and purgatory, on
the fear of death and on the sixteenth chapter of the Koran. Then the
turkey-cock, strutting with 'every feather on end, and all the colours
of the rainbow on his neck', attracted him once more, and he filled
several pages with his opinions upon the immortality of animals,
drifting on to a discussion of man's position in the universe, and the
infinite knowledge of God. It was all clear to him. And yet--'what a
contradiction, is life! I hate Her Majesty's Government for their
leaving the Sudan after having caused all its troubles, yet I believe
our Lord rules heaven and earth, so I ought to hate Him, which I
(sincerely) do not. '
One painful thought obsessed him. He believed that the two Egyptian
officers, who had been put to death after the defeat in March, had been
unjustly executed. He had given way to 'outside influences'; the two
Pashas had been 'judicially murdered'. Again and again he referred to
the incident with a haunting remorse. "The Times", perhaps, would
consider that he had been justified; but what did that matter? 'If The
Times saw this in print, it would say, "Why, then, did you act as you
did? " to which I fear I have no answer. ' He determined to make what
reparation he could, and to send the families of the unfortunate Pashas
L1,000 each.
On a similar, but a less serious, occasion, he put the same principle
into action. He boxed the ears of a careless telegraph clerk--'and then,
as my conscience pricked me, I gave him $5. He said he did not mind if I
killed him--I was his father (a chocolate-coloured youth of twenty). '
His temper, indeed, was growing more and more uncertain, as he himself
was well aware. He observed with horror that men trembled when they came
into his presence--that their hands shook so that they could not hold a
match to a cigarette.
He trusted no one. Looking into the faces of those who surrounded him,
he saw only the ill-dissimulated signs of treachery and dislike. Of the
40,000 inhabitants of Khartoum he calculated that two-thirds were
willing--were perhaps anxious--to become the subjects of the Mahdi.
'These people are not worth any great sacrifice,' he bitterly observed.
The Egyptian officials were utterly incompetent; the soldiers were
cowards. All his admiration was reserved for his enemies. The meanest of
the Mahdi's followers was, he realised, 'a determined warrior, who could
undergo thirst and privation, who no more cared for pain or death than
if he were stone'. Those were the men whom, if the choice had lain with
him, he would have wished to command. And yet, strangely enough, he
persistently underrated the strength of the forces against him. A
handful of Englishmen--a handful of Turks would, he believed, be enough
to defeat the Mahdi's hosts and destroy his dominion. He knew very
little Arabic, and he depended for his information upon a few ignorant
English-speaking subordinates. The Mahdi himself he viewed with
ambiguous feelings. He jibed at him as a vulgar impostor; but it is easy
to perceive, under his scornful jocularities, the traces of an uneasy
respect.
He spent long hours upon the palace roof, gazing northwards; but the
veil of mystery and silence was unbroken. In spite of the efforts of
Major Kitchener, the officer in command of the Egyptian Intelligence
Service, hardly any messengers ever reached Khartoum; and when they did,
the information they brought was tormentingly scanty. Major Kitchener
did not escape the attentions of Gordon's pen. When news came at last,
it was terrible: Colonel Stewart and his companions had been killed. The
Abbas, after having passed uninjured through the part of the river
commanded by the Mahdi's troops, had struck upon a rock; Colonel Stewart
had disembarked in safety; and, while he was waiting for camels to
convey the detachment across the desert into Egypt, had accepted the
hospitality of a local Sheikh. Hardly had the Europeans entered the
Sheikh's hut when they were set upon and murdered; their native
followers shared their fate. The treacherous Sheikh was an adherent of
the Mahdi, and to the Mahdi all Colonel Stewart's papers, filled with
information as to the condition of Khartoum, were immediately sent. When
the first rumours of the disaster reached Gordon, he pictured, in a
flash of intuition, the actual details of the catastrophe. 'I feel
somehow convinced,' he wrote, they were captured by treachery . . .
Stewart was not a bit suspicious (I am made up of it). I can see in
imagination the whole scene, the Sheikh inviting them to land . . . then a
rush of wild Arabs, and all is over! ' 'It is very sad,' he added, 'but
being ordained, we must not murmur. ' And yet he believed that the true
responsibility lay with him; it was the punishment of his own sins. 'I
look on it,' was his unexpected conclusion, 'as being a Nemesis on the
death of the two Pashas. '
The workings of his conscience did indeed take on surprising shapes. Of
the three ex-governors of Darfur, Bahr-el-Ghazal, and Equatoria, Emin
Pasha had disappeared, Lupton Bey had died, and Slatin Pasha was held in
captivity by the Mahdi. By birth an Austrian and a Catholic, Slatin, in
the last desperate stages of his resistance, had adopted the expedient
of announcing his conversion to Mohammedanism, in order to win the
confidence of his native troops. On his capture, the fact of his
conversion procured him some degree of consideration; and, though he
occasionally suffered from the caprices of his masters, he had so far
escaped the terrible punishment which had been meted out to some other
of the Mahdi's European prisoners--that of close confinement in the
common gaol. He was now kept prisoner in one of the camps in the
neighbourhood of Khartoum. He managed to smuggle through a letter to
Gordon, asking for assistance, in case he could make his escape. To this
letter Gordon did not reply. Slatin wrote again and again; his piteous
appeals, couched in no less piteous French, made no effect upon the
heart of the Governor-General.
'Excellence! ' he wrote, 'J'ai envoye deux lettres, sans avoir recu une
reponse de votre excellence. . . . Excellence! j'ai me battu 27 FOIS pour
le gouvernement contre l'ennemi--on m'a feri deux fois, et j'ai rien
fait contre l'honneur--rien de chose qui doit empeche votre excellence
de m'ecrir une reponse que je sais quoi faire. JE VOUS PRIE, Excellence,
de m'honore avec une reponse. P. S. Si votre Excellence ont peutetre
entendu que j'ai fait quelque chose contre l'honneur d'un officier et
cela vous empeche de m'ecrir, je vous prie de me donner l'occasion de me
defendre, et jugez apres la verite. '
The unfortunate Slatin understood well enough the cause of Gordon's
silence. It was in vain that he explained the motives of his conversion,
in vain that he pointed out that it had been made easier for him since
he had, 'PERHAPS UNHAPPILY, not received a strict religious education at
home'. Gordon was adamant. Slatin had 'denied his Lord', and that was
enough. His communications with Khartoum were discovered and he was put
in chains. When Gordon heard of it, he noted the fact grimly in his
diary, without a comment.
A more ghastly fate awaited another European who had fallen into the
hands of the Mahdi. Clavier Pain, a French adventurer, who had taken
part in the Commune, and who was now wandering, for reasons which have
never been discovered, in the wastes of the Sudan, was seized by the
Arabs, made prisoner, and hurried from camp to camp. He was attacked by
fever; but mercy was not among the virtues of the savage soldiers who
held him in their power. Hoisted upon the back of a camel, he was being
carried across the desert, when, overcome by weakness, he lost his hold,
and fell to the ground. Time or trouble were not to be wasted upon an
infidel. Orders were given that he should be immediately buried; the
orders were carried out; and in a few moments the cavalcade had left the
little hillock far behind. But some of those who were present believed
that Olivier Pain had been still breathing when his body was covered
with the sand.
Gordon, on hearing that a Frenchman had been captured by the Mahdi,
became extremely interested. The idea occurred to him that this
mysterious individual was none other than Ernest Renan, 'who,' he wrote,
in his last publication 'takes leave of the world, and is said to have
gone into Africa, not to reappear again'. He had met Renan at the rooms
of the Royal Geographical Society, had noticed that he looked bored--the
result, no doubt, of too much admiration--and had felt an instinct that
he would meet him again. The instinct now seemed to be justified. There
could hardly be any doubt that it WAS Renan; who else could it be? 'If
he comes to the lines,' he decided, 'and it is Renan, I shall go and see
him, for whatever one may think of his unbelief in our Lord, he
certainly dared to say what he thought, and he has not changed his creed
to save his life. ' That the mellifluous author of the Vie de Jesus
should have determined to end his days in the depths of Africa, and have
come, in accordance with an intuition, to renew his acquaintance with
General Gordon in the lines of Khartoum, would indeed have been a
strange occurrence; but who shall limit the strangeness of the
possibilities that lie in wait for the sons of men? At that very moment,
in the south-eastern corner of the Sudan, another Frenchman, of a
peculiar eminence, was fulfilling a destiny more extraordinary than the
wildest romance. In the town of Harrar, near the Red Sea, Arthur Rimbaud
surveyed with splenetic impatience the tragedy of Khartoum.
'C'est justement les Anglais,' he wrote, 'avec leur absurde politique,
qui minent desormais le commerce de toutes ces cotes. Ils ont voulu tout
remanier et ils sont arrives a faire pire que les Egyptiens et les
Turcs, ruines par eux. Leur Gordon est un idiot, leur Wolseley un ane,
et toutes leurs entreprises une suite insensee d'absurdites et de
depredations. '
So wrote the amazing poet of the Saison d'Enfer amid those futile
turmoils of petty commerce, in which, with an inexplicable deliberation,
he had forgotten the enchantments of an unparalleled adolescence,
forgotten the fogs of London and the streets of Brussels, forgotten
Paris, forgotten the subtleties and the frenzies of inspiration,
forgotten the agonised embraces of Verlaine.
When the contents of Colonel Stewart's papers had been interpreted to
the Mahdi, he realised the serious condition of Khartoum, and decided
that the time had come to press the siege to a final conclusion. At the
end of October, he himself, at the head of a fresh army, appeared
outside the town. From that moment, the investment assumed a more and
more menacing character. The lack of provisions now for the first time
began to make itself felt. November 30th--the date fixed by Gordon as
the last possible moment of his resistance--came and went; the
Expeditionary Force had made no sign. The fortunate discovery of a large
store of grain, concealed by some merchants for purposes of speculation,
once more postponed the catastrophe. But the attacking army grew daily
more active; the skirmishes around the lines and on the river more
damaging to the besieged; and the Mahdi's guns began an intermittent
bombardment of the palace. By December 10th it was calculated that there
was not fifteen days' food in the town; 'truly I am worn to a shadow
with the food question', Gordon wrote; 'it is one continuous demand'. At
the same time he received the ominous news that five of his soldiers had
deserted to the Mahdi. His predicament was terrible; but he calculated,
from a few dubious messages that had reached him, that the relieving
force could not be very far away. Accordingly, on the 14th, he decided
to send down one of his four remaining steamers, the Bordeen, to meet it
at Metemmah, in order to deliver to the officer in command the latest
information as to the condition of the town. The Bordeen carried down
the last portion of the Journals, and Gordon's final messages to his
friends. Owing to a misunderstanding, he believed that Sir Evelyn Baring
was accompanying the expedition from Egypt, and some of his latest and
most successful satirical fancies played around the vision of the
distressed Consul-General perched for days upon the painful eminence of
a camel's hump. 'There was a slight laugh when Khartoum heard Baring was
bumping his way up here--a regular Nemesis. ' But, when Sir Evelyn Baring
actually arrived--in whatever condition--what would happen? Gordon lost
himself in the multitude of his speculations. His own object, he
declared, was, 'of course, to make tracks'. Then in one of his strange
premonitory rhapsodies, he threw out, half in jest and half in earnest,
that the best solution of all the difficulties of the future would be
the appointment of Major Kitchener as Governor-General of the Sudan. The
Journal ended upon a note of menace and disdain:
'Now MARK THIS, if the Expeditionary Force, and I ask for no more than
200 men, does not come in ten days, the town may fall; and I have done
my best for the honour of our country. Good-bye. --C. G. GORDON.
'You send me no information, though you have lots of money. C. G. G. '
To his sister Augusta he was more explicit.
'I decline to agree,' he told her, 'that the expedition comes for my
relief; it comes for the relief of the garrisons, which I failed to
accomplish. I expect Her Majesty's Government are in a precious rage
with me for holding out and forcing their hand. '
The admission is significant. And then came the final adieux.
'This may be the last letter you will receive from me, for we are on our
last legs, owing to the delay of the expedition. However, God rules all,
and, as He will rule to His glory and our welfare, His will be done. I
fear, owing to circumstances, that my affairs are pecuniarily not over
bright . . . your affectionate brother, C. G. GORDON.
'P. S. I am quite happy, thank God, and, like Lawrence, I have TRIED to
do my duty. '
The delay of the expedition was even more serious than Gordon had
supposed. Lord Wolseley had made the most elaborate preparations. He had
collected together a picked army of 10,000 of the finest British troops;
he had arranged a system of river transports with infinite care.
