At the end of the first
stage, he had become convinced that he was responsible for Gordon's
appointment to Khartoum.
stage, he had become convinced that he was responsible for Gordon's
appointment to Khartoum.
Strachey - Eminent Victorians
He told Sir
Evelyn Baring that, since the Government refused to send either an
expedition or Zobeir, he would 'consider himself free to act according
to circumstances. ' 'Eventually,' he said, 'you will be forced to smash
up the Mahdi', and he declared that if the Government persisted in its
present line of conduct, it would be branded with an 'indelible
disgrace'. The message was made public, and it happened that Mr.
Gladstone saw it for the first time in a newspaper, during a country
visit. Another of the guests, who was in the room at the moment, thus
describes the scene: 'He took up the paper, his eye instantly fell on
the telegram, and he read it through. As he read, his face hardened and
whitened, the eyes burned as I have seen them once or twice in the House
of Commons when he was angered--burned with a deep fire, as if they
would have consumed the sheet on which Gordon's message was printed, or
as if Gordon's words had burned into his soul, which was looking out in
wrath and flame. He said not a word. For perhaps two or three minutes he
sat still, his face all the while like the face you may read of in
Milton--like none other I ever saw. Then he rose, still without a word,
and was seen no more that morning. '
It is curious that Gordon himself never understood the part that Mr.
Gladstone was playing in his destiny. His Khartoum journals put this
beyond a doubt. Except for one or two slight and jocular references to
Mr. Gladstone's minor idiosyncrasies--the shape of his collars, and his
passion for felling trees, Gordon leaves him unnoticed while he lavishes
his sardonic humour upon Lord Granville. But in truth Lord Granville was
a nonentity. The error shows how dim the realities of England had grown
to the watcher in Khartoum. When he looked towards home, the figure that
loomed largest upon his vision was--it was only natural that it should
have been so the nearest--it was upon Sir Evelyn Baring that he fixed
his gaze. For him, Sir Evelyn Baring was the embodiment of England--or
rather the embodiment of the English official classes, of English
diplomacy, of the English Government with its hesitations, its
insincerities, its double-faced schemes. Sir Evelyn Baring, he almost
came to think at moments, was the prime mover, the sole contriver, of
the whole Sudan imbroglio.
In this he was wrong; for Sir Evelyn Baring, of course, was an
intermediary, without final responsibility or final power; but Gordon's
profound antipathy, his instinctive distrust, were not without their
justification. He could never forget that first meeting in Cairo, six
years earlier, when the fundamental hostility between the two men had
leapt to the surface. 'When oil mixes with water,' he said, 'we will mix
together. ' Sir Evelyn Baring thought so too; but he did not say so; it
was not his way. When he spoke, he felt no temptation to express
everything that was in his mind. In all he did, he was cautious,
measured, unimpeachably correct. It would be difficult to think of a man
more completely the antithesis of Gordon. His temperament, all in
monochrome, touched in with cold blues and indecisive greys, was
eminently unromantic. He had a steely colourlessness, and a steely
pliability, and a steely strength. Endowed beyond most men with the
capacity of foresight, he was endowed as very few men have ever been
with that staying-power which makes the fruit of foresight attainable.
His views were long, and his patience was even longer. He progressed
imperceptibly; he constantly withdrew; the art of giving way he
practised with the refinement of a virtuoso. But, though the steel
recoiled and recoiled, in the end it would spring forward. His life's
work had in it an element of paradox. It was passed entirely in the
East; and the East meant very little to him; he took no interest in it.
It was something to be looked after. It was also a convenient field for
the talents of Sir Evelyn Baring. Yet it must not be supposed that he
was cynical; perhaps he was not quite great enough for that. He looked
forward to a pleasant retirement--a country place--some literary
recreations. He had been careful to keep up his classics. His ambition
can be stated in a single phrase--it was to become an institution; and
he achieved it. No doubt, too, he deserved it. The greatest of poets, in
a bitter mood, has described the characteristics of a certain class of
persons, whom he did not like. 'They,' he says,
'that have power to hurt and will do none,
That do not do the things they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow,
They rightly do inherit heaven's graces,
And husband nature's riches from expense;
They are the lords and owners of their faces . . . '
The words might have been written for Sir Evelyn Baring.
Though, as a rule, he found it easy to despise those with whom he came
into contact, he could not altogether despise General Gordon. If he
could have, he would have disliked him less. He had gone as far as his
caution had allowed him in trying to prevent the fatal appointment; and
then, when it had become clear that the Government was insistent, he had
yielded with a good grace. For a moment, he had imagined that all might
yet be well; that he could impose himself, by the weight of his position
and the force of his sagacity, upon his self-willed subordinate; that he
could hold him in a leash at the end of the telegraph wire to Khartoum.
Very soon he perceived that this was a miscalculation. To his disgust,
he found that the telegraph wire, far from being an instrument of
official discipline, had been converted by the agile strategist at the
other end of it into a means of extending his own personality into the
deliberations at Cairo. Every morning Sir Evelyn Baring would find upon
his table a great pile of telegrams from Khartoum--twenty or thirty at
least; and as the day went on, the pile would grow. When a sufficient
number had accumulated he would read them all through, with the greatest
care. There upon the table, the whole soul of Gordon lay before him--in
its incoherence, its eccentricity, its impulsiveness, its romance; the
jokes, the slang, the appeals to the prophet Isaiah, the whirl of
contradictory policies--Sir Evelyn Baring did not know which exasperated
him most. He would not consider whether, or to what degree, the man was
a maniac; no, he would not. A subacid smile was the only comment he
allowed himself. His position, indeed, was an extremely difficult one,
and all his dexterity would be needed if he was to emerge from it with
credit.
On one side of him was a veering and vacillating Government; on the
other, a frenzied enthusiast. It was his business to interpret to the
first the wishes, or rather the inspirations, of the second, and to
convey to the second the decisions, or rather the indecisions, of the
first. A weaker man would have floated helplessly on the ebb and flow of
the Cabinet's wavering policies; a rasher man would have plunged
headlong into Gordon's schemes. He did neither; with a singular courage
and a singular caution he progressed along a razor-edge. He devoted all
his energies to the double task of evolving a reasonable policy out of
Gordon's intoxicated telegrams, and of inducing the divided Ministers at
home to give their sanction to what he had evolved. He might have
succeeded, if he had not had to reckon with yet another irreconcilable;
Time was a vital element in the situation, and Time was against him.
When the tribes round Khartoum rose, the last hope of a satisfactory
solution vanished. He was the first to perceive the altered condition of
affairs; long before the Government, long before Gordon himself, he
understood that the only remaining question was that of the extrication
of the Englishmen from Khartoum. He proposed that a small force should
be dispatched at once across the desert from Suakin to Barber, the point
on the Nile nearest to the Red Sea, and thence up the river to Gordon;
but, after considerable hesitation, the military authorities decided
that this was not a practicable plan. Upon that, he foresaw, with
perfect lucidity, the inevitable development of events. Sooner or later,
it would be absolutely necessary to send a relief expedition to
Khartoum; and, from that premise, it followed, without a possibility of
doubt, that it was the duty of the Government to do so at once. This he
saw quite clearly; but he also saw that the position in the Cabinet had
now altered, that Mr. Gladstone had taken the reins into his own hands.
And Mr. Gladstone did not wish to send a relief expedition. What was Sir
Evelyn Baring to do? Was he to pit his strength against Mr. Gladstone's?
To threaten resignation? To stake his whole future upon General Gordon's
fate? For a moment he wavered; he seemed to hint that unless the
Government sent a message to Khartoum promising a relief expedition
before the end of the year, he would be unable to be a party to their
acts. The Government refused to send any such message; and he perceived,
as he tells us, that 'it was evidently useless to continue the
correspondence any further'. After all, what could he do? He was still
only a secondary figure; his resignation would be accepted; he would be
given a colonial governorship and Gordon would be no nearer safety. But
then, could he sit by and witness a horrible catastrophe, without
lifting a hand? Of all the odious dilemmas which that man had put him
into this, he reflected, was the most odious. He slightly shrugged his
shoulders. No; he might have 'power to hurt', but he would 'do none'. He
wrote a dispatch--a long, balanced, guarded, grey dispatch, informing
the Government that he 'ventured to think' that it was 'a question
worthy of consideration whether the naval and military authorities
should not take some preliminary steps in the way of preparing boats,
etc. , so as to be able to move, should the necessity arise'. Then,
within a week, before the receipt of the Government's answer, he left
Egypt. From the end of April until the beginning of September--during
the most momentous period of the whole crisis, he was engaged in London
upon a financial conference, while his place was taken in Cairo by a
substitute. With a characteristically convenient unobtrusiveness, Sir
Evelyn Baring had vanished from the scene.
Meanwhile, far to the southward, over the wide-spreading lands watered
by the Upper Nile and its tributaries, the power and the glory of him
who had once been Mohammed Ahmed were growing still. 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.
Evelyn Baring that, since the Government refused to send either an
expedition or Zobeir, he would 'consider himself free to act according
to circumstances. ' 'Eventually,' he said, 'you will be forced to smash
up the Mahdi', and he declared that if the Government persisted in its
present line of conduct, it would be branded with an 'indelible
disgrace'. The message was made public, and it happened that Mr.
Gladstone saw it for the first time in a newspaper, during a country
visit. Another of the guests, who was in the room at the moment, thus
describes the scene: 'He took up the paper, his eye instantly fell on
the telegram, and he read it through. As he read, his face hardened and
whitened, the eyes burned as I have seen them once or twice in the House
of Commons when he was angered--burned with a deep fire, as if they
would have consumed the sheet on which Gordon's message was printed, or
as if Gordon's words had burned into his soul, which was looking out in
wrath and flame. He said not a word. For perhaps two or three minutes he
sat still, his face all the while like the face you may read of in
Milton--like none other I ever saw. Then he rose, still without a word,
and was seen no more that morning. '
It is curious that Gordon himself never understood the part that Mr.
Gladstone was playing in his destiny. His Khartoum journals put this
beyond a doubt. Except for one or two slight and jocular references to
Mr. Gladstone's minor idiosyncrasies--the shape of his collars, and his
passion for felling trees, Gordon leaves him unnoticed while he lavishes
his sardonic humour upon Lord Granville. But in truth Lord Granville was
a nonentity. The error shows how dim the realities of England had grown
to the watcher in Khartoum. When he looked towards home, the figure that
loomed largest upon his vision was--it was only natural that it should
have been so the nearest--it was upon Sir Evelyn Baring that he fixed
his gaze. For him, Sir Evelyn Baring was the embodiment of England--or
rather the embodiment of the English official classes, of English
diplomacy, of the English Government with its hesitations, its
insincerities, its double-faced schemes. Sir Evelyn Baring, he almost
came to think at moments, was the prime mover, the sole contriver, of
the whole Sudan imbroglio.
In this he was wrong; for Sir Evelyn Baring, of course, was an
intermediary, without final responsibility or final power; but Gordon's
profound antipathy, his instinctive distrust, were not without their
justification. He could never forget that first meeting in Cairo, six
years earlier, when the fundamental hostility between the two men had
leapt to the surface. 'When oil mixes with water,' he said, 'we will mix
together. ' Sir Evelyn Baring thought so too; but he did not say so; it
was not his way. When he spoke, he felt no temptation to express
everything that was in his mind. In all he did, he was cautious,
measured, unimpeachably correct. It would be difficult to think of a man
more completely the antithesis of Gordon. His temperament, all in
monochrome, touched in with cold blues and indecisive greys, was
eminently unromantic. He had a steely colourlessness, and a steely
pliability, and a steely strength. Endowed beyond most men with the
capacity of foresight, he was endowed as very few men have ever been
with that staying-power which makes the fruit of foresight attainable.
His views were long, and his patience was even longer. He progressed
imperceptibly; he constantly withdrew; the art of giving way he
practised with the refinement of a virtuoso. But, though the steel
recoiled and recoiled, in the end it would spring forward. His life's
work had in it an element of paradox. It was passed entirely in the
East; and the East meant very little to him; he took no interest in it.
It was something to be looked after. It was also a convenient field for
the talents of Sir Evelyn Baring. Yet it must not be supposed that he
was cynical; perhaps he was not quite great enough for that. He looked
forward to a pleasant retirement--a country place--some literary
recreations. He had been careful to keep up his classics. His ambition
can be stated in a single phrase--it was to become an institution; and
he achieved it. No doubt, too, he deserved it. The greatest of poets, in
a bitter mood, has described the characteristics of a certain class of
persons, whom he did not like. 'They,' he says,
'that have power to hurt and will do none,
That do not do the things they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow,
They rightly do inherit heaven's graces,
And husband nature's riches from expense;
They are the lords and owners of their faces . . . '
The words might have been written for Sir Evelyn Baring.
Though, as a rule, he found it easy to despise those with whom he came
into contact, he could not altogether despise General Gordon. If he
could have, he would have disliked him less. He had gone as far as his
caution had allowed him in trying to prevent the fatal appointment; and
then, when it had become clear that the Government was insistent, he had
yielded with a good grace. For a moment, he had imagined that all might
yet be well; that he could impose himself, by the weight of his position
and the force of his sagacity, upon his self-willed subordinate; that he
could hold him in a leash at the end of the telegraph wire to Khartoum.
Very soon he perceived that this was a miscalculation. To his disgust,
he found that the telegraph wire, far from being an instrument of
official discipline, had been converted by the agile strategist at the
other end of it into a means of extending his own personality into the
deliberations at Cairo. Every morning Sir Evelyn Baring would find upon
his table a great pile of telegrams from Khartoum--twenty or thirty at
least; and as the day went on, the pile would grow. When a sufficient
number had accumulated he would read them all through, with the greatest
care. There upon the table, the whole soul of Gordon lay before him--in
its incoherence, its eccentricity, its impulsiveness, its romance; the
jokes, the slang, the appeals to the prophet Isaiah, the whirl of
contradictory policies--Sir Evelyn Baring did not know which exasperated
him most. He would not consider whether, or to what degree, the man was
a maniac; no, he would not. A subacid smile was the only comment he
allowed himself. His position, indeed, was an extremely difficult one,
and all his dexterity would be needed if he was to emerge from it with
credit.
On one side of him was a veering and vacillating Government; on the
other, a frenzied enthusiast. It was his business to interpret to the
first the wishes, or rather the inspirations, of the second, and to
convey to the second the decisions, or rather the indecisions, of the
first. A weaker man would have floated helplessly on the ebb and flow of
the Cabinet's wavering policies; a rasher man would have plunged
headlong into Gordon's schemes. He did neither; with a singular courage
and a singular caution he progressed along a razor-edge. He devoted all
his energies to the double task of evolving a reasonable policy out of
Gordon's intoxicated telegrams, and of inducing the divided Ministers at
home to give their sanction to what he had evolved. He might have
succeeded, if he had not had to reckon with yet another irreconcilable;
Time was a vital element in the situation, and Time was against him.
When the tribes round Khartoum rose, the last hope of a satisfactory
solution vanished. He was the first to perceive the altered condition of
affairs; long before the Government, long before Gordon himself, he
understood that the only remaining question was that of the extrication
of the Englishmen from Khartoum. He proposed that a small force should
be dispatched at once across the desert from Suakin to Barber, the point
on the Nile nearest to the Red Sea, and thence up the river to Gordon;
but, after considerable hesitation, the military authorities decided
that this was not a practicable plan. Upon that, he foresaw, with
perfect lucidity, the inevitable development of events. Sooner or later,
it would be absolutely necessary to send a relief expedition to
Khartoum; and, from that premise, it followed, without a possibility of
doubt, that it was the duty of the Government to do so at once. This he
saw quite clearly; but he also saw that the position in the Cabinet had
now altered, that Mr. Gladstone had taken the reins into his own hands.
And Mr. Gladstone did not wish to send a relief expedition. What was Sir
Evelyn Baring to do? Was he to pit his strength against Mr. Gladstone's?
To threaten resignation? To stake his whole future upon General Gordon's
fate? For a moment he wavered; he seemed to hint that unless the
Government sent a message to Khartoum promising a relief expedition
before the end of the year, he would be unable to be a party to their
acts. The Government refused to send any such message; and he perceived,
as he tells us, that 'it was evidently useless to continue the
correspondence any further'. After all, what could he do? He was still
only a secondary figure; his resignation would be accepted; he would be
given a colonial governorship and Gordon would be no nearer safety. But
then, could he sit by and witness a horrible catastrophe, without
lifting a hand? Of all the odious dilemmas which that man had put him
into this, he reflected, was the most odious. He slightly shrugged his
shoulders. No; he might have 'power to hurt', but he would 'do none'. He
wrote a dispatch--a long, balanced, guarded, grey dispatch, informing
the Government that he 'ventured to think' that it was 'a question
worthy of consideration whether the naval and military authorities
should not take some preliminary steps in the way of preparing boats,
etc. , so as to be able to move, should the necessity arise'. Then,
within a week, before the receipt of the Government's answer, he left
Egypt. From the end of April until the beginning of September--during
the most momentous period of the whole crisis, he was engaged in London
upon a financial conference, while his place was taken in Cairo by a
substitute. With a characteristically convenient unobtrusiveness, Sir
Evelyn Baring had vanished from the scene.
Meanwhile, far to the southward, over the wide-spreading lands watered
by the Upper Nile and its tributaries, the power and the glory of him
who had once been Mohammed Ahmed were growing still. 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.
