' How could he have
forgotten
that?
Strachey - Eminent Victorians
Nor
was the Government as a whole by any means incapable of ignoring public
opinion; a few months were to show that, plainly enough. It is difficult
to avoid the conclusion that if Ministers had been opposed to the
appointment of Gordon, he would never have been appointed. As it was,
the newspapers were in fact forestalled, rather than followed, by the
Government.
How, then, are we to explain the Government's action? Are we to suppose
that its members, like the members of the public at large, were
themselves carried away by a sudden enthusiasm, a sudden conviction that
they had found their saviour; that General Gordon was the man--they did
not quite know why, but that was of no consequence--the one man to get
them out of the whole Sudan difficulty--they did not quite know how, but
that was of no consequence either if only he were sent to Khartoum?
Doubtless even Cabinet Ministers are liable to such impulses; doubtless
it is possible that the Cabinet of that day allowed itself to drift, out
of mere lack of consideration, and judgment, and foresight, along the
rapid stream of popular feeling towards the inevitable cataract. That
may be so; yet there are indications that a more definite influence was
at work. There was a section of the Government which had never become
quite reconciled to the policy of withdrawing from the Sudan. To this
section--we may call it the imperialist section--which was led, inside
the Cabinet, by Lord Hartington, and outside by Lord Wolseley, the
policy which really commended itself was the very policy which had been
outlined by General Gordon in his interview with Mr. Stead and his
letter to Sir Samuel Baker. They saw that it might be necessary to
abandon some of the outlying parts of the Sudan to the Mahdi; but the
prospect of leaving the whole province in his hands was highly
distasteful to them; above all, they dreaded the loss of Khartoum. Now,
supposing that General Gordon, in response to a popular agitation in the
Press, were sent to Khartoum, what would follow? Was it not at least
possible that, once there, with his views and his character, he would,
for some reason or other, refrain from carrying out a policy of pacific
retreat? Was it not possible that in that case he might so involve the
English Government that it would find itself obliged, almost
imperceptibly perhaps, to substitute for its policy of withdrawal a
policy of advance? Was it not possible that General Gordon might get
into difficulties, that he might be surrounded and cut off from Egypt'?
If that were to happen, how could the English Government avoid the
necessity of sending an expedition to rescue him? And, if an English
expedition went to the Sudan, was it conceivable that it would leave the
Mahdi as it found him? In short, would not the dispatch of General
Gordon to Khartoum involve, almost inevitably, the conquest of the Sudan
by British troops, followed by a British occupation? And, behind all
these questions, a still larger question loomed. The position of the
English in Egypt itself was still ambiguous; the future was obscure; how
long, in reality, would an English army remain in Egypt? Was not one
thing, at least, obvious--that if the English were to conquer and occupy
the Sudan, their evacuation of Egypt would become impossible?
With our present information, it would be rash to affirm that all, or
any, of these considerations were present to the minds of the
imperialist section of the Government. Yet it is difficult to believe
that a man such as Lord Wolseley, for instance, with his knowledge of
affairs and his knowledge of Gordon, could have altogether overlooked
them. Lord Hartington, indeed, may well have failed to realise at once
the implications of General Gordon's appointment--for it took Lord
Hartington some time to realise the implications of anything; but Lord
Hartington was very far from being a fool; and we may well suppose that
he instinctively, perhaps subconsciously, apprehended the elements of a
situation which he never formulated to himself. However that may be,
certain circumstances are significant. It is significant that the
go-between who acted as the Government's agent in its negotiations with
Gordon was an imperialist--Lord Wolseley. It is significant that the
'Ministers' whom Gordon finally interviewed, and who actually determined
his appointment were by no means the whole of the Cabinet, but a small
section of it, presided over by Lord Hartington. It is significant, too,
that Gordon's mission was represented both to Sir Evelyn Baring, who was
opposed to his appointment, and to Mr. Gladstone, who was opposed to an
active policy in the Sudan, as a mission merely 'to report'; while, no
sooner was the mission actually decided upon, than it began to assume a
very different complexion. In his final interview with the 'Ministers',
Gordon we know (though he said nothing about it to the Rev. Mr Barnes)
threw out the suggestion that it might be as well to make him the
Governor-General of the Sudan. The suggestion, for the moment, was not
taken up; but it is obvious that a man does not propose to become a
Governor-General in order to make a report.
We are in the region of speculations; one other presents itself. Was the
movement in the Press during that second week of January a genuine
movement, expressing a spontaneous wave of popular feeling? Or was it a
cause of that feeling, rather than an effect? The engineering of a
newspaper agitation may not have been an impossibility--even so long ago
as 1884. One would like to know more than one is ever likely to know of
the relations of the imperialist section of the Government with Mr.
Stead.
But it is time to return to the solidity of fact. Within a few hours of
his interview with the Ministers, Gordon had left England forever. At
eight o'clock in the evening, there was a little gathering of elderly
gentlemen at Victoria Station. Gordon, accompanied by Colonel Stewart,
who was to act as his second-in-command, tripped on to the platform.
Lord Granville bought the necessary tickets; the Duke of Cambridge
opened the railway-carriage door. The General jumped into the train; and
then Lord Wolseley appeared, carrying a leather bag, in which was L200
in gold, collected from friends at the last moment for the contingencies
of the journey. The bag was handed through the window. The train
started. As it did so, Gordon leaned out and addressed a last whispered
question to Lord Wolseley. Yes, it had been done. Lord Wolseley had seen
to it himself; next morning, every member of the Cabinet would receive a
copy of Dr. Samuel Clarke's Scripture Promises. That was all. The train
rolled out of the station.
Before the travellers reached Cairo, steps had been taken which finally
put an end to the theory--if it had ever been seriously held--that the
purpose of the mission was simply the making of a report. On the very
day of Gordon's departure, Lord Granville telegraphed to Sir Evelyn
Baring as follows: 'Gordon suggests that it may be announced in Egypt
that he is on his way to Khartoum to arrange for the future settlement
of the Sudan for the best advantage of the people. ' Nothing was said of
reporting. A few days later, Gordon himself telegraphed to Lord
Granville suggesting that he should be made Governor-General of the
Sudan, in order to 'accomplish the evacuation', and to 'restore to the
various Sultans of the Sudan their independence'. Lord Granville at once
authorised Sir Evelyn Baring to issue, if he thought fit, a proclamation
to this effect in the name of the Khedive. Thus the mission 'to report'
had already swollen into a Governor-Generalship, with the object, not
merely of effecting the evacuation of the Sudan, but also of setting up
'various Sultans' to take the place of the Egyptian Government.
In Cairo, in spite of the hostilities of the past, Gordon was received
with every politeness. He was at once proclaimed Governor-General of the
Sudan, with the widest powers. He was on the point of starting off again
on his journey southwards, when a singular and important incident
occurred. Zobeir, the rebel chieftain of Darfur, against whose forces
Gordon had struggled for years, and whose son, Suleiman, had been
captured and executed by Gessi, Gordon's lieutenant, was still detained
at Cairo. It so fell out that he went to pay a visit to one of the
Ministers at the same time as the new Governor-General. The two men met
face to face, and, as he looked into the savage countenance of his old
enemy, an extraordinary shock of inspiration ran through Gordon's brain.
He was seized, as he explained in a State paper, which he drew up
immediately after the meeting, with a 'mystic feeling' that he could
trust Zobeir. It was true that Zobeir was 'the greatest slave-hunter who
ever existed'; it was true that he had a personal hatred of Gordon,
owing to the execution of Suleiman--'and one cannot wonder at it, if one
is a father'; it was true that, only a few days previously, on his way
to Egypt, Gordon himself had been so convinced of the dangerous
character of Zobeir that he had recommended by telegram his removal to
Cyprus. But such considerations were utterly obliterated by that one
moment of electric impact of personal vision; henceforward, there was a
rooted conviction in Gordon's mind that Zobeir was to be trusted, that
Zobeir must join him at Khartoum, that Zobeir's presence would paralyse
the Mahdi, that Zobeir must succeed him in the government of the country
after the evacuation. Did not Sir Evelyn Baring, too, have the mystic
feeling? Sir Evelyn Baring confessed that he had not. He distrusted
mystic feelings. Zobeir, no doubt, might possibly be useful; but, before
deciding upon so important a matter, it was necessary to reflect and to
consult.
In the meantime, failing Zobeir, something might perhaps be done with
the Emir Abdul Shakur, the heir of the Darfur Sultans. The Emir, who had
been living in domestic retirement in Cairo, was with some difficulty
discovered, given L2,000, an embroidered uniform, together with the
largest decoration that could be found, and informed that he was to
start at once with General Gordon for the Sudan, where it would be his
duty to occupy the province of Darfur, after driving out the forces of
the Mahdi. The poor man begged for a little delay; but no delay could be
granted. He hurried to the railway station in his frockcoat and fez, and
rather the worse for liquor. Several extra carriages for his
twenty-three wives and a large quantity of luggage had then to be
hitched on to the Governor-General's train; and at the last moment some
commotion was caused by the unaccountable disappearance of his
embroidered uniform. It was found, but his troubles were not over. On
the steamer, General Gordon was very rude to him, and he drowned his
chagrin in hot rum and water. At Assuan he disembarked, declaring that
he would go no farther. Eventually, however, he got as far as Dongola,
whence, after a stay of a few months, he returned with his family to
Cairo.
In spite of this little contretemps, Gordon was in the highest spirits.
At last his capacities had been recognised by his countrymen; at last he
had been entrusted with a task great enough to satisfy even his desires.
He was already famous; he would soon be glorious. Looking out once more
over the familiar desert, he felt the searchings of his conscience
stilled by the manifest certainty that it was for this that Providence
had been reserving him through all these years of labour and of sorrow
for this! What was the Mahdi to stand up against him! A thousand
schemes, a thousand possibilities sprang to life in his pullulating
brain. A new intoxication carried him away. 'Il faut etre toujours ivre.
Tout est la: c'est l'unique question. ' Little though he knew it, Gordon
was a disciple of Baudelaire. 'Pour ne pas sentir l'horrible fardeau du
Temps qui brise vos epaules et vous penche vers la terre, il faut vous
enivrer sans treve. ' Yes--but how feeble were those gross resources of
the miserable Abdul-Shakur! Rum? Brandy? Oh, he knew all about them;
they were nothing. He tossed off a glass. They were nothing at all. The
true drunkenness lay elsewhere. He seized a paper and pencil, and dashed
down a telegram to Sir Evelyn Baring. Another thought struck him, and
another telegram followed. And another, and yet another. He had made up
his mind; he would visit the Mahdi in person, and alone. He might do
that; or he might retire to the Equator. He would decidedly retire to
the Equator, and hand over the Bahr-el-Ghazal province to the King of
the Belgians. A whole flock of telegrams flew to Cairo from every
stopping-place. Sir Evelyn Baring was patient and discrete; he could be
trusted with such confidences; but unfortunately Gordon's strange
exhilaration found other outlets. At Berber, in the course of a speech
to the assembled chiefs, he revealed the intention of the Egyptian
Government to withdraw from the Sudan. The news was everywhere in a
moment, and the results were disastrous. The tribesmen, whom fear and
interest had still kept loyal, perceived that they need look no more for
help or punishment from Egypt, and began to turn their eyes towards the
rising sun.
Nevertheless, for the moment, the prospect wore a favourable appearance.
The Governor-General was welcomed at every stage of his journey, and on
February 18th he made a triumphal entry into Khartoum. The feeble
garrison, the panic-stricken inhabitants, hailed him as a deliverer.
Surely they need fear no more, now that the great English Pasha had come
among them. His first acts seemed to show that a new and happy era had
begun. Taxes were remitted, the bonds of the usurers were destroyed, the
victims of Egyptian injustice were set free from the prisons; the
immemorial instruments of torture--the stocks and the whips and the
branding-irons were broken to pieces in the public square. A bolder
measure had been already taken. A proclamation had been issued
sanctioning slavery in the Sudan. Gordon, arguing that he was powerless
to do away with the odious institution, which, as soon as the withdrawal
was carried out, would inevitably become universal, had decided to reap
what benefit he could from the public abandonment of an unpopular
policy. At Khartoum the announcement was received with enthusiasm, but
it caused considerable perturbation in England. The Christian hero, who
had spent so many years of his life in suppressing slavery, was now
suddenly found to be using his high powers to set it up again. The
Anti-Slavery Society made a menacing movement, but the Government showed
a bold front, and the popular belief in Gordon's infallibility carried
the day.
He himself was still radiant. Nor, amid the jubilation and the devotion
which surrounded him, did he forget higher things. In all this turmoil,
he told his sister, he was 'supported'. He gave injunctions that his
Egyptian troops should have regular morning and evening prayers; 'they
worship one God,' he said, 'Jehovah. ' And he ordered an Arabic text,
'God rules the hearts of all men', to be put up over the chair of state
in his audience chamber. As the days went by, he began to feel at home
again in the huge palace which he knew so well. The glare and the heat
of that southern atmosphere, the movement of the crowded city, the
dark-faced populace, the soldiers and the suppliants, the reawakened
consciousness of power, the glamour and the mystery of the whole strange
scene--these things seized upon him, engulfed him, and worked a new
transformation on his intoxicated heart. England, with its complications
and its policies, became an empty vision to him; Sir Evelyn Baring, with
his cautions and sagacities, hardly more than a tiresome name. He was
Gordon Pasha, he was the Governor-General, he was the ruler of the
Sudan. He was among his people--his own people, and it was to them only
that he was responsible--to them, and to God. Was he to let them fall
without a blow into the clutches of a sanguinary impostor? Never! He was
there to prevent that. The distant governments might mutter something
about 'evacuation'; his thoughts were elsewhere. He poured them into his
telegrams, and Sir Evelyn Baring sat aghast. The man who had left London
a month before, with instructions to 'report upon the best means of
effecting the evacuation of the Sudan', was now openly talking of
'smashing up the Mahdi' with the aid of British and Indian troops. Sir
Evelyn Baring counted upon his fingers the various stages of this
extraordinary development in General Gordon's opinions. But he might
have saved himself the trouble, for, in fact, it was less a development
than a reversion. Under the stress of the excitements and the realities
of his situation at Khartoum, the policy which Gordon was now proposing
to carry out had come to tally, in every particular, with the policy
which he had originally advocated with such vigorous conviction in the
pages of the Pall Mall Gazette.
Nor was the adoption of that policy by the English Government by any
means out of the question. For, in the meantime, events had been taking
place in the Eastern Sudan, in the neighbourhood of the Red Sea port of
Suakin, which were to have a decisive effect upon the prospects of
Khartoum. General Baker, the brother of Sir Samuel Baker, attempting to
relieve the beleaguered garrisons of Sinkat and Tokar, had rashly
attacked the forces of Osman Digna, had been defeated, and obliged to
retire. Sinkat and Tokar had then fallen into the hands of the Mahdi's
general. There was a great outcry in England, and a wave of warlike
feeling passed over the country. Lord Wolseley at once drew up a
memorandum advocating the annexation of the Sudan. In the House of
Commons even Liberals began to demand vengeance and military action,
whereupon the Government dispatched Sir Gerald Graham with a
considerable British force to Suakin. Sir Gerald Graham advanced, and in
the battles of El Teb and Tamai inflicted two bloody defeats upon the
Mahdi's forces. It almost seemed as if the Government was now committed
to a policy of interference and conquest; as if the imperialist section
of the Cabinet were at last to have their way. The dispatch of Sir
Gerald Graham coincided with Gordon's sudden demand for British and
Indian troops with which to 'smash up the Mahdi'. The business, he
assured Sir Evelyn Baring, in a stream of telegrams, could very easily
be done. It made him sick, he said, to see himself held in check and the
people of the Sudan tyrannised over by 'a feeble lot of stinking
Dervishes'. Let Zobeir at once be sent down to him, and all would be
well.
The original Sultans of the country had unfortunately proved
disappointing. Their place should be taken by Zobeir. After the Mahdi
had been smashed up, Zobeir should rule the Sudan as a subsidised vassal
of England, on a similar footing to that of the Amir of Afghanistan. The
plan was perhaps feasible; but it was clearly incompatible with the
policy of evacuation, as it had been hitherto laid down by the English
Government. Should they reverse that policy? Should they appoint Zobeir,
reinforce Sir Gerald Graham, and smash up the Mahdi? They could not make
up their minds. So far as Zobeir was concerned, there were two
counterbalancing considerations; on the one hand, Evelyn Baring now
declared that he was in favour of the appointment; but, on the other
hand, would English public opinion consent to a man, described by Gordon
himself as 'the greatest slave-hunter who ever existed', being given an
English subsidy and the control of the Sudan? While the Cabinet was
wavering, Gordon took a fatal step. The delay was intolerable, and one
evening, in a rage, he revealed his desire for Zobeir--which had
hitherto been kept a profound official secret--to Mr Power, the English
Consul at Khartoum, and the special correspondent of "The Times. "
Perhaps he calculated that the public announcement of his wishes would
oblige the Government to yield to them; if so, he was completely
mistaken, for the result was the very reverse. The country, already
startled by the proclamation in favour of slavery, could not swallow
Zobeir. The Anti-Slavery Society set on foot a violent agitation,
opinion in the House of Commons suddenly stiffened, and the Cabinet, by
a substantial majority, decided that Zobeir should remain in Cairo. The
imperialist wave had risen high, but it had not risen high enough; and
now it was rapidly subsiding. The Government's next action was decisive.
Sir Gerald Graham and his British Army were withdrawn from the Sudan.
The critical fortnight during which these events took place was the
first fortnight of March. By the close of it, Gordon's position had
undergone a rapid and terrible change. Not only did he find himself
deprived, by the decision of the Government, both of the hope of
Zobeir's assistance and of the prospect of smashing up the Mahdi with
the aid of British troops; the military movements in the Eastern Sudan
produced, at the very same moment, a yet more fatal consequence. The
adherents of the Mahdi had been maddened, they had not been crushed, by
Sir Gerald Graham's victories. When, immediately afterwards, the English
withdrew to Suakin, from which they never again emerged, the inference
seemed obvious; they had been defeated, and their power was at an end.
The warlike tribes to the north and the northeast of Khartoum had long
been wavering. They now hesitated no longer, and joined the Mahdi. From
that moment--it was less than a month from Gordon's arrival at
Khartoum--the situation of the town was desperate. The line of
communications was cut. Though it still might be possible for occasional
native messengers, or for a few individuals on an armed steamer, to win
their way down the river into Egypt, the removal of a large number of
persons--the loyal inhabitants or the Egyptian garrison--was
henceforward an impossibility. The whole scheme of the Gordon mission
had irremediably collapsed; worse still, Gordon himself, so far from
having effected the evacuation of the Sudan, was surrounded by the
enemy. 'The question now is,' Sir Evelyn Baring told Lord Granville, on
March 24th, 'how to get General Gordon and Colonel Stewart away from
Khartoum. '
The actual condition of the town, however, was not, from a military
point of view, so serious as Colonel Coetlogon, in the first moments of
panic after the Hicks disaster, had supposed. Gordon was of opinion that
it was capable of sustaining a siege of many months. With his usual
vigour, he had already begun to prepare an elaborate system of
earthworks, mines, and wire entanglements. There was a five or six
months' supply of food, there was a great quantity of ammunition, the
garrison numbered about 8,000 men. There were, besides, nine small
paddle-wheel steamers, hitherto used for purposes of communication along
the Nile, which, fitted with guns and protected by metal plates, were of
considerable military value. 'We are all right,' Gordon told his sister
on March 15th. 'We shall, D. V. , go on for months. ' So far, at any rate,
there was no cause for despair. But the effervescent happiness of three
weeks since had vanished. Gloom, doubt, disillusionment,
self-questioning, had swooped down again upon their victim.
'Either I must believe He does all things in mercy and love, or else I
disbelieve His existence; there is no half way in the matter. What holes
do I not put myself into! And for what? So mixed are my ideas. I believe
ambition put me here in this ruin. '
Was not that the explanation of it all? 'Our Lord's promise is not for
the fulfilment of earthly wishes; therefore, if things come to ruin here
He is still faithful, and is carrying out His great work of divine
wisdom.
' How could he have forgotten that? But he would not transgress
again. 'I owe all to God, and nothing to myself, for, humanly speaking,
I have done very foolish things. However, if I am humbled, the better
for me. '
News of the changed circumstances at Khartoum was not slow in reaching
England, and a feeling of anxiety began to spread. Among the first to
realise the gravity of the situation was Queen Victoria. 'It is
alarming,' she telegraphed to Lord Hartington on March 25th. 'General
Gordon is in danger; you are bound to try to save him . . . You have
incurred a fearful responsibility. ' With an unerring instinct, Her
Majesty forestalled and expressed the popular sentiment. During April,
when it had become clear that the wire between Khartoum and Cairo had
been severed; when, as time passed, no word came northward, save vague
rumours of disaster; when at last a curtain of impenetrable mystery
closed over Khartoum, the growing uneasiness manifested itself in
letters to the newspapers, in leading articles, and in a flood of
subscriptions towards a relief fund. At the beginning of May, the public
alarm reached a climax. It now appeared to be certain, not only that
General Gordon was in imminent danger, but that no steps had yet been
taken by the Government to save him.
On the 5th, there was a meeting of protest and indignation at St.
James's Hall; on the 9th there was a mass meeting in Hyde Park; on the
11th there was a meeting at Manchester. The Baroness Burdett-Coutts
wrote an agitated letter to "The Times" begging for further
subscriptions. Somebody else proposed that a special fund should be
started with which 'to bribe the tribes to secure the General's personal
safety'. A country vicar made another suggestion. Why should not public
prayers be offered up for General Gordon in every church in the kingdom?
He himself had adopted that course last Sunday. 'Is not this,' he
concluded, 'what the godly man, the true hero, himself would wish to be
done? ' It was all of no avail. General Gordon remained in peril; the
Government remained inactive. Finally, a vote of censure was moved in
the House of Commons; but that too proved useless. It was strange; the
same executive which, two months before, had trimmed its sails so
eagerly to the shifting gusts of popular opinion, now, in spite of a
rising hurricane, held on its course. A new spirit, it was clear--a
determined, an intractable spirit--had taken control of the Sudan
situation. What was it? The explanation was simple, and it was ominous.
Mr. Gladstone had intervened.
The old statesman was now entering upon the penultimate period of his
enormous career. He who had once been the rising hope of the stern and
unbending Tories, had at length emerged, after a lifetime of
transmutations, as the champion of militant democracy. He was at the
apex of his power. His great rival was dead; he stood pre-eminent in the
eye of the nation; he enjoyed the applause, the confidence, the
admiration, the adoration, even, of multitudes. Yet--such was the
peculiar character of the man, and such was the intensity of the
feelings which he called forth--at this very moment, at the height of
his popularity, he was distrusted and loathed; already an unparalleled
animosity was gathering its forces against him. For, indeed, there was
something in his nature which invited--which demanded--the clashing
reactions of passionate extremes. It was easy to worship Mr. Gladstone;
to see in him the perfect model of the upright man--the man of virtue
and of religion--the man whose whole life had been devoted to the
application of high principles to affairs of State; the man, too, whose
sense of right and justice was invigorated and ennobled by an
enthusiastic heart. It was also easy to detest him as a hypocrite, to
despise him as a demagogue, and to dread him as a crafty manipulator of
men and things for the purposes of his own ambition.
It might have been supposed that one or other of these conflicting
judgments must have been palpably absurd, that nothing short of gross
prejudice or wilful blindness, on one side or the other, could reconcile
such contradictory conceptions of a single human being. But it was not
so; 'the elements' were 'so mixed' in Mr. Gladstone that his bitterest
enemies (and his enemies were never mild) and his warmest friends (and
his friends were never tepid) could justify, with equal plausibility,
their denunciations or their praises. What, then, was the truth? In the
physical universe there are no chimeras. But man is more various than
nature; was Mr. Gladstone, perhaps, a chimera of the spirit? Did his
very essence lie in the confusion of incompatibles? His very essence? It
eludes the hand that seems to grasp it. One is baffled, as his political
opponents were baffled fifty years ago. The soft serpent coils harden
into quick strength that has vanished, leaving only emptiness and
perplexity behind. Speech was the fibre of his being; and, when he
spoke, the ambiguity of ambiguity was revealed. The long, winding,
intricate sentences, with their vast burden of subtle and complicated
qualifications, befogged the mind like clouds, and like clouds, too,
dropped thunder bolts. Could it not then at least be said of him with
certainty that his was a complex character? But here also there was a
contradiction.
In spite of the involutions of his intellect and the contortions of his
spirit, it is impossible not to perceive a strain of naivete in Mr.
Gladstone. He adhered to some of his principles that of the value of
representative institutions, for instance with a faith which was
singularly literal; his views upon religion were uncritical to
crudeness; he had no sense of humour. Compared with Disraeli's, his
attitude towards life strikes one as that of an ingenuous child. His
very egoism was simple-minded; through all the labyrinth of his passions
there ran a single thread. But the centre of the labyrinth? Ah! the
thread might lead there, through those wandering mazes, at last. Only,
with the last corner turned, the last step taken, the explorer might
find that he was looking down into the gulf of a crater. The flame shot
out on every side, scorching and brilliant; but in the midst, there was
a darkness.
That Mr. Gladstone's motives and ambitions were not merely those of a
hunter after popularity was never shown more clearly than in that part
of his career which, more than any other, has been emphasised by his
enemies--his conduct towards General Gordon. He had been originally
opposed to Gordon's appointment, but he had consented to it partly,
perhaps, owing to the persuasion that its purpose did not extend beyond
the making of a 'report'. Gordon once gone, events had taken their own
course; the policy of the Government began to slide, automatically, down
a slope at the bottom of which lay the conquest of the Sudan and the
annexation of Egypt. Sir Gerald Graham's bloody victories awoke Mr.
Gladstone to the true condition of affairs; he recognised the road he
was on and its destination; but there was still time to turn back.
It was he who had insisted upon the withdrawal of the English army from
the Eastern Sudan. The imperialists were sadly disappointed. They had
supposed that the old lion had gone to sleep, and suddenly he had come
out of his lair, and was roaring. All their hopes now centred upon
Khartoum. General Gordon was cut off; he was surrounded, he was in
danger; he must be relieved. A British force must be sent to save him.
But Mr. Gladstone was not to be caught napping a second time. When the
agitation rose, when popular sentiment was deeply stirred, when the
country, the Press, the Sovereign herself, declared that the national
honour was involved with the fate of General Gordon, Mr. Gladstone
remained immovable. Others might picture the triumphant rescue of a
Christian hero from the clutches of heathen savages; before HIS eyes was
the vision of battle, murder, and sudden death, the horrors of defeat
and victory, the slaughter and the anguish of thousands, the violence of
military domination, the enslavement of a people.
The invasion of the Sudan, he had flashed out in the House of Commons,
would be a war of conquest against a people struggling to be free. 'Yes,
those people are struggling to be free, and they are rightly struggling
to be free. ' Mr. Gladstone--it was one of his old-fashioned
simplicities--believed in liberty. If, indeed, it should turn out to be
the fact that General Gordon was in serious danger, then, no doubt, it
would be necessary to send a relief expedition to Khartoum. But, he
could see no sufficient reason to believe that it was the fact.
Communications, it was true, had been interrupted between Khartoum and
Cairo, but no news was not necessarily bad news, and the little
information that had come through from General Gordon seemed to indicate
that he could hold out for months. So his agile mind worked, spinning
its familiar web of possibilities and contingencies and fine
distinctions. General Gordon, he was convinced, might be hemmed in, but
he was not surrounded. Surely, it was the duty of the Government to take
no rash step, but to consider and to inquire, and, when it acted, to act
upon reasonable conviction. And then, there was another question. If it
was true--and he believed it was true--that General Gordon's line of
retreat was open, why did not General Gordon use it?
Perhaps he might be unable to withdraw the Egyptian garrison, but it was
not for the sake of the Egyptian garrison that the relief expedition was
proposed; it was simply and solely to secure the personal safety of
General Gordon. And General Gordon had it in his power to secure his
personal safety himself; and he refused to do so; he lingered on in
Khartoum, deliberately, wilfully, in defiance of the obvious wishes of
his superiors. Oh! it was perfectly clear what General Gordon was doing:
he was trying to force the hand of the English Government. He was hoping
that if he only remained long enough at Khartoum, he would oblige the
English Government to send an army into the Sudan which should smash up
the Mahdi. That, then, was General Gordon's calculation! Well, General
Gordon would learn that he had made a mistake. Who was he that he should
dare to imagine that he could impose his will upon Mr. Gladstone? The
old man's eyes glared. If it came to a struggle between them--well, they
should see! As the weeks passed, the strange situation grew tenser. It
was like some silent deadly game of bluff. And who knows what was
passing in the obscure depths of that terrifying spirit? What mysterious
mixture of remorse, rage, and jealousy? Who was it that was ultimately
responsible for sending General Gordon to Khartoum? But then, what did
that matter? Why did not the man come back? He was a Christian hero,
wasn't he? Were there no other Christian heroes in the world? A
Christian hero! Let him wait until the Mahdi's ring was really round
him, until the Mahdi's spear was really about to fall! That would be the
test of heroism! If he slipped back then, with his tail between his
legs--! The world would judge.
One of the last telegrams sent by Gordon before the wire was cut seemed
to support exactly Mr. Gladstone's diagnosis of the case. 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?
was the Government as a whole by any means incapable of ignoring public
opinion; a few months were to show that, plainly enough. It is difficult
to avoid the conclusion that if Ministers had been opposed to the
appointment of Gordon, he would never have been appointed. As it was,
the newspapers were in fact forestalled, rather than followed, by the
Government.
How, then, are we to explain the Government's action? Are we to suppose
that its members, like the members of the public at large, were
themselves carried away by a sudden enthusiasm, a sudden conviction that
they had found their saviour; that General Gordon was the man--they did
not quite know why, but that was of no consequence--the one man to get
them out of the whole Sudan difficulty--they did not quite know how, but
that was of no consequence either if only he were sent to Khartoum?
Doubtless even Cabinet Ministers are liable to such impulses; doubtless
it is possible that the Cabinet of that day allowed itself to drift, out
of mere lack of consideration, and judgment, and foresight, along the
rapid stream of popular feeling towards the inevitable cataract. That
may be so; yet there are indications that a more definite influence was
at work. There was a section of the Government which had never become
quite reconciled to the policy of withdrawing from the Sudan. To this
section--we may call it the imperialist section--which was led, inside
the Cabinet, by Lord Hartington, and outside by Lord Wolseley, the
policy which really commended itself was the very policy which had been
outlined by General Gordon in his interview with Mr. Stead and his
letter to Sir Samuel Baker. They saw that it might be necessary to
abandon some of the outlying parts of the Sudan to the Mahdi; but the
prospect of leaving the whole province in his hands was highly
distasteful to them; above all, they dreaded the loss of Khartoum. Now,
supposing that General Gordon, in response to a popular agitation in the
Press, were sent to Khartoum, what would follow? Was it not at least
possible that, once there, with his views and his character, he would,
for some reason or other, refrain from carrying out a policy of pacific
retreat? Was it not possible that in that case he might so involve the
English Government that it would find itself obliged, almost
imperceptibly perhaps, to substitute for its policy of withdrawal a
policy of advance? Was it not possible that General Gordon might get
into difficulties, that he might be surrounded and cut off from Egypt'?
If that were to happen, how could the English Government avoid the
necessity of sending an expedition to rescue him? And, if an English
expedition went to the Sudan, was it conceivable that it would leave the
Mahdi as it found him? In short, would not the dispatch of General
Gordon to Khartoum involve, almost inevitably, the conquest of the Sudan
by British troops, followed by a British occupation? And, behind all
these questions, a still larger question loomed. The position of the
English in Egypt itself was still ambiguous; the future was obscure; how
long, in reality, would an English army remain in Egypt? Was not one
thing, at least, obvious--that if the English were to conquer and occupy
the Sudan, their evacuation of Egypt would become impossible?
With our present information, it would be rash to affirm that all, or
any, of these considerations were present to the minds of the
imperialist section of the Government. Yet it is difficult to believe
that a man such as Lord Wolseley, for instance, with his knowledge of
affairs and his knowledge of Gordon, could have altogether overlooked
them. Lord Hartington, indeed, may well have failed to realise at once
the implications of General Gordon's appointment--for it took Lord
Hartington some time to realise the implications of anything; but Lord
Hartington was very far from being a fool; and we may well suppose that
he instinctively, perhaps subconsciously, apprehended the elements of a
situation which he never formulated to himself. However that may be,
certain circumstances are significant. It is significant that the
go-between who acted as the Government's agent in its negotiations with
Gordon was an imperialist--Lord Wolseley. It is significant that the
'Ministers' whom Gordon finally interviewed, and who actually determined
his appointment were by no means the whole of the Cabinet, but a small
section of it, presided over by Lord Hartington. It is significant, too,
that Gordon's mission was represented both to Sir Evelyn Baring, who was
opposed to his appointment, and to Mr. Gladstone, who was opposed to an
active policy in the Sudan, as a mission merely 'to report'; while, no
sooner was the mission actually decided upon, than it began to assume a
very different complexion. In his final interview with the 'Ministers',
Gordon we know (though he said nothing about it to the Rev. Mr Barnes)
threw out the suggestion that it might be as well to make him the
Governor-General of the Sudan. The suggestion, for the moment, was not
taken up; but it is obvious that a man does not propose to become a
Governor-General in order to make a report.
We are in the region of speculations; one other presents itself. Was the
movement in the Press during that second week of January a genuine
movement, expressing a spontaneous wave of popular feeling? Or was it a
cause of that feeling, rather than an effect? The engineering of a
newspaper agitation may not have been an impossibility--even so long ago
as 1884. One would like to know more than one is ever likely to know of
the relations of the imperialist section of the Government with Mr.
Stead.
But it is time to return to the solidity of fact. Within a few hours of
his interview with the Ministers, Gordon had left England forever. At
eight o'clock in the evening, there was a little gathering of elderly
gentlemen at Victoria Station. Gordon, accompanied by Colonel Stewart,
who was to act as his second-in-command, tripped on to the platform.
Lord Granville bought the necessary tickets; the Duke of Cambridge
opened the railway-carriage door. The General jumped into the train; and
then Lord Wolseley appeared, carrying a leather bag, in which was L200
in gold, collected from friends at the last moment for the contingencies
of the journey. The bag was handed through the window. The train
started. As it did so, Gordon leaned out and addressed a last whispered
question to Lord Wolseley. Yes, it had been done. Lord Wolseley had seen
to it himself; next morning, every member of the Cabinet would receive a
copy of Dr. Samuel Clarke's Scripture Promises. That was all. The train
rolled out of the station.
Before the travellers reached Cairo, steps had been taken which finally
put an end to the theory--if it had ever been seriously held--that the
purpose of the mission was simply the making of a report. On the very
day of Gordon's departure, Lord Granville telegraphed to Sir Evelyn
Baring as follows: 'Gordon suggests that it may be announced in Egypt
that he is on his way to Khartoum to arrange for the future settlement
of the Sudan for the best advantage of the people. ' Nothing was said of
reporting. A few days later, Gordon himself telegraphed to Lord
Granville suggesting that he should be made Governor-General of the
Sudan, in order to 'accomplish the evacuation', and to 'restore to the
various Sultans of the Sudan their independence'. Lord Granville at once
authorised Sir Evelyn Baring to issue, if he thought fit, a proclamation
to this effect in the name of the Khedive. Thus the mission 'to report'
had already swollen into a Governor-Generalship, with the object, not
merely of effecting the evacuation of the Sudan, but also of setting up
'various Sultans' to take the place of the Egyptian Government.
In Cairo, in spite of the hostilities of the past, Gordon was received
with every politeness. He was at once proclaimed Governor-General of the
Sudan, with the widest powers. He was on the point of starting off again
on his journey southwards, when a singular and important incident
occurred. Zobeir, the rebel chieftain of Darfur, against whose forces
Gordon had struggled for years, and whose son, Suleiman, had been
captured and executed by Gessi, Gordon's lieutenant, was still detained
at Cairo. It so fell out that he went to pay a visit to one of the
Ministers at the same time as the new Governor-General. The two men met
face to face, and, as he looked into the savage countenance of his old
enemy, an extraordinary shock of inspiration ran through Gordon's brain.
He was seized, as he explained in a State paper, which he drew up
immediately after the meeting, with a 'mystic feeling' that he could
trust Zobeir. It was true that Zobeir was 'the greatest slave-hunter who
ever existed'; it was true that he had a personal hatred of Gordon,
owing to the execution of Suleiman--'and one cannot wonder at it, if one
is a father'; it was true that, only a few days previously, on his way
to Egypt, Gordon himself had been so convinced of the dangerous
character of Zobeir that he had recommended by telegram his removal to
Cyprus. But such considerations were utterly obliterated by that one
moment of electric impact of personal vision; henceforward, there was a
rooted conviction in Gordon's mind that Zobeir was to be trusted, that
Zobeir must join him at Khartoum, that Zobeir's presence would paralyse
the Mahdi, that Zobeir must succeed him in the government of the country
after the evacuation. Did not Sir Evelyn Baring, too, have the mystic
feeling? Sir Evelyn Baring confessed that he had not. He distrusted
mystic feelings. Zobeir, no doubt, might possibly be useful; but, before
deciding upon so important a matter, it was necessary to reflect and to
consult.
In the meantime, failing Zobeir, something might perhaps be done with
the Emir Abdul Shakur, the heir of the Darfur Sultans. The Emir, who had
been living in domestic retirement in Cairo, was with some difficulty
discovered, given L2,000, an embroidered uniform, together with the
largest decoration that could be found, and informed that he was to
start at once with General Gordon for the Sudan, where it would be his
duty to occupy the province of Darfur, after driving out the forces of
the Mahdi. The poor man begged for a little delay; but no delay could be
granted. He hurried to the railway station in his frockcoat and fez, and
rather the worse for liquor. Several extra carriages for his
twenty-three wives and a large quantity of luggage had then to be
hitched on to the Governor-General's train; and at the last moment some
commotion was caused by the unaccountable disappearance of his
embroidered uniform. It was found, but his troubles were not over. On
the steamer, General Gordon was very rude to him, and he drowned his
chagrin in hot rum and water. At Assuan he disembarked, declaring that
he would go no farther. Eventually, however, he got as far as Dongola,
whence, after a stay of a few months, he returned with his family to
Cairo.
In spite of this little contretemps, Gordon was in the highest spirits.
At last his capacities had been recognised by his countrymen; at last he
had been entrusted with a task great enough to satisfy even his desires.
He was already famous; he would soon be glorious. Looking out once more
over the familiar desert, he felt the searchings of his conscience
stilled by the manifest certainty that it was for this that Providence
had been reserving him through all these years of labour and of sorrow
for this! What was the Mahdi to stand up against him! A thousand
schemes, a thousand possibilities sprang to life in his pullulating
brain. A new intoxication carried him away. 'Il faut etre toujours ivre.
Tout est la: c'est l'unique question. ' Little though he knew it, Gordon
was a disciple of Baudelaire. 'Pour ne pas sentir l'horrible fardeau du
Temps qui brise vos epaules et vous penche vers la terre, il faut vous
enivrer sans treve. ' Yes--but how feeble were those gross resources of
the miserable Abdul-Shakur! Rum? Brandy? Oh, he knew all about them;
they were nothing. He tossed off a glass. They were nothing at all. The
true drunkenness lay elsewhere. He seized a paper and pencil, and dashed
down a telegram to Sir Evelyn Baring. Another thought struck him, and
another telegram followed. And another, and yet another. He had made up
his mind; he would visit the Mahdi in person, and alone. He might do
that; or he might retire to the Equator. He would decidedly retire to
the Equator, and hand over the Bahr-el-Ghazal province to the King of
the Belgians. A whole flock of telegrams flew to Cairo from every
stopping-place. Sir Evelyn Baring was patient and discrete; he could be
trusted with such confidences; but unfortunately Gordon's strange
exhilaration found other outlets. At Berber, in the course of a speech
to the assembled chiefs, he revealed the intention of the Egyptian
Government to withdraw from the Sudan. The news was everywhere in a
moment, and the results were disastrous. The tribesmen, whom fear and
interest had still kept loyal, perceived that they need look no more for
help or punishment from Egypt, and began to turn their eyes towards the
rising sun.
Nevertheless, for the moment, the prospect wore a favourable appearance.
The Governor-General was welcomed at every stage of his journey, and on
February 18th he made a triumphal entry into Khartoum. The feeble
garrison, the panic-stricken inhabitants, hailed him as a deliverer.
Surely they need fear no more, now that the great English Pasha had come
among them. His first acts seemed to show that a new and happy era had
begun. Taxes were remitted, the bonds of the usurers were destroyed, the
victims of Egyptian injustice were set free from the prisons; the
immemorial instruments of torture--the stocks and the whips and the
branding-irons were broken to pieces in the public square. A bolder
measure had been already taken. A proclamation had been issued
sanctioning slavery in the Sudan. Gordon, arguing that he was powerless
to do away with the odious institution, which, as soon as the withdrawal
was carried out, would inevitably become universal, had decided to reap
what benefit he could from the public abandonment of an unpopular
policy. At Khartoum the announcement was received with enthusiasm, but
it caused considerable perturbation in England. The Christian hero, who
had spent so many years of his life in suppressing slavery, was now
suddenly found to be using his high powers to set it up again. The
Anti-Slavery Society made a menacing movement, but the Government showed
a bold front, and the popular belief in Gordon's infallibility carried
the day.
He himself was still radiant. Nor, amid the jubilation and the devotion
which surrounded him, did he forget higher things. In all this turmoil,
he told his sister, he was 'supported'. He gave injunctions that his
Egyptian troops should have regular morning and evening prayers; 'they
worship one God,' he said, 'Jehovah. ' And he ordered an Arabic text,
'God rules the hearts of all men', to be put up over the chair of state
in his audience chamber. As the days went by, he began to feel at home
again in the huge palace which he knew so well. The glare and the heat
of that southern atmosphere, the movement of the crowded city, the
dark-faced populace, the soldiers and the suppliants, the reawakened
consciousness of power, the glamour and the mystery of the whole strange
scene--these things seized upon him, engulfed him, and worked a new
transformation on his intoxicated heart. England, with its complications
and its policies, became an empty vision to him; Sir Evelyn Baring, with
his cautions and sagacities, hardly more than a tiresome name. He was
Gordon Pasha, he was the Governor-General, he was the ruler of the
Sudan. He was among his people--his own people, and it was to them only
that he was responsible--to them, and to God. Was he to let them fall
without a blow into the clutches of a sanguinary impostor? Never! He was
there to prevent that. The distant governments might mutter something
about 'evacuation'; his thoughts were elsewhere. He poured them into his
telegrams, and Sir Evelyn Baring sat aghast. The man who had left London
a month before, with instructions to 'report upon the best means of
effecting the evacuation of the Sudan', was now openly talking of
'smashing up the Mahdi' with the aid of British and Indian troops. Sir
Evelyn Baring counted upon his fingers the various stages of this
extraordinary development in General Gordon's opinions. But he might
have saved himself the trouble, for, in fact, it was less a development
than a reversion. Under the stress of the excitements and the realities
of his situation at Khartoum, the policy which Gordon was now proposing
to carry out had come to tally, in every particular, with the policy
which he had originally advocated with such vigorous conviction in the
pages of the Pall Mall Gazette.
Nor was the adoption of that policy by the English Government by any
means out of the question. For, in the meantime, events had been taking
place in the Eastern Sudan, in the neighbourhood of the Red Sea port of
Suakin, which were to have a decisive effect upon the prospects of
Khartoum. General Baker, the brother of Sir Samuel Baker, attempting to
relieve the beleaguered garrisons of Sinkat and Tokar, had rashly
attacked the forces of Osman Digna, had been defeated, and obliged to
retire. Sinkat and Tokar had then fallen into the hands of the Mahdi's
general. There was a great outcry in England, and a wave of warlike
feeling passed over the country. Lord Wolseley at once drew up a
memorandum advocating the annexation of the Sudan. In the House of
Commons even Liberals began to demand vengeance and military action,
whereupon the Government dispatched Sir Gerald Graham with a
considerable British force to Suakin. Sir Gerald Graham advanced, and in
the battles of El Teb and Tamai inflicted two bloody defeats upon the
Mahdi's forces. It almost seemed as if the Government was now committed
to a policy of interference and conquest; as if the imperialist section
of the Cabinet were at last to have their way. The dispatch of Sir
Gerald Graham coincided with Gordon's sudden demand for British and
Indian troops with which to 'smash up the Mahdi'. The business, he
assured Sir Evelyn Baring, in a stream of telegrams, could very easily
be done. It made him sick, he said, to see himself held in check and the
people of the Sudan tyrannised over by 'a feeble lot of stinking
Dervishes'. Let Zobeir at once be sent down to him, and all would be
well.
The original Sultans of the country had unfortunately proved
disappointing. Their place should be taken by Zobeir. After the Mahdi
had been smashed up, Zobeir should rule the Sudan as a subsidised vassal
of England, on a similar footing to that of the Amir of Afghanistan. The
plan was perhaps feasible; but it was clearly incompatible with the
policy of evacuation, as it had been hitherto laid down by the English
Government. Should they reverse that policy? Should they appoint Zobeir,
reinforce Sir Gerald Graham, and smash up the Mahdi? They could not make
up their minds. So far as Zobeir was concerned, there were two
counterbalancing considerations; on the one hand, Evelyn Baring now
declared that he was in favour of the appointment; but, on the other
hand, would English public opinion consent to a man, described by Gordon
himself as 'the greatest slave-hunter who ever existed', being given an
English subsidy and the control of the Sudan? While the Cabinet was
wavering, Gordon took a fatal step. The delay was intolerable, and one
evening, in a rage, he revealed his desire for Zobeir--which had
hitherto been kept a profound official secret--to Mr Power, the English
Consul at Khartoum, and the special correspondent of "The Times. "
Perhaps he calculated that the public announcement of his wishes would
oblige the Government to yield to them; if so, he was completely
mistaken, for the result was the very reverse. The country, already
startled by the proclamation in favour of slavery, could not swallow
Zobeir. The Anti-Slavery Society set on foot a violent agitation,
opinion in the House of Commons suddenly stiffened, and the Cabinet, by
a substantial majority, decided that Zobeir should remain in Cairo. The
imperialist wave had risen high, but it had not risen high enough; and
now it was rapidly subsiding. The Government's next action was decisive.
Sir Gerald Graham and his British Army were withdrawn from the Sudan.
The critical fortnight during which these events took place was the
first fortnight of March. By the close of it, Gordon's position had
undergone a rapid and terrible change. Not only did he find himself
deprived, by the decision of the Government, both of the hope of
Zobeir's assistance and of the prospect of smashing up the Mahdi with
the aid of British troops; the military movements in the Eastern Sudan
produced, at the very same moment, a yet more fatal consequence. The
adherents of the Mahdi had been maddened, they had not been crushed, by
Sir Gerald Graham's victories. When, immediately afterwards, the English
withdrew to Suakin, from which they never again emerged, the inference
seemed obvious; they had been defeated, and their power was at an end.
The warlike tribes to the north and the northeast of Khartoum had long
been wavering. They now hesitated no longer, and joined the Mahdi. From
that moment--it was less than a month from Gordon's arrival at
Khartoum--the situation of the town was desperate. The line of
communications was cut. Though it still might be possible for occasional
native messengers, or for a few individuals on an armed steamer, to win
their way down the river into Egypt, the removal of a large number of
persons--the loyal inhabitants or the Egyptian garrison--was
henceforward an impossibility. The whole scheme of the Gordon mission
had irremediably collapsed; worse still, Gordon himself, so far from
having effected the evacuation of the Sudan, was surrounded by the
enemy. 'The question now is,' Sir Evelyn Baring told Lord Granville, on
March 24th, 'how to get General Gordon and Colonel Stewart away from
Khartoum. '
The actual condition of the town, however, was not, from a military
point of view, so serious as Colonel Coetlogon, in the first moments of
panic after the Hicks disaster, had supposed. Gordon was of opinion that
it was capable of sustaining a siege of many months. With his usual
vigour, he had already begun to prepare an elaborate system of
earthworks, mines, and wire entanglements. There was a five or six
months' supply of food, there was a great quantity of ammunition, the
garrison numbered about 8,000 men. There were, besides, nine small
paddle-wheel steamers, hitherto used for purposes of communication along
the Nile, which, fitted with guns and protected by metal plates, were of
considerable military value. 'We are all right,' Gordon told his sister
on March 15th. 'We shall, D. V. , go on for months. ' So far, at any rate,
there was no cause for despair. But the effervescent happiness of three
weeks since had vanished. Gloom, doubt, disillusionment,
self-questioning, had swooped down again upon their victim.
'Either I must believe He does all things in mercy and love, or else I
disbelieve His existence; there is no half way in the matter. What holes
do I not put myself into! And for what? So mixed are my ideas. I believe
ambition put me here in this ruin. '
Was not that the explanation of it all? 'Our Lord's promise is not for
the fulfilment of earthly wishes; therefore, if things come to ruin here
He is still faithful, and is carrying out His great work of divine
wisdom.
' How could he have forgotten that? But he would not transgress
again. 'I owe all to God, and nothing to myself, for, humanly speaking,
I have done very foolish things. However, if I am humbled, the better
for me. '
News of the changed circumstances at Khartoum was not slow in reaching
England, and a feeling of anxiety began to spread. Among the first to
realise the gravity of the situation was Queen Victoria. 'It is
alarming,' she telegraphed to Lord Hartington on March 25th. 'General
Gordon is in danger; you are bound to try to save him . . . You have
incurred a fearful responsibility. ' With an unerring instinct, Her
Majesty forestalled and expressed the popular sentiment. During April,
when it had become clear that the wire between Khartoum and Cairo had
been severed; when, as time passed, no word came northward, save vague
rumours of disaster; when at last a curtain of impenetrable mystery
closed over Khartoum, the growing uneasiness manifested itself in
letters to the newspapers, in leading articles, and in a flood of
subscriptions towards a relief fund. At the beginning of May, the public
alarm reached a climax. It now appeared to be certain, not only that
General Gordon was in imminent danger, but that no steps had yet been
taken by the Government to save him.
On the 5th, there was a meeting of protest and indignation at St.
James's Hall; on the 9th there was a mass meeting in Hyde Park; on the
11th there was a meeting at Manchester. The Baroness Burdett-Coutts
wrote an agitated letter to "The Times" begging for further
subscriptions. Somebody else proposed that a special fund should be
started with which 'to bribe the tribes to secure the General's personal
safety'. A country vicar made another suggestion. Why should not public
prayers be offered up for General Gordon in every church in the kingdom?
He himself had adopted that course last Sunday. 'Is not this,' he
concluded, 'what the godly man, the true hero, himself would wish to be
done? ' It was all of no avail. General Gordon remained in peril; the
Government remained inactive. Finally, a vote of censure was moved in
the House of Commons; but that too proved useless. It was strange; the
same executive which, two months before, had trimmed its sails so
eagerly to the shifting gusts of popular opinion, now, in spite of a
rising hurricane, held on its course. A new spirit, it was clear--a
determined, an intractable spirit--had taken control of the Sudan
situation. What was it? The explanation was simple, and it was ominous.
Mr. Gladstone had intervened.
The old statesman was now entering upon the penultimate period of his
enormous career. He who had once been the rising hope of the stern and
unbending Tories, had at length emerged, after a lifetime of
transmutations, as the champion of militant democracy. He was at the
apex of his power. His great rival was dead; he stood pre-eminent in the
eye of the nation; he enjoyed the applause, the confidence, the
admiration, the adoration, even, of multitudes. Yet--such was the
peculiar character of the man, and such was the intensity of the
feelings which he called forth--at this very moment, at the height of
his popularity, he was distrusted and loathed; already an unparalleled
animosity was gathering its forces against him. For, indeed, there was
something in his nature which invited--which demanded--the clashing
reactions of passionate extremes. It was easy to worship Mr. Gladstone;
to see in him the perfect model of the upright man--the man of virtue
and of religion--the man whose whole life had been devoted to the
application of high principles to affairs of State; the man, too, whose
sense of right and justice was invigorated and ennobled by an
enthusiastic heart. It was also easy to detest him as a hypocrite, to
despise him as a demagogue, and to dread him as a crafty manipulator of
men and things for the purposes of his own ambition.
It might have been supposed that one or other of these conflicting
judgments must have been palpably absurd, that nothing short of gross
prejudice or wilful blindness, on one side or the other, could reconcile
such contradictory conceptions of a single human being. But it was not
so; 'the elements' were 'so mixed' in Mr. Gladstone that his bitterest
enemies (and his enemies were never mild) and his warmest friends (and
his friends were never tepid) could justify, with equal plausibility,
their denunciations or their praises. What, then, was the truth? In the
physical universe there are no chimeras. But man is more various than
nature; was Mr. Gladstone, perhaps, a chimera of the spirit? Did his
very essence lie in the confusion of incompatibles? His very essence? It
eludes the hand that seems to grasp it. One is baffled, as his political
opponents were baffled fifty years ago. The soft serpent coils harden
into quick strength that has vanished, leaving only emptiness and
perplexity behind. Speech was the fibre of his being; and, when he
spoke, the ambiguity of ambiguity was revealed. The long, winding,
intricate sentences, with their vast burden of subtle and complicated
qualifications, befogged the mind like clouds, and like clouds, too,
dropped thunder bolts. Could it not then at least be said of him with
certainty that his was a complex character? But here also there was a
contradiction.
In spite of the involutions of his intellect and the contortions of his
spirit, it is impossible not to perceive a strain of naivete in Mr.
Gladstone. He adhered to some of his principles that of the value of
representative institutions, for instance with a faith which was
singularly literal; his views upon religion were uncritical to
crudeness; he had no sense of humour. Compared with Disraeli's, his
attitude towards life strikes one as that of an ingenuous child. His
very egoism was simple-minded; through all the labyrinth of his passions
there ran a single thread. But the centre of the labyrinth? Ah! the
thread might lead there, through those wandering mazes, at last. Only,
with the last corner turned, the last step taken, the explorer might
find that he was looking down into the gulf of a crater. The flame shot
out on every side, scorching and brilliant; but in the midst, there was
a darkness.
That Mr. Gladstone's motives and ambitions were not merely those of a
hunter after popularity was never shown more clearly than in that part
of his career which, more than any other, has been emphasised by his
enemies--his conduct towards General Gordon. He had been originally
opposed to Gordon's appointment, but he had consented to it partly,
perhaps, owing to the persuasion that its purpose did not extend beyond
the making of a 'report'. Gordon once gone, events had taken their own
course; the policy of the Government began to slide, automatically, down
a slope at the bottom of which lay the conquest of the Sudan and the
annexation of Egypt. Sir Gerald Graham's bloody victories awoke Mr.
Gladstone to the true condition of affairs; he recognised the road he
was on and its destination; but there was still time to turn back.
It was he who had insisted upon the withdrawal of the English army from
the Eastern Sudan. The imperialists were sadly disappointed. They had
supposed that the old lion had gone to sleep, and suddenly he had come
out of his lair, and was roaring. All their hopes now centred upon
Khartoum. General Gordon was cut off; he was surrounded, he was in
danger; he must be relieved. A British force must be sent to save him.
But Mr. Gladstone was not to be caught napping a second time. When the
agitation rose, when popular sentiment was deeply stirred, when the
country, the Press, the Sovereign herself, declared that the national
honour was involved with the fate of General Gordon, Mr. Gladstone
remained immovable. Others might picture the triumphant rescue of a
Christian hero from the clutches of heathen savages; before HIS eyes was
the vision of battle, murder, and sudden death, the horrors of defeat
and victory, the slaughter and the anguish of thousands, the violence of
military domination, the enslavement of a people.
The invasion of the Sudan, he had flashed out in the House of Commons,
would be a war of conquest against a people struggling to be free. 'Yes,
those people are struggling to be free, and they are rightly struggling
to be free. ' Mr. Gladstone--it was one of his old-fashioned
simplicities--believed in liberty. If, indeed, it should turn out to be
the fact that General Gordon was in serious danger, then, no doubt, it
would be necessary to send a relief expedition to Khartoum. But, he
could see no sufficient reason to believe that it was the fact.
Communications, it was true, had been interrupted between Khartoum and
Cairo, but no news was not necessarily bad news, and the little
information that had come through from General Gordon seemed to indicate
that he could hold out for months. So his agile mind worked, spinning
its familiar web of possibilities and contingencies and fine
distinctions. General Gordon, he was convinced, might be hemmed in, but
he was not surrounded. Surely, it was the duty of the Government to take
no rash step, but to consider and to inquire, and, when it acted, to act
upon reasonable conviction. And then, there was another question. If it
was true--and he believed it was true--that General Gordon's line of
retreat was open, why did not General Gordon use it?
Perhaps he might be unable to withdraw the Egyptian garrison, but it was
not for the sake of the Egyptian garrison that the relief expedition was
proposed; it was simply and solely to secure the personal safety of
General Gordon. And General Gordon had it in his power to secure his
personal safety himself; and he refused to do so; he lingered on in
Khartoum, deliberately, wilfully, in defiance of the obvious wishes of
his superiors. Oh! it was perfectly clear what General Gordon was doing:
he was trying to force the hand of the English Government. He was hoping
that if he only remained long enough at Khartoum, he would oblige the
English Government to send an army into the Sudan which should smash up
the Mahdi. That, then, was General Gordon's calculation! Well, General
Gordon would learn that he had made a mistake. Who was he that he should
dare to imagine that he could impose his will upon Mr. Gladstone? The
old man's eyes glared. If it came to a struggle between them--well, they
should see! As the weeks passed, the strange situation grew tenser. It
was like some silent deadly game of bluff. And who knows what was
passing in the obscure depths of that terrifying spirit? What mysterious
mixture of remorse, rage, and jealousy? Who was it that was ultimately
responsible for sending General Gordon to Khartoum? But then, what did
that matter? Why did not the man come back? He was a Christian hero,
wasn't he? Were there no other Christian heroes in the world? A
Christian hero! Let him wait until the Mahdi's ring was really round
him, until the Mahdi's spear was really about to fall! That would be the
test of heroism! If he slipped back then, with his tail between his
legs--! The world would judge.
One of the last telegrams sent by Gordon before the wire was cut seemed
to support exactly Mr. Gladstone's diagnosis of the case. 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?
