His position, indeed, was an extremely difficult one,
and all his dexterity would be needed if he was to emerge from it with
credit.
and all his dexterity would be needed if he was to emerge from it with
credit.
Strachey - Eminent Victorians
'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? 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.
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? 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.
