Page:EB1911 - Volume 12.djvu/269

Rh At Cairo he received further instructions from Sir Evelyn Baring, and was appointed by the khedive as governor-general, with executive powers. Travelling by Korosko and Berber, he arrived at Khartum on the 18th of February, and was well received by the inhabitants, who believed

that he had come to save the country from the rebels. Gordon at once commenced the task of sending the women and children and the sick and wounded to Egypt, and about two thousand five hundred had been removed before the mahdi’s forces closed upon Khartum. At the same time he was impressed with the necessity of making some arrangement for the future government of the country, and asked for the help of (q.v.), who had great influence in the Sudan, and had been detained in Cairo for some years. This request was made on the very day Gordon reached Khartum, and was in accordance with a similar proposal he had made when at Cairo. But, after delays which involved the loss of much precious time, the British government refused (13th of March) to sanction the appointment, because Zobeir had been a notorious slave-hunter. With this refusal vanished all hope of a peaceful retreat of the Egyptian garrisons. Wavering tribes went over to the mahdi. The advance of the rebels against Khartum was combined with a revolt in the eastern Sudan, and the Egyptian troops in the vicinity of Suakin met with constant defeat. At length a British force was sent to Suakin under the command of General Sir Gerald Graham, and routed the rebels in several hard-fought actions. Gordon telegraphed to Sir Evelyn Baring urging that the road from Suakin to Berber should be opened by a small force. But this request, though strongly supported by Baring and the British military authorities in Cairo, was refused by the government in London. In April General Graham and his forces were withdrawn from Suakin, and Gordon and the Sudan were seemingly abandoned to their fate. The garrison of Berber, seeing that there was no chance of relief, surrendered a month later and Khartum was completely isolated. Had it not been for the presence of Gordon the city would also soon have fallen, but with an energy and skill that were almost miraculous, he so organized the defence that Khartum held out until January 1885. When it is remembered that Gordon was of a different nationality and religion to the garrison and population, that he had only one British officer to assist him, and that the town was badly fortified and insufficiently provided with food, it is just to say that the defence of Khartum is one of the most remarkable episodes in military history. The siege commenced on the 18th of March, but it was not until August that the British government under the pressure of public opinion decided to take steps to relieve Gordon. General Stephenson, who was in command of the British troops in Egypt, wished to send a brigade at once to Dongola, but he was overruled, and it was not until the beginning of November that the British relief force was ready to start from Wadi Haifa under the command of Lord Wolseley. The force reached Korti towards the end of December, and from that place a column was despatched across the Bayuda desert to Metemma on the Nile. After some severe fighting in which the leader of the column, Sir Herbert Stewart, was mortally wounded, the force reached the river on the 20th of January, and the following day four steamers, which had been sent down by Gordon to meet the British advance, and which had been waiting for them for four months, reported to Sir Charles Wilson, who had taken command after Sir Herbert Stewart was wounded. On the 24th Wilson started with two of the steamers for Khartum, but on arriving there on the 28th he found that the place had been captured by the rebels and Gordon killed two days before. A belief has been entertained that Wilson might have started earlier and saved the town, but this is quite groundless. In the first place, Wilson could not have started sooner than he did; and in the second, even if he had been able to do so, it would have made no difference, as the rebels could have taken Khartum any time they pleased after the 5th of January, when the provisions were exhausted. Another popular notion, that the capture of the place was due to treachery on the part of the garrison, is equally without foundation. The attack was made at a point in the fortifications where the rampart and ditch had been destroyed by the rising of the Nile, and when the mahdi’s troops entered the soldiers were too weak to make any effectual resistance. Gordon himself expected the town to fall before the end of December, and it is really difficult to understand how he succeeded in holding out until the 26th of January. Writing on the 14th of December he said, “Now, mark this, if the expeditionary force—and I ask for no more than two hundred men—does not come in ten days, the town may fall, and I have done my best for the honour of my country.” He had indeed done his best, and far more than could have been regarded as possible. To understand what he went through during the latter months of the siege, it is only necessary to read his own journal, a portion of which, dating from 10th September to 14th December 1884, was fortunately preserved and published.

Gordon was not an author, but he wrote many short memoranda on subjects that interested him, and a considerable number of these have been utilized, especially in the work by his brother, Sir Henry Gordon, entitled Events in the Life of Charles George Gordon, from its Beginning to its End. He was a voluminous letter-writer, and much of his correspondence has been published. His character was remarkable, and the influence he had over those with whom he came in contact was very striking. His power to command men of non-European races was probably unique. He had no fear of death, and cared but little for the opinion of others, adhering tenaciously to the course he believed to be right in the face of all opposition. Though not holding to outward forms of religion, he was a truly religious man in the highest sense of the word, and was a constant student of the Bible. To serve God and to do his duty were the great objects of his life, and he died as he had lived, carrying out the work that lay before him to the best of his ability. The last words of his last letter to his sister, written when he knew that death was very near, sum up his character: “I am quite happy, thank God, and, like Lawrence, I have tried to do my duty. With this estimate of Gordon’s character may be contrasted those of Lord Cromer (the most severe of Gordon’s critics), and of Lord Morley of Blackburn; in their strictures as in their praise they help to explain both the causes of the extraordinary influence wielded by Gordon over all sorts and conditions of men and also his difficulties. Lord Cromer’s criticism, it should be remembered, does not deal with Gordon’s career as a whole but solely with his last mission to the Sudan; Lord Morley’s is a more general judgment. Lord Cromer (Modern Egypt, vol. i., ch. xxvii., p. 565-571) says: “We may admire, and for my own part I do very much admire General Gordon’s personal courage, his disinterestedness and his chivalrous feeling in favour of the beleaguered garrisons, but admiration of these qualities is no sufficient plea against a condemnation of his conduct on the ground that it was quixotic. In his last letter to his sister, dated December 14, 1884, he wrote: ‘I am quite happy, thank God, and, like Lawrence, I have tried to do my duty’ I am not now dealing with General Gordon’s character, which was in many respects noble, or with his military defence of Khartoum, which was heroic, but with the political conduct of his mission, and from this point of view I have no hesitation in saying that General Gordon cannot be considered to have tried to do his duty unless a very strained and mistaken view be taken of what his duty was As a matter of public morality I cannot think that General Gordon’s process of reasoning is defensible I do not think that it can be held that General Gordon made any serious effort to carry out the main ends of British and Egyptian policy in the Sudan. He thought more of his personal opinions than of the interests of the state In fact, except personal courage, great fertility in military resource, a lively though sometimes ill-directed repugnance to injustice, oppression and meanness of every description, and a considerable power of acquiring influence over those, necessarily limited in numbers, with whom he was brought into personal contact, General Gordon does not appear to have possessed any of the qualities which would have fitted him to undertake the difficult task he had in hand.” Lord Morley (Life of Gladstone, vol. iii., 1st ed., 1903, ch. 9, p. 151) says: “Gordon, as Mr Gladstone said, was a hero of heroes. He was a soldier of infinite personal courage and daring, of striking military energy, initiative and resource; a high, pure and single character, dwelling much in the region of the unseen. But as all who knew him admit, and as his own records testify, notwithstanding an undercurrent of shrewd common sense, he was the creature, almost the sport, of impulse; his impressions and purposes changed with the speed of lightning; anger often mastered him; he went very often by intuitions and inspirations rather than by cool