I have already told Father Ohrwalder that, in commenting upon what he says in “Ten Years’ Captivity,” when speaking of Gordon’s actions, the remarks I may feel called upon to make are not intended for him personally, and although I foresee |307| that I must in the main have to speak as to the second person, I think Father Ohrwalder quite understands that the second person in this instance is his book, not himself. I do not, as I have told him, consider that he is directly responsible for the opinions he is credited with in “Ten Years’ Captivity,” and this notwithstanding the remark, “The reader is reminded that all opinions expressed are those of Father Ohrwalder.” Considering that Father Ohrwalder is a priest and missionary, and has ventured upon thin ice in attacking Gordon’s memory, such a statement is hardly fair to him, as in the preface to the book it is stated, that “Father Ohrwalder’s manuscript, which was in the first instance written in German, was roughly translated into English by Yusef Effendi Cudzi, a Syrian; this I entirely rewrote in narrative form; the work therefore does not profess to be a literal translation of the original manuscript. . . .”
I should have thought that when Gordon was being attacked the original manuscript might have been treated a little differently. Of course it is easily understandable that when a Syrian, with Arabic for his mother tongue, translates from one difficult language which he has picked up into another equally difficult, and translates roughly too, when moreover this rough translation is handled in the manner admitted, errors may have crept in or been passed unnoticed, whilst salient points were lost sight of. It is also quite possible that the peculiar idioms of the Arabic, German, and English languages |308| got into a hopeless tangle, and were left so. Whatever the cause, there is no gainsaying the fact that Father Ohrwalder is credited with the expression of opinions which he, as a priest and missionary, ought to be one of the last on this earth to give utterance to. That he did not appreciate to the full the real import of the opinions he is credited with, I feel certain of after my long interview with him, when, with the Bible in one hand and a copy of “Ten Years’ Captivity” in the other, we compared the opinions expressed in the latter with the teachings of Christ in the former.
Father Ohrwalder may or may not have been ill-advised in omitting or suppressing the relation of well-known incidents, which accounted for Gordon’s attitude in certain cases. It was only by omitting to mention these incidents that the criticisms on Gordon were rendered possible, or I should say that, had those incidents been included, the criticisms would not have lived a day. It would have been far better to tell everything to the generous and sympathetic world which he and Slatin met when they escaped, and to leave it to condone, if any condoning was called for, and to sympathize with them in the parts force of circumstances compelled them to act, which must have been so repugnant to them; for to omit, when criticizing Gordon, the relation of the very acts which compelled him also by force of circumstances to act as he did, was, to say the least of it, very unwise.
In “Ten Years’ Captivity” the reader is led into a maze of opinions, and left there. Once inside, you |309| discover that you can neither gain the centre of the maze or return to the starting-point; you must either wander round for an eternity, or do as I shall do, cut your way through the hedges planted to bewilder you, and thank Heaven when on the outside that you are clear of the tortuous passages. Compare, for instance—
“He (Cudzi) added that Gordon should have no anxiety about Berber as long as Hussein Pasha Khaleefa was Mudir,”
with,
“Gordon himself committed a mistake by which he gave a deathblow to himself and his mission. On his way to Khartoum, he stopped at Berber, and interviewed the Mudir Hussein Pasha Khaleefa; he imprudently told him that he had come up to remove the Egyptian garrisons, as Egypt had abandoned the Soudan.”
Gordon cannot be blamed for confirming, as Governor-General of the Soudan, the news telegraphed to his subordinate, the Mudir of Berber, through whose hands the retiring garrisons must pass, nor can he be blamed if, when his suspicions were aroused, he deferred to the opinion of the man who was acting British Consul, Government representative, and his own agent, when he wrote and telegraphed as he did, “Trust in Hussein Pasha.”
“The catastrophe which had overtaken Hicks filled the inhabitants of Khartoum with indescribable dismay. Several of them returned to Egypt, and the members of the Austrian Mission, with their blacks, quitted Khartoum on the 11th December, 1883.”
I therefore take it for granted that Father Ohrwalder’s fellow-workers saw that all was hopeless |310| two months before Gordon’s name had been suggested to the Egyptian Government, yet, in the face of this, we are first asked—