The Life of Gordon, Volume II

by Demetrius Charles Boulger

Before entering on the events of this crowning passage in the career of this hero, I think the reader might well consider on its threshold the exact nature of the adventure undertaken by Gordon as if it were a sort of everyday experience and duty. At the commencement of the year 1884 the military triumph of the Mahdi was as complete as it could be throughout the Soudan. Khartoum was still held by a force of between 4000 and 6000 men. Although not known, all the other garrisons in the Nile Valley, except Kassala and Sennaar, both near the Abyssinian frontier, had capitulated, and the force at Khartoum would certainly have offered no resistance if the Mahdi had advanced immediately after the defeat of Hicks. Even if he had reached Khartoum before the arrival of Gordon, it is scarcely doubtful that the place would have fallen without fighting. Colonel de Coetlogon was in command, but the troops had no faith in him, and he had no confidence in them. That officer, on 9th January, "telegraphed to the Khedive, strongly urging an immediate withdrawal from Khartoum. He said that one-third of the garrison are unreliable, and that even if it were twice as strong as it is, it would not hold Khartoum against the whole country." In several subsequent telegrams Colonel de Coetlogon importuned the Cairo authorities to send him authority to leave with the garrison, and on the very day that the Government finally decided to despatch Gordon he telegraphed that there was only just enough time left to escape to Berber. While the commandant held and expressed these views, it is not surprising that the garrison and inhabitants were disheartened and decidedly unfit to make any resolute opposition to a confident and daring foe. There is excellent independent testimony as to the state of public feeling in the town.

Mr Frank Power had been residing in Khartoum as correspondent of The Times from August 1883, and in December, after the Hicks catastrophe, he was appointed Acting British Consul. In a letter written on 12th January he said: "They have done nothing for us yet from Cairo. They are leaving it all to fate, and the rebels around us are growing stronger!" Such was the general situation at Khartoum when General Gordon was ordered, almost single-handed, to save it; and not merely to rescue its garrison, pronounced by its commander to be partly unreliable and wholly inadequate, but other garrisons scattered throughout the regions held by the Mahdi and his victorious legions. A courageous man could not have been charged with cowardice if he had shrunk back from such a forlorn hope, and declined to take on his shoulders the responsibility that properly devolved on the commander on the spot. A prudent man would at least have insisted that his instructions should be clear, and that the part his Government and country were to play was to be as strictly defined and as obligatory on them as his own. But while Gordon's courage was of such a quality that I believe no calculation of odds or difficulties ever entered into his view, his prudence never possessed the requisite amount of suspicion to make him provide against the contingencies of absolute betrayal by those who sent him, or of that change in party convenience and tactics which induced those who first thought his mission most advantageous as solving a difficulty, or at least putting off a trouble, to veer round to the conclusion that his remaining at Khartoum, his honourable but rigid resolve not to return without the people he went to save, was a distinct breach of contract, and a serious offence.

The state of feeling at Khartoum was one verging on panic. The richest townsmen had removed their property and families to Berber. Colonel de Coetlogon had the river boats with steam up ready to commence the evacuation, and while everyone thought that the place was doomed, the telegraph instrument was eagerly watched for the signal to begin the flight. The tension could not have lasted much longer—without the signal the flight would have begun—when on 24th January the brief message arrived: "General Gordon is coming to Khartoum." The effect of that message was electrical. The panic ceased, confidence was restored, the apathy of the Cairo authorities became a matter of no importance, for England had sent her greatest name as a pledge of her intended action, and the unreliable and insufficient garrison pulled itself together for one of the most honourable and brilliant defences in the annals of military sieges. Yet it was full time. Two months had been wasted, and, as Mr Power said, "the fellows in Lucknow did not look more anxiously for Colin Campbell than we are looking for Gordon." Gordon, ever mindful of the importance of time, and fully impressed with the sense of how much had been lost by delay, did not let the grass grow under his feet, and after his two days' delay at Cairo sent a message that he hoped to reach Khartoum in eighteen days. Mr Power's comment on that message is as follows: "Twenty-four days is the shortest time from Cairo to Khartoum on record; Gordon says he will be here in eighteen days; but he travels like a whirlwind." As a matter of fact, Gordon took twenty days' travelling, besides the two days he passed at Berber. He thus reached Khartoum on 18th February, and four days later Colonel de Coetlogon started for Cairo.

The entry of Gordon into Khartoum was marked by a scene of indescribable enthusiasm and public confidence. The whole population, men, women, and children, turned out to welcome him as a conqueror and a deliverer, although he really came in his own person merely to cope with a desperate situation. The women threw themselves on the ground and struggled to kiss his feet; in the confusion Gordon was several times pushed down; and this remarkable demonstration of popular confidence and affection was continued the whole way from the landing-place to the Hukumdaria or Palace. This greeting was the more remarkable because it was clear that Gordon had brought no troops—only one white officer—and it soon became known that he had brought no money. Even the Mahdi himself made his contribution to the general tribute, by sending General Gordon on his arrival a formal salaam or message of respect. Thus hailed on all hands as the one pre-eminently good man who had been associated with the Soudan, Gordon addressed himself to the hard task he had undertaken, which had been rendered almost hopeless of achievement by the lapse of time, past errors, and the blindness of those who should have supported him.

Difficult as it had been all along, it was rendered still more difficult by the decisive defeat of Baker Pasha and an Egyptian force of 4000 men at Tokar, near Souakim. This victory was won by Osman Digma, who had been sent by the Mahdi to rouse up the Eastern Soudan at the time of the threatened Hicks expedition. The result showed that the Mahdi had discovered a new lieutenant of great military capacity and energy, and that the Eastern Soudan was for the time as hopelessly lost to Egypt as Kordofan and Darfour.

The first task to which Gordon addressed himself was to place Khartoum and the detached work at Omdurman on the left bank of the White Nile in a proper state of defence, and he especially supervised the establishment of telegraphic communication between the Palace and the many outworks, so that at a moment's notice he might receive word of what was happening. His own favourite position became the flat roof of this building, whence with his glass he could see round for many miles. He also laid in considerable stores of provisions by means of his steamers, in which he placed the greatest faith. In all these matters he was ably and energetically assisted by Colonel Stewart; and beyond doubt the other Europeans took some slight share in the incessant work of putting Khartoum in a proper state of defence; but even with this relief, the strain, increased by constant alarms of the Mahdi's hostile approach, was intense, and Mr Power speaks of Gordon as nearly worn out with work before he had been there a month.

When Gordon went to the Soudan his principal object was to effect the evacuation of the country, and to establish there some administration which would be answerable for good order and good neighbourship. If the Mahdi had been a purely secular potentate, and not a fanatical religious propagandist, it would have been a natural and feasible arrangement to have come to terms with him as the conqueror of the country. But the basis of the Mahdi's power forbade his being on terms with anyone. If he had admitted the equal rights of Egypt and the Khedive at any point, there would have been an end to his heavenly mission, and the forces he had created out of the simple but deep-rooted religious feelings of the Mahommedan clans of the Soudan would soon have vanished. It is quite possible that General Gordon had in his first views on the Mahdist movement somewhat undervalued the forces created by that fanaticism, and that the hopes and opinions he first expressed were unduly optimistic. If so, it must be allowed that he lost not a moment in correcting them, and within a week of his arrival at Khartoum he officially telegraphed to Cairo, that "if Egypt is to be quiet the Mahdi must be smashed up."

When the British Government received that message, as they did in a few days, with, moreover, the expression of supporting views by Sir Evelyn Baring, they ought to have reconsidered the whole question of the Gordon mission, and to have defined their own policy. The representative they had sent on an exceptional errand to relieve and bring back a certain number of distressed troops, and to arrange if he could for the formation of a new government through the notabilities and ancient families, reports at an early stage of his mission that in his opinion there is no solution of the difficulty, save by resorting to offensive measures against the Mahdi as the disturber of the peace, not merely for that moment, but as long as he had to discharge the divine task implied by his title. As it was of course obvious that Gordon single-handed could not take the field, the conclusion necessarily followed that he would require troops, and the whole character of his task would thus have been changed. In face of that absolute volte-face, from a policy of evacuation and retreat to one of retention and advance, for that is what it signified, the Government would have been justified in recalling Gordon, but as they did not do so, they cannot plead ignorance of his changed opinion, or deny that, at the very moment he became acquainted with the real state of things at Khartoum, he hastened to convey to them his decided conviction that the only way out of the difficulty was to "smash up the Mahdi."

All his early messages show that there had been a change, or at least a marked modification, in his opinions. At Khartoum he saw more clearly than in Cairo or in London the extreme gravity of the situation, and the consequences to the tranquillity of Lower Egypt that would follow from the abandonment of Khartoum to the Mahdi. He therefore telegraphed on the day of his arrival these words: "To withdraw without being able to place a successor in my seat would be the signal for general anarchy throughout the country, which, though all Egyptian element were withdrawn, would be a misfortune, and inhuman." In the same message he repeated his demand for the services of Zebehr, through whom, as has been shown, he thought he might be able to cope with the Mahdi. Yet their very refusal to comply with that reiterated request should have made the authorities more willing and eager to meet the other applications and suggestion of a man who had thrust himself into a most perilous situation at their bidding, and for the sake of the reputation of his country. It must be recorded with feelings of shame that it had no such effect, and that apathy and indifference to the fate of its gallant agent were during the first few months the only characteristics of the Government policy.

At the same period all Gordon's telegrams and despatches showed that he wanted reinforcements to some small extent, and at least military demonstrations along his line of communication with Egypt to prove that he possessed the support of his Government, and that he had only to call upon it to send troops, and they were there to come. He, naturally enough, treated as ridiculous the suggestion that he had bound himself to do the whole work without any support; and fully convinced that he had only to summon troops for them to be sent him in the moderate strength he alone cared for, he issued a proclamation in Khartoum, stating that "British troops are now on their way, and in a few days will reach Khartoum." He therefore begged for the despatch of a small force to Wady Halfa, and he went on to declare that it would be "comparatively easy to destroy the Mahdi" if 200 British troops were sent to Wady Halfa, and if the Souakim-Berber route were opened up by Indian-Moslem troops. Failing the adoption of these measures, he asked leave to raise a sum, by appealing to philanthropists, sufficient to pay a small Turkish force and carry on a contest for supremacy with the Mahdi on his own behoof. All these suggestions were more or less supported by Sir Evelyn Baring, who at last suggested in an important despatch, dated 28th February, that the British Government should withdraw altogether from the matter, and "give full liberty of action to General Gordon and the Khedive's Government to do what seems best to them."