On the 16th of March he had to look upon his native troops retiring before the rebel horsemen. He writes:
“Our gun with the regulars opened fire. Very soon a body of about sixty rebel horsemen charged down upon my Bashi-Bazouks, who fired a volley, then turned and fled. The horsemen galloped towards my square of regulars, which they immediately broke. The whole force then retreated slowly towards the fort with their rifles shouldered. The men made no effort to stand, and the gun was abandoned. Pursuit ceased about a mile from stockade, and there the men rallied. We brought in the wounded. Nothing could be more dismal than seeing these horsemen, and some men even on camels, pursuing close to troops, who with arms shouldered plodded their way back.”
But Gordon was no weak humanitarian. Two Pashas were tried, and found guilty of cowardice, and were promptly shot—pour encourager les autres. After that he tried to train his men to face the enemy by little skirmishes, and he made frequent sallies with his river steamers.
“You see,” he wrote, “when you have steam on the men can’t run away.”
Then began a long and weary waiting for the relief which came not until it was too late. The Arabs kept on making attacks, which they never pressed home, expecting to effect a surrender from scarcity of food.
A Strange Weapon of Offence
Lieut. Herbert was ordered to paste some labels at the ambulance doors in Plevna. In passing a dark lane someone sprang at him and seized his paste-pot, no doubt taking it for food. To defend himself he belaboured and plastered his opponents’ face with the paste-brush, and later on those of two others. He then turned and ran.
In September only three months’ food remained. No news came from England; they knew not if England even thought of them. The population of Khartoum was at first about 60,000 souls; nearly 20,000 of these were sent away as the siege went on as being friends of the Mahdi.
On the 9th of September Gordon sent down the Nile, in a small paddle-boat named the Abbas, Colonel Stewart, Mr. Power, M. Herbin, the French Consul, some Greeks, and about fifty soldiers. They took with them letters, journals, dispatches which were to be sent from Dongola. The Abbas drew little water, the river was in full flood, and they seemed likely to be able to get over the rapids with safety. Henceforth Gordon was alone with his black and Egyptian troops. One might have thought that his heart would have sunk within him at the loneliness of his situation, at the feeling of desertion by England, and of treachery in his own garrison. He had no friend to speak to, no sympathetic companion left at Khartoum. Yes, he had one Friend left, and in his journal he tells us that he was happier and more peaceful now than in the earlier months of the siege.