And yet, to General Gordon, facing death alone in that far-off Soudanese town, it was not terrible; it was simply a bit of God’s will. Listen to the words that he wrote just ten days before the end came, when he knew quite well that if succour did not come speedily, it need not come at all.
After writing ‘Good-bye’ to all his friends, he adds, ‘I am quite happy, thank God; and, like Lawrence, I have tried to do my duty.’
These are not the words of a man who sees death coming, and is afraid; they are the words of one who was ‘quite happy,’ because he had done his life-work as well as he could, and was content to go home to God, no matter if the way thither were very rough and very lonely.
His body was never found; probably it was hacked in pieces by the Mahdi’s wild followers; and yet he had a ‘funeral.’
For although Englishmen may be slow to act, they act surely; and fourteen long years after Gordon’s death, the Soudan was retaken, and after the great Battle of Omdurman, Lord Kitchener, with his victorious army, entered Khartoum one peaceful Sunday morning, and what do you think was the first thing that he did?
He took his troops, British and Egyptian, into the open space in front of the ruined Palace where Gordon had fallen, and formed them into three sides of a square, while he and his generals stood in the centre.
And then, after the British and Egyptian flags had been run up to the roof of the Palace, and a Royal Salute had been fired, a little group of clergymen stepped forward. They represented all parts of the Church, for soldiers of all creeds wished to take part in Gordon’s ‘funeral.’ Then, while solemn minute-guns were fired, a Presbyterian minister read the seventeenth Psalm, which tells how God’s people, whenever or however they die, will behold His ‘Face in righteousness,’ and how they will be ‘satisfied’ when they ‘awake in His likeness.’
Then an English clergyman said the Lord’s Prayer, and an old Roman Catholic Priest, with snow-white hair, said a memorial prayer for Gordon and those who had fallen with him. Then the Scottish pipers wailed out a dirge, and the dark Egyptian band played Gordon’s favourite hymn, ‘Abide with Me.’ After that the soldiers were dismissed from their ranks, and were at liberty to wander up and down, and everybody, down to the youngest bugler, had a glad feeling in his heart, that, although they did not know the exact spot where General Gordon’s bones were resting, they had done their best, after fourteen years, to give him Christian burial.
There are many more memorials here of men about whom we could tell the most interesting stories, had we only the time. Here is a monument to Sir John Moore, who was killed at Corunna; and who, as doubtless you have learned at school, was ‘buried darkly at dead of night,’ before the defeated English army took to their boats.
And here is one to Sir John Howard, the great prison reformer. See, he carries a key in his hand, to show us how he unlocked the prison doors, and brought help and comfort to the wretched inmates, far more hopeless and neglected in his day than they are in ours.