As a boy he seemed to combine in the most curious fashion a constitutional sensitiveness amounting almost to timidity, with a contempt for personal danger, and an equal contempt for authority which individually he was unable to respect.
Altogether, in fact, his was a nature which had very little to expect in the way of promotion or favour from conventional officialdom, and it was very little that he got. This view was no doubt amply justified by his first experience in warfare in the trenches before Sebastopol, for if ever heroism and devotion abroad were crucified by authority at home, this was the case during the Crimean War.
From the Crimea the scene shifts somewhat suddenly to China. And yet here we may note that this is not the place to stop and worry about the morality or otherwise of those so-called opium wars which led up to the trouble of 1860. If the opium trade was bad, the opening of the Flowery Land to European commerce was good, and one usually does find good and bad mixed up in the most extraordinary manner in matters of this sort. The point here is that the brief war which ended with the taking of the Taku forts in the August of 1860, and the capture of Pekin, was the beginning of the career of “Chinese Gordon.”
He did not see the taking of the forts, but he did see the destruction of the Summer Palace, “the Garden of Perpetual Brightness,” which was destroyed as an act of revenge at the order of a British envoy who may here be left nameless in the infamy that he earned by it. Gordon was one of the involuntary Vandals, and this is what he said about the business when writing home:
“You can scarcely imagine the beauty and magnificence of the palaces we burnt. It made one’s heart sore to destroy them. It was wretchedly demoralising work.”
After this for a year and a half he fulfilled the duties of a Captain of Engineers in the camp at Tien-Tsin in the midst of a vast dreary plain. During this time the Taiping rebels had been industriously employing fire and sword to make one of the most fertile portions of the Flowery Land the reverse of worthy of the name and, at length Shanghai itself, the headquarters of the foreign traders, was threatened by the ever-advancing wave of barbarism.
A defensive force was hurriedly raised by an American named Ward, who for nearly two years led it to constant victory and earned for it the somewhat magniloquent title of the Ever-Victorious Army.
Then a chance bullet killed Ward at the beginning of what might have been a most brilliant career. Under his successor everything went wrong. Victory was replaced by defeat and success by disaster. This incompetent person being removed, the hitherto obscure officer of Engineers stepped into his place. It was a time when a leader of men was badly wanted. It was also the moment when Fate knocked at the door of Charles George Gordon and found him in.
Within a very short time disorganisation was replaced by discipline, despair by confidence, and the Ever-Victorious Army was once more made worthy of its name. It was here that Gordon really began his career as a soldier of fortune. When he took command he told Li-Hung-Chang that he would turn the rebels out of the score of walled cities which they had captured and strengthened, and put the rebellion down within eighteen months. As a matter of fact he did it in fifteen.
The story of the doing of this so clearly shows the extraordinary capacity that Gordon possessed for both the organisation and the execution of a military campaign, as well as the faculty of inspiring confidence in all sorts and conditions of men, that it is simply amazing that the home authorities did not immediately recognise the fact that he was something a good deal more than they had hitherto taken him for. This, however, it was to take them some twenty years more to find out.