Men Who Have Made the Empire

by George Chetwynd Griffith

The troops that came labouring after him were of such miserable material that they deserved only to be made slaves themselves, and such the Arabs would speedily have made them but for this yellow-faced, bright-eyed man, who set them one against another, played off their jealousies and hatreds, and generally out-manœuvred them with such consummate and incomprehensible skill, striking at such vast distances with such incredible rapidity, that in four months a seemingly impossible feat had been accomplished, and the rebellion of the slave-kings put down.

And yet it was all hopeless. The slave trade was too much for him, as it has so far been too much for every one else. “I declare I see no human way to stop it!” he writes in one of his letters. “When you have got the ink that has soaked into blotting-paper out of it, then slavery will cease in these lands.”

In the November of 1877 there occurred an incident which was destined in after years to bear terrible fruit. He travelled from Kordofan viâ Khartoum to Merawy. He was on his way to Wadi Halfa to see about pushing on the railway from there to Dongola. But before he got there a dispatch reached him saying that the Abyssinians had invaded the Eastern Soudan. Back he went, post-haste, only to find the news was false.

If it had not been for this the railway would have been completed, and the cataracts of the Nile would not have delayed the tardily-sent Relief Expedition until the Arab bullets had done their work and gallant Gordon’s busy head had rolled to the foot of the Mahdi’s throne.

A few weeks after this he is once more in Cairo in obedience to an urgent summons from the Khedive. The work was this time financial. The grip of the foreign bondholder was closing round the throat of the fellaheen, and the bill for official extravagance and incompetence had to be paid. It was characteristic of Gordon that his first financial reform was the cutting down of his own salary from six thousand to three thousand a year.

This was all very well, but when he proposed to apply the same methods to other people’s salaries he was very soon given to understand that he was not the kind of man who was wanted in Cairo just then, so he promptly threw up his presidency of the Committee of Inquiry and went back to two years’ more work in the Soudan, to fight the slave trade again in the old heroic, hopeless fashion, and to make maps and plans; to fly hither and thither over the ghastly, waterless country, sometimes riding for as much as two months at a time, till at last the replacement of his old friend Ismael by Tewfik Pasha once more called him back to Cairo.

This time he went to Abyssinia also, and got arrested twice, a circumstance which enabled him to give us the following word picture of King Johannes. “He is of the strictest sect of the Pharisees. He talks like the Old Testament. Drunk overnight, he is up at dawn reading the psalms. If he were in England he would never miss a prayer-meeting, and would have a Bible as big as a portmanteau.”

After his release he came home again to rest, as he thought, but as a fact to be called after a few weeks’ run on the Continent to take the command of the Colonial Forces at the Cape of Good Hope.

It was the eve of the Transvaal War, and now Gordon made the first and the greatest mistake of his life. He refused the command. If he had taken it there might have been no Transvaal War; certainly there would have been no Ingogo or Majuba Hill. He started instead to India to be Secretary to Lord Ripon, the new Liberal Viceroy.

Three days after he landed he threw up his appointment, and two days later he received an urgent invitation from China. He asked for leave, and the War Office refused. He threw up his commission, making a present of its value, about £6,000, to his stupid and graceless masters.