He thought, alas, that “Chinese Gordon” was a yellow-faced Asiatic who wore a pigtail—and yet, after all, did British Officialdom know very much more about the hero it was now sending to his death?
In Egypt all was panic. The army of Hicks Pasha had been annihilated. All Gordon’s work was undone, and the Mahdi was practically master of the Soudan. But meanwhile Gordon had decided to accept the King of the Belgians’ offer. On New Year’s Day, 1884, he reached Brussels to tell him so, and the same day he learnt that the British Government would not let him go. His thoroughly justified answer was a request to be allowed to retire from Her Majesty’s service, “without any claim whatever for pension”—King Leopold, with a juster estimate of the man’s value, having promised to make up the loss to him. The refusal was withdrawn, and he prepared to start for the Congo.
Then on the 17th of January there came that memorable telegram from Lord Wolseley asking him to come to London. He knew what he was wanted for and he went. The work was the pacification and then the evacuation of the Soudan.
By the 18th of February he was in Khartoum again. His old influence at once reasserted itself. What followed is too recent and too well known for detailed repetition here: the vacillation between war and peace, between diplomacy and force, argument when there should have been hard-hitting, and hard-hitting when there should have been argument.
THE LONELY MAN WHO STOOD ON THE RAMPARTS OF KHARTOUM.
The net result was only fully known to the lonely man who month after month stood on the ramparts of Khartoum, beleaguered by the Mahdi’s innumerable hosts, looking out over the desert and down the Nile for the army of relief which ought even then to have been there, and which was waiting for politicians to finish their wrangles before it even started.
Then, week after week, the weary working and waiting went on, the ring of spears drawing ever closer and closer round the doomed city, the provisions within rapidly dwindling, and the lonely soldier, the last of his blood now left in Khartoum, was still looking vainly northward.
So Monday morning, the 26th of January, came, and in the dim light that comes before the dawn the Arabs made their last and successful assault. The moon had set at one o’clock. The famished garrison made but little resistance. Gordon at the head of about a score of men faced the incoming victors near the church of the Austrian mission.
The eastern sky was just reddening with the coming dawn when a stream of Arabs, shouting for Islam and victory, rushed into the open space that had been made round the church. They stopped and put up their rifles. An irregular volley crackled along their line, and when the smoke had drifted away there was nothing for the belated expedition to do but avenge the death of the betrayed and deserted hero.