Earl Granville's advice directly conflicted with Gordon's sense of honour. As he stated, on or about March 20, the fidelity of the people of Khartum, while treachery was rife all around, bound him not to leave them until he could do so "under a Government which would give them some hope of peace." Here again his duty as Governor of the Sudan, or his extreme conscientiousness as a man, held him to his post despite the express recommendations of the British Government. His decision is ever to be regretted; but it redounds to his honour as a Christian and a soldier. At bottom, the misunderstanding between him and the Cabinet rested on a divergent view of duty. Gordon summed up his scruples in his telegram to Baring:--
You must see that you could not recall me, nor could I possibly obey, until the Cairo employés get out from all the places. I have named men to different places, thus involving them with the Mahdi. How could I look the world in the face if I abandoned them and fled? As a gentleman, could you advise this course?
Earl Granville summed up his statement of the case in the words:--
The Mission of General Gordon, as originally designed and decided upon, was of a pacific nature and in no way involved any movement of British forces. . . . He was, in addition, authorised and instructed to perform such other duties as the Egyptian Government might desire to entrust to him and as might be communicated by you to him. . . . Her Majesty's Government, bearing in mind the exigencies of the occasion, concurred in these instructions [those of the Egyptian Government], which virtually altered General Gordon's Mission from one of advice to that of executing, or at least directing, the evacuation not only of Khartum but of the whole Sudan, and they were willing that General Gordon should receive the very extended powers conferred upon him by the Khedive to enable him to effect his difficult task. But they have throughout joined in your anxiety that he should not expose himself to unnecessary personal risk, or place himself in a position from which retreat would be difficult[397].
He then states that it is clear that Khartum can hold out for at least six months, if it is attacked, and, seeing that the British occupation of Egypt was only "for a special and temporary purpose," any expedition into the Sudan would be highly undesirable on general as well as diplomatic grounds.
Both of these views of duty are intelligible as well as creditable to those who held them. But the former view is that of a high-souled officer; the latter, that of a responsible and much-tried Minister and diplomatist. They were wholly divergent, and divergence there spelt disaster.
On hearing of the siege of Khartum, General Stephenson, then commanding the British forces in Egypt, advised the immediate despatch of a brigade to Dongola--a step which would probably have produced the best results; but that advice was overruled at London for the reasons stated above. Ministers seem to have feared that Gordon might use the force for offensive purposes. An Egyptian battalion was sent up the Nile to Korosko in the middle of May; but the "moral effect" hoped for from that daring step vanished in face of a serious reverse. On May 19, the important city of Berber was taken by the Mahdists[398].
Difficult as the removal of about 10,000 to 15,000[399] Egyptians from Khartum had always been--and there were fifteen other garrisons to be rescued--it was now next to impossible, unless some blow were dealt at the rebels in that neighbourhood. The only effective blow would be that dealt by British or Indian troops, and this the Government refused, though Gordon again and again pointed out that a small well-equipped force would do far more than a large force. "A heavy, lumbering column, however strong, is nowhere in this land (so he wrote in his Journals on September 24). . . . It is the country of the irregular, not of the regular." A month after the capture of Berber a small British force left Siut, on the Nile, for Assuan; but this move, which would have sent a thrill through the Sudan in March, had little effect at midsummer. Even so, a prompt advance on Dongola and thence on Berber would probably have saved the situation at the eleventh hour.
But first the battle of the routes had to be fought out by the military authorities. As early as April 25, the Government ordered General Stephenson to report on the best means of relieving Gordon; after due consideration of this difficult problem he advised the despatch of 10,000 men to Berber from Suakim in the month of September. Preparations were actually begun at Suakim; but in July experts began to favour the Nile route. In that month Lord Wolseley urged the immediate despatch of a force up that river, and he promised that it should be at Dongola by the middle of October. Even so, official hesitations hampered the enterprise, and it was not until July 29 that the decision seems to have been definitely formed in favour of the Nile route. Even on August 8, Lord Hartington, then War Minister, stated that help would be sent to Gordon, if it proved to be necessary[400]. On August 26, Lord Wolseley was appointed to the command of the relief expedition gathering on the Nile, but not until October 5 did he reach Wady Haifa, below the Second Cataract.
Meanwhile the web of fate was closing in on Khartum. In vain did Gordon seek to keep communications open. All that he could do was to hold stoutly to that last bulwark of civilisation. There were still some grounds for hope. The Mahdi remained in Kordofan, want of food preventing his march northwards in force. Against his half-armed fanatics the city opposed a strong barrier. "Crows' feet" scattered on the ground ended their mad rushes, and mines blew them into the air by hundreds. Khartum seemed to defy those sons of the desert. The fire of the steamers drove them from the banks and pulverised their forts[401]. The arsenal could turn out 50,000 Remington cartridges a week. There was every reason, then, for holding the city; for, as Gordon jotted down in his Journal on September 17, if the Mahdi took Khartum, it would need a great force to stay his propaganda. Here and there in those pathetic records of a life and death struggle we catch a glimpse of Gordon's hope of saving Khartum for civilisation. More than once he noted the ease of holding the Sudan from the Nile as base. With forts at the cataracts and armed steamers patrolling the clear reaches of the river, the defence of the Sudan, he believed, was by no means impossible[402].