It seemed as if from the very first Nature had intended him for a soldier. His father came of a clan that has a fighting record even in Scotch history, and he was living on Woolwich Common, within hearing of the Arsenal guns, when his fourth son, Charles George, was born on January 28, 1833. Yet, strange to say, though fearless in many ways, and accustomed to rough games with his numerous brothers and sisters, Charles as a small boy hated the roar of cannon. Unlike queen Christina of Sweden, who at four years old used to clap her hands when a gun was discharged near her, and cry 'Again!' Charles shrank away and put his fingers in his ears to shut out the noise. It was not lack of courage, for he showed plenty of that about other things, but simply that the sudden sound made him jump, and was unpleasant to him.
His life was from the first full of change, as the lives of soldiers' children often are, for the Gordons were stationed in Dublin and near Edinburgh before they went out to the island of Corfu when Charles was seven. During the three years he spent there Charles grew big and strong and full of daring; guns might fire all day long without his moving a muscle, and he was always trying to imitate the deeds of boys bigger than himself. When he saw them diving and swimming about in the beautiful clear water, he would throw himself from a rock into their midst, feeling quite sure that somebody would help him to float. And as courage and confidence are the two chief qualities necessary to make a good swimmer, by the time he left Corfu he was as much at home in the sea as any of his friends.
After his tenth birthday his life at Corfu came to an end, and Charles was brought home by his mother and sent to school at Taunton, where he stayed for five years. He is sure to have been liked by his schoolfellows, for he was a very lively, mischievous boy, constantly inventing some fresh prank, but never shirking the punishment it frequently brought. At Woolwich, which he entered as a cadet at fifteen, it was just the same. He was continually defying, in a good-humoured way, those who were set over him, and more than once he had a very narrow escape of having his career cut short by dismissal.
At this period his father held the appointment of director of the carriage department of the Arsenal, and his whole family suffered greatly from the plague of mice which overran the house they lived in. After putting up with it for some time, Charles and his brother Henry, also a cadet, laid traps and caught vast numbers of the mice, and during the night they carried them stealthily across the road in baskets to the commandant's house, exactly opposite. Opening a door which they felt pretty sure of finding unlocked, they emptied the baskets one by one, and let the mice run where they would. Then the boys crept back softly to their own room, shaking with laughter at the thought of the commandant's face when he came down in the morning.
The two youths were great favourites with the workmen in the Arsenal, who used often to leave off the work they should have been doing to make squirts, crossbows, and other weapons for Charles and Henry. They must have trembled sometimes when they heard that the windows of the storehouse had been mysteriously broken, or that an officer who was known to be disliked by the cadets had received a deluge of water down his neck from a hedge bordering the road. But the culprits never betrayed each other, and the young Gordons soon grew so bold that they thought they might venture on a piece of mischief which very nearly ended their military career.
Some earthworks had been newly thrown up near a room where the senior cadets, known as 'Pussies,' attended lectures on certain evenings in the week. One night the two Gordons hid themselves behind this rampart, and while listening to remarks upon fortification and strategy the cadets were startled by a crash of glass and a shower of small shot falling about their ears. In an instant they were all up and out of the house, dashing about in the direction from which the shots had come; and so quick were they that if Charles and Henry had not known every inch of the ground and dodged their pursuers, they would certainly have been caught and expelled, as they richly deserved.
In June 1852 Charles Gordon was given a commission as second lieutenant in the Engineers, and was sent to Chatham for two years. In spite of the mice and the crossbows and the earthworks and many other things, he had gained several good conduct badges, for he had worked hard, and was noted for being clever both at fortifications and at surveying. Mathematics he never could learn. So Charles said good-bye to his father, who was thankful to see him put to man's work—for during the four years his son had passed at Woolwich he had, as he expressed it, 'felt himself sitting on a powder barrel'—and set out on the career in which he was to earn a name for justice and truth throughout three continents.