Gordon had a swift camel, and a reputation for sorcery, because leaving his escort days astern in the desert, he would ride alone into the midst of a hostile nation, dressed in a diplomatic uniform consisting of gold lace and trousers, quite unarmed, but compelling everybody to obey his orders. He was so tired that he wanted to die, and when the tribes disobeyed he merely cut off their whole supply of water until they learned to behave. So for five years, the only honest man in all that region fought the Soudanese, the Egyptian government and the British ministry, to put an end to slavery. He failed.
Charles George Gordon
Long chapters would be required for the story of Gordon’s work in Bessarabia, Armenia, India, South Africa, or the second period in China.
In 1884, England, having taken charge of Egypt, was responsible for the peace of Soudan. But the Arabs, united for once, and led by their prophet—the Mahdi—had declared a holy war against everybody, and wiped out an Egyptian army. So England said, “This is very awkward; let us pray”; and the government made up its mind to scuttle, to abandon the whole Soudan. Of course the Egyptians in the Soudan, officials, troops and people, would all get their throats cut, so our government had a qualm of conscience. Instead of sending an army to their rescue, they sent Gordon, with orders to bring the Egyptians to the coast. With a view to further economies they then let the Arabs cut off Gordon’s retreat to the coast. England folded her hands and left him to perish.
As soon as Gordon reached Khartoum, he began to send away the more helpless of the Egyptian people, and before the siege closed down some two thousand five hundred women, children and servants escaped from the coming death. At the last moment he managed to send the Englishmen, the Europeans and forty-five soldiers down the Nile. They were saved, and he remained to die with his soldiers. “May our Lord,” he wrote, “not visit us as a nation for our sins; but may His wrath fall on me.”
He could not believe in England’s cowardice, but walled his city with ramp and bastion, planned mines and raids, kept discipline while his troops were starving to death, and the Union Jack afloat above the palace, praying for his country in abasement, waiting for the army which had been sent too late. So for nine months the greatest of all England’s engineers held at bay an army of seventy-five thousand fighting Arabs. And when the city fell, rallying the last fifty men of his garrison, he went to his death, glad that he was not doomed to outlive England’s honor.
Year after year our army fought through the burning deserts, to win back England’s honor, to make amends for the death of her hero-saint, the knightliest of modern men, the very pattern of all chivalry. And then his grave was found, a heap of bloodstained ashes, which once had been Khartoum.
Now, in Trafalgar Square, men lay wreaths at the base of his statue, where with his Magic Wand of Victory, that Prince of the Chinese Empire and Viceroy of the African Equatorial Provinces, stands looking sorrowfully on a people who were not worthy to be his countrymen. But there is a greater monument to Gordon, a new Soudan, where men live at peace under the Union Jack, and slavery is at an end forever.