First Jihad: Khartoum, and the Dawn of Militant Islam (14 page)

It was a state of affairs that attracted little attention from the European powers then attempting to carve out various spheres of influence in China, at least until the Taipings began to advance eastward in 1858 to threaten the city of Shanghai, which had a large number of Europeans living there.
A hastily raised force of Europeans and Filipinos was organized to defend the city, and it took up positions outside of Shanghai to block the Taiping advance.
Placed under the command of an American, Frederick Townsend Ward, the motley force defended Shanghai for about two years, but by the time General Staveley’s column arrived, the situation had become critical.
Staveley decided to systematically clear the region in a thirty-mile radius around Shanghai.
It was during this operation that Ward was killed, and his successor quarreled so violently with the Chinese authorities that Li Hung Chang, the governor of the Kiang-su province, requested that General Staveley appoint a British officer to take command of the ragtag contingent.
Staveley selected Gordon, who had been attached to his staff as engineer officer, and who had been made a brevet-major in December 1862 for his previous services.
It proved to be an inspired choice.

In March 1863 Gordon named his new command “The Ever Victorious Army,” something of an exaggeration in light of its rather spotty history, and marched on Chansu, a town some forty miles northwest of Shanghai, which had been surrounded and cut off by the rebels.
Breaking though the Taiping lines, he relieved the little garrison there, and won the confidence of his troops in the process.
After reorganizing his small army, Gordon attacked Quinsan, another town near Shanghai, which he quickly took, though at the cost of heavy casualties.
His troops’ confidence was unshaken, however, and the capture of Quinsan was the beginning of a procession of conquest, for their reputation for steadiness under fire in front of Quinsan soon spread throughout the Taiping forces, which soon came to rightly fear the Ever Victorious Army.

The army soon had reason to fear Gordon as well, for as he marched through the country, driving the rebels out of one town after another, he imposed an iron discipline on his men.
And when they challenged his discipline, he demonstrated a ruthlessness that cowed the fiercest among them.
In an episode that showed for all to see the steel in Gordon’s character, he decreed that the troops of the Ever Victorious Army would not be permitted to loot captured cities, a “privilege” that was granted the Imperial Chinese forces.
Murmurings of mutiny sprang up almost immediately—some of the men openly rebelled against Gordon.
He retaliated by having one of the mutineers brought before him and promptly shot the man dead.
He then announced that he would shoot one of the mutineers an hour until the mutiny was over.
Less than sixty minutes later the mutiny had ended.

The Ever Victorious Army’s march of conquest continued until it reached the great city of Suchow.
There it was joined by a column of Imperial Chinese soldiers, and the city was stormed on November 29, striking a crippling blow at Tien Wang’s power.
It was there that an incident occurred immediately after the city’s fall which throws another intriguing light on Gordon, his concepts of morality and authority, and his capacity for compromising on smaller ethical issues without surrendering his honor or the integrity of his cause.
When the city had been taken, a large number of rebel leaders, whose safety had been guaranteed by Gordon if they surrendered, were beheaded on the orders of Li Hung Chang.
While not a harsh or unusual action according to Chinese standards of conduct, it was so contrary to Gordon’s sense of honor that he withdrew his soldiers from Suchow and refused to take any further part in operations until February 1864.
Eventually he came to the conclusion that ending the rebellion was of greater importance than his quarrel with Chinese sensibilities, and once more he began cooperating with Li; by mutual agreement no mention of the executions in Suchow was ever made.
Gordon did get in the last word, though, after a fashion: he refused the decorations and rewards offered him by the Chinese emperor for the capture of Suchow.

In May 1864 the Ever Victorious Army advanced on Chanchufu, the Taipings’ main position.
When it fell at the end of the month, Gordon brought the army back to Quinsan and there disbanded it.
A few weeks later Tien Wang committed suicide, the capture of Nanking by Imperial troops came shortly afterward, and the Taiping revolt had come to an end.
It was due in no small part to the exploits of The Ever Victorious Army, which drew its inspiration and dash from Gordon.
The Emperor was finally able to persuade him to accept both promotion and reward, appointing him Titu, the Chinese equivalent of a major-general, although Gordon did refuse the large sum of money that was offered to him.

His efforts did not go unnoticed by the British either: Gordon was promoted Lieutenant-Colonel of Engineers and made a Companion of the Bath.
Now styled Sir Charles, he was often known behind his back by the affectionately familiar “Chinese” Gordon.
Accompanying his promotion was an appointment to Gravesend as superintendent of the construction of forts defending the mouth of the Thames.

Physically, Gordon was not impressive, or at least should not have been so.
Short of stature, he stood not more than five feet six inches tall, and he had a lithe, wiry build.
His eyes were a very clear, calm gray, and his rather squared off jaw and brow were framed by a shock of reddish hair and a set of large sideburns, while he sported the typical “Sandhurst” moustache so popular among British officers of his day.
What set Gordon apart was his presence, his manner of carrying himself that bespoke of great ability and self-confidence, and which allowed him to carry his authority easily and openly.

There was more occupying Gordon’s time at Gravesend than just his construction work on the Thames forts.
Just after his return, he received word that his father was dying.
He hurried to Woolwich to be at his bedside and stayed with him until the elder Gordon died.
Hard on the heels of his father’s passing came news of the death of one of his brothers.
Together, the two incidents had a deep and profound effect on Gordon’s life.
Heretofore he had paid lip service to his Christian faith, but when he returned to Gravesend, he resolved to put aside what he called “superficial religion” and put the faith he professed into action.
Gordon’s duties required his presence from 8:00 in the morning until 2:00 in the afternoon, after which he devoted himself to social work.
If it were not so well documented his record would be difficult to believe.
His house served at various times as a school, a hospital, an almshouse, and a church, according to need.
He visited the sick and dying, gave money to the poor, and taught the street children in the local Ragged school.
Calling them his “kings,” the street boys were his special objects of attention and concern.
He clothed them, fed them, nursed them when they were ill, and found them jobs, often writing letters of recommendation to ship owners and captains for one of his young men who was seeking a berth as a cabin boy aboard a merchant ship.
He was the founder and one of the first benefactors of the Gravesend and Milton Mendicant Society, whose purpose was to aid itinerant workers who found themselves in dire straits.

For all of his genuine piety, though, Gordon never joined any church.
He was equally comfortable in the company of a Church of England vicar, a Baptist pastor, a Presbyterian chaplain, a Methodist minister, or a Roman Catholic priest.
He attended all of their churches at one time or another, and once remarked that, in his view, “the church is like the British Army, one army but many regiments.” Gordon’s devotion to social work in Gravesend became so complete that he excluded all other social contact, shunning the busy social life normally enjoyed by the commander of the Engineers in Gravesend.
To him, though, it was no hardship for he fully believed that social work was his God-given duty.

It shouldn’t be implied that he was a man without vices: there is still some considerable debate on just how heavily he drank—or didn’t.
Some accounts claim that he only drank rarely, while others have him consuming huge amounts of brandy.
Certainly he had no taste for the wining, dining, and socializing that was characteristic of garrison life in so much of the British Army in the middle of the 19th century.
He was also given over to severe, inexplicable bouts of melancholy, which sometimes lasted for days.

In the summer of 1872 Gordon was sent to inspect the British military cemeteries in the Crimea, and it was as he was passing through Constantinople on his return that he took the first steps down the road that would bring him to Khartoum to face the Mahdi.
At a chance meeting with Nubar Pasha, then the prime minister of Egypt, Gordon was asked if would consider serving under the Khedive.
While nothing was settled at the time, the following year he received a definite offer from the khedive to become governor of the Sudan.
Once Her Majesty’s government had given its consent to the appointment, he accepted, and made his way to Egypt early in 1874.

To fully understand the importance of Gordon’s appointment by the Khedive, it is necessary to return again to Africa.
By the beginning of the 1870s, when Egypt occupied most of the Sudan, the slave trade was still flourishing in the south of the country, in the region called Equatoria, despite the concerted efforts of the European nations to bring it to a halt.
Particularly troublesome were the regions of the White Nile and Bahr-el-Ghazal.
Captains John Speke and James Grant, who had come through Uganda and down the White Nile in 1863, as well as Sir Samuel Baker, who made the journey up the river as far as Albert Nyanza, returned to Europe with chilling tales of misery, disease, and death suffered by the victims of the slave hunters.
Europeans, who had been swept by a fever of abolitionist sentiment in the middle of the century, were outraged, particularly the British, and in 1869 Khedive Ismail, bowing to both French and British pressure, sent a military expedition up the White Nile, with its objective the elimination of the slave trade in the Sudan.

Command of the expedition was given to Sir Samuel Baker, who encountered seemingly endless difficulties, and when his four-year term of service was up he had little to show for it, apart from the establishment of a handful of mud forts along the Nile.
Exhausted and dispirited, Baker returned to Britain, never to set foot in Africa again.
Gordon was to be Baker’s successor, and it was hoped that he would be more successful.
Gordon, for his part, was instructed to extend the line of forts begun by Baker as far south as Buganda, annex Buganda itself, and deploy a handful of specially designed gunboats on Lake Albert and Lake Victoria.
If he also found the time to suppress the slave trade while doing all this, so much the better.

It was a post for which Gordon was ideally suited: incorruptible and indefatigable, he immediately immersed himself in his task.
Arriving in Cairo on February 7, 1874, he spent two weeks assembling his staff—a mixed bag of Egyptians, Turks, and Britons, all of whom were chosen solely for their abilities rather than, as was typical of the time, their social skills and standing.
One of Gordon’s advisers was even a notorious slaver, Abu Soud.
Gordon explained his presence by declaring that Soud would bring an invaluable knowledge of how and where the slave hunters operated, as a sort of “poacher-turned-gamekeeper.”

Leaving Cairo, Gordon set out for Khartoum, traveling down the Red Sea to the port of Suakin, then crossing over the Nubian Desert to the Nile, where he boarded a steamer at Berber, which then brought him to the Sudanese capital.
It would be the route that he always regarded as the best way to reach Khartoum from Cairo, an observation that others would later ignore to their cost and his.
After spending nine days in Khartoum, where he was received at a state dinner by the Governor-General of the Sudan, Ismail Pasha Ayoub, he boarded another steamer, which took him up the White Nile to Gondokoro, his new capital, where he arrived twenty-four days later.

Gordon would remain in Equatoria for two and a half years, not returning to Cairo until October 1876.
It was thirty months of endless labor, with mixed results.
He immediately set about restoring discipline among the Egyptian garrisons, many of which, feeling forgotten or abandoned by Cairo, had ceased to resemble military units.
The line of forts and garrisons along the White Nile was extended, while the river and Lake Albert were extensively charted by Gordon and his staff.
At the same time, displaying the same sort of humanity that had characterized his time at Gravesend, he devoted considerable energy to improving the conditions of the people in Equatoria, from introducing medicines to digging new wells to trying to establish a rudimentary education system.

Most surprising of all was his progress in suppressing the slave trade.
Drawing on Abu Soud’s knowledge of slaver ways and using his reorganized and re-equipped troops to patrol and raid the routes and locales frequented by the slavers, Gordon was able to put a severe crimp on the trade, although he was hampered to a large degree by the fact that Khartoum and the whole of the northern Sudan was under the rule of Ismail Pasha Ayoub, who had been in collusion with the slave traders and was profiting handsomely from it.
As a consequence he offered little cooperation or support for Gordon’s efforts, which eventually fell short of the goals he had envisioned.

It was a bitter blow, for a man as moralistic and religious as Gordon could not help but perceive bringing an end to the slave trade as something little short of a divine mission.
Finally Gordon decided that he was wasting his time and energy, when on one hand Khedive Ismail was urging him to suppress the slave trade, while on the other he was taking no action to prevent Ayoub from exploiting it for his own personal gain.