First Jihad: Khartoum, and the Dawn of Militant Islam (21 page)

This was Gladstone at his worst, the petty politician.
He was capable of better: once he had been a rising star among the Tories, only to emerge a convinced and convicted Liberal, a champion of democracy.
In his second term as Prime Minister, he was, though he did not yet know it, at the peak of his power.
He was the pre-eminent statesman of the world’s pre-eminent power, adored by the common people and respected on both sides of the House.
Yet there was a flaw in his character that would undo him in a few short months: something in his nature provoked reactions with those who supported as well as opposed him.
Though his personal modesty would never have allowed him to bask in the applause, the admiration, the adulation which the people of Britain were willing to offer, there was an overconfidence, almost an arrogance about him when questioned on decisions of policy.
This eventually stirred a distrust that would transform itself into unparalleled animosity.
For there were two sides to Gladstone: one the very model of the Victorian gentleman—upright, virtuous, and deeply religious—who brought his belief in justice to the table of politics and there put them to work; the other a hypocrite, a demagogue, manipulative of men and events for the purposes of his own ambition.
As the crisis on the Nile grew, the perception that the latter was the true measure of William Gladstone gradually overtook the British public, the House of Commons, and even his own Cabinet.

That transformation was due in no small part to the British press.
The Sudan crisis was one of the first incidents to highlight the growing power of the press to shape public opinion and influence government policy.
The first great “penny daily,” the
Daily Telegraph
, which in the 1880s boasted the largest circulation in the world, had originally been a great supporter of Liberalism, a position which gradually eroded until ending with the Eastern crisis of 1876, when it appeared that the Russians were advancing on Constantinople.

Decrying Gladstone’s attempts at conciliation as tantamount to selling out Britain’s interests, it changed its allegiance for good and became thoroughly Conservative.
Now the paper was one of Gladstone’s most outspoken critics.
William Stead too, kept up a steady pressure on the Prime Minister.
While Stead’s
Pall Mall Gazette
was usually staunch in its support for the Liberal Party and in particular for Gladstone, the paper had also been the first public forum to promote the idea of sending General Gordon to Khartoum.
Finally, the London
Times
posted a powerful commentary on March 20, 1884, declaring, “The position of General Gordon, besieged at Khartoum, unfortunately remains exceedingly precarious.
Yesterday we published the unwelcome report that he is now totally isolated.
All communications have been cut.
A month ago the British government was fully warned that it would become necessary to employ something more than moral force at Khartoum.
The necessity is now becoming urgent, but the government has not yet ordered the commander of British and Egyptian forces in southern Egypt to march to Khartoum.” A formidable array of influential dailies was beginning to question not just Gladstone’s policies, but the motives behind them as well.

With some justification, Gladstone believed that Gordon’s refusal to leave Khartoum was a subtle form of blackmailing him into sending the British Army into the Sudan, which he flatly refused to do.
At one point, he wrote a memorandum to Granville, which read in part, “We ought to act in the Sudan only by peaceful means, except for the safety of Gordon and his party.
If, in consequence of his being in danger, we have to act by military means, the object of our action ought to be to bring him away at once from Khartoum, and he ought to know that.
If Gordon continues at Khartoum knowing that we cannot approve of supplying him with any forces for military expeditions, he should state to us the cause of his staying and his intentions.”

Certainly the British newspapers never went to any particular pains to point out that Gordon was deliberately defying his orders to evacuate the city, precipitating the crisis and the accompanying public outcry.
If Gordon had been abandoned, as some of the Government’s critics were charging, he certainly was not forgotten.
In January 1884 Stead had so skillfully presented sending Gordon to Khartoum as the solution to the Sudan crisis that it gradually became an accepted article of faith among the public–as well as many members of Parliament and even Queen Victoria herself–that it had been the government’s plan all along, and that backing him with an expeditionary force was an inevitable consequence of that policy.
The subtlety of the idea Gladstone, Hartington, and Granville had actually formulated—sending Gordon out with nothing more than his own moral authority to evacuate the Egyptian garrison and civilians from Khartoum—was too intricate for the general public to grasp.

As the spring passed and the military situation around Khartoum changed, it became clear that Gordon would be unable to evacuate the Egyptians, and the public perception of this development was that Gordon had been cut off and abandoned by the Government.
Of course, Gladstone, through Evelyn Baring in Cairo, repeatedly informed Gordon that if he were unable to bring out the garrison and civilians, he was still expected to make good his own escape.

To this Gordon replied that he felt bound by his original orders, which came not only from the Cabinet in London but also from the Khedive in Cairo, and if he could not bring the Egyptians out with him, he wasn’t leaving Khartoum at all.
In his journal he confided his feelings after one such order to quit the city was received, emphasizing the key passages: “I declare POSITIVELY AND ONCE FOR ALL, THAT I WILL NOT LEAVE THE SUDAN UNTIL EVERY ONE WHO WANTS TO GO DOWN IS GIVEN THE CHANCE TO DO SO, unless a government is established which relieves me of the charge; therefore, if any emissary or letter comes up here ordering me to come down, I WILL NOT OBEY IT, BUT WILL STAY HERE AND FALL WITH THE TOWN, AND RUN ALL RISKS.”

To the British public, it seemed that Gladstone’s policy had failed, which was disappointing, but the apparent inactivity of Her Majesty’s government in refusing to send troops to Gordon and relieve Khartoum also began to generate a sense of alarm.
One of the first to give voice to the growing concern over the safety of Gordon and the fate of the city was Queen Victoria herself, who sent Lord Hartington a telegram on March 25 saying, “It is alarming.
General Gordon is in danger; you are bound to try to save him…You have incurred a fearful responsibility.” On May 5, there was a protest meeting at St.
James’s Hall in London; four days later a mass meeting that numbered in the thousands in Hyde Park; on May 11 there was a similar gathering in Manchester.
In each case those attending were vocal in their demands that Gordon be rescued and the city relieved.

At the same time the subject of increasingly acrimonious debates in the House of Commons was the safety of Gordon, but underneath lay the realization that Gordon was determined to remain behind because of his inherent humanity.
It was a curious motivation, for Gordon was not one of those colonial administrators who become so enamored of their charges that they gradually “went native.” No matter where his assignments took him, Gordon remained thoroughly English.
At the same time, his Christianity compelled him to carry out his duty not only with dedication but with compassion.
He may not like the people over whom he was given governance, but he was responsible for them, therefore he would do his utmost for them.
While by all accounts he liked the Sudanese and the Egyptians, they weren’t by any means beloved by him.
There are often passages in his journals, such as the remark, “These people are not worth any great sacrifice,” which may not be flattering to Gordon as a man, but make it even clearer that he was driven by his sense of duty and responsibility.
If those were concepts that the Cabinet could not understand, that was their problem, not his.

It had been on March 16, by coincidence the same day as Gordon’s unhappy expedition to retake Halfaya, that Lord Randolph Churchill rose in the House of Commons and took Gladstone’s government to task for sending General Gordon to Khartoum then denying him the resources needed to carry out his instructions.
Accusing the government of vacillation, he questioned the “purposeless slaughter” in the Eastern Sudan occasioned by General Graham’s action there the previous month, and demanded an explanation as to why an overland evacuation route from Suakin to Berber had not been opened by the troops under Graham’s command.

Quoting a report from a British officer who had been in Khartoum just a month before Gordon’s arrival, he sharply put the question to Gladstone: “Colonel Coetlogon has stated that Khartoum may be easily captured; we know that General Gordon is surrounded by hostile tribes and cut off from communications with Cairo and London; and under these circumstances the House has a right to ask her Majesty’s Government whether they are going to do anything to relieve him.
Are they going to remain indifferent to the fate of the one man on whom they have counted to extricate them from their dilemmas, to leave him to shift for himself, and not make a single effort on his behalf?”

No reply came from the government bench, and once raised, the issue of what to do about Gordon refused to go away.
The government’s alleged mismanagement of Egyptian–and by extension, Sudanese–affairs had long been a convenient hook on which the Conservatives hung their Parliamentary attacks on Gladstone and his Cabinet, but as the debate continued throughout the summer it became obvious that the issue was not merely one of partisan politics.
(Lord Randolph already had a considerable reputation for baiting his opposites, but in this case he had struck a genuine chord of discontent in the House.) Throughout the summer, Ministers and Members were given leave to state their positions on what should be done about Gordon and Khartoum, and tensions rose with each passing day.
On the occasions when Gladstone rose to speak for the government, he continued to fall back on his argument that the Mahdi’s rebellion was nothing more than a popular uprising of the Sudanese to throw off the Egyptian yoke.

Yet that argument began to ring more and more hollow as stories of Arab atrocities committed against civilian populations began to make their way into the popular press.
When Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, a Conservative MP, rose to speak on May 12, 1884, he was emphatic on this point: “I believe that the people of this country are determined that General Gordon shall be saved together with those who have trusted in him.
If General Gordon had been supplied with materials of war earlier, he would have been enabled to stem at Khartoum the wave of religious fanaticism and anarchy led by the Madhi.
It is our duty to complete the commitments which we made when General Gordon went out to the Sudan.
Her Majesty’s government must leave no stone unturned to avert from this country the intolerable stain which would be left upon her honor by any injury inflicted upon General Gordon.”

In his reply, Gladstone stumbled badly, uttering one of his least perceptive political judgments and revealing to the entire House how poorly he understood what was actually happening in the Sudan.
“The government, he said, “was and is pledged to shield General Gordon from danger.
Should necessity arise, the government shall do this.
The Right Honorable Gentleman Sir Michael Hicks-Beach has said, though, that it is the duty of England to keep the Mahdi’s movement out of Egypt and to put it down in the Sudan, and it is this task which the gentleman desires to saddle upon England.
That means the conquest of the Sudan.
I put aside for the moment all questions of climate, of distance, of the enormous expenses, and all the frightful loss of life.
There is something worse involved.
It would be a war of conquest against a people struggling to be free.”

Even among the government’s supporters there was an undercurrent of dissatisfaction with how the Sudan question was being handled.
Gladstone remained unmoved and unmoving.
As autumn approached and with it the end of the Session, the whole matter came to a head when Sir Michael Hicks-Beach moved for a vote of censure for the government.
Gladstone’s tenure as Prime Minister hung by the thinnest of threads.

It’s not at all difficult to imagine Gladstone’s frustration with the whole affair, and it may be that frustration holds the key to his actions as well as his inaction when deciding what to do about Gordon and Khartoum, for by now the two were inseparable.
The cries to “Save Gordon!” heard throughout the press, the public–even from the Crown–had within them the imperative to save Khartoum as well, for Gordon had made it clear that he would never leave the city unless its security was assured.
The entire Sudan situation–Gordon, Khartoum, the Mahdi–should have been a sideshow in his conduct of the affairs of the British Empire, yet here it was an issue upon which the fate of his government hung.

Strong-minded and stubborn, the Prime Minister had met his match in Gordon.
He was accustomed to the exercise of power, and the power at his fingertips was immense, far greater than that wielded by comparable statesman today: he could send military or naval expeditions against foes, civilized or savage, in any corner of the world with far fewer complications and less accountability than any of his successors a century later.
The governments of lesser nations literally rose or fell as a consequence of decisions made by the Prime Minister of Great Britain.
When the British lion roared, it was deafening, and the whole world stopped to listen.

At the same time, though Gladstone held the power, he refused to be precipitate in its use.
Like most men, Gladstone tried to do what was right, or at least what he persuaded himself was right, and in this case he could not find a justification in ordering an expedition into the Sudan that was worth the expense in lives, in treasure, in prestige.
It was not that he feared the responsibility; rather he felt that greater responsibilities lay elsewhere.