Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress (64 page)

He wrote his journal in his stifling upstairs bedroom. He had refused to have its windows sandbagged against blast or rifle-fire: the fierce sun came slanting through its slats all day, the dust dancing on its shafts, while at night candles burnt defiantly at the open window. Gordon wrote at first on ruled account paper, neatly and methodically. Later he used very thin tissue paper, on which the ink often messily blotted, and when this ran out he wrote on old cable forms, headed
Administration
des
Télégraphes Egyptiens
du
Sudan,
and generally slipped into his journal upside-down. His writing is cramped but clear—he uses the eighteenth century ‘s’—and at first he evidently intended the journal to be published: ‘N.B. This journal will want
pruning
out,
if thought necessary, to publish’. Later the diary grew moodier, crankier, more careless, as his chances of survival retreated, and his health and confidence declined. The whole work is an extraordinary performance. The journals are strangely punctuated, sometimes strikingly phrased, sometimes blandly fatalist, sometimes piously orthodox, and their range of subjects, emotions, and allusions extends for beyond the state of the siege or the condition of the Sudan.

Sometimes Gordon does philosophize about the Sudanese (‘decidedly slave-huntingly inclined’), sometimes he reflects upon his own part in the drama: ‘A MP in one of our last received papers, asked “whether officers were not supposed to go where ordered?” I quite agree with his view, but it cannot be said I was ordered to go, the subject was too complex for any order, it was “Will you go and try?” and my answer was, “only too delighted”.’ Almost as often, though, he writes about officialdom in general, or throws in a
Punch
parody, or an anecdote of local life. Here he considers polygamy:
‘It is really amusing to find (when one can scarcely call one’s life one’s own) one’s servant,
already
with one wife (which most men find is enough), coming and asking for leave for three days in order to take another wife….’ Here he muses upon the British bureaucracy: ‘I must say I do not love our F.O. or diplomatists, as a whole (and I can fancy the turning up of noses, at my venturing to express an opinion of them, I mean in their
official
attire, for, personally, the few I know are most agreeable (and I specially except Alston the Chief Clerk, and Weller the Hall Porter, (who has, of late years, become quite amiable))’. Here he talks about the conventional bravery—he was
always
afraid himself, he used to say: ‘Some accounts in
Gazette
, describing reasons for giving Victoria Cross are really astounding, such as a man who, with another, was out on a reconnaissance, this other was wounded, and his companion waited for him and took him on his horse, saving his life! What would we have said, had he left his companion!’

Once he sends a mock-address to the Lord Mayor’s banquet in London. Once he echoes Jeremiah:
1
‘
Cursed
is
be,
of
the
Lord
, who hopes by any arrangement of forces, or by exterior help, to be relieved from the position we are in’. Once he writes R.I.P. for a donkey blown up by a mine, having strong views about the souls of animals. Sometimes he bursts into contumely; on Africa, for example: ‘a “beast” to our country, as one of Dickens characters called it’; on a former Italian lieutenant: ‘I expect he is a vile traitor, like all Italians I ever met’; on Egyptian troops: ‘A more contemptible soldier than the Egyptian never existed’. Sometimes he pulls himself together, after a splurge of irritable complaint, with a biblical quotation or a striking comparison: ‘That I have had to undergo a tithe of what any nurse has to undergo, who is attached to a querulous invalid, is absurd, and ought to be weighed together’.
2

‘A drum beats—tup! tup! tup! It comes into a dream, but after a few minutes one becomes more awake, and it is in the brain that
one
is
in
Khartoum
. The next query is, where is this tup, tupping going on. A hope arises that it will die away. No, it goes on, and increases in intensity. The thought strikes one, “Have they enough ammunition?” (the excuse of bad soldiers). One exerts oneself. At last, it is no use, up one must get, and go on to the roof of the Palace; then telegrams, orders, swearing, and cursing goes on till 9 a.m.’

For all his oddities and inconsistencies, Gordon was a great commander, and throughout 1884 he was in himself the defence of Khartoum. He had able Sudanese lieutenants, some of them French-trained,
1
but without his own presence the city would doubtless have fallen to the Mahdi without resistance. As it was, Khartoum held out with spirit for ten months. ‘As safe as Kensington Park,’ Gordon had declared it upon his arrival, and miraculously he had sustained this illusion as the forces of Mahdism assembled all around. Elsewhere in the Sudan the last Egyptian garrisons had long since surrendered. Some of the provincial Governors, most of them old colleagues of Gordon, had been killed: some like Slatin Pasha, the Austrian-born Governor of Darfur, had theoretically accepted Islam, and were spared as prisoners in the Mahdi’s camp. Khartoum was an island in enemy territory—not an island of Christianity, for nearly all its inhabitants were Muslim, certainly not an island of Empire, for the Queen’s Government claimed no suzerainty over it, but really no more than the island of one man’s commanding presence.

Though Gordon’s military intelligence was negligible, and his ignorance of the enemy almost wilful, his defence was indefatigable. He used every ruse and device to keep the enemy at bay, and his people’s spirits up. He fortified the town with wire entanglements and home-made mines. He sent armed paddle-steamers up and down
the Nile on patrol, having specialized in the use of gunboats since his China days, and had a new boat built in the Government dockyard (he called it
Zubeir
).
1
He inspired the arsenal to produce hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition. He cast his own medals, inscribed ‘The Siege of Khartoum, 1884’—silver for senior officers, tin for everyone else. He sustained morale with band concerts, hopeful proclamations, even false messages from the relieving army. He showed himself in the streets of Khartoum as confident as ever, and he assiduously cultivated his own super-human legend: ‘When God was portioning out fear to all the people in the world,’ he once told a Khartoum merchant, ‘at last it came to my turn, and there was no fear left to give me; go, tell all the people in Khartoum that Gordon fears nothing, for God has created him without fear.’

Even so, as the weeks passed without sign of relief, as the messages from Egypt became rarer and finally ceased, as food ran short in the capital, and the siege became ever more intense, Gordon’s resistance was sustained only by desperate bluff. When the Mahdi sent him a call to surrender, he replied: ‘I am here, like iron, and hope to see the newly-arrived English’. When the public spirit sagged, he spread rumours of imminent relief, or set labourers to work on moorings for the relieving army’s steamers, or rented houses for the incoming English officers. Sometimes he dispatched runners bearing messages of false assurance, hoping they would be intercepted by the enemy—‘Khartoum all right. 12.12.84’, or ‘Khartoum is all right. Could hold out for years. C. G. Gordon. 29.12.84’.

He spent much of his time on the roof of his palace. He had picked up a telescope in the bazaar, ‘the best glass I ever had’, and through it he kept his eye on the outpost sentries, or watched enemy movements on the far bank of the river. From that high watchpost he could see the funnels of his steamers at the dockyard, and look down the line of the Blue Nile quays, and away in the distance, if he could not see the mainstream of the Nile itself, week after week he hoped to sight the flags and upperworks of the relieving steamers sliding past Tuti island.

The heat up there was stunning, especially for a European dressed, as Gordon generally was, in the florid uniform of an Egyptian government official, with a high braided collar and a tarboosh on his head. But it was an heroic prospect, all the same, and it is hard to escape the feeling that ‘Chinese’ Gordon enjoyed the last weeks of his siege. We can sense from his journals the perverse satisfaction he derived from self-laceration and recrimination; those scurrilous cartoons he drew, those hilariously waspish denunciations of Baring or Gladstone, were, like furious but unposted letters to the editor of
The
Times
,
obviously fan to compose. He admired his Mahdist enemies, he enjoyed war and responsibility, and if he despised his Egyptian soldiers, he was indubitably attracted by the stalwart Sudanese—the British always were. From his rooftop he could observe the whole grand cycle of the Nile, the very number of whose cataracts held a mystic meaning for him, the rise and fall of its waters, the grand flow of its stream, the movements of the pelicans and great maribou storks that haunted those equatorial reaches. The purposes of his heroism may sometimes have seemed unclear to him, as they do to us, but he must have known that his relief would only have been a sad anti-climax—an ignominious rescue from failure, for brave and skilful though his defence had been, he had really achieved nothing.

He was terribly alone. He had no intimate friend in the city—he spoke little Arabic, nobody else spoke English. Yet he never sounds unhappy. He had, like so many of the Victorian imperial heroes, like Napier, like Hodson, like Colley, a vivid sense of theatre: and there in the throttling heat of his palace roof he was playing the most splendid of all tragic roles, to the best of all audiences. He made sure it was all recorded for posterity, and he did not fail to stage manage the last curtain to legendary effect.

For on Monday, January 26, 1885, at three in the morning, the Mahdi’s soldiers burst into Khartoum at last, slaughtering everybody they saw. They reached the palace before dawn, and Gordon went to the roof to see what was happening. Some people say he then changed into his white ceremonial uniform, picked up a sword and a revolver, and went to the head of the palace stairs, where he awaited his death with a saintly scorn, and was speared to death
just before the sun came up. Other versions have him fighting desperately to the death—from the roof, on the stairs, into the garden. Yet another says that Gordon was leaning over the balcony shouting in his crude Arabic ‘Kill them! Hit them!’ when a spear hit him, spun him round, and held him for an instant balanced on the top of the stairs, before he toppled down and was cut to pieces. However it happened, Gordon’s death was to be imprinted for ever upon the minds of his wondering audience far away, and for his own generation the perfect archetype of the imperial hero was to remain this fanatic, disobedient and unpredictable original.

‘Who,’ asked Ruskin once at the beginning of this affair, ‘is the Sudan?’ By now he was sure to know, for the predicament of General Gordon in Khartoum had become the principal preoccupation not merely of the British, but of the world. Almost from the start Gladstone realized what a terrible mistake he had made in sending Gordon to Africa at all. Whether he had been deceived by more imperially-minded colleagues, or duped by Gordon himself, a mission that had begun as mere reportage had fatally changed its character, and the genie had left its bottle with a vengeance. Already deep in a quagmire of imperial adventure and domestic reform, Gladstone now found his worst nightmare coming true: a true-blue British hero, sent by a Liberal Government to do a desperately dangerous task surrounded by savages in an inconceivably hot and distant land, was at large in Africa, inspiring the public to adulatory hero-worship, and summoning all those false phantoms of glory which the Prime Minister most detested. Empire all too often followed trade, as Mr Gladstone knew, and sometimes (more beneficially) followed the missionaries, and occasionally (such was the inscrutability of that Providence which, as history confirmed more explicitly each year, could only be Divine) followed the armies. Here it seemed horribly likely to follow the Hero. If the Grand Old Man obeyed the call of glory, he would be betraying his own principles: if he ignored it, he would soon be out of office.

To everybody else but Gladstone the idea of abandoning General
Gordon seemed almost unimaginable, and his Cabinet knew that to do so would be political suicide. The Press, the clergy, the army, the Queen herself as emotionally as anyone—all demanded the dispatch of an army to rescue the general. Yet for weeks the Prime Minister temporized. He was understandably exasperated by Gordon’s behaviour—‘turning upside down and inside out every idea and intention with which he had left England, and for which he had obtained our approval’. He was reluctant to embark upon a war against the Sudanese, ‘a people struggling to be free’, as he assured the House of Commons—‘yes, those people are struggling to be free, and they are rightly struggling to be free!’ Besides, he thought Gordon’s predicament exaggerated. To send an expedition ‘would be to act in the teeth of evidence which, however imperfect, is far from being trivial, and would be a grave and dangerous error’. It was possibly true that Khartoum was hemmed in, ‘that is to say, that there are bodies of hostile troops in the neighbourhood forming more or less of a chain around it’, but ‘I draw a distinction between that and the town being surrounded, which would bear technically a very different meaning’.

Nevertheless he knew himself to be both hemmed in and surrounded. His Government depended upon the fate of General Gordon, who had, Gladstone now began to think, deliberately arranged things to manoeuvre him into this quandary. ‘The cause,’ he told Lord Granville, looking back upon it all, ‘was insufficient knowledge of our man.’ Everybody now pressed him to mount a relief expedition, even Granville himself. Public feeling was fierce. Crowds hissed him for the delay. Mass meetings protested against the ‘betrayal’ of Gordon. White feathers were stuck on cards and called ‘Gladstone primroses’. It is true that Lord Tennyson sent him a poem, rich in Nilotic imagery, which began with these lines: