Pharaoh (Jack Howard 7) (38 page)

Gordon’s last journal entry, quoted at the front of this novel, has an air of finality about it, like Scott’s final entry from the Antarctic. Yet it was written on 14 December when he still had more than five weeks to live, and the assumption has to be that he continued to keep a journal to the end. Whether or not he would have chosen to reflect on his archaeological and ethnographic collections is unknown. However, he had shown much interest in these matters years earlier when he had even invited Heinrich Schliemann to join him, and several of his appointees to administrative and army positions in the Sudan, including the American adventurer Charles Chaillé-Long, had something of the treasure-hunter about them. It may never be possible truly to know what Prime Minister Gladstone thought of Gordon, but it is conceivable that their shared fascination with biblical history and archaeology would in private have transcended the gulf that had appeared between them publicly, one that widened after Gordon’s death when Gladstone was vilified for failing to order a rescue expedition in time.

Another pivotal character in this story is Sir Charles Wilson, who was blamed by Wolseley for failing to reach Gordon in time after Wilson was obliged to take over the desert column when its commander, Brigadier General Herbert Stewart, was mortally wounded in the battle that followed Abu Klea. Wilson’s own published book, noted above, rebutting the criticisms of Wolseley, is the best eyewitness account of the final stages of the campaign; much personal correspondence and writing related to his wider career is found in Colonel Sir Charles Watson’s
The Life of Major-General Sir Charles Wilson
, published by the Royal Engineers in 1909. The breadth of Wilson’s activities, as a mapmaker, geographer and intelligence officer, from North America to Asia Minor and the Sudan, make him one of the great unsung achievers of the Victorian age, and it is fascinating to speculate that his role as founder of the War Office Intelligence Department – the antecedent of the modern Secret Intelligence Service – might have included the sanctioning of a ‘mandate to kill’ that has become such an ingrained part of our view of covert intelligence activities since the novels of Ian Fleming were first published.

Colonel William Francis Butler describes a long-range ‘rifle duel’ between his men and the Arabs near Kirbekan, the basis for my fictional action between Major Mayne and the Mahdist sharpshooter in Chapter 8. His description of the cataracts is invaluable because much of the atmosphere of the place was lost after the Aswan dam was constructed, and today it requires some imagination to see the place as it would have been in pharaonic times or during the days in 1884 when the Gordon relief expedition struggled against the Nile towards Khartoum. A fascinating recent project to study the length of the railway built by the Royal Engineers to supply that expedition shows how much detritus remains in the desert, much of it in a remarkable state of preservation: spent ammunition casings, tins and tobacco packaging, the remains of camps and supply dumps, and places where burials undoubtedly exist, swept over and lost beneath the shifting sands of the desert. These investigations are a new kind of archaeology, giving a vivid basis for understanding the challenges of ancient campaigns into the desert as well as a fresh perspective on precisely what went on during those fateful months leading up to the fall of Khartoum in January 1885.

The description of the battle of Abu Klea in Chapter 11 is inspired by eyewitness accounts, including that of Colonel Sir Charles Wilson. Some 1,400 British troops confronted at least 11,000 dervishes; in ten minutes of ferocious fighting more than a thousand dervishes were killed, at a cost of 81 British killed and 121 wounded. The battle became one of the most famous in military history, the last time the British fought in a square, in a conflict immortalised by Rudyard Kipling in his 1890 poem ‘Fuzzy-Wuzzy’:

So ’ere’s to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, at your ’ome in the Soudan;

You’re a pore benighted ’eathen but a first-class fightin’ man . . .

We sloshed you with Martinis, an’ it wasn’t ’ardly fair;

But for all the odds agin’ you, Fuzzy-Wuz, you broke the square.

(Along with ‘dervish’, the British soldiers commonly referred to their Sudanese enemy as ‘Fuzzy-Wuzzy’, a term originally coined for the wild-haired Beja of the Red Sea coast who were the first of the Sudanese the British fought in pitched battles, in early 1884, when they did actually break a square.)

One of the casualties at Abu Klea was Colonel Fred Burnaby, who was discovered by an officer lying against a rock surrounded by dead dervishes, a spear having ‘inflicted a terrible wound on the side of his neck and throat’, and his skull ‘cleft by a blow from a two-handed sword’. The expression that I have Burnaby using, that he was ‘bowled over a terrible crumpler’, comes from eyewitness of that day, Count Albert Gleichen, a Grenadiers officer serving with the Camel Corps, who used it to describe the death of a dervish (Gleichen, A.,
With the Camel Corps on the Nile,
London 1889, p 135). The young soldier who had first seen Burnaby and called the officer over wondered why ‘the bravest man in England’ should be dying without succour; his last words as the boy propped him up were supposedly ‘look after yourself’. Burnaby had ridden out of the square to help bring skirmishers back in, an act of near-suicidal courage that cost him his life; it was the type of act for which the Victoria Cross was invented, and perhaps he would have been awarded it had his commanding officer, Brigadier General Stewart, not himself been fatally wounded two days later, before having the time to write despatches and make recommendations for the fight at Abu Klea. Burnaby died as he had lived, larger than life, yet he should be remembered as much for his achievements as an intelligence officer and adventurer, revealed in his marvellous book
On Horseback through Asia Minor
(1878), still in print and widely read today.

There is no single authoritative eyewitness account of the death of Gordon. One of the best known of many fanciful images,
General Gordon’s Last Stand
, by George William Joy (1893), showing Gordon waiting coolly at the top of the stairs, revolver in hand, as the dervish spearmen approach him from below, probably contains elements of the truth; an account by Gordon’s servant Orfali suggests that Gordon and his Sudanese bodyguards fought to the end, and that Gordon personally accounted for several of the enemy. What does seem certain is that he was decapitated and his head taken to the Mahdi, where it was seen by his captive, the Austrian officer Rudolf von Slatin, a friend of Gordon and future inspector general of the Sudan, whose box of Gordon relics resides in the Royal Engineers Museum. ‘A brave soldier, who fell at his post. Happy is he to have fallen. His sufferings are over,’ von Slatin famously told his captors. It was von Slatin’s account of the treatment of Gordon’s body that hardened Kitchener’s resolve to wreak the terrible vengeance he eventually inflicted on the dervish army at Omdurman thirteen years later, including the desecration of the Mahdi’s tomb.

Sir Charles Wilson’s operative, Major Edward Mayne, is fictional, though he bears the surname of an Anglo-Irish family who figured in the Army List – another Mayne appears in the Second World War in my novel
The Mask of Troy
– and I have based his career and interests closely on Royal Engineers officers of the period. The same is true for his subordinate at the cataract, the fictional Lieutenant Tanner, who is killed along with General Earle in the battle that the river column were eventually forced to fight at Kirbekan, when more than two thousand dervishes were killed for the loss of some eighty British soldiers. In my fiction, Mayne’s servant, Corporal Jones, missed the battle because he had been reassigned to the 8th Railway Company, RE, building the line south of Korti; he also appears in my novel
The Tiger Warrior
in the 1879 Rampa rebellion in India as Sergeant Jones (having subsequently been reduced in rank for misdemeanour), and is inspired in part by a real-life soldier from that railway company, 17818 Sapper M. Knight, whose Khedive’s Star and Egypt medal with the clasp ‘The Nile 1884–85’ are illustrated on my website.

Colonel William Francis Butler writes of his astonishment and pleasure at seeing a Canadian birch-bark canoe on the Nile, above the second cataract; it was paddled by William Prince, ‘Chief of the Swampy Indians’, whom Butler had last met fourteen years before during the Red River expedition in Canada, a man ‘grown more massive of frame … but still keen of eye and steady of hand as when I last saw him standing bowman in a bark canoe among the whirling waters whose echoes were lost in the endless pine woods of the great Lone Land’.

One of the most extraordinary aspects of the relief expedition was the employment of Mohawk Indians from Canada to help navigate the whaleboats that were supposed to take British troops on to Khartoum. As well as west African ‘Kroomen’ – boatmen from the Kroo (Kru) tribe, admired by Wolseley when he led his campaign against the Ashanti in 1873 – the expedition included 400 Canadian voyageurs, drawn from the community of backwoodsmen and fur-traders who had helped Wolseley’s Red River expedition in Canada in 1870. The elite among them were some sixty Mohawk men from the Ottawa valley, Iroquoian speakers, many with French blood, who were descendants of the feared Iroquois allies of the British in the wars against America. By the mid nineteenth century they specialised in guiding rafts of logs down the Ottawa river, and would have been familiar to the British army engineers and their families based in Ottawa to build and maintain the Rideau Canal, part of a communication and supply network designed to impede American attack. In my novel, Major Ormerod, second in command of the contingent, as well as Mayne’s companion Charrière, are both fictional, but are inspired by real-life characters; several of the Mohawks on the Nile were veterans of the Red River expedition, and at least one had also served in the Union Army in the American Civil War. The voyageur contingent was a civilian force, and suffered no battle casualties – of the sixteen deaths, six were drownings in the Nile, the rest from illness – though it provided a precedent for the dispatch of Canadian volunteers to the Boer War and the First World War, when soldiers of Iroquois and other aboriginal descent had a high reputation as scouts and snipers and many were killed in action.

As an archaeologist, I have always been fascinated by the reverence given to relics of Gordon after his death, when he was promoted in popular imagination to something akin to sainthood – a transformation ironically only possible through his death, but which was undoubtedly encouraged by those who wished to deflect public attention from their failure to rescue him. His elevation had begun while he was still alive, and burgeoned once he was in Khartoum. His
Reflections in Palestine
, compiled from his notes ‘with anxious care by more than one of the writer’s friends’, shows an almost mystical reverence towards his every word, with every inchoate thought they could find put into print; Gordon the saint might have looked upon their efforts with indulgence, but it is hard to believe that Gordon the Royal Engineer would have approved. Afterwards his admirers hunted everywhere for relics, some of them of dubious authenticity. The Royal Engineers Museum contains a fragment of the wooden staircase where he was thought to have died, said to have been removed from the palace at Khartoum when it was demolished in 1898; any doubts about its authenticity would be dispelled in the mind of the believer by the silver case topped with a cross that holds it, just like a medieval reliquary. More bizarrely, the museum houses a box said to have come from Rudolf von Slatin, containing among other things one of Gordon’s teeth, his last match and pencil, and the corpse of a fly said to have walked on his nose!

The Gordon Relics Committee was concerned not with these kinds of relics but with the important collection of ethnographic, historic and archaeological artefacts that Gordon amassed during his various postings, including much material from the Sudan. A remarkable display of this material in the Royal Engineers Museum at Chatham was one of the inspirations for this novel. Gordon had a considerable interest in archaeology, in common with many of his fellow engineer officers – men who by vocation were concerned with structures and artefacts – and like many of them he was a devout though idiosyncratic Christian, fascinated by the Holy Land and the discoveries being made there and in surrounding lands touched on by the Bible. Two of the engineers on the Gordon relief expedition, Kitchener and Wilson, were among the foremost field archaeologists of the nineteenth century, responsible for surveys in Palestine that remain the basis for archaeological knowledge of the Holy Land today. They were also close friends of Gordon’s, and as the senior intelligence officers of the relief expedition were deeply implicated in everything that went on. All three men would have shared a fascination with the archaeology of Egypt and the desert to the south because of its biblical connections; it is possible to imagine them joining together on the kind of collective endeavour envisaged in this novel, with Gordon’s search for artefacts allied to his own yearning for the personal revelation in the desert that he might have imagined inspiring Akhenaten, as well as the Mahdi.

The events of 1884–5 had a dramatic impact on archaeology in Egypt. The war with the Mahdi and the rise of jihad in the Sudan in the 1880s has much modern resonance, but the fascination with this period today stems not only from the grip that the Gordon relief expedition held over the nation – indeed, the world – at that time, but also from the fact that many in Britain today have ancestors who served in Egypt and the Sudan, or visited during the early years of British rule. My own maternal great-grandfather went to Egypt with the 6th Dragoon Guards in 1882, arriving shortly after the battle of Tel el-Kebir; my daughter’s maternal great-great-grandfather was a civil engineer who worked on the first Aswan dam in the 1890s, when he lived with his family in Cairo. Aside from those who were stationed in Egypt, the opening in 1867 of the Suez Canal, the ‘Gateway to India’ and the primary motivation for British interest in Egypt, meant that the thousands travelling to and from India who had previously gone via the Cape of Good Hope now went past Egypt, and a stopover in Cairo to see the pyramids, and Luxor became as obligatory as the sites of Greece and Rome had been to the ‘Grand Tourists’ of a century before. The fascination today with ancient Egypt stems from the accessibility of its monuments after the British takeover, not only to wealthy travellers but also to soldiers and their families going to and from India. From that perspective, the war with the Mahdi and his successors – drawing the British ever further into involvement with Egypt and the Sudan – is closely interlinked with the rise of Egyptology as a discipline, and the development of archaeological investigations which eventually led to fabulous discoveries such as Tutankhamun’s tomb.