Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress (63 page)

At the same time he was a mystic of a weirder kind. He believed the earth to be enclosed in a hollow globe, the firmament, with God’s throne resting upon it immediately above the altar of burnt offering in the temple at Jerusalem. When God spoke at the creation, he maintained, the devil fled to the point in the hemisphere
of darkness farthest from God’s throne—latitude 31° 47' South, he estimated, 144° 5' West, which was not far from Pitcairn Island in the South Pacific. As for the Garden of Eden, it was on the bed of the sea near the Seychelles, the forbidden fruit being really the
coco
de
mer
. Gordon had pronounced theories too about the Holy Places in Jerusalem, vigorously denying the authenticity of most accepted sites, and confidently identifying alternatives of his own.
1

He was obviously eccentric: he was also notoriously undisciplined. Wherever he went he made disciples, but he nearly always quarrelled too. He was the very antithesis of the good regimental soldier: he spent most of his life on independent missions, generally in command, and almost the most compelling thing about him was his air of absolute self-reliance. He gave the impression of
knowing
—knowing the tribes, the terrain, the enemy intentions, the inner reasons for a development or its unrevealed results. He liked to be alone, preferably in a position of uninterruptable power, and from his commanding isolation he looked out upon the world with a caustic but not humourless fatalism, tinged with bitterness sometimes, but more often with a sense of the transient or the ludicrous.

Gordon’s influence on those he met was generally stunning, though not always permanent. It was the eyes that did it, with the conviction, and a modesty which, while in retrospect it often seems specious, was clearly persuasive at the time. The Archdeacon of Mauritius, for instance, used to record with reverence that Gordon, as commanding engineer on the island, liked to sit at the back of the church with the native Mauritians. ‘But one day, on some official church ceremonial, Gordon had to attend in full uniform and take his place in the front pew. The chest of the great soldier was blazing with medals. But every time he stood up during the service Gordon picked up his helmet and held it in front of his chest … to hide (them).’

Garnet Wolseley called Gordon ‘God’s friend’—one of the few men among his acquaintances, as the Only General cautiously added, ‘who came up to my estimate of the Christian hero’. Gladstone too thought him ‘a hero, and a hero of heroes’. William Butler, that
invaluable chronicler of imperial reactions, called him ‘the noblest knight among us all’. Richard Burton described him as ‘a man whose perfect truthfulness and integrity … made him a phenomenon in the nineteenth century’. A Sudanese steamer captain, remembering him after his death, called him ‘not a man but a God’. Among the public at large these impressions were wildly magnified. Gordon could do no wrong. He was the greatest guerilla leader in the world. He was a saint. He was a living legend of perfection.

Gladstone and his colleagues were not always so sure. Nor was Evelyn Baring, the cool and able ex-soldier who, as British Agent-General in Cairo, dubiously awaited the arrival of this contradictory paragon. Nor for that matter was Gordon himself—‘talk of two natures in one!’ he wrote of himself. ‘I have a hundred, and none think alike and all want to rule.’ Which nature was required on this particular mission, nobody was sure, for nobody quite knew what the mission was. By the time Gordon reached Egypt, his original instructions to ‘report’ had become a mandate to organize the withdrawal of the garrisons, and he had been appointed Governor-General of the Sudan once more. Even so his purposes were interpreted according to taste. The British Government apparently wanted him to withdraw the garrisons and abandon the country to the Mahdi. The expansionists wanted him either to annex the Sudan to the British Empire, or reorganize it as a dependency of Egypt—the puppet of a puppet. The anti-imperialists wanted him to establish a truly independent Sudan, presumably under the Mahdi. The soldiers were concerned about the security of Egypt and of the Sudanese ports on the Red Sea. The evangelicals thought Mahdism might mean a resurgence of Islamic power throughout Africa, and certainly new life for the slave trade. Some people hoped Gordon would establish his own personal regime in the Sudan, as the buccaneering James Brooke had made himself the beneficent ruler of Sarawak earlier in the century.

As for Gordon himself, one can only say that his purposes did
not
embrace the abandonment of the Sudan, as Gladstone intended. ‘Stand fast,’ he cabled Khartoum, ‘I am coming, you are men, not women.’ He was not an imperialist himself—‘I have never been able to answer the query in what way we would lose, if we failed to keep
[India]’—and was unlikely to want to seize the Sudan for the Crown of England, let alone for the tinsel coronet of Egypt. Nor was he, for all his Christian fervour, altogether hostile to the Mahdi, who was certainly more admirable than the unspeakable Egyptians he was rebelling against. Perhaps he himself had no very clear notion why he was going to Khartoum, but merely wished to be back there, exerting his magical ascendancy over the people, occupying the centre of the stage, and making all things right. This was, too, the vague but comforting feeling of the British public. As the
Pall
Mall
Gazette
put it, ‘he will have full and undivided responsibility for affairs in the Sudan. Whether we evacuate the country or retain it, as soon as Gordon takes command and for as long as Gordon’s command holds, England is directly responsible for whatever is done in the name of the Egyptian Government between the Third Cataract and the Equatorial Lakes’.

With such hyperbole ringing in his ears, and perhaps playing through his mind, did the peculiar Major-General, chain-smoking and dictating incessant telegraphic messages, leave Cairo for Khartoum. He took with him a military assistant, Colonel J. D. Stewart, and a young
Times
correspondent, Frank Power, and he left behind him an anxious Baring, a bewildered Government and a doting British public.

On February 18, 1884, he reached Khartoum. It was not a very beautiful place in those days. Its
raison
d’être
was the river junction at which, mingling symbolically in the sunshine, the White and Blue Niles joined their streams. For the rest it was unremarkable. It stood along the bank of the Blue Nile, littered with the masts and felucca sails of the river craft, and extended perhaps a mile inland in a hot straggle of mud brick. Its houses were mostly grey single-storey structures, interspersed with gardens and palm groves, with the domes and minarets of a few shabby mosques, and narrow dusty streets criss-crossing the city from wall to wall. There was a small dockyard near the river junction, with its own settlement of dockyard workers in huts and shanties by the water, and here one could
see the spindly funnels and white upper-works of the Government paddle steamers which ran downstream to Berber. Behind it were the sleazy streets of the red-light district, geared so habitually to the demands of the Egyptian civic authorities that the Sudanese called it Salamat-al-Pasha—Pasha Town. At the north end of the city were the barracks of the Egyptian garrison, with an arsenal nearby, and there was an Austrian Catholic mission, and an Austrian Consulate in a date grove, and a handful of substantial houses built by the few European traders in the place, and a Coptic church with three domes.

Beyond Tuti Island the main stream of the united river slowly passed, dun-coloured itself, a mile across, with the open desert extending as far as the eye could see on the other side, and only the small village of Omdurman, with its clumps of palms, to break the monotonous silhouette. Khartoum was horribly isolated. There was a telegraph line to Cairo, but the mail, like nearly everything else, had to come by camel over immense tracts of desert, or in boats warped laboriously over the Nile cataracts. The average daytime heat varied from 90° in January to 170° in May; the rainfall ran from nothing at all during five months of the year to about 3" in August; the city smelt of dust and dung, and heavily on its air hung hot African sounds—the exhausted barking of pi-dogs, the chuff of steam machinery at the dockyard, quavering muezzins in the morning, the rattle of cartwheels and the slow flabby thud of camel-hoofs on the way to market.

‘I am glad to see you’, Gordon told the people of this stifling African city, arriving there by camel-back with his companions. ‘It is four years since I was here, and the Sudan is miserable, and I am miserable, and I want your help to put it right. I have come here alone without troops and we must ask Allah to look after the Sudan if no one else can.’ He moved at once into the Governor-General’s palace, on the bank of the Blue Nile in the centre of town. This was a dingy building of two stories, grey with green sunblinds, likened in one sufficiently macabre comparison to an Egyptian boarding house. In front, across the open quay, was its private landing-stage; behind, enclosed by single-storey wings, there was a courtyard with a pond, a fountain and a vine-trellis; behind that again, a garden,
shaded by palms and watered by a steam-pump. At first Gordon shared this unprepossessing edifice with Stewart and Power, later he lived there all alone; the upper floor, built as a harem, he used as his private quarters, downstairs were his offices.

For nearly a year he stayed there. Exactly why, nobody could be sure, for he confided in nobody, and though he sent a constant stream of telegrams to Baring in Cairo, he never really defined his intentions. As to instructions from London, he simply took no notice of them, first to last. He did not long pretend that he was simply there to evacuate the garrisons, making indeed no attempt to do anything of the kind. Instead he implied that he was chiefly concerned with the future stability of the Sudan. He toyed with the idea of negotiating peace with the Mahdi, and suggested that as an agent of authority the Government should send to Khartoum a notorious former slave-trader, Zubeir Pasha, who had once been Gordon’s bitter enemy, but towards whom he had lately developed, he said, ‘a mystical feeling’. The very name of Zubeir was anathema to the English evangelicals, and Gordon’s quixotic demand for his services was the British public’s first intimation that queer things were likely to happen in Khartoum—his employment, said the Anti-Slavery Society, would be ‘a degradation for England, a scandal to Europe’.

Next Gordon began to hint that perhaps after all the Sudan should be reconquered by British arms, if only to guarantee the security of Egypt. ‘If Egypt is to be kept quiet the Mahdi must be smashed up. Mahdi is most unpopular and with care and time could be smashed … evacuation is possible, but you will feel effect in Egypt and will be forced into a far more serious affair in order to guard Egypt. At present it would be comparatively easy to destroy Mahdi.’ Within Khartoum Gordon exuded confidence and calm. In his cables to the world outside, he seemed in a perpetual state of irritable dither, constantly changing his mind: telegrams reached Baring in Cairo almost every day, so full of ideas and counter-ideas, at once so exuberant and so inconsistent, sometimes so eminently sensible, sometimes so ridiculous, that poor Baring understandably concluded General Gordon to be ‘half-cracked’.

In March the situation abruptly changed. A message from the
Mahdi put paid to any hope of negotiated settlement: if Gordon surrendered he would save himself and his supporters, ‘otherwise you shall perish with them and your sins and theirs shall be on your head’. Now the tribes to the north of Khartoum, hitherto quiescent, rose in support of the Mahdi. The rebels invested Khartoum itself, and the telegraph line to Cairo was cut. Gordon’s communications with Baring were reduced to messages on scraps of paper, sent out by runner, and Khartoum became a city under siege.

Now at least Gordon was explicit. When the British Government got a message through asking why he seemed to be making no attempt to leave Khartoum with the garrison, as instructed, his reply was tart. ‘You ask me to state cause and intention in staying in Khartoum knowing Government means to abandon Sudan, and in answer I say, I stay at Khartoum because Arabs have shut us up and will not let us out.’ This was not true. He could still fight his way out of Khartoum, but he had never tried to do so, and gradually, as the summer of 1884 dragged by, it became dimly apparent to Mr Gladstone’s Government that Gordon was blackmailing them. He had no intention either of withdrawing the garrisons, or even escaping himself: he wanted the British to reconquer the Sudan by force of arms, and he was staking his own person as hostage. If the British public baulked at Zubeir, despised the Egyptians, was not very interested in the future of the Sudan and had little idea where Khartoum was, it would certainly not be prepared to let ‘Chinese’ Gordon, the perfect Christian gentleman, die abandoned and friendless in the heart of Africa.

By the middle of September Gordon was almost the only European in Khartoum. Power and Stewart had tried to get away by steamer, only to be caught and slaughtered by Arabs downstream. The city was closely invested now, very few messages arrived from Cairo, and our only reliable account of Gordon’s circumstances comes from his own journal, which he sent to Egypt on board the steamer
Bordeen
, the last to leave Khartoum. He was an impulsive diarist, erratic but enthralling in this as in all else, and his chronicle is jumpy, tense, sometimes a little paranoiac, decorated with thickly-shaded pen sketches and cartoons, and informed always with a bitter humour. Rumours had readied Gordon of a relief expedition
being prepared in Egypt to rescue him, and the knowledge of that distant army, so reluctantly it seemed coming to his support, sours many of his entries, and moves him to an often unconvincing sarcasm. He apparently wanted the army to come, if only to restore order to the Sudan, and to embarrass the pacifist Gladstone, already embarrassed enough by the conquest of Egypt: but he only half wanted to be rescued. His journal is full of the death wish, for he shared with the Mahdi and his warriors the conviction that death in battle was the quickest way to God.