At Cairo he received further instructions from Sir Evelyn
Baring, and was appointed by the khedive as governor-general,
with executive powers. Travelling by Korosko and
Berber, he arrived at Khartum on the 18th of February,
and was well received by the inhabitants, who believed
At Khartum.
that he had come to save the country from the rebels. Gordon
at once commenced the task of sending the women and children
and the sick and wounded to Egypt, and about two thousand
five hundred had been removed before the mahdi’s forces closed
upon Khartum. At the same time he was impressed with the
necessity of making some arrangement for the future government
of the country, and asked for the help of Zobeir (q.v.), who had
great influence in the Sudan, and had been detained in Cairo
for some years. This request was made on the very day Gordon
reached Khartum, and was in accordance with a similar proposal
he had made when at Cairo. But, after delays which involved
the loss of much precious time, the British government refused
(13th of March) to sanction the appointment, because Zobeir
had been a notorious slave-hunter. With this refusal vanished
all hope of a peaceful retreat of the Egyptian garrisons. Wavering
tribes went over to the mahdi. The advance of the rebels
against Khartum was combined with a revolt in the eastern
Sudan, and the Egyptian troops in the vicinity of Suakin met
with constant defeat. At length a British force was sent to
Suakin under the command of General Sir Gerald Graham, and
routed the rebels in several hard-fought actions. Gordon
telegraphed to Sir Evelyn Baring urging that the road from
Suakin to Berber should be opened by a small force. But this
request, though strongly supported by Baring and the British
military authorities in Cairo, was refused by the government in
London. In April General Graham and his forces were withdrawn
from Suakin, and Gordon and the Sudan were seemingly
abandoned to their fate. The garrison of Berber, seeing that
there was no chance of relief, surrendered a month later and
Khartum was completely isolated. Had it not been for the
presence of Gordon the city would also soon have fallen, but with
an energy and skill that were almost miraculous, he so organized
the defence that Khartum held out until January 1885. When
it is remembered that Gordon was of a different nationality
and religion to the garrison and population, that he had only
one British officer to assist him, and that the town was badly
fortified and insufficiently provided with food, it is just to say
that the defence of Khartum is one of the most remarkable
episodes in military history. The siege commenced on the 18th
of March, but it was not until August that the British government
under the pressure of public opinion decided to take steps
to relieve Gordon. General Stephenson, who was in command
of the British troops in Egypt, wished to send a brigade at once
to Dongola, but he was overruled, and it was not until the
beginning of November that the British relief force was ready
to start from Wadi Haifa under the command of Lord Wolseley.
The force reached Korti towards the end of December, and from
that place a column was despatched across the Bayuda desert
to Metemma on the Nile. After some severe fighting in which
the leader of the column, Sir Herbert Stewart, was mortally
wounded, the force reached the river on the 20th of January,
and the following day four steamers, which had been sent down
by Gordon to meet the British advance, and which had been
waiting for them for four months, reported to Sir Charles Wilson,
who had taken command after Sir Herbert Stewart was wounded.Death.
On the 24th Wilson started with two of the steamers
for Khartum, but on arriving there on the 28th he
found that the place had been captured by the rebels and Gordon
killed two days before. A belief has been entertained that
Wilson might have started earlier and saved the town, but this
is quite groundless. In the first place, Wilson could not have
started sooner than he did; and in the second, even if he had
been able to do so, it would have made no difference, as the rebels
could have taken Khartum any time they pleased after the 5th
of January, when the provisions were exhausted. Another
popular notion, that the capture of the place was due to treachery
on the part of the garrison, is equally without foundation. The
attack was made at a point in the fortifications where the
rampart and ditch had been destroyed by the rising of the Nile,
and when the mahdi’s troops entered the soldiers were too weak
to make any effectual resistance. Gordon himself expected the
town to fall before the end of December, and it is really difficult
to understand how he succeeded in holding out until the 26th
of January. Writing on the 14th of December he said, “Now,
mark this, if the expeditionary force—and I ask for no more
than two hundred men—does not come in ten days, the town
may fall, and I have done my best for the honour of my country.”
He had indeed done his best, and far more than could have been
regarded as possible. To understand what he went through
during the latter months of the siege, it is only necessary to read
his own journal, a portion of which, dating from 10th September
to 14th December 1884, was fortunately preserved and published.
Gordon was not an author, but he wrote many short memoranda on subjects that interested him, and a considerable number of these have been utilized, especially in the work by his brother, Sir Henry Gordon, entitled Events in the Life of Charles George Gordon, from its Beginning to its End. He was a voluminous letter-writer, and much of his correspondence has been published. His character was remarkable, and the influence he had over those with whom he came in contact was very striking. His power to command men of non-European races was probably unique. He had no fear of death, and cared but little for the opinion of others, adhering tenaciously to the course he believed to be right in the face of all opposition. Though not holding to outward forms of religion, he was a truly religious man in the highest sense of the word, and was a constant student of the Bible. To serve God and to do his duty were the great objects of his life, and he died as he had lived, carrying out the work that lay before him to the best of his ability. The last words of his last letter to his sister, written when he knew that death was very near, sum up his character: “I am quite happy, thank God, and, like Lawrence, I have tried to do my duty.[1]
- ↑ With this estimate of Gordon’s character may be contrasted those of Lord Cromer (the most severe of Gordon’s critics), and of Lord Morley of Blackburn; in their strictures as in their praise they help to explain both the causes of the extraordinary influence wielded by Gordon over all sorts and conditions of men and also his difficulties. Lord Cromer’s criticism, it should be remembered, does not deal with Gordon’s career as a whole but solely with his last mission to the Sudan; Lord Morley’s is a more general judgment.
Lord Cromer (Modern Egypt, vol. i., ch. xxvii., p. 565-571) says: “We may admire, and for my own part I do very much admire General Gordon’s personal courage, his disinterestedness and his chivalrous feeling in favour of the beleaguered garrisons, but admiration of these qualities is no sufficient plea against a condemnation of his conduct on the ground that it was quixotic. In his last letter to his sister, dated December 14, 1884, he wrote: ‘I am quite happy, thank God, and, like Lawrence, I have tried to do my duty’ . . . I am not now dealing with General Gordon’s character, which was in many respects noble, or with his military defence of Khartoum, which was heroic, but with the political conduct of his mission, and from this point of view I have no hesitation in saying that General Gordon cannot be considered to have tried to do his duty unless a very strained and mistaken view be taken of what his duty was. . . . As a matter of public morality I cannot think that General Gordon’s process of reasoning is defensible. . . . I do not think that it can be held that General Gordon made any serious effort to carry out the main ends of British and Egyptian policy in the Sudan. He thought more of his personal opinions than of the interests of the state. . . . In fact, except personal courage, great fertility in military resource, a lively though sometimes ill-directed repugnance to injustice, oppression and meanness of every description, and a considerable power of acquiring influence over those, necessarily limited in numbers, with whom he was brought into personal contact, General Gordon does not appear to have possessed any of the qualities which would have fitted him to undertake the difficult task he had in hand.”
Lord Morley (Life of Gladstone, vol. iii., 1st ed., 1903, ch. 9, p. 151) says: “Gordon, as Mr Gladstone said, was a hero of heroes. He was a soldier of infinite personal courage and daring, of striking military energy, initiative and resource; a high, pure and single character, dwelling much in the region of the unseen. But as all who knew him admit, and as his own records testify, notwithstanding an undercurrent of shrewd common sense, he was the creature, almost the sport, of impulse; his impressions and purposes changed with the speed of lightning; anger often mastered him; he went very often by intuitions and inspirations rather than by cool
