As for the campaign against the Taiping itself, Gordon showed his strategic nous and validated time and again the original decision to appoint him as head of this Chinese fighting force. His plans pivoted on the successful capture of the city of Suzhou, immediately west of Shanghai. With the city in sight, Gordon reiterated his proscription on looting and for his pains received an anonymous note from his aggrieved Chinese artillerymen threatening to kill him and all the Western officers with one cannon blast. There could be but one response. Gordon had one man shot and the rest promptly backed down. Indeed, as a scattering of ungrateful, avaricious soldiers deserted the Army, they were as often as not replaced from among the ranks of their captured Taiping prisoners, whom Gordon almost always individually admired. He had no hatred for the ordinary soldiers ranged against him.
Gordon formed the habit, backed by his training and experience in the field, of dashing on horseback, unarmed and unescorted, to reconnoitre the territory and this advance work combined with his strategic thinking to pay rich dividends. His Ever Victorious Army scored one victory after another over the Taiping. This was the life for which Gordon had been born. Soon he was marching behind silk banners inscribed with the names of all his victories but not all aspects of this war were under his control. He favoured clemency if the context permitted and he was keen on victory by means of negotiation rather than bloodshed, if this might be managed. He gained Suzhou, for example, by parley and he guaranteed the safety of the Taiping who had surrendered to him. Disgracefully, his work was immediately undone when the restored government mandarins sacked the city with imperial Chinese forces and massacred the Taiping leaders who had entrusted themselves to Gordon’s care.
There were cultural differences at work. Gordon’s attitude was that the judicious deployment of clemency would speed the war to victory. As each victory was achieved without undue bloodshed and with an element of honour, so the next confrontation was all the more likely to be resolved in the same fashion. For the imperial Qing government, however, a show of mercy would only provoke further uprisings. Rebellions must therefore be crushed ruthlessly. False historical accounts would lay the responsibility for such atrocities at Gordon’s door, as the leader of the active militia, and these accounts would be spread further by the evangelical American partisans of the Taiping.
In material terms, every temptation was resisted by Gordon. He declined the offer by one of his seedier militia predecessors to march on Peking and make themselves heirs to the Qing dynasty and wealthy with it. With only the better class of missionary his equal in this regard, Gordon therefore contrived to leave China bounty-less and poorer than when he had arrived. He had many times paid his men out of his own pocket. While disdainful of riches, he had a rather more relaxed attitude to racking up debts and borrowing from friends and he refused the traditional imperial bounties pushed his way. He even rebuffed the offer made in the name of the boy-emperor Tongzhi of 10,000 taels of silver. His decision managed to impress the Chinese rather than offend them because of the loss of face.
Gordon even accomplished that rarest of successes with a mercenary army fighting victoriously for a cause inside an antique and tottering empire: he successfully wound his army up. The gifted Sir Harry Parkes, the British consul at Shanghai and later the effective founder of Hong Kong, was one of many who felt dismayed at the prospect. That at this moment of triumph for Gordon and therefore for Palmerston’s policy of formal non-intervention, he should stand aside? Gordon was unable to tolerate any further Qing abuses of their own people. He told Parkes: ‘On these subjects I act for myself and judge for myself. This I have found to be the best way of getting on.’ For his troubles he left China a marshal in the imperial army and a wearer of the Yellow Jacket, their equivalent of the Garter. After a brief interlude superintending Chinese artillery training, Gordon went home, having served others as faithfully as he could and, more importantly, as best he felt he should.
During his time in the Far East, ‘Chinese Gordon’ underscored those aspects of his character that had always been present. Note the inescapable morality play of the great commander who thought as much of feeding enemy civilians as he did of victory in battle, the evangelical impulses of a man who saw that true justice for all lay in recognising that the idea of a new Christian dawn in the East was a false hope and the humanity of a commander who begged for mercy for his defeated foes against their cruel masters. There was no way that this paragon of Victorian manhood could not appeal to the British public.
For all this, however, we must not lose sight of what went on around Gordon, of the large context against which he operated. The collapse of China as an empire and a state would manifestly not have been in Britain’s interests. Gordon’s work underpinned the success of the cool and sure policy pursued by successive British governments and helped ensure that China did not follow the other empires of antiquity into final, irrevocable dissolution. He returned to Britain in 1864 with the endorsement of The Times ringing in the nation’s ears:
The part of the soldier of fortune is in these days very difficult to play with honour … but if ever the actions of a soldier fighting in foreign service ought to be viewed with indulgence and even with admiration, this exceptional tribute is due to Colonel Gordon.
*
Back in England and stationed at Gravesend, Charles Gordon fell into a routine life. His days began early, with a cold bath followed by an hour of prayer and Bible-reading. His military work could normally be accomplished by lunchtime, which, to the unjust excitement of Strachey and generations of lazy commentators to come, left him ostensibly free for the remainder of the day. He filled these hours with good works for the local poor, not least the boys of the parish, who adored him. Gordon set up his own free or ‘Ragged’, as they were then known, school. He would pay for the most promising of his charges to get training places on merchant ships and would follow their progress round the globe, with pins on a map showing where he thought their ships were. When he went to whichever church he randomly chose, he sat among the poor and worshipped with them. He permitted the destitute access to his riverside garden and set aside land for them to have allotments. Appalled by the poverty he witnessed during a visit to Manchester, he scratched his name off the one gift he had brought back from China, a gold watch from the Emperor, anonymously sold it and distributed the money for poor relief. It is thought that in his Gravesend years, Gordon distributed 90 per cent of his income to charity.
In a loving if theologically unformed fashion, Gordon came to believe that all would be saved through Christ’s redemption. He would visit the dying, of all ages and classes. ‘I like to be with them. It brings the future nearer to me, as if you were seeing friends off by a train to a place to which you will eventually go yourself.’ This English interlude, pleasant, if in Gordon’s own eyes a trifle dull, did not last long and in the autumn of 1871 he returned to Romania, this time to be the British representative on the very Danube Commission he had helped establish in 1856.
Here too he soon saw that something was missing. He happily wrote to the British military attaché at Vienna of his wild travels in search of a correctly demarcated border: ‘It is no joke walking over crackling ice with the view of fish swimming beneath you, the great sobs the ice gives, and the wild wail of wolves make it cheerful work. Here you may die without any fuss, for there are but few people about.’ As usual he disdained the large pay that came with the post, not least because he saw it as an ever more otiose sinecure. Once more, the ice and the howling wolves notwithstanding, Gordon was bored and it was at this time that an opportunity arose, one he seized with both hands.
In 1872, Gordon attended a dinner held in the wooden summer palace on the Bosphorus of the British ambassador to the Sublime Porte, as the Ottoman Empire was officially known. Here he met Nubar Pasha, a Smyrna-born, European-educated Armenian Christian who was the Egyptian representative in Constantinople. Since 1863 Egypt had been ruled by Khedive Isma’il. He was the leader of a terr
itory that remained nominally under the suzerainty of the Ottomans but which was in fact an autonomous state.
Egypt was on paper autonomous but financially in hock to French bankers, who had paid for the construction of the Suez Canal. The country was also a key part of international and imperial diplomacy. The Canal provided a rapid route for military might and goods to pass between Britain and India and Disraeli’s government was aware that the Canal and Egypt itself were both potential prize assets and weak points in Britain’s web of global influence.
Gordon’s conversation with Nubar Pasha took place at a precise point in this game of strategy and control. Isma’il was determined to create a new Egyptian empire in the valley of the River Nile and it was with this intent in mind that an expedition, sponsored by Egypt and led by the Englishman Samuel Baker, was sent south along the Nile in 1870. It reached Khartoum in February but its control of the river valley remained at best nominal. As Nubar Pasha sat in conversation with Gordon by the Bosphorus, he was aware of the need for a commander and a strategist who could assist in forwarding Isma’il’s dream of pushing Egyptian control into what is now South Sudan towards Lake Victoria.
As it happened, Nubar had no idea of Gordon’s reputation as a strategist and leader but a conversation developed that would flow in one direction. In 1873, Isma’il formally offered a commanding role to Gordon, who consulted the British government. He could see the advantages of a British presence in the upper echelons of the Egyptian administration and consented with satisfaction. Gordon assumed the role of governor of the as yet theoretical Egyptian province of Equatoria in 1874.
He accepted the job but declined the handsome salary that went with it. After all, he remarked, ‘All the coin one takes is wrung out of poor people’ and, he might have added, by despots wielding whips. Isma’il himself was at first confused. He thought that Gordon’s agreed pittance meant that he must be a spy or intriguer in the pay of the British. Isma’il was not unreasonable to be suspicious of British intentions in general. In 1875, Her Majesty’s government would effectively take control of the Suez Canal and in 1879 the British overthrew Isma’il himself. At this time, however, he was convinced by Gordon’s bona fides and Gordon set off towards Khartoum. His journey there required all that the Victorian picaresque could provide, camel journeys, desert landscapes, paddle-steamers on the Nile, mutiny, crocodiles, inefficient German servants and naked tribesmen distaining even a loincloth as being emblematic of bondage. All this and more carried the new Gordon Pasha to his glory.
Isma’il had in fact been correct, up to a point. Gordon did have an agenda but it was not to seize the Sudan as a British colony. It was to end the scandal of slavery, which, decades after its abolition in the Empire, was still a flourishing trade along the Nile and from which Isma’il himself profited. The very moment of Gordon’s despatch to the Sudan had seen a clamour in the British press for him to be sent to the Gold Coast, today’s Ghana, on the other side of the African continent. Who could have been better than the master of irregular warfare to deal with the scourge of slavery in West Africa? Gordon could not be everywhere and there was a humanitarian situation developing in the Sudan that had to be managed.
Baker’s expedition had stopped the slaving of Africans down the Nile but the result was that, being unable to trade by river, the slavers instead forced their captives on a thousand-mile march across the Sahara, tethered to wooden yokes. At the heart of what Gordon wanted to do in and for the Sudan was to put an end to this evil. These were ethical choices made viable by the fact of British power and fuelled by Gordon’s Christian zeal. In fact, the sole embarrassment to the twenty-first-century mind is quite how casually this good work has been allowed to slip out of mind.
Gordon gazed upon horrors in the Sudan. Slavery formed the basis of the region’s economy but its human consequences were evil. Right and wrong were at stake and General Gordon, with those who stood behind him, was on the right side. Irrespective of anyone’s general views on the intricacies of imperialism, it is clear that the British presence in the upper Nile valley improved matters for the local people. Gordon and his colleagues faced up to the wickedness they saw around them and they acted. To see Gordon at work in the Sudan is to see action being taken which for all its advances the international community seems largely incapable of today. This is to this generation’s discredit and still more reason why Charles Gordon’s fame should endure with undiminished honour. At this critical and deeply moral moment in the story, it is important to take stock of the greater play of ideas and ideologies that were in movement around the figure of Gordon. His lodestar was a principle of morality and it seems that the guiding principle of the Empire which he served was also founded on morality.
It is safe to say that attitudes to the Empire oscillate wildly between two points. That it was a rapacious monster, which wider still and wider, ate until it was bloated and incapable, or that it was famously acquired in a fit of absence of mind. Neither is true. The story of the Empire is its constant and continuous abnegation by its would-be masters for most of its existence and in most of the places it touched. Put more simply, the British did not want to acquire most of it, most of the time, and once it was acquired the country was mostly not very interested in it. To see the Empire as the men who made it saw it is to see something they largely sought not to make. The problem for imperial administrators in London was that on the frontier there were legions of Gordons, to be managed, ordered and controlled as well as possible. They existed to do certain jobs and to manage certain situations, so that British troops would not have to be sent in and in order that certain territories could otherwise be left well alone.
Sometimes circumstances meant that Britain was forced to intervene but the administrators in London worked hard to keep these interventions to a minimum. A map of Africa when Gordon first set foot in it, before the so-called Scramble for Africa which ended the nineteenth century, was one without borders. Such a state of affairs suited the maritime British. They did not want masses of territory as they had all the access they needed and were glad that no one else had much territory either. This happy state, for the United Kingdom, prevailed wherever the sea lapped and the Royal Navy went or let others go. The consequence of this was that were many places for such a man as Gordon to go, to do the things his own government did not want to do. Gordon claimed no new realms for Victoria, he undertook an arduous trek into the mountains of Abyssinia specifically to seek peace and not to wage war and he administered precious little of what Her Majesty already possessed.
Time after time, in the course of Gordon’s illustrious service abroad his fear of the Foreign Office is evident, as was his concern that his deeds might embroil his own country in unnecessary foreign affairs. The key was to manage events so that British commercial and imperial interests came out on top. A stable Egypt, and a stable China, served British interests well. In both cases, good could flow unimpeded when there was political stability. Let Gordon do his work, and do it well but let him do it in such a way as to avoid the expense and bloodshed that came with an army on the ground. This is central to understanding the motives of the imperial ideology.
*
Early in 1880, Gordon left the Sudan. He admitted that the country, its climate, its internal politics, the strain of dealing with Ottoman and Egyptian bureaucracy, had defeated him. Although he had done his best, he could not even claim to have swept away the scourge of slavery. He had come close to a breakdown and now he took time to calm his mind. He travelled in Switzerland, England and Ireland, from where he wrote to the new Prime Minister William Gladstone on the tensions he observed on the land question. He even reminded Gladstone of his own family’s part in the slave trade, to the Prime Minister’s perhaps understandable irritation.
Gordon also travelled to South Africa, Mauritius and the Seychellesfn2 and he returned to China where he counselled the Qing in the context of rising border tensions with Russia. He was even offered a position by Leopold II, King o
f the Belgians, managing the monarch’s private possession of the Congo. Belgian activities in the Congo would become the most notorious of colonial activities in Africa and a byword for plunder, torture and rape on a colossal scale so it was well that Gordon declined the offer. Now Sudan again intervened and settled Gordon’s fate.
In 1881, an uprising began in the Sudan against Egyptian rule of the region, led by a ‘Madhi’ named Muhammad Ahmed. In Islamic culture, a ‘Madhi’ is a self-proclaimed saviour destined to destroy the religion’s enemies. The uprising spread along the Nile valley. Simultaneously, Egyptians rose against the British-backed authorities in protest at spiralling taxation, creating a dangerous situation concerning the governance of the Suez Canal. Gladstone ordered British troops into Egypt to guard the Canal. In July 1882, British ships bombarded Alexandria, leaving much of the city in flames, and by mid-September British soldiers were on the streets of Cairo.
With Egypt came the gathering imbroglio in the Sudan. Egyptian troops gradually lost control of the situation and by the end of 1883 Gladstone’s government had resolved on the withdrawal of all British and Egyptian troops and administrators in the upper Nile valley. It was a complicated operation that would take time to organise. Gordon now intervened on a grand scale. In an interview given to W. T. Stead of the Pall Mall Gazette, he advocated massive intervention in the Sudan, to crush the Mahdi uprising and assert control of the entire Nile valley. Stead has a reasonable claim to having invented the political interview as we know it and the opinions he obtained from Gordon were just those the British public wanted to hear from its heroes.
The Victorians Page 28