When Mr Gladstone read the words, he realized that the game was over. Lord Hartington’s position in the Liberal Party was second only to his own; he was the leader of the rich and powerful Whig aristocracy; his influence with the country was immense. Nor was he the man to make idle threats of resignation; he had said he would resign, and resign he would: the collapse of the Government would be the inevitable result. On 5 August, therefore, Parliament was asked to make a grant of £300,000, in order ‘to enable Her Majesty’s Government to undertake operations for the relief of General Gordon, should they become necessary’. The money was voted; and even then, at that last hour, Mr Gladstone made another, final, desperate twist. Trying to save himself by the proviso which he had inserted into the resolution, he declared that he was still unconvinced of the necessity of any operations at all. ‘I nearly,’ he wrote to Lord Hartington, ‘but not quite, adopt words received today from Granville. “It is clear, I think, that Gordon has our messages, and does not choose to answer them.” ’ Nearly, but not quite! The qualification was masterly; but it was of no avail. This time, the sinuous creature was held by too firm a grasp. On 26 August, Lord Wolseley was appointed to command the relief expedition; and on 9 September, he arrived in Egypt.
The relief expedition had begun; and at the same moment a new phase opened at Khartoum. The annual rising of the Nile was now sufficiently advanced to enable one of Gordon’s small steamers to pass over the cataracts down to Egypt in safety. He determined to seize the opportunity of laying before the authorities in Cairo and London, and the English public at large, an exact account of his position. A cargo of documents, including Colonel Stewart’s Diary of the siege and a personal appeal for assistance addressed by Gordon to all the European powers, was placed on board the Abbas; four other steamers were to accompany her until she was out of danger from attacks by the Mahdi’s troops; after which, she was to proceed alone into Egypt. On the evening of 9 September, just as she was about to start, the English and French Consuls asked for permission to go with her – a permission which Gordon, who had long been anxious to provide for their safety, readily granted. Then Colonel Stewart made the same request; and Gordon consented with the same alacrity. Colonel Stewart was the second-in-command at Khartoum; and it seems strange that he should have made a proposal which would leave Gordon in a position of the gravest anxiety without a single European subordinate. But his motives were to be veiled for ever in a tragic obscurity. The Abbas and her convoy set out. Henceforward the Governor-General was alone. He had now, definitely and finally, made his decision. Colonel Stewart and his companions had gone, with every prospect of returning unharmed to civilization. Mr Gladstone’s belief was justified; so far as Gordon’s personal safety was concerned, he might still, at this late hour, have secured it. But he had chosen; he stayed at Khartoum.
No sooner were the steamers out of sight than he sat down at his writing-table and began that daily record of his circumstances, his reflections, and his feelings, which reveals to us, with such an authentic exactitude, the final period of his extraordinary destiny. His Journals, sent down the river in batches to await the coming of the relief expedition, and addressed, first to Colonel Stewart, and later to the ‘Chief of Staff, Sudan Expeditionary Force’, were official documents, intended for publication, though, as Gordon himself was careful to note on the outer covers, they would ‘want pruning out’ before they were printed. He also wrote, on the envelope of the first section, ‘No secret as far as I am concerned’. A more singular set of state papers was never compiled. Sitting there, in the solitude of his palace, with ruin closing round him, with anxieties on every hand, with doom hanging above his head, he let his pen rush on for hour after hour in an ecstasy of communication, a tireless unburdening of the spirit, where the most trivial incidents of the passing day were mingled pell-mell with philosophical disquisitions, where jests and anger, hopes and terrors, elaborate justifications and cynical confessions, jostled one another in reckless confusion. The impulsive, demonstrative man had nobody to talk to any more, and so he talked instead to the pile of telegraph forms, which, useless now for perplexing Sir Evelyn Baring, served very well – for they were large and blank – as the repositories of his conversation. His tone was not the intimate and religious tone which he would have used with the Rev. Mr Barnes or his sister Augusta; it was such as must have been habitual with him in his intercourse with old friends or fellow-officers, whose religious views were of a more ordinary caste than his own, but with whom he was on confidential terms. He was anxious to put his case to a select and sympathetic audience – to convince such a man as Lord Wolseley that he was justified in what he had done; and he was sparing in his allusions to the hand of Providence, while those mysterious doubts and piercing introspections, which must have filled him, he almost entirely concealed. He expressed himself, of course, with eccentric abandon – it would have been impossible for him to do otherwise; but he was content to indicate his deepest feelings with a fleer. Yet sometimes – as one can imagine happening with him in actual conversation – his utterance took the form of a half soliloquy, a copious outpouring addressed to himself more than to anyone else, for his own satisfaction. There are passages in the Khartoum Journals which call up in a flash the light, gliding figure, and the blue eyes with the candour of childhood still shining in them; one can almost hear the low voice, the singularly distinct articulation, the persuasive – the self-persuasive – sentences, following each other so unassumingly between the puffs of a cigarette.
As he wrote, two preoccupations principally filled his mind. His reflections revolved round the immediate past and the impending future. With an untiring persistency he examined, he excused, he explained, his share in the complicated events which had led to his present situation. He rebutted the charges of imaginary enemies; he laid bare the ineptitude and the faithlessness of the English Government. He poured out his satire upon officials and diplomatists. He drew caricatures, in the margin, of Sir Evelyn Baring, with sentences of shocked pomposity coming out of his mouth. In some passages, which the editor of the Journals preferred to suppress, he covered Lord Granville with his raillery, picturing the Foreign Secretary, lounging away his morning at Walmer Castle, opening The Times and suddenly discovering, to his horror, that Khartoum was still holding out. ‘Why, HE said distinctly he could only hold out six months, and that was in March (counts the months). August! why, he ought to have given in! What is to be done? They’ll be howling for an expedition…. It is no laughing matter; that abominable Mahdi! Why on earth does he not guard his roads better? What IS to be done?’ Several times in his bitterness he repeats the suggestion that the authorities at home were secretly hoping that the fall of Khartoum would relieve them of their difficulties. ‘What that Mahdi is about,’ Lord Granville is made to exclaim in another deleted paragraph, ‘I cannot make out. Why does he not put all his guns on the river and stop the route? Eh what? “We will have to go to Khartoum!” Why, it will cost millions, what a wretched business! What! Send Zobeir? Our conscience recoils from that, it is elastic, but not equal to that, it is a pact with the Devil…. Do you not think there is any way of getting hold of HIM, in a quiet way?’ If a boy at Eton or Harrow, he declared, had acted as the Government had acted, ‘I think he would be kicked, and I am sure he would deserve it’. He was the victim of hypocrites and humbugs. There was ‘no sort of parallel to all this in history – except it be David with Uriah the Hittite’; but then ‘there was an Eve in the case’, and he was not aware that the Government had even that excuse.
From the past, he turned to the future, and surveyed, with a disturbed and piercing vision, the possibilities before him. Supposing that the relief expedition arrived, what would be his position? Upon one thing he was determined: whatever happened, he would not play the part of ‘the rescued lamb’. He vehemently asserted that the purpose of the expedition could only be the relief of the Sudan garrisons; it was monstrous to imagine that it had been undertaken merely to ensure his
personal safety. He refused to believe it. In any case, ‘I declare positively,’ he wrote, with passionate underlinings, ‘and once for all, that I will not leave the Sudan until every one who wants to go down is given the chance to do so, unless a government is established which relieves me of the charge; therefore if any emissary or letter comes up here ordering me to come down, I WILL NOT OBEY IT, BUT WILL STAY HERE, AND FALL WITH TOWN, AND RUN ALL RISKS.’ This was sheer insubordination, no doubt; but he could not help that; it was not in his nature to be obedient. ‘I know if I was chief, I would never employ myself, for I am incorrigible.’ Decidedly, he was not afraid to be ‘what club men call insubordinate, though, of all insubordinates, the club men are the worst.’
As for the government which was to replace him, there were several alternatives: an Egyptian Pasha might succeed him as Governor-General, or Zobeir might be appointed after all, or the whole country might be handed over to the Sultan. His fertile imagination evolved scheme after scheme; and his visions of his own future were equally various. He would withdraw to the Equator; he would be delighted to spend Christmas in Brussels; he would… at any rate he would never go back to England. That was certain. ‘I dwell on the joy of never seeing Great Britain again, with its horrid, wearisome dinner-parties and miseries. How we can put up with those things, passes my imagination! It is a perfect bondage.… I would sooner live like a Dervish with the Mahdi, then go out to dinner every night in London. I hope, if any English general comes to Khartoum, he will not ask me to dinner. Why men cannot be friends without bringing the wretched stomachs in, is astounding.’
But would an English general ever have the opportunity of asking him to dinner in Khartoum? There were moments when terrible misgivings assailed him. He pieced together his scraps of intelligence with feverish exactitude; he calculated times, distances, marches; ‘If,’ he wrote on 24 October, ‘they do not come before 30 November, the game is up, and Rule Britannia.’ Curious premonitions came into his mind. When he heard that the Mahdi was approaching in person, it seemed to be the fulfilment of a destiny, for he had ‘always felt we were doomed to come face to face’. What would be the end of it all? ‘It is, of course, on the cards,’ he noted, ‘that Khartoum is taken under the nose of the Expeditionary force, which will be just too late.’ The splendid hawks that swooped about the palace reminded him of a text in the Bible: ‘The eye that mocketh at his father and despiseth to obey his mother, the ravens of the valley shall pick it out, and the young eagles shall eat it.’ ‘I often wonder,’ he wrote, ‘whether they are destined to pick my eyes, for I fear I was not the best of sons.’
So, sitting late into the night, he filled the empty telegraph forms with the agitations of his spirit, overflowing ever more hurriedly, more furiously, with lines of emphasis, and capitals, and exclamation-marks more and more thickly interspersed, so that the signs of his living passion are still visible to the inquirer of today on those thin sheets of mediocre paper and in the torrent of the ink. But he was a man of elastic temperament; he could not remain for ever upon the stretch; he sought, and he found, relaxation in extraneous matters – in metaphysical digressions, or in satirical outbursts, or in the small details of his daily life. It amused him to have the Sudanese soldiers brought in and shown their ‘black pug faces’ in the palace looking-glasses. He watched with a cynical sympathy the impertinence of a turkey-cock that walked in his courtyard. He made friends with a mouse who, ‘judging from her swelled-out appearance’, was a lady, and came and ate out of his plate. The cranes that flew over Khartoum in their thousands, and with their curious cry, put him in mind of the poems of Schiller, which few ever read, but which he admired highly, though he only knew them in Bulwer’s translation. He wrote little disquisitions on Plutarch and purgatory, on the fear of death and on the sixteenth chapter of the Koran. Then the turkey-cock, strutting with ‘every feather on end, and all the colours of the rainbow on his neck’, attracted him once more, and he filled several pages with his opinions upon the immortality of animals, drifting on to a discussion of man’s position in the universe, and the infinite knowledge of God. It was all clear to him. And yet – ‘what a contradiction is life! I hate Her Majesty’s Government for their leaving the Sudan after having caused all its troubles; yet I believe our Lord rules heaven and earth, so I ought to hate Him, which I (sincerely) do not.’
One painful thought obsessed him. He believed that the two Egyptian officers, who had been put to death after the defeat in March, had been unjustly executed. He had given way to ‘outside influences’; the two Pashas had been ‘judicially murdered’. Again and again he referred to the incident, with a haunting remorse. The Times, perhaps, would consider that he had been justified; but what did that matter? ‘If The Times saw this in print, it would say, “Why, then, did you act as you did?” to which I fear I have no answer.’ He determined to make what reparation he could, and to send the families of the unfortunate Pashas £1,000 each.
On a similar, but a less serious, occasion, he put the same principle into action. He boxed the ears of a careless telegraph clerk ‘and then, as my conscience pricked me, I gave him £5. He said he did not mind if I killed him – I was his father (a chocolate-coloured youth of twenty).’ His temper, indeed, was growing more and more uncertain, as he himself was well aware. He observed with horror that men trembled when they came into his presence – that their hands shook so that they could not hold a match to a cigarette.
He trusted no one. Looking into the faces of those who surrounded him, he saw only the ill-dissimulated signs of treachery and dislike. Of the 40,000 inhabitants of Khartoum he calculated that two thirds were willing – were perhaps anxious – to become the subjects of the Mahdi. ‘These people are not worth any great sacrifice,’ he bitterly observed. The Egyptian officials were utterly incompetent; the soldiers were cowards. All his admiration was reserved for his enemies. The meanest of the Mahdi’s followers was, he realized, ‘a determined warrior, who could undergo thirst and privation, who no more cared for pain or death than if he were stone’. Those were the men whom, if the choice had lain with him, he would have wished to command. And yet, strangely enough, he persistently underrated the strength of the forces against him. A handful of Englishmen – a handful of Turks – would, he believed, be enough to defeat the Mahdi’s hosts and destroy his dominion. He knew very little Arabic, and he depended for his information upon a few ignorant English-speaking subordinates. The Mahdi himself he viewed with ambiguous feelings. He jibed at him as a vulgar impostor; but it is easy to perceive, under his scornful jocularities, the traces of an uneasy respect.
He spent long hours upon the palace roof, gazing northwards; but the veil of mystery and silence was unbroken. In spite of the efforts of Major Kitchener, the officer in command of the Egyptian Intelligence Service, hardly any messengers ever reached Khartoum; and when they did, the information they brought was tor-mentingly scanty. Major Kitchener did not escape the attentions of Gordon’s pen. When news came at last, it was terrible: Colonel Stewart and his companions had been killed. The Abbas, after having passed uninjured through the part of the river commanded by the Mahdi’s troops, had struck upon a rock; Colonel Stewart had disembarked in safety; and, while he was waiting for camels to convey the detachment across the desert into Egypt, had accepted the hospitality of a local Sheikh. Hardly had the Europeans entered the Sheikh’s hut when they were set upon and murdered; their native followers shared their fate. The treacherous Sheikh was an adherent of the Mahdi, and to the Mahdi all Colonel Stewart’s papers, filled with information as to the condition of Khartoum, were immediately sent. When the first rumours of the disaster reached Gordon, he pictured, in a flash of intuition, the actual details of the catastrophe. ‘I feel somehow convinced,’ he wrote, ‘they were captured by treachery…. Stewart was not a bit suspicious (I am made up of it). I can see in imagination the whole scene, the Sheikh inviting them to land… then a rush of wild Arabs, and all is over!’ ‘It is very sad,’ he added, ‘but
being ordained, we must not murmur.’ And yet he believed that the true responsibility lay with him: it was the punishment of his own sins. ‘I look on it,’ was his unexpected conclusion, ‘as being a Nemesis on the death of the two Pashas.’
Eminent Victorians Page 29