Eminent Victorians
Page 31
That morning, while Slatin Pasha was sitting in his chains in the camp at Omdurman, he saw a group of Arabs approaching, one of whom was carrying something wrapped up in a cloth. As the group passed him, they stopped for a moment, and railed at him in savage mockery. Then the cloth was lifted, and he saw before him Gordon’s head. The trophy was taken to the Mahdi: at last the two fanatics had indeed met face to face. The Mahdi ordered the head to be fixed between the branches of a tree in the public highway, and all who passed threw stones at it. The hawks of the desert swept and circled about it – those very hawks which the blue eyes had so often watched.
The news of the catastrophe reached England, and a great outcry arose. The public grief vied with the public indignation. The Queen, in a letter to Miss Gordon, immediately gave vent both to her own sentiments and those of the nation. ‘How shall I write to you,’ she exclaimed,
or how shall I attempt to express what I feel! To think of your dear, noble, heroic Brother, who served his Country and his Queen so truly, so heroically, with a self-sacrifice so edifying to the World, not having been rescued. That the promises of support were not fulfilled – which I so frequently and constantly pressed on those who asked him to go – is to me grief inexpressible! Indeed, it has made me ill…. Would you express to your other sisters and your elder Brother my true sympathy, and what I do so keenly feel, the stain left upon England, for your dear Brother’s cruel, though heroic, fate!
In reply, Miss Gordon presented the Queen with her brother’s Bible, which was placed in one of the corridors at Windsor, open, on a white satin cushion, and enclosed in a crystal case. In the meanwhile, Gordon was acclaimed in every newspaper as a national martyr; State services were held in his honour at Westminster and St Paul’s; £20,000 was voted to his family; and a great sum of money was raised by subscription to endow a charity in his memory. Wrath and execration fell, in particular, upon the head of Mr Gladstone. He was little better than a murderer; he was a traitor; he was a heartless villain, who had been seen at a play on the very night when Gordon’s death was announced. The storm passed; but Mr Gladstone had soon to cope with a still more serious agitation. The cry was raised on every side that the national honour would be irreparably tarnished if the Mahdi were left in the peaceful possession of Khartoum, and that the Expeditionary Force should be at once employed to chastise the false prophet and to conquer the Sudan. But it was in vain that the imperialists clamoured, in vain that Lord Wolseley wrote several dispatches, proving over and over again that to leave the Mahdi unconquered must involve the ruin of Egypt, in vain that Lord Hartington at last discovered that he had come to the same conclusion. The old man stood firm. Just then, a crisis with Russia on the Afghan frontier supervened; and Mr Gladstone, pointing out that every available soldier might be wanted at any moment for a European war, withdrew Lord Wolseley and his army from Egypt. The Russian crisis disappeared. The Mahdi remained supreme lord of the Sudan.
And yet it was not with the Mahdi that the future lay. Before six months were out, in the plenitude of his power, he died, and the Khalifa Abdullahi reigned in his stead. The future lay with Major Kitchener and his Maxim-Nordenfeldt guns. Thirteen years later the Mahdi’s empire was abolished for ever in the gigantic hecatomb of Omdurman; after which it was thought proper that a religious ceremony in honour of General Gordon should be held at the palace of Khartoum. The service was conducted by four chaplains – of the Catholic, Anglican, Presbyterian, and Methodist persuasions – and concluded with a performance of ‘Abide with Me’ – the General’s favourite hymn – by a select company of Sudanese buglers. Every one agreed that General Gordon had been avenged at last. Who could doubt it? General Gordon himself, possibly, fluttering, in some remote Nirvana, the pages of a phantasmal Bible, might have ventured on a satirical remark. But General Gordon had always been a contradictious person – even a little off his head, perhaps, though a hero; and besides, he was no longer there to contradict…. At any rate, it had all ended very happily – in a glorious slaughter of 20,000 Arabs, a vast addition to the British Empire, and a step in the Peerage for Sir Evelyn Baring.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
General Gordon, Reflections in Palestine. Letters. Khartoum Journals.
A. E. Hake, The Story of Chinese Gordon.
H. W. Gordon, Events in the Life of C. G. Gordon.
D. C. Boulger, Life of General Gordon.
Sir W. Butler, General Gordon.
Rev. R. H. Barnes and C. E. Brown, Charles George Gordon: A Sketch.
A. Biovès, Un grand aventurier.
Li Hung Chang, Memoirs.*
Colonel Chaillé-Long, My Life in Four Continents.
Lord Cromer, Modern Egypt.
Sir R. Wingate, Mahdiism and the Sudan.
Sir R. Slatin, Fire and Sword in the Sudan.
J. Ohrwalder, Ten Years of Captivity in the Mahdi’s Camp.
C. Neufeld, A Prisoner of the Khaleefa.
Wilfrid Blunt, A Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt. Gordon at Khartoum.
Winston Churchill, The River War.
F. Power, Letters from Khartoum.
Lord Morley, Life of Gladstone.
George W. Smalley, Mr Gladstone. Harper’s Magazine, 1898.
B. Holland, Life of the Eighth Duke of Devonshire.
Lord Fitzmaurice, Life of the Second Earl Granville.
S. Gwynn and Gertrude Tuckwell, Life of Sir Charles Dilke.
Arthur Rimbaud, Lettres.
G.F. Steevens, With Kitchener to Khartoum.
* ‘The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth; so is every one that is born of the Spirit.’
*The authenticity of the Diary contained in this book has been disputed, notably by Mr J. O. P. Bland in his Li Hung Chang. (Constable, 1917.)