General Gordon at Kartoum

IT is a worthy function and a fitting time that now revive for us, with the novelty of an unexpected revelation, one of those stories of heroism and self-sacrifice that bring, most of all in epochs of moral sterility, a refreshing stimulus to one’s faith in human nature quite independent of the limitations of race. New light on the life and work of General Gordon would have been welcomed even from an outsider, but to have the famous Englishman’s sojourn at Kartoum made visible to us, in all its exciting and melancholy details, by the graphic pen of the chief actor himself is a timely privilege calling for a special gratitude, and shows that after all the

true " psychological moment ” in the appearance of books arises in their natural and unpremeditated coincidence with a great public need. It is true that an earlier publication of these Journals,¹ had that been possible, would in no way have impaired the high value which belongs to their disclosures today, yet one peruses them now with an interest that far transcends any feeling they would have excited during General Gordon’s life. A sense of the final tragedy gives its color to every page, and details that would otherwise have appealed to the mind in the due order of their subordination to each other now assume the significance and solemnity which belong to the narrative as a whole. But the Journals have a higher value than that of their association with the fall of Kartoum. They perform a service for the reading public, the importance of which it would not be easy to exaggerate. On the one hand, they form what must be called the most weighty and authoritative contribution to a notable episode of political history which has yet been made, since, while they clear up much that party controversy had rendered obscure in General Gordon’s relations to the British and Egyptian governments, they also reveal, in all their sustained consistency, the long neglect and blundering which, thwarting him at every step, helped to bring on the closing catastrophe by an attitude not generically different from the native treachery to which it was directly due. On the other hand, these records give us, in a narrative of absorbing interest, our last glimpses of the brave soldier and upright man who loved honor better than life, and gladly entered the dark vale at the post of duty.

It is now abundantly manifest that the English government entrusted General Gordon with a mission which, in the nature of things, it was impossible for him to perform. The very multiplicity of his functions and responsibilities confused the problem submitted for his solution, and made the arbitrament of his own conscience a political as well as a moral necessity. As the envoy of her majesty’s government, he went to Kartoum simply to report as to the best means of securing the safety of the Egyptian garrisons. As Governor-General of the Soudan, servant of the Khedive and his ministers, — a position assumed with the sanction of the English authorities, — it became his duty, as agreed upon by the two governments, to evacuate the Soudan. In entrusting to him this task, the joint powers expressed, on behalf of the Egyptian government, “ the fullest confidence in his judgment and knowledge of the country, and of his comprehension of the general line of policy to be pursued;” it being further agreed that “no effort was to be wanting on the part of the Cairo authorities, whether English or Egyptian, to afford him all the coöperation and support in their power.” The sanction of his appointment as Governor-General really rendered him independent of the home authorities. The character of the work before him, while it closed the field to the hard and fast lines of diplomacy, gave a large and necessary scope to his own discretion. But this liberty of an English agent, practically lent to the Khedive to discharge certain duties in the Soudan, in no way absolved the British government from its promise and obligation of support. The duty of the English cabinet could be suspended only by the canceling of the appointment as Governor-General. While General Gordon held the powers conferred upon him by Egypt, the British ministers were bound by every moral principle and political usage not only to abstain from undue interference with his arrangements, but to aid him in every possible way throughout the duration of his functions at Kartoum.

How, then, did those ministers discharge their obligation towards the man whom they had helped to place in a position perilous at the best of times, but doubly so in the disturbed condition of the Soudan ? Their earliest communications with him were of the nature of obstacles. The new Governor-General had seen at once that to evacuate the garrisons without leaving some form of government in the place of that withdrawn would have involved the country in a new anarchy, besides costing thousands of lives. He therefore recommended the appointment of Zubair Pasha, the only man at all fitted to wield power in the Soudan, or make a firm stand against the Mahdi, after the disappearance of the Egyptian officials. This proposal was repeatedly made, with an urgency growing from month to month with the peril of the situation ; yet each time the English government refused its consent. Prejudice against Zubair as a slave-hunter seems to have blinded the home authorities to the wisdom of a necessary appointment; and here we see how the British cabinet, in its eagerness to protect a public principle,— that is, to avoid a party condemnation, — preferred for a moment, or appeared to prefer, a higher form of utilitarianism than that which characterized its political ethics as a whole. But the gravity of this refusal to support the advice from Kartoum cannot be overestimated. It held General Gordon a prisoner in his own capital, — captive to his own honor, — and kept him there until his life had fallen a sacrifice to his devotion. Believing that he would he supported, he inspired others with his own faith : to desert those who had cast in their lot with his would have been an act of abject cowardice. The help needed by the Governor-General for his own safety was not an expeditionary force of relief, but some one to rule in his place at Kartoum, some one who would inherit the responsibilities into which he had entered towards the people, some one whose authority would oppose a check to the triumphant progress of the Mahdi and stave off the growing forces of disorder. Had England given him Zubair, he could have withdrawn from the city he defended so well, and would have been spared, at least to Europe, if not to England, which did not know how to estimate at their just value his personality and his services. But Zubair was refused ; the British offered no one in his place; and so Gordon was handed over to the conquering Arab hordes by the very men who had solemnly pledged themselves to give him every support, and who were still more bound to aid him by the commonest obligations of blood and race. We do not hesitate to say that, had the solitary hero’s danger been as fully realized in this country as it must have been known in England, hundreds of Americans could have been found ready and willing to do more towards securing his safety — and to do it singly, and under the hard conditions of personal adventure — than was ever even attempted, before the time for help had passed, by a powerful government with the whole of England’s resources at its back.

But the story is even blacker than this sacrifice of a noble-hearted man has made it. The Journals plainly show that their author was not only not supported, but was thwarted at every step. The most commonplace prudences of a judicious foreign policy seem to have been cast to the winds. Wiseacres in Downing Street, believing they could regulate the Soudan far better than any one stationed at Kartoum, exerted themselves to the utmost to nullify the powers of the Governor-General. The functionary who had been armed with the authority of the Khedive himself, the official who had the power of life and death over avast territory, was now to become the dummy of Mr. Gladstone’s cabinet. He was not to see the Mahdi, not to go to the Bahr Gazelle or Equatorial Provinces, not to have three hundred Turkish troops placed at his disposal, not to have a Firman recognizing a moral control and suzerainty over the Soudan, not to have Indian Moslem troops at Wady Halfa, not to have one hundred British troops at Assouan, not to be aided in smashing the Mahdi, not to have a British diversion at Berber — not, in fine, to have anything that he considered necessary to the proper discharge of his mission. Instead of manfully meeting the difficulties of the situation in the Soudan, and doing this in such a way as to fulfill their obligations to General Gordon and the Egyptian government, — for the responsibility was not less heavy in the one case than in the other, — the British government decided to shirk the inconveniences inflicted upon them by their own policy ; and so while Punch was depicting for the world that lonely figure scanning from the battlements of Kartoum the mirage-dimmed horizon for the help that was only to come too late, members of the English cabinet were coolly suggesting that the man whom their inactivity had imprisoned in the Nile desert could leave his post if he liked ! In other words, the home authorities were prepared to disown all the pledges which had been given on their behalf and in the name of the Khedive ; they were ready to scuttle out of the Soudan, even though the loss of thousands of lives should be an immediate consequence of the withdrawal, and these the lives of the people who had reposed faith in the promises and undertakings of England. How utterly irreconcilable was the English policy, or change of policy, with what General Gordon thought to be his duty as an honorable man must now be clear. I To wished to act uprightly towards those who had given him their confidence: what the British government expected of him was a base compromise with his conscience as a soldier and a Christian, — an act so mean that, as he tells us himself, the black sluts would have stoned him had they thought he only meditated it. It is this striking contrast between the scant moral sense of the Gladstone cabinet and the honesty of its quasi-servant at Kartoum that makes these Journals one of the most powerful indictments of the foreign policy of a government we remember ever to have read. Had the English government gained its object, even at the sacrifice of everything highest in individual morality, the course pursued would have had at least a nominal justification. But not even this petty triumph could be counted. The task of evacuating the garrisons, as General Gordon understood it, was not seriously attempted. The expeditionary force—sent grudgingly, after an almost criminal delay, and dispatched to relieve the GovernorGeneral instead of to aid him in withdrawing the Egyptian forces — began in blundering and ended in catastrophe. Yet the crowning humiliation of the English presence in the Soudan, having regard to political rather than personal issues, was the failure of the British ministers to redeem their military undertakings. “ We mean,” Cassim el mûs Pasha was informed, to destroy the power of Mohammed Achmet [the Mahdi] at Kartoum, no matter how long it may take us to do so. You know Gordon Pasha’s countrymen are not likely to turn back from any enterprise they have begun until it has been fully accomplished.” Who wonders now that in every caravansary and bazaar of the Mohammedan world these pompous words of Lord Wolseley should have added so much to the ridicule and scorn which England’s ignominious withdrawal from the Soudan has provoked, not in Europe alone, but in Persia, Arabia, India, and far on towards the Russian frontier?

But a shining figure grows all the brighter amid surrounding gloom, and so General Gordon stands before us in these Journals all the more radiant by contrast with the petty intrigues, the inglorious utilitarianism, and the basely strung morality that beset and vexed his path through life. Not a touch in the picture could be spared. It brings into relief the rare purity of the man’s aims, the singular beauty of his moral nature. It shows us how intolerant was his fine feeling of honor of the exigencies of government by party. In reviving some of those higher truths which life in the camp and the council-chamber is sadly apt to dim, it more than suggests that the secret of Gordon’s success with Eastern peoples was that sense of universal justice, that intense sympathy with down-trodden races, which needed no knowledge of Chinese or Arabic to strengthen their appeal to the native heart. The hero of Kartoum proved that he had a purer love of his country than some of those who contrived to thwart him in Downing Street; yet he ranked humanity higher than patriotism, and would not have hesitated to sacrifice a whole cabinet of ministers to the interests of truth. Few will fail to admire, even where they cannot imitate, the robust independence with which he shaped his conduct according to the dictates of his conscience. It was probably this fidelity to himself and to the real England which he loved, not to the false, the time-serving England of the diplomatists, that strewed so many obstacles in his path.

There is still another side to the story told by the Journals now before us. If they depict the man, they also present the soldier. And truly, all wild and perilous elements combine in the narrative of the defense of Kartoum to give it at once the picturesque interest of romance and the startling realism of tragedy. In days of myth-making this solitary warrior of the desert would by this time have disappeared from ordinary history into a vague mist not unlike that which the Skalds wove around Odin and Thor, or the poet legend-tellers contrived for the figures half divine of Lancelot and Galahad. It is the triumph of narratives and times like these that hero-worship and human interest do not exclude each other. We are sensible of both these elements as the Journals tell us by what rare combination of watchfulness, ingenuity, and effort General Gordon contrived so long to hold his Arab enemies at bay ; with what courage, truthfulness, modesty, kindness of heart, and yet with how full a presentiment of the final disaster, this single-handed soldier continued to plan and work in the interests of the population under his care; and last, by what light play of fancy and satire he sought to lighten the monotony of his daily tasks, and forget, if but for a moment, the growing peril of his situation. The knowledge that it was all of no avail, and that help came too late to save the life of such a man, makes it impossible to close the book without a feeling nearly akin to that of personal bereavement.

It should be added that the Journals have been carefully edited by Mr. A. Egmont Hake, whose introduction adequately covers the whole historical period of General Gordon’s work in the Soudan. Not less welcome is a statement by Sir Henry W. Gordon regarding his brother’s position at Kartoum. The Journals themselves are illustrated by General Gordon’s own sketches and maps. The appendices contain a number of important documents — amongst them letters from the Mahdi — now for the first time given to the public. An excellent portrait of General Gordon — by far the best we have seen — faces the title-page of the work.