Chapter III: Gordon’s Work on the White Nile

AND here, before I go further, it will, I think, make matters still clearer in regard to the history of the next twelve months in Egypt, including, as it must, Gordon’s heroic defence of Khartoum, if I break off my personal narrative and devote a chapter or two to a critical examination of that truly wonderful man’s character. I propose to do so not in the spirit of mere hero-worship, though I hold him to have been by far the most chivalric figure among Englishmen of our generation; and still less of belittlement; but in the spirit of a sane historian, reconstructing from the many records we have of his inner spiritual life no less than of his public actions, and from some sources, too, of private knowledge and my own recollection of him, a picture of the living man he was.

To appreciate Gordon’s character at all accurately, and thereby to judge his career at its true value, it is essential to recognize him as a man of many contradictions and a singularly complex character. He himself, in one of those intimate letters which through life he was in the habit of writing to his sister, and which form the most complete self- revelation made in any letters that have been published in our time, says: “Talk of two natures in one! I have a hundred, and none think alike and all want to rule”; and, again: “No man in the world is more changeable than I”—an exaggeration of the truth yet no less strictly true. Gordon had at least two distinctly antagonistic features in his nature—the one, that of a man of action, with an imperative need of strong practical work, the instinct of a soldier who saw the thing he had it in his mind to do with absolute clearness of vision, and as clearly the way to do it—the other, that of a religious mystic, occupied not with this world but with spiritual forces in a world unseen; perplexed perpetually, and perpetually in doubt as to the precise will of God with him, a fatalist, a disbeliever in his own free will, and consequently liable to sudden changes of plan; a seeker of omens and supernatural directions; at times (as he also himself says) a “religious fanatic,” perhaps hardly on this one point sane. Not that Gordon was in the smallest degree a fanatic in the sense of one who hated another for his creed. His mind was large on this as on all other matters; but he was imbued with the belief in God’s direct dealings with man and with his own interpretation of them, as suited to his own spiritual and temporal case, and with the nothingness of worldly affairs or of life and death for himself and others in view of a life to come.

Entering the army early he saw service for the first time at the siege of Sebastopol, and remained on in Turkey when the war was over as one of the officers on the Commission of frontier delimitation in Bessarabia and Armenia. This gave him his first experience of the Mohammedan East. In 1860 he joined the British forces in China, where he took part in the capture of Pekin, and again stayed on, specially employed. Shanghai, one of the Treaty Ports, was just then threatened by the Taiping rebellion, and for its protection an Imperial Chinese force had been raised under European officers, and the command of it was given to Gordon. With the permission of his superiors he thus entered a foreign service, and found himself, at the early age of twenty-nine, commanding an army of Asiatics under the Chinese Emperor. His military authority was practically absolute, and by a display of strategy of the highest order and lavish personal courage he succeeded in breaking the Taiping rebellion, and restoring one of the richest provinces of China and some of its most populous cities to the Imperial Government. The Emperor, in gratitude for so great a service, loaded him with honours, and would have enriched him if Gordon had been willing. But with a fine contempt for wealth he would take nothing but his stipulated pay, and, the work done, returned to his ordinary duties in England without further remark or claim on his own Government.

This stamps him as a man entirely above the rank of the common soldier of fortune. That he was also a man of immense natural military genius cannot be doubted, with a power of exerting influence over the soldiers he commanded, and turning the rawest material into good fighting stuff, and in this he compares favourably with any of the great European leaders of Asiatics that can be named in history. It is by no means certain, however, to my mind that in this first brilliant episode of Gordon’s life, any more than in his latest at Khartoum, he was fighting on what I should consider the right side, the side that is of those who had the better right in justice. Indeed the Taipings, though the methods of their insurrection were barbarous in the extreme, represented what was more probably the juster cause of the Chinese people than that of the Man Chu Emperors, in whose service Gordon was. Gordon, however, did not often stop to consider points like these when he accepted foreign employment, and only discovered his mistake when it was too late to retire from it. This was the case with him, as he found to his cost, when serving the Khedive Ismaïl, and so, too, he discovered and would have avowed it if he had survived his last campaign against the Mahdi. What is important about the Chinese episode is the strong effect it had upon his character. The terrible sights which he there witnessed in the lands laid waste by the Taipings, the appalling incidents of an Eastern civil war, the cruelties inflicted on the weak, the outraged women and the starving children, famine, pestilence, and death spread over immensely populous areas, joined with the almost miraculous victories achieved by the army he commanded, the huge personal risks daily run, and his unvarying success, bred in him a conviction that he was under immediate divine direction, and had for his special mission in life the redressing of wrongs and the protection of the helpless. His attitude thenceforth, though he made mistakes, was that of the Christian knight errant, seeking service through the world wherever there were dragons of iniquity to fight, or distressed persons to be rescued by feats of arms. It is necessary to remember this if we are to understand rightly the spirit of his early Egyptian service.

For a while, however, Gordon’s humanitarian impulse was to be turned into more peaceful channels. In 1865 he returned to England and was given a command at Gravesend with the engineering task of fortifying the entrance to the Thames. Here he had much spare time, and devoted it to works of mercy among the poor, especially to the rescuing of the waifs and strays of the London streets, boys for whom he found employment, and whom he befriended with money and advice. Gordon had, from his youth up, been deeply religious. He belonged to no church or sect, unless it were that of what is called Bible Christianity, a form of belief based solely on the Old and New Testaments as interpreted, each man, by the light of his own spiritual conscience. He owed this to his mother. It is a little difficult, now in the twentieth century, when the higher criticism has permeated all theology and when science has accepted evolution as its recognized basis, to realize how at the beginning of Queen Victoria’s reign the great body of educated Englishmen were brought up to believe with an implicit faith in the text of the authorized English version of the Holy Scriptures as the literal word of God containing all direction needed for the spiritual wants of man. This was specially the case in the middle rank of society, that of Gordon’s mother, which for the most part had nonconformist traditions and had remained equally unaffected by the scepticism of the eighteenth century and by the Oxford Church movement of the nineteenth in the direction of authority. Nor was it till some years after Gordon’s education was over, and he was well launched on his military career, that the publication of Darwin’s “Origin of Species” prevailed at last in dissociating scientific training from the simpler English creeds.

Gordon therefore carried with him untouched into his active life the Biblical foundation of his childhood. He held the text of Scripture from the first verse of Genesis to the last of Revelations to be God’s written word, and that it was given to every man by faith and prayer and constant study to find in it all necessary direction both for his temporal and his eternal needs. He spent a certain portion of every day in studying the Book, and, being of a logical mind, in seeking counsel in its pages for each morrow as it came. His certainty that the text was inspired induced him by a further logic to believe that, relying on it, he, too, was inspired. This is the real key to much that otherwise would be inexplicable in his public career.

In his moral life Gordon stood on the highest possible plane. Apart from a few boyish escapades at school—and he was all his life high- spirited—there is no record of his ever having transgressed the straitest rules of exemplary conduct. He seems never to have been in love, or to have indulged even for a moment in any dream of earthly happiness to be found in domestic joys. These he regarded as not intended for him, and he was as far from the thought of marriage as though he had renounced the possibility of it by vow. “What a blessing,” he exclaims in one of his letters to his sister, “one was never married! Marriage spoils human beings.” Even the sentimental regard in which many women held him was distasteful to him. “What I dislike,” he says, “in ——’s letters is the sentimental part; it is to me quite painful; she is so impressive. I do hope you will try and quiet her. I am torn in two with the wish not to be unkind, and yet I wish her not to bother me.” That was his general attitude toward women other than the old and helpless. Dr. Barnes, who was in some measure Gordon’s spiritual adviser in the last five years of his life, says of him: “Gordon was much less at ease in talking to women than in talking to men. While conversing with women he seemed to exercise even more than his usual self-control in the expression of his thought and feeling. His sympathy, geniality, and attractiveness became as it were veiled, and he was ‘himself again’ only when the restraint was removed. He was seen at his best in the society of young children, his keen interest for whom had not been dulled either by solitude or by the necessity—which had often been imposed on him in other relations—for strictly-guarded intercourse. With children he was quite at home.”

In all things he was abstemious. Even the poor pleasures of the table were generally denied. He hated feasts and entertainments, and at Greenwich allowed his uncomfortable meals to be freely interrupted by any caller on however trifling a business. “His meals,” says his brother of him, “were of the most frugal kind, and his arrangements were such that no one was ever prevented seeing him in consequence of his being engaged at any of them, for he had a table with a deep drawer in which when drawn out, the food was deposited, and so if any one came the drawer was shut and there were no signs that he had been engaged otherwise than at his ordinary work.” In his evenings, instead of enjoying rest or talk, he would go out to ragged schools or on some other work of mercy. His money he would give away as long as he had any available, and he would even borrow to give, this not in small driblets, but in considerable sums of £50 and £100 and £200 at a time. On himself he would spend nothing. Speaking to Sir Rivers Wilson about him in 1878, the Catholic Bishop of Khartoum explained the wonderful influence he then enjoyed among the Soudanese as due to his alms-giving and his chastity. It astonished all men that he should care nothing for the two things those in power mostly indulged in, the love of money and the love of women. In all this Gordon was a saint.

Seven years of his life were passed in this way at Gravesend, and there grew up around him a little band of religious admirers which gradually made for him a name in the English humanitarian world. He was willing always to talk on the things of the spirit with the spiritually-minded, and to write to those who sought his opinion or counsel by letter, whether it was on a public or a private matter. It was with the poor and unimportant that he preferred to correspond rather than with those in high places, though among these also he had friends. Thus on a foundation of general esteem gradually acquired, the power came to him which he was to wield in public affairs, and was steadily built up. His worth in his own profession was acknowledged, for he had done mighty deeds in war,—that could not be denied, though by many of his fellow soldiers he was accounted “insubordinate,” by others mad. It seemed enough to them to prove his insanity that he did not ask promotions or rewards and that he was careless of his pay.

The only failing I can really find in him—for that of drink with which he has been charged was not a serious one—was a certain tendency to court publicity, which he himself acknowledged as a snare to his generally humble attitude. His sister seems at one time to have pointed this out to him, and his reply shows that he felt her reproach as true. “Newspapers,” he says in answer to her, “feed a passion I have for giving my opinion . . . You drew a bow at a venture with your full strength and you have done for your brother; the arrow has gone in up to its feathers! He that speaketh of himself seeketh his own glory! Why, you have knocked down the work of years; what have I ever been talking of but self? . . . I have a sort of wish that I could get rid of _Colonel Gordon_.” He called this craving for publicity “Agag; a catering for notice and praise; hailing the tram of the world!” a thing which must be “hewn in pieces before the Lord”—and yet he yields over and over again to it, while he torments himself for his weakness, a point in his character which he shares with many saints who have been canonized by popular acclaim, and which must not be missed, for it, too, explains much.

Such was Gordon at the time of his first entrance on the Egyptian scene in 1874, and it is with the Egyptian period only of his life that we need concern ourselves in any detail. His connection with the Khedivial service came about in this way. In 1871 he was sent on special service once more to Turkey, and finding himself at Constantinople in connection with the Danube commission, to which he had been appointed, it chanced that he met Nubar Pasha at the English Embassy and had a talk with him, which determined his after life. The Egyptian Government was in search of an engineer officer who would undertake, in succession to Sir Samuel Baker, the administration of the Equatorial Province of the Upper Nile, and Nubar consulted him as to the securing of such an officer; and this led a year later to Gordon’s agreeing to go there himself as the Khedive Ismaïl’s servant. What tempted him to the work was, I think, a certain natural restlessness and a desire for useful professional employment. English military life at home, with its constant round of unreal duties and of social inanities, was thoroughly distasteful to him, and the freedom of an independent command abroad in however wild a region was always preferred by him to ordinary employment at home. Also he had become interested in the suppression of the slave trade on the Nile and Congo, which was being much discussed at the time, and this was probably what decided him. Be this as it may, he visited Cairo on his way back from the Danube in 1873 and, having received permission from the War Office in London, was named Governor of the Equatorial Province at the beginning of the following year, his instructions on leaving Cairo for the seat of his new government at Gondokoro being to open a trade route by river to the Equatorial Lakes, to establish the Khedive’s authority on these to the Nile sources, and also to put a stop to the slave raiding in the upper provinces, which had become a scandal in Europe, and was injuring the Khedive’s credit. Gordon’s idea at starting on his mission was that the first half of his instructions would, when accomplished, bring about the second half. “Open out the country,” he says in one of his letters of the time, “and it [the slave trade] will fall of itself.” It was the general idea held by English humanitarians of the day, but one which Gordon found reason to distrust later.

There are two ways of looking at this question. The slave raiding which prevailed along the whole border line between Equatorial Africa and the waterless northern deserts which extend from the White Nile to the Atlantic had for many centuries been a terrible scourge upon the indigenous black race. It was carried on by the Bedouin tribes, more or less Arab in their origin and Mohammedan in their religion, who had invaded and conquered North Africa in the early centuries of Islam. These considered the Pagan negroes their lawful booty wherever they could capture them, and made a trade of bringing them with other equatorial produce to the sea coasts of Morocco and the rest of the Mohammedan States bordering the Mediterranean and Red Seas. It was a yearly tithe of many thousands taken from the unwarlike agricultural villagers, and may justly be likened to the depredation inflicted on the antelope herds of the same borderland by lions living on the desert outskirts. At first sight, and from a humanitarian point of view, it would seem that the destruction of these human lions was the beneficent duty of any one who would undertake it, and the extirpation of the slave raiders by force of arms the surest way of bringing prosperity to the negro inhabitants. And such was the view taken by most of our European explorers of the nineteenth century, Schweinfurth, Baker, Stanley, and the rest, who were in correspondence with the anti-slavery association in London and were constantly urging the duty of the penetration and civilizing of Central Africa by the states of Europe. Africa once Europeanized, they argued, slave-raiding must necessarily be made to cease and the negroes be freed from an immemorial misfortune. The reasoning harmonized well with the commercial ideas of the day, which saw in Central Africa new fields for its enterprise; and the civilized occupation of the two lines of waterway by which the Soudan could most easily be reached, the Nile and the Congo, was pushed on by the societies as a duty of humanity. I remember attending a meeting of the Royal Geographical Society under Sir Roderick Murchison, to which I had just been elected in 1862, in which our then Consul Petherick at Khartoum was praised for his exploration of the White Nile, as yet an unknown region, on this very ground, that benefit must necessarily accrue to the negroes from the opening up of their country through Englishmen acting in conjunction with the Viceroy of Egypt. Yet this very exploration of Petherick’s turned out to be the beginning of far worse evils to the negroes of the White Nile than any they had during all the centuries of their unexplored history experienced, even to the total destruction of some of their communities.

The truth is—and this Gordon came to understand at Khartoum, as we to- day are coming to understand it on the Congo—though European civilization is able to deal with certain evils incidental to uncivilized life, it brings with it other evils ten times more destructive than those it cures. It destroys the lions, but the antelopes are not found thereby to increase. On the contrary they become a prey, all of them, to the newcomer, their far more scientific and unsparing friend. And so it is also with the negroes who are ten times worse ruined by European conquest. Of the reality of this truth Gordon gained at least occasional glimpses during the years he served the Khedive Ismaïl in the Soudan. For myself I have never been in any doubt, since I have had an opinion at all on the matter, that the only true humanity towards the negroes of Equatorial Africa would have been to leave them unvisited, uncivilized, and severely alone with their own local troubles. The alternative policy to that of force applied to the slave raiders was that of the encouragement of Mohammedan reform in the Mediterranean Moslem states, and with it to secure the abolition of slavery as a legal institution and so the demand of slaves from the interior. This policy, however, was never one at all popular with the anti-slave-trade associations. Our professional humanitarians were no more anxious to abolish slavery altogether than masters of foxhounds are anxious to abolish foxes; and Mohammedan reformers were generally discouraged by the societies and reminded that slavery was recognized by the Koran, and so could not be legally condemned by any reformers professing themselves Moslems. This was certainly the case in 1882 when Sheykh Mohammed Abdu and Arabi included the complete abolition of slavery in their programme of national reform. Sir William Muir and Allen, the anti-slavery secretary, at once took up the cudgels against them in the “Times,” and their anger knew no bounds. It was an unheard- of thing, they said, that a Mohammedan reformer should dare to strike at the roots of a time-honoured Oriental institution to which their English society owed its _raison d’être_.

Yet the Egyptian reformers of that day were perfectly sincere in their intention. They were poor men, representing a community too humble to be slave owning itself, arrayed against a wealthy ruling class possessed of slaves. Their interests did not warp their judgement, and their judgement on this, as on other things, was humanitarian. The Khedive and the Turkish Pashas, however, were infinitely preferred by Allen and the agents of the society in Egypt, whose salaries would have ceased had slavery and slave dealing really disappeared from the Nile. As to our diplomatic representatives, at Cairo as elsewhere, they hated the worry of the whole slavery question and resented anything that raised its abolition in practical form. It meant for them the tiresome duty of presenting remonstrances to Mohammedan princes who all possessed slaves and who wished to keep them and not to be deprived of the means of getting new ones when required. I remember well the disgust with which dispatches from the Slave Trade department of the Foreign Office were regarded in our Chancelleries. All the same, the method of dealing with them as I have just indicated would have been the true line for our humanitarians to take if the interests of the raided black villagers of the Upper Nile had been alone in question. A pronouncement against slavery at Cairo by a Nationalist Sheykh el Islam, would have been worth more to them than a whole army of civilized protectors sent to guard their desert frontier against _jellabat_.

It will be interesting to give some extracts from Gordon’s letters to his sister and others bearing on these points, letters written while in Ismaïl’s service, for they are infinitely instructive, and as human documents unsurpassed in the political history of our time. They were begun immediately on his arrival at Cairo at the beginning of 1874, and continued without interruption during the whole period of his Soudan service. It must be remembered that the official world of Cairo of that day represented a society as pecuniarily corrupt and as destitute of all public virtue as could well be found upon the face of the globe. The Khedive Ismaïl, who had all the vices of the East overlaid with a veneer of Western civilization, plausible, unscrupulous, and profoundly immoral, had gathered round him a gang of European speculators whose one object was to extract money from his coffers by contracts, loans, and services rendered at extravagant rates in every branch of the administration. Among the highest paid were those that took service in the Soudan and ministered to Ismaïl’s ambition of conquering the Upper Nile to its sources, and on the pretence of putting down the slave trade adding province after province to his African empire. Gordon’s predecessor as Governor of the Equatorial Provinces, Sir Samuel Baker, had been paid at the extravagant rate of £10,000 a year, exclusive of all his expenses, and had left Egypt at the close of his four years’ engagement with a solid sum of £40,000 untouched at his banker’s. The arrival therefore of Gordon with his unself-seeking ways was a wholly disturbing element for the official mind, and made him enemies from the beginning not only among his fellow Europeans who considered that he was underselling them in the administrative market, but by the Turco- Circassian and Armenian Pashas who were amassing large fortunes in the general reign of extravagance. The allusion made in one of the first extracts given is to an interview between Gordon and Sherif Pasha, then Prime Minister, in which there had been a characteristic misunderstanding between the two, Gordon refusing the £10,000 salary of his predecessor, and protesting that £2,000 would be ample, Sherif imagining that his refusal was only the coyness of a rogue who wanted a still huger sum. It was difficult, too, for any one at Cairo to understand that Gordon had the suppression of the slave trade really at heart or that his acceptance of the mission to the Equatorial Nile would be followed by any practical result in a humanitarian direction. Ismaïl, as little as the rest, was sincere in this, but affected a zeal in suppressing the slave trade, which at first took in the not very discerning mind of Gordon, who with all his power of managing Orientals _en masse_ was far from being a good judge of individual character,[15] thinking to gain thereby a prop in humanitarian England to his failing commercial credit. The process of Gordon’s undeception both as to Ismaïl and as to the reality of the good he was doing or could possibly do in the Soudan is to me the most interesting feature of the letters, and I will give such extracts from them as seem to bear most directly on this feature of his character, with others exemplifying the strange religious mysticism which was to play so important a part in the drama of his later exploits at Khartoum. Incidentally, too, the extracts will explain much of the official ill-will manifested towards Gordon in 1884 not only by Nubar and the Court clique of ministerial Pashas, but by our own English diplomatists at the British Consulate-General, including Lord Cromer. These are my quotations:

“I believe if the Soudan was settled the Khedive would prevent the slave trade; but he does not see his way to do so till he can move about the country. . . . My object is to show the Khedive and his people that gold and silver idols are not worshipped by all the world. They are very powerful gods, but not so powerful as our God; so if I refuse a large sum you will not be angry at my doing so. From whom does all the money come? From poor miserable creatures who are ground down to produce it. Of course these ideas are outrageous. ‘Pillage the Egyptians’ is still the cry. . . .

“I remember that God has at all times worked by weak and small means. All history shows this to be His mode, and so I believe if He will He may work by me. . . . I paid a visit to Sherif Pasha, the Minister of Justice, and let him understand that your brother was not an hireling. I did this rather sharply. . . . I think I can see the true motive now of the expedition, and believe it to be a sham, to catch the attention of the English people. As Baker said: I think the Khedive is quite innocent (or nearly so) of it, but Nubar is the chief man. Now what has happened? There has been a mutual disappointment. Nubar thought he had a rash fellow to deal with, who could be persuaded to cut a dash, etc., etc., and he found he had one of the Gordon race. This latter thought the thing real, and found it a sham and felt like a Gordon who has been humbugged. . . . Though I do not credit myself with anything, it cannot be denied but that your brother’s conduct [in wishing to cut down expenses] is a silent reproach to the usual mode of doing things in this country and is the more cutting from its silence. It is Greek and Hebrew to them to reason that all the coin one takes is wrung out of poor people. . . . Nubar and your brother do not hit it off, and the other evening So-and-so said foolishly, ‘Do not make an enemy of Nubar. He will or may do you mischief.’ It was too much, and your brother replied, in the midst of a circle of guests, that there was no one living who could do him the slightest injury which he could feel, and that he would not shape his face to suit any one beyond acting loyally. . . . I think they think me very queer, and I am, I dare say. . . . You have no idea of the intrigues here; it is a regular hot bed, and things cannot last long like this. They are paying 36 per cent. for money. . . . I think the Khedive likes me, but no one else does; and I do not like them—I mean the swells whose corns I tread on in all manner of ways. I saw so and so at Suez. He agrees with me in our opinion of the rottenness of Egypt: it is all for the flesh, and in no place is human nature to be studied with such advantage. Duke of This wants steamer—say £600. Duke of That wants house, etc. All the time the poor people are ground down to get money for all this. Who art thou to be afraid of a man? If He wills, I will shake all this in some way not clear to me now. Do not think I am an egoist. I am like Moses who despised the riches of Egypt. We have a king mightier than these, and more enduring riches and power in Him than we can have in this world. I will not bow to Haman.”[16]

Arrived at the seat of his labours and engaged in the work set him by the Khedive of opening up the White Nile to the Equatorial Lakes, we find him speedily disgusted with the methods in use for the spreading of civilization in those remote regions, the petty warfare waged by the troops he was given to command against the primitive negro tribes which were living happily without him, and whose only wish was to be left alone. Baker had been brutal with these poor blacks; Gordon’s heart went out towards them. He speedily saw the fallacy of the pretence that he was sent there to do them good.

“They (the native blacks) have had no communication with the world. They would seem to get on well without any regular laws and to live out their span in comparative quiet. . . . No country presents such a field for a philosopher as this country does with its dense population quite innocent of the least civilization. I should say that they are singularly free from vice; their wars are generally very harmless affairs and seldom cause bloodshed. . . . Is it not remarkable that you never find anything like ambition in a native sheikh? They will readily agree to plunder their neighbour, but would never think of annexing his tribe to theirs. . . . They are in tribes of 100 or 300 families, and I expect have been so for ages. . . . The natives suffered in their attack to-day and I do not think they will trouble us again. . . . If they are to be put down it is better I should do it than an exterminating pasha who would have no mercy. . . . I wish the whole of this business was over. I do not want to hurt these people, but we must defend ourselves.” And later, a detachment of his soldiers having been surprised by the blacks and destroyed: “We derided the poor blacks who fought for their independence, and now God gave them the victory. I declare, in spite of the expressions you may note in my letters, I truly sympathize with them. They say, ‘We do not want your cloth and beads; you go your way and we will go ours; we do not want to see your chief. . . . This land is ours, and you shall not have it, neither its bread nor its flocks.’ Poor fellows! You will say I am most inconsistent, and so I am, and so are you. We are dead against our words when it comes to action. . . . I have a number of Niam-Niam soldiers. . . . The Niam-Niam warriors are fearful objects; they do look very fierce. They are thick set, sturdy fellows, and they look brave and fearless. I declare it is rather a trial to me to set them on the satin-skinned Baris, but these latter will not leave me alone. . . . Did I not mention the incantations made against us by the magicians on the other side, and how somehow, from the earnestness that they made them with, I had some thought of misgiving on account of them? It were odd their repulse was so soon to follow. These prayers were earnest prayers for celestial aid in which the prayer knew he would need help from some unknown power to avert a danger. That the native knows not the true God is true, but God knows him and moved him to pray and answered his prayer. ‘The horse is prepared for the day of battle, but the victory is of the Lord.’ . . . The tax-gatherers are out and there is immense excitement among the natives on the other side. Six or seven hundred are collected on the hill tops. . . . We cannot see what the tax-gatherers are doing. . . . The taxes are in sight . . . 200 cows and 1,500 sheep. . . . The daughter of the Sheykh was taken: I have now sent to him to say if he will submit I will leave him alone and that he is to come for his daughter. I hope sincerely to make friends with him and end this miserable work, for it is just that.

“I wish they would submit now and save any more of these wars or rather miserable cattle raids; but it is no use wishing—you must take their cows, otherwise they will never give in. . . . To-day on a bare rock a mile off stood a man with two attendants. He held his hands clasped together at the back of his head, and turned to all quarters, putting them down sometimes straight to his sides. I watched him with my glass. ‘Come, curse me this people: for they are too mighty for me.’ I can quite enter into these poor people’s misery at their impotency. ‘We do not want beads. We do not want the Pasha. . . . We want our own lands and you to go away.’ Their poor minds never conceived such a trial as this before. Rain was their only care, now _civilization_ (?) is to begin with them. They are to be brought into the family of nations. . . . There are a great number of natives on Balak’s hill to-day. . . . Balaam is there with his hands in the same position; the kings and princes of Midian are sitting like apes behind him. . . . How I hate this country and all the work. . . . I am thoroughly disgusted. These (the Khedive’s) people are unfit to acquire the country . . . incapable of civilizing the natives. . . . They are conies, a feeble race. . . . I cannot help it, but I have taken such a dislike to these blacks that I cannot bear their sight. I do not mean the natives, but these soldiers. They are nothing but a set of pillagers, and are about as likely to civilize these parts as to civilize the moon. Though it tells against my operations, I am glad in my heart that they are afraid of the natives. God permits me to open the road to the interior, but, humanly speaking, I see nothing to encourage the hope that this occupation of their lands will be of any advantage towards civilizing them. In excuse for taking this employ I can only say that I think I have accomplished a work with the nearly minimum amount of suffering to natives and soldiery which would have been done by an Arab Pasha with a great amount of suffering to soldiery and natives. . . . Some philanthropic people write to me about ‘noble work,’ ‘poor blacks,’ etc. I have I think stopped their writings by acknowledging ourselves to be a pillaging horde of brigands.”

Such, as seen in these intimate letters, was Gordon’s own opinion of his work down to the end of his two years as Governor of the Equator. He reconciled it to his conscience only by the reflection that, if another had been entrusted with it than himself, the injury inflicted on the negro tribes would have been greater than it was.

At this time, October 1876, he was so little in love with his exhausting and thankless work, and in so great despair of doing real good in the Soudan, that he resolved to throw it up. “I want to see my way clear first,” he writes. “Comfort of the body, a very strong gentleman says, ‘What is the use of opening more country to such a Government? There is more now under their power than they can ever manage. Retire now.’ But Mr. (I do not know what) says, ‘Shut your eyes to what may happen in future; leave that to God, and do what you think will open the country thoroughly to both lakes. Do this not for His Highness or for his Government, but do it blindly and in faith.’” And a few days later, “To- day Reason says strongly, ‘Do not stay and aid such a Government.’ But I do not like to be beaten, which I am if I retire; and by retiring I do not remedy anything. By staying I keep my province safe from injustice and cruelty in some degree. . . . When a house gives ominous cracks prior to a fall one’s desire is—the rule in ships—to leave it. . . . But I do not like the idea, even if the cracks are serious. Why should I fear? Is man more strong than God? Things have come to such a pass in these Mussulman countries that a crisis must come about soon.”

He had come, too, to persuade himself that he was an instrument in God’s hands for purposes, obscure at present, but ultimately to be made manifest, which would more than counterbalance the immediate evil. The idea recurs perpetually in his letters, joined with that of a fatalism as absolute as that of any Moslem. Indeed, it is evident that the long years spent with none but Moslems on the Upper Nile, where he was cut off from all communication with men of his own Christian creed, heightened, if it did not initiate, the predestinarian tone of his religious thought. It is a point in his character of the highest importance if we are to understand his action when later he was called upon to rescue the Soudan garrisons. It seems to have grown upon him that he was one pre-ordained to do God’s work as was Joshua when leading the armies of Israel as conquerors into the promised land. The uncompromising logic of his mind made him accept this inference from results, and he refused to acknowledge that the same faith which had inspired Joshua and Moses to deeds that were miraculous should be lacking to his own as absolute faith. All were but instruments in the hands of the same God—all were under equal direction. It will be worth while to collect the passages in his letters which most clearly illustrate this belief, a belief founded on Bible teaching, and intensified in the Soudan by the solitude in which he lived. What the Koran was to his Moslem companions, that the Bible was to him, with the Islamic doctrine of submission to God’s providence for good and for evil, the fatalism which believes in all things as pre-ordained. Each year spent in the Soudan added to the illusion of his divine instrumentality, especially in the suppression of the slave trade, which signalized the second period of his work when he had become Governor- General, a position to which he was promoted in 1877.

“Has it ever struck you,” he writes from Kordofan to his sister, “that if man’s birth and death are predetermined by God to happen at certain epochs, so every intervening event must be also predetermined? Few are atheistical enough to say either man’s birth or death are things of chance; and how can they therefore dispute that the intervening events are not preordained. In governing these countries I wish I could realize this truth more than I do. . . . The more I live in this country and the more God prospers me, the more I despise myself and feel despicable; some of the _coups_ I have made, and which have been successful, have been such flukes, or chances, as the world calls them, as to astonish me quite as much as they have astonished others, and I cannot feed myself with the thought of ‘How clever I am,’ for impressed on my mind is the fact, ‘You know you had no idea of what would happen on your so acting.’ . . . I have really no troops with me, but I have the Shekinah (the Lord) and I do like trusting to Him and not to man. . . . Had I not got this Almighty Power to back me, with His infinite wisdom, I do not know how I could even think of what is to be done. . . . I do not believe in man’s free will; therefore, if my actions are right they are His actions; if evil, they are the inevitable produce of the corrupt body in which I am placed by Him. . . . Those who hold by man’s free will must consequently be more or less elated if they do well. Now, if you accepted what I think the truth, namely, that man has no free will, you would never be elated, for you would not arrogate to yourself your actions; neither would you be depressed by your evil acts. . . . I own I feared to trust God in this slave dealer’s business; I was tossed up and down. Perhaps physical fatigue may have been the cause. I hold to ‘Trust in the Lord and lean not on thine own understanding.’ And He has brought me through. . . . You and I are flies on the wheel; try and realize this, that you do not move the wheel. . . . All this points to the absolute rule God has over events, good or evil. As I said before ‘Be a fool’ in the world’s language.”

And again: “I wonder if I look ambitious in your eyes. Do you think I sought this place? You should know more than most people, for you have all my thoughts in my letters. Judging myself, I fear it was so when I took the work in hand; not that I cared for the money or the honours to come from it. I think, however, my main idea was a quixotic one—to help the Khedive, mixed with the feeling that I could with God’s direction accomplish this work. . . . If God puts ten pounds on a man He will give him strength to bear twenty pounds. And if He puts twenty tons on a man He will (if He wills) give him power to carry sixty tons. This He has done for me; and I in saying this do not seek the praise of any man or society, or king or power. I would have your prayers—they will be heard—but no praise, for He is the GOVERNOR-GENERAL, and I am only His useless agent, by whom He deigns to work His will. . . . I feel I am only a straw, yet God gave the men in Darfour courage under me. I cannot look back or forward to ever having done or to ever doing anything worthy of commendation. . . . I do not and cannot chew the cud of self- complacency. . . . I no more believe in the foresight of Napoleon or the Duke. People made out their talent as foresight after the thing was done. God gives the thought, man carries it out, for the thought is given so strongly as to force him to act thus.”

“I am now, thank God, so far from the least thought of man’s free will that it never enters into my calculation in these thoughts, however it may guide me as Governor-General or as fellow-man. . . . I feel so strongly that death is not an evil to man that, if I thought the shooting of any number of slave dealers would be of avail in stopping the slave trade, I would shoot them without the least compunction, though if a slave dealer was ill and it was in my power to cure him I would do my best to do so. . . . I believe entirely in the Old and New Testaments as being inspired by God. . . . I base my belief on the Scripture entirely; it is there distinctly laid down that God rules all things. . . . To accept the doctrine of man having no free will we must acknowledge his utter insignificance. For my part I can give myself no credit for anything I ever did; and further I credit no man with talents, etc., etc., in anything he may have done. Napoleon, Luther—indeed, all men—I consider were directly worked on and directed to work out God’s great scheme. Everything that happens to-day, good or evil, is settled and fixed. . . . No comfort is equal to that which he has who has God for his stay, but believes, not in words but in fact, that all things are ordained to happen and must happen.”

Again, when worn out with work and loneliness: “Long before you get this I shall be out of my troubles; so do not pity me, for I have the Almighty to guide me and death is no terror. I only wish you to know how worn I am through having to lean on GOD ALONE. It seems odd but it is diametrically opposed to our flesh to do so, and it is very trying. My flesh says, ‘I should like 1,000 good, trustworthy soldiers, and not His promise.’ It is utterly wrong, but a widow would prefer £15,000 in the 3 per cent. consols to the promise that God will provide for her. After my spirit I prefer the promise; after my flesh I prefer the 1,000 soldiers; not having them my spirit lords it over my flesh and conquers; but the flesh suffers all the same, and I see the deep lines in my face getting deeper and deeper day by day. _Why did you go?_ Well, He sent me, for I went on a toss up. He is the GOVERNOR-GENERAL, I am only His agent.”

All these are passages from Gordon’s letters written to his sister during his service under the Khedive Ismaïl between 1874 and 1879. They explain the man. With regard to its results from a humanitarian point of view he was, as I have said, conscious of failure, even when his friends in England were loudest in their praise of his success. He knew it had no permanence.

The work indeed that he had undertaken was one which could not be achieved under the circumstances which then ruled the Soudan. At Khartoum and throughout the whole country slavery was the recognized basis of social and industrial life. The slave was as much property as the ox or the sheep, and though his lot was less hard than it had been in Christian lands a few decades before—for the slave was not put to field labour, as in the West Indies, and was admitted to a certain filial position in the household of his master—the thought of his having any natural right to freedom had not yet penetrated the humanest local brain. The Egyptian officials at Khartoum were, as a rule, the very worst section of their class, men exiled for their misdemeanours from the lower Nile, while the army was, to a large extent, recruited from convicted criminals. The native Soudanese of Arab origin were wholly disaffected to the Government, and many of them, driven from their homes by its exactions, had formed themselves into bands of robber slave hunters, and were in revolt against it. No real help was to be had from Cairo. Gordon had some nine or ten Europeans with him in all, scattered through the country, and the Christian population of Khartoum, mostly Greeks, were hardly less interested in the slave trade than their Moslem neighbours, many of them being themselves slave owners. There were a few Catholic missionaries, and a bishop, but they exercised little influence, and Gordon, as an Englishman determined to stop the trade, was practically alone. The Soudan was an immense territory with no natural frontiers, few means of communication, and a population of several warlike millions, unamalgamated except by the tie of a somewhat fanatical anti-Christian creed. He thus describes the western regions, where the raids were chiefly organized: “These countries are very curious; they seem to be peopled with huge tribes of Bedouin Arabs, with a small nucleus of more settled people who congregate in the larger villages. . . . Some of them can put from 2,000 to 6,000 horse or camel men into the field. . . . Now these tribes raid on the negro tribes to the south, or else exchange cloth for slaves with the Bedouin tribes beyond even the pretended boundary of Egypt. . . . The tribes sell the slaves to the little merchants, _jellabat_, of all kinds, who flock into these lands. The merchants, who come from all parts of Egypt, then come down to the more populous places . . . and sell them to others. Even with the British Government in possession, I do not know how this slave trade could be stopped.”

Nevertheless, as a soldier, and he was a dogged one, Gordon fought on, though conscious of its being morally a losing battle. As a soldier he was successful and accomplished the work given him of subduing the revolted slave dealers; though the slave trade itself he could not stop, much less slavery in the Soudan. The caravans were too intangible on the open western frontier, and he had no means of setting the recaptured slaves at liberty. In order at all to deal with the case he was obliged himself to purchase slaves, for which he accuses himself thus to imaginary humanitarians sitting in their easy chairs at home: “The slaves I buy are already torn from their homes, and whether I buy them or not they will remain slaves. . . . It is not as if I encouraged raids for the purpose of getting slaves as soldiers. But people will say, ‘By buying slaves you increase the demand and indirectly encourage raids.’ I say, ‘Yes, I should do so, if after buying them I still allowed the raids to continue.’ . . . This slave question is most troublesome and difficult to manage. A number of slaves taken in the last raid made near here (in Darfour) refuse to go back, for they find they are better fed with their new masters than they were with the old. . . . Darfour is a regular cockpit. One thing troubles me. What am I to do with the two or three thousand slaves that are now at Shaka, if we take it? I cannot take them back into their own country; I cannot feed them. Solve this problem for me. I must let them be taken by my auxiliaries, or by my soldiers, or by the merchants. There is no help for it. If I let them loose they will be picked up in every direction, for an escaped slave is like an escaped sheep, the property of him who finds him or her. . . . If I let the slaves be taken by my soldiers, by the tribes, or by the merchants, instead of there being a cessation of the slave caravans there will be a great increase of them for two or three months and a corresponding outcry against me. But at any rate the slaves will go by frequented routes and will not die on the road. . . . Shall I be cowardly for fear of what ill-informed Europe may say?”

This was written in the early days of his Darfour campaign. As it proceeded, the horrors of the midsummer warfare in a waterless wilderness oppressed him as a nightmare, the necessity of reducing all, tribes, slave raiders, and slaves alike, by thirst and hunger, seizing the wells and the hidden supplies of corn. “The men find the corn by probing the ground, and by the ‘question’ applied to captives, which I cannot prevent. The detachment of the Leopard tribe are without water, and have been so for a day. I am sorry for it. Consider it as we may, war is a brutal, cruel affair. . . . You see the people coming over the sand, like flies on a wall. The poor fugitives cannot stand the thirst, and are coming down one by one to water. You have not the very least idea of the fearful effect of want of water in this scorched-up country. . . . Hunger is nothing to thirst; the one can be eased by eating grass, the other is swift and insupportable.”

And all—though he succeeded with the help of his Italian Lieutenant, Gessi, in breaking up the chief slave trading band under Suliman Zebehr—for almost nothing. He finds he cannot solve the problem. “There are some 6,000 more slave dealers in the interior who will obey me now they have heard that Zebehr’s son and the other chiefs have given in. You can imagine what a difficulty there is in dealing with all these armed men. I have separated them here and there, and in course of time will rid myself of the mass. Would you shoot them all? Have they no rights? Are they not to be considered? Had the planters no rights? Did not our Government once allow slave-trading? Do you know that cargoes of slaves came into Bristol Harbour in the time of our fathers? . . . I must notice to you one thing which is very different among the society here and that of the planters in the Colonies. One never hears of owners of slaves keeping gangs of them for field labour, or for cultivation. They are kept for slave servants, or by the slave dealers as slave troops. . . . Certain Greeks are now at Katarif on whom I have my eye, who have gangs of slaves cultivating cotton. I mean to make a swoop on them. In fact the condition of the negro is incomparably better in these lands than ever it was in the West Indies, and I therefore claim for my people a greater kindness of heart than was possessed by the planters, with all their Christian profession and civilization. You speak of Mohammedanism being imperilled [he means in peril of damnation]. Not so. I find the Mussulman quite as good a Christian as many a Christian, and do not believe he is in any peril. All of us are more or less pagans. I like the Mussulman; he is not ashamed of his God; his life is a fairly pure one. Certainly he gives himself a good margin in the wife line, but at any rate he never poaches on others. Can our Christian people say the same?”

It is of importance to consider these sayings of Gordon’s in connection with his subsequent action, which so surprised and shocked his English friends six years later.

“This morning I came on a caravan of slaves which is accompanying me—some sixty or eighty men, women and children chained. What am I to do with them? Their homes are too far off to send them to; so I decided to make the slave merchant take off their chains as scandalous, and then to leave them with him. He, looking on them as valuable cows, will look well after them. Don Quixote would have liberated them, and made an attempt to send them back some forty days march through hostile tribes to their homes—which they would have never reached. The only remedy is to stop slave raids on the frontier. . . . You must stop it at its source. Once the slaves have left the source it is useless to try. . . . In all previous emancipations, either there has been a strong government to enforce obedience, or a majority of the nation wished it. Here in this country there is not one that wishes it, or who would aid it even by advice. . . . _No one_ is uninterested in the matter.” And he could not stop the trade. It was like the hydra with a hundred heads. As soon as he cut off one band another took its place. As soon as he closed one entrance to the slave caravans another entrance was discovered. What he achieved was a miracle, for all depended on himself and his one European Lieutenant, Gessi. No one else either in the Soudan or Cairo cared for or wished to see the traffic stopped.

The last year of Gordon’s Governor-Generalship was one of harassing disappointments. The Khedive had failed him. He received no more support. There was a new regime at Cairo, the Nubar-Wilson one. He was at loggerheads with it, and talks of it in his letters as a “Hermaphrodite government.” They did not understand him, and he had no respect for them. It was a constant exchange of telegrams between Cairo and Khartoum in which Cairo made impossible demands for money, and Khartoum responded with bitter refusals. He was left quite unaided in regard to the slave trade. “I have no belief,” he wrote, “in the Cairo Government acting against slavery. . . . Nubar never helped me at the equator, though I wrote to him frequently, waste of time as it was!” It was the same with the Khedive, though he still pitied him, for Ismaïl was now at bay surrounded by the financial wolves that were on the point of devouring him.

“I can say truly,” he writes in 1879; “that my life is one long series of flesh-vexing telegrams, of rows, of disputes—a regular Ishmaelite existence—I am at war with nearly every one at Cairo, and my crest is a thistle.” “I am exceedingly weary, and wish with a degree of bitterness that it was all over. I am cooped up here (at Khartoum) now, and am much occupied with the finances, which are in a very low state. . . . I am striking daily deadly blows against the slave trade, and am establishing a sort of Government of Terror about it.” “I am stronger than ever in my belief that if H. H. had taken my advice he would be in a better plight than he is now, and at any rate would have fallen with dignity. Now I see by the paper he is offering to abdicate. This sort of thing cannot last, and I fear for him. He cannot go straight—even his dispatches to me are all evasive. . . . The continual wars that I carry on, and cannot help, are very wearisome; and I feel more and more daily ‘How long? how long?’”

It was in this state of despair, and weary of his life that Gordon threw himself into the excitement of his last campaign against the Darfour slave raiders, a campaign he was not destined to finish, for he was recalled in the midst of it once more to Cairo, and had to leave the final capture of the chief raider, Suliman Zebehr, to his Lieutenant Gessi. He had lost, however, his zest for fighting. “I no longer delight in war,” he writes, “or fights like this one before me. I look on the accounts one reads of wars as so much romance writing, and, somewhat like the Chinese people, I have rather a contempt for the warrior. . . . Eminent services, etc., are eminent nonsense.” His iron health, too, was breaking down. “I have almost entirely given up smoking, for I am much affected in my circulation. If I had gone on with it much longer I believe my heart would have stopped altogether. I may indeed say that I have lost every desire in a material way for the things of this life, and I have no wish for eating, drinking, or comforts. If I have a wish for anything, it would be for a dreamless sleep.” It was a terrible oppression to him, too, to find that in spite of all he could do the slave trade was only “scotched not killed.” Indeed it flourished still, despite the cost. “I have just made a calculation of the loss of life in Darfour during the years 1875-1879. It comes to 16,000 Egyptians, and some 50,000 natives of Darfour—add to this the loss of life on the Bahr Gazelle some 15,000, and you will have a fine total of 81,000; and this exclusive of the slave trade which one may put down for three years at from 80,000 to 100,000. Upwards of 470 slave dealers have been driven out of this place since I came here two days ago. This evening we were surprised at a caravan coming in. The slave dealers had come on here with them, and hearing I was here, and having no water, they abandoned their slaves and fled. The slaves were sadly distressed by thirst, thirty had died on the road. Though the water here is putrid, and everything is wretched enough, I am revived when I make these captures. You must count them up. From Oomchanga to Toashia, during, say, a week, we must have caught from 500 to 600. I suppose we may consider that nearly that number must have been passing every week for the last year and a half or two years along this road!!! and this during my tenure of office!!!—which is very creditable to me. These slaves just captured have been four to five days without water. They were in the most terrible distress.” A few days later, 21st July, he takes what was to be his final leave of Khartoum, till his last fatal return to it in 1884. “I shall D.V. leave for Cairo in ten days. . . . I am a wreck, like the portion of the ‘Victory,’ towed into Gibraltar after Trafalgar; but God has enabled me, or rather has used me, to do what I wished to do—that is to break down the slave trade.”

It was his last word of comfort to his sick soul. At Cairo, when he arrived there, he found a new order of things established still less to his mind than the old one had been. The Khedive Ismaïl had made his exit from the scene, and his place was occupied, not filled, by the poor dummy Tewfik, with the Anglo-French financial control for tutor and guardian. He did not long consent to serve it. After finding himself sent on a fool’s errand to Abyssinia, where he nearly met his death, he folded his tent and, shaking the dust of Egypt from his feet, once more returned to England. Nothing then was further from his mind than that he should ever see the Nile again. Body and soul he had been overwrought. The British surgeon who examined him at Alexandria before he left found him suffering from “symptoms of nervous exhaustion and alteration of the blood.” He recommended “several months of complete rest and quiet,” and insisted strongly on his “abstaining from all exciting work, especially such as implies business or political excitement.”