XI
“CHINESE GORDON”

We are living rather too near to the days of the man himself, to be able to say what place History will ultimately assign to the greatest and most famous of the old fighting stock of the Gordons. Probably the discriminating historian of the day after to-morrow will look upon him ethnologically as a queer survival or throwback—a man who lived and did his work in the nineteenth century in the style of the fifteenth, or even the fourteenth.

In the military sense he would seem to be the last of our great soldiers of fortune—for soldier of fortune he undoubtedly was far more than soldier of Britain—and the work that he did as one of the makers of the British Empire was done under foreign flags.

It might, indeed, be asked by the superficial observer in what sense he was an Empire-Maker at all, or what right he has to claim a place in that long and splendid array of great men, only a few of whom can be silhouetted within the limits of such a volume as this and whose succession stretches through the centuries from William, Duke of Normandy to Cecil John Rhodes of Rhodesia.

The answer is plain enough, though not very obvious at first sight. The British Empire is twofold. It is not only the greatest concrete Fact that the world has ever seen; it is also a vast and very splendid Idea, and in this sense it covers, not only just that portion of the earth’s surface over which the Union Jack flies, but also every other land known and half-known, old and new, civilised and savage, into which the genius of the Anglo-Saxon has forced its way and over which it has exercised that peculiar influence for which the word “English” stands in the dictionaries of our foreign competitors.

Charles George Gordon never added a square yard to the British Empire, considered as a geographical expression. He very seldom fought at the head of British troops, and when he did, it was not to any very great purpose—in fact his witnessing of the murder of many hundreds of gallant British soldiers by the officials who were guilty of the criminal mismanagement of the Crimean War was about the sum total of his experiences of warfare under the Flag.

It is a not altogether curious fact that, although Gordon was one of the very ablest leaders and organisers of men, and although he, shortly after thirty, proved to demonstration that he possessed most of the qualities of a great soldier, his native country didn’t appear to have any use for him, or at least no adequate use. As I have said before, the curse of both our Services, and therefore, in a very definite and practical sense, of the whole Empire, is officialism, or officialdom.

Two very different men grasped this fact in its relation to Gordon. One was Nubar Pasha, Egyptian Minister at Constantinople, and the other was John Ruskin. Nubar said: “England owes little to her officials; she owes her greatness to men of different stamp.” Ruskin said practically the same thing in one of his lectures at Woolwich, but in different fashion and in many more words, while Gordon, within a mile or so of the lecture-hall at Woolwich, was bending his great soul to the routine duties which appear to have been about the best work that the British Government could find for him to do.

When the British Government did at last get him to take his share in the doing of the most difficult and dangerous work which was just then necessary to be done upon the very outskirts of civilisation, those who were responsible for the exercise of the executive power deserted him and left him to his death by what is probably the basest and most criminal betrayal of a man of deeds by men of words that can be laid to the charge of a British Government.

History will probably say with truth that every member of that fatally futile Cabinet who had any hand in sending Gordon to Khartoum and neglecting to give him reasonable support incurred a direct and personal responsibility for his death, from which the dispassionate verdict of Posterity will be very slow to relieve their memories.

It is a stain that can never pass away from their public reputations. There are other faults of a similar sort for which these men will be arraigned at the bar of History, but the fate of the lonely, betrayed man, who day after day left his starving and ever-diminishing garrison to look out across the desert from the battlements of Khartoum for the help which, for him, never came, will certainly be considered the blackest if not the greatest of them all.

But there is another and very practical sense in which Gordon was a British Empire-Maker. This realm of ours is what it is, not only because we have fought for some parts of it and successfully stolen others. It is ours because we knew how to make use of it after we got it; because of all other men now existing on the face of the earth the Anglo-Saxon is the best leader and governor of savage and semi-savage men that has so far been evolved, and of such leaders and governors Gordon plainly proved himself to be one of the very best.

Under the British flag he never won a battle for Britain. The genius which his Motherland might have made such splendid use of did its best work under the dragon-flag of China and the crescent-flag of Egypt, but nevertheless on the day when the last mile of the British high road from Cairo to Cape Town is thrown open, and the Pax Britannica is proclaimed from north to south of Africa, men will remember Gordon and confess that without him this might never have been done.

It will have been noticed by those who have read between the lines here printed that where Empire-Makers are concerned the old-fashioned idea of ancestry seems to be not altogether the fiction that certain latter-day theorists, men of words to a man, have sought to make it, and Gordon was no exception to this rule.

His lineage stretches away back into the dim mists which lie behind the history of all these islands into the days when Englishmen, Scotsmen, and Irishmen had yet to be thought of, and when the divisions of mankind were racial rather than national.

Of course the Gordons of last century were for the most part desperate Jacobites, and as such were hinderers rather than doers of the work of empire-making. But, curiously enough, this particular Gordon did not come from these. On the contrary, there was a fight during that miserable business of 1745 in which, on the field of Gladsmuir, a couple of thousand Highland clansmen played havoc with some English regiments fresh back from the Flemish wars, and after the slaughter they took many prisoners, one of whom was David Gordon, great-grandfather of the hero and martyr of Khartoum.

From this it will be seen that, whether by design or accident, his branch of the ancient and widespread stock had managed to get upon the right side—that is to say, the side which was to fight for imperialism as distinguished from mere nationalism, which in many cases is only another way of spelling parochialism.

It is noteworthy, by the way, that Gordon’s grandfather, William Augustus, so named after “Butcher Cumberland,” fought at Louisburg and on the Heights of Abraham, after Captain Cook had taken those soundings on the St. Lawrence. His son, William Henry, fought as an officer of artillery at Maida, and it was his grandson who won the yellow jacket and mandarin’s button in suppressing the Taiping rebellion, who refused a roomful of gold as a bribe, and who, after carefully scratching out the inscription, gave the huge gold medal which he had received from the Emperor of China anonymously to the Coventry Relief Fund.

This “give away your medal,” to use his own words, is the keynote of his whole life. Gordon worked “for honour, not honours,” and that one letter makes a great deal of difference. We see here, too, the sign of his kinship with other Empire-Makers, the faculty of seeing what work had to be done and the power of doing it for its own sake, whatever difficulties there might lie in the way.

As a boy he seemed to combine in the most curious fashion a constitutional sensitiveness amounting almost to timidity, with a contempt for personal danger, and an equal contempt for authority which individually he was unable to respect.

Altogether, in fact, his was a nature which had very little to expect in the way of promotion or favour from conventional officialdom, and it was very little that he got. This view was no doubt amply justified by his first experience in warfare in the trenches before Sebastopol, for if ever heroism and devotion abroad were crucified by authority at home, this was the case during the Crimean War.

From the Crimea the scene shifts somewhat suddenly to China. And yet here we may note that this is not the place to stop and worry about the morality or otherwise of those so-called opium wars which led up to the trouble of 1860. If the opium trade was bad, the opening of the Flowery Land to European commerce was good, and one usually does find good and bad mixed up in the most extraordinary manner in matters of this sort. The point here is that the brief war which ended with the taking of the Taku forts in the August of 1860, and the capture of Pekin, was the beginning of the career of “Chinese Gordon.”

He did not see the taking of the forts, but he did see the destruction of the Summer Palace, “the Garden of Perpetual Brightness,” which was destroyed as an act of revenge at the order of a British envoy who may here be left nameless in the infamy that he earned by it. Gordon was one of the involuntary Vandals, and this is what he said about the business when writing home:

“You can scarcely imagine the beauty and magnificence of the palaces we burnt. It made one’s heart sore to destroy them. It was wretchedly demoralising work.”

After this for a year and a half he fulfilled the duties of a Captain of Engineers in the camp at Tien-Tsin in the midst of a vast dreary plain. During this time the Taiping rebels had been industriously employing fire and sword to make one of the most fertile portions of the Flowery Land the reverse of worthy of the name and, at length Shanghai itself, the headquarters of the foreign traders, was threatened by the ever-advancing wave of barbarism.

A defensive force was hurriedly raised by an American named Ward, who for nearly two years led it to constant victory and earned for it the somewhat magniloquent title of the Ever-Victorious Army.

Then a chance bullet killed Ward at the beginning of what might have been a most brilliant career. Under his successor everything went wrong. Victory was replaced by defeat and success by disaster. This incompetent person being removed, the hitherto obscure officer of Engineers stepped into his place. It was a time when a leader of men was badly wanted. It was also the moment when Fate knocked at the door of Charles George Gordon and found him in.

Within a very short time disorganisation was replaced by discipline, despair by confidence, and the Ever-Victorious Army was once more made worthy of its name. It was here that Gordon really began his career as a soldier of fortune. When he took command he told Li-Hung-Chang that he would turn the rebels out of the score of walled cities which they had captured and strengthened, and put the rebellion down within eighteen months. As a matter of fact he did it in fifteen.

The story of the doing of this so clearly shows the extraordinary capacity that Gordon possessed for both the organisation and the execution of a military campaign, as well as the faculty of inspiring confidence in all sorts and conditions of men, that it is simply amazing that the home authorities did not immediately recognise the fact that he was something a good deal more than they had hitherto taken him for. This, however, it was to take them some twenty years more to find out.

Still there was one incident at the close of the rebellion which might have shown even the official mind very clearly what sort of man this Major of Engineers was. The last incident of the war was the surrender of the great lake-city of Soo-Chow, and the Wangs, or chiefs of the rebels, laid down their arms on a guarantee of safety and good treatment. The Chinese way of acting up to this was to chop the heads off the whole lot. Now Gordon considered himself in a measure responsible for this guarantee, and the way in which he marked his sense of the breach of faith was characteristically unique.

The brilliancy of his services was recognised by a money gift of 10,000 taels (between three and four thousand pounds of English money). Gordon acknowledged it by writing on the back of the Imperial letter: “Major Gordon regrets that, owing to the circumstances which occurred since the capture of Soo-Chow, he is unable to receive any mark of his Majesty the Emperor’s recognition.”

If ever a sceptred monarch got the snub direct the Son of Heaven must have got it then, although the probability is that the 10,000 taels never found their way back to the Imperial treasury. Gordon also wanted to throw up the whole business, but the rebellion suddenly broke out again in another place, and so he went on with his work until it was finally crushed, for he was not the sort of man who liked to begin a thing and not get through with it.

His brilliant success in every single operation that he conducted clearly proved, as I have said, that in Gordon Britain possessed a true leader of men and master of affairs; in other words an Empire-Maker of the first order. And yet she first ignored and undervalued him, and then, as David did with Uriah, put him in the forefront of the battle and left him there to die.

For twenty years after we had wars in many places—in South and West Africa, in Egypt, Abyssinia, and Afghanistan. In some we gained credit and in some disgrace, but during all that twenty years the leaden eye of officialdom never seems to have fallen upon Gordon. The Chinamen were quicker sighted. He was the first and I believe the only “foreign devil” who was endowed with the Yellow Jacket and made one of the bodyguard of the Son of Heaven.

If he had chosen he might have made an enormous fortune and risen to any dignity short of the throne that the Flowery Land had to offer, but as a matter of fact he left China poorer than he went into it, bringing away with him only that big gold medal which he afterwards gave anonymously to charity.

And all this time he was, as one of his biographers and a fellow soldier has truly said, “not only without honour in his own country, but was regarded by many of the mandarins and ruling classes of his fellow countymen as a madman.” The use of the word “mandarin” there will be understood if we remember that his brother mandarins of China held him in the highest honour.

He came back to England in 1865, and was given the command of the Royal Engineers at Gravesend, and there for six years he did the routine work of a soldier, and in his spare time won a reputation for missionary work of the unofficial and unassuming sort which will live as long as his fame as a soldier and leader of men.

Here in the interval between his two careers we may take a glance at the physical man as he was just about now. This is how his comrade Sir William Butler describes him: “In figure Gordon, at forty years of age, stood somewhat under middle height, slight but strong, active, and muscular. A profusion of thick, brown hair clustered above a broad, open forehead. His features were regular, his mouth firm, and his expression when silent had a certain undertone of sadness which instantly vanished when he spoke.

“But it was the clear, grey-blue eyes, and the low, soft, and very distinct voice that left the most lasting impression on the memory of the man who had seen and spoken with Charles Gordon, and an eye that seemed to have looked at great distances and seen the load of life carried on men’s shoulders, and a voice that, like the clear chime of some Flemish belfry, had in it fresh music to welcome the newest hour, even though it had rung out the note of many a vanished day.”

Such was, then, the outer aspect of the man who at length went to Egypt at the invitation of Nubar Pasha and the Khedive Ismael, to begin that work which in the end cost one of the most valuable of British lives, and made the delta and valley of the Nile what they are to-day in everything but name—a British province.

In this sense Gordon was de facto an Empire-Maker. The mendacious amenities of Diplomacy may lisp out meaningless phrases about the evacuation of Egypt, but the fact is that we have re-created the land of the Pharaohs, we have brought it from bankruptcy to prosperity, we have released the fellah from the terror of the lash and the servitude of forced labour. We have raised a downtrodden peasantry to the position of self-respecting citizens, and we have turned slaves into soldiers. This was the work that Gordon began for us, although we did not employ him to do it, or recognise that he was doing it; but, having taken it over and carried it so far, it is hardly likely that even British officialdom will commit such a crime against civilisation as the surrender of the almost completed task would now be.

Gordon went south from Cairo by way of Suakin and Berber to Khartoum, taking with him the somewhat curious title of Governor of the Equator—which of course meant the Equatorial Provinces—and a very distinct conception of a Central African Dominion which the soldiers and statesmen of other generations will realise in due course, provided always that the onward march of the Anglo-Saxon is not turned aside or stopped by faint-heartedness within or disaster without.

His headquarters or capital was a place called Gondokoro, situate in the midst of a ghastly region of river, lake, and swamp, sunbaked by day, and miasma-haunted by night. He went up by steamer from Khartoum and, some two hundred miles above the city, he passed the island of Abba in the White Nile, and in one of his letters home he wrote these words which read somewhat weirdly in the lurid light of the camp-fires which seven years later closed round Khartoum:

“Last night, March 26th, we were going slowly along in the moonlight and I was thinking of you all and of the expeditions and Nubar and Co., when all of a sudden from a large bush came peals of laughter. I felt put out, but it turned out to be birds, who laughed at us from the bushes for some time in a very rude way. They are a species of stork, and seemed in capital spirits and highly amused at anybody thinking of going to Gondokoro with the hope of doing anything.”

But the laughing storks were not the only inhabitants of the Island of Abba, for, in a cave among its rocks, there was dwelling at that very moment a certain Moslem monk, or dervish, named Mohammed Achmet, who had already won some reputation for sanctity among his fellow tribesmen.

It would have been a most unwarrantable and, for Gordon, quite an impossible thing to do, and yet, so far is fact stranger than fiction, that the whole history of about a quarter of a continent would have been changed for the better, and the march of civilisation and humanity in Northern Africa would have been incalculably accelerated if the Governor-General of the Equator had stopped his boat just at that point, landed his men on the island, routed the holy man out of his cave, and either put a bullet through his head or drowned him in the Nile; for this recluse, then unknown beyond the confines of his native desert, was destined seven years later to be hailed by the Soudan tribesmen as the Mahdi—a word which to us means so much disgrace and disaster as well as hard and tardily won triumph that there is no need here to further elaborate the coincidence.

It was not a pleasant land, this scene of Gordon’s first government. As he himself says of the wilderness: “No one can conceive the utter misery of these lands. Heat and mosquitoes day and night all the year round.” These are few words, but I am able to say from personal experience that to those who know what African heat and African mosquitoes are they speak very eloquently.

Here, until October, 1876, Gordon lived and worked and suffered, making maps, building forts, enticing traders to come to him, teaching his soldiers to work and to till the ground and raise crops instead of plundering the natives. One by one his staff died about him, but still somehow the work went on.

When he first arrived he wrote: “the only possessions Egypt has in my province are two forts, one here at Gondokoro and the other at Fatiko. There are three hundred men in one and two hundred in the other. You can’t go out in safety half a mile.”

But towards the end of ’76 the line of posts had been pushed to Duffli, a place on the Nile only three degrees north of the Equator itself. Lake Albert Nyanza had been circumnavigated for the first time by a steamboat and mapped out—not by Gordon himself, who declined the honour of first steaming on its waters, but by an Italian lieutenant of his, named Gessi, and his reason for doing this was “to give a practical proof of what I think regarding the inordinate praise which is given to an explorer.”

His idea was that those who did the hard work, the getting up of stores and boats and other impedimenta over rapids and across deserts, were the real men who deserved the honour. “But all this would go for nothing in comparison with the fact of going on the lake, which you may say is a small affair when you have the boats ready for you”—from which certain much-boomed and belauded explorers known to latter-day fame might well learn wisdom as well as a little becoming modesty.

The farther south the bounds of Equatoria were pushed the more dismal the country seems to have become. He calls it “a dead, mournful spot, with a heavy, damp dew penetrating everywhere. It is as if the angel Azrael had spread his wings over this land. You have little idea of the silence and solitude. I am sure no one whom God did not support could bear up. It is simply killing.”

At length the three years of his miserable service came to an end. In October he set his face northward from Khartoum and ate his Christmas dinner in London.

It was in those days that Britain woke up to some sense of her opportunities and responsibilities. She had begun what was then called the “forward” policy, and which to-day with wider vision and sounder wisdom we call the Imperial policy.

Unhappily the fickle breath of popular favour soon blew the other way for a space; a halt was called, then a retreat was sounded, and of course with the inevitable result. The arms of Britain were sullied by defeat, and her ancient honour was stained by the breach of her plighted word and the desertion of those who had trusted to her faith.

This was the dark and disgraceful period which lasted from the end of 1880 to the beginning of 1885. It began with the desertion of the heroic British garrisons in the Transvaal and the everlasting shame of Majuba Hill, and it ended with the political betrayal and the constructive murder of Charles George Gordon.

It was on January 31, 1877, that Gordon went back to Africa as Governor-General of the Soudan. On May 5th he was installed at Khartoum; on the 19th he left to strike his first blow against slavery; by June 7th he had crossed four hundred miles of wilderness and passed the frontier of Dafour.

His movements during this time, amazing as they are now to us, were absolutely paralysing to the chiefs and officials of the country. To them a Pasha of Egypt was a portly gentleman, never in a hurry, never inclined to leniency or mercy, a staunch upholder of the slave trade in its worst as well as its best aspects, and possessing a very keen eye indeed to the main chance.

But the quite phenomenal Pasha who now flits across their astonished vision is a lean, yellow-faced little man, clad in the gorgeous but dusty and travel-stained uniform of a Marshal of Turkey, mounted on a swift dromedary which out-distances every other animal of the desert save the beast ridden by the Arab sheikh who accompanies him. The two fly from point to point with incredible rapidity; the words of the Pasha are sometimes stern and sometimes mild, but always just and always dead against slavery. There is no talk of what he wants for himself, but only of what he wants done or left undone, because this or that is right or wrong—and what he wants he gets.

The troops that came labouring after him were of such miserable material that they deserved only to be made slaves themselves, and such the Arabs would speedily have made them but for this yellow-faced, bright-eyed man, who set them one against another, played off their jealousies and hatreds, and generally out-manœuvred them with such consummate and incomprehensible skill, striking at such vast distances with such incredible rapidity, that in four months a seemingly impossible feat had been accomplished, and the rebellion of the slave-kings put down.

And yet it was all hopeless. The slave trade was too much for him, as it has so far been too much for every one else. “I declare I see no human way to stop it!” he writes in one of his letters. “When you have got the ink that has soaked into blotting-paper out of it, then slavery will cease in these lands.”

In the November of 1877 there occurred an incident which was destined in after years to bear terrible fruit. He travelled from Kordofan viâ Khartoum to Merawy. He was on his way to Wadi Halfa to see about pushing on the railway from there to Dongola. But before he got there a dispatch reached him saying that the Abyssinians had invaded the Eastern Soudan. Back he went, post-haste, only to find the news was false.

If it had not been for this the railway would have been completed, and the cataracts of the Nile would not have delayed the tardily-sent Relief Expedition until the Arab bullets had done their work and gallant Gordon’s busy head had rolled to the foot of the Mahdi’s throne.

A few weeks after this he is once more in Cairo in obedience to an urgent summons from the Khedive. The work was this time financial. The grip of the foreign bondholder was closing round the throat of the fellaheen, and the bill for official extravagance and incompetence had to be paid. It was characteristic of Gordon that his first financial reform was the cutting down of his own salary from six thousand to three thousand a year.

This was all very well, but when he proposed to apply the same methods to other people’s salaries he was very soon given to understand that he was not the kind of man who was wanted in Cairo just then, so he promptly threw up his presidency of the Committee of Inquiry and went back to two years’ more work in the Soudan, to fight the slave trade again in the old heroic, hopeless fashion, and to make maps and plans; to fly hither and thither over the ghastly, waterless country, sometimes riding for as much as two months at a time, till at last the replacement of his old friend Ismael by Tewfik Pasha once more called him back to Cairo.

This time he went to Abyssinia also, and got arrested twice, a circumstance which enabled him to give us the following word picture of King Johannes. “He is of the strictest sect of the Pharisees. He talks like the Old Testament. Drunk overnight, he is up at dawn reading the psalms. If he were in England he would never miss a prayer-meeting, and would have a Bible as big as a portmanteau.”

After his release he came home again to rest, as he thought, but as a fact to be called after a few weeks’ run on the Continent to take the command of the Colonial Forces at the Cape of Good Hope.

It was the eve of the Transvaal War, and now Gordon made the first and the greatest mistake of his life. He refused the command. If he had taken it there might have been no Transvaal War; certainly there would have been no Ingogo or Majuba Hill. He started instead to India to be Secretary to Lord Ripon, the new Liberal Viceroy.

Three days after he landed he threw up his appointment, and two days later he received an urgent invitation from China. He asked for leave, and the War Office refused. He threw up his commission, making a present of its value, about £6,000, to his stupid and graceless masters.

He stopped the war with Russia, and sped back again to London, receiving a telegram on the way telling him that his leave had been cancelled and his resignation refused.

He afterwards made a futile visit to Ireland and an equally futile trip to South Africa. He offered to go and help in settling the Basuto trouble. The Cape Government, to its loss and its shame, had not even the politeness to reply to his offer, but when two millions of money and a great number of valuable lives had been lost, they asked him a year later if he would renew his offer, and, like the generous and single-hearted hero that he was, he did so.

Unhappily, however, when he got on the scene of action he spoilt everything by allowing the enthusiast in him to get the better of the soldier and the skilled man of affairs. The Cape Government was certainly in the wrong as regards the Basuto question. Gordon’s advice to them was to admit their wrong and begin to do right. Very good indeed from the ethical point of view, but in practice hopelessly wrong and bad where the South African native is concerned. With him, as with the Boers, to admit yourself in the wrong is to own yourself defeated, and to invite instant aggression.

Of course the Cape Government could do nothing of the sort. To have done so would have been to have kindled the flames of native war over the whole southern half of the Continent. This was the fatal policy which had already lost us the Transvaal when Sir Evelyn Wood had it in the hollow of his hand. To have repeated it would probably have been to lose all South Africa. Gordon, in his usual fashion, threw up his appointment at once and came back to England.

It was now November, 1882. Naturally he was coldly received at home, but his reception was somewhat mollified by a letter which the King of the Belgians sent him, for the second time asking him to enter his service.

“For the moment,” says his Majesty, “I have no mission to offer you, but I wish to have you at my disposal, and I wish to take you from this moment as my counsellor. You can name your own terms. You know the consideration I have for your great qualities.”

The post that he would probably have had was the Governorship of the Congo. One can imagine how in such a position he would have dealt with an unhung blackguard like Lothaire, the murderer of a man who had confided himself to his hospitality.

He spent most of the following year in travel, chiefly in Palestine. The Delta of Egypt had been conquered, Mohammed Achmet, the carpenter’s son, had become Mahdi, and the Soudan revolt was in full blast. Now at last the British Government called upon the one man who, had his genius and his work been recognised ten years sooner, could have saved so much disgrace and disaster.

How utterly he had been neglected and how completely he was unknown in his own country even now, may be guessed from a remark made by a gentleman to an officer of the Pembroke garrison.

“I see,” said this person, “that the Government have just sent a Chinaman to the Soudan. What can they mean by sending a native of that country to such a place?”

He thought, alas, that “Chinese Gordon” was a yellow-faced Asiatic who wore a pigtail—and yet, after all, did British Officialdom know very much more about the hero it was now sending to his death?

In Egypt all was panic. The army of Hicks Pasha had been annihilated. All Gordon’s work was undone, and the Mahdi was practically master of the Soudan. But meanwhile Gordon had decided to accept the King of the Belgians’ offer. On New Year’s Day, 1884, he reached Brussels to tell him so, and the same day he learnt that the British Government would not let him go. His thoroughly justified answer was a request to be allowed to retire from Her Majesty’s service, “without any claim whatever for pension”—King Leopold, with a juster estimate of the man’s value, having promised to make up the loss to him. The refusal was withdrawn, and he prepared to start for the Congo.

Then on the 17th of January there came that memorable telegram from Lord Wolseley asking him to come to London. He knew what he was wanted for and he went. The work was the pacification and then the evacuation of the Soudan.

By the 18th of February he was in Khartoum again. His old influence at once reasserted itself. What followed is too recent and too well known for detailed repetition here: the vacillation between war and peace, between diplomacy and force, argument when there should have been hard-hitting, and hard-hitting when there should have been argument.

The net result was only fully known to the lonely man who month after month stood on the ramparts of Khartoum, beleaguered by the Mahdi’s innumerable hosts, looking out over the desert and down the Nile for the army of relief which ought even then to have been there, and which was waiting for politicians to finish their wrangles before it even started.

Then, week after week, the weary working and waiting went on, the ring of spears drawing ever closer and closer round the doomed city, the provisions within rapidly dwindling, and the lonely soldier, the last of his blood now left in Khartoum, was still looking vainly northward.

So Monday morning, the 26th of January, came, and in the dim light that comes before the dawn the Arabs made their last and successful assault. The moon had set at one o’clock. The famished garrison made but little resistance. Gordon at the head of about a score of men faced the incoming victors near the church of the Austrian mission.

The eastern sky was just reddening with the coming dawn when a stream of Arabs, shouting for Islam and victory, rushed into the open space that had been made round the church. They stopped and put up their rifles. An irregular volley crackled along their line, and when the smoke had drifted away there was nothing for the belated expedition to do but avenge the death of the betrayed and deserted hero.

It was about midday on the 28th when a couple of steamers, with Sir Charles Wilson and a detachment of the Sussex Regiment on board, steamed out on to the broad stretch of river above which Khartoum stands at the junction of the Blue and White Nile. Half-an-hour told the miserable truth. There was no flag flying from the battlements, and no English voice to bid the tardy comers welcome.

But there is to be a welcome of a sort, for, as the boats come within range, the guns of Khartoum open fire on them and a spattering hail of rifle-balls drop about them, and the puffs of smoke leap up from every point along the banks till the circle round the boats is completed. Of this there could be only one meaning: Gordon the deserted was dead. And this meaning was true, though we did not know the full truth of it until long after all that was left of him on earth had been scattered, graveless and uncared for, over the wind-swept sands of the Soudan.

There is his grave; there, too, now is his monument—the memory of the work he did and the deathless fame he earned. On those who sent him to the forefront of the battle and left him there to die History has not yet given her verdict. When she does it will, as usual, be a just one, and, in all probability, it will not form very pleasant reading for those of their descendants who may be animated with anything like a proper pride of ancestry.