XXIVA. D. 1885GORDON
Duringthe Crimean war, when our men in the trenches before Sebastopol crowded under their earthworks to escape the Russian fire, one of the subalterns showed fear unbecoming an officer. The young chap meant no harm, but as he had to be taught manners, a lieutenant slightly his senior, invited him up upon the ramparts. There, arm in arm, the two walked up and down, the senior making amusing remarks about the weather, while the storm of lead swept round them, and the Tommies watched horror-struck, expecting both to fall. That officer who gave lessons in courage, was Charles George Gordon.
After eight years of varied service in many lands, Major Gordon came to Shanghai, where the British officer commanding had need of such a man. The Taiping rebels at war with the Chinese government numbered one million five hundred thousand, holding impregnable cities, and threatening the British merchants of Shanghai. These had raised a force of four thousand Chinese with white officers, known as the Ever Victorious Army because they were always thrashed, and Gordon took over the command. Hewas helped by Li Hung Chang, commander-in-chief of the Chinese armies, but no great impression had as yet been made upon fifteen hundred thousand rebels, trenched in the impregnable rock cities, which stood as islands over flat lands laced with canals. Those channels made the land impassable for troops, but Gordon brought steamers, and where a city fronted him with hundreds of guns and tier upon tier of unscalable walls, he steamed round the canals, cut off the line of communications, then dropped in, unexpected, in the rear. His attack was always a most unpleasant surprise to the rebels, beginning with gunnery that battered down the walls, until up a slope of ruins the storming party charged. The Taipings, led by white adventurers, defended the breach with desperation, and Gordon would weep because of the slaughter, his gentle spirit shocked at the streams of blood. “Two men,” he says, “of the Thirty-first Regiment were on the breach at Fort San, as Taiping leaders for the defense. One was killed, the other, struck by a shell splinter, was taken prisoner. ‘Mr. Gordon, Mr. Gordon, you will not let me be killed!’
“‘Take him down to the river and shoot him!’ And aside: ‘Put him in my boat, let the doctor attend him, and send him down to Shankhai.’”
Gordon not only saved the poor adventurers, but where he captured garrisons of Taipings, he would arm his prisoners, drill them, and lead them on to attack fresh cities in the march of the Ever Victorious Army. The odds were slightly against him, three hundred and seventy-five to one—an army against three hundred and seventy-five armies—but his third siege reduced the rebel capital, which he starved intosurrender. The Taiping generals laid down their arms to Gordon because he gave them their lives. Then Li Hung Chang jumped in and murdered the whole gang of generals, and Gordon, sorely annoyed, for the only time in his life carried a gun. For a whole day, revolver in hand, he hunted the Chinese commander-in-chief through the streets of Soo Chow, but Li was too sly for him, and hid under some matting in a boat until Gordon’s rage cooled down.
This Scotchman who, with forty men in a steamer, destroyed a Taiping army near Quin San, had only one weapon for his personal use—a little bamboo swagger cane, such as Tommy carries in the street. It was known to the Chinese as his Magic Wand of Victory, with which he had overthrown an army seven times as big as that of Great Britain.
The Chinese emperor sent an imperial decree conferring four thousand pounds and all sorts of honors. Gordon wrote on the back of the parchment: “Regret that owing to the circumstances which occurred since the capture of Soo Chow, I am unable to receive any mark of his majesty the emperor’s recognition.” So he sent the thing back—a slap in the face for China. The emperor sent a gold medal, but Gordon, scratching out the inscription, gave it to a charity bazaar. The emperor made him a prince of the Chinese empire, and with the uniform of that rank as a curio in his trunk, he returned to England.
In China he was prince and conqueror; in Gravesend Major Gordon did garrison duty and kept ducks, which he delighted to squirt with the garden syringe.
He was a Sunday-school teacher, and reared slum boys to manhood, he was lady bountiful in the parish,he was cranky as an old maid, full of odd whims, a little man, with tender gray eyes, and a voice like a peal of bells. For six years he rotted in Gravesend, then served a couple of years as British commissioner on the Danube, and then in 1874 was borrowed by Egypt to be viceroy of the equatorial provinces. There he made history.
The Turkish empire got its supply of slaves from this big Soudan, a tract the size of Europe, whose only trade was the sale of human flesh. If Gordon stopped the selling of slaves, the savages ate them. But the Egyptian government wanted money, so Gordon’s work was to stop the slave trade, get the people prosperous, and tax them. To aid him he had Egyptian officials, whose only interest in the job was the collecting of bribes, plunder and slaves for their private use; also a staff of Europeans, all of whom died of fever within the first few months. Moreover, the whole native population was, more or less, at war with the Egyptian government.
Gordon had a swift camel, and a reputation for sorcery, because leaving his escort days astern in the desert, he would ride alone into the midst of a hostile nation, dressed in a diplomatic uniform consisting of gold lace and trousers, quite unarmed, but compelling everybody to obey his orders. He was so tired that he wanted to die, and when the tribes disobeyed he merely cut off their whole supply of water until they learned to behave. So for five years, the only honest man in all that region fought the Soudanese, the Egyptian government and the British ministry, to put an end to slavery. He failed.
Charles George Gordon
Charles George Gordon
Long chapters would be required for the story ofGordon’s work in Bessarabia, Armenia, India, South Africa, or the second period in China.
In 1884, England, having taken charge of Egypt, was responsible for the peace of Soudan. But the Arabs, united for once, and led by their prophet—the Mahdi—had declared a holy war against everybody, and wiped out an Egyptian army. So England said, “This is very awkward; let us pray”; and the government made up its mind to scuttle, to abandon the whole Soudan. Of course the Egyptians in the Soudan, officials, troops and people, would all get their throats cut, so our government had a qualm of conscience. Instead of sending an army to their rescue, they sent Gordon, with orders to bring the Egyptians to the coast. With a view to further economies they then let the Arabs cut off Gordon’s retreat to the coast. England folded her hands and left him to perish.
As soon as Gordon reached Khartoum, he began to send away the more helpless of the Egyptian people, and before the siege closed down some two thousand five hundred women, children and servants escaped from the coming death. At the last moment he managed to send the Englishmen, the Europeans and forty-five soldiers down the Nile. They were saved, and he remained to die with his soldiers. “May our Lord,” he wrote, “not visit us as a nation for our sins; but may His wrath fall on me.”
He could not believe in England’s cowardice, but walled his city with ramp and bastion, planned mines and raids, kept discipline while his troops were starving to death, and the Union Jack afloat above the palace, praying for his country in abasement, waitingfor the army which had been sent too late. So for nine months the greatest of all England’s engineers held at bay an army of seventy-five thousand fighting Arabs. And when the city fell, rallying the last fifty men of his garrison, he went to his death, glad that he was not doomed to outlive England’s honor.
Year after year our army fought through the burning deserts, to win back England’s honor, to make amends for the death of her hero-saint, the knightliest of modern men, the very pattern of all chivalry. And then his grave was found, a heap of bloodstained ashes, which once had been Khartoum.
Now, in Trafalgar Square, men lay wreaths at the base of his statue, where with his Magic Wand of Victory, that Prince of the Chinese Empire and Viceroy of the African Equatorial Provinces, stands looking sorrowfully on a people who were not worthy to be his countrymen. But there is a greater monument to Gordon, a new Soudan, where men live at peace under the Union Jack, and slavery is at an end forever.