This picture, of course, is only one take on these extraordinary events, and there is another, darker version, full of ambiguity and apparent contradiction. As I moved beyond my boyhood fascination and went on to study classical antiquity, I was much influenced by the ‘big man’ theory, in which domineering personalities provide the main driving force in history. Applying this prism to the events of 1884–5, against a backdrop of world events that would seem to have their own momentum – the resurgence of Islamic jihad, and the crystallisation of power politics in Europe that would eventually lead to the First World War – it is the extraordinary personalities that stand out, some with motivations far removed from the heroic ideal. The Victorian military, especially the more cerebral branches such as the Royal Engineers, could attract men of ambition, intellect and idiosyncrasy who were often given free rein in the field. The personalities in this story could not have been greater: Gordon himself, inscrutable and fascinating, with a messianic charisma that gripped the world during those months; Muhammad Ahmad, the self-styled Mahdi (Chosen One), a former boatbuilder and Sufi, who held more men under his sway than any European ruler; Lord Wolseley, the outstanding British general of his day, a fastidious stickler for detail and control; and men of lesser rank but expansive personality, including the flamboyant Colonel Fred Burnaby, arguably the greatest adventurer of the late Victorian age, and Major Herbert Kitchener of the Royal Engineers, future nemesis of the Mahdist revolt and commander-in-chief who would lead the British army into the bloodbath of the First World War.
Whether Gordon himself in the end really wanted to be rescued and whether those who were sent to rescue him ever really intended to do so are questions not easily answered. Looming in the background are the figures of Queen Victoria, ardent supporter of Gordon and spokeswoman for the vox populi, and Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone, a man who professed not to be able to abide Gordon, despite their shared fascination with the ancient history of Palestine and the lands of the Bible. Gladstone has appeared elsewhere in my fiction, in The Mask of Troy, where he sees the fall of Troy as a dark portent of modern times, yet where his aversion to war is tinged by realism. Once it had become clear that Gordon could not, or would not, be rescued, Gladstone may have been obliged to exercise a directive of appalling necessity in order to ensure that he was not captured; the image of Gordon in chains would have enraged public opinion and severely damaged British prestige at a time when international brinksmanship was the order of the day. Any sign of weakness might have led Russia to order the invasion of British India, as could have happened when the Russians clashed with the Afghans in the ‘Panjdeh incident’ of March 1885, a mere matter of weeks after the fall of Khartoum. Gordon the martyr was perhaps a weight that Gladstone could more easily have borne than Gordon the pitiful captive – or, worse still, Gordon the convert to Islam, driven to shocking apostasy by government indifference to the plight of his beloved Sudanese, standing alongside the Mahdi. If these were indeed Gladstone’s calculations, then events were to bear him out, conflict with Russia being avoided and British prestige left intact, though the great European war he most feared was only forestalled by a few decades, and the final destruction of the Mahdist revolt by Kitchener at Omdurman in 1898 did little to extinguish the flame of jihad kindled in the desert in the 1880s that has become such a dominating threat to world peace today.
The basis for the account in this novel of the Gordon relief expedition includes unpublished material related to my great-great-grandfather, Colonel Walter Andrew Gale, Royal Engineers (RE), who was a personal friend of Lord Kitchener and in charge of the Gordon Relics Committee while he was secretary of the RE Institute from 1889 to 1894. His Report of the Gordon Relics Committee (1894) is in the RE Library at Chatham, where the museum contains a fascinating collection of Gordon memorabilia that provided much initial inspiration for this story. Among published sources, I have relied where possible on first-hand accounts, notably Colonel Sir Charles Wilson’s From Korti to Khartoum (1885), Colonel William Francis Butler’s The Campaign of the Cataracts (1887) and Lieutenant Colonel E. W. C. Sandes’ The Royal Engineers in Egypt and the Sudan (1937), the last incorporating eyewitness records of RE officers present during the campaign.
Many contemporary accounts of Gordon are overtly hagiographical, extolling both his heroic attributes and his religious zeal; the same applies to many biographies of Lord Kitchener. I have sought to understand both men by reading their own writings and correspondence, in the case of Kitchener his contributions to the multi-volume Survey of Western Palestine, published in 1881–5 when he was in his early thirties, as well as accounts from 1884–5 that reveal a man of extraordinary energy and presence, a fearless adventurer quite distinct from the later image of the First World War field marshal so fixed in popular memory.
The essential source for Gordon is the compendious diary he wrote while besieged at Khartoum – unfortunately not including anything he might have written in his final days – published in 1885 as The Journals of Major-General C. G. Gordon, CB, at Kartoum, printed from the original mss; something of his religious vision is also revealed in the account of his time in Jerusalem, Reflections in Palestine, 1883, published after Gordon was already in Khartoum and possibly never seen by him.
Ironically, given the mystique that was built up around the man, his journals allow a more intimate, detailed picture of Gordon than is possible for any other of the main characters in this story. The tenor is overwhelmingly practical, not mystical; his daily concerns included the food supply, the likely arrival of the relief expedition, and the other professional checklists of a besieged garrison commander, including ammunition expended, a tally of incoming fire from the Mahdist forces, and lists of wounded and killed. His emphatic instructions to edit out extraneous material suggest that he would have been appalled by the notes that his admirers had seen fit to include in Reflections in Palestine. Several of the incidents he recounts in the fictional encounter with Mayne come from his journal, including the faulty ammunition in a Remington rifle that nearly blinded him (12 December), and his reflection on Abraham Lincoln and slavery (23 November, when he incorrectly identified 18 December as the date in 1862 of Lincoln’s proclamation). In creating dialogue, I have used words and phrases from the journal to represent his use of language, including his reference to the Mahdist forces as ‘Arabs’, as was the case for most of the British officer accounts of the campaign including that of Colonel Butler.
Gordon’s last journal entry, quoted at the front of this novel, has an air of finality about it, like Scott’s final entry from the Antarctic. Yet it was written on 14 December when he still had more than five weeks to live, and the assumption has to be that he continued to keep a journal to the end. Whether or not he would have chosen to reflect on his archaeological and ethnographic collections is unknown. However, he had shown much interest in these matters years earlier when he had even invited Heinrich Schliemann to join him, and several of his appointees to administrative and army positions in the Sudan, including the American adventurer Charles Chaillé-Long, had something of the treasure-hunter about them. It may never be possible truly to know what Prime Minister Gladstone thought of Gordon, but it is conceivable that their shared fascination with biblical history and archaeology would in private have transcended the gulf that had appeared between them publicly, one that widened after Gordon’s death when Gladstone was vilified for failing to order a rescue expedition in time.
Another pivotal character in this story is Sir Charles Wilson, who was blamed by Wolseley for failing to reach Gordon in time after Wilson was obliged to take over the desert column when its commander, Brigadier General Herbert Stewart, was mortally wounded in the battle that followed Abu Klea. Wilson’s own published book, noted above, rebutting the criticisms of Wolseley, is the best eyewitness account of the final stages of the campaign; much personal correspondence and writing related to his wider career is found in Colonel Sir Charles Watson’s The Life of Major-General Sir
Charles Wilson, published by the Royal Engineers in 1909. The breadth of Wilson’s activities, as a mapmaker, geographer and intelligence officer, from North America to Asia Minor and the Sudan, make him one of the great unsung achievers of the Victorian age, and it is fascinating to speculate that his role as founder of the War Office Intelligence Department – the antecedent of the modern Secret Intelligence Service – might have included the sanctioning of a ‘mandate to kill’ that has become such an ingrained part of our view of covert intelligence activities since the novels of Ian Fleming were first published.
Colonel William Francis Butler describes a long-range ‘rifle duel’ between his men and the Arabs near Kirbekan, the basis for my fictional action between Major Mayne and the Mahdist sharpshooter in Chapter 8. His description of the cataracts is invaluable because much of the atmosphere of the place was lost after the Aswan dam was constructed, and today it requires some imagination to see the place as it would have been in pharaonic times or during the days in 1884 when the Gordon relief expedition struggled against the Nile towards Khartoum. A fascinating recent project to study the length of the railway built by the Royal Engineers to supply that expedition shows how much detritus remains in the desert, much of it in a remarkable state of preservation: spent ammunition casings, tins and tobacco packaging, the remains of camps and supply dumps, and places where burials undoubtedly exist, swept over and lost beneath the shifting sands of the desert. These investigations are a new kind of archaeology, giving a vivid basis for understanding the challenges of ancient campaigns into the desert as well as a fresh perspective on precisely what went on during those fateful months leading up to the fall of Khartoum in January 1885.
The description of the battle of Abu Klea in Chapter 11 is inspired by eyewitness accounts, including that of Colonel Sir Charles Wilson. Some 1,400 British troops confronted at least 11,000 dervishes; in ten minutes of ferocious fighting more than a thousand dervishes were killed, at a cost of 81 British killed and 121 wounded. The battle became one of the most famous in military history, the last time the British fought in a square, in a conflict immortalised by Rudyard Kipling in his 1890 poem ‘Fuzzy-Wuzzy’:
So ’ere’s to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, at your ’ome in the Soudan;
You’re a pore benighted ’eathen but a first-class fightin’ man…
We sloshed you with Martinis, an’ it wasn’t ’ardly fair;
But for all the odds agin’ you, Fuzzy-Wuz, you broke the square.
(Along with ‘dervish’, the British soldiers commonly referred to their Sudanese enemy as ‘Fuzzy-Wuzzy’, a term originally coined for the wild-haired Beja of the Red Sea coast who were the first of the Sudanese the British fought in pitched battles, in early 1884, when they did actually break a square.)
One of the casualties at Abu Klea was Colonel Fred Burnaby, who was discovered by an officer lying against a rock surrounded by dead dervishes, a spear having ‘inflicted a terrible wound on the side of his neck and throat’, and his skull ‘cleft by a blow from a two-handed sword’. The expression that I have Burnaby using, that he was ‘bowled over a terrible crumpler’, comes from eyewitness of that day, Count Albert Gleichen, a Grenadiers officer serving with the Camel Corps, who used it to describe the death of a dervish (Gleichen, A., With the Camel Corps on the Nile, London 1889, p 135). The young soldier who had first seen Burnaby and called the officer over wondered why ‘the bravest man in England’ should be dying without succour; his last words as the boy propped him up were supposedly ‘look after yourself’. Burnaby had ridden out of the square to help bring skirmishers back in, an act of near-suicidal courage that cost him his life; it was the type of act for which the Victoria Cross was invented, and perhaps he would have been awarded it had his commanding officer, Brigadier General Stewart, not himself been fatally wounded two days later, before having the time to write despatches and make recommendations for the fight at Abu Klea. Burnaby died as he had lived, larger than life, yet he should be remembered as much for his achievements as an intelligence officer and adventurer, revealed in his marvellous book On Horseback through Asia Minor (1878), still in print and widely read today.
There is no single authoritative eyewitness account of the death of Gordon. One of the best known of many fanciful images, General Gordon’s Last Stand, by George William Joy (1893), showing Gordon waiting coolly at the top of the stairs, revolver in hand, as the dervish spearmen approach him from below, probably contains elements of the truth; an account by Gordon’s servant Orfali suggests that Gordon and his Sudanese bodyguards fought to the end, and that Gordon personally accounted for several of the enemy. What does seem certain is that he was decapitated and his head taken to the Mahdi, where it was seen by his captive, the Austrian officer Rudolf von Slatin, a friend of Gordon and future inspector general of the Sudan, whose box of Gordon relics resides in the Royal Engineers Museum. ‘A brave soldier, who fell at his post. Happy is he to have fallen. His sufferings are over,’ von Slatin famously told his captors. It was von Slatin’s account of the treatment of Gordon’s body that hardened Kitchener’s resolve to wreak the terrible vengeance he eventually inflicted on the dervish army at Omdurman thirteen years later, including the desecration of the Mahdi’s tomb.
Sir Charles Wilson’s operative, Major Edward Mayne, is fictional, though he bears the surname of an Anglo-Irish family who figured in the Army List – another Mayne appears in the Second World War in my novel The Mask of Troy – and I have based his career and interests closely on Royal Engineers officers of the period. The same is true for his subordinate at the cataract, the fictional Lieutenant Tanner, who is killed along with General Earle in the battle that the river column were eventually forced to fight at Kirbekan, when more than two thousand dervishes were killed for the loss of some eighty British soldiers. In my fiction, Mayne’s servant, Corporal Jones, missed the battle because he had been reassigned to the 8th Railway Company, RE, building the line south of Korti; he also appears in my novel The Tiger Warrior in the 1879 Rampa rebellion in India as Sergeant Jones (having subsequently been reduced in rank for misdemeanour), and is inspired in part by a real-life soldier from that railway company, 17818 Sapper M. Knight, whose Khedive’s Star and Egypt medal with the clasp ‘The Nile 1884–85’ are illustrated on my website.
Colonel William Francis Butler writes of his astonishment and pleasure at seeing a Canadian birch-bark canoe on the Nile, above the second cataract; it was paddled by William Prince, ‘Chief of the Swampy Indians’, whom Butler had last met fourteen years before during the Red River expedition in Canada, a man ‘grown more massive of frame … but still keen of eye and steady of hand as when I last saw him standing bowman in a bark canoe among the whirling waters whose echoes were lost in the endless pine woods of the great Lone Land’.
One of the most extraordinary aspects of the relief expedition was the employment of Mohawk Indians from Canada to help navigate the whaleboats that were supposed to take British troops on to Khartoum. As well as west African ‘Kroomen’ – boatmen from the Kroo (Kru) tribe, admired by Wolseley when he led his campaign against the Ashanti in 1873 – the expedition included 400 Canadian voyageurs, drawn from the community of backwoodsmen and fur-traders who had helped Wolseley’s Red River expedition in Canada in 1870. The elite among them were some sixty Mohawk men from the Ottawa valley, Iroquoian speakers, many with French blood, who were descendants of the feared Iroquois allies of the British in the wars against America. By the mid nineteenth century they specialised in guiding rafts of logs down the Ottawa river, and would have been familiar to the British army engineers and their families based in Ottawa to build and maintain the Rideau Canal, part of a communication and supply network designed to impede American attack. In my novel, Major Ormerod, second in command of the contingent, as well as Mayne’s companion Charrière, are both fictional, but are inspired by real-life characters; several of the Mohawks on the Nile were veterans of the Red River expedition, and at least one had also served in the Union Arm
y in the American Civil War. The voyageur contingent was a civilian force, and suffered no battle casualties – of the sixteen deaths, six were drownings in the Nile, the rest from illness – though it provided a precedent for the dispatch of Canadian volunteers to the Boer War and the First World War, when soldiers of Iroquois and other aboriginal descent had a high reputation as scouts and snipers and many were killed in action.
As an archaeologist, I have always been fascinated by the reverence given to relics of Gordon after his death, when he was promoted in popular imagination to something akin to sainthood – a transformation ironically only possible through his death, but which was undoubtedly encouraged by those who wished to deflect public attention from their failure to rescue him. His elevation had begun while he was still alive, and burgeoned once he was in Khartoum. His Reflections in Palestine, compiled from his notes ‘with anxious care by more than one of the writer’s friends’, shows an almost mystical reverence towards his every word, with every inchoate thought they could find put into print; Gordon the saint might have looked upon their efforts with indulgence, but it is hard to believe that Gordon the Royal Engineer would have approved. Afterwards his admirers hunted everywhere for relics, some of them of dubious authenticity. The Royal Engineers Museum contains a fragment of the wooden staircase where he was thought to have died, said to have been removed from the palace at Khartoum when it was demolished in 1898; any doubts about its authenticity would be dispelled in the mind of the believer by the silver case topped with a cross that holds it, just like a medieval reliquary. More bizarrely, the museum houses a box said to have come from Rudolf von Slatin, containing among other things one of Gordon’s teeth, his last match and pencil, and the corpse of a fly said to have walked on his nose!
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