Egypt never formally became part of the empire. Indeed, the British kept insisting that they’d be leaving shortly: they repeated the claim no fewer than sixty-six times between 1882 and 1922. The problem was that it was never entirely clear when their conditions for withdrawal would be met, and if these conditions included a properly functioning democracy and educational system the British did not seem to be doing a great deal to bring them about. In theory, the country was still under an Ottoman viceroy with an Egyptian cabinet. But Evelyn Baring, the believer in ‘manifest destiny’, was transferred from India, with the very modest title of consul general. In reality no Egyptian minister could stay in office if he opposed Baring’s proposals, earning the Consul General the inevitable nickname ‘Over’ Baring. He was soon ennobled as Lord Cromer and was known in Egypt simply as ‘The Lord’, the enormous residence built for him on the banks of the Nile being the ‘bayt al lurd’ or ‘house of the lord’.* The British flag flew above the citadel Saladin had built against the Crusaders and colonial officials ran the public finances. The Egyptian army was disbanded and reconstituted under a British commander in chief. The Veiled Protectorate, as this system of government was known, functioned by having (not so) shadow British officials in all important government departments. British soldiers watched over the Nile. British brokers struck deals for Egyptian-grown cotton. British vessels crowded the harbour in Alexandria. And on the most famous river in civilization, Thomas Cook ran steamers carrying visiting Europeans to see the ruins of another Egypt, of 5,000 years earlier.
As so often in the history of the empire, one thing led to another. For by taking control of Egypt the British had also assumed responsibility for Sudan, upstream on the Nile, and the biggest country in Africa, much of which had been under Egyptian authority for sixty years. Gladstone was about to learn that seizing Egypt was like putting your hand in a hole and discovering you’ve stuck your fingers inside a primed mousetrap.
There was nothing particularly enticing about this enormous expanse of not very much. Sudan’s most important city was – and remains – Khartoum, at the point where the White Nile meets the Blue Nile, both of which are today spanned by bridges of varying degrees of ugly functionality. Both rivers are a dirty brown. The rutted streets are jammed with smoky, hooting vehicles, the government offices with dozy and decision-averse civil servants. In summer the temperature climbs to over 50 degrees Celsius. Alcohol is illegal and in 2009 the country’s President earned the distinction of becoming the first serving head of state to have an arrest warrant issued against him by the International Criminal Court.
Here, in early January 1885, a guttering lantern in the window of what is now the Republican Palace revealed a European sitting at a table, writing. Closer inspection would have discovered a thin, restless man in his early fifties, of average height, with the reddened skin of years of military service in the sun. When he fixed you with his grey-blue eyes, it was, someone said, as if he looked straight into your soul. Charles Gordon had survived over 300 days of siege. Very shortly, he would become the empire’s most dramatic martyr.
He was a very singular man. Although he was the ninth child of a general and his body had worn a British military uniform for nearly forty years, his head buzzed with metaphysical abstractions. He had no taste for money (in fact, he demanded his salary be reduced). He had no taste for women. He had no taste for comfort. His religious beliefs having convinced him of an afterlife, he also seems to have had an authentic death-wish. He had used a rather less testing time, in command of the Royal Engineers detachment in Mauritius, to work out the location of the Garden of Eden (he could demonstrate conclusively that it was on an island in the Seychelles). He had stalked alone into confrontations with killers on a previous mission in Sudan and shown a maverick wisdom in trying to defuse tension in Basutoland. In China he had led a rag-bag army which extinguished a rebellion. In South Africa he inspected his troops in a shabby frock coat and top hat. He had calculated the precise positions in the Holy Land of the crucifixion and burial of Christ. He was, in short, courageous, self-reliant and slightly loopy. ‘Much as I like and respect him,’ said a friend who found his mood-swings incomprehensible, ‘I must say, he is not all there.’
This strange man had been on his way to take up an appointment in the king of the Belgians’ appalling slave colony of the Congo when his ship stopped in Southampton. News of his presence in England reached the great newspaperman W. T. Stead, a journalistic genius lucky enough to live at a time when his own ambition ran in step with the growing expectations of the British people. Stead had the three essential requirements for a successful journalist: a knack for the vivid sentence, an unshakeable conviction that he was right, and an intuitive understanding of public feeling. He also had a healthy suspicion of established authority and a lively social conscience. (His greatest coup came in July 1885, with a series of still horrifying articles in which he exposed the existence of under-age brothels in London: newspaper vendors besieged the Pall Mall Gazette offices, clamouring for more copies, after which parliament raised the age of consent from thirteen to sixteen.) Stead recognized in the ascetic, visionary, independent-minded Gordon an imperial hero and took himself down to Southampton to conduct an interview. The problem of the moment was called the Mahdi, a man eleven years younger than Charles Gordon, claiming an even closer relationship with God. The Mahdi swore he was God’s elect, ‘the chosen one’, who would lead the people of Sudan in a holy war to throw off the exploitative rule of the Egyptians and create a society of equals (apart from their slaves, of course). The problem for London was that, since the British ran Egypt, the Mahdi’s uprising was also a revolt against the empire. In November 1883, an army under the command of Colonel William Hicks (‘Hicks Pasha’) was dispatched to deal with the revolt. The force contained a handful of European officers and thousands of poorly trained and largely useless local recruits. When the Mahdists’ green banners swept down on them they were wiped out. Delirious with belief in the Mahdi’s genius, some of his followers now began to drink the water in which he had washed, convinced that it would cure their illnesses. This was the sort of enemy to delight any decent journalist, and Stead was one of the best. When he met Gordon, the Sudan crisis was the focus of his interview.
Stead was convinced he had found the man to assert British values against fundamentalist jihad.* Gordon was politic enough in conversation with the reporter to stress that he did not want to embarrass the British government. His only concern, he claimed, was the welfare of the local people, for whom he had developed a genuine affection during earlier service in the country in the 1870s. ‘The Soudanese are very nice people,’ he said, who ‘deserve the sincere compassion and sympathy of all civilized men.’ Yet they were being abandoned to ‘their Turkish and Circassian oppressors’, and ‘they deserve a better fate’. Stead – who like many great journalists combined puritan zeal with low guile – immediately recognized a cause: delivering ‘a better fate’ was the central conviction of all those who believed in the destiny of the British Empire. The Mahdi promised the usual jihadi stuff about a paradise in which no one drank, smoked, danced, clapped their hands or spent too much time with the opposite sex. Gordon was the man to offer something different.
Gladstone’s government was in no mood to send another force up the Nile. But the newly emergent mass media began to behave in a way which has since become tediously familiar. The Pall Mall Gazette bellowed that Gordon must be dispatched to Khartoum and soon the entire herd was mooing. In no time, there were crowds in the streets chanting ‘Gordon Must Go!’ and the government caved in. But he was emphatically not being sent there to bag another colony: Gordon was to go to Khartoum, evacuate all those who wished to leave, and then report back. The Foreign Secretary himself came to Charing Cross station to see him off at the start of his journey, although Gladstone’s secretary was wise enough to spot the risks of sending someone like Gordon to a place where he would be beyond any effective control. ‘He seems
to be a half cracked fatalist,’ he reflected, ‘and what can one expect from such a man?’ ‘Half cracked fatalist’ was right. Gordon made his way up the Nile towards Khartoum in a buzz of thoughts, counter-thoughts, flashes of inspiration, second thoughts, third thoughts and fourth thoughts which he fired back to Evelyn Baring in Cairo by telegraph, sometimes at the rate of twenty or thirty a day – a pattern which was to continue until the (rapidly approaching) end of his life. Baring soon decided that the only way to deal with Gordon’s dispatches was to let them pile up, and then to settle down in the evening and attempt to make out what was going on in his head. General Gordon reached Khartoum in the middle of February, declaring that he came without soldiers, but with God on his side, and entered the city promising to leave. Yet soon he was speaking not about evacuation, but about the fact that for Egypt to be secure, ‘the Mahdi must be smashed up’.
In a matter of weeks, however, he was in no position to smash up anyone. He was stuck in Khartoum, surrounded by 30,000 jihadists. His earlier announcement that he would not be staying had had the predictable – if not predicted – effect of ensuring that there was no incentive for anyone to join him. What had begun as an evacuation had turned into a siege. There were occasional negotiations, in one of which the Mahdi’s emissaries invited Gordon to surrender and become a Muslim. The rest of the time, it was a question simply of enduring. The Mahdi aimed to starve the town into surrender. Gordon – in careless disobedience of his orders – lived in hope of a relief column arriving.
But it was not only Gordon who was besieged. So too were Gladstone and his government, for Gordon continued to send his torrent of messages, some of which were published, and the public clamoured for the cabinet to dispatch a force to rescue a national hero. Gladstone hated the idea, but finally gave in when his Secretary for War, Lord Hartington, threatened to resign. General Wolseley was ordered to assemble a relief expedition. ‘It’s funny that a man whom it took one journalist to send should take our only general, two thousand camels, a thousand boats, and ten thousand men to bring back,’ remarked a knowing diplomat. But it was already too late. The expedition took months to make its way towards Khartoum, while inside the town things went from difficult to dreadful. Gordon was virtually alone in his rooms in the palace, scanning the landscape beyond the town through his telescope, praying, reading his Bible and writing his journal on scraps of paper and telegraph forms. As ever, this impossible character was greatly aware of the impression he made – a merchant who visited Gordon later recalled begging him not to light candles in the windows, for fear of giving his presence away to the enemy. At this, the general became furious, lit candles all over the room, put a lantern on a table by one of the windows and sat at it. He turned to the merchant and said, ‘When God was portioning out fear to all the people in the world, at last it came to my turn, and there was no fear left to give me. Go and tell all the people of Khartoum that Gordon fears nothing, for God has created him without fear.’ In his journal, which he decorated with cartoon sketches, he notes that he shares his meals with a mouse, despises the indolence and slovenliness of his Egyptian soldiers and dreams of never having to return to Britain: he would rather live like a tribesman with the Mahdi than be obliged to go out to dinner in London every night. On 14 December 1884 he sent a message reading:
NOW MARK THIS, if the Expeditionary Force, and I ask for no more than two hundred men, does not come in ten days, the town may fall; and I have done my best for the honour of my country. Good-bye
C. G. Gordon
You send me no information, though you have lots of money.
C.G.G.
Characteristically, this was followed, two weeks later, by a message which said the precise opposite: ‘Khartoum is all right. Could hold out for years. CG Gordon. 29.12.84’.
This was nonsense. As even the Mahdi knew from the deserters who crossed to his lines, by now almost every living thing that could be eaten – even rats – had been devoured. The waters of the Nile, which had provided a natural defence, were falling all the time. At around three in the morning of 26 January 1885 Khartoum was woken by the sound of tens of thousands of jihadists swarming into the town. It was all over very quickly and very savagely. Gordon’s contempt for his Egyptian troops had been justified, and in their emaciated state they were unable to put up much of a fight anyway. The Mahdi’s men were aflame with what they conceived to be holy passion and stormed on towards the palace. Gordon had positioned himself on the roof, picking off invaders as they approached. Finally, they swarmed so close that he could no longer point the gun down at them over the edge of the roof. If he had had any hope of saving his life earlier in the fight, by this stage he must have known that the end for which he had professed such enthusiasm was at hand. He returned to his room and put on his white uniform. Then, taking his revolver and sword, he went and stood at the top of the stairs to await the inevitable. It was shortly before sunrise.
There are several different versions of what happened next. Some accounts have Gordon going down fighting, but the preferred story was that he stood at the head of the steps and faced down his attackers for some seconds, until, with a cry of ‘O cursed one, your time has come,’ one of them gathered his wits, lunged forward and drove his spear into Gordon’s body. Apart from having him in the wrong uniform, this was the scene depicted in George William Joy’s picture of a stiff-upper-lipped Englishman glaring down contemptuously at the dozen attackers about to stab him to death. For once, the word ‘iconic’ is appropriate, for the image of the lone, outnumbered white man about to fall to a mass of alien weapons, one hand hanging by his side, the other across his breast, really became an icon of empire. It fitted the imperial belief of a lonely mission to an ungrateful world. The popularity of the painting was nothing to do with Sudan, which much of the British population would have been hard put to identify on a map. The place did not matter. What they cared about was an idea of what the empire was about, not money or power, but moral purpose, perfectly expressed through a half-cracked general.
The Mahdi had wanted to take Gordon alive, for his plan was to keep him in chains until he abandoned his faith and became a Muslim. But in the frenzy Gordon’s head was hacked from his body, which was tossed down a well. The head – the blue eyes half closed, the hair now apparently white – was taken away in a cloth, shown to the Mahdi and then stuck in the branches of a tree, where every passing child could throw a stone at it. Inside Khartoum, there followed two days of looting, killing and rape. Women who survived were placed in cages, so that the Mahdi’s senior officers could choose whom they wanted as concubines. The British relief column finally reached Khartoum, on 28 January 1885, on what would have been Gordon’s fifty-second birthday. It was two days late. The British retreated down the Nile.
News of the catastrophe reached London in the first week of February. The poet and anti-imperialist Wilfrid Scawen Blunt had despised the whole venture, characterizing the rescue force as ‘a mongrel scum, of thieves from Whitechapel and Seven Dials, commanded by young fellows … without beliefs, without traditions, without other principle’, so he was one of the very few people not to see it as a disaster. He said he could ‘not help singing all the way down in the train’ from London to the countryside. For public opinion generally, the news struck like a torrential thunderstorm. By choosing to defend Khartoum, instead of merely evacuating those who wished to leave the city, Gordon had disobeyed his orders and he freely conceded in his diary that if he had been in charge, he would never have employed himself, ‘for I am incorrigible’. As Baring remarked later, ‘A man who habitually consults the Prophet Isaiah when he is in a difficulty is not apt to obey the orders of anyone.’
But Gordon’s wilfulness and disobedience didn’t matter – to the public he was a hero. And more than a hero, a martyr, whose death sanctified the imperial mission. For days crowds gathered at Downing Street in the hope of jeering Gladstone for having failed to send the rescue mission soon enough – the Grand Old Man, o
r GOM, as he had previously been known, became the MOG – Murderer of Gordon. Queen Victoria wrote a letter in her own hand to Gordon’s sister. ‘That the promises of support were not fulfilled – which I so frequently and so constantly pressed on those who asked him to go – is to me grief inexpressible! Indeed it has made me ill … I do so keenly feel, the stain left upon England, for your dear Brother’s cruel, though heroic fate!’ The composer Sir Edward Elgar planned to write a symphony about him. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote that ‘England stands before the world dripping with blood and daubed with dishonour.’ General Wolseley was said to have taught his dog to growl at the mention of Gladstone’s name. Gordon’s chief advocate in the press, Stead, depicted a saint who had broken off from his military duties during the siege ‘to try to nurse a starving little black baby into life’ and who had seen himself as no more than ‘the passive instrument of a Higher Power’. The tribute he wrote for the Pall Mall Gazette even now reads as if tear-stained. ‘In him were incarnate the characteristics of the heroes of our national story. The chivalry of Arthur of the Round Table, the indomitable valour and saintly life of the Great Alfred, and the religious convictions of Oliver the Protector.’ It ended: ‘If in the defence of England’s honour it is necessary to go to Khartoum, it is not to avenge Gordon’s death,’ because the general had taken himself there only out of duty to God, to empire and to ‘the poor Soudanese’. Britain owed it to its own higher calling to destroy the Islamists.
Empire Page 20
