The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire (32 page)

The Taipings captured Nanking and made it their capital in 1853. Aiding Hung were his chief lieutenants, his wangs (kings), who become warlords in their own right. One proclaimed himself the Holy Ghost and criticized Hung—and was executed for his impertinence. By 1860 the Taipings were threatening the international entrepôt of Shanghai. Though Shanghai was guarded by a small force of French and British troops, the city's merchants thought it prudent to raise an army of their own, the Shanghai Foreign Arms Corps, later and better known as the Ever Victorious Army, under the command of American soldier of fortune Frederick Townsend Ward. Ward, however, was killed in 1862, the year Captain Gordon arrived as chief officer of engineers for the British general Charles Stavely. Stavely had orders to clear the Taipings from a thirty-mile radius of Shanghai. He was impressed by Gordon and recommended he command the Ever Victorious Army, which had fallen into indiscipline and disarray since Ward's death.

In March 1863, Gordon, now a brevet-major, was given leave from the British Army, made a mandarin, and appointed commander of the Ever Victorious Army, a body of an estimated 4,000 Chinese and assorted rascally American and European mercenaries. Gordon brought with him five British officers and set to work whipping his new army into shape (and whipping the Taipings simultaneously). He uniformed his men, disciplined them,
drilled them, barracked them, and let them know he cared for them, sick, wounded, or well; he banned hard liquor and looting; and he led them into battle calmly smoking a cigar and waving a bamboo cane (after having thoroughly scouted the enemy positions). The Ever Victorious Army now lived up to its name, and Gordon showed his tactical acumen in organizing its handful of small steamships for combined naval and land operations. The Taipings feared him and the Manchu authorities respected him, even if they disliked his insistent independence. He had told Li Hung Chang, the provincial governor and leader of the Manchu forces against the Taipings, that he would defeat the rebels in eighteen months. He did, though Gordon quarreled violently with Li whom he suspected of ordering the decapitation of several Taiping wangs who had surrendered on conditions of clemency. In protest, Gordon turned down the emoluments offered him by the Chinese emperor, though he did accept elevation to the highest rank of Chinese general and the award of a yellow jacket, which had been granted to only forty Mandarins and never before to a European.

In the British press, he earned the moniker “Chinese” Gordon. Yet whatever fame he gained—and he certainly did not seek it; he shunned social invitations and avoided and disparaged dinner parties—did not lead to fortune. Gordon made a habit of spurning financial rewards for himself; whatever money he had flowed through his fingers to others. Sir Frederick Bruce, the British minister at Peking, noted that “Not only has he [Gordon] refused any pecuniary reward but he has spent more than his pay in contributing to the comfort of the officers who served under him and in assuaging the distress of the starving population whom he relieved from the yoke of their oppressor [the Taipings].”
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The last thing Gordon wanted was to build forts in England, yet that was the next command he was given. He wanted postings abroad and he wanted action, but did his engineering chores with his usual impressive energy; he also spent hours every afternoon and evening working with the poor and
needy as part of his Christian commitment and kept his early mornings reserved for private Bible study and prayer. The great epiphany that motivated Gordon was the idea that God is within us, or within every believer in Jesus Christ—that was the lamplight of his Christian faith.
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Gordon did not have another foreign posting until October 1871 when he was appointed to map out navigation rights on the Danube; it proved dull
work, but he met Nubar Pasha, a powerful adviser to the khedive in Egypt who offered him a better posting: the khedive wished to make Gordon governor of Equatoria in the southern Sudan, replacing another Briton, the explorer Sir Samuel Baker. Gordon agreed, pending the approval of the British government, which granted its assent in September 1873.

Gordon, the former Chinese general, now became an Ottoman general, and took with relish to abolishing the slave trade. He crushed the slavers by force when he found them, won over previously hostile tribes, and built way stations along the Nile. In 1877, after a period of leave in England (which is what it amounted to, though he had officially resigned in protest at the khedive not expanding his governing powers), the khedive coaxed Gordon to return as governor-general of the entire Sudan, giving him the military rank of Egyptian field marshal. Gordon's program was the same—establishing peace, eliminating corruption (a never-ending task, he found), and most of all laboring to end the slave trade (if not slavery itself), which, along with ivory was the centerpiece of the Sudanese economy. He rode at speed everywhere on his camel, dropping unsuspecting among tribes and potential rebels demanding—and usually winning—their fealty. He was also something of a dealmaker, frequently trying to find ways to employ the slavers who were among the canniest and most powerful men in the country. He abolished whipping in Khartoum, cancelled projects the government could not afford (including a railway along the Nile), and defended “his” people (the Sudanese) against the khedive's French and British creditors. The arrival of a new khedive provided an exhausted Gordon with the opportunity to resign; he left Egypt in January 1880.

For the next four years he was an officer with, in essence, a roving independent
commission. He was offered a colonial military appointment in South Africa, work in the Congo by the king of Belgium, and the position of private secretary to Lord Ripon, governor-general of India, which he accepted but resigned almost as soon as he started. He launched his own diplomatic peace initiative in China, traveled in Ireland to study the Irish question (and was entirely sympathetic to the Irish peasants), was free with political and military advice in letters to
The Times
(he loathed Disraeli for supporting the Turks against the Greeks and because Gordon thought the Tories were more concerned with penny-pinching than empire-building; but the anti-imperialist Liberals were hardly better)
,
was assigned as chief of engineers on Mauritius (where he developed some interesting theories on the Garden of Eden, which he located in the Seychelles), and saw diplomatic service in Basutoland. He spent a year on leave in the Holy Land where he mapped, to his own satisfaction, the actual sites of many Biblical events, and then finally accepted the Belgian king's renewed offer of governing the Congo. But the British government had other ideas.

In the Sudan, a religious visionary of fanatical aspect, Mohammed Ahmed, styling himself the Mahdi, had declared a jihad against all who stood against him. His dervishes swept across the country as the sword of Islam and slaughtered an Egyptian army led by a British officer, General (in Egyptian rank) William Hicks. The British government, which had taken responsibility for Egypt and the Sudan, had to do something, and that something, it was decided, was to withdraw from the Sudan as quickly as possible. The press, however, was clamoring for Gordon to be sent to the Sudan. Over the skepticism of Sir Evelyn Baring, British Consul-General in Cairo (who had experience of Gordon), Prime Minister William Gladstone, and even Lord Granville, the foreign secretary who had proposed the idea, it was decided to send Gordon to report on the military situation in the Sudan and how best to evacuate the Europeans and Egyptians. Though it was impossible to believe Gordon would merely file a report, he had proven a remarkable power over native peoples, and it was hoped he might achieve a face-saving exit.

Reappointed as governor-general, he entered Khartoum in February 1884 to the hosannas of the Sudanese; their miracle-worker had come. He had, however, let slip that the Egyptian government might abandon the Sudan, which cost him the support of wavering Sudanese leaders, who plumped for making their peace with the Mahdi. To regain some of their support, Gordon affirmed he would not abolish slavery. This brought cheers from influential Sudanese—and cries of disbelief from Gordon's anti-slavery supporters in Britain. In addition, he abolished taxes for two years and promised an end to the heavy-handed ways of the Egyptians, burning debt books and whips, and freeing prisoners. He came as a liberator, “without soldiers, but with God on my side, to redress the evils of the Sudan.”
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Having failed to buy off the Mahdi with an offer of making him ruler of a Sudanese province, Gordon immediately set to planning how he could defend Khartoum and “smash up” the dervishes. Though his request for British troops was denied, he assured the people that a relief expedition would be on the way.
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The Mahdi meanwhile was picking off Egyptian forts and setting a noose around Khartoum. By March he was shelling the city and by May he had cut off any hope for an evacuation along the Nile by capturing Berber.

Gordon used his considerable skills as a military engineer and tactician to strengthen Khartoum's defenses with ditches, mines, and gunboats. With his flair for drama and his taste for perpetual action, Gordon remained an inspiring figure to the Sudanese: facing an empty treasury, he designed and signed his own banknotes; he burst open the stores of grain merchants who
had hid their wares to reap greater profits; he set up a system of relief for the starving poor; he sent troops sallying into the desert to smite the besiegers; and he worked endlessly to rally morale. He capitalized on his own famous lack of fear: “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, tell the people of Khartoum that Gordon fears nothing, for God has created him without fear.”
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But even Gordon knew time was running out. On 14 December 1884, he wrote, “Now MARK THIS, if the Expeditionary Force, and I ask for no more than two hundred men,
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does not come in ten days,
the town may fall
; and I have done my best for the honour of our country.”
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With Garnet Wolseley's relief force fighting its way up the Nile, the Mahdi almost gave up the siege, until he was informed of a weak point in the city's defenses—a point that Gordon had ordered repaired, but that the exhausted, starving Egyptian troops had left vulnerable. On 26 January 1885, the three hundred and twentieth day of the siege of Khartoum, the dervishes struck full force against the city. They burst through the weak point, slaughtering all in their path. When they finally reached the palace of Gordon Pasha he stood before them, armed with a sword and a revolver, at the top of a flight of stairs. There was a sudden silence as the horde looked at the calm figure who had kept them at bay so long. A dervish broke the silence shouting, “O cursèd one, your time has come!” and hurled a spear into Gordon's chest. “His only reply was a gesture of contempt. Another spear transfixed him; he fell, and the swords of three Dervishes . . . instantly hacked him to death.”
¹⁴
Gordon's head was severed, presented to the Mahdi, and then made the sport of birds.

The relief expedition arrived two days too late. Gladstone was blamed—not just in popular opinion but by Queen Victoria: “To think that all this might have been prevented and many precious lives saved by earlier action is too frightful.”
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But Gordon would be avenged. Although it would come more than a decade later, the retaliatory sword would be wielded by another
stalwart imperialist of piercing blue eye: the perfect recruiting poster, Major-General Sir Horatio Herbert (as he then was) Kitchener.