Chapter V: Gordon’s Last Mission

THE problem of how, notwithstanding Gordon’s well-known views about the Soudan and Egypt, and the recollection of his past conflicts with our diplomacy both at Cairo and in Downing Street, and the belief entertained there of his madness, he came to be once more employed by Gladstone’s Government, and sent to Khartoum on a mission ostensibly not of his own choosing, and then left to perish, is one of perennial interest, which history has not yet finally solved. It has been variously dealt with by official apologists as well as by Gordon’s friends. Morley has given an authoritative version of it in his “Life of Gladstone,” Fitzmaurice another in his “Life of Granville,” and Cromer yet a third in his “Modern Egypt”; but they none of them agree; while opposed to them we have Sir Henry Gordon’s and Egmont Hake’s narratives, supplemented by Stead’s account of his own part in it, and no few other annalists who each has added his contribution to the general knowledge. Above all we have Gordon’s own diary at Khartoum, and we have the Blue Books, a body of official information bulkier, perhaps, than that concerning any individual ever employed by the British Government since Blue Books were first published. Nevertheless I doubt if the whole truth has yet been told, or the real reasons given, or the responsibility of failure placed quite on the right shoulders. I will endeavour to supply the lacking evidence and reconcile the various narratives.

The first official suggestion of Gordon’s re-employment in Egypt seems to have been due to Sir Charles Wilson, that excellent engineer officer who, it will be remembered (see “Secret History”) did such good service to Egypt and the cause of justice at the time of Arabi’s trial. Wilson was at that time very closely in Lord Dufferin’s confidence, having served under him as perambulating Consul-General for some years in Asia Minor; and, being a personal friend and fellow officer of Gordon’s and better acquainted than any Englishman then at Cairo with Soudanese affairs, he was consulted by Dufferin on the subject as soon as the latter arrived in Egypt. The result was a despatch, dated 18th November 1882, in which, after repeating Wilson’s opinion, Dufferin adds: “It can be understood that the Khedive should be unwilling to abandon a country with such possibilities of development; and it is probable that, if only some person like Colonel Gordon could be found to undertake its administration, fairly good government might be maintained there without drawing upon Egypt either for men or money. Colonel Gordon I believe has already broken up and disorganized in a great measure the former centres of the slave traffic, and the same energy and ability which has gone so near to effecting this difficult task ought to be sufficient to keep the country in order.”

Although, as already explained, I do not believe that at that date, and apart from a change of Khedive and a reconstruction of the National party at Cairo, Gordon could have effected any permanent settlement of the Soudan trouble unsupported by an adequate military force from without, there was still a chance that something of the sort might have succeeded.

It is just possible that, if Gordon had been sent at once to Khartoum, and that if, as was being talked of at the end of the year 1882, Wilson had succeeded Malet at Cairo, and a Nationalist Ministry been reinstated, even under Tewfik, Gordon might have succeeded in reconstituting an effective government at Khartoum in opposition to the Mahdi, though I doubt it for the reasons already given. At any rate the suggestion was not adopted—it is probable that Riaz and the other Pashas of the restored regime opposed it[20]—and nothing more came of it than the sending of Colonel D. H. Stewart to Khartoum “to report,” and a little later, January 1883, to an offer made by Dufferin to Wilson that he should himself go to Khartoum as Governor-General. Wilson, I think, wisely declined this, for it was already too late; and on his refusal Hicks was entrusted with the thankless task, with the result we have seen.

Stewart’s report of affairs on arrival at Khartoum proved of the most pessimistic kind. He placed the Mahdi’s followers at 338,000 men, and recommended the abandonment of the southern and eastern provinces to their own chiefs, and Darfour to its original Royal Family. He pronounced the Egyptians “quite unfit in every way to undertake such a trust as the government of so vast a country with a view to its welfare”—and in opposition to Wilson, who believed in the Soudan as a country of great prospective wealth, he pronounced it to be a financial burden on Egypt hardly worth retaining.

While mentioning the names of these two distinguished officers, Wilson and Stewart, who were destined to play each of them a tragic part in the coming drama of Gordon’s defence of Khartoum, I will say what I remember of them personally, for it so happened that I met them both at Aleppo in the summer of 1881. They were travelling together at the time, employed on special service as consuls in Asia Minor, under the terms of the Cyprus Convention, and they were both staying, as I was, for some days in the house of the British Consul. They were men of very different types and characters. Wilson shared many of Gordon’s characteristics. He was a serious man, with a large knowledge of the East, and much sympathy with its peoples, altogether humane and lovable. Like Gordon, he was a biblical scholar and greatly interested in the topography of such of the lands in which he travelled as were connected with the Old and New Testaments. He had served with Palmer and others on the Palestine Exploration Staff, and was full of learning on the subjects that interested him. After our meeting at Aleppo he travelled with us to Scanderoon, and on by sea as far as Smyrna, where we parted company. I have always retained a very pleasant recollection of him and a high respect for his character. Stewart, on the other hand, though also a hard worker and a man of ability, was of a quite different type. He was a smart young cavalry captain of Hussars, the 11th, with all the ordinary English officer’s contempt for “natives” and inability to deal courteously with them. Though I found him an excellent fellow in other ways, our ideas on the East differed entirely. He was all for the extension of English authority, and had little sympathy with Orientals. He was desirous, at the moment, of visiting the Anazeh tribes, from some of which I had just come, and I gave him letters to two or three of the leading Anazeh Sheykhs, my friends. But he, after gallopping about the desert for some weeks with a Turkish escort, gave up his attempt, having failed to get into pleasant relations with any of them; they “were all,” he explained to me, “such rogues and liars.” I judge his character by this. He was a good, active, fearless young Englishman, with all our English virtues, but too little fellow feeling with ways not English to succeed in inspiring Eastern confidence. In one of his dispatches from Khartoum he expresses his “contempt and disgust” for what he holds to be the “cowardice” of the poor exiled Arabist soldiers at Khartoum, sent to die in a cause they abhorred. He could not understand their unwillingness as soldiers to fight.

Lord Cromer’s high opinion of Stewart was justified by the fact that both in their separate ways were typical of our English intolerance of Oriental character, and one needs no other explanation than this to understand how it was that Stewart and Gordon failed to pull together. Stewart’s death by treachery at Arab hands was one of the minor tragedies of the Nile campaign. His report, nevertheless, of February 1883, was an able one, and had considerable influence on Soudanese policy. Dufferin, in his own report, written about the same time as Stewart’s, adopts more than one of his ideas, and though Dufferin takes a far more cheerful view of the situation, as was natural in a man of his hopeful Irish nature, he recommends with Stewart the abandonment of the western provinces. “Some persons,” says Dufferin, “are inclined to advise Egypt to withdraw altogether from the Soudan and her other acquisitions in that region. But she can hardly be expected to acquiesce in such a policy. Possessing the lower ranges of the Nile, she is naturally inclined to claim dominion along its entire course; and when it is remembered that the territories in question, if properly developed, are capable of producing inexhaustible supplies of sugar and cotton, we cannot be surprised at her unwillingness to abandon them. Unhappily, Egyptian administration in the Soudan has been almost uniformly unfortunate. The success of the present Mahdi . . . is a sufficient proof of the Government’s inability either to reconcile the inhabitants to its rule or to maintain order. The consequences have been most disastrous.” He then goes on to say that he places high hopes on General Hicks, who has just been appointed Chief of the Staff at Khartoum, and to suggest the construction of a Souakin to Berber railway, which would “change all the elements of the problem. . . . The finances of the Soudan once rehabilitated . . . commerce would eventually extend the blessings of civilization for some distance through the surrounding region. I apprehend, however,” he concludes, “that it would be wise upon the part of Egypt to abandon Darfur, and perhaps Kordofan, and to be content with maintaining her jurisdiction in the provinces of Khartoum and Senaar.”

This part of the report, we know from Wilson’s biographer, was practically Wilson’s own; and we know also that Wilson and Gordon were at one on the subject, and there can be little doubt that, if Dufferin had had full power at the date of his report to deal with the Soudan, and if Wilson had gone there, such would have been his instructions. As it was, the Foreign Office resolved on doing nothing, and Hicks was left unaided and undirected. It was not till nine months later that the question of either Wilson or Gordon was brought forward by Lord Granville. It came about in this way.

In the fortnight immediately following the news of Hicks’s disaster, Gordon, who had powerful friends both at Cairo, in Sir Charles Watson and Sir Evelyn Wood, and at the War Office, in Lord Wolseley and Reginald Brett (Lord Esher), had his name brought forward, whether consciously or unconsciously I am not sure, in official circles as a possible saviour of what was now an almost hopeless situation at Khartoum. At the War Office it was known that Gordon, though he considered himself engaged to King Leopold for the Congo, would not in his secret heart be otherwise than glad to take the affairs of the Soudan once more in hand. He was beginning to chafe at his long inaction in the Holy Land, and had a longing for his old life of active employment; and, at the suggestion probably of Hartington, and perhaps also of Northbrook, with whom Gordon was in occasional correspondence, Lord Granville, so we are informed by Fitzmaurice, wrote to Gladstone, 27th November: “Do you see any objection to using Gordon in some way? He has an immense name in Egypt, he is popular at home, he is a strong but very sensible opponent of slavery, he has a small bee in his bonnet. If you do not object I could consult Baring by telegraph.” To this Gladstone consented, and the telegram, which appears in the Blue Books, was dispatched to Cromer, 1st December: “If General Charles Gordon were willing to go to Egypt would he be of any use to you or to the Egyptian Government, and if so in what capacity?” Cromer, however, without ceremony refused the offer. He explains in “Modern Egypt” that his real reason for refusing was that he knew Gordon to be an entirely unfit person for the task, and that the reason he gave at the time of the Egyptian Government’s being unwilling to send a Christian to Khartoum, in view of the religious feeling there, was not the true one; and he proceeds to give his reasons, founded on his knowledge of Gordon’s character, for his belief in the unfitness, though he says nothing of their personal quarrel in 1878, or of the ill-relations in past years between Gordon and Tewfik.

It is certain all the same that Gordon’s status as a Christian was a perfectly sound reason with Sherif for refusing his appointment, as Gordon himself discovered when it was too late, three months afterwards. And I cannot help suspecting that the whole plea of personal “unfitness,” put forward in “Modern Egypt,” has been an afterthought on Cromer’s part, devised to screen his own share in Gordon’s mission and its failure. That Cromer and Gordon were personally antipathetic we know. But, except as a Christian, it is nonsense to talk of Gordon as an “unfit” person for such a duty as was then proposed. It had not at that time been as yet decided that Khartoum was to be evacuated, and no Englishman could have possibly been more fit than Gordon to hold it, if that was possible, against the Mahdi, and restore the Khedive’s lost authority. What Gordon was really unfit for, was to be the obedient agent of a shifty and treacherous diplomacy, nominally a servant of Egypt, but ready to execute any order of the British Agency at Cairo, and to defend or betray his Egyptian employers at English bidding. Cromer’s idea of loyalty and fitness for service in Egypt was always that of loyalty to himself. Gordon’s was a quite different idea. He held that an Englishman, accepting employment and receiving pay from a foreign prince, was bound in honour to do the best he could, not for his own country’s diplomatic interests, but for the advantage of the prince and people he served. If Cromer had told us the whole of his thought in “Modern Egypt,” we should have found it to be this, and that it was in this sense only, and of his own personal dislike that his objection to Gordon on the ground of “unfitness” must be understood.

Still less is there any truth in what he goes on to say that at this time, December 1883, his hand was forced about Gordon by the London press, and especially the “Pall Mall Gazette”; for such is the reverse of fact and easily disproved. Any one who will take the trouble of looking through the files of the chief London newspapers of that date will find hardly any mention in them at all of Gordon. Indeed, the press seems to have been quite ignorant of the proposal made regarding him. During the whole of that year, 1883, Gordon had been all but ignored by the English public; and, with the exception of two “headed articles” in the “Times,” written early in the year while Dufferin was still considering the appointment of Hicks, and one or two references to Gordon in the “St. James’s Gazette,” I can find absolutely nothing about him. As to the “Pall Mall,” that paper was on all matters where Egypt was concerned run strictly on Gladstonian lines, advocating the evacuation of the country at the earliest possible date, and with regard to the Soudan complete abstention. All the earlier part of the year Morley had been still its editor; and he, having experienced a revulsion of feeling in regard to the attitude his paper had taken in bringing about the war of 1882, was now in a mood of anti-Imperialist repentance, nor had the “Pall Mall” changed its tone when Morley, having entered Parliament, left his desk in Northumberland Street at the end of August.

William Stead, the new editor, who four months later was to run Gordon for the Soudan, and be the chief advocate of accepting responsibility in Egypt, was still in October reproving the Tory press for this very advocacy, and indignant with the “Times” for its protest against the withdrawal of the troops. As to Gordon, the only mention of him is one rather of depreciation, written at the time of the first news of Hicks’ defeat, and the article might have emanated from the pen of Lord Cromer himself; “Sir Samuel Baker,” says Stead in a leading article, 20th November, on the disaster in Kordofan, “fought and conquered in the same region, and it was also the scene of the labours of Colonel Gordon, but although we should have lamented the fate of either of these daring adventurers, no one dreamed that their defeat and death would have entailed any responsibility upon the English Government. The fact that since Gordon’s resignation we have occupied the Delta makes no difference in our relation to the officers in command of the Egyptian forces in the Soudan. Whether Hicks falls, or whether he conquers is not our business. _Not a single British soldier will be ordered to Khartoum if the Mahdi were to rout the whole force under the orders of the Khedive’s officers_. . . . The question arises whether Sir E. Baring ought not to tell the Egyptian Government that this kind of folly has gone on long enough, and that there would be no chance of the re- establishment of its prestige, credit, and independence, until its ambition in the Soudan is restricted within a manageable compass.”

This article, be it noted, was published just a week before Granville’s proposal to send Gordon, and, while it stands in strange contrast with Stead’s pronouncements of two and three months later, it contradicts absolutely Lord Cromer’s excuse that the sending of Gordon was forced on the Government by Stead. It is a mere juggling with the issue to shift the date of the pressure exercised by the press in January and February, 1884, back to November and December 1883. I will return to this matter of the “Pall Mall” and the London press later. What is of more historical importance is to show, as can easily be done by a reference to the Blue Books and to his own avowals, that Cromer, in spite of his attempt to shift the responsibility of the Gordon mission from his own on to the back of the London public, was himself, in all but the individual choice of Gordon as its instrument, the responsible proposer of the mission. The facts are these:

Lord Cromer tells us that his first anxiety about Hicks and the Soudan was in consequence of a talk with Giegler Pasha on 19th November, the day before the article last quoted. Giegler seems to have infected Cromer with something of the panic at that time beginning to prevail at Khartoum; and, taking as he did a purely financial view of the situation, he straightway telegraphed to Granville that, if Hicks should be beaten, “the wisest course for the Egyptian Government to adopt would be to accept defeat and fall back on whatever point of the Nile they could hold with confidence.” There is nothing, however, to show that at that time he meant more by this advice than to repeat Dufferin’s recommendation of a withdrawal from the southern and western provinces, and a concentration on Khartoum and Suakin. Indeed I think it is pretty clear that it was so understood at the Foreign Office when Granville the next day replied, “If consulted, recommend the abandonment of the Soudan _within certain limits_.” It was then that the idea of Gordon’s being sent was suggested; and certainly if an Englishman was to go in order to carry out the abandonment Gordon was the obvious man. There was, indeed, nobody else to do it with anything like as good a chance of success. The only English officer then at Khartoum was Colonel Coetlogon, an acknowledged incapable, who had telegraphed that Khartoum could not hold out two months against the Mahdi, while Gordon, though not dispatched till January, and though ultimately unsuccessful, managed by his great energy and military genius to keep the Egyptian flag flying at Khartoum for nearly twelve months after Coetlogon’s date. Yet Cromer in his “Modern Egypt” says he judged Gordon for this purpose, “an unfit person.” The next stage in the affair is that, the panic at Khartoum still continuing, Cromer on the 3rd December writes a long dispatch, still under the influence of the panic, recommending a withdrawal of the Egyptian garrisons, not only to Khartoum or Berber, but even as far as to Wady Halfa, thus abandoning the Soudan in its entirety. It was probably Coetlogon’s continued telegrams that suggested it, and the unwillingness of the English Government to give any material assistance. And to this proposal Granville, on 13th December, at once assents, explaining that all the English Government is prepared to do is to “assist in maintaining order in Egypt proper, and in defending it as well as the ports in the Red Sea.”

By the 22nd December, however, we find Cromer in a different mood. He had found the Egyptian Government unable to “agree to the abandonment of the territories which they consider absolutely necessary for the security and even for the existence itself” of Egypt, and they were for invoking the aid of the Sultan and of Turkish troops. Moreover, the reports from Khartoum had begun to be less alarming; the Mahdi had not advanced to attack the place, and was lingering on at El Obeyd. Although Cromer does not say so precisely in his despatch of that date (22nd December), it is easy to read between the lines of it that the idea had occurred to him that, while insisting upon the abandonment of the whole Soudan by Egypt, it might be possible not to surrender it to the Mahdi, but to build up some other form of native self-government, under English direction at Khartoum, which should constitute a semi-civilized buffer state between Egypt and the Mahdi’s fanatical rule. The idea of this is to be found in the last sentences of his despatch, where, after recounting the difficulties attendant on the proposed withdrawal and the objections raised by Sherif Pasha, he goes on, in contradiction of his first alarmist dispatches: “The immediate position is not, I think, so alarming as appears to be thought in England. Dissensions seem to be rife among the tribes of the Soudan, some of the most important being opposed to the Mahdi. It is quite possible that by a judicious expenditure of money and by good management the Government of the Khedive may succeed in maintaining its authority northwards from Khartoum. They will not, however, be able to hold that country except on sufferance, and I believe them to be perfectly incapable of governing it properly.” Therefore they must be coerced into abandoning it, and he asks for power to coerce them. “The only way,” he says, “in which it can be carried out, will be for me to inform the Khedive that Her Majesty’s Government insist on the adoption of this course, and that if his present Ministers will not carry out the policy others must be named who will consent to do so.” Then he adds, disclosing here his thought: “_It would also be necessary to send an English officer of high authority to Khartoum with full power to withdraw the garrisons and to make the best arrangements possible for the future government of that country_.”

I recommend this dispatch to the renewed attention of historians, for in it lies not only the demand for new absolute powers to be undertaken by England in Egypt, but also in regard to the Soudan, the germ of that claim, afterwards enforced upon the Khedive in 1899, that Egypt should abandon the Soudan, leaving it to England to decide what later should be its status. The Egyptian Government was to withdraw its troops, but “an English officer of high authority” was to be sent to Khartoum, not only to insist upon the withdrawal, but also to provide the Soudan with a new government. One cannot help thinking that Cromer may have already contemplated what he afterwards carried out, the appropriation of the great Nile provinces to England herself.

At any rate it is quite certain that we see in this dispatch of 22nd December clearly set forth what was to be the Gordon mission, though Gordon himself is not named in it. An English officer was to go to Khartoum not only to bring away the garrison, as was afterwards pretended, but to re-establish order and set up a new political regime. It is characteristic of Cromer’s lack of scruple as a historian that, in order to evade admitting his initial responsibility for the mission and for its failure, he should have omitted, in quoting the concluding sentence of this dispatch in “Modern Egypt,” the essential word “English,” and should have altered it into “an officer of high authority,” thereby enabling him to make it appear that it was not Gordon or any Englishman, but an Egyptian officer he had in his mind when writing it. The omission can hardly have been an accident in a passage so important. Yet none of his critics so far have noticed the manœuvre.[21]

This brings us to the end of the year 1883, and almost to the date, 7th January 1884, of Gordon’s arrival from Palestine in England; and again I beg the attention of historians to what I am now going to say.

The particular choice of Gordon for the mission Cromer had proposed, though as we have seen his name had been more than once talked of at the Foreign Office, would probably never have been actually made and insisted on but for a combination of chances closely connected with a Cabinet intrigue just then coming to a head in London. Down to the end of the year 1883 nobody was thinking at all of Gordon in connection with actual circumstances in the Soudan, nor was anything known of Cromer’s proposal. Gordon had been away close on a year in Palestine, and had kept silence, an unusual thing with him, during the whole of it as far as the press was concerned. Not a dozen persons in England knew of his being on his way back to Europe, and his few friends at head-quarters looked upon him as being engaged to King Leopold for service on the Congo, and so out of the question for Khartoum—this although they knew also that the idea of the Soudan was once more present to his mind, since the defeat of Hicks, as a possibility and a temptation for his ambition. He had written to Wolseley to get him leave at the War Office to enter Leopold’s service, and on landing at Genoa had gone straight to Brussels, there to arrange terms with the King about the Congo. Except for a few reviews of Hake’s book “Chinese Gordon,” which had been published at Christmas time, I can find nothing about him in any of the London newspapers. And so things stood at the end of the year.

It would be a curious matter to speculate what might have been the respective fates of the Nile population and those of the Congo if Gordon’s contract, then all but signed, with Leopold had been carried into effect. It would probably have been for the welfare, or, let us say, the lesser suffering of both. It is difficult to think of the Congo venture taking the inhuman shape it did had Gordon ever had personally to do with it, and had he been left alive to protest against a violation of human rights so monstrous; while, on the other hand, the Egyptian Soudan might have been spared the destruction of four-fifths of its inhabitants at the blundering hands of our Government, and its present melancholy subjection to European rule. Chance, however, or whatever directs the destinies for good and evil in the world, ruled it otherwise, and Gordon, turned aside from the Congo, was to meet his fate, not there, but upon the Upper Nile, while the Congo was to become the scene of still greater horrors. Whose the hands were exactly that pulled the strings in the affair and sent him to his doom, and what was the relative amount of responsibility assignable to each of the chief actors, with the mystery of their secret motives, I have been at great pains to ascertain. This is how the thing, when carefully examined, appears to have come about.

Gordon’s return to Europe, as I have said, coincided very exactly with a crisis both in London and at Cairo closely connected with the mission he was a few days later to be entrusted with. Gladstone’s Cabinet had, at Cromer’s suggestion, agreed that the Khedive’s Government should be advised to evacuate the whole Soudan as far north as Wady Halfa, and the Khedive and Sherif Pasha, his Prime Minister, had refused, and Cromer had asked permission to add threats to advice, and to insist upon the advice being taken. The request involved an entire change in Gladstone’s Egyptian policy, which had, so far, been to assume a minimum of governing responsibility in Egypt proper, and none at all in the Soudan. On this point, however, he no longer could count upon a clear majority in his Cabinet, and parties within it were so evenly balanced that, as is usual in such cases, the London press was being called in to add weight to opinion on either side.

Moreover, the press being largely in the hands of capitalists and City financiers, it was happening, as is also usual in such cases, that the balance of journalistic opinion, directly it came to understand the position in the Cabinet, was as largely on the side where money interests were involved. These lay strongly with the continuation of the British occupation of Egypt, and with the undertaking by England, where the chance should be given, of new responsibilities. The house of Rothschild still held half the Domains Loan of £9,000,000 in its own hands, and the “Times” was its obedient organ. It needed therefore only a slight impulse from the War Office, which was the head-quarters of the faction opposed to Gladstone, to set the press in motion on the Soudan question; and on the first day of the year 1884, we find the “Times” publishing a strong letter from Sir Samuel Baker protesting against the abandonment of the Soudan by civilization, and urging the employment of British or Indian troops for the purpose of recovering it from the Mahdi. It was a powerful letter, and we find it supported by a leading article, as strongly recommending the assumption of full authority by England at Cairo and citing with regard to the Soudan the Dufferin recommendation of the year before, namely that, while Darfour and Kordofan might be abandoned, Khartoum and the northern and eastern provinces should be retained, that troops should be sent to Assouan, and that communication with the Red Sea should be reopened by the construction of a railway from Berber to Souakin. This was not only the Dufferin but also the Gordon policy, as was well known both to Samuel Baker and to those who inspired the “Times.” Baker was interested in the Soudan both by his former connection with it and by the fact that his brother Valentine (Baker Pasha) had just been ordered to Souakin to defend the Red Sea coast against Osman Digna the new Mahdist leader. In Baker’s letter to the “Times” occurs the first public suggestion I can find of Gordon’s being employed by the Government to solve the difficulty at Khartoum. It is not repeated in the “Times” article, nor is it more than a question “Why should not General Gordon Pasha be invited to assist the Government?”

Two days later, a Cabinet meeting being about to be held where the fate of the new policy of Egypt was to be decided, we find the “Pall Mall Gazette” yielding to the same influence and announcing its sudden conversion from the evacuationist Gladstonian view of Egyptian policy, of which it had been so stout and consistent a supporter, to that of Gladstone’s political opponents in the Cabinet. It opened its campaign by publishing the first of a series of leading articles on the crisis, issued on consecutive days and headed respectively, “Facing a Crisis,” “The Alternatives,” “Downing Street and Cairo,” and “The Drift of Events in Egypt.” All were sensational articles, and all in favour of the full authority in Egypt Cromer was demanding, namely, that of enabling him to coerce the Khedive, take the supreme power at Cairo into his own hands and assume sole responsibility in regard to the Soudan.

No one, I think, with any knowledge of journalism can doubt that a conversion so sudden and so violent can have been due to anything less than a Ministerial hint of the very directest kind. The decision of the Cabinet to undertake the new responsibility at Cairo was come to on the 3rd January, the date of the first “Pall Mall Gazette” article, but it was not known to the general public till the 7th, the date of the fourth article, and so must have been the result of private information from within the Cabinet, probably from the War Office and communicated by Brett, who was Hartington’s private secretary and his usual intermediary with the press, besides being an old member of the “Pall Mall” staff.[22] There is, however, as yet no mention in any of the “Pall Mall Gazette” articles of Gordon, nor can I find his name in any London paper except in the one phrase I have quoted from the “Times,” during that first week of the year, the reason doubtless being that Gordon’s few friends knew that on landing at Genoa he had gone straight to Brussels, _en route_ for the Congo. The only allusion to Gordon in the “Pall Mall Gazette” of that week is not in the articles, but in an “occasional note,” and again in the form of a query, “Chinese Gordon is to undertake the administration of the Congo. . . . Is it not a pity that at a time when so much other work is urgently wanting to be done in Egypt and elsewhere the ablest leader of irregular forces England has produced should be told off to the service of an International Association amid the swamps of the Congo?”

This was all that had been said about Gordon before his arrival at Southampton on the 7th. He had spent the best part of the week at Brussels before proceeding to England, and had found there on 2nd January a communication awaiting him from Wolseley, with whom he had been in correspondence, telling him that the permission he had asked for at the War Office to take service under King Leopold was refused him by the British Government. This had brought him in haste to England, and he had arrived at his sister’s house at Southampton so angry about the refusal that his first act had been to sign and send in his papers to the War Office resigning his commission in Her Majesty’s army. His brother Sir Henry tells us that the refusal was “more a Foreign Office than a War Office question, and the refusal emanated from the former.” Gordon took it to be due to a Foreign Office prepossession against him. It is possible, however, to read the refusal in another sense, and that Granville, who had already once proposed him to Cromer, and who was considering Cromer’s demand for an English officer, still wished to retain a hold over Gordon for the contingency of his being required at Khartoum; and this is how I am inclined to interpret it. It is difficult indeed to understand it otherwise, seeing that the Foreign Office must have just then received Cromer’s telegram asking for an officer to carry out a duty precisely such as Gordon was most fitted, indeed the only man fitted, to perform.

For these reasons, too, I refuse to accept as entirely reliable Mr. Stead’s claim to absolute independence of official inspiration in the matter of his celebrated interview with Gordon at Southampton, which took place on the day following the general’s arrival there. Mr. Stead’s genius may very well have conceived the idea of the visit as the particular form in which Gordon was to be advertised; but in view of the series of articles just alluded to, and knowing as I do the ways of journalism and the close connection there was that year between the “Pall Mall Gazette” and the War Office through Lord Esher, and having, moreover, been myself more than once interviewed by Mr. Stead, I find it impossible not to recognize in the sudden entrance of Gordon into the intrigue one of those manœuvres worked from time to time in the “Pall Mall” columns through Lord Esher’s agency.

We know from Fitzmaurice’s “Life of Granville” that the antagonism between Hartington and Gladstone did actually exist at the time, and that it had just then reached a critical stage; and we know that Hartington, as Secretary for War, must have been the Minister to whom the choice of an officer for Khartoum had been referred, and who, in fact, did a few days later decide it, and we know Lord Esher’s position at the War Office, and we know his connection with the “Pall Mall Gazette.” Lord Esher was Gordon’s friend, Mr. Stead at the time was not. Lord Esher was conversant with his movements, with his application for leave to serve King Leopold, with the refusal of his leave, and I decline to believe that there was no hint given on which Mr. Stead acted. In every newspaper office there are scores of such journalistic secrets never divulged and easily forgotten, and it seems to me vastly more probable that the Gordon “boom” was one of them.

What is quite certain is that, from the moment of the publication of the interview, the “Pall Mall” became avowedly the organ of that section of the Cabinet which was working for intervention in the Soudan, if necessary, by force of arms. If any one doubts this he needs to go no further than to the files of the “Pall Mall” for proof. There is among the rest a perfectly plain confession of the fact in a leading article of 14th February, where Stead thus excuses himself as the Liberal editor of a Liberal journal for his advocacy of the Gordon mission at a time when many Liberals were far from approving it. “From a mere party point of view,” Stead writes, “it is often the most useful thing a true Liberal can do to oppose the immediate policy of his party, for it is only by that means that he can secure the adoption of the policy which will give victory to his own side. _Cabinets, it must never be forgotten, are composite bodies, and the outsider who advocates a new departure is often the exponent of the views of those who in the secrecy of the council chamber have been hitherto unsuccessfully striving for the policy_ that makes for righteousness and peace. There are times when the most loyal followers may find it necessary to indicate to his leaders the path of safety which they may hitherto have been too preoccupied to perceive or too evenly divided to adopt.” The whole passage, and especially those words which I have italicized, is a very candid avowal of the position of things as between the “Pall Mall Gazette” and the section of the Cabinet represented by Hartington, and it was explained to me in this way on my return to England by those in a position to know.

With regard to the interview itself, perhaps the most important part of it in this regard are the phrases used in the leading article recommending the interview. It is a repetition and amplification of the question put by Sir Samuel Baker in his “Times” letter of a week before. “Why not,” asks Stead, “send Chinese Gordon with full powers to Khartoum to assume absolute control of the territory, to relieve the garrisons, and do what can be done to save what can be saved from the wreck in the Soudan? . . . No one can deny the urgent need in the midst of that hideous welter of confusion for the presence of such a man with a born genius for command and unexampled capacity for organizing ever- victorious armies and a perfect knowledge of the Soudan and its people. Why not send him out with _carte blanche_ to do the best that can be done?”

Here we have the Gordon mission exactly as it was sent, in fact if not nominally, by Her Majesty’s ministers nine days later, almost exactly as it had been proposed by Cromer in December, namely, the sending of “an English officer of high authority to Khartoum with full power to withdraw the garrisons and to make the best arrangements possible for the future government of that country.” Seeing that nothing as yet was known outside the public offices of Cromer’s dispatch or of his having made any such demand, and the extreme improbability of an identity of ideas between Stead and Cromer by mere journalistic inspiration, I think we may fairly conclude that the description by Stead of what Gordon was to effect at Khartoum was due to a War Office suggestion rather than mere accident. At any rate, it is absurd that Cromer, of all persons, should complain as he does in his “Modern Egypt” of the idea of the mission having been forced upon him by the “Pall Mall Gazette.” All that can fairly be said is that Stead, having got an inkling that such a mission had been demanded, put the dots promptly and powerfully on the _i_’s and named the only man capable of carrying it out effectually. It is difficult indeed to understand, notwithstanding all we know of Cromer’s dislike of Gordon and his recent protestations, that Gordon was absent from his mind when he penned his telegram of 22nd December. Lord Cromer has a convenient way of forgetting things when it suits him to forget, and it has probably suited him to forget this among the rest. At any rate, it is impossible to suggest another name.

Neither, I think, can it be pretended that Stead’s recommendation of Gordon for the post was so potent and instantaneous an influence at the Foreign Office as to have forced Granville’s hand unless Granville had been already willing. Between the publication of the “Pall Mall” interview and Lord Granville’s second proposal to Cromer of sending Gordon there was an interval of less than twenty-four hours, and it is far more likely that those in the Cabinet who wanted to send Gordon should have made use of Stead to popularize their plan than that Stead should have been able by his few words, however powerful, so suddenly to force it on them. Gordon’s views, publicly and forcibly stated in the “Pall Mall Gazette,” may possibly have quickened the pace, and this is all that can reasonably be affirmed about it. The real object of the press campaign of the past week, it is essential to understand, had been to force not Granville’s hand, but Gladstone’s. Granville needed no convincing. He was already of the Hartington faction in regard to Egypt. But Gladstone, it was known, would be difficult to persuade. Gladstone, unlike the rest, really wanted to get out of Egypt, he really wanted to have nothing to do with the Soudan, and he had only consented to the new responsibility undertaken at Cairo a fortnight before of making and unmaking ministries on its being explained to him that thus alone could he escape being involved in the further responsibility of Khartoum. It was necessary now to force his hand to the idea of sending up an “English officer of high authority” not only to withdraw the garrisons, but also to stay on at Khartoum and to “arrange a future government.” Gladstone could hardly be made to swallow this second dose of responsibility, except through pressure from outside the Cabinet, the pressure of public opinion, and this it was that was put upon him by Hartington through Stead and the magic of Gordon’s name. The “Pall Mall Gazette” had more than once been used to coerce Gladstone. It was the paper that he chiefly read.[23]

Granville’s position was quite different. It was an intermediate one between Gladstone’s and Hartington’s. A Whig by birth and tradition and, as Foreign Secretary in 1881-82, the member of the Cabinet most directly concerned in the aggression on Egypt, he needed no conversion at all to the idea of remaining on at Cairo or of a further commitment to responsibility in the Soudan, and he was certainly at one with Hartington on these points; but, on the other hand, Gladstone was his chief, with whom he could not afford to quarrel. He was poor and in debt, and dependent on Gladstone for his continuance in office. What made him of value in the Cabinet was his amiability. He was friends with both factions,[24] and was used by them both as go-between. In the present instance it was necessary to get Gladstone to go with Hartington the way the Whigs wanted. They had used the press, and precisely the “Pall Mall Gazette” under Morley, against him in the spring of 1882 when they wanted his consent for the sending of the fleet to bombard Alexandria. They were using the same “Pall Mall Gazette” under Stead now that they wanted his consent to the sending of an “English officer” to Sarawak the Soudan. They had pretended to Gladstone in 1882 that the mission of the fleet would be one of moral pressure only, to protect British subjects, and give moral support to the Khedive—no actual firing of guns, nothing at all like an armed intervention in Egypt, still less like a permanent occupation. They pretended to him now that Gordon’s mission was to be an entirely peaceful one, a tour of inspection, to withdraw the garrisons by peaceable means and return at once in a few weeks. Of course it was nothing really of the sort; it could not really be anything of the sort, and they knew it; it was to arrange a new government at Khartoum, and this could only be done by reorganizing a fighting force under Englishmen, and thus indirectly by an English occupation of Egypt indefinitely prolonged.

Any one who will take the trouble to go through all the documents of the case with an open mind will, I think, inevitably agree with this reading of the facts. It is the only one that accounts rationally for Gladstone’s position afterwards or for that of any one of those principally concerned. Morley, in his “Life of Gladstone,” would have one believe that Granville and Hartington, and Dilke and Northbrook, four level-headed English politicians, at least as much rogues politically as fools, went suddenly mad on Stead’s persuading them that Gordon was a miracle man. Cabinet Ministers, however, do not go mad in this way; their madnesses have much more method than that. Nor are they thus carried off their legs in twenty-four hours by a newspaper interview. It is they that inspire the newspapers, not the newspapers them; and, though Heaven knows they are guided at times by little enough wisdom, it is seldom to the press they go for their folly, especially at the Foreign Office. For the rest of the situation it is necessary to consider that Granville does not seem to have understood all when on the 9th, the evening of the day after Stead’s interview was published, he telegraphed to Cromer, “Would General Charles Gordon or Sir Charles Wilson be of assistance under altered circumstances in Egypt?”—the “altered circumstances” being of course Cromer’s assumption of all power. Stead’s _ballon d’essai_ had been well received in London by the morning papers, and Granville doubtless felt surer of his ground with Gladstone. The circumstances, however, had not been favourable to either Gordon or Wilson. Nubar hated Gordon, and the Khedive hated Wilson, who had baulked him in his intention of hanging Arabi;[25] and Cromer, who only wanted now an obedient agent at the end of a wire, and who knew Gordon was not the man implicitly to obey any of them, willingly joined Nubar and the Khedive in their refusal. Once more, therefore, Gordon was found to be “quite unfit,” and Cromer’s reply, 12th January, was, “I have consulted Nubar Pasha and I do not think that the services of General Gordon or Sir Charles Wilson can be utilized at present.”

Cromer in his “Modern Egypt” says that the man they had in view then was after all no Englishman, but an Egyptian, Abd-el-Kader Pasha, an excellent man doubtless for a job in the Soudan, but he does not explain Nubar’s objection to Gordon, and in order to avoid the difficulty of doing so, and of reconciling his refusal of either Englishman now offered him with his special request a few weeks before for an English officer, he drops, as we have seen, the word “English” out of his earlier telegram. The attempt to get Abd-el-Kader to undertake their work occupied another several more days in the final decision, and it was not till Gladstone’s and Cromer’s and Nubar’s consent had all been obtained, by the 16th, that the actual sending on the 18th was carried into effect. How this was engineered in London, and on what conditions, we will now examine, following Gordon’s steps from day to day in accordance with his recorded movements.

Stead’s interview with Gordon took place at Southampton on the 8th January, and was published on the afternoon of the 9th. It reached Gordon at Southampton on the morning of the 10th, and had on him a very disturbing influence. In the interview itself he had been careful not to suggest that he was himself willing to undertake the task proposed to him; on the contrary, he had suggested Sir Samuel Baker as the proper man for it. He looked upon the Soudan as a temptation to vain glory, and Stead’s suddenly thrusting him forward into the glare of publicity as a candidate for the duty troubled his conscience. In his heart he was tempted to go, if only the Government would send him, yet it was what he called his “Agag,” the thing he must “hew in pieces,” his besetting sin of “hailing the tram of the world.” It was in this double mood that he fled the same evening to the vicarage of his religious friend, Dr. Barnes, at Heavitree, near Exeter, there to take spiritual counsel, and also to see Baker, who lived in the neighbourhood, and consult with him as to what was to be done. Barnes’ story of this visit is brief, but enlightening and most characteristic of the man Gordon was. The worthy vicar thus records it:

“He [Gordon] found time to spend a night at Heavitree Vicarage, and on the morning of Friday the 11th of January, he received Holy Communion in the parish church. This, so far as I can trace his course, was, with one exception, his last communion. On the same morning he visited Bishop Temple, with whom, as we have seen from a letter already quoted, he had wished to ‘talk about those things’—the only things which seemed to him to be of really vital interest and importance.

“Later in the day he went on to Sandford Orleigh, Sir Samuel Baker’s house; and to those who accompanied him it was pleasant to see the meeting between the two ex-governors of the Soudan. While we were driving from Newton Abbot Station to Sandford Orleigh, Sir Samuel Baker pressed on Gordon the expediency of his again going to the Soudan as Governor-General, if Her Majesty’s Government should require it. Gordon was silent, but his eyes flashed, and an eager expression passed over his face as he looked at his host. Late at night, when we had retired, he came to my room, and said in a soft voice, ‘You saw me to-day?’ ‘You mean in the carriage?’ ‘Yes; you saw _me_—that was _myself_—the self I want to get rid of.’”

The same evening he wrote a letter to Baker—it was probably agreed between them that he should do so—in which he again urged Baker to accept the task, and gave him his idea of what would be necessary for successfully carrying it out. This letter Baker sent to the “Times,” and it appeared in that paper on the morning of the 14th. We will return to what he said in it later, when we consider precisely what those who sent him on his mission intended him to do. It had the effect of causing Granville to write that same day privately (note the humanitarian appeal) to Gladstone: “If Gordon says he believes he could by his personal influence excite the tribes to escort the Khartoum garrison and inhabitants to Suakin, a little pressure on Baring might be advisable. The destruction of these poor people would be a great disaster.” Also on the morning of the 15th, Gladstone’s consent having been obtained, Wolseley, who had already sent for Gordon, was commissioned to sound him as to his willingness to go, and found him to be so under certain conditions.

What these were, and what exactly passed between the two on the 15th, it is very difficult to disentangle from the conflicting evidence, for little of it was put in writing at the time, and the chief testimony regarding it rests upon the recollections of persons, or rather of partisans, all concerned in excusing themselves many years after the event. Thus Lord Esher (Brett) tells us that on that occasion, besides Wolseley, Gordon saw Hartington and Granville, but I think there must be some confusion of memory here in which the interview of the 15th has been mixed up with that of three days later, the 18th. Esher’s words are: “In January 1884, after his interviews with Lord Hartington and Lord Granville, Gordon came for the last time to Tilney Street. He was leaving for Brussels. I can see him now with his muffler and his warm coat walking about the nursery with my eldest son in his arms.” Now Gordon, in a letter from Brussels dated the 17th, says: “Brocklehurst is here with me. Government and authorities have been exceedingly kind and I have every reason to be grateful to them for I have often worried them and they have decided to let me stay on in H. M. S. (Service?).” This, as Brett was certainly in the best position to know, would seem conclusive as to the date, for Gordon left for Brussels the next morning, the 16th, but I feel sure that the visit described at Tilney Street was on the 18th, when Gordon certainly saw both Hartington and Granville. About the 15th, writing soon after the event, Sir Henry Gordon says very clearly, “on the 15th January General Gordon came up to London in accordance with a telegram from Lord Wolseley and had an interview with him of over two hours, during which time although Lord Wolseley saw some members of the Cabinet General Gordon did not.” And Sir Henry goes on to say that his brother that same evening came to dine with him, and next morning went with Brocklehurst to Brussels. As to what took place between Wolseley and Gordon, nothing very precisely is known, as Gordon seems to have kept his own counsel about it. Fitzmaurice says briefly: “Lord Wolseley met General Gordon, then on his way to Brussels, and discussed the situation in Egypt with him. Having asked the General what under the circumstances of the hour he would do, Lord Wolseley received the reply ‘I would send myself.’ The brief conversation suggested that General Gordon, stirred by the thought of the threatened collapse of the edifice which he had helped to raise, through the very dangers he had foreseen, and believing that he alone was the man of the situation, was prepared to cancel his existing engagements and return to the Soudan.”

The text of Granville’s telegram of the same evening to Cromer, using the gentle pressure which Gladstone had agreed to, is given in “Modern Egypt,” dispatched, doubtless, on Wolseley’s report of the conversation. “I hear indirectly that Gordon is ready to go straight to Suakin without passing through Cairo on the following rather vague terms, his mission to be to report to Her Majesty’s Government on the military situation in the Soudan and to return without any further engagement towards him. He would be under you for instructions and will send letters through you under flying seal. You and Nubar Pasha to give him all assistance and facilities as to telegraphing, etc. Egyptian Government to send Ibrahim Fowzi to meet him at Suez with a writer to attend on him. He might be of use in informing you and us of the situation. It would be popular at home but there may be countervailing objections. Tell me your real opinion with or without Nubar Pasha.” The word “indirectly” would seem to mean that Granville had not himself seen Gordon that day. The phrase about the mission being to “report” only seems to have been the gentle way of putting things calculated to gain Cromer’s acquiescence, and it is on this initial account of the mission communicated also to Gladstone, with the design to allay his suspicions as well, that the legend was based to which Gladstone always adhered, that Gordon had received no other instructions, and had disobeyed them by understanding that they covered wider ground. It is quite impossible, however, that this should have been all that passed between Wolseley and Gordon during the two hours their conference had lasted, or that it was in this sense that Gordon understood the proposal made to him by the War Office. Gordon’s letter to Baker had been published the morning of the day before in the “Times,” and it was very explicit about what ought to be done in the Soudan, and the minimum of outside support needed to accomplish it successfully.

Cromer, in his “Modern Egypt,” makes light of the interview with Stead at Southampton as being only talk, but he cannot say the same of the published letter which, according to his usual controversial practice, he passes by in silence. Gordon in the interview had declared in the plainest possible words not only that Khartoum ought to and must be held against the Mahdi, but that the evacuation of its garrison, with the garrisons of Darfur and the Upper Nile, was a physical impossibility; he lays this down in language as to which there can be no conceivable mistake: “Whatever you decide about evacuation you cannot evacuate because your army cannot be moved; you must either surrender absolutely to the Mahdi or defend Khartoum at all hazards, the latter is the only course which ought to be entertained. There is no serious difficulty about it, the Mahdi’s forces will fall to pieces of themselves, but if in a moment of panic orders are issued for the abandonment of the whole of the Eastern Soudan, a blow will be struck against Egypt and the peace of the East which may have fatal consequences. . . . Nubar should be left untrammelled by any stipulations concerning the evacuation of Khartoum; there is no hurry. The garrisons can hold their own at present, let them continue to hold on until disunion and tribal jealousies have worked their natural result in the camp of the Mahdi. Nubar should be free to deal with the Soudan in his own way. How he will deal with the Soudan I cannot profess to say, but I should imagine that he would appoint a Governor-General at Khartoum with full powers, and furnish him with 2,000,000 sterling. . . . Sir Samuel Baker might be appointed Governor-General, he might take his brother as Commander-in- Chief.” This was a strong fighting policy, and, _mutatis mutandis_, precisely how he afterwards understood his instructions. In his letter to Baker he had been even more explicit. “To my mind,” he says, “patience and diplomacy are far more needed than arms. Still to some degree you must have the latter. . . . I would recommend (1) permission to be got from the Sultan to engage 4,000 of his reserved troops, both officers and men, which will be under your brother’s command, and be volunteers with the promise of remuneration at the end of their service; (2) that some 2,000 Belooches under the native officers should be enlisted in India, who have been soldiers of Her Majesty, old sturdy warriors; for your cavalry you can horse them in the Hedjaz, Palestine, and Syria; (3) that Her Majesty’s Government will allow you to purchase from Her Majesty animals, paying a percentage upon all purchases; (4) that Her Majesty’s Government should allow military store officers to aid you but not to go into the field”—another fighting programme.

With these two pronouncements of what was to be done hot before them—and Hartington and Granville and Wolseley must all have read them—it is ludicrous to suppose that the real object of the mission, as it was certainly understood by Gordon, and afterwards, to the best of his power, put in execution by him, was not discussed between Gordon and Wolseley, or by Wolseley as go-between with Hartington and Granville, or that these did not understand it in an active sense. Cromer scouts the idea of Gordon having been sent to him only to report, and in this Cromer is right. The talk of reporting was only make-believe, gently to propitiate him, Cromer, and to propitiate Gladstone; it never had any reality. Hartington, describing the mission some weeks later in the House of Commons, while attempting to excuse the Government, admits that the mission had a larger and more important scope than either reporting or a withdrawal of the garrisons. “Gordon’s mission,” he says, 20th February 1884, was “to attempt the rescue of 28,000 men contained in Khartoum and the other portions of the Soudan, and not only these garrisons, but also to make some arrangement for the better government of those provinces.” He was clearly quoting Cromer’s original words of the previous December, which had all along remained the basis of the mission as understood by himself and his own section of the Cabinet at the War Office.

If Gordon was not sent at once on the 15th to Khartoum it was because Cromer had not yet answered Granville’s latest telegram. While waiting for it he consequently went back to Brussels to excuse himself with King Leopold for breaking his Congo agreement. The War Office had already refused to accept his resignation of his commission, and on the 17th, Cromer and Nubar having capitulated on the 16th declaring now that Gordon was the best man, Gordon was telegraphed for and returned to London.[26] Here on the 18th the same process of interviewing took place at the War Office; first, a talk between Gordon and Wolseley; then, in the afternoon, with four members of the Cabinet, who had been hastily got together, all of them members of the Hartington faction and without Gladstone, who was still away invalided at Hawarden. The discussion that day seems to have been little more than formal, for Gordon was already in his train by eight o’clock to catch the Brindisi mail for Egypt, and the instructions had had to be drafted and written out and signed at the Foreign Office, and a search made for Stewart, who was to go with him, and good-byes to be said. Gordon was brought into a room where the four Ministers, Hartington, Granville, Dilke, and Northbrook,[27] were, and exchanged a few words with them, and that seems to have been all. The whole of the details clearly had been arranged with Wolseley. Gordon’s own account of the interview is given in a letter he wrote to Barnes in the train, and posted at Brindisi on the 22nd.

“I saw Wolseley at 8 a.m. He said nothing was settled, but Ministers would see me at 3.30 p.m. No one knew I had come back. At noon he, Wolseley, came for me and took me to Ministers. He went in and talked to the Ministers and came back and said: ‘Her Majesty’s Government want you to understand this—Government are determined to evacuate Soudan, for they will not guarantee future government. Will you go and do it?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘Go in.’ I went in and saw them. They said, ‘Did Wolseley tell you our orders?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘You will not guarantee future government of Soudan, and you wish me to go up and evacuate now.’ I said ‘Yes,’ and it was over, and I left at 8 p.m. for Calais. Very little passed between us. The Duke [of Cambridge] and Wolseley came to see me off, so that is over.”