Chapter VI: Was Gordon Disobedient?

IT is said that Gordon drafted his own instructions at the Foreign Office, but I find it hard to believe this, for, if true, it would go near to proving him as great a diplomatic rogue as those who sent him. The instructions are a very crafty document. They begin with a manifest insincerity about Gordon’s going to Egypt “to report on the measures it may be advisable to take for the security of the Egyptian garrisons and the European population in Khartoum,” and he is also “to consider and report upon the best mode of effecting the evacuation of the Interior and upon the manner in which the safety and good administration of the Red Sea Ports can be secured.” Then there is a paragraph about the slave trade as manifestly insincere, introduced for the satisfaction of the Anti-Slavery Association in London, and he is to send his reports on these subjects under flying seal through Cromer. In all this it is impossible to find more than a hint of the true object of the mission. It is contained in the document, but hidden away in the two unobtrusive concluding paragraphs. These are: “You will consider yourself authorized and instructed to perform such other duties as the Egyptian Government may desire to entrust to you, and as may be communicated to you by Sir E. Baring. You will be accompanied by Colonel Stewart, who will assist you in the duties thus confided to you.” (Gordon afterwards described Stewart as having been sent with him as his dry nurse to keep him out of mischief.) “On your arrival in Egypt you will at once communicate with Sir E. Baring, who will arrange to meet you and will settle with you whether you should proceed direct to Suakin, or should go yourself or dispatch Colonel Stewart to Khartoum _via_ the Nile.”

These instructions, I say, are a model of how to conceal an intention, and have the true Foreign Office ring. They really amount to _carte blanche_ to propose or do anything that the missioner could get Cromer to consent to, and, in fact, cover all and more than all that Gordon eventually tried to perform. “Such other duties as the Egyptian Government might entrust to you” would have included either his handing over the whole Soudan to the Mahdi, or his determination to smash the Mahdi, or again to Sarawak the Soudan on his own account or King Leopold’s or the Queen’s. Cromer was made responsible for all, and the Government at home retained the ordinary parliamentary privilege of disavowing their own responsibility for things if things went wrong. Above all, it enabled Granville to telegraph to Gladstone with a free conscience that Gordon had been sent by the War Office simply “to report.”

I confess that, though I have blamed and still blame Gladstone for nearly all the misfortunes that have happened since 1882 in Egypt, I here feel some sympathy with him as with a man duped and deceived. He certainly would never have consented to the Gordon mission in its full sense if he had been allowed to understand the full meaning of the instructions. He would have known, not only that the sending of Gordon “to report” would make it very difficult not to accept and act upon his report—this point he noticed in a letter written by him at the time—but also that sending Gordon, who was a fighter born, on a merely peaceful mission to carry out a military plan which he had himself declared to be impossible except with the aid of a large body of troops, would make the sending of troops also a certainty. Gordon was in the eyes of the British public a Christian hero starting on a crusade, and it was inconceivable that he should be left to perish for want of Christian help. It is true that, when Gladstone arrived three days later in London, a Cabinet was held, where the thing was more or less explained to him, and that he consented to what had been done; but it was by this time a _fait accompli_, and too late to stop Gordon, who had already reached Brindisi and was on the high seas on his way to Port Said. His mission could no longer be cancelled. All the religious press of England had risen like one man to the occasion, and were rejoicing over Gordon as the champion of Christendom. It was too late to recall him.

What the choice of such a missioner meant for the Government in the way of new astonishing responsibilities may be gathered from Stead’s scream of triumph printed in the “Pall Mall Gazette” on the day after his departure. It is headed “At Last.” It began: “The whole Egyptian question has been revolutionized in an hour. At yesterday’s informal meeting of the Ministers at the War Office there was taken one of those decisive steps that make or mar the destinies of Empires. . . . The question called for immediate decision. After some consultation Ministers determined to accept General Gordon’s conditions. The decision was arrived at between 3 and 4 yesterday afternoon. At 8 General Gordon had left London for Khartoum. The die was cast. Henceforth we have the full and undivided responsibility for affairs in the Soudan. Whether we evacuate the country or whether we retain it, as soon as General Gordon takes command, and for so long as General Gordon’s commission holds, England is directly responsible for whatever is done in the name of the Egyptian Government between the third Cataract and the Equatorial Lakes. That is an enormous extension of our responsibilities, but vast as it is it is not all. Whether the public realizes it or not, the dispatch of General Gordon to the Soudan, exercising practically unlimited powers not as Governor-General of the Khedive, but as the accredited representative of the British Government, must entail as a natural and inevitable corollary the assumption sooner or later of a similar responsibility as direct and as unlimited for the affairs of Egypt proper.”

Gladstone after this was powerless to draw back, and, putting a good face on the matter as long as the sun shone, he went in for the gamble with the rest. An immense gamble it certainly was, and one for which he was destined to pay heavily.

As for Gordon himself he started in the highest possible spirits. He had got the secret wish of his heart thrust upon him without his seeking it; he had not “hailed the tram of the world”; it was “the tram of the world” that had hailed him, and his conscience was at rest. He was certain now that God was with him and that the service imposed on him was God’s service, and so could not but succeed. His very first act after seeing the Ministers was to telegraph to Barnes from the War Office at five o’clock: “I go to the Soudan to-night; if He goes with me all must be well.” And in a letter to the same Barnes on his way to Brindisi, he says: “I am quite restored to my peace, thank God, and in His hand He will hide me. . . . The Hosts are with me. Mahanaim.” He counted much upon the prayers that were being offered for him in every church and chapel in England. “If people ask after me, tell them they can greatly help me with their prayers, not for my earthly success, but that my mission may be for God’s glory, the welfare of the poor and wretched, and for me what He wills, above all for a humble heart.” And again, 26th January: “I leave for the Soudan to-night. I feel quite happy for I say if God is with me who can or will be hurtful to me? May He be glorified, the world and people of the Soudan be blessed, and may I be the dust under His feet.”

That Gordon was absolutely sincere in this estimate of his mission we cannot doubt. Yet what a self-delusion! What a blindness! He did not perceive that those who were sending him on this last great adventure of his life were no angels of the Lord, but four wily statesmen doing the work mainly of the London Stock Exchange, and interested far more in perpetuating England’s robber hold on Egypt than in any humanitarian scheme which might be imagined for the Soudan—he himself a useful pawn in their not very noble game, and some of them ready enough already to sacrifice and betray him. He did not perceive this or understand that, if it were a question of God being on one side or the other, it could hardly be with these, but with the poor fanatic Soudanese who really did believe in Him and counted on Him to hear their vociferous prayers and praises, and give them the victory. He did not understand that all the men of good in the Soudan would be found on the Mahdi’s side, and all the men of Belial, the scoundrel refuse of the corrupt city of Khartoum, on his own, leaving him with only the least godly weapons of the flesh wherewith to fight, some modern superiority of weapons, money to buy a faithless fidelity, and his own skill and courage as a fighting man.

It was an instinct of his self-delusion and a knowledge of the base ends of those that sent him that caused me to write to him as I did from Delhi. I knew that this time he must be wrong, that he was being sent on a fool’s errand, and that he would be betrayed and defeated.

Of the many things with which Gordon has been reproached officially in the conduct of his mission by those who would shift the blame of his failure from their own backs on to his, I will endeavour to deal with the chief and especially with those brought against him by Lord Cromer, only premising once again that the mission itself was according to my ideas a bad one and doomed from the first to failure. Lord Cromer, his chief assailant, has reproached him with a constant change of plan, with insubordination, with failure to do his duty, and with being the cause of his own defeat. I will endeavour to set these matters in their true light.

Gordon’s idea when he left London seems to have been a clear one as to the general lines of what he was to do. He was to make his way to Khartoum as he best could, take over the military command of the place from Coetlogon, withdraw the Egyptian garrisons from their outlying posts in the interior, and make what arrangements he could for a government at Khartoum to take the place of the Khedive’s. It was to be a government which was not to be an Egyptian Government, and for which Her Majesty’s Government was not to be responsible. These two conditions had been imposed on him, and he had accepted them. All the rest was left to his discretion, subject only to Cromer’s official approval.

A point he on his side had insisted on at the outset was that he should go under orders from his own Government, and not merely as taking foreign service with his Government’s permission. His insistence about this was, I believe, primarily with him a matter of honour. He had engaged himself to King Leopold, and he could not with any decency throw him over to enter the service of another foreign prince unless it was in compliance with an order he as a soldier was bound to obey from his own Government. Also it would ease his conscience, as signifying to him more clearly the command of God, and not the gratification of his own secret wish. This is how I read the matter. It could not have been with him a rooted objection to re-entering a foreign service or in particular the Khedive’s service, for as we have seen he recommended Baker, if he went to the Soudan, to go there as the Khedive’s Governor-General. What would have been the right course for Baker must have been the right course also for himself. As a matter of fact he would have found himself even more powerless than he proved to be at Khartoum if he had gone there simply as a British officer. Stewart had gone there as such, but his had been no executive mission. Gordon’s was to be essentially executive, and it was imperative with him to have local authority from the local sovereign, if only to treat with the tribes for the withdrawal of the garrisons. The English Government could not give him this—it must of necessity be given him by the Khedive. It argues therefore no change of plan that Gordon, on his way to Egypt, should have proposed that if he went to Khartoum it should be in his old capacity as Governor-General. He had gained all that he wanted for his soldier’s honour once he had received his own Government’s order to undertake the service. The Governor-Generalship was a means to an end, and in his view the only means.

A more reasonable reproach which might be made to him—but it has not been officially made—is that he abandoned the idea he certainly had at the outset of going straight on a peaceful errand to the Mahdi at El Obeyd and treating with him personally for the withdrawal of the Egyptian garrisons. I have always been of opinion that that would have been his wisest course; and it certainly was in his mind when he started from London, for passing through Paris the next morning he saw Sheffield at the Embassy and told him of his intention so to do. There was, of course, considerable risk in the matter, but it was just one of those risks Gordon had over and again run successfully in the Soudan, and there is good reason to believe that, properly accompanied, he would have been courteously received at El Obeyd, and that, if he had negotiated on the basis of withdrawing the garrisons peaceably and handing over Khartoum at once to the Mahdi, the Mahdi would have provided the necessary escorts. At any rate, it was his best chance. But that was not what either our Government or the Government at Cairo wanted; and, once at Cairo and in the Khedive’s service, this course was formally forbidden him, nor did Gordon persist in it. It cannot be too strongly repeated that what Gordon was intended to do was not merely to evacuate the Soudan, but to establish a Government at Khartoum and in the eastern provinces which should take the place of the Khedive’s Government and serve as a barrier between Egypt proper, including the Red Sea coast, and the Mahdi’s fanatical advance. To hand over Khartoum to the Mahdi was not, at that time, whatever Lord Cromer may now pretend, in his more than in the Khedive’s plan. I think, nevertheless, that if Gordon had understood the full political power and religious position acquired by Mohammed Ahmed since the fall of El Obeyd and the destruction of Hicks’s army, he would have held to the idea of treating with the Mahdi personally. Unfortunately he throughout underrated his opponent and allowed himself to be persuaded that through the power of money and a display of vigour, joined with reforms in the way of more freedom, less taxation, and better justice, he could build up a counter popularity to that possessed by the Mahdi. It was a snare into which he too easily fell.

Another sudden change of plan, which Lord Fitzmaurice says surprised and disturbed the Government soon after Gordon had been despatched upon his mission, and in regard to which he is severe, calling it a plan “fantastic in the extreme,” is that which Gordon announced of re- establishing the family of the Sultans of Darfur in their hereditary possessions. It was, perhaps, not a very practical idea, but that the Foreign Office should have been surprised at it only shows its ignorance of its own records, for it is to be found in no less conspicuous a document than Stewart’s Soudan Report of February 1883, to say nothing of its having been repeatedly put forward unofficially by Gordon in print and officially by Abd-el-Kader Pasha in December at Cairo. The whole conception of the re-establishment of independent native states in opposition to the Mahdi was, in my opinion, one unsuited to the circumstances of the case, however desirable in itself; but, at any rate, there was nothing new in it nothing to “surprise or disturb” Lord Granville. Gordon had hardly arrived at Khartoum before he found the whole scheme impracticable, and it was heard of no more. Even under the most favourable circumstances it would have been very difficult of accomplishment, and, as a move counter to the Mahdi, could not possibly have succeeded.

Much the same may be said about the idea of employing Zebehr. Here, too, the “surprise and disturbance” of the Foreign Office were entirely gratuitous. When Gordon arrived at Cairo Zebehr had already been engaged there for some weeks recruiting and drilling a black force from among the Soudanese, and had got together 200 ex-soldiers and ex-slaves impressed in Egypt proper. These were destined to be sent with Zebehr for service in the Soudan, and had been regularly enlisted by Zebehr for the Government. It was therefore gratuitous on the part of the Foreign Office to affect surprise that it should be proposed by Gordon to take Zebehr and his men with him. There was, of course, reason for comment that it should have been Gordon, and no other, who made the request, for Gordon had quarrelled with Zebehr and had been responsible for his son’s death, and Zebehr had been the head and front of the slave trade rebellion in the Soudan. But Gordon was no longer on an anti-slavery war-path. He had lived long enough to understand that battling in the Bahr el Gazal against the slave-hunters was not the surest way of dealing with the evil of slavery or stopping the trade. And his present mission was of an entirely different kind, one which needed Zebehr’s help, not a continuance of his hostility. Gordon was a man who never pursued his resentments far, and he was always ready to forget a quarrel and to believe once more in the man’s friendship who had wronged him or whom he had wronged. He had buried the hatchet with Tewfik and Nubar and Cromer. Why not also with Zebehr? There was nothing really to be surprised at, nothing to blame or to forbid.

As to the policy of enlisting Zebehr as an ally I am not of opinion that it would have led to much profit in the way of helping Gordon to establish a buffer state against the Mahdi. Zebehr had been too long absent from the Soudan to be of use to him in that way. His influence was dead, and it is all but certain that he would have yielded to the new influence abroad among his people and thrown in his lot with the Mahdi. I do not think he would have betrayed Gordon. He was a man of old Arab nobility and chivalrous traditions, and he had no actual blood feud with Gordon, for it was Gessi, not Gordon himself, who had had Suliman Zebehr shot. In after years I have talked these matters over with Zebehr, and am convinced that he would not have betrayed Gordon, only that he could not have stemmed the tide which was then so strongly flowing in the Mahdi’s favour. All that he could have done would have been to serve as intermediary between Gordon and the Mahdi, and to warn Gordon against some of the worst mistakes he made.

The great weakness of Gordon’s position at Khartoum was that, being almost ignorant of Arabic and without any dependable native interpreter (for his old secretary Berzati had accompanied Hicks on his fatal campaign and there lost his life), he was left to the tender mercies of Greek merchants and other Christian informants as to what was going on. Zebehr would, at any rate, have supplied him with reliable news and a correct interpretation of the letters he received from the Mahdi. As it was, with no one near him to explain the exact truth, Gordon was as a blind man at Khartoum and became the tool of rogues who betrayed him with false tales and prevented him from seeing what otherwise he could not but have recognized, the sincerity and high character of the Mahdi. With Zebehr at his side he could not have committed his last crowning mistake of offering Mohammed Ahmed a tarboosh and a Sultanate, an insult which more than any other sealed his doom.

Lastly, as to Gordon’s pretended insubordination and disobedience to his instructions, the case against him is really not maintainable. Even admitting that his instructions on leaving London, and the free hand accorded him, were nothing more than are contained within the four corners of the written memorandum drawn up at the Foreign Office, he must stand personally absolved. The paragraph, “You will consider yourself authorized and instructed to perform such other duties as the Egyptian Government may desire to intrust to you and as may be communicated to you by Sir E. Baring,” covers him entirely from any blame there might be in the extension of his duty in Egypt. Lord Cromer tries in his “Modern Egypt” to evade his own responsibility in regard to such extensions of duty by pleading that it was Gordon himself who initiated them; thus he instances a telegram he received from Granville dated the 18th: “Gordon suggests that it may be announced in Egypt that he is on his way to Khartoum to arrange for the future settlement of the Soudan for the best advantage of the people.” This telegram, Cromer points out, says nothing of his duty of reporting, and he adds, “if General Gordon was to arrange for the future settlement of the Soudan, I fail to see how he could do so without exercising some executive authority.” On this ground he protests that “the idea of Gordon’s going as Governor-General to the Soudan did not emanate from any one in Cairo, it was made by General Gordon himself.” Lord Cromer seems, however, to have forgotten that the suggestion about the future settlement of the Soudan was, in fact, his own of 22nd December, and he has also forgotten that, if Gordon was sent in order to arrange such a settlement, his appointment as Governor-General was a necessary part of what he himself had approved before ever Gordon arrived at Cairo. Lord Cromer’s answer, 23rd January, to the telegram of the 18th, says distinctly: “All Gordon’s suggestions are excellent and quite in harmony with the lines on which we have been working. A message was sent by the Khedive some while ago to the leading men at Khartoum which was in the sense and almost in the words suggested by Gordon.” This proves that all that had not at that time been contemplated at Cairo was that the English officer expected to arrange the new settlement was to be Gordon and not another, and that he was to go to Khartoum with the full authority of Governor- General.

If, however, there remains any doubt as to Cromer’s initiative in the extension of Gordon’s duties, I am in a position to supply an important link of evidence by giving the text of a hitherto unpublished letter written by Cromer to Gordon the day before he landed at Port Said. Though a most important letter in the controversy, it is not to be found in any Blue Book, and Cromer in his “Modern Egypt” ignores it entirely. The circumstances under which it was written were these. Gordon’s idea in leaving London had been to go straight through the Suez Canal without visiting Cairo, and to proceed at once to Suakin, where he expected to be able to put himself into communication with certain Sheykhs of the Hadendowa tribe to whom he had formerly rendered a service while he was Governor-General, and through whom he counted on being able to reach Khartoum, and eventually El Obeyd, for his proposed visit to the Mahdi. In the Mahdi himself he thought he had recognized the uncle of a young man who had been formerly in his service, and who had been kindly treated by him, and so hoped to establish initial good relations with him. He had come, however, to see that authority from the Khedive was a necessity of the case, and he expected his Firman of appointment to be delivered to him by Cromer on his passage through the Canal. Such a course, however, was not exactly in Cromer’s plan, who wished to get Gordon to Cairo, and so have him from the start more closely under his authority, and to talk over with him and Nubar the further instructions he was to receive. He pretexted, therefore, an inability to spare time for a journey to Port Said (there was no railway further than Ismailia at that time) and instead of going himself, he wrote this letter and sent it by the hand of Sir Evelyn Wood to be delivered to Gordon on landing, with instructions to intercept him and bring him on to Cairo.

“Cairo, _22nd January_, 1884.

“MY DEAR GORDON,

“I was exceedingly glad to receive Lord Granville’s telegram informing me that you and Stewart were coming to Egypt. I feel confident that you may both render very great services as regards Soudan affairs. I need hardly assure you that you can rely on my most cordial support and assistance.

“Wood, accompanied by Watson, is going to Port Said to meet you. He is thoroughly acquainted with all the most recent facts of the situation and with the views entertained by myself and others. Under these circumstances I will not dwell at any length on the course of action which, as it appears to me, had better be adopted. I will only say briefly that I think you had better go to Khartoum and arrange for the withdrawal of the Egyptian garrisons etc. as rapidly as is consistent with (1) the saving of life and so far as is possible, property; (2) the establishment of some rough form of Government which will prevent, so far as is possible, anarchy and confusion arising on the withdrawal of the Egyptian troops. The task, though very difficult, will not I believe in your hands be impossible.

“I hope very shortly to discuss the whole question with you personally and my views are of course liable to modification by the light of your greater experience in Soudan matters.

“Lord Granville told me that you were unwilling to come to Cairo. It is not, on public grounds, desirable that I should leave Cairo at present, although of course I would do so for a very short time if it were absolutely necessary. I hope, however, to convince you that it is absolutely necessary that you should come to Cairo. The valley of the Nile is indeed at present the only route by which you can reach Khartoum. The Souakin-Berber route is closed and, so far as our latest information goes, there does not appear to be much prospect of its being opened. It is also, I think, very desirable that before you start you should discuss the whole situation not only with myself, but with Nubar and others, so that we may arrange a common plan of action and prevent any risk of working at cross purposes. For these and other reasons I am very strongly of opinion that you should come to Cairo. I need hardly say that I should not propose a course of action, which I believe to be personally distasteful to yourself, unless I thought that there were strong public grounds for doing so. Wood has arranged about Ibrahim Bey Fowzi.

“Believe me very truly yours,
“EVELYN BARING.”

It will be noted in this letter, which was written before Cromer had seen Gordon and therefore entirely on his own initiative, that he suggests a new course of action to be adopted far in advance of anything the original written instructions drawn up at the Foreign Office contained. In the first place, there is no mention whatever of reporting; secondly, Gordon is to go to Khartoum by way of Cairo and the Nile instead of by Suakin. He is also to go himself and not merely to send Stewart. Thirdly, he is to withdraw the Egyptian garrisons as rapidly as is consistent with the saving of _property_ as well as life, an entirely new condition to be found in no previous suggestion connected with the mission and one necessarily entailing far greater time and labour to effect. Lastly, he is to establish “some rough form of government which will prevent anarchy and confusion arising on the withdrawal of Egyptian troops.” This, although as we have seen it was in the spirit and intention of the instructions, was an immense extension of anything that had been actually written or telegraphed, of which we have any knowledge; and the writer of the letter could hardly have contemplated, in proposing such an extension, a work which would occupy less than many months to execute, if not a whole year. It is, moreover, absolutely at variance with the pretence afterwards made at the Foreign Office that Gordon’s mission was simply to withdraw the Khartoum garrison. And lastly, its date proves the idea to be Cromer’s and not Gordon’s.

As we know, Sir Evelyn Wood met Gordon at Port Said with this letter in his hand, and its effect was an entire change of plan on Gordon’s part. Instead of going on to Suakin, he went back with Wood and Watson to Cairo, saw Cromer, who took him to Nubar and later to the Khedive both of whom received him graciously. Cromer then obtained the necessary Firman (he probably drew it up himself) assigning to Gordon his new duties. This Firman, be it observed, although it is by far the most important document of the whole case, is suppressed by Cromer in his “Modern Egypt;” and instead of it he gives a letter he wrote to Gordon containing not the instructions themselves but certain remarks about the way in which the instructions were understood by himself. The instructions themselves are to be found in Blue Book, Egypt, No. 12, 1884. They amount practically to a _carte blanche_ commission to do whatsoever Gordon would with the Soudan without restriction of time and without limit to his authority. They run as follows:

“HIS HIGHNESS THE KHEDIVE TO GORDON PASHA.

“_January_ 26, 1884.

“EXCELLENCY,

“HAVING confidence in your tact and experience, and being aware that the excellent services rendered by you in the Soudan have endeared you to the people of those provinces, and made them acknowledge the good derived from your efforts to introduce among them tranquillity and good government; and seeing that the present state of affairs in those territories requires a person capable of grappling with the difficulties of the situation, and of ameliorating the condition of the inhabitants by restoring public tranquillity on a sure basis, as it is our earnest desire to do what is just and right, to remove all sources of discontent and to observe equity towards the native populations, we do hereby appoint you Governor-General of the Soudan by reason of your perfect knowledge of that country, and we trust that you will carry out our good intentions for the establishment of justice and order, and that you will assure the peace and prosperity of the peoples of the Soudan by maintaining the security of the roads open to commerce.

“Now by these presents we make known to you our desire, and urge upon you a speedy departure for those provinces, so that good government may be restored by your tact and experience.”

This document, which is of the widest conceivable scope, covers absolutely all that Gordon did at Khartoum, all that he designed to do and all that he might have done. It included his decree permitting slavery; it included all his military operations; it included his refusals to retire before the accomplishment of his full work unless his Firman were revoked; it included his attempt to smash the Mahdi, and it would have included, if he had succeeded in so doing, his remaining on at Khartoum and “Sarawaking” the Soudan to the end of his days; or he might have ceded the whole Soudan to the Mahdi, or, as far as I can see, made any other arrangement for its future he might think fit. I repeat that thus enlarged I do not approve of the mission. Also it was one bound to fail. But I affirm that Cromer, who was the man responsible for the enlargement of the mission, who procured the Firman’s signature authorizing it, and who almost certainly dictated the instructions it contained, should have been of all men the last to blame Gordon because he held these instructions binding on him and refused to obey anything less direct than a counter-firman ordering him not to carry them out. Cromer’s dispatch to the Foreign Office, enclosing the Firman, admits his responsibility and the largeness of its scope. “It was thought desirable,” he says, “after full discussion here that the widest discretionary powers should be given to General Gordon as regards the manner of carrying out the policy and as to the best time and mode for announcing it at Khartoum. . . . Although he takes his instructions from me, the widest discretionary power has been left to him. His visit to Cairo was most useful as it will enable the Egyptian authorities to be of much greater service to him than would have been otherwise possible. His views differ in no sort of way from those entertained by Nubar Pasha and myself.”

Yet Lord Cromer to-day has the face now to come forward and charge Gordon with overstepping his authorized programme! That he was so understood to have overstepped them in the summer of 1884 I know, for I myself thought he had done so, but the full facts had not yet been made public, and we knew only what the Government chose to tell us. But the Government itself already knew all, and yet it accused him; and Cromer, who knew and knows the truth better than any one, accuses him still!

As to what happened after the mission left Cairo the history is too well known for there to be any necessity for my recapitulating it here. All now depended on Gordon’s being able to inspire such confidence in the Khartoum garrison as to hold the fort till succour should come. This was expected to be, if at all, from Valentine Baker at Souakin, Sir Samuel’s brother. The position at Souakin was this. The sending of Hicks to Khartoum to take command of the Khedivial troops in the spring of 1883 had been answered by the Mahdi by the dispatch of emissaries into the provinces between the Nile and the Red Sea to preach a religious war against the infidel; and the war broke out early in the autumn under the afterwards celebrated leader Osman Digna, who, with the fighting tribe of the Hadendowa, set themselves to occupy the caravan road from Berber to Souakin and lay siege to that seaport and to the fortified places near it. In October a force of 500 Egyptian troops sent to relieve one of these last was surprised and routed, and the English Consul, Moncrieff, a young naval officer who had gone with them, was killed by the Mahdists. The defeat of Hicks in Kordofan speedily followed, and Khartoum began to be threatened. The Souakin-Berber route was at that time the speediest mode of communication between Cairo and Khartoum, and after one or two more misadventures near the Red Sea coast it became completely blocked, and it was found necessary to attempt to reopen it, and thus towards the end of the year, there being no more regular Egyptian troops to send, Baker Pasha, who had been organizing a corps of military police at Cairo, was entrusted with the duty, his police accompanying him, strengthened with the scratch force of Turks and negroes impressed by Zebehr in Lower Egypt. Baker’s duty, as defined in the Khedive’s Firman appointing him, was to “take command of the operations which have for their object the pacification of the regions lying between Berber and Souakin and the maintenance of communication between these two points. . . . You should use every means of conciliation and diplomacy, with a view to secure the obedience and submission of the Sheikhs of the different tribes before having recourse to force.”

Valentine Baker’s character was one that in this double duty inspired confidence at the War Office. I remember him as long ago as the winter of 1860-61, when he was in command of the 10th Hussars at York, the hard-riding popular Colonel of a hard-riding popular cavalry regiment, the smartest in the British army, hunting, every officer of them, four days a week with the York and Ainsty or the Bramham Moor hounds—the ideal man of his cavalry type. Then he fell into trouble, and in the midst of a promising career had to leave the British army. The campaign of Plevna was just beginning in the Balkans, and he took service with the Turks and greatly distinguished himself in the famous retreat after the fall of that fortress, and thus he had become a Pasha in the Sultan’s service. But, on receiving the news of Tel-el-Kebir, nothing would satisfy him but an attempt to get back into the British army, and he unceremoniously left Constantinople and came to Cairo, where he was made welcome by his former fellow soldiers and obtained from Sir Evelyn Wood the command of the _gens d’armerie_, a quasi-military duty under the Khedive. Valentine Baker was essentially a soldier of fortune and a fighting man, and was burning with the desire of distinguishing himself by some action of _éclat_ and so being restored to Her Majesty’s service. That was his position and that the service he had been sent on, and he had taken command at Souakin on the last day of the year.

Gordon was expected to co-operate with him and do the same at Khartoum, and his original plan of passing through Souakin was in order that they might make their plans together. Gordon was to help Baker to conciliate and buy up the Souakin tribes, and he was himself to make his way to Khartoum and re-establish order there and hold the fort till the communications were free for both of them between the two places. It was a plan in which common action was essential; and then the Egyptian garrisons of the interior were to be sent down to the sea coast and Gordon was to organize his new government at Khartoum.

The success of the whole plan as a military one of evacuation depended on the possibility of a double success in reopening the Souakin-Berber route and keeping it open, the other line of retreat down the Nile to Egypt being too long and too difficult, in face of the disturbed state of the country and the absence of transport, for it to have been possible to convey the garrisons and the civilians who were to accompany them in safety northwards. It was an essential part of Gordon’s mission of evacuation that the road to the coast should be cleared, and, as we have seen, Gordon, in his letter to Sir Samuel Baker, had made co- operation between him and Sir Samuel’s brother a first necessity of the position. No soldier could have been blind to this.

I am inclined therefore to think that Gordon’s original plan of going to Souakin to take counsel with Baker would have given Gordon a better chance of ultimate success than by changing it, as Cromer insisted on his doing, to the Nile route. Also Gordon had a perfect soldier’s right to expect that, if according to the new plan he was to play his own part unassisted at Berber and Khartoum, the Government that sent him should at least have helped Baker at the other end of the evacuating line, that between the sea and the Nile, to keep this line open. There is a passage indicative of the acknowledgement of such an obligation on the part of the Foreign Office in Fitzmaurice’s “Life of Granville,” to which I shall return later, a passage which would show that the British Government at the time of their dispatch of Gordon intended to defend not only the Red Sea coast against the Mahdi, but also the whole of the eastern provinces as far inland as the Nile. Had they adhered to this intention the necessary support would have been given to Gordon, and it was thus that Gordon understood the position.

The whole plan, however, lost any chance of success it might have had by the total and inglorious defeat of Baker at Teb on the 5th February. Gordon ought then, according to all strategic rule, either to have been recalled or troops of some sort ought to have been provided to reinforce him and open the road which Baker had failed to open, the road now more than ever closed for his retreat. It should have been done at once, if at all, for on the 19th of May Berber declared for the Mahdi and the chance was gone. The Government at home, however, could not make up its mind either to recall Gordon or to send the assistance needed. There was a conflict of feeling in the Cabinet which prevented anything being decided. General Graham was sent indeed to Suakin with a British force in February, but after fighting a battle or two with Osman Digna he was forbidden to go further and his force was withdrawn. Hartington and Wolseley at the War Office wanted Gordon supported, but Gladstone stuck to it that he had always understood Gordon’s mission to be a mission of peace and would not consent to Graham’s advance. On the other hand, nobody in the Cabinet or at Cairo seems to have had his wits sufficiently about him to get Gordon’s Firman revoked, or to have understood that without such revocation he could not in honour abandon his mission. Had he been released from his instructions, Gordon could have left the garrisons to make the best terms they could with the Mahdi, and gone on, as was his original intention, by way of the White Nile to the Congo. This would have been, if not a very glorious, at least a simple solution of the difficulty, and indeed, if troops were not to be sent, it was the only rational one.

Lastly, as to the English help promised Gordon which he is blamed for having counted on, I think it cannot be doubted that when he left London in February some such promise was made him, or at least that there was an understanding to that effect between him and the War Office. It may be gathered from his speeches that Hartington so considered it, and it is notorious that such was Wolseley’s view. Gordon was to go to Khartoum, in the first place, to try his luck single-handed, but Wolseley always counted on helping him if his luck should fail. Whether the full conclave of the four Ministers who dispatched him on his mission so understood the case is open to doubt; certainly Gladstone was not a party to any such promise; and yet it must necessarily have been present in their minds if not upon their lips. The contrary is inconceivable.

Also the Queen, who cannot but have been informed of all at the time, unquestionably considered her Ministers to have promised Gordon armed support. Her view of the obligation is to be found in the letter she wrote to Gordon’s sister a few days after the news of his death reached England, and which has been published. Queen Victoria’s letter begins thus:

“How shall I write to you or how shall I attempt to express _what I feel_! To _think_ of your dear noble heroic brother, who served his country and his Queen so truly, so heroically, with a self-sacrifice so edifying to the world, not having been rescued; that the promises of support were not fulfilled—which I so frequently and constantly pressed on those who asked him to go—is to me _grief inexpressible_!”

This letter, drafted by no secretary, but written with the Queen’s own royal hand, seems to me conclusive. Its very indignation is the best proof of its truth, its anger at a betrayal known by the writer to have been such. It is impossible that the Queen should have used the words “the promises of support were not fulfilled” without any such having been understood by her at the time to have been made. There is, of course, no written record of them in any of the papers presented to Parliament, and the promises probably were verbal only, as indeed were all the details of the mission treated departmentally between Wolseley and Gordon. But it makes it almost certain that the War Office, if not the Government as a body, had intended military support, if such should be required, and had spoken of it to Gordon. Gordon certainly counted on military help, for he alludes to it repeatedly in his diaries.

Who then, if not her Ministers, can have conveyed to the Queen the idea of a promise having been given? Who gave or implied an assurance that the mission would, if necessary, have outside help? Between Wolseley and Gordon it was certainly understood that the War Office would do its best to see that he was properly backed when the time came. It might be difficult to get Gladstone to consent, but pressure would be put. The Duke of Cambridge also, in all probability, said more than this. He saw Gordon off at the station, and cannot but have recounted all to Her Majesty afterwards. However silent Granville and the rest may have been, these two, Wolseley and the Duke of Cambridge, must have promised. The Queen’s letter remains its certain proof.

For the rest of the incidents of Gordon’s tragic mission, having said my say on the principal points in dispute regarding it, I will now return to my interrupted diary. It will show how I at the time regarded the mission, not in the light of my now better knowledge, but as it was presented to me in part by the public voice, in part by what I learned privately from those that knew.