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CHARLES GEORGE GORDON 



A SKETCH 



REGINALD H. BARNES 

VICAR OF HEAVITREE 

CHARLES E. BROWN 

MAJOR R.A. 



WITH FACSIMILE LETTER 



Be not thou greatly moved " 



|£01t*)0tt 

MACMILLAN AND CO. 

1SS5 

96043 



LONDON : 
POINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, 

STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS. 



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^efoicattb, bg ^tvmxssxovt, 

TO HER MAJESTY 

THE QUEEN OF THE BELGIANS. 



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CONTENTS. 



■ a* 

I. Reminiscences . ... 


PAGE 
I 


II. Inward Life 


• • .13 


III. Outward Life . 


. 49 


IV. Khartoum .... 


. - . 69 


Appendix 


. 97 



I. 



REMINISCENCES. 



CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 



i. 

Early in 1880, before the cold had left 
the mountains around the Lake of Geneva, 
I was residing with my family in the Hotel 
# du Faucon at Lausanne. The party con- 
sisted of eight persons, including five chil- 
dren ; and the reader may easily picture 
them seated near one of the sunnier win- 
dows of the salle a manger. The children's 
attention was soon attracted by a lad and 
an English gentleman, who occupied a 
corner of the room near the entrance door. 
They seemed to know no one in the hotel, 
but to be wholly wrapped up in each 
other. The orentleman was of the middle 
height, very strongly built ; his face was 

B 



2 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

furrowed with deep lines ; and his fine 
broad brow and most determined mouth 
and chin indicated a remarkable power of 
grave and practical thought. He ap- 
peared to be as gentle as he was strong, 
for there was a certain tenderness in the 
tones of his rich, unworn voice and in the 
glance of his delicately expressive blue 
eyes. By-and-by he spoke to me, and, 
because I was not in good health, offered 
to take such a walk as might suit my 
strength. We talked of the most serious 
subjects, and I was greatly impressed by 
the directness, simplicity, and earnestness 
with which he discussed them. 

For some days I did not know his name, 
and even after I knew it, it did not occur to 
me that he might be the famous " Chinese 
Gordon," who had been for years ruling the 
Soudan. The manner in which I learned 
the truth about him was rather striking. 
One day, after the midday table d'hote, 
while he was smoking a cigarette, he 
invited me to accompany him to his room. 



REMINISCENCES. 3 

I did so, and at once noticed some strange 
documents on the table. "You have 
been in Palestine and know Arabic," he 
said ; " look at those papers." I took 
several of them in my hand and glanced 
at them, but soon laid them down, re- 
marking that I knew very little Arabic. 
" They are Death Warrants," he said. I 
was so startled that I exclaimed, " Death 
Warrants ! why, who are you ?" " Don't 
you know me ? " he answered ; "I have 
been Governor-General of the Soudan, 
and still nominally retain the position ; but 
nothing now remains for me but to sign 
these papers — that will end it." 

Gordon had then just completed his 
forty-sixth year. To all appearance he 
had for ever relinquished his work in the 
Soudan ; and he was occupied chiefly in 
displaying most tender care for his 
nephews, the children of his brother, 
Enderby Gordon, who had lately died, 
and during his illness had passed part of 
his time at Lausanne. One of these 

B 2 



4 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

children, Charles Gordon (who is now at 
his own work in Canada), was the lad 
whom we had observed as Gordon's 
companion in the hotel. 

During the remainder of the time when 
we were together at Lausanne, we saw one 
another constantly, and our friendship soon 
became so close that I had some difficulty 
in realising that I had only lately made 
his acquaintance. I have never known any 
one who had the same faculty of winning 
the confidence, love, and reverence of those 
who happened to be brought into relation 
with him. He had a kind of spiritual 
power, which exercised a singular fascina- 
tion when one talked with him about the 
subjects on which he most frequently and 
most deeply meditated. 

Our conversation related chiefly to reli- 
gion, and it was impossible not to be struck 
by the vividness of his apprehension of 
spiritual truth. It was evident that he 
was incapable of regarding the doctrines of 
Christianity as merely a set of propositions 



REMINISCENCES. 5 

to which the intellect ought to yield assent ; 
they dominated his whole nature, and 
appeared to him to represent the supreme 
realities of existence. He was especially 
emphatic in the utterance of his belief as 
to the intimacy of the relation which ought 
to subsist between God and man. On this 
subject his modes of expression often had 
a close resemblance to those of the great 
medieval Mystics. As we have need of 
God, he would say, so God has need of 
us, and He created mankind in order that 
He might have a dwelling-place in the 
body — in the heart and conscience. All 
spiritual insight, everything good, great, 
and truly beautiful in human life he attri- 
buted directly to this "indwelling;" and 
hence, as he was never tired of reminding 
himself, the necessity for complete self- 
abnegation, since God can find in us a fit 
home only in proportion as our will makes 
way for the Divine Will. Gordon was a 
man of strict — in some respects of austere 
— morality ; but he never spoke in a 



6 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

cold or harsh tone about the lawful plea- 
sures of the world. To such pleasures, 
however, he himself was absolutely indif- 
ferent. To him the only real joys seemed 
to be those of the spiritual life ; and he had 
an easier desire for the time when he would 
possess them in their full splendour in 
another state of being. He told me that 
he could not remember a period when, 
thinking of these things, he had not longed 
for death. 

The seriousness of Gordon's temper did 
not prevent him from being a bright and 
agreeable companion, especially when those 
with whom he talked could join him in 
smoking a cigarette. He had a keen 
sense of humour, and on every matter 
about which he cared to form an opinion 
he spoke clearly and decisively. Although 
he was quick to perceive the passing moods 
of his friends, and to give them his sym- 
pathy in their troubles, there was always a 
tone of self-restraint in his ordinary con- 
versation. Perhaps his manner may be 



REMINISCENCES. 



most accurately described as that of^ju- 
professed and accomplished diplomatist, 
using the word "diplomatist" in its best 
sense. His education as an engineer ; his 
intercourse in later youth with men of 
many races, first in the Crimea, afterwards 
on the Asiatic and European confines of 
Russia ; his study of the weight which 
might be attached to each of his words in 
China ; his long periods of unbroken silence 
in the Soudan — all this had helped to 
make him, not sententious, but habitually 
impressive towards those whom he 
addressed. 

It may here be noted that in discharging 
diplomatic duties Gordon always displayed 
remarkable tact and firmness. On one 
occasion Ismail Pasha sent him on a 
mission to the King of Abyssinia ; and 
when Gordon went to have an interview 
with the King, he found that a chair had 
been placed for him to the left of the 
throne and at a great distance off. Before 
utterine a word he took the chair and 



8 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

placed it near the King, on the right hand 
side. Said the King, " You know I may 
kill you for this ? " "I do not fear death," 
answered Gordon. The interview was 
completely successful, and afterwards the 
King accompanied Gordon to the coast. 

Gordon was much less at ease in talking 
to women than in talking to men. While 
conversing with women he seemed to 
exercise even more than his usual self- 
control in the expression of his thought 
and feeling. His sympathy, geniality, and 
attractiveness became, as it were, veiled ; 
and he was " himself again " only when the 
restraint was removed. He was seen at 
his best in the society of young children, 
his keen interest in whom had not been 
dulled either by solitude or by the neces- 
sity — which had often been imposed upon 
him in other relations — for strictly guarded 
intercourse. With children he was quite 
at home, and they instinctively felt that in 
him they had a friend who understood 
them and whom they could trust and love. 



REMINISCENCES. 9 

It always seemed to me that the faults 
the farthest removed from Gordon's 
character were those which the French 
express by the words petit maitre. In all 
his aims and methods he was simple, 
sincere, disinterested ; and his predominant 
impulses sprang from an ardent love 
towards God and man. Of this he gave 
unmistakable evidence at every stage of 
his career, and no one who saw him from 
day to day could doubt that his action was 
governed by high motives in the small 
incidents of ordinary life, not less than in 
those great events which have secured for 
him a foremost place among the most 
illustrious of English heroes. 



II. 



INWARD LIFE. 



( 13 ) 



II. 

After Gordon's departure from Lausanne 
I did not meet him again until shortly before 
he started on his last journey to Egypt. 
In the interval he had revisited China, 
where he had written, as a parting gift, a 
masterly state-paper; he had acted for 
England at the Cape and other Colonies ; 
and almost the whole of 1883 he had 
spent in Palestine. During those years 
we corresponded as frequently as our 
respective duties permitted, and while 
he was in the Holy Land I received 
from him not less than 2000 pages of 
manuscript in letters, some extracts from 
which were included in the little book 
lately published, his ' Reflections in Pales- 
tine in 1883/ This volume was issued 
at his own request, not because he had the 
slightest wish for fame as a writer, but 
because he hoped he might be able to help 
some of his readers to a better apprecia- 



14 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

tion of the truths in which alone he himself 
found strength and consolation. 

Gordon's visit to Palestine was due in 
part to a desire for rest after great exertions, 
but he would in any case have wished 
to spend some time among the scenes 
associated with all that he held most 
dear and most sacred. He found much 
to interest him in the study of the topo- 
graphy of the Holy Land, and the highest 
authorities on the subject have accepted 
some of the most important conclusions 
to which he was led by his inquiries. In 
his letters, however, there were occasional 
indications that the work did not quite 
satisfy him. " I have now a sense of very 
great weariness," he wrote to me from 
Jerusalem on the 9th of July, 1883, "not 
discontent, but a desire to put off my 
burden. I believe it is good to be here 
for myself, else I would not be here, 
and certainly God gives me comforting 
thoughts, but one's body is tired of it — 
and somehow it seems a selfish life, for I 



INWARD LIFE. 1 5 

see no one for weeks sometimes. All 
these researches are interesting. My faith 
— which is God's gift — prevents me saying 
it is a useless life. Dr. Wordsworth, 
Bishop of Lincoln, would know more out 
here than any explorer. He would catch 
up all these places at once, for he is 
imbued with the indwelling of God ; only 
one fault — he is hard on the Roman 
Catholics." 

"A traveller," Gordon wrote, "should 
first know Holy Scripture and then visit 
Palestine." This condition he had himself 
fulfilled. Few men can ever have sur- 
passed his wonderful heart-apprehension of 
the Bible. St. Paul wrote to Timothy : 
" from a babe thou hast known the sacred 
writings, which are able to make thee wise 
unto salvation through faith which is in 
Christ Jesus" (2 Timothy iii. 15). And 
we know the names of those through 
whose care St. Paul's disciple and friend 
had been enabled, " from a babe," to know 
the Old Testament. In early childhood 



1 6 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

Gordon had obtained similar deep instruc- 
tion from some who survive him, and in later 
life he continued to " search the Scriptures " 
with constantly growing ardour. Every- 
where in this great volume of law, of 
poetry, of history, of correspondence, he 
listened with humble and contrite spirit, 
but with the full exercise of his reason, for 
the voice of God. He never attempted, 
as some Mystics have done, to read into 
the books of the Sacred Canon a forced 
interpretation, such as a calm and diligent 
student would not find there. Never- 
theless, he often appropriated particular 
passages as messages from One who 
guided him and as definite answers to 
prayer. In his last letter to me, dated 
Khartoum, the 6th of March, 1884, he 
wrote : — 

"Two passages, 2 Chron. xiv. 11, and 
2 Chron. xx. 1 2 are helpful to me this day 
under my present difficulties." 

These passages are (1), " And Asa 
cried unto the Lord his God, and said, 



INWARD LIFE. I 7 

Lord, it is nothing with Thee to help, 
whether with many or with them that have 
no power : help us, O Lord our God ; for 
we rest on Thee, and in Thy name we 
go against this multitude. O Lord, Thou 
art our God : let not mortal man prevail 
against Thee." 

(2) " O our God, wilt Thou not judge 
them ? for we have no mio-ht against this 
great company that cometh against us ; 
neither know we what to do : but our 
eyes are upon Thee." 

As another example, take that which 
was known among his more intimate 
friends as his watchword: " Be not moved," 
or "Be not thou greatly moved." 

Gordon did not, however, content him- 
self with the inspiration he derived from 
individual passages of the Bible. He 
sought to penetrate to its meaning as a 
whole, and to read all its parts in the light 
of the central truth, that " God dwells in 
us." To Gordon this seemed the deepest 
and most far-reaching of Christian doc- 

c 



1 8 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

trines ; and he attached vast importance 
to the effect which, as he believed, it 
produced on the minds of intelligent 
Mahometans. " They have nothing in 
their religion," he wrote, "which in the 
least answers to this great truth." He 
regarded it as the master-key for unlocking 
the inspired writings, and while he was in 
Palestine he applied it in a way peculiarly 
his own to the earlier chapters of Genesis. 
It was especially prominent in his thoughts 
when he contrasted the Divine command 
to Adam and Eve : " Thou shalt not 
eat," with the words of the Lord Jesus, 
" Take, eat." What can be more tender 
to the ignorant, more attractive to any 
person who sincerely desires to obey 
Christ's word, than the manner in which 
Gordon discloses the significance of this 
contrast ? " Man," he says, " ate in 
utter ignorance of the sequel, in the case 
of the forbidden fruit, for death was not 
then known ; so man may eat in utter 
ignorance of the sequel, in the case of 



INWARD LIFE. 1 9 

sacramental bread. In the first case he 
ate in trust in self, distrust in God, and 
communion with Satan. In the second 
case he eats in trust in God, distrust in 
self, and communion with God. To the 
world both eatings are foolishness, yet they 
are the wisdom of God." 

In this quotation from his ' Reflections 
in Palestine' we have a specimen of 
Gordon's practical application of the Bible, 
and of his abrupt style. The ' Reflections ' 
consist of passages from his correspondence 
with his brother, with his sister, and with 
myself. The proof-sheets were sent to 
him at Khartoum, and he expressed full 
approval of the selections which had been 
made ; but the book had not the advan- 
tage of his own revision, and in his absence 
it was impossible to add a single note 
or explanation. It is fair, therefore, to 
plead for him that much which now seems 
rugged, and hardly capable of defence, if 
pressed by the strictest rules of grammar 
or lo^ic, as for instance the final sentence 

c 2 



20 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

in the above quotation, is yet quite true 
in the homely and direct manner in which 
he employed the words. 

The ' Reflections in Palestine ' evidently 
took many critics by surprise. They were 
not prepared for a work of so purely 
spiritual a character, and some of them 
expressed the belief that Gordon knew 
little of any book except his Bible. This 
is a serious error. He may not have read 
a very large number of books — the circum- 
stances of his life made it almost impossible 
that he should have done so — but those 
which he attempted to master he mastered 
thoroughly, and they were by no means 
all of one kind. Of the devotional books 
which he knew almost by heart, the English 
Book of Common Prayer and the ' Imita- 
tion of Christ' by Thomas a Kempis 
(Hutching's translation), may stand as 
specimens. He made constant use, too, 
of ' Daily Prayer,' by E. N. Dumbleton, 
and of Dr. Samuel Clarke's ' Scripture 
Promises,' a work of which, before 



INWARD LIFE. 2 1 

leaving England for Khartoum, he pre- 
sented a copy to each member_of the 
Cabinet.* Among books of a different 
class, well known to him in 1883, and 
before that year, were the works of 
Josephus, Bishop Pearson on the Creed, 
and Bishop Harold Browne on the Thirty- 
nine Articles, of which latter treatise he 
wrote expressly that it was of much use 
to him. All of the voluminous researches 
in Palestine, both those of older date and 
the treatises written by his comrades and 
friends, Sir Charles Warren, Sir Charles 
Wilson, and Captain Conder, with the 
works of Bishop Wordsworth of Lincoln, 
and some papers by the Rev. W. F. Birch 
of Manchester, had been exhaustively ex- 
amined ; and he did not fail to take with 
him to Palestine such recent books as 
Bagster's translation of the Septuagint. 
He had acquired a considerable amount of 
knowledge in Patristic Literature, but I 

* He liked for his own use the edition published by 
T. Nelson and Sons, 1863, and marked the Promises on 
pp. 125 to 130. 



2 2 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

am unable to say how far he had at any 
time studied these authors in the languages 
in which they wrote. For the great ethical 
writers of Paean times he had a cordial ad- 
miration, and several of them he read 
frequently. The writings of Epictetus he 
knew intimately ; and any one who looks 
into his well-worn copy of the ' Thoughts ' 
of Marcus Aurelius (Long's translation) 
will see how diligently the book must 
have been studied. There was no secular 
writer of any period whom he held in 
higher esteem than Marcus Aurelius, and 
at different times he gave away many 
copies of the ' Thoughts ' as presents to 
his friends. 

Although, however, it is a mistake to 
say that Gordon refused " to know any 
book but one, and that one the Bible," it 
is true that to the study of the Bible he 
subordinated all other studies. And in 
the ' Reflections ' were embodied some of 
the most characteristic results of his inves- 
tigations. If in that work he passed by 
many modern controversies as if he had 



INWARD LIFE. 23 

never heard of them, perhaps he may be 
justified by the old Roman proverb that 
" the eagle does not eat flies " (Aquila 
no7i vorat muscas). His mind had been 
in contact with the minds of many men in 
many lands, and the Arab, the Chinaman, 
the Armenian, the Egyptian were equally 
well known to him. May we not say that 
he sought in his Bible and in the deep 
symmetry of its many books for that 
which might help or influence men, women, 
children everywhere, and not merely for 
doctrines corresponding to the common ex- 
pressions of his English fellow Christians ? 
It is said in Holy Scripture that " Isaac 
digged again the wells of water, which they 
had digged in the days of Abraham his 
father." (Genesis xxvi. 18.) These wells 
had been filled in by others, and in 
Southern Palestine a man can do no 
greater injury to an enemy than by the 
destruction of wells, the discovery and 
excavation of which cost much care and 
labour ; but Isaac patiently renewed his 



24 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

father's work, and freely forgave the men 
who had ruined it, so far as they could. 
There was something in Gordon's use of 
Holy Scripture which exactly accorded with 
this diligent labour, and with this patience 
towards others. Some wells of spiritual 
truth which seemed to him to have been 
choked he sought to clear ; but he never 
undertook the task in the spirit of a fault- 
finder. His aim in the study of the in- 
spired Word was to beckon others forward, 
that they might come with him. He had 
no desire to parade something rare and 
precious because discovered by himself; 
he wished to address all " whose hearts 
the Lord had opened'' (Acts xvi. 14), to 
see with him if these things were so. 

It has often been said that Gordon was 
a fatalist, and there is a sense in which he 
would not have repudiated the name. Of 
the death of his friend Craigie in the 
Crimea he wrote : " The shell burst above 
him, and, by what is called chance, struck 
him in the back, killing him at once. 



INWARD LIFE. 25 

" It is a delightful thing to be a fatalist, 
not as that word is generally employed, but 
to accept that, when things happen, and 
not before, God has for some wise reason 
so ordained them to happen — all things, 
not only the great things, but all the cir- 
cumstances of life. 

" We have nothing further to do, when 
the scroll of events is unrolled, than to 
accept them as being for the best. Before 
it is unrolled, it is another matter ; and you 
could not say, ' I sat still and let things 
happen,' with this belief. 

" I cannot separate the existence of a 
God from His pre-ordination and direction 
of all things, good and evil ; the latter He 
permits, but still controls." 

If this was fatalism, it was a kind of 
fatalism which gave Gordon both peace 
and energy, for he continued : — 

" All I can say is that, amidst troubles 
and worries, no one can have peace till he 
thus stays upon his God. It gives a man 
superhuman strength. If we could take 



26 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

all things as ordained and for the best, 
we should indeed be the conquerors of the 
world. Everything - that happens to-day, 
good or evil, is settled and fixed, and it is 
no use fretting over it. The quiet, peaceful 
life of our Lord was solely due to his sub- 
mission to God's will." 

Gordon had not only a clear perception 
of the evil in the world, but strong convic- 
tions as to the source from which it 
originally sprang. Of the tree of know- 
ledge of good and evil he says in the 
' Reflections ' : — 

" By eating of this tree man became 
as God, for God said, ' Behold man is 
become as one of us, to know good and 
evil.' This would imply that though 
man was made in the likeness and image of 
God, the faculty of the knowledge of evil, 
though it must have been present was 
not developed in him before eating. Satan 
works in the children of disobedience, and 
he began to work in man, when man dis- 
obeyed God by eating the forbidden fruit. 



INWARD LIFE. 1*] 

" Had Eve never eaten what was for- 
bidden, she never could have been worked 
in by the Spirit of disobedience." 

As to the consequences of eating the 
forbidden fruit, he does not show very 
distinctly in the ' Reflections ' whether he 
believed the ruin of man to have been 
complete or only partial. He held that in 
Eve were all mankind, and that when she 
ate the fruit not only her own body but 
those of all her children were poisoned. 
Of the soul, however, he says that it " was 
breathed into man, and was therefore 
divine." This leaves us in some uncer- 
tainty, as the body is generally spoken of 
in the Scriptures as simply the "tabernacle" 
of the soul. His views are more plainly 
set forth in a private unpublished letter, 
written in Jerusalem : — 

" I do not care for the praise of the 
world. If one truly has been given the 
sense of God's indwelling in us, and of 
our natural depravity, it is quite impossible 
to relish even the slightest taste of man's 



28 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

praise. For if analyzed, man's praise of 
another is the denial of God. For this is 
implied, that man can be good separate 
from God." 

I have already quoted from the ' Re- 
flections ' a passage in which Gordon 
contrasts the eating of the forbidden 
fruit with the eating of sacramental bread. 
He recognised a deep significance in the 
use of the same outward means for the 
trial in which our first parents fell, and for 
the sacrament in which Christ gives Him- 
self to all who will by faith receive Him, 
Gordon, however, exhibited extreme sim- 
plicity of faith when he came to the 
practical part of this doctrine. " Do not," 
he says, "let us fence the Tree of Life. 
God gives us the way to it in Christ. 
All that is needed is, ' I am ill ; I wish 
I were well ; / hate and ablwr myself ; 
I have faint hopes of deriving any benefit : 
but I will trust Him, and do, in remem- 
brance of Him, what he bade me do! 
There is nothing superstitious about this. 



INWARD LIFE. 2 9 

Here he ceases to reason ; he receives the 
Scripture as a little child. 

His conception of the remedy for man's 
spiritual maladies he expressed in unmis- 
takable terms in an unpublished letter, 
dated from Jafa : — 

" God the Son took man's nature and is 
Man. What God the Son did is not de- 
rogatory to God the Holy Ghost to do ; 
and we have the Scripture to say that He 
lives in our bodies. ' Know ye not that 
your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost ?' 
Christ's sufferings are expiatory, our suffer- 
ings are sequences of our sins and for our 
discipline. Christ's sufferings are the full, 
perfect, sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and 
satisfaction for the sins of the world, once 
and for ever on the Cross." 

In other unpublished letters he wrote : — 

" Christ as man felt all the sorrow and 
grief as if He had really committed the 
sins for which He suffered the exact full 
punishment. Our Lord would remember 
each sin from the suffering it caused. It 
is this transcendent love which would 



30 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

break our hearts in the end, were we not 
then to know that our offences were com- 
mitted in ignorance, and that when en- 
lightened we no longer took pleasure in 
them." "It is very wonderful that we 
should be so imbued with Himself that 
our breath is drawn without that realiza- 
tion. We subsist by virtue of His life in 
us ; whether we are pagans or not, it is 
His life." 

Gordon had a full and happy sense of 
Assurance, and he thus stated the grounds 
on which it was based : " You believe in 
your heart that Jesus is the Son of God, 
then God dwells in your body, and if you 
ask Him, 'O Lord ! I believe that Jesus is 
the Son of God ; show me for His sake 
that Thou livest in us,' He will make you 
feel His presence in your heart. Many 
believe sincerely that Jesus is the Son of 
God, but they are not happy, because they 
do not believe that which God tells them." 

He did not profess to be a theologian 
in the ordinary sense of the term ; but in 
its deeper meaning it may be fairly applied 



INWARD LIFE. 3 I 

to him, since it includes every one who 
tries to think and speak rightly about 
God. In the words of the Bishop of 
Derry (Dr. Alexander) : " The General 
is not a professional theologian ; but 
he is something far higher and better ; 
and I dare not criticize one so immeasur- 
ably above me, even if I were not intellec- 
tually convinced by all his arguments. He 
is an example of faith in the living God." 
When Gordon was in Palestine, Bishop 
Wordsworth of Lincoln wrote to me of 
him : "I should be greatly obliged to you, 
if you could express to him my deep 
interest in his investigations and thoughts. 
I am glad to know that the very interest- 
ing subject [Biblical investigation] has 
the benefit of an enquirer like General 
Gordon, who sees Divine things, and pla- 
ces, not with the natural organ only, but 
with the eye of faith. I wish I could now 
give the time to such Biblical studies as 
those which General Gordon is pursuing 
with so much ardour and success." 



32 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

To this message General Gordon 
answered : "I shall probably never see 
your Lordship, so I may say how blessed 
you have been in your Commentary. You 
held the key that Christ and His members 
are one and indivisible ; if ever spiritual 
men arise who will look on our redemption 
like this, what treasures we will have in 
the Scriptures." 

In another letter to me, the venerable 
Bishop of Lincoln wrote : " Anything 
that can be done, ought to be done to 
strengthen and comfort a man who has 
the faults of a saint and the courage of a 
hero." 

On the 14th May, 1884, the Archbishop 
of Canterbury wrote from Lambeth : — 

My Dear Prebendary, — 

Accept my best thanks for your 
kindness in sending me General Gordon's 
' Reflections in Palestine,' and for your most 
kind letter. The former is a wonderful 
expression of a devout soul with deep 



INWARD LIFE. 33 

resources, and full of faithful life towards 
God. The deep interest of his position, 
and painful eager sympathy with the man, 
are surely drawing out myriads of prayers 
for him, and intercessions, especially in the 
Communions which are so dear to himself. 
As to the latter point, — you ask about 
prayers for General Gordon in our public 
service. It is quite natural that some 
clergy should do what, I believe, many 
are now doing, viz. using the provided 
way for praying for all in danger or 
anxiety, with mention of his name person- 
ally before the Prayer for all conditions of 
men, or before the Litany. Those who 
consider him to be already in danger, or 
likely soon to be so, as well as those who 
take the darkest view of his peril, are 
all enabled by our very rubrics to pray 
for him in Church. Doubtless he is sure 
that hearts are thus being poured out for 
him. 

Sincerely yours, 

Edward Cantuar. 
d 



34 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

But to return to the position assumed 
by Gordon himself in his researches. 
Some extracts from his correspondence 
will show that he regarded himself rather 
as a student than as a teacher of Divine 
Truths. On the 24th of October, 1883, 
he wrote to me from Jafa : 

" I have not heard from my family at 
Heavitree for two mails. I have asked 
my sister to send you what I wrote with 
no delay, and not to hurry you. I do not 
want you to read in dribblets, for some 
things I write need frequent modification. 
I am sending another paper this mail. 
Have not the words, 'my Name shall 
rest there,' reference to the title on the 
cross : 

On the 27th of the same month he 
wrote : " Thanks for your letter, just re- 
ceived. I have sent many papers to you. 
They are crude, but they give me much 
pleasure to write them. I am all right, 
thank God. I do not know when I come 
home. I shall not stay long in England. 



INWARD LIFE. 35 

I go first to Brussels. I am glad to hear 
of your lambs, dear little souls, but they 
have a kind shepherd. Good-bye. In 
the papers you read my thoughts, nothing 
more. I am not bound to those views, so 
when I say this is this and that is that, I 
do it only because I want to join one 
thought to another." 

On the 20th of November, i S83, he wrote 
again from Jafa : "I am glad you are 
going to Sir Samuel Baker's ; he, for eight 
or ten years, was constantly in my prayers. 
Do not prevent my writing to yotc [in the 
original underlined], for it is a pleasure to 
do so — what is untrue reject, what you 
accept, tell me" 

On the 6th of December, 1883, he 
wrote from Jerusalem : "I hope to leave 
Jafa on the 15th instant. I assure you 
your kind letters refresh me. One word 
about fasting : I think after the spirit it is 
most beneficial, but I do not practise it. 
D.V. I will do so. D.V. I will give you 
three days while in England. I have put 

D 2 



36 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

Harding's name down on the list.* I hope 
ere this you will get all the papers. I 
have been in the Abyss all November ; it 
is a bad month with me always. Kindest 
regards to you all. Mrs. Barnes will give 
me ^1,000,000,000,000,000, a thousand 
million millions, if she would pray I may 
be emptied of self. Good-bye." 

On the 1 6th of December, 1883, he wrote 
from Mt. Carmel : " I left Jafa on the 12th 
in a sailing vessel for Port Said. We got 
just south of Gaza, and then got into a 
storm, which drove us north, and after two 
nights and days of cold, wet and misery, 
put in here, where I found a steamer going 
to Marseilles, which I shall, D.V., take. 
During the voyage I realized that the 
praise of the Lord is quite independent of 
the sorrow of body, which was a gain. 
Baker liked your visit." 

On the 2nd of January, 1884, he wrote 
from Brussels: " I was with you that night 

* Mr. Harding is the clergyman in charge of one of the 
Church Missionary stations on the Lower Congo. 



INWARD LIFE. 2)7 

1 883-1 884, hoping for you to have much 
closer union with the Lord, who rules all 
things from His throne on the Rock." 
To Gordon our incarnate Lord seemed 
ever present, ordering and controlling all 
things by His good Providence, and as 
though His unseen Throne on high had 
still its relation to the Rock on the site of 
Solomon's Temple. His next words are : 
" I yearn to talk to you of these great 
truths. Do not egg on ambition in me, 
— try and drown it. Our Lord works 
with flies (Exodus viii. 21). He has no 
need of man, — one of the hardest things to 
believe is our own utter insignificance, and 
any who egg on our self-conceit are ene- 
mies of His, and deny His rule. D.V., I 
will come and see you all. I hope to see 
Bishop Temple when I come down, es- 
pecially if he will talk about those things. 
Kindest regards to you all and to Miss 
Freeman. I am glad to say that through 
the model of the Rock o-iven in hiodi 
places [i.e. to persons of high rank], oppor- 

9604.1 



38 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

tunity is given to speak of the Indwelling 
of God in man. The union with our God 
in Christ is our Force, — and only Force 
or power, thence self must die ; and we 
must never indulge the thought of one's 
utility. It is only His utility in us. I try 
to keep my mind as if it were situated 
at the foot of His Throne. We can keep 
a continual telegraphic communion with 
Him ; that is our strength. The rush of 
angelic Hosts to that centre must be im- 
mensely great, for He intercedes and rules 
as man in a definite place, — and there 
is an ancient belief, from the history of 
Abraham, that each act needs one angel ; 
that an angel can only do one thing at the 
time ; and with us any thought, or desire 
for things to be otherwise {when they have 
Jiappcned), is a harp out of tune with the 
Heavenly hosts. Such desires imply that 
Divine Wisdom does not rule. Thus for 
Egypt He is working out His wonderful 
embroidery of events ; those events are 
nothing ; but the actions in men's hearts 



INWARD LIFE. 39 

are everything. That which cometh forth 
out of a man, that defileth the man. Alex- 
ander, Titus, the Government, &c, what 
signifies what they did, what they thought ; 
their motives, these are eternal ! " 

These extracts show how Gordon quieted 
all earthly anxiety by "making every 
request known unto God." In his en- 
deavours after the Christian life he looked 
far beyond that which has become in 
England a usual but dangerous limit. He 
never let himself rest short of the hope of 
complete union with Christ. He did not 
suppose that all that is required for a 
man's salvation is a conviction that he is 
unable to save himself, and an assured 
consciousness that he has been saved by 
Christ. No doubt this is a great part of 
saving truth. All who acknowledge it 
believe in the Sovereignty of God the 
Father ; the Righteousness of Christ ; the 
satisfaction made by Him for sin ; and the 
renewing power of the Holy Ghost. But 
these statements do not form the whole of 



4-0 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

Christianity, — they must not be allowed 
to displace all other truths. Gordon de- 
sired progress, and found our sanctification 
through union with God in Christ. Hence 
he approached and understood the Sacra- 
ments as a part of that which has been 
ordained from the first, even before the 
world began. He did not, indeed, regard 
Holy Baptism, or Holy Communion, as 
channels within which God's Free Grace 
can be restrained ; but he ardently pro- 
claimed their value as vital elements of 
the economy of faith. The priesthood of 
every Christian man, woman, and child, 
was equally present to him with the ministry 
of holy orders ; and in one of his letters 
he spoke of the members of every con- 
gregation as being marked before angelic 
hosts by the living symbol of the Holy 
Ghost's indwelling, the flame over each 
head and heart burning more or less 
brightly. 

The depth and fervour of Gordon's 
relisfious convictions are brought out with 



INWARD LIFE. 4 1 

extraordinary distinctness in a passage 
quoted by Mr. William Hurrell Mallock 
in the 'Fortnightly Review' for July i, 
1884 : " I like the following sort of prayer : 
Thou hast moulded me out of dust, every 
fibre ; therefore thou knowest every fibre. 
Thou gavest me Thy own life. Thou 
didst mould me in Thine exact Image and 
Likeness (for none but Thou couldest make 
me) by Thyself. Thou gavest me free 
will to be altogether like Thyself. I have 
abased and defiled Thy sacred image. 
Though I was Thy chief work, yet so low 
have I debased Thy image, that all crea- 
tures turn with horror from me, and I am 
a horror to myself. Though I had Thy 
Life in me, though by Thy Life I exist ; 
though Thou couldest have made myriads 
with no trouble, yet didst Thou so love 
me, that Thou earnest in my form, and did 
so suffer every conceivable injury that I 
could commit against Thee. Yet I hin- 
dered Thee by every possible cruelty and 
contempt. Thou didst set Thy face as a 



42 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

flint, and bore the imputation and the 
punishment of every sin I ever committed 
— sins which, even in my fellow-creatures, I 
abhor and hate. Thou wast so pure as to 
cause aneels to veil their faces before Thee. 
Yet Thou bore the guilt as entirely Thine 
■ — as if Thou hadst done those sins. Surely 
now Thou hast routed Thy enemies, Thou 
wilt not permit them to trample and scoff 
at Thee. Remember Thy sufferings, for 
they were beyond conception. Are those 
sufferings to go for naught, as they do, if 
Thou permit these unconquered enemies 
to prevail against me, Thy own flesh and 
bone ? Thy member ? " 

One other quotation may be given to 
indicate more fully Gordon's estimate of 
the present life and his conception of the 
nature of the Christian's union with 
Christ : " The world is a vast prison- 
house under hard keepers. We are in 
cells, solitary and lonely, looking for a 
release. By the waters of earthly joy and 
plenty to this world's inhabitants, to our 



INWARD LIFE. 43 



flesh ; but by the waters of lively affliction 
to our souls, we sit down and weep, when 
we remember our home, from which death, 
like a narrow stream, divides us. We hang 
our harps upon the willows in the midst 
thereof; for they that oppress require of 
us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs 
of home. How shall we sing the song of 
the Lamb in a strange land ; in the, to us, 
waste, howling wilderness, in the land of 
strangers ? Oh ! for that home, where 
the wicked will cease from troubling, and 
the weary have rest ; where the good fight 
will have been fought, the dusty labour 
finished, and the crown of life given ; when 
our eyes will behold the only One that ever 
knew our sorrows and trials, and has borne 
with us in them all, soothing and comfort- 
ing our weary souls. No new Friend to 
be made then, but an old Friend ! Are you 
weary ? So was He. Are you sad ? So 
was He. Are you despised and laughed 
at ? So was He. Is your love repelled, 
and does the world not care for you ? 



44 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

Neither did it for Him. He has gra- 
ciously taken a lower place than any of 
His people. Unutterably weary, sad and 
lonely was He on this earth. A Man of 
sorrows, and acquainted with grief, strong- 
crying and tears. And shall we repine at 
our trials, which are but for a moment ? 
We are nearing home day by day. No 
dark river, but divided waters are before us, 
and they let the world take its portion. 
Dust it is, and dust we will leave it. ' I 
heard a voice from Heaven saying unto me, 
Write, happy are the dead that die in the 
Lord, even so saith the Spirit, for they 
rest from their labours', — rest from their 
troubles, — rest from works of weariness, 
from sorrow, from tears, from hunger and 
thirst, and sad sights of poor despairing 
bodies, and sighing hearts, who find no 
peace in their prisons, — from wars, and 
strifes and words and judgments. It is a 
long weary journey, but we are well on the 
way of it. The yearly milestones quickly 
slip by ; and, as our days, so will our 



INWARD LIFE. 45 

strength be. Perhaps before another mile- 
stone is reached the wayfarer may be in 
that glorious Home, by the side of the 
River of life, where there is no more care, or 
sorrow, or crying, and rest for ever with 
that kind and well-known Friend. 

"The sand is flowing out of the glass, 
day and night, night and day; shake it not. 
You have a work here, to suffer even as he 
suffered." 



III. 



OUTWARD LIFE. 



( 49 ) 



III. 

Gordon was a man of such perfect 
simplicity of nature that he would have 
been well content to pass his life in the 
discharge of common and humble duties, 
but he did not shrink from the great tasks 
which were actually imposed upon him. 
Nor did he ever falter in his loyalty to his 
governing principles. From the beginning 
to the end of his career his inward and his 
outward life were in absolute accord. 

Gordon's first experience of war was in 
the Crimea, whither he went as an Engineer 
officer when he was about twenty. An 
incident which happened before Sebastopol 
may suffice to indicate his spirit at this 
early age. Some soldiers in a trench, who 
were not under Gordon's command, had 
suffered so severely that not even a non- 
commissioned officer survived to command 
them. Gordon, seeing the danger of the 
men, sprang in among them, armed only 

E 



50 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

with a stick — which may have suggested 
the use of the " wand of victory " at a later 
time in China. He at once raised his head 
above the earthworks, thus freely exposing 
himself to the fire of the enemy ; and he 
did not quit the trench until he had enabled 
the men to understand exactly what they 
were to do. 

The command in China he would never 
have thought of soliciting. Owing to the 
death of Ward, the dismissal of Burge- 
vine, and the subsequent defeat under 
the English Captain Holland, the Chinese 
army happened to be urgently in want of 
a leader. The Chinese Prime Minister 
applied to the English Government, and 
Gordon Ivas selected by General Stanley, 
who knew him well. 

This difficult position he accepted, as he 
himself wrote at the time, simply because 
he hoped that it might be in his power to 
save China from the pillage, fire, and 
famine with which it was threatened, and 
to open the country to civilisation. His 



OUTWARD LIFE. 5 I 

magnificent energy and resource in the 
fulfilment of his mission soon made his 
name famous. The " ever-victorious army " 
was composed of only some five or six regi- 
ments, armed with smooth-bore muskets, 
and six batteries of artillery. The officers 
were chiefly American, French, and Ger- 
man adventurers, who, though brave and 
sharp, were extremely quarrelsome, and 
so much given to drink that, out of some 
one hundred and forty officers, eleven died 
of delirium tremens. This motley crew was 
thoroughly drilled and provided with trans- 
port by Gordon. They frequently mutinied, 
it is true, but these were opportunities for 
the display of the determination and deci- 
sion of their commander. Mr. Hake, 
Gordon's biographer, mentions two such 
occasions. Once when the artillery refused 
to "fall in," and threatened to shoot their 
officers, Gordon called the non-commis- 
sioned officers together and asked them 
to give up the name of the writer of the 
proclamation of the mutiny. On his 

E 2 



52 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

request being refused, he told them with 
quiet determination that one in every five 
would be shot — an announcement which 
was received with groans. Gordon dragged 
out of the ranks, with his own hand, the 
man who was making the greatest dis- 
turbance, and had him shot by some 
infantry, who were standing by. This 
brought the men to their senses — the files 
fell in, and the writer's name was given up. 
He happened to be the man who had 
been shot. 

Again, at Quinsan (Hake, p. 232): " The 
artillery refused to march from the parade- 
ground to the boats, which were about 
fifty yards off, and on which their baggage 
had been already stowed. Gordon arriv- 
ing at this juncture, unarmed, and as usual 
exceedingly quiet and cool and undemon- 
strative, ordered every man who had 
refused to embark to step to the front. 
One only advanced : Gordon presented a 
pistol to his head and ordered him embark, 
which he did, and the rest followed him. It 



OUTWARD LIFE. $3 

was said by the officers that the success in 
this instance was solely due to the awe 
and respect in which General Gordon was 
held by the men ; and that such was the 
spirit of the troops at the time (who were 
much demoralised by the excessive heat 
of the weather, the ravages of cholera and 
their consequent inaction), that, had any 
other but he attempted what he did, the 
company would have broken into open 
mutiny, shot their officers and committed 
the wildest exesses. In less than a week 
the spirit of the troops was as excellent as 
before." 

Gordon's influence was of course mainly 
due, as Mr. Hake says, first, to his mili- 
tary genius, and second, to his moral 
qualities, which were such as to cause all 
brought in contact with him to have un- 
bounded faith in his capacity. 

It is well known that in battle Gordon 
was always foremost, and never armed, 
except with a cane, which his men called 
the "wand of victory." We are told that 



54 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

the officers of his force would sometimes 
hold back. " Gordon, in his mild way, 
would take one or other of these by the 
arm and lead them into the thick of the 
fire. When he was once wounded in 
battle, and his men wished to carry him 
out of it, he would not allow it, but went 
on leading them till he fainted from loss 
of blood." 

In return for his splendid services to 
China, Gordon would accept only the dis- 
tinctions of the "Yellow Jacket" and the 
" Peacock's Feather," which correspond to 
our own Orders of the Garter and the 
Bath. Of these rewards he wrote to his 
mother : "I do not care twopence about 
these things, but know that you and my 
father like them." The Chinese Govern- 
ment twice offered him a fortune. On the 
first occasion 10,000 taels were actually 
brought into his room, but he drove out 
the bearers of the treasure and would not 
even look at it. On the second occasion 
the sum was still larger, but this also he 



OUTWARD LIFE. 55 

declined, and afterwards he wrote home : — 
"I do not want anything, either money 
or honours, from either the Chinese Go- 
vernment or our own. As for the honours, 
I do not value them at all. I know that I 
am doing a great deal of good, and, liking 
my profession, do not mind going on with my 
work." " Do not think I am ill-tempered, 
but I do not care one jot about my promo- 
tion, or what people may say. I know I 
shall leave China as poor as I entered it, 
but with the knowledge that through my 
weak instrumentality upwards of eighty to 
one hundred thousand lives have been 
spared." 

Mr. Hake says that Gordon not only 
refused two fortunes, but spent his pay of 
^1200 a year in comforts for his army 
and in the relief of the victims of the in- 
surgent troops, and that for these purposes 
he even taxed his private means. Who 
can wonder at the vast influence exerted 
on the Chinese by one who displayed so 
great a spirit ? 



56 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

It would be hard to find a counterpart 
to Gordon among European soldiers who 
have commanded native armies in the 
East. Clive was a man of unsurpassed 
energy and courage ; he never lost control 
over himself in the presence of danger ; 
and he exhibited high genius in organising 
armies out of mere rabbles. His influence 
over Oriental races was extraordinary, and 
has never perhaps been excelled. But, 
unlike Gordon, Clive did not scruple to 
promote his interests by falsehood and 
hypocrisy ; and instead of refusing two 
fortunes, he accepted between two and 
three hundred thousand pounds for his 
services, and after his return to England 
lived in the greatest luxury and splendour. 

When Gordon came home, he refused 
to be treated as a hero, and earnestly 
requested that no record of his deeds 
should be published. He even went so 
far as to demand back his Journal of the 
Taiping War, which a Minister of State 
had borrowed and sent to the printers. 



OUTWARD LIFE. $? 

So successful (as in other operations) was 
Gordon in seeking to be forgotten that he 
verv soon ceased to be even talked about. 
His quiet life at Gravesend, as an 
Engineer officer, was not, perhaps, less 
remarkable than his career in China, 
although in a very different way. There 
he devoted himself to the service of the 
poor. " His house," says Mr. Hake, 
" was school, and hospital, and almshouse 
in turn. The troubles of all interested 
him alike. The poor, the sick, the unfor- 
tunate were ever welcome, and never did 
supplicant knock vainly at his door. Many 
children he rescued from the gutter, 
cleansed, clothed, and fed them, and for 
their benefit established evening classes, 
over which he himself presided. What a 
livinsf likeness this seems to be of the life 
of the God-man, the Lord Jesus Christ, 
durinof his short residence on this earth ! 
What sympathy and even love for his 
poorer brethren ! How the Light — the 
true Light — shines ! What a ' single eye !' 



$S CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

A lover of God, a despiser of Mammon. 
In this he outshines Peter the Hermit, 
Savonarola, and Havelock." 

In 1876, Gordon was again brought 
prominently before the world, as Governor- 
General of the Soudan. This vast region 
was entirely in the hands of slave-dealers, 
with Zebehr at their head. Having formed 
military posts, they were able to mono- 
polise the trade in ivory, and, while 
kidnapping human beings, to depopulate 
and turn into deserts great districts which 
had formerly been nourishing. The 
Khedive Ismail, rather from jealousy than 
from humane motives, requested Gordon 
to crush Zebehr and his vile traffic. 
Gordon accepted the appointment, and in 
doing so displayed his usual generosity, for 
he was offered a salary of ^10,000 a year 
but declined to take more than ^2000 
a year, that being the amount he had for 
some time been receiving from the British 
Government as Commissioner at Galatz. 
The reason given by him for not taking 



OUTWARD LIFE. 59 

the larger sum was that he knew it would 
be " blood-money wrung from the wretches 
under his rule." Afterwards he cut down 
his pay one-half, to save the revenue to 
that extent ; and ultimately he left the 
Soudan, as he had left China, no richer 
than when he entered it. "I am like 
Moses," he wrote, "who despised the 
riches of Egypt. We have a King mightier 
than these, and more enduring riches and 
power in Him than we can have in this 
world." 

Aided by only one European, the 
gallant Italian Gessi, Gordon overcame 
what seemed to be almost insurmountable 
difficulties in the Soudan. On the eve of 
resigning his Governor-Generalship he 
wrote : " I do not profess to have been a 
great ruler or a great financier ; but I can 
say this, I have cut off the slave-dealers 
in their strongholds, and I made the people 
love me." And his success was not 
surprising to those who knew on what 
principles he carried on his work. " The 



60 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

main point," he wrote, " is to be just and 
straightforward, to fear no one, or no one's 
sayings ; to avoid all tergiversation or 
twisting, even if you lose by it, and to be 
hard on all if they do not obey you. All 
this is not easy to do, but it must be my 
aim to accomplish it." 

By his courage, resolute will, and 
humanity, Gordon gained as strong a hold 
over the imagination and feelings of the 
Soudanese as he had gained over those of 
the Chinese. A remarkable proof of this 
was afforded by the results of his now 
famous ride to Dara, which Suleiman 
(Zebehr's son) was on the point of attack- 
ing. The rebel camp consisted of some 
3000 trained warriors, similar to those who 
fought so furiously at Teb and Tamanib 
against the English under General Graham. 
Gordon rode into this nest of slave-dealers 
with only a very small escort of men, who 
were so utterly worthless as troops that he 
called them "sheep' 1 ' soldiers. He sent 
for Suleiman, told him plainly that he knew 



OUTWARD LIFE. 6 I 

what he was about, and warned him that 
if he did not submit he and his tribes 
would be disarmed and broken up. Strange 
to say, Suleiman, who could easily have 
captured Gordon, submitted uncondi- 
tionally. " The people," wrote Gordon, 
" were paralyzed when they saw a single, 
dirty, red-faced man on a camel ride into 
their camp." 

He was equally fearless when, with only 
ten men, he entered Walad-el-Michael's 
camp of 7000 armed warriors and was 
made a prisoner. The following letter 
explains how he came to expose himself to 
peril on this occasion : — . 

" I do try and think, and try to put in 
practice, that God is the Supreme Power 
in the world, and that He is Almighty ; 
and though ' use your judgment ' people 
may say, You tempt your God in putting 
yourself in positions like my present one, 
yet I do not care. I do not do it to 
tempt Him. I do it because I wish to 
trust in His promises, and I feel sure, 



62 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

however trying it may be (and it is trying 
to me in a great degree), that I gain in 
strength and faith by it. If He wills me 
to fail, so be it." 

When marching in Darfour on Fasher, 
with a body-guard consisting only of sub- 
dued enemies, whom he had enlisted, he 
prayed that the Chief whom he was about 
to meet might be influenced by God. 
*' Something," he wrote, " seems already to 
have passed between us, when I meet a 
Chief (for whom I have prayed) for the 
first time. On this I base my hopes of a 
triumphant entry into Fasher. I have 
really no troops with me, but I have the 
Shekinah, and I do like trusting to Him 
and not to men. Remember unless He 
gave me confidence and encouraged me 
to trust Him, I could not have it ; and 
so I have the earnest of success in this 
confidence." 

He was once defied by some 6000 Turks 
and Bashi-Bazouks, whom he had employed 
as his frontier-guards, but who would not 



OUTWARD LIFE. 63 

carry out his orders to stop caravans of 
slaves. He resolved to disband them, and 
this was how he commented on his deter- 
mination : " Let me ask who that hath not 
the Almighty with him could do that ? 
I have the Almighty with me, and I will 
do it. Consider the effect of harsh mea- 
sures among an essentially Mussulman 
population, carried out brusquely by a 
Nazarene ; measures which touch the 
pocket of every one." 

Hard as Gordon could be on occasions 
which required him to be so, as when he 
came across a slave-dealer carrying on his 
nefarious trade, his soul revolted at the 
sight of misery, and he was at times moved 
to tears by the sufferings of even his 
enemies. His hand on these occasions 
acted in unison with his heart. He could 
not bear to see wretchedness without if 
possible trying to alleviate it. Mr. Hake 
describes how Gordon, whilst travelling 
in the Soudan, used so freely to distribute 
grain to the hungry and give employment 



64 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

to the needy, that the poor negroes flocked 
about him in great numbers. Here we 
find him bringing, as he wrote to his sister, 
" a poor old bag of bones " into his camp 
and trying to restore life by feeding her 
up. To another wretched woman, who is 
struggling along the road and is such a 
" wisp of bones that the wind threatens to 
overthrow her," he sends some doora. 
When he finds a baby in the grass, he does 
not pass it by, or even direct that the 
infant shall be looked after by others, but 
he himself pours some brandy down her 
throat, carries her in his arms to a hut and 
has the mud washed out of her eyes. The 
dullest natures were touched by the spec- 
tacle of this inexhaustible pity, and it was 
not strange that before he left the Soudan 
he could write, " I have made the people 
love me." 

He once wrote from the Soudan : " I dare 
say some of my letters have been boastful; 
but I know that my conscience has remon- 
strated whenever I have so written. Some 



OUTWARD LIFE. 6$ 

of my letters have been written by one 
nature ; others by another nature, and so 
it will be to the end." No one else would 
have thought of accusing him of boastful- 
ness. His most astonishing achievements 
he recorded as if honour were not in any 
way due to himself. And the secret of his 
modesty is to be found in his own words : — 

" How often do the Scriptures claim for 
Him all honour, power and might, and yet 
all of us claim honour from our fellow 
men." " As Solomon asked, I asked 
wisdom to govern this great people, and 
He not only will give me it, but all else 

besides I feel my own weakness, 

and look to Him." 

In this constant and devout reference to 
an unseen world Gordon was, perhaps, 
more like Cromwell than any other great 
figure in our history. Nor did the resem- 
blance between them end here. They had 
the same vigour, the same control over 
a naturally fiery and masterful temper, the 
same hatred of pretence, the same un- 

F 



66 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

flinching determination, when the path of 
duty seemed clear, in marching straight 
to their goal. And both were equally 
remarkable for their power of fascinating 
and dominating other minds. 



IV. 
KHARTOUM. 



F 2 



( 69 ) 



IV. 

When Gordon left the Soudan, the old 
system of oppression, by means of Cir- 
cassians, Turks, and Bashi-Bazouks, was 
restored, and all the results of his labour 
seemed about to be swept away. He had 
warned the Khedive that, if this were 
done, Egypt would soon find herself in a 
position of extreme difficulty. As he 
afterwards said to Mr. Stead, " I had 
taught the natives that they had a right 
to exist. I had taught them something of 
the meaning of liberty and justice, and 
accustomed them to a higher ideal of 
government than that with which they 
had previously been acquainted." He 
believed, therefore, that the Soudanese 
would not again tamely submit to tyranny, 
and events proved that he was right. 
Under the Mahdi, whose religious claims 
Gordon believed to have been in the first 
instance merely a mask for political de- 



70 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

signs, a number of tribes revolted against 
Egyptian rule ; and they had the enthu- 
siastic support of the slave-dealers, whose 
traffic Gordon had so earnestly striven to 
destroy at its source. 

The attention of British Ministers being 
absorbed by their troubles in Egypt 
Proper, they gave little heed to what was 
going on in the Soudan ; and about six 
months after the battle of Tel-el-Kebir 
the Egyptian Government were allowed 
to dispatch a force thither under Hicks 
Pasha, a retired officer of the Bombay 
army. Egypt being unable or unwilling 
to send the large reinforcements which 
Hicks Pasha frequently and urgently de- 
manded, his troops were annihilated by 
the Mahdi in November, 1883. After this 
the Mahdi's power rapidly increased, and 
Sinkat, Trinkitat, Tokar, and Souakim 
were besieged by the "rebels." 

Meanwhile, Gordon returned from Pa- 
lestine, having been invited by the King 
of the Belgians to succeed Mr. Stanley in 



KHARTOUM. 7 1 

the government of the Upper Congo in its 
equatorial regions. At Brussels he made 
some arrangements with the Belgian King 
as to his mission, and early in January, 
1884, he arrived in England. He found 
time to spend a night at Heavitree Vicar- 
age, and on the morning of Friday, the 
nth of January, he received Holy Com- 
munion 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 
Orleisfh. Sir Samuel Baker's house ; and 
to those who accompanied him it was 
pleasant to see the meeting between the 
two ex-eovernors of the Soudan. While 
we were driving from Newton Abbot 
Station to Sandford Orleigh, Sir Samuel 



72 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

Baker pressed on Gordon the expediency 
of his again going to the Soudan as 
Governor- General, if Her Majesty's Go- 
vernment 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 possibility of his going to the 
Soudan was really being talked of, and on 
the 1 2th of January a telegram from Lord 
Wolseley, asking him to go to London, 
was delivered at my house. This tele- 
gram was forwarded to Gordon at South- 
ampton after he left Sandford Orleigh, 
and on the 15th he had an interview with 
Lord Wolseley. Their conversation led 
to no definite result, and next day Gordon 
went to Brussels. On the forenoon of the 
t 7th Lord Wolseley again summoned him 



KHARTOUM. J3 

by telegraph to London ; and Gordon 
spoke of the matter to the King of the 
Belgians, who was greatly disappointed at 
the prospect of even a temporary loss of 
his services. Gordon started from Brussels 
in the evening, and early next morning 
(the 1 8 th) he was at Lord Wolseley's 
office. Later in the day he saw Lord 
Granville, Lord Hartington, Lord North- 
brook, and Sir Charles Dilke ; and after a 
brief consultation it was decided that he 
should proceed to the Soudan as the re- 
presentative of the British Government, 
but in no way responsible to the Khedive. 
His mission was to superintend the evacu- 
ation of the Soudan. He was to withdraw 
the Egyptian garrisons, the civil officials, 
and as many of the inhabitants as might 
wish to be taken away.* 

Having spent much time in seeking for 
Colonel Stewart, who was to go with him, 
Gordon started for Khartoum the same 
evening at eight o'clock. He was accom- 

* See Appendix, B. 



74 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

panied to the station by H.R.H. the Duke 
of Cambridge and by Lord Wolseley. 
Lord Wolseley, it may be mentioned, was 
Gordon's comrade at the Crimea, and he 
declared some time a^o that Gordon was 
one of the only two heroes whom he had 
ever personally known ; the other being 
Lee of the Southern army. 

Gordon realised distinctly, as he alone 
was in a position to do, all the perils which 
might attend the fulfilment of the mission 
undertaken on this memorable day. Yet 
never, perhaps, had he experienced a 
deeper feeling of inward serenity. In 
the eveninor I received from him the fol- 
lowing telegram, dispatched from the War 
lOffice at 5 p.m. : " I go to the Soudan to- 
jnight. I came from Brussels this morn- 
Sine. If he* oroes with me, all must be 
'"well." To those who read Gordon's cha- 
racter aright, the whole story of his life will 
seem to be written in these simple words. 

* The word " He " has no capital letter in the telegram, 
but no one who knew Gordon could doubt what was 
meant. 



KHARTOUM. 75 

At Cairo Gordon's functions were greatly 
extended. He accepted from the Khedive 
the office of Governor - General of the 
Soudan, and in the firman conferring on 
him this appointment he was instructed 
not only to effect the evacuation of the 
Soudan, but to " take the necessary steps 
for establishing an organised government 
in the different provinces of the Soudan, 
for the maintenance of order and the ces- 
sation of all disasters and incitement to 
revolt." At that time it appeared to Gor- 
don that the best course would be to re- 
store the country to descendants of the 
petty Sultans who had existed at the time 
of Mehemet Ali's conquest, and to try to 
form a confederation of the new rulers. 
In this view the Egyptian Government 
concurred ; and he received full discretion- 
ary power to retain the troops until the 
completion of such arrangements as would 
enable the evacuation to be accomplished 
" with the least possible risk to life and 
property." 



76 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

In Gordon's camel-ride across the desert 
he may be said to have been accompanied 
in imagination by the whole civilised 
world. Everywhere his heroic devotion 
was spoken of with glowing admiration. 
It seemed like a gleam of poetry in the 
prose of the nineteenth century. 

On the 19th of February I received 
from him the following note, written on a 
post-card on the 1st : — 

" Arrived borders of Desert, am quite 
well. Hosts with me through your kind 
prayers. I do not believe in advance of 
Mahdi, who is nephew to my old guide in 
Darfour, who was a very good fellow. 
The little letter your children gave me is 
now before me. I shall have no eating 
[Holy Communion] in Soudan. The 
Roman Catholic priests have all left and 
are at Assouan. Several will want copies 
of the book. It must be all on the point 
1 God in you.' I see 28th January Psalm 
is ' Remember David and all his trouble,' 
— how he sware he would find habitations 



KHARTOUM. J? 

[tabernacles] for the Mighty God, who is 
houseless if not in our hearts. Kindest 
regards to you all, and to Mr. Maclelland, 
to the Bishop and Mrs. Temple. I am 
very hopeful, for men's hearts are in His 
hand. — C. G. Gordon." 

From Abou Hamed he wrote to me on 
the 8th of February : — 

" Thanks to all your kind prayers, we 
arrived safely here yesterday. People are 
quite quiet, and all seems hopeful. Evi- 
dently the defeat of Hicks has been much 
less thought of here than at Cairo, and 
now it seems as if it would be more diffi- 
cult to get the Egyptian element out of 
Soudan than I expected, for they will not 
go. They think that things will settle 
down, and wish to stay. I hope (d.v.) 
that in a month the country will be quiet 
and the roads open. The cold was great 
in desert at night, and heat ditto by day. 
It is a terrible desert [between Korosko 
and Abou Hamed], worse than any in the 
Soudan I am glad to have come, 



78 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

for somehow I think God will bless my 
mission, aided as I am by so many 
prayers. His glory, the people's welfare, 
my humiliation (i.e. an increased sense of 
His indwelling in me, which is the se- 
quence of a humble heart, to be nothing 
in this world, the dust of His feet, for 
who has caused Him greater pain, greater 
shame than myself, who had so much 
light ?) 

" I saw two pleasant things at Cairo, 
Baring's and Wood's chicks, and I heard 
one pleasant thing — Mrs. Amos wanted 
me to see her lambs. Good-bye, my 

dear Mr. Barnes P.S. We are 

now on Nile, the river of Egypt, the 
strength of the Flesh, in which the Law 
was nearly destroyed in Moses. It is 
a mighty river with its Leviathan the 
crocodile." 

On the 1 8th of February he arrived at 
Khartoum. He was received with the 
greatest enthusiasm, and the city was 
illuminated in his honour. " I come," he 



1 



KHARTOUM. 79 

said, "without soldiers, but with God on 
my side, to redress the evils of the Soudan. 
I will not fight with any weapons but 
justice. There shall be no more Bashi- 
Bazouks. I will hold the balance level." 
He then held a levee, at which the poorest 
might attend and pour out their grievances. 
The people appeared in their thousands 
to kiss his feet, styling him " The Sultan 
of the Soudan." With the aid of Colonel 
Stewart, he inquired into their grievances, 
remitted public debts, publicly burnt instru- 
ments of torture, and delivered prisoners 
of all ages, old men and boys, who had 
been unjustly imprisoned for years, many 
of them without even the form of a trial. 
" Backsheesh," without which it had been 
impossible for suppliants to obtain a hear- 
ing from their superiors, was abolished, 
and in several places he set up boxes into 
which petitions might be dropped. At 
the same time he issued a proclamation 
declaring the independence of the Soudan, 
granting an amnesty, and repealing the 



80 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

laws against slavery. " Henceforth none 
shall interfere with your property ; who- 
soever has slaves shall have full right to 
them." " Such is the influence of one 
man," telegraphed the Khartoum corre- 
spondent of the Times, "that there are no 
longer any fears for the garrison or people 
of Khartoum." 

Gordon at once proceeded to send down 
sick men, women, and children to Egypt ; 
but it was impossible for him to remove 
the earrisons and civil officials until he had 
taken steps for the establishment of a 
stable government. He was of opinion 
that only about one-third of the population 
were favourable to the Mahdi. If, however, 
the whole machinery of administration had 
been suddenly withdrawn, the remaining 
two-thirds would have had no alternative 
but to recognise the pretensions of the 
False Prophet, whose supremacy would* 
at least have been better than anarchy. 
Gordon's proposal was that Zebehr should 
be made ruler of Khartoum ; and there 



KHARTOUM. 8 1 

can be little doubt that if this plan had 
been adopted a tolerable settlement would 
have been rendered possible. Whatever 
may have been Zebehr's crimes as a slave- 
dealer, he is a man of ability and energy ; 
and, as Gordon urged again and again, 
power might have been granted to him on 
terms that would have provided for some 
time an adequate guarantee for his good 
behaviour. But the British Government 
peremptorily refused to sanction Zebehr's 
appointment ; and Gordon knew of no 
other native of the Soudan who was com- 
petent to gain the allegiance of those who 
feared or disliked the Mahdi. 

When Gordon became convinced that 
Zebehr would not be sent to Khartoum, 
he asked for the dispatch of troops both 
from Cairo and from the Red Sea ; and, 
after General Graham's victories in the 
Eastern Soudan, it was the opinion of 
the highest military authorities that the 
opening of the route between Souakim and 
Berber was not impracticable. Gordon 

G 



82 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

felt so confident that he would receive the 
aid he had declared to be necessary that 
he " ordered messengers to be sent along 
the road from Berber to ascertain whether 
any English force was advancing." But 
he was again to be cruelly disappointed. 
The Government procrastinated, and 
finally decided that his request should be 
refused. 

The inevitable consequence was that 
the friendly and the neutral tribes began 
to lose confidence in Gordon's professions. 
Knowing- that the connection between the 
Soudan and Egypt was to be severed, and 
perceiving no sign that a new administra- 
tive system was to be substituted for the 
old, they naturally reflected that it might 
be prudent to be on good terms with the 
Mahdi, who alone seemed likely to have 
permanent authority. At the same time, 
the longer Gordon remained in Khartoum, 
the more deeply he was pledged not to 
desert the inhabitants. He had encouraged 
them to hope that a Soudanese Govern- 



KHARTOUM. 83 

ment would be formed ; he had called 
upon them to make serious sacrifices ; by 
the mere fact of his presence among them 
he had prevented them from coming to 
terms with the only rising power in their 
country. Having done all this, he could 
not honourably go away and leave them 
exposed to the vengeance of their enemies. 
How bitterly he resented the conduct of 
the Government he showed in the famous 
dispatch of the 16th of April — the last 
received before the final severing of the 
telegraph : " As far as I can understand, 
the situation is this : you state your in- 
tention of not sending any relief up here 
or to Berber, and you refuse me Zebehr. 
I consider myself free to act according to 
circumstances. I shall hold on here as 
long as I can, and if I can suppress the 
rebellion I shall do so. If I cannot, I 
shall retire to the Equator, and leave you 
the indelible disgrace of abandoning the 
garrisons of Senaar, Kassala, Berber, and 
Dongola, with the certainty that you will 

g 2 



84 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

eventually be forced to smash up the 
Mahdi under great difficulties if you would 
retain peace in Egypt." 

Abandoned by the Government, Gordon 
tried in desperation to obtain help by other 
means. Before he was cut off from com- 
munication with the outer world he tele- 
graphed to his friend, Sir Samuel Baker, 
to ask whether "an appeal to the million- 
aires of America and England, for the 
raising of ^200,000, would be of any 
avail." "With this sum you might get 
permission of the Sultan for the loan of 
2000 or 3000 men, and send them up to 
Berber. With these men we could not 
only settle our affairs here, but also do for 
the Mahdi, in whose collapse the Sultan 
would be necessarily interested. I would 
not send many Europeans with them, as 
they cost too much, and I will put Zebehr 
in command." 

In the midst of his perplexities, Gordon 
was able for some time to give his friends 
an occasional glimpse of the thoughts and 



KHARTOUM. 85 

aspirations which no external troubles 
could quench. On the 24th of February- 
he wrote: "An eventful day in 1870 for 
all your circle. [The reference is to the 
birthday of Angela Annie Barnes.] I 
hope God will bless you all. I am all 
right, but there is no 'eating' up here, 
which I miss. Things look settling down 
a little, but I have the weight on me at 
times very heavily, and the natural in- 
firmity of human nature brings me down. 
It is as well it should be so, for the for- 
bidden fruit is glorying in self, which one 
is prone to do. Herod was eaten by 
worms for not giving glory to God when 
the people cheered him. I have no time. 
C. G. Gordon." 

The next letter he sent me was dated 
the 3rd of March : — 

"Thanks for your letter of 28th Janu- 
ary, received to-day. Thanks for all the 
pains you have taken about the Reflections. 
As to the title, I am interested, for I hope 
the book may tend to show forth God's 



86 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

dwelling in us. This is the sfreat secret. 
I would sooner pay more than ^25 than 
have any bother to you. About Congo, 
there is no issue. I shall (d.v.) start for it 
in September, 1884, when I hope to be at 
Brussels. God made us, to have a house 
to live in : without us He is houseless. He 
needs us, and how much more do we need 
Him ! I am comforted up here in my 
weakness by the reflection — Our Lord 
rules all things, and it is dire rebellion to 
dislike or murmur against His rule. May 
His name be glorified — these people 
blessed and comforted, and may I be 
deeply humbled, and thus have a greater 
sense of His indwelling Spirit. This is 
my earnest prayer. Kindest love to you 

all, and to . Believe me, yours ever 

sincerely, C. G. Gordon." 

His last note to me, dated the 6th of 
March, ended with the words : " Let no 
news from hence move you. He over- 
rules all for good." 

The Arabs began to attack Khartoum 



KHARTOUM. 87 

on the 1 2th of March, and from that time 
until his death Gordon was engaged in 
defending the city against its assailants. 
The record of his achievements in this 
memorable siegfe will form one of the most 
heart-stirring pages in English history. 

L 

Khartoum is situated on the western 
bank of the Blue Nile, and within about 
three miles of that river's junction with 
the White Nile. Both the rivers are from 
600 to 800 yards in width at their lowest 
point. The Blue Nile, though fordable 
at its lowest season in many places above 
the town, has very steep banks. The 
White Nile is fordable only in one or two 
places far up, and has a dyke on its right 
bank. The ferry over this river can be 
strongly defended, and adequate measures 
were taken by Gordon for its defence. 

Gordon had several Yarrow-built 
steamers, which, with remarkable inge- 
nuity, he made bullet-proof. He also 
erected on them towers capable of de- 
livering a powerful fire. He thus not 



88 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

only rendered himself perfectly secure 
from the north and west, but was able to 
make sorties and gather provisions for his 
garrison. 

Towards the south, about half a mile 
from the town, Khartoum was defended 
by earthworks with ditches, extending 
from the White Nile to the Blue Nile, a 
length of about three miles. Within this 
exterior line, the outskirts of the town 
formed a good second irregular line ; and 
in Khartoum itself guns were mounted on 
the public buildings, the Palace being, in 
Gordon's words, "the great place for the 
firing." It was his habit every morning, 
shortly after sunrise, to scan the surround- 
ing country from these dominating points, 
and to note any change in the enemy's 
situation. 

The first battle was fought on the 16th 
of March, and this engagement Gordon 
himself described : 

"At 8 a.m. on the 16th, two steamers 
started for Halfaya. Bashi-Bazouks and 



KHARTOUM. 89 

some regulars advanced across plain to- 
wards rebels. At 10 a.m. the regulars 
were in square opposite centre of rebels' 
position, and Bashi-Bazouks were extended 
in their line to their right. The gun with 
regulars then opened fire. Very soon after 
this a body of about sixty rebel horsemen 
charged down a little to the right of centre 
of Bashi-Bazouks' line. The latter fired a 
volley, then turned and fled. The horse- 
men galloped towards the square, which 
they immediately broke. The whole force 
then retreated slowly towards the fort with 
their rifles shouldered. The horsemen 
continued to ride along flanks cutting off 
straeelers. The men made no effort to 
stand, and the gun was abandoned with 
63 rounds and 15 cases of reserve am- 
munition. The rebels advanced, and the 
retreat of our men was so rapid that 
the Arabs on foot had no chance of at- 
tacking Pursuit ceased about a mile 
from stockade, and the men rallied. We 
brought in the wounded. Nothing could be 



90 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

more dismal than seeing these horsemen, 
and some men even on camels, pursuing 
close to troops who, with arms shouldered, 
plodded their way back." 

Most commanders would have aban- 
doned the hope of being able to do any- 
thing with such troops. Not so General 
Gordon. Two Pashas who had disgraced 
themselves in. the battle were tried and 
found guilty of cowardice, and by his 
orders they were shot. His "sheep" he 
made determined efforts to convert into 
soldiers. 

After this defeat there was continual 
skirmishing with the Arabs. On one 
occasion, when the river rose, they were 
driven off in three or four engagements, 
and their towns were burned. Gordon 
sent up two expeditions to Senaar ; and in 
a battle fought on the 25th of August his 
troops took the Arab camp and killed the 
Arab commander-in-chief. On the 4th of 
September the Arabs gained a victory ; 
but they derived from it no solid advan- 



KHARTOUM. 91 

tage, and for some time afterwards there 
was " comparative quiet." In a letter to 
the officer commanding the royal navy at 
Massowah, dated August 24th, Gordon 
mentioned that his steamers had been 
doing "splendid work." "You see," he 
added with grim humour, "when you have 
steam on, the men can't run away, and 
must go into action." 

During the whole course of the sie^e he 
displayed his usual dauntless spirit and 
inexhaustible resource. When the Arabs 
captured two small steamers at Berber and 
one on the Blue Nile, he caused two new 
steamers to be built. His exterior lines 
he defended by means of wire entangle- 
ments, with live shells as mines ; and these 
land-torpedoes (used for the first time) 
" did great execution." They were ignited 
with lucifer matches. On the nth of 
November (the date of an important letter 
to Lord Wolseley) his soldiers were only 
half-a-month in arrears ; and he had 
evidently succeeded in inspiring many of 



92 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

them with something of his own courage 
and vigour. 

He had never ceased to resent the 
strange indifference of the authorities at 
home to the events in which he was play- 
ing so great a part. On the 9th of Sep- 
tember he wrote to the Khedive, Nubar 
Pasha, and Sir E. Baring: "How many 
times have we written asking for reinforce- 
ments, calling your serious attention to the 
Soudan ? No answer at all has come to 
us as to what has been decided in the 
matter, and the hearts of men have become 
weary of this delay. While you are eating, 
drinking, and resting on good beds, we 
and those with us, both soldiers and 
servants, are watching by night and day, 
endeavouring to quell the movement of 
this false Mahdi. Of course you take no 
interest for suppressing this rebellion, the 
serious consequences of which are reverse 
of victorious for you, and the neglect 
thereof will not do." It was in order that 
the English Government mi^ht learn the 



KHARTOUM. 93 

whole truth about the state of the Soudan, 
that Colonel Stewart and the French and 
English Consuls started in September on 
the journey which was to have so sad 
a close. 

Towards the end of 1884 there was 
much hard fighting at Khartoum ; and, 
notwithstanding Gordon's written mes- 
sages, he had forebodings of coming 
disaster. The runner who brought the 
famous note of the 14th of December — 
" Khartoum all right" — was instructed to 
say, " Our troops in Khartoum are suffer- 
ing from lack of provisions. Food we 
still have is little ; some grain and biscuit. 
We want you to come quickly. ... In 
Khartoum there are no butter nor dates, 
and little meat. All food is very dear." 
On the very day on which he wrote that 
Khartoum was "all right," he also wrote 
to a friend in Cairo : " All is up. I expect 
a catastrophe in ten days' time. It would 
not have been so if our people had kept 
me informed as to their intentions. My 
adieux to all." 



94 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

On the 28th of January, 1885, soon 
after the hard-won victory at Abou-Klea, 
in which Sir Herbert Stewart received his 
fatal wound, Sir Charles Wilson ap- 
proached Khartoum with soldiers, food, 
and ammunition. A heavy fire was 
opened on his steamers, and he was un- 
able to land. The town which had been 
so grandly defended was in the hands of 
the Mahdi. Two days before Sir Charles 
Wilson's arrival the besiegers had been 
admitted by traitors, and Gordon had 
been killed. 

So ended a career as romantic and as 
noble as any that the modern world has 
seen. When the terrible tidings were 
made known, England mourned for 
Gordon as she has seldom mourned even 
for her heroes. His unworldly temper, 
his ardent faith, his magnificent energy, 
his sublime unselfishness — in all this there 
was something that captivated the heart 
of the nation ; and it needed but the 
crowning glory of his death to evoke an 



KHARTOUM. 95 

expression of love and reverence to which 
there is hardly a parallel in our history. 
They who knew him best knew that his 
countrymen had obeyed a true instinct in 
placing him, even while he lived, beside 
those whose names are " on fame's eternal 
bead-roll worthy to be filed." With regard 
to Gordon's character there are no popular 
illusions to be dispelled. The more closely 
it is studied the deeper will be the admi- 
ration excited by his strength, his tender- 
ness, his purity, and his honour. 



APPENDIX. 



ii 



98 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 



A. 

Gordon's family is of Scottish origin. In 
the service of Peter the Great there was 
a General Gordon, who in a barbarous 
and coarse society maintained his inte- 
grity ; and it is worth noting that his 
favourite author was Thomas a Kempis. 
A distinguished officer who was one 
of Gordon's immediate ancestors served 
under Wolfe on the plains of Abraham. 

Gordon's grandfather, Captain William 
Augustus Gordon, R.A., lived in Exeter; 
and in the present church of St. Thomas, 
a suburb of Exeter, there are monuments 
which, with the more recent monuments 
in the cemetery at Southampton, give the 
family history through a full century. 
Over one of the vaults in the church of 
St. Thomas, near Exeter, is the following 
inscription :— " Anna Maria Gordon died 
in Exeter, 25th February, 1796, aged 47, 
after two days' illness, and her son on the 



APPENDIX. 99 

8th March, 1796, by a fall from his horse 
at the Cape of Good Hope, in the 
19th year of his age." These were 
Gordon's grandmother and uncle. Captain 
Gordon, the bereaved husband and father, 
died at Exeter, in June 1809, and his body 
was buried in the same vault. 

Gordon's father, the late Lieutenant- 
General Henry W. Gordon, R.A., was 
born in Devon, and always reckoned him- 
self a Devonshire man. Both he and 
Gordon's mother (whose maiden name 
was Enderby) were alive at the time of 
their son's successes in China. 

The family is one of soldiers, and they 
have served chiefly in the Royal Artillery. 



IOO CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 



*d 



B. 

The following letters were written in 
January, 1884, when Gordon was on the 
way to Egypt : — 

Mont Cenis, 19. 1. 84. 

My dear Mr. Barnes, — 

I left last night for Soudan to ar- 
range for evacuation. I enclose cheque 
for book ; if more is wanted up to ^10 
I will send it, for it ought to be done well. 
Colonel Sir C. Warren, R.E., Chatham, 
would give a good plan of Jerusalem 
without the debris. I hope you, Mrs. 
Barnes and the six are well, also Miss 
Freeman. Ministers said they were deter- 
mined to evacuate. Would I go and 
superintend it ? I said " Yes." Good 
night. With kindest love to you. I 



LETTERS. IOI 

expected Baker ere, but he may be at 
Brindisi. 

[No signature follows.] 



At Sea, 22. i. 84. 

My dear Mr. Barnes, — 

Your letter written on Epiphany has 
been read, but I have seen you since. 
The repentant thief was on right side — 
the side pierced — this is another point 
which fixes the side pierced. On the left 
was the unrepentant thief. 

You must be told shortly what passed. 
You know Wolseley sent a telegram to 
me at your house, but I did not know it 
until Sunday — he said, " Come up at once." 
This telegram came when I was so bothered 
that I said to my sister, " I will fly on 
Wednesday, the 16th, to Brussels;" so I 
said to Wolseley, " I will come up on 
Tuesday the 15th and go to Brussels on 



102 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

1 6th." I reached London at 2 p.m., Tues- 
day, stayed with Wolseley in Wolseley's 
office from 2 till 5 p.m., while he talked to 
Ministers. Nothing, however, came of it ; 
so I said, " I will go to Brussels." I did 
not see Ministers. I consequently went 
to Brussels on Wednesday, and got 
there Wednesday night. At noon on 
Thursday I got telegram from Wolseley 
saying, " Come over at once ;" so I saw the 
King, who did not like my going, and left 
Brussels at 8 p.m., Thursday, reaching 
London at 6 a.m., Friday. 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 deter- 
mined to evacuate Soudan, for they will 
not Guarantee future government. Will 
you go and do it ?" I said " Yes." He 



LETTERS. IO 



J 



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 to 
evacuate now." They said " Yes," and it 
was over, and I left at 8 p.m. for Calais. 
Very little passed between us. The Duke 
and Wolseley came to see me off, so that 
is over. 

The day after to-morrow I reach, D.V., 
Port Said, and go through Canal on 
to Suakim by H.M.S. ' Carysfort,' and 
reach that, D.V., on my birthday. I am 
quite restored to my peace, thank God ! 
and in His hand He will hide me. You 
and I are equally exposed to the attacks 
of the enemy. Me not a bit more than 
you are. Kindest love to you all. I am 
sorry not to have time to write to you 
graphic details. Lord Granville thanked 
me for going very nicely. Government 
are right, if they will not guarantee future 
government of Soudan, to evacuate it. 



104 CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

Good bye, kindest regards to the Temples, 
Bowring, Blackmore, and you all. 
Yours sincerely, 

My dear friend, 

C. G. Gordon. 



The Hosts are with me, " Mahanaim. 



* 



* Gordon frequently referred to the word " Mahanaim," 
and he liked the full explanation of its meaning given 
in Smith's 'Dictionary of the Bible.' It means "the 
two hosts," and is so used by the patriarchs in Holy 
Scripture. 

It is necessary to add that these letters, although appa- 
rently private and confidential in their character, were 
not intended by the writer to be so regarded. They 
belong to a series of which the first letter states that I am 
to make them known as I may see fit, and whensoever 
I may see fit. He called on me as a friend, to whom he 
had said " that he should probably not see me again on 
earth," both " to defend his character and to make known 
his religious views ; " adding that I was to " act on my 
sole discretion and responsibility." 



LONDON! PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, 
STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS. 



w 



■ I 



MESSRS. MACMILLAN & CO.'S PUBLICATIONS. 



BY THE LATE GENERAL GORDON. 

REFLECTIONS IN PALESTINE, 1883. 

By CHARLES GEORGE GORDON. 

Crown 8vo. 3^.' 67. 

"It must command the most respectful attention. '1 he earnest! 
General Gordon is stamped on every line, while his strong and original vii 

are expressed "with characteristic self-confidence He only knows one 

book, and that is the Bible ; but of the Bible his knowledge is exhaustive 

and profound But we have said enough to show that the ' Reflections ' 

are a clue to the heroic character of the man, who has set before him id 
impossible, indeed, of attainment, but towards which he is always striving to 
elevate himself; who seeks to mortify self, like his model, Thomas a Kemj 
and carries with him the profound conviction that, happen what will, his 
prayers are being heard and his footsteps directed." — Times. 

"It is a very distinct indication of how much the appreciation of historical 
and sacramental Chiistianity is 'in the air.' It is evidence of the hold which 
this Christianity has, even of those who may be most unconscious of its 
presence, or who believe themselves inimical to its progress. Short of a miracle, 
no soldier, however pious and heroic, of the last or the last but one generation, 

could have written the book Whatever may be the secret of its incept 

the phenomenal value of the book is incontestable." — Saturday Revieiv. 

EGYPT, the NILE, and the SOUDAN. 

Sir Sa muel W. Baker's Records of* his Journeyings, and 
Exploring Expeditions in Abyssinia, The Valle? of the 
NILE, and The SOUDAN, contain full and detailed accounts 
ol these rarely travelled Districts. 
Works by Sir Samuel White Baker, M.A., F.R.G.S., F.R.S. 

ISMAILIA. A Narrative of the Expedition to Central Africa for the 
ion of the Slave Trade, organised by Ismail, Khedive of Kgypt. With I\l 
, and numerous lllu by Zweckek and Dukand. New and Che 

Edition, with New Preface. Crown Svu. 6s. 

THE NILE TRIBUTARIES OP ABYSSINIA, AND THE 

SWORD HUNTERS OF THE JIAMRAM ARABS. With Maps and Illustrations. 
New and Cheaper Edition. Crown 8vo. 6s. 

i his Work affords the most complete Account of THE SOUDAN and sun 
ii.g distant portions of Egyptian territory. ——^—— — 

THE ALBERT N'YANZA GREAT BASIN OF THE NILE, 
AND EXPLORATION OF THE NILE SOURCES. New ai r Edition. 

With Maps and Illustrations. Crown 8vo. 6s. 

THE EGYPTIAN QUESTION. lieing Letters to tne Tit 
the Tall Mall Gazette. With Map. Demy 8vo. 

MACMILLAN AND CO., LONDON. 



I * 



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