General Gordon did not imagine that such extraordinary
digressions from the military essentials of a campaign journal would ever be
published. Indeed, each of his original volumes contains many sections, some as
long as eleven pages of manuscript, struck through in pen or pencil as an
indication that they were to be ‘pruned out’. But he did expect at least parts
of the journal to be made public as some form of official document.
Indeed, it was with an eye to the eventual inclusion of his
journal’s salient parts in a government dossier that he included a specific
advisory note to Wolseley about the different treatment of public and private
material when he despatched Volume 6 by steamer to Metemma. ‘Since departure 10
Sept of Lt. Col. Stewart CMG,’ he wrote, ‘I have kept a daily journal of all
events at Kartoum, which contains also my private opinions on certain facts,
which perhaps it is just as well you should know confidentially. You can, of
course, make extracts of all official matter, and will naturally leave my
private opinions out in the case of publication.’
This assumption that the diary’s most controversial elements
would be deemed of value by senior officers and, possibly, a wider readership,
demonstrated considerable vanity on the part of a man who professed to have
little interest in material reward or celebrity. Yet the journals represented
Gordon’s best chance to win vindication for his own philosophical and military
arguments. On a personal basis, those arguments centred on a moral opposition
to Gladstone’s own unshakeable determination on foreign non-interference. It
was Gordon’s position that personal morality and national honour should
preclude the possibility of abandoning allies, let alone subordinates, in the
face of enemy attack.
More practically relevant in the imperial context, Gordon
also argued that the withdrawal policy would not only drive all Sudanese into
the arms of the Mahdī, but also embolden like-minded Muslims to mount similar
uprisings in Egypt, the Ottoman possessions and even in British India. ‘It
cannot be too strongly impressed on the public,’ he argued on 17 September,
‘that it is not the Mahdi’s forces which are to be feared, but the rising of
the populations by his emissaries.’ Few overtly contradicted this argument,
although Sir Alfred Lyall, then Chief Commissioner of Oudh in British India,
had earlier written: ‘The Mahdi’s fortunes do not interest India. The talk in
some of the papers about the necessity of smashing him, in order to avert the
risk of some general Mahomedan uprising, is futile and imaginative.’
This, therefore, obligated a middle path between Gladstone’s
stubborn policy of ‘minimum engagement, zero responsibility’ on the one hand
and aggressive, Conservative-style imperial expansion on the other. Gordon’s
solution was that the least interventionist solution was to use Turkey as a
counter to the Mahdī. On this point, Gordon revealed a profound lack of empathy
with the Sudanese and a continuing failure to comprehend the nature of either
the Mahdī or the uprising he led, just as he had in his pre-mission analysis of
the situation in Sudan and in his absurd proposal to buy off the Mahdī with the
offer of the Sultanate of Kordofan.
The widespread cross-community support for the Mahdī’s
rebellion had its roots in decades of hatred for the Ottoman/Egyptian
occupation, derided collectively by Sudanese as al-Turkīa, the ‘Era of the
Turks’. Gordon failed to see any irony in proposing to combat a rebellion
against those ‘Turks’ by sending in & the Turks! But the opportunity to
address military and civilian supporters through the journals prompted
endlessly reworked justifications for Gordon’s proposal of an indigenous
administration under al-Zubeir Raḥma Manṣūr. Subsidising al-Zubeir with Turkish
military backing, he argued, would be far cheaper than a full-scale British
military mission. In fact, Gordon had written to Sultan Abdülhamit II in April,
asking for 3,000 Turkish troops to head off the spreading menace posed by the
Mahdī:
Your Majesty as head of the Mussulmin [sic] Faith must
know far better than I do, that the False Prophet threatens Your Majesty’s
spiritual authority, and that if he is allowed to capture Kartoum and the other
towns which now hold out, he will by his emissaries, raise the Hedjaz, Syria,
Palestine and Damascus& . If the beleaguered towns [in Sudan] fall, Your
Majesty may be sure that all the Hedjaz will rise, for the False Prophet’s
prestige will be then immense. We can hold out for five months, and I believe
if Your Majesty sends these men these men will not have to fire a shot, the
rebels will dissolve as ice before fire.
Similar letters were dashed off to the Emperors of
Austria-Hungary, Germany and Russia, the King of Italy and to Pope Leo XIII. To
these dignitaries, Gordon presented a variation on his fund-raising scheme: ‘Is
it possible for Your Majesties to relax your laws,’ he wrote, ‘and let your
subjects volunteer to come to our succour, and could not Your Majesties allow
volunteer subscription to cover the expenses. The questions is one of
civilization agst the worse form of ascetic fanaticism, headed by an impious
adventurer, who is condemned by the very religion, he claims to belong to.’
As for Wolseley’s relief force, Gordon’s running commentary
on its function serves not least to draw attention to its dismally slow
progress. Confirmation that such an expedition was at least underway came to
Khartoum only on 18 September 1884, when spies from Shendi reported ‘the
arrival of troops at Dongola, and their advance towards Berber’.28 Gordon was
categorical in refusing to accept that its primary function was to rescue him.
I altogether decline the imputation that the projected
expedition has come to relieve me. It has come to SAVE OUR NATIONAL HONOUR, in
extricating the garrisons, &c., from a position our action in Egypt has
placed these garrisons: I was a relief expedition No 1, they are relief
expedition NO. 2. As for myself, I could make good my retreat at any moment if
I wished. Now realise, what would happen, if the 1st Relief expedition was to
bolt, & the steamers fell into hands of the Mahdi, the 2nd Relief
Expedition (for the honour of England, engaged in extricating garrisons) would
be somewhat hampered. We the 1st and 2nd Expeditions are equally engaged for
honour of England. This is fair logic. I came up to extricate garrisons, and
failed. [Wolseley] comes up to extricate garrisons & (I hope) succeeds.
[Wolseley] does not come up to extricate me. The extrication of the garrisons
was supposed to affect our national honour& . I am not the “rescued lamb”,
and I will not be.
Cross-referring Gordon’s journal entries, each written in an
increasingly fraught atmosphere of isolation, deprivation and violence, with
those in Wolseley’s own campaign diary makes for a riveting juxtaposition of
desperation and complacency. The day Gordon assumed responsibility for the
Khartoum log, the first batch of special boats for Wolseley’s relief expedition
had left Britain. Wolseley himself had only arrived in Cairo the previous day.
By 18 September, when Gordon first heard about the Relief Expedition, its
commander was still in Cairo, enjoying dinner with the Khedive and a firework
show after-wards. Wolseley did not head south until the evening of 27
September, travelling by rail to Assyūt.
On 4 October, Gordon notched up another day of siege in his
journal: ‘Today is the 206th day, we have been more or less shut up. Delightful
life!’ Wolseley, meanwhile, had made it only as far as Korosko, a point from
which a desert crossing direct to Abū-Ḥamad and thence to Berber was still an
option and where he found Kitchener’s small detachment of roving scouts.
Seventeen days later Gordon embarked on the fifth volume of his journal,
scribbling grimly on the flimsy unlined paper that the Mahdī had at last
reached Omdurman. The British expeditionary force, meanwhile, was stuck at
Wādī-Ḥalfāʾ, ‘struggling with difficulties of transport, lack of coal, and
administrative hitches’. Despite his refusal to be ‘the rescued lamb’, Gordon’s
journal is peppered with obsessive calculations as to the likely arrival date
of the rescue force:
I calculate that the advance force of troops arrived at
Wadi Halfa on 22 Sept, that they took 20 days from there to Debba, so that on
12 Oct, they were at Debba (Stewart (D.V.) arrived Debba on the 28th Sept.) and
I calculate they could not be at Metemma – Shendy, before 10 Novr which will
give them 29 days for 150 Miles, thence it is 5 days here for a steamer so that
15 Novr ought to see them, or their advance guard.
These estimates, possibly based on Gordon’s own hectic pace
of travel through inhospitable terrain, were far too optimistic. That very day,
Wolseley was still at the 2nd Cataract, known locally as the Bāb al-Kabīr or
‘great gate’, arguing with the Royal Navy over its ‘management of our boats’
and with Thomas Cook & Son over coal supplies, while Butler struggled to
manhandle the whalers over the immense black boulders of the rapids.38 Wolseley
would not reach Dongola until 3 November, Ambukol on 12 December, al-Dabba on
15 December and Kūrti – still 285 miles from Khartoum by the Nile route – ‘in
the evening of the 16th December 1884’, two days after Gordon’s final surviving
diary entry.
Decr 14. Arabs fired 2 shells at Palace this morning. 546
ardebs [2736 bushels] Dhoora! in store, also 83525 okes [233,670 lb.] of
Biscuit! 10.30 A.M. The steamers are down at Omdaraman, engaging the Arabs,
consequently I am on tenter hooks! 11.20 A.M. Steamers returned, the “Bordeen”
was struck by a shell, in her battery, we had only one man wounded. [Remainder
of line deleted]
We are going to send down “Bordeen” tomorrow, with this
journal. If I was in command of the 200 men of Expeditionary Force, which are
all that are necessary for movement, I should stop just below Halfyeh &
attack Arabs at that place before I came on here to Kartoum. I should then
communicate with North Fort, and act according to circumstances. NOW MARK THIS,
if Expeditionary Force, and I ask for no more than 200 men does not come in 10
days, the town may fall, and I have done my best for the honour of our country.
Good bye. C. G. Gordon.
Could Khartoum could have been relieved had Wolseley been
removed from command and a more direct route taken? On 3 October 1884, The
Times reported in an editorial ‘a statement so startling that, notwithstanding
the unimpeachable source from which it proceeds, we give it with considerable
reserve. The statement of our Correspondent is that LORD WOLSELEY has been
summoned to return to London before the end of the present month, and that the
command of the Nile expedition will be assumed, on LORD WOLSELEY’s departure,
by GENERAL STEPHENSON& . But the recall of LORD WOLSELEY would clearly mean
a material change of policy, and the step, however it may be explained, would
therefore be regarded by the country with very grave anxiety.’
The report was picked up in later editions the same day by
almost every newspaper in Britain and Ireland. Word travelled fast and on 4
October, Wolseley, by now at Korosko, wrote to his wife to describe how he had
received ‘a telegram from the Central News saying the Times states I have been
recalled, and asking if it be true. What a curious rumour!’ That same day, an
official denial was issued by the military command in Cairo. Parliament was not
in session at the time but by 30 October, a week after the House of Commons
resumed business, Gladstone was able to express his government’s ‘perfect
confidence in his [Wolseley’s] ability and skill’.
Still, even if the politicians had not wavered, the Queen
was deeply dissatisfied with the general’s progress and did not hesitate to tell
him so. Wolseley’s subsequent letter to his wife Louise reveals not just his
anger at the monarch’s intervention, but his still complacent attitude to the
mission in hand.
I am brimfull [sic] of wrath at a letter from the Q which
I enclose. She could scarcely have written a General in the field a nastier
letter: so ungracious, so ungenerous& . As she is the Queen, I cannot argue
with her, so I mean to stop writing to her. She owes me a great deal, I owe her
nothing. Every reward I have received has been drawn from Her at the point of
the bayonet. I expect Sir C. Wilson with two steamers & about 100 soldiers
& 50 of the Rl. Navy to reach Khartoum next Tuesday the 20th instant, and
that Wilson will get back to Matammeh or before on evening of 27th or morning
of 28th. On the news he brings will depend all my future movements.
Wolseley’s survival may have prompted Gladstone’s opponents
to look for a more radical policy reversal in the shape of a reassertion of
British military strength in eastern Sudan. The rationale here was twofold: a
flanking manoeuvre to draw away the Mahdī’s forces, who might otherwise be
massed to resist Wolseley’s advance; and the provision of a shorter exit route
to Sawākīn. As always, The Times was swift to comment scathingly on the
Gladstonian record in foreign affairs. On 5 January 1885, with Wolseley still
labouring upriver, an editorial called on Gladstone to resign, as ‘our
interests, not in Egypt alone, but throughout the whole of the Imperial system,
are suffering from a dangerous paralysis of will. If MR. GLADSTONE and LORD
GRANVILLE & are fatally crippled, for decision and action, by personal
engagements, at a crisis so vital, they must be prepared – hard though the
saying may be – to make way for others who are not similarly incapacitated.’
Hamilton, who knew the way things worked, noted the
unfairness of Granville being made the scapegoat: ‘The policy is Mr. G.’s; and
he would be the last to palm off the responsibility for it on a colleague. The
prevalent idea is that Mr. G. won’t trouble himself about foreign matters like
Egypt; whereas it is Egypt, and nothing but Egypt, which occupies his
thoughts.’ But Gladstone was frequently absent and when the cabinet met on 7
January 1885 to debate intensifying British military involvement through a new
push from Sawākīn, ‘it was,’ as Kimberley noted, ‘left to Hartington to
exercise his discretion after consulting Wolseley’.
Gladstone, at home at Hawarden Hall, was horrified. ‘We have
already performed once, of course with loss, & with frightful slaughter of
most gallant Arabs in two bloody battles, this operation of ‘pacifying’ the
Eastern Soudan, & I am very loath to have another such pacification, &
quite unable to see how it is to be better or more effective& . what I think
we ought to know is whether Wolseley upon his own responsibility deems a new
expedition through Suakim against Osman Digna requisite for the efficiency
& success of his own expedition against Khartoum.’ On the specific point of
retaining possession of Sawākīn itself indefinitely, Gladstone categorically
restated standing policy: any British deployment ‘will be sent as in no way to
fetter the Cabinet with reference to ulterior occu-pation’. It was another
brief policy wobble, but Gladstone had reasserted control and with his explicit
disapproval the initiative died on the vine.
It was Augustus Wylde, writing in Sawākīn in 1887, who
observed that ‘no pen or brush will ever be able to relate or depict the last
horrors at Khartoum’.51 Without Gordon’s final volume of journal, describing
forty-two miserable days between 15 December 1884 and 25 January 1885, Wylde’s
is an accurate summary of the information gap in English. Arabic sources,
however, are available. Bordeini Bey, a grain merchant in Khartoum, produced a
vivid account, in which he described the surrender on 5 January 1885 of the
small garrison under Farajallah Rāghib at Fort Omdurman, the desperate scouring
of Khartoum’s warehouses for any remaining grain, the collection of all
available ammunition and powder in the stone-built Catholic church near the
Governor-General’s mansion and Gordon’s preparation of a small steamer, the Muḥammad
ʿAlī, as an escape vessel for the city’s leading officials (though not for
himself).
Bordeini’s account culminated in the ‘heavy despair’ of what
was to be for many residents their last day alive: ‘It was a gloomy day, that
last day in Khartoum; hundreds lay dead and dying in the streets from
starvation, and there were none to bury them’. Kitchener, too, was privy to
intelligence from Arabic-speaking sources who revealed that famine in the city
had prompted Gordon to send more than half the civilian population out of
Khartoum during the first week of January 1885, there to await the Mahdī’s
mercy:
The state of the garrison was then desperate from want of
food; all the donkeys, dogs, cats, rats, &c., had been eaten; a small
ration of grain was issued daily to the troops, and a sort of bread was made
from pounded palm tree fibres& . Gordon continually visited the posts, and
personally encouraged the soldiers to stand firm; it was said during this
period that he never slept.
After so many months of determined resistance, Gordon
launched his last desperate military sortie on 18 January 1884. With his troops
hugely outnumbered, short of ammunition and incapacitated by hunger, failure
was inevitable and triggered a bitter row five days later between Gordon and
his senior Egyptian staff officers, General Faraj al-Zeini, Colonel Ḥassan
al-Bahnasāwī and Bakhīt Butraki, the latter commanding the still–loyal Shaiqīa
militiamen known as ‘Bashi-bazouks’. That same day, 23 January, the civilian
City Council met to discuss surrender. It must have been the power of Gordon’s
personality, coupled with a glimmer of hope that the British rescue force might
yet arrive in time, that persuaded the fearful and starving dignitaries of
Khartoum to agree to hold out further. Gordon’s spies had alerted him three
days earlier to the steady advance of the Relief Expedition. But few could have
doubted that the end was near.
When the end did come, during the night of 25-26 January,
Gordon himself was ‘slightly ill’ and his famished troops had either abandoned
their posts on the broken walls to search for food in town or, weakened by
malnutrition, maintained position on the fortifications but in no condition to
resist the advance of the Mahdī’s army under cover of the early morning
darkness. One anomalous but interesting account current in Omdurman in the
immediate aftermath of the fall of Khartoum, relayed by a Hausa pilgrim from
West Africa named only as Abūbakar, claims that Gordon was captured alive but
grievously wounded and describes the Mahdī’s anger at the general’s subsequent
murder.
The Pasha, he said he would not run away till he was captured. He was struck with a gun; he was pierced with a sword and a spear; he was struck with a stone. The Mahdi had said, ‘He must not be killed, he must be brought before me; men do not kill a king in war’. When the Pasha said he would not go to the place of the Mahdi, all the Mahdi’s men struck him. The Mahdi, when he heard it, said, ‘Let his head be brought’. It was cut off, his body was thrown into the river. When his head was brought to the Mahdi he said, ‘Close his eyes’. He said, ‘You have done a wicked thing; why did you kill him?’ He was angry; he rose up, he returned to his camp in the evening.
