Books: In a Terrible Country

CHINESE GORDON: THE STORY OF A HERO (256 pp.)—Lawrence and Elisabeth Hanson—Funk & Waqnalls ($4).

When General Charles George Gordon was speared to death at Khartoum in 1885, Queen Victoria “had difficulty in speaking.” “How shall I … express what I feel? . . . grief inexpressible!” she wrote the hero’s sister. “Indeed, it has made me ill! My heart bleeds. . .” At the time—and for decades afterwards—Poet Arthur Rimbaud’s brusquer comment, “Gordon est un idiot,” represented the opinion of none but Poet Arthur Rimbaud.

Today, even in Britain few people could say precisely who Gordon was, what he was doing in the Sudan, why and by whom he was murdered. Still less could they say what there was in his character and acts to justify his becoming “the Stainless Knight of the century.” Chinese Gordon answers these questions—but in such a way that if the old Queen were still alive, she would again experience difficulty in speaking.

The Circles on Paper. The authors Hanson, who have made a solid reputation with biographies of the Bronte sisters, Jane Welsh Carlyle and George Eliot, are too fair and balanced a team to want to debunk Gordon. “But a man without fault is dreadfully dull and also extremely improbable. What … we asked ourselves, was this man really like?” He was a small, blue-eyed Scot whose charm was so great that even his enemies forgave his furious temper and Messianic pomposity. He detested formal society and despised money: often his first act on taking new office would be to cut his salary. He led scratch armies to victory all the way from Nanking to Equatorial Africa, but he never came near to winning his private battle with the world, the flesh and the devil.

Gordon drew two circles on paper, one marked “Body,” the other “Soul.” His “whole faith” consisted in believing that everything in the “Body” circle was foul and contemptible, and that only in the “Soul” circle was there “the indwelling of God.” But like most people who dote on going round in circles, Gordon was always flying off at tangents.

He read the Bible ceaselessly, pressed on members of Gladstone’s Cabinet copies of Dr. Samuel Clarke’s Scripture Promises, and never wearied of asking God to carry him out of this world into “the very bright, happy land with beautiful sights and glories.” But he also reveled in brandy, tobacco, the thrills of war and the company of handsome youths and boys. At best, this contrast between Gordon’s beliefs and acts resulted in savage self-hatred.

Fanatical activity was Gordon’s main answer to his troubles. He was only a captain of Engineers when he hit China like a bomb and smashed the power of the Taipings, a host of rebels who were destroying both their own government and British trading rights. A brilliant sapper and artilleryman, he blew gaps in walled towns that were deemed untakable and led his skimpy “armies” through the breaches, puffing gaily on a cigar and waving a bamboo cane. He parleyed with his enemies, but if they resisted both God’s word and Gordon’s charm he turned scarlet with rage, called for a Chinese dictionary and laid a trembling finger against the word “idiocy.” He sent home the most extraordinary dispatches ever received by the Foreign Office. “Anyhow, it matters little,” he concluded a report on the Turkish Empire. “A few years hence a piece of ground six feet by two will contain all that remains of Ambassadors, Ministers and your obedient, humble servant.”

Against the Mahdi. None of this appealed much to Mr. Gladstone. But the old Queen and the hero-worshiping public knew nothing about Chinese Gordon’s “Body”; they saw only the “Soul” personified, defeating and converting heathen hordes and making his name the terror of African slave traders. When Egypt was threatened by the Mahdi (a Sudanese who believed he was the supreme prophet foretold by Mahomet), there was uproar in Britain when Gladstone refused to send Gordon out to deal with him. Not until the Mahdi had built an army 300,000 strong did the Gladstone government bow to public pressure and order General Gordon to Khartoum.

Gordon sent the garrison a typical telegram: “You are men, not women. Be not afraid; I am coming.” On reaching the city, in February 1884, he told the despairing commandant: “Khartoum is as safe as Kensington Gardens.” For some months he actually convinced the Sudanese that he was right; even the London Times correspondent lost his head. “The way he pats you on the shoulder when he says ‘Look here, dear fellow, now what do you advise?’ would make you love him . . . He has found me badly up in Thomas a Kempis, which he reads every day . . . He is … the greatest and best man of this century.” But Khartoum became a besieged city.

“Gordon ordered all dogs and cats and donkeys to be killed and eaten, rats to be caught and eaten . . .” The gentle Gordon changed into a holy terror—”an old man, white-haired . . . kicking, shouting, punishing.” A new and terrible burden of guilt now rested on him: he knew that by defying the Mahdi’s orders to surrender, he had made sure that every inhabitant of Khartoum would be slaughtered if no relief force arrived.

He spent hours on the palace roof, his telescope trained down the Nile in search of the smoke of gunboats. But he saw only the white puffs of the Mahdi’s cannon. “I am quite happy, thank God,” he wrote his sister in his last letter, “. . . and have tried to do my duty.” Before dawn on Jan. 26, 1885, the Mahdi forced his frightened troops over Gordon’s land mines and the Arab army poured into the city.

The screams of dying citizens rang in Gordon’s ears as he stood unarmed at the top of the palace steps. A party of Arabs, their “bloodstained white robes [swinging] brightly in the dim light,” swept up to him and halted. “Where is the Mahdi?” demanded Gordon. They made no reply.

“Where is the Mahdi?” he asked again.

This time, the leading sheik answered with a shrill scream: “Oh cursed one, your time is come!”, and drove his spear through Gordon’s body.

The relief force arrived three days later.

“Gordon was avenged in the British manner,” and Khartoum became the capital of that “pleasant fiction” entitled “the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan.” Few of Gordon’s works have survived like his legend—and few Britons are likely to swap this for the brave man of flesh & blood who used humbly to say: “I’ve been very low, old fellow. Don’t be hard on me. This is a terrible country.”