28 January: Boreham on Charles George Gordon

The Happy Warrior
It was on January the twenty-eighth, 1833, that Charles George Gordon was born in Woolwich, near London. The British people have seldom been more cruelly shocked than when they heard, on January twenty-sixth, 1885, that Khartoum had fallen, and General Gordon had been slain. Not since the news of the battle of Trafalgar and the death of Nelson had so profound an impression been made on the imagination of the British public. A tempest of emotion swept the world. Every conceivable passion was stirred. Grief, shame, anger, revenge, and a multitude of kindred instincts and impulses raged tumultuously and simultaneously in the universal mind. Even Queen Victoria lost her temper and sent Mr. Gladstone a furious telegram. The tragic episode quickly became the storm-centre of a heated political strife, and in many a newspaper controversy and on many a public platform the policy of the Gladstone government was vigorously denounced and as vigorously defended.

Those who like to torture their brains with the ramifications and complexities of an involved detective story will find a task to their taste in the bewildering records of the massacre at Khartoum. Who killed Gen. Gordon? Who was really to blame? And in all probability the average reader will reach the conclusion that the guilt was widely distributed. There are times in the experience of every household when everything goes wrong. We are confronted by a chapter of accidents. "It never rains," we say to one another, "but it pours." All the evidence goes to show that something of the kind happened in 1884. By some hideous refinement of perversity, everybody concerned did the wrong thing, or failed to do the right thing, simultaneously. Statesmen acted hesitatingly and dubiously, doubting at night the decisions that they had reached at noon. If the Relief Expedition had been despatched with greater promptitude, and if it had travelled with better speed, it would not have reached the scene of the disaster two days too late.

Uncompromising Enemy Of Tyranny
Nor is it possible to acquit Gordon himself of his share of censure. He was sent out to evacuate the Sudan. On arrival he decided that the right course was not to evacuate but to fight. His view was probably sound, but his change of front, in the teeth of implicit instructions, made confusion still worse confounded at home. And everything was made more difficult by the meagre channels of communication that were then available. Gordon, as "The Times" remarked, ranks with the heroes of antiquity, the warriors of renown, the knights of romance, the men who never die. Alike in the Crimea, in China, and in Africa he covered himself with glory. He is one of the people whom everybody seems to have met. We are all familiar with his well-knit but unimpressive figure, his fine head that somehow seems to be a size too large for him, his well-moulded face, lively and rich in eloquent expressiveness, the short curly hair that had once been black, and, above all, with his clear blue eye, full of merriment yet capable of startling gravity—the eye that seemed to look you through and through.

An uncompromising enemy of tyranny and slavery, and a man of the loftiest Christian principle, he could make no terms with a faith he felt to be false. He regarded it as his duty to repudiate and destroy the superstitions and fanaticisms that threatened to overwhelm the Sudan. During the final agony at Khartoum the Mahdi sent him an Eastern costume. "Put it on," said the embassy, "as a sign that you renounce your faith, and no harm shall come to you!" Gordon flung the robes to the ground and, in the sight of everybody, trampled them under his feet. "Then," says Lytton Strachey, "all alone, he went up to the roof of his high palace and turned the telescope, almost mechanically, to the north," looking, but looking in vain, for the relieving columns he knew to be on their way.

The Triumphs Of War And Of Peace
Gordon never married. He formed no close ties or intimate friendships. How could he? The roving nature of his commissions sentenced him to solitude. His one companion was his Bible, the Bible that afterwards became the treasured possession of Queen Victoria. His delight was in his boys, the waifs and strays he gathered about him when in England, and whom he endeavoured to fit for positions of honour and usefulness. On the monument in London it is said of him that, "he gave his strength to the weak, his substance to the poor, his sympathy to the suffering, and his heart to God." And on the four sides of the pedestal of the Melbourne statue it is recorded that: (1) He sought for little children to tend and clothe and train; (2) He rescued provinces from anarchy and would accept no reward; (3) He would not desert those dependent on him while life remained; (4) He sought to save the lost and bid the oppressed go free.

Gordon will go down to history as an Englishman who loved his country far better than he loved himself, as an illustrious soldier who, an utter stranger to fear, courted danger and death on countless honourable fields, and as the heroic victim of a malignant combination of hostile circumstances that seemed cruelly banded together for his destruction. Lord Tennyson penned his epitaph—

Warrior of God, man's friend, not laid below,
But somewhere dead, far in the waste Sudan,
Thou livest in all hearts, for all men know
This earth hath borne no simpler, nobler man.

The record of Charles George Gordon is one of the most stainless and chivalrous in our annals, and his name will be an incentive to high-minded devotion as long as patriotism survives.

F W Boreham

Image: Charles George Gordon