Part 14

“No, but I was through your conduct!” came the dry retort, and Crawford walked away crestfallen, remarking to himself that the General was “damned crusty to-day.”

Wellington’s best known title is the Iron Duke, and yet no man ever had less iron in him than he. It is true that he armed himself from head to foot with a mail which his enemies found impenetrable, but the gallant heart whose high courage carried him through so many dangers and difficulties was withal as tender as a woman’s.

When his last great fight had been fought and won, when the long tragedy of the Napoleonic wars was over, and the curtain had just fallen upon the tremendous climax of Waterloo, Dr. Hume, his physician, went to see him early on the morning of the 19th of June to tell him of the death during the night of his friend Gordon, and this is how he described the conqueror on the morrow of his greatest victory.

“He had, as usual, taken off his clothes, but had not washed himself. As I entered he sat up in bed, his face covered with the dust and sweat of the previous day, and extended his hand to me which I took and held in mine while I told him of Gordon’s death and of such of the casualties as had come to my knowledge. He was much affected. I felt the tears dropping fast upon my hand, and, looking towards him, saw them chasing one another in furrows over his dusty cheeks.”

This is a touching little picture of the one man in the world who has proved himself capable of grappling with and overthrowing the Corsican Colossus, and with it we may here bid him farewell. Waterloo was the last as well as the greatest of his fights. He had given the world peace. He had overthrown the most grievous tyranny that had threatened it for many a long century.

He had found Europe under the heel of France. He had conquered her conqueror; and yet it was he who, when terms of peace were being dictated in Paris, stopped his ferocious old ally Blücher from blowing up the Bridge of Jena, and got such concessions for France in the hour of her defeat and humiliation as none but the victor of the Peninsula and the hero of Waterloo could have done. Like all really strong men, he was merciful in his strength; and like all really great soldiers he looked upon his enemies as his friends as soon as he had soundly thrashed them.

With his after career as a politician and a statesman I have here nothing to do. His empire-making ended with the order that sent the whole steadfast British line streaming down from the rising ground which they had held so stubbornly all through that famous day. It is better to take leave of him here, for Arthur Wellesley was too good and too great a man for politics. He was the idol of the army he had created, but he didn’t know how to lead a mob.

Seventeen years after Waterloo, to the very day, he was beset in London streets by a howling multitude of the very people he had served so splendidly.

If he had not found a refuge in the Temple and a bodyguard of Benchers, it is probable that they would have pulled him from his horse and torn him limb from limb. It is a sorry spectacle, although relieved by the quaintness of the vision of this unconquered hero of a hundred fights trusting for his life to a bodyguard of lawyers.

He never forgot this, and probably never forgave it. Every one knows how, when Apsley House was threatened by a mob, he made ready to defend it in a businesslike and soldierly way. When the mob broke his windows he coolly ordered iron shutters and put them up. Afterwards, when the fickle tide of popular fancy had turned the other way, and the mob was wont to cheer instead of cursing him, he used to point to these shutters and laugh good-humouredly but seriously withal.

In one sense, however, it is hardly true that Wellington’s last fight was at Waterloo. The last time that he really made a display of his military capacity was in London. It was he who on the 10th of April, 1848, saved London from the Chartists. He never allowed a soldier to be seen, much less a weapon, and when it was all over, Sir John Campbell came to him and said:

“Well, Duke, it all turned out as you foretold.”

And this was the answer:

“Oh, yes; I was sure of it, and I never showed a soldier or a musket, but I was ready. I could have stopped them whenever you liked, and if they had been armed it would have been all the same.”

That was Wellington’s last victory--bloodless, and, therefore, since the enemy would have been his own countrymen, all the more glorious for that.

In the article on Nelson, I mentioned the well-known fact that the greatest soldier and the greatest sailor of their age met but once, and that Wellington so far gauged the character of the hero of Trafalgar as to describe him as “a very superior person.” In the spirit they not only met again, but they will live together in everlasting honour in the memory of the British people.

Their last resting-places are side by side, as they should be, in St. Paul’s Cathedral, and side by side their glorious memories will remain as long as the noble qualities which made them the greatest men, not only of their nation, but of the age which their great deeds made splendid, are held in honour--and that is the same thing as saying as long as the human race endures.

XI

“_CHINESE GORDON_”

“_HONOUR--NOT HONOURS_”

XI

“CHINESE GORDON”

We are living rather too near to the days of the man himself, to be able to say what place History will ultimately assign to the greatest and most famous of the old fighting stock of the Gordons. Probably the discriminating historian of the day after to-morrow will look upon him ethnologically as a queer survival or throwback--a man who lived and did his work in the nineteenth century in the style of the fifteenth, or even the fourteenth.

In the military sense he would seem to be the last of our great soldiers of fortune--for soldier of fortune he undoubtedly was far more than soldier of Britain--and the work that he did as one of the makers of the British Empire was done under foreign flags.

It might, indeed, be asked by the superficial observer in what sense he was an Empire-Maker at all, or what right he has to claim a place in that long and splendid array of great men, only a few of whom can be silhouetted within the limits of such a volume as this and whose succession stretches through the centuries from William, Duke of Normandy to Cecil John Rhodes of Rhodesia.

The answer is plain enough, though not very obvious at first sight. The British Empire is twofold. It is not only the greatest concrete Fact that the world has ever seen; it is also a vast and very splendid Idea, and in this sense it covers, not only just that portion of the earth’s surface over which the Union Jack flies, but also every other land known and half-known, old and new, civilised and savage, into which the genius of the Anglo-Saxon has forced its way and over which it has exercised that peculiar influence for which the word “English” stands in the dictionaries of our foreign competitors.

Charles George Gordon never added a square yard to the British Empire, considered as a geographical expression. He very seldom fought at the head of British troops, and when he did, it was not to any very great purpose--in fact his witnessing of the murder of many hundreds of gallant British soldiers by the officials who were guilty of the criminal mismanagement of the Crimean War was about the sum total of his experiences of warfare under the Flag.

It is a not altogether curious fact that, although Gordon was one of the very ablest leaders and organisers of men, and although he, shortly after thirty, proved to demonstration that he possessed most of the qualities of a great soldier, his native country didn’t appear to have any use for him, or at least no adequate use. As I have said before, the curse of both our Services, and therefore, in a very definite and practical sense, of the whole Empire, is officialism, or officialdom.

Two very different men grasped this fact in its relation to Gordon. One was Nubar Pasha, Egyptian Minister at Constantinople, and the other was John Ruskin. Nubar said: “England owes little to her officials; she owes her greatness to men of different stamp.” Ruskin said practically the same thing in one of his lectures at Woolwich, but in different fashion and in many more words, while Gordon, within a mile or so of the lecture-hall at Woolwich, was bending his great soul to the routine duties which appear to have been about the best work that the British Government could find for him to do.

When the British Government did at last get him to take his share in the doing of the most difficult and dangerous work which was just then necessary to be done upon the very outskirts of civilisation, those who were responsible for the exercise of the executive power deserted him and left him to his death by what is probably the basest and most criminal betrayal of a man of deeds by men of words that can be laid to the charge of a British Government.

History will probably say with truth that every member of that fatally futile Cabinet who had any hand in sending Gordon to Khartoum and neglecting to give him reasonable support incurred a direct and personal responsibility for his death, from which the dispassionate verdict of Posterity will be very slow to relieve their memories.

It is a stain that can never pass away from their public reputations. There are other faults of a similar sort for which these men will be arraigned at the bar of History, but the fate of the lonely, betrayed man, who day after day left his starving and ever-diminishing garrison to look out across the desert from the battlements of Khartoum for the help which, for him, never came, will certainly be considered the blackest if not the greatest of them all.

But there is another and very practical sense in which Gordon was a British Empire-Maker. This realm of ours is what it is, not only because we have fought for some parts of it and successfully stolen others. It is ours because we knew how to make use of it after we got it; because of all other men now existing on the face of the earth the Anglo-Saxon is the best leader and governor of savage and semi-savage men that has so far been evolved, and of such leaders and governors Gordon plainly proved himself to be one of the very best.

Under the British flag he never won a battle for Britain. The genius which his Motherland might have made such splendid use of did its best work under the dragon-flag of China and the crescent-flag of Egypt, but nevertheless on the day when the last mile of the British high road from Cairo to Cape Town is thrown open, and the _Pax Britannica_ is proclaimed from north to south of Africa, men will remember Gordon and confess that without him this might never have been done.

It will have been noticed by those who have read between the lines here printed that where Empire-Makers are concerned the old-fashioned idea of ancestry seems to be not altogether the fiction that certain latter-day theorists, men of words to a man, have sought to make it, and Gordon was no exception to this rule.

His lineage stretches away back into the dim mists which lie behind the history of all these islands into the days when Englishmen, Scotsmen, and Irishmen had yet to be thought of, and when the divisions of mankind were racial rather than national.

Of course the Gordons of last century were for the most part desperate Jacobites, and as such were hinderers rather than doers of the work of empire-making. But, curiously enough, this particular Gordon did not come from these. On the contrary, there was a fight during that miserable business of 1745 in which, on the field of Gladsmuir, a couple of thousand Highland clansmen played havoc with some English regiments fresh back from the Flemish wars, and after the slaughter they took many prisoners, one of whom was David Gordon, great-grandfather of the hero and martyr of Khartoum.

From this it will be seen that, whether by design or accident, his branch of the ancient and widespread stock had managed to get upon the right side--that is to say, the side which was to fight for imperialism as distinguished from mere nationalism, which in many cases is only another way of spelling parochialism.

It is noteworthy, by the way, that Gordon’s grandfather, William Augustus, so named after “Butcher Cumberland,” fought at Louisburg and on the Heights of Abraham, after Captain Cook had taken those soundings on the St. Lawrence. His son, William Henry, fought as an officer of artillery at Maida, and it was his grandson who won the yellow jacket and mandarin’s button in suppressing the Taiping rebellion, who refused a roomful of gold as a bribe, and who, after carefully scratching out the inscription, gave the huge gold medal which he had received from the Emperor of China anonymously to the Coventry Relief Fund.

This “give away your medal,” to use his own words, is the keynote of his whole life. Gordon worked “for honour, not honours,” and that one letter makes a great deal of difference. We see here, too, the sign of his kinship with other Empire-Makers, the faculty of seeing what work had to be done and the power of doing it for its own sake, whatever difficulties there might lie in the way.

As a boy he seemed to combine in the most curious fashion a constitutional sensitiveness amounting almost to timidity, with a contempt for personal danger, and an equal contempt for authority which individually he was unable to respect.

Altogether, in fact, his was a nature which had very little to expect in the way of promotion or favour from conventional officialdom, and it was very little that he got. This view was no doubt amply justified by his first experience in warfare in the trenches before Sebastopol, for if ever heroism and devotion abroad were crucified by authority at home, this was the case during the Crimean War.

From the Crimea the scene shifts somewhat suddenly to China. And yet here we may note that this is not the place to stop and worry about the morality or otherwise of those so-called opium wars which led up to the trouble of 1860. If the opium trade was bad, the opening of the Flowery Land to European commerce was good, and one usually does find good and bad mixed up in the most extraordinary manner in matters of this sort. The point here is that the brief war which ended with the taking of the Taku forts in the August of 1860, and the capture of Pekin, was the beginning of the career of “Chinese Gordon.”

He did not see the taking of the forts, but he did see the destruction of the Summer Palace, “the Garden of Perpetual Brightness,” which was destroyed as an act of revenge at the order of a British envoy who may here be left nameless in the infamy that he earned by it. Gordon was one of the involuntary Vandals, and this is what he said about the business when writing home:

“You can scarcely imagine the beauty and magnificence of the palaces we burnt. It made one’s heart sore to destroy them. It was wretchedly demoralising work.”

After this for a year and a half he fulfilled the duties of a Captain of Engineers in the camp at Tien-Tsin in the midst of a vast dreary plain. During this time the Taiping rebels had been industriously employing fire and sword to make one of the most fertile portions of the Flowery Land the reverse of worthy of the name and, at length Shanghai itself, the headquarters of the foreign traders, was threatened by the ever-advancing wave of barbarism.

A defensive force was hurriedly raised by an American named Ward, who for nearly two years led it to constant victory and earned for it the somewhat magniloquent title of the Ever-Victorious Army.

Then a chance bullet killed Ward at the beginning of what might have been a most brilliant career. Under his successor everything went wrong. Victory was replaced by defeat and success by disaster. This incompetent person being removed, the hitherto obscure officer of Engineers stepped into his place. It was a time when a leader of men was badly wanted. It was also the moment when Fate knocked at the door of Charles George Gordon and found him in.

Within a very short time disorganisation was replaced by discipline, despair by confidence, and the Ever-Victorious Army was once more made worthy of its name. It was here that Gordon really began his career as a soldier of fortune. When he took command he told Li-Hung-Chang that he would turn the rebels out of the score of walled cities which they had captured and strengthened, and put the rebellion down within eighteen months. As a matter of fact he did it in fifteen.

The story of the doing of this so clearly shows the extraordinary capacity that Gordon possessed for both the organisation and the execution of a military campaign, as well as the faculty of inspiring confidence in all sorts and conditions of men, that it is simply amazing that the home authorities did not immediately recognise the fact that he was something a good deal more than they had hitherto taken him for. This, however, it was to take them some twenty years more to find out.

Still there was one incident at the close of the rebellion which might have shown even the official mind very clearly what sort of man this Major of Engineers was. The last incident of the war was the surrender of the great lake-city of Soo-Chow, and the Wangs, or chiefs of the rebels, laid down their arms on a guarantee of safety and good treatment. The Chinese way of acting up to this was to chop the heads off the whole lot. Now Gordon considered himself in a measure responsible for this guarantee, and the way in which he marked his sense of the breach of faith was characteristically unique.

The brilliancy of his services was recognised by a money gift of 10,000 taels (between three and four thousand pounds of English money). Gordon acknowledged it by writing on the back of the Imperial letter: “Major Gordon regrets that, owing to the circumstances which occurred since the capture of Soo-Chow, he is unable to receive any mark of his Majesty the Emperor’s recognition.”

If ever a sceptred monarch got the snub direct the Son of Heaven must have got it then, although the probability is that the 10,000 taels never found their way back to the Imperial treasury. Gordon also wanted to throw up the whole business, but the rebellion suddenly broke out again in another place, and so he went on with his work until it was finally crushed, for he was not the sort of man who liked to begin a thing and not get through with it.

His brilliant success in every single operation that he conducted clearly proved, as I have said, that in Gordon Britain possessed a true leader of men and master of affairs; in other words an Empire-Maker of the first order. And yet she first ignored and undervalued him, and then, as David did with Uriah, put him in the forefront of the battle and left him there to die.

For twenty years after we had wars in many places--in South and West Africa, in Egypt, Abyssinia, and Afghanistan. In some we gained credit and in some disgrace, but during all that twenty years the leaden eye of officialdom never seems to have fallen upon Gordon. The Chinamen were quicker sighted. He was the first and I believe the only “foreign devil” who was endowed with the Yellow Jacket and made one of the bodyguard of the Son of Heaven.

If he had chosen he might have made an enormous fortune and risen to any dignity short of the throne that the Flowery Land had to offer, but as a matter of fact he left China poorer than he went into it, bringing away with him only that big gold medal which he afterwards gave anonymously to charity.

And all this time he was, as one of his biographers and a fellow soldier has truly said, “not only without honour in his own country, but was regarded by many of the mandarins and ruling classes of his fellow countymen as a madman.” The use of the word “mandarin” there will be understood if we remember that his brother mandarins of China held him in the highest honour.

He came back to England in 1865, and was given the command of the Royal Engineers at Gravesend, and there for six years he did the routine work of a soldier, and in his spare time won a reputation for missionary work of the unofficial and unassuming sort which will live as long as his fame as a soldier and leader of men.

Here in the interval between his two careers we may take a glance at the physical man as he was just about now. This is how his comrade Sir William Butler describes him: “In figure Gordon, at forty years of age, stood somewhat under middle height, slight but strong, active, and muscular. A profusion of thick, brown hair clustered above a broad, open forehead. His features were regular, his mouth firm, and his expression when silent had a certain undertone of sadness which instantly vanished when he spoke.

“But it was the clear, grey-blue eyes, and the low, soft, and very distinct voice that left the most lasting impression on the memory of the man who had seen and spoken with Charles Gordon, and an eye that seemed to have looked at great distances and seen the load of life carried on men’s shoulders, and a voice that, like the clear chime of some Flemish belfry, had in it fresh music to welcome the newest hour, even though it had rung out the note of many a vanished day.”

Such was, then, the outer aspect of the man who at length went to Egypt at the invitation of Nubar Pasha and the Khedive Ismael, to begin that work which in the end cost one of the most valuable of British lives, and made the delta and valley of the Nile what they are to-day in everything but name--a British province.

In this sense Gordon was _de facto_ an Empire-Maker. The mendacious amenities of Diplomacy may lisp out meaningless phrases about the evacuation of Egypt, but the fact is that we have re-created the land of the Pharaohs, we have brought it from bankruptcy to prosperity, we have released the fellah from the terror of the lash and the servitude of forced labour. We have raised a downtrodden peasantry to the position of self-respecting citizens, and we have turned slaves into soldiers. This was the work that Gordon began for us, although we did not employ him to do it, or recognise that he was doing it; but, having taken it over and carried it so far, it is hardly likely that even British officialdom will commit such a crime against civilisation as the surrender of the almost completed task would now be.

Gordon went south from Cairo by way of Suakin and Berber to Khartoum, taking with him the somewhat curious title of Governor of the Equator--which of course meant the Equatorial Provinces--and a very distinct conception of a Central African Dominion which the soldiers and statesmen of other generations will realise in due course, provided always that the onward march of the Anglo-Saxon is not turned aside or stopped by faint-heartedness within or disaster without.

His headquarters or capital was a place called Gondokoro, situate in the midst of a ghastly region of river, lake, and swamp, sunbaked by day, and miasma-haunted by night. He went up by steamer from Khartoum and, some two hundred miles above the city, he passed the island of Abba in the White Nile, and in one of his letters home he wrote these words which read somewhat weirdly in the lurid light of the camp-fires which seven years later closed round Khartoum: