Part 15

“Last night, March 26th, we were going slowly along in the moonlight and I was thinking of you all and of the expeditions and Nubar and Co., when all of a sudden from a large bush came peals of laughter. I felt put out, but it turned out to be birds, who laughed at us from the bushes for some time in a very rude way. They are a species of stork, and seemed in capital spirits and highly amused at anybody thinking of going to Gondokoro with the hope of doing anything.”

But the laughing storks were not the only inhabitants of the Island of Abba, for, in a cave among its rocks, there was dwelling at that very moment a certain Moslem monk, or dervish, named Mohammed Achmet, who had already won some reputation for sanctity among his fellow tribesmen.

It would have been a most unwarrantable and, for Gordon, quite an impossible thing to do, and yet, so far is fact stranger than fiction, that the whole history of about a quarter of a continent would have been changed for the better, and the march of civilisation and humanity in Northern Africa would have been incalculably accelerated if the Governor-General of the Equator had stopped his boat just at that point, landed his men on the island, routed the holy man out of his cave, and either put a bullet through his head or drowned him in the Nile; for this recluse, then unknown beyond the confines of his native desert, was destined seven years later to be hailed by the Soudan tribesmen as the Mahdi--a word which to us means so much disgrace and disaster as well as hard and tardily won triumph that there is no need here to further elaborate the coincidence.

It was not a pleasant land, this scene of Gordon’s first government. As he himself says of the wilderness: “No one can conceive the utter misery of these lands. Heat and mosquitoes day and night all the year round.” These are few words, but I am able to say from personal experience that to those who know what African heat and African mosquitoes _are_ they speak very eloquently.

Here, until October, 1876, Gordon lived and worked and suffered, making maps, building forts, enticing traders to come to him, teaching his soldiers to work and to till the ground and raise crops instead of plundering the natives. One by one his staff died about him, but still somehow the work went on.

When he first arrived he wrote: “the only possessions Egypt has in my province are two forts, one here at Gondokoro and the other at Fatiko. There are three hundred men in one and two hundred in the other. You can’t go out in safety half a mile.”

But towards the end of ’76 the line of posts had been pushed to Duffli, a place on the Nile only three degrees north of the Equator itself. Lake Albert Nyanza had been circumnavigated for the first time by a steamboat and mapped out--not by Gordon himself, who declined the honour of first steaming on its waters, but by an Italian lieutenant of his, named Gessi, and his reason for doing this was “to give a practical proof of what I think regarding the inordinate praise which is given to an explorer.”

His idea was that those who did the hard work, the getting up of stores and boats and other impedimenta over rapids and across deserts, were the real men who deserved the honour. “But all this would go for nothing in comparison with the fact of going on the lake, which you may say is a small affair when you have the boats ready for you”--from which certain much-boomed and belauded explorers known to latter-day fame might well learn wisdom as well as a little becoming modesty.

The farther south the bounds of Equatoria were pushed the more dismal the country seems to have become. He calls it “a dead, mournful spot, with a heavy, damp dew penetrating everywhere. It is as if the angel Azrael had spread his wings over this land. You have little idea of the silence and solitude. I am sure no one whom God did not support could bear up. It is simply killing.”

At length the three years of his miserable service came to an end. In October he set his face northward from Khartoum and ate his Christmas dinner in London.

It was in those days that Britain woke up to some sense of her opportunities and responsibilities. She had begun what was then called the “forward” policy, and which to-day with wider vision and sounder wisdom we call the Imperial policy.

Unhappily the fickle breath of popular favour soon blew the other way for a space; a halt was called, then a retreat was sounded, and of course with the inevitable result. The arms of Britain were sullied by defeat, and her ancient honour was stained by the breach of her plighted word and the desertion of those who had trusted to her faith.

This was the dark and disgraceful period which lasted from the end of 1880 to the beginning of 1885. It began with the desertion of the heroic British garrisons in the Transvaal and the everlasting shame of Majuba Hill, and it ended with the political betrayal and the constructive murder of Charles George Gordon.

It was on January 31, 1877, that Gordon went back to Africa as Governor-General of the Soudan. On May 5th he was installed at Khartoum; on the 19th he left to strike his first blow against slavery; by June 7th he had crossed four hundred miles of wilderness and passed the frontier of Dafour.

His movements during this time, amazing as they are now to us, were absolutely paralysing to the chiefs and officials of the country. To them a Pasha of Egypt was a portly gentleman, never in a hurry, never inclined to leniency or mercy, a staunch upholder of the slave trade in its worst as well as its best aspects, and possessing a very keen eye indeed to the main chance.

But the quite phenomenal Pasha who now flits across their astonished vision is a lean, yellow-faced little man, clad in the gorgeous but dusty and travel-stained uniform of a Marshal of Turkey, mounted on a swift dromedary which out-distances every other animal of the desert save the beast ridden by the Arab sheikh who accompanies him. The two fly from point to point with incredible rapidity; the words of the Pasha are sometimes stern and sometimes mild, but always just and always dead against slavery. There is no talk of what he wants for himself, but only of what he wants done or left undone, because this or that is right or wrong--and what he wants he gets.

The troops that came labouring after him were of such miserable material that they deserved only to be made slaves themselves, and such the Arabs would speedily have made them but for this yellow-faced, bright-eyed man, who set them one against another, played off their jealousies and hatreds, and generally out-manœuvred them with such consummate and incomprehensible skill, striking at such vast distances with such incredible rapidity, that in four months a seemingly impossible feat had been accomplished, and the rebellion of the slave-kings put down.

And yet it was all hopeless. The slave trade was too much for him, as it has so far been too much for every one else. “I declare I see no human way to stop it!” he writes in one of his letters. “When you have got the ink that has soaked into blotting-paper out of it, then slavery will cease in these lands.”

In the November of 1877 there occurred an incident which was destined in after years to bear terrible fruit. He travelled from Kordofan _viâ_ Khartoum to Merawy. He was on his way to Wadi Halfa to see about pushing on the railway from there to Dongola. But before he got there a dispatch reached him saying that the Abyssinians had invaded the Eastern Soudan. Back he went, post-haste, only to find the news was false.

If it had not been for this the railway would have been completed, and the cataracts of the Nile would not have delayed the tardily-sent Relief Expedition until the Arab bullets had done their work and gallant Gordon’s busy head had rolled to the foot of the Mahdi’s throne.

A few weeks after this he is once more in Cairo in obedience to an urgent summons from the Khedive. The work was this time financial. The grip of the foreign bondholder was closing round the throat of the fellaheen, and the bill for official extravagance and incompetence had to be paid. It was characteristic of Gordon that his first financial reform was the cutting down of his own salary from six thousand to three thousand a year.

This was all very well, but when he proposed to apply the same methods to other people’s salaries he was very soon given to understand that he was not the kind of man who was wanted in Cairo just then, so he promptly threw up his presidency of the Committee of Inquiry and went back to two years’ more work in the Soudan, to fight the slave trade again in the old heroic, hopeless fashion, and to make maps and plans; to fly hither and thither over the ghastly, waterless country, sometimes riding for as much as two months at a time, till at last the replacement of his old friend Ismael by Tewfik Pasha once more called him back to Cairo.

This time he went to Abyssinia also, and got arrested twice, a circumstance which enabled him to give us the following word picture of King Johannes. “He is of the strictest sect of the Pharisees. He talks like the Old Testament. Drunk overnight, he is up at dawn reading the psalms. If he were in England he would never miss a prayer-meeting, and would have a Bible as big as a portmanteau.”

After his release he came home again to rest, as he thought, but as a fact to be called after a few weeks’ run on the Continent to take the command of the Colonial Forces at the Cape of Good Hope.

It was the eve of the Transvaal War, and now Gordon made the first and the greatest mistake of his life. He refused the command. If he had taken it there might have been no Transvaal War; certainly there would have been no Ingogo or Majuba Hill. He started instead to India to be Secretary to Lord Ripon, the new Liberal Viceroy.

Three days after he landed he threw up his appointment, and two days later he received an urgent invitation from China. He asked for leave, and the War Office refused. He threw up his commission, making a present of its value, about £6,000, to his stupid and graceless masters.

He stopped the war with Russia, and sped back again to London, receiving a telegram on the way telling him that his leave had been cancelled and his resignation refused.

He afterwards made a futile visit to Ireland and an equally futile trip to South Africa. He offered to go and help in settling the Basuto trouble. The Cape Government, to its loss and its shame, had not even the politeness to reply to his offer, but when two millions of money and a great number of valuable lives had been lost, they asked him a year later if he would renew his offer, and, like the generous and single-hearted hero that he was, he did so.

Unhappily, however, when he got on the scene of action he spoilt everything by allowing the enthusiast in him to get the better of the soldier and the skilled man of affairs. The Cape Government was certainly in the wrong as regards the Basuto question. Gordon’s advice to them was to admit their wrong and begin to do right. Very good indeed from the ethical point of view, but in practice hopelessly wrong and bad where the South African native is concerned. With him, as with the Boers, to admit yourself in the wrong is to own yourself defeated, and to invite instant aggression.

Of course the Cape Government could do nothing of the sort. To have done so would have been to have kindled the flames of native war over the whole southern half of the Continent. This was the fatal policy which had already lost us the Transvaal when Sir Evelyn Wood had it in the hollow of his hand. To have repeated it would probably have been to lose all South Africa. Gordon, in his usual fashion, threw up his appointment at once and came back to England.

It was now November, 1882. Naturally he was coldly received at home, but his reception was somewhat mollified by a letter which the King of the Belgians sent him, for the second time asking him to enter his service.

“For the moment,” says his Majesty, “I have no mission to offer you, but I wish to have you at my disposal, and I wish to take you from this moment as my counsellor. You can name your own terms. You know the consideration I have for your great qualities.”

The post that he would probably have had was the Governorship of the Congo. One can imagine how in such a position he would have dealt with an unhung blackguard like Lothaire, the murderer of a man who had confided himself to his hospitality.

He spent most of the following year in travel, chiefly in Palestine. The Delta of Egypt had been conquered, Mohammed Achmet, the carpenter’s son, had become Mahdi, and the Soudan revolt was in full blast. Now at last the British Government called upon the one man who, had his genius and his work been recognised ten years sooner, could have saved so much disgrace and disaster.

How utterly he had been neglected and how completely he was unknown in his own country even now, may be guessed from a remark made by a gentleman to an officer of the Pembroke garrison.

“I see,” said this person, “that the Government have just sent a Chinaman to the Soudan. What can they mean by sending a native of that country to such a place?”

He thought, alas, that “Chinese Gordon” was a yellow-faced Asiatic who wore a pigtail--and yet, after all, did British Officialdom know very much more about the hero it was now sending to his death?

In Egypt all was panic. The army of Hicks Pasha had been annihilated. All Gordon’s work was undone, and the Mahdi was practically master of the Soudan. But meanwhile Gordon had decided to accept the King of the Belgians’ offer. On New Year’s Day, 1884, he reached Brussels to tell him so, and the same day he learnt that the British Government would not let him go. His thoroughly justified answer was a request to be allowed to retire from Her Majesty’s service, “without any claim whatever for pension”--King Leopold, with a juster estimate of the man’s value, having promised to make up the loss to him. The refusal was withdrawn, and he prepared to start for the Congo.

Then on the 17th of January there came that memorable telegram from Lord Wolseley asking him to come to London. He knew what he was wanted for and he went. The work was the pacification and then the evacuation of the Soudan.

By the 18th of February he was in Khartoum again. His old influence at once reasserted itself. What followed is too recent and too well known for detailed repetition here: the vacillation between war and peace, between diplomacy and force, argument when there should have been hard-hitting, and hard-hitting when there should have been argument.

The net result was only fully known to the lonely man who month after month stood on the ramparts of Khartoum, beleaguered by the Mahdi’s innumerable hosts, looking out over the desert and down the Nile for the army of relief which ought even then to have been there, and which was waiting for politicians to finish their wrangles before it even started.

Then, week after week, the weary working and waiting went on, the ring of spears drawing ever closer and closer round the doomed city, the provisions within rapidly dwindling, and the lonely soldier, the last of his blood now left in Khartoum, was still looking vainly northward.

So Monday morning, the 26th of January, came, and in the dim light that comes before the dawn the Arabs made their last and successful assault. The moon had set at one o’clock. The famished garrison made but little resistance. Gordon at the head of about a score of men faced the incoming victors near the church of the Austrian mission.

The eastern sky was just reddening with the coming dawn when a stream of Arabs, shouting for Islam and victory, rushed into the open space that had been made round the church. They stopped and put up their rifles. An irregular volley crackled along their line, and when the smoke had drifted away there was nothing for the belated expedition to do but avenge the death of the betrayed and deserted hero.

It was about midday on the 28th when a couple of steamers, with Sir Charles Wilson and a detachment of the Sussex Regiment on board, steamed out on to the broad stretch of river above which Khartoum stands at the junction of the Blue and White Nile. Half-an-hour told the miserable truth. There was no flag flying from the battlements, and no English voice to bid the tardy comers welcome.

But there is to be a welcome of a sort, for, as the boats come within range, the guns of Khartoum open fire on them and a spattering hail of rifle-balls drop about them, and the puffs of smoke leap up from every point along the banks till the circle round the boats is completed. Of this there could be only one meaning: Gordon the deserted was dead. And this meaning was true, though we did not know the full truth of it until long after all that was left of him on earth had been scattered, graveless and uncared for, over the wind-swept sands of the Soudan.

There is his grave; there, too, now is his monument--the memory of the work he did and the deathless fame he earned. On those who sent him to the forefront of the battle and left him there to die History has not yet given her verdict. When she does it will, as usual, be a just one, and, in all probability, it will not form very pleasant reading for those of their descendants who may be animated with anything like a proper pride of ancestry.

XII

_CECIL RHODES_

“_ALL ENGLISH--THAT’S MY DREAM!_”

XII

CECIL RHODES

Although there are obvious difficulties in the way of writing at once without fear and without favour of a man who is unquestionably one of the great ones of the earth while he is still alive, there are yet two very cogent reasons why Cecil Rhodes should be the subject of this concluding essay.

In the first place, he is the last of our Empire-Makers in order of time, and, in the second place, he has done his empire-making in the last region of the earth in which this empire, or any other, can be extended without coming into direct armed conflict with the great Powers of the earth.

If you get a map of Africa published thirty years ago, and lay it beside a quite recent one, a very little intelligent observation will enable you to see, at any rate, what I may be allowed to call _prima facie_ evidence of the magnificent work which this last of our Empire-Makers has done, not so much for this generation, perhaps, as for the next, and the next.

It is all very well for the goose that has never seen over its own farmyard wall to assume a lofty, and possibly sincere, contempt for the vast stretches of prairie and forest land that may lie outside. He is quite justified in saying to his brother geese: “This is our home; all our wants are supplied here. What do we want to go and lose ourselves for in the long grass, or expose ourselves to the wild animals that may be lurking about the dark depths of the forest? This farmyard where we have lived all our lives, and where our long and honourable ancestry has lived before us, is surely enough for us. There is a nice pond yonder fringed with succulent mud. It has nice worms and other things in it, and there doesn’t seem any prospect of our general supply of goose-food coming to an end. What do we care about what there is outside? Why should we trouble ourselves about the fortunes of silly birds who go and fly over the wall, and lose themselves in the wilderness? Let them go. What are they to us, even if they were born in the same farmyard?”

That is all very well as far as it goes, but there comes a time when the farmyard fills up, and the duck-pond becomes over-crowded, and worms and goose-food, &c., have to be scrambled for, and sometimes even fought for, and it is just here that the larger wisdom of those who not only look over, but fly over, the farmyard wall comes in.

The fact is, that the known world is fast filling up. It may be that Nature is preparing some colossal cataclysm for the destruction of this civilisation, just as she has done for the subversion of others; but, for the present, what those who have looked over the farmyard wall have to consider is the fact that vastly improved conditions of life in the older countries of the world have, with the sole and ominous exception of France, had their inevitable result in a vast increase of population, and that meanwhile, for the last three hundred years or so, the available portions of the world have been getting discovered, and filled up according to their capacity of sustenance.

It is not, therefore, a merely predatory instinct, or a felonious desire to go and steal away from the gentle savage those lands which he is mostly accustomed to use as battlefields, that sends out the pioneer to the uttermost ends of the earth. It is that ineradicable instinct planted deep in all healthy human nature to get elbow-room, and behind this instinct there is the necessity which Providence provided against when it gave us this instinct, and that is the necessity of getting out of a place that is overcrowded, into some other where muscles and brains can get a better chance.

It is probable, too, that that widespread passion which we are accustomed to call “land-hunger” has been given to us in order to compel us to carry out the vast scheme of human progress under the impression that we are benefiting ourselves.

Of course, as a rule, we do benefit ourselves, but it is reserved for the few to see that greater Purpose which we are fulfilling at the same time that we are serving ourselves, and of all the men who ever lived no one has seen this more clearly than Cecil Rhodes. Accident and weak lungs took him to Africa--that is to say to the only continent in which it is yet possible for the British Empire to be increased without violating the territory of some already established and recognised Power, more or less civilised.

Like Nelson and Warren Hastings, he came of a clerical stock. If it had not been for those weak lungs of his it is possible that he might have passed through a distinguished career at Oxford, and either entered the church, or gone into business--probably the latter--but in either case the map of South Africa would have looked very different to what it does to-day.

In one respect he presents a very strong and striking contrast to our other Empire-Makers. Francis Drake went on his filibustering expeditions, looted plate-ships, and sacked towns, no doubt with a worthy intention of hurting the Queen’s enemies, but also with a very definite idea of making money. John Hawkins started the Slave Trade for the same reason; so too that East India Company which made it possible for Clive and Warren Hastings to do their work, was in its beginnings a money-making concern, and little else. It will be remembered, for instance, how Warren Hastings was grievously hampered in his empire-making by the incessant demands of his directors for money.

Now the distinctive fact of Cecil Rhodes’s career is that he started the other way. The first solid and salient fact that he appears to have grasped in those old days in the early seventies, when he used to sit under the burning African sun at a rough deal table picking diamonds out from the yellow earth as it was brought by his kaffirs from the old Kimberley mine, was the transcendent and almost irresistible power of money.