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Charles George Gordon

Major-General Charles George Gordon CB (28 January 1833 – 26 January 1885), also known as Chinese Gordon, Gordon Pasha, and Gordon of Khartoum, was a British Army officer and administrator. He saw action in the Crimean War as an officer in the British Army. However, he made his military reputation in China, where he was placed in command of the "Ever Victorious Army", a force of Chinese soldiers led by European officers which was instrumental in putting down the Taiping Rebellion, regularly defeating much larger forces. For these accomplishments, he was given the nickname "Chinese Gordon" and honours from both the Emperor of China and the British.

Charles George Gordon
Gordon between 1878 and 1885
Nickname(s)Chinese Gordon, Gordon Pasha, Gordon of Khartoum
Born28 January 1833
Woolwich, Kent, England
Died26 January 1885(1885-01-26) (aged 51)
Khartoum, Mahdist Sudan
AllegianceUnited Kingdom
Service/branch
Years of service1852–1885
RankMajor-General
Commands held
Battles/wars
Awards
Signature

He entered the service of the Khedive of Egypt in 1873 (with British government approval) and later became the Governor-General of the Sudan, where he did much to suppress revolts and the local slave trade. He then resigned and returned to Europe in 1880.

A serious revolt then broke out in the Sudan, led by a Muslim religious leader and self-proclaimed Mahdi, Muhammad Ahmad. In early 1884, Gordon was sent to Khartoum with instructions to secure the evacuation of loyal soldiers and civilians and to depart with them. In defiance of those instructions, after evacuating about 2,500 civilians, he retained a smaller group of soldiers and non-military men. In the months before the fall of Khartoum, Gordon and the Mahdi corresponded; Gordon offered him the sultanate of Kordofan and the Mahdi requested Gordon to convert to Islam and join him, which Gordon declined. Besieged by the Mahdi's forces, Gordon organised a citywide defence that lasted for almost a year and gained him the admiration of the British public, but not of the government, which had wished him not to become entrenched there. Only when public pressure to act had become irresistible did the government, with reluctance, send a relief force. It arrived two days after the city had fallen and Gordon had been killed.

Early life edit

Gordon was born in Woolwich, Kent, a son of Major General Henry William Gordon (1786–1865) and Elizabeth (1792–1873), daughter of Samuel Enderby Junior. The men of the Gordon family had served as officers in the British Army for four generations, and as a son of a general, Gordon was raised to be the fifth generation; the possibility that Gordon would pursue anything other than a military career seems never to have been considered by his parents.[1] All of Gordon's brothers also became Army officers.[1]

Gordon grew up in England, Ireland, Scotland, and the Ionian Islands (which were under British rule until 1864) as his father was moved from post to post.[2] He was educated at Fullands School in Taunton, Taunton School, and the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich.[3]

In 1843, Gordon was devastated when his favourite sibling, his sister Emily, died of tuberculosis, writing years later, "humanly speaking it changed my life, it was never the same since".[4] After her death, her place as Gordon's favourite sibling was taken by his very religious older sister Augusta, who nudged her brother towards religion.[5]

As a teenager and an army officer cadet, Gordon was known for his high spirits, a combative streak, and tendency to disregard authority and the rules if he felt them to be stupid or unjust, a personality trait that held back his graduation by two years when teachers decided to punish him for flouting the rules.[6]

As a cadet, Gordon displayed exceptional talents at map-making and in designing fortifications, which led to his career choice of the Royal Engineers or "sappers" in the Army.[7] He was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Royal Engineers on 23 June 1852,[8] completing his training at Chatham, and he was promoted to full lieutenant on 17 February 1854.[9] The sappers were an elite corps who performed reconnaissance work, led storming parties, demolished obstacles in assaults, and undertook rear-guard actions in retreats and other hazardous tasks.[10]

As an officer, Gordon showed strong charisma and leadership, but his superiors distrusted him on account of his tendency to disobey orders if he felt them to be wrong or unjust.[7] A man of medium stature, with striking blue eyes, the charismatic Gordon had the ability to inspire men to follow him anywhere.[11]

Gordon was first assigned to construct fortifications at Milford Haven, Pembrokeshire, Wales. During his time in Milford Haven, Gordon was befriended by a young couple, Francis and Anne Drew, who introduced him to evangelical Protestantism.[12] Gordon was especially impressed with Philippians 1:21 where St. Paul wrote: "For to me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain", a passage he underlined in his Bible and often quoted.[12] He attended diverse congregations, including Roman Catholic, Baptist, Presbyterian, and Methodist. Gordon, who once said to a Roman Catholic priest that "the church is like the British Army, one army but many regiments", never aligned himself with or became a member of any church.[13]

From Crimea to the Danube edit

When the Crimean War began, Gordon was assigned to his boyhood home of Corfu, but after several letters to the War Office, he was sent to Crimea instead.[14] He was sent to the Russian Empire, arriving at Balaklava in January 1855. He first displayed his death wish as he wrote at the time that he had gone "to the Crimea, hoping, without having a hand in it, to be killed".[15]

In the 19th century, Russia was Britain's archenemy, with many people in both nations seeing an ideological conflict between Russian autocracy and British democracy, and Gordon was anxious to fight in the Crimea.[15] He was put to work in the Siege of Sevastopol and took part in the assault of the Redan from 18 June to 8 September. As a sapper, Gordon had to map out the Russian fortifications at the city-fortress of Sevastopol, designed by the famous Russian military engineer, Eduard Totleben. It was a highly dangerous job that frequently put him under enemy fire, and led to him being wounded for the first time when a Russian sniper put a bullet into him.[16] Gordon spent much time in "the Quarries", as the British called their section of the trenches, facing Sevastopol.[16]

During his time in Crimea, Gordon made friendships that were to last for the rest of his life, most notably with Romolo Gessi, Garnet Wolseley, and Gerald Graham, all of whom would cross paths with Gordon several times in the future.[16]

On 18 June 1855, the besieging British and French armies began what was intended to be the final assault that would take Sevastopol, which began with a huge bombardment. As a sapper, Gordon was in a front line trench where he was under intense fire, men fell all around him, and he was forced to take cover so often that he was covered literally from head to toe with mud and blood.[17] Despite the best efforts of the Allies, the French failed to take the Malakhov fortress, while the British failed to take the Redan fortress on 18 June.[17] The casualties on the Allied side were quite high that day.[17]

Gordon spent thirty-four consecutive days in the trenches around Sevastopol, and earned a reputation as an able and brave young officer.[18] It was said at the British HQ that, "If you want to know what the Russians are up to, send for Charlie Gordon."[18]

Gordon took part in the expedition to Kinburn, and returned to Sevastopol at the war's end. During the Crimean war, Gordon picked up an addiction to Turkish cigarettes which was to last for his rest of his life, and many commented that smoking was Gordon's most conspicuous vice as he always seemed to have a cigarette at his lips.[19]

For his services in Crimea, he received the Crimean war medal and clasp.[3] For the same services, he was appointed a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour by the Government of France on 16 July 1856.[20]

 
Gordon, from a photograph taken shortly after the Crimea.

Following the peace, he was attached to an international commission to mark the new border between the Russian Empire and the Ottoman Empire in Bessarabia. When Gordon first arrived in the city of Galatz (modern Galați, Romania) in the Ottoman protectorate of Moldavia, he called the city "very dusty and not desirable at all as a place of residence".[21] As he travelled to Bessarabia, he commented in his letters home about the richness and fertility of the Romanian countryside, which produced delicious fruits and vegetables in great abundance, and the poverty of the Romanian peasants.[22]

After a visit to Jassy (modern Iași), Gordon wrote: "The boyers live most of their lives in Paris and society is quite French... The prince keeps a great state, and I was introduced to him with much ceremony. The English uniform produces an immediate sensation".[23] Gordon did not speak Romanian, but his fluency in French allowed him to socialise with the Francophile Romanian elite, who were all fluent in French.[24] As the maps that delineated the Russian-Ottoman frontier were all old and inaccurate, Gordon spent much time clashing with his Russian counterparts about where precisely the frontier was and soon discovered that the Russians were very keen to have the frontier on the Danube, which Gordon had orders from London to prevent.[24] Gordon called the Romanians the "most fickle and intriguing people on the earth. They ape the French in everything and are full of ceremony, dress, etc... The employees sent by the Moldovan government to take over the ceded territory have been receiving bribes and trafficking in the most disgraceful manner."[25]

Afterwards, Gordon was sent to delineate the frontier between Ottoman Armenia and Russian Armenia, the highlight of which was tobogganing down Mount Ararat.[26] Gordon continued surveying, marking off the boundary into Asia Minor. During his time in Anatolia, Gordon embraced the new technology of the camera to take what the Canadian historian C. Brad Faught called a series of "evocative photographs" of the people and landscape of Armenia.[26] Throughout his life, Gordon was always a keen amateur photographer and was elected a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society to honour him for his Armenian photographs.[27] Gordon returned to Britain in late 1858, and was appointed as an instructor at Chatham. He was promoted to captain on 1 April 1859.[28]

China edit

Arrival in China edit

 
Charles Gordon as a tidu (Captain General).

Gordon was bored with garrison duty in Chatham and often wrote to the War Office, begging them to send him anywhere in the world where British arms were seeing action.[29] In 1860, Gordon volunteered to serve in China, in the Second Opium War.[30] When Gordon arrived at Hong Kong, he was disappointed to learn he was "just too late for the fighting".[31] Gordon had heard of the Taiping Rebellion long before he had set sail for China, and he was at first sympathetic towards the Taipings, led by Hong Xiuquan, who proclaimed himself to be the younger brother of Jesus Christ, viewing them as somewhat eccentric Christians.[31]

After stopping in Shanghai, Gordon visited the Chinese countryside and was appalled at the atrocities committed by the Taipings against the local peasants, writing to his family he would love to smash this "cruel" army with its "desolating presence" that killed without mercy.[31] He arrived at Tianjin in September 1860. He was present during the capture of Peking and at the destruction of the Summer Palace. Gordon agreed with Lord Elgin that after the Chinese authorities had murdered a group of British and French officers travelling under a white flag to parley that a reprisal was in order, but called the burning of the Summer Palace "vandal-like" and informed his sister in a letter that "it made one's heart sore" to burn it.[32] The Anglo-French force remained in northern China until April 1862, then, under General Charles William Dunbar Staveley, withdrew to Shanghai to protect the European settlement from the rebel Taiping army.[33]

Following the successes in the 1850s in the provinces of Guangxi, Hunan, and Hubei, and the capture of Nanjing in 1853, the rebel advance had slowed. For some years, the Taipings gradually advanced eastwards, but eventually they came close enough to Shanghai to alarm the European inhabitants. A militia of Europeans and Asians was raised for the defence of the city and placed under the command of an American, Frederick Townsend Ward, and occupied the country to the west of Shanghai.[34] The British arrived at a crucial time. Staveley decided to clear the rebels within 30 miles (48 km) of Shanghai in co-operation with Ward and a small French force.[34] Gordon was attached to his staff as engineer officer. Jiading, northwest suburb of present Shanghai, Qingpu, and other towns were occupied, and the area was fairly cleared of rebels by the end of 1862.[34]

 
A scene of the Taiping Rebellion. Estimates of the war dead from the Taiping Rebellion range from 20 to 70 million to as high as 100 million.[35]

Ward was killed in the Battle of Cixi and his successor H. A. Burgevine, an American, was disliked by the Imperial Chinese authorities.[36] Burgevine was an unsavory character known for his greed and alcoholism.[37] Moreover, Burgevine made little effort to hide his racism, and his relations with the Chinese were very difficult at the best of times.[37] Li Hongzhang, the governor of the Jiangsu province, requested Staveley to appoint a British officer to command the contingent. Staveley selected Gordon, who had been made a brevet major in December 1862 and the nomination was approved by the British government.[36] Given Burgevine's alcoholism, open corruption, and tendency to engage in acts of mindless violence when drunk, the Chinese wanted "a man of good temper, of clean hands, and a steady economist" as his replacement.[38] These requirements led Staveley to choose Gordon.[38] Li was impressed with Gordon, writing:

It is a direct blessing from Heaven, the coming of this British Gordon. ... He is superior in manner and bearing to any of the foreigners whom I have come into contact with, and does not show outwardly that conceit which makes most of them repugnant in my sight...What an elixir for a heavy heart-to see this splendid Englishman fight! ... If there is anything that I admire nearly as much as the superb scholarship of Zeng Guofan, it is the military qualities of this fine officer. He is a glorious fellow!...With his many faults, his pride, his temper, and his never-ending demand for money—but he is a noble man, and in spite of all I have said to him or about him, I will ever think most highly of him. ... He is an honest man, but difficult to get on with.[39]

Gordon was honest and incorruptible, and unlike many Chinese officers, did not steal the money that was meant to pay his men, but rather insisted on paying the Ever Victorious Army on time and in full.[39] Gordon's insistence on paying his men meant that he was always pressing the Imperial government for money, something which often irritated the mandarins who did not understand why Gordon did not just let his men loot and plunder as a compensation for wages.[39] Gordon designed the uniform for the Ever Victorious Army, which consisted of black boots together with turbans, jackets, and trousers that were all green, while his personal bodyguard of 300 men wore blue uniforms.[40]

Command of the Ever Victorious Army edit

In March 1863, Gordon took command of the force at Songjiang, which had received the name of "Ever Victorious Army".[36] Without waiting to reorganise his troops, Gordon led them at once to the relief of Changsu, a town 40 miles northwest of Shanghai. The relief was successfully accomplished and Gordon quickly won the respect of his troops. Gordon made a point of treating POWs well to encourage the Taipings to surrender, and many of his men were former Taipings who chose to enlist in the Ever Victorious Army.[38] Unlike Ward and Burgevine, Gordon realised that the network of canals and rivers that divided the Chinese countryside were not obstacles blocking an advance, but were rather "arteries" for allowing an advance as Gordon decided to move his men and supplies via the waterways.[41]

Gordon's task was made easier by innovative military ideas Ward had implemented in the Ever Victorious Army. Gordon was quite critical of the way Chinese generals fought the war, observing that the Chinese were willing to inflict and accept gargantuan losses in battle, an approach Gordon disapproved of.[42] Gordon wrote: "The great thing...is to cut off their retreat, and the chances are they will go without trouble; but attack them in the front, and leave their rear open, and they fight most desperately".[42] Gordon always preferred to outflank the Taiping lines rather than to take them on frontally, an approach that caused much tension with his counterparts in the Chinese Imperial Army who did not share Gordon's horror at the huge numbers of casualties caused by frontal assaults.[42]

On the morning of 30 May 1863, the Taiping forces guarding the town of Quinsan were astonished to see an armoured paddle steamer, the Hyson, armed with a 32-pounder cannon on the bow, sailing up a canal, at whose prow stood Gordon. Following the Hyson was a fleet of 80 junks converted to gunboats.[43] Aboard the Hyson were 350 men from the elite 4th Regiment of the Ever Victorious Army.[42] Under fire from the Taiping forces, Gordon's men chopped up the wooden stakes the Taipings had placed in the canal, thereby allowing Gordon to outflank the main Taiping defence line and to enter the main canal connecting Quinsan to Suzhou.[42]

Gordon's breakthrough caught the rebel army off guard and caused thousands of the enemy to panic and flee.[42] Gordon disembarked the 4th Regiment with orders to take Quinsan while he sailed up and down the main canal in the Hyson, using the 32-pounder gun to blast apart the Taiping positions on the canal.[42] At times, Gordon feared that assaults by the Taiping would take the Hyson, but all the attacks were repulsed.[44] The next day, Quinsan fell to the 4th Regiment, which led a proud Gordon to write: "The rebels did not know its importance until they lost it".[45]

In its last years, the Taiping movement had oppressed the Chinese peasantry and as the Taipings retreated in the face of fire from the Hyson, Chinese peasants emerged from their homes to cut down and hack to death the fleeing Taipings.[45] After the battle, Gordon was hailed as a liberator from the Taipings by the ordinary Chinese people.[45] One British officer serving with the Ever Victorious Army described Gordon at this time as: "a light-built, wiry, middle-sized man, of about thirty two years of age, in the undress uniform of the Royal Engineers. The countenance bore a pleasant frank appearance, eyes light blue with a fearless look in them, hair crisp and inclined to curl, conversation short and decided".[46]

The Ever Victorious Army was entirely a mercenary force whose only loyalty was to money and whose men were interested in fighting only in order to gain the chance to plunder.[46] Gordon felt very uncomfortable commanding this force and at one point had to order the summary execution of one of his officers when the latter tried to take the Ever-Victorious Army over to the Taipings, who had offered a generous bribe for switching sides.[46] Gordon had to impose strict discipline on the Ever Victorious Army and worked hard to prevent the Army from engaging in its tendency to loot and mistreat civilians.[39]

Gordon also had the pleasure of defeating Burgevine (whom Gordon detested), who had raised a mercenary force and joined the Taipings.[47] After Gordon had surrounded Burgevine's force outside of Suzhou, the latter had abandoned his own men and attempted to rejoin the Imperial side, leading Gordon to arrest him and send him to the American consul in Shanghai together with a letter asking that Burgevine be expelled from China.[48]

As Gordon travelled up and down the Yangtze River valley, he was appalled by the scenes of poverty and suffering he saw, writing in a letter to his sister: "The horrible furtive looks of the wretched inhabitants hovering around one's boats haunts me, and the knowledge of their want of nourishment would sicken anyone; they are like wolves. The dead lie where they fall, and are, in some cases, trodden quite flat by passers by".[46] The suffering of the Chinese people strengthened Gordon's faith, as he argued that there had to be a just, loving God who would one day redeem humanity from all this wretchedness and misery.[39]

During his time in China, Gordon was well-known and respected by friend and foe alike for leading from the front and going into combat armed only with his rattan cane (Gordon always refused to carry a gun or a sword), a choice of weapon that almost cost him his life several times.[39] Gordon's bravery in battle, his string of victories, apparent immunity to bullets and his intense, blazing blue eyes led many Chinese to believe that Gordon had supernatural powers and had harnessed the Qi (the mystical life-force traditionally believed in China to govern everything) in some extraordinary way.[42]

Capture of Kunshan edit

Gordon then reorganised his force and advanced against Kunshan, which was captured at considerable loss. Gordon then took his force through the country, seizing towns until, with the aid of Imperial troops, capturing the city of Suzhou in November.[36] After its surrender, Gordon personally guaranteed that any Taiping rebel who laid down his arms would be humanely treated.[49] The Ever-Victorious Army—which was inclined to looting—had been ordered not to enter Suzhou, and only Imperial forces entered the city.[46] Gordon was thus powerless when the Imperial forces executed all of the Taiping POWs, an act that enraged him.[50]

A furious Gordon wrote that executing POWs was "stupid", writing, "if faith had been kept, there would have been no more fighting as every town would have given in".[50] In China, the penalty for rebellion was death. Under the Chinese system of familial responsibility, all family members of a rebel were equally guilty even if they had nothing to do with the rebellious individual's acts. The mandarins were thus much inclined to execute not only Taipings, but also their spouses, children, parents, and siblings as being all equally guilty of treason.[50]

Gordon believed this approach was militarily counterproductive, as it encouraged the Taipings to fight to the death, which Gordon felt to be very unwise as the Taiping leader Hong Xiuquan, had become murderously paranoid, conducting bloody purges of his followers. Many Taipings were willing to surrender only if the Imperial government would spare their lives and those of their families. Even more importantly, Gordon had given his word of honour that all of the Taipings who surrendered would be well-treated, and regarded the massacre as a stain on his honour.[50]

On 1 January 1864, Gordon was informed that a messenger from the Tongzhi Emperor was coming to see him and that he should put on his finest uniform.[50] When the Emperor's messenger arrived, he had with him servants carrying boxes of silver taels (coins) numbering 10,000 in total, together with banners written in the most eloquent calligraphy celebrating Gordon as a great general and a letter from the Emperor himself written in the best calligraphy on yellow silk thanking Gordon for taking Suzhou and offering all these presents as rewards.[50]

Gordon refused all these gifts and wrote on the Emperor's silk message: "Major Gordon receives the approbation of His Majesty the Emperor with every gratification, but regrets most sincerely that owing to the circumstances which occurred since the capture of Soochow, he is unable to receive any mark of His Majesty the Emperor's recognition".[50] The Emperor was much offended when he received Gordon's message at the Forbidden City, and Gordon's military career in China was effectively over for a time.[50] A Scotsman who knew Gordon in China wrote: "he shows the Chinese that if even an able and reliable man, such as he is, is unmanageable".[50] Following a dispute with Li over the execution of rebel leaders, Gordon withdrew his force from Suzhou and remained inactive at Kunshan until February 1864.[36]

Gordon then made a rapprochement with Li and visited him in order to arrange for further operations. The "Ever-Victorious Army" resumed its high tempo advance, leading to the Battle of Changzhou, and culminating in the capture of Changzhou Fu, the principal military base of the Taipings in the region. Gordon wrote in his diary: "The HOUR GLASS BROKEN" and predicted that the war would soon be won.[51] The Ever Victorious Army did not take part in the final offensive that ended the war with the Capture of Nanking as the "Imps", as Gordon called the Imperial Army, wanted the honour of taking Nanking, the Taiping capital, for themselves.[51]

Capture of Yesing, Liyang, and Kitang edit

Instead, the Ever Victorious Army was given the task of taking the secondary cities of Yesing, Liyang, and Kitang.[51] At Kitang, Gordon was wounded for the second time on 21 March 1864, when a Taiping soldier shot him in the thigh. The wound was only slight and Gordon was soon back in action, fighting his last battle at Chang-chou in May 1864.[51] Gordon then returned to Kunshan and disbanded his army in June 1864.[50] During his time with the Ever Victorious Army, Gordon had won thirty-three battles in succession.[50] Gordon wrote a letter home that his losses were "no joke" as 48 of his 100 officers and about 1,000 of 3,500 soldiers had been killed or wounded in action.[52]

The Emperor promoted Gordon to the rank of tidu (提督: "Chief commander of Jiangsu province" – a title equal to field marshal), decorated him with the imperial yellow jacket, and raised him to Qing's Viscount first class, but Gordon declined an additional gift of 10,000 taels of silver from the imperial treasury.[53][54] Only forty men were allowed to wear the Yellow Jacket, which was the Emperor's ceremonial bodyguard, and it was thus a signal honour for Gordon to be allowed to wear it.[55] The British Army promoted Gordon to lieutenant-colonel on 16 February 1864,[56] and he was appointed a Companion of the Order of the Bath on 9 December 1864.[57]

The traders of Shanghai offered Gordon huge sums of money to thank him for his work commanding the Ever Victorious Army. Gordon declined all honours of financial gain, writing: "I know I shall leave China as poor as I entered it, but with the knowledge that, through my weak instrumentality, upwards of eighty to one hundred thousand lives have been spared. I want no further satisfaction than this".[55] The British journalist Mark Urban, wrote: "People saw a brave man who acted with humanity in an otherwise ghastly conflict, standing out from the other mercenaries, adventurers, and cut-throats in wanting almost nothing for himself".[55]

In a leader in August 1864, The Times wrote about Gordon: "the part of the soldier of fortune is in these days very difficult to play with honour...but if ever the actions of a soldier fighting in foreign service ought to be viewed with indulgence, and even with admiration, this exceptional tribute is due to Colonel Gordon".[55] The savage Taiping Rebellion—which was the bloodiest war of the entire 19th century, taking somewhere between 20 and 30 million lives—is largely forgotten in the West today, but at the time, the civil war in China attracted much media attention in the West, and Gordon's command of the Ever Victorious Army received much coverage from British newspapers.[55] Gordon also gained the popular nickname, "Chinese" Gordon.[55]

Service with the Khedive edit

From the Danube to the Nile edit

In October 1871, he was appointed British representative on the international commission to maintain the navigation of the mouth of the River Danube, with headquarters at Galatz. Gordon was bored with the work of the Danube commission, and spent as much time as possible exploring the Romanian countryside, whose beauty enchanted Gordon when he was not making visits to Bucharest to meet up with his old friend Romolo Gessi, who was living there at the time.[58] During his second trip to Romania, Gordon insisted on living with ordinary people as he travelled over the countryside, commenting that Romanian peasants "live like animals with no fuel, but reeds", and spent one night at the home of a poor Jewish craftsman whom Gordon praised for his kindness in sharing the single bedroom with his host, his wife, and their seven children.[59] Gordon seemed pleased by his simple lifestyle, writing in a letter that: "One night, I slept better than I have for a long time, by a fire in a fisherman's hut".[59]

During a visit to Bulgaria, Gordon and Gessi become involved in an incident when a Bulgarian couple told them that their 17-year-old daughter had been abducted into the harem of an Ottoman pasha, and asked them to free their daughter.[60] Popular legend has it that Gordon and Gessi broke into the pasha's palace at night to rescue the girl, but the truth is less dramatic.[60] Gordon and Gessi demanded that Ahmed Pasha allow them to meet the girl alone, had their request granted after much arm-twisting, and then met the girl, who ultimately revealed she wanted to go home.[61] Gordon and Gessi threatened to go to the British and Italian press if she was not released at once, a threat that proved sufficient to win the girl her freedom.[61]

Gordon was promoted to colonel on 16 February 1872.[62] In 1872, Gordon was sent to inspect the British military cemeteries in the Crimea, and when passing through Constantinople, he made the acquaintance of the Prime Minister of Egypt, Raghib Pasha. The Egyptian Prime Minister opened negotiations for Gordon to serve under the Ottoman Khedive, Isma'il Pasha, who was popularly called "Isma'il the Magnificent" on the account of his lavish spending. In 1869, Isma'il spent 2 million Egyptian pounds (the equivalent to $300 million U.S. dollars in today's money) just on the party to celebrate the opening of the Suez Canal, in what was described as the party of the century.[63] In 1873, Gordon received a definite offer from the Khedive, which he accepted with the consent of the British government, and proceeded to Egypt early in 1874. After meeting Gordon in 1874, the Khedive Isma'il had said: "What an extraordinary Englishman! He doesn't want money!".[64]

The French-educated Isma'il Pasha greatly admired Europe as the model for excellence in everything, being an especially passionate Italophile and Francophile, saying at the beginning of his reign: "My country is no longer in Africa, it is now in Europe".[65] Isma'il was a Muslim who loved Italian wine and French champagne, and many of his more conservative subjects in Egypt and the Sudan felt alienated by a regime that was determined to Westernise the country with little regard for tradition.[65] The languages of Khedive's court were Turkish and French, not Arabic. The Khedive's great dream was to make Egypt culturally a part of Europe, and he spent huge sums of money attempting to modernise and Westernise Egypt, in the process going very deeply into debt.[66]

At the beginning of his reign in 1863, Egypt's debt had been 3 million Egyptian pounds. When Isma'il's reign ended in 1879, Egypt's debt had risen to 93 million pounds.[67] During the American Civil War, when the Union blockade had cut off the American South from the world economy, the price of Egyptian cotton, known as "white gold" had skyrocketed as British textile mills turned to Egypt as an alternative source of cotton, causing an economic blossoming of Egypt that ended abruptly in 1865.[66] As the attempts of his grandfather—Muhammad Ali the Great—to depose the ruling Ottoman family in favour of his own family had failed due to the opposition of Russia and Britain, the imperialistic Ismai'il had turned his attention southwards and was determined to build an Egyptian empire in Africa, planning on subjugating the Great Lakes region and the Horn of Africa.[68] As part of his Westernisation programme, Isma'il often hired Westerners to work in his government both in Egypt and in the Sudan. Ismai'il's Chief of General Staff was the American general Charles Pomeroy Stone, and other veterans of the American Civil War were commanding Egyptian troops.[69] Urban wrote that most of the Westerners in Egyptian pay were "misfits" who took up Egyptian service because they were unable to get ahead in their own nations.[70]

Typical of the men that Khedive Isma'il Pasha hired was Valentine Baker, a British Army officer dishonorably discharged after being convicted of raping a young woman in England that he had been asked to chaperon. After Baker's release from prison, Isma'il hired him to work in the Sudan.[71] John Russell, the son of the famous war correspondent William Howard Russell, was another European recruited to serve on Gordon's staff.[72] The younger Russell was described by his own father as an alcoholic and spendthrift who "was beyond help" as it was always the "same story-idleness, self-indulgence, gambling, and constant promises" broken time after time, leading his father to get him a job in the Sudan, where his laziness infuriated Gordon to no end.[72]

Equatoria: Building Egypt's empire in the Great Lakes region edit

 
General Gordon in Egyptian uniform.

The Egyptian authorities had been extending their control southwards since the 1820s. Right up to 1914, Egypt was officially a vilayet (province) of the Ottoman Empire, but after Mohammed Ali become the vali (governor) of Egypt in 1805, Egypt was a de facto independent state where the authority of the Ottoman Sultan was more nominal than real. An expedition was sent up the White Nile, under Sir Samuel Baker, which reached Khartoum in February 1870 and Gondokoro in June 1871. Baker met with great difficulties and managed little beyond establishing a few posts along the Nile.[73]

The Khedive asked for Gordon to succeed Baker as the governor of Equatoria province that comprised much of what is today South Sudan and northern Uganda.[73] Isma'il Pasha told Gordon that he wished to expand Equatoria into the rest of Uganda, with the ultimate aim of absorbing the entire Great Lakes region of East Africa into the empire that Isma'il wanted to build in Africa.[74] Baker's annual salary as governor of Equatoria had been £10,000 (Egyptian pounds, about US$1 million in today's money) and Ismail was astonished when Gordon refused that salary, saying that £2,000 per year was more than enough for him.[75]

After a short stay in Cairo, Gordon proceeded to Khartoum via Suakin and Berber. In Khartoum, Gordon attended a dinner with the Governor-General, Ismail Aiyub Pasha, entertained with barely dressed belly dancers whom one of Gordon's officers drunkenly attempted to have sex with, leading to a disgusted Gordon walking out, saying he was shocked that Aiyub allowed these things to happen in his palace.[76] Joining Gordon on the journey to Equatoria was his old friend Romolo Gessi and a former US Army officer, Charles Chaillé-Long, who did not get along well with Gordon.[75]

From Khartoum, he proceeded up the White Nile to Gondokoro. During his time in Sudan, Gordon was much involved in attempting to suppress the slave trade while struggling against a corrupt and inefficient Egyptian bureaucracy that had no interest in suppressing the trade.[77] Gordon soon learned that his superior, the Governor-General of the Sudan, Ismail Aiyub Pasha, was deeply involved in the slave trade and was doing everything within his power to sabotage Gordon's anti-slavery work by denying him supplies and leaking information to the slavers.[78] Gordon also clashed with Chaillé-Long, whom he accused of working as an informant for Aiyub Pasha and called him to his face a "regular failure".[79] Chaillé-Long in return painted a very unflattering picture of Gordon in his 1884 book The Three Prophets, whom he portrayed as a bully, a raging alcoholic, an incompetent leader, and a rank coward.[79] Faught argued that since no one else who knew Gordon in Equatoria described him in these terms, and given that Gordon's accusation that Chaillé-Long was a spy for Aiyub Pasha seems to be justified, that Chaillé-Long was engaging in character assassination as an act of revenge.[79]

Gordon, despite his position as an official in the Ottoman Empire, found the Ottoman-Egyptian system of rule inherently oppressive and cruel, coming into increasing conflict with the very system he was supposed to uphold, later stating about his time in the Sudan, "I taught the natives they had a right to exist".[64] In the Ottoman Empire, power was exercised via a system of institutionalised corruption where officials looted their provinces via heavy taxes and by demanding kickbacks known as baksheesh; some of the money went to Constantinople with the rest being pocketed by the officials.[77]

Gordon established a close rapport with the African peoples of Equatoria such as the Nuer and Dinka, who had long suffered from the activity of Arab slave traders, and who naturally supported Gordon's efforts to stamp out the slave trade.[73] The peoples of Equatoria had traditionally worshipped spirits present in nature, but were steadily being converted to Christianity by missionaries from Europe and the United States, which further encouraged Gordon in his efforts as governor of Equatoria, who notwithstanding his position working for the Egyptian government, saw himself as doing God's work in Equatoria.[73] Gordon was not impressed with the forces of the Egyptian state. The soldiers of the Egyptian Army were fallāḥīn (peasant) conscripts who were both ill-paid and ill-trained.[73] The other force for law and order were the much-feared bashi-bazouks, irregulars who were not paid a salary, but were expected to support themselves by looting. The bashi-bazouks were extremely susceptible to corruption and were notorious for their brutality, especially to non-Muslims.[70]

Gordon remained in the Equatoria province until October 1876. He quickly learned that before he could establish stations to crush the slave trade, he would have to first explore the area to find the best places for building them.[80] A major problem for Gordon was malaria, which decimated his men, and led him to issue the following order: "Never let the mosquito curtain out of your sight, it is more valuable than your revolver".[80] The heat greatly affected Gordon as he wrote to his sister Augusta, "This is a horrid climate, I seldom if ever get a good sleep".[79]

Gordon had succeeded in establishing a line of way stations from the Sobat confluence on the White Nile to the frontier of Uganda, where he proposed to open a route from Mombasa. In 1874, he built the station at Dufile on the Albert Nile to reassemble steamers carried there past rapids for the exploration of Lake Albert. Gordon personally explored Lake Albert and the Victorian Nile, pushing on through the thick, humid jungle and steep ravines of Uganda amid heavy rains and vast hordes of insects in the summer of 1876 with an average daily temperature of 95 °F (35 °C), down to Lake Kyoga.[81] Gordon wrote in his diary, "It is terrible walking ... it is simply killing ... I am nearly dead".[81]

Besides acting as an administrator and explorer, Gordon had to act as a diplomat, dealing carefully with Muteesa I, the Kabaka (king) of the Buganda, who ruled most of what is today southern Uganda, a man who did not welcome the Egyptian expansion into the Great Lakes region.[82] Gordon's attempts to establish an Egyptian garrison in the Buganda had been stymied by the cunning Muteesa, who forced the Egyptians to build their fort at his capital of Lubaga, making the 140 or so Egyptian soldiers his virtual hostages.[81] Gordon chose not to meet Muteesa himself, instead sending his chief medical officer, a German convert to Islam, Dr. Emin Pasha, to negotiate a treaty wherein in exchange for allowing the Egyptians to leave the Buganda, the independence of the kingdom was recognised.[83]

Moreover, considerable progress was made in the suppression of the slave trade.[84] Gordon wrote in a letter to his sister about the Africans living a "life of fear and misery", but in spite of the "utter misery" of Equatoria that, "I like this work".[85] Gordon often personally intercepted slave convoys to arrest the slavers and break the chains of the slaves, but he found that the corrupt Egyptian bureaucrats usually sold the freed Africans back into slavery, and the expense of caring for thousands of freed slaves who were a long away from home burdensome.[86]

Gordon grew close to the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, an evangelical Christian group based in London dedicated to ending slavery all over the world, and who regularly celebrated Gordon's efforts to end slavery in the Sudan. Urban wrote that, "Newspaper readers in Bolton or Beaminister had become enraged by stories about chained black children, cruelly abducted, being sold into slave markets", and Gordon's anti-slavery efforts contributed to his image as a saintly man.[64]

Gordon had come into conflict with the Egyptian governor of Khartoum and Sudan over his efforts to ban slavery. The clash led to Gordon informing the Khedive that he did not wish to return to the Sudan, and he left for London. During his time in London, he was approached by Sir William Mackinnon, an enterprising Scottish ship owner who had gone into partnership with King Leopold II of the Belgians with the aim of creating a chartered company that would conquer central Africa, and wished to employ Gordon as their agent in Africa.[87]

He accepted their offer, believing in Leopold's and Mackinnon's assurances their plans were purely philanthropic and they had no interest in exploiting Africans for profit[88] but the Khedive Isma'il Pasha wrote to him saying that he had promised to return, and that he expected him to keep his word.[89] Gordon agreed to return to Cairo, and was asked to take the position of Governor-General of the entire Sudan, which he accepted. He thereafter received the honorific rank and title of pasha in the Ottoman aristocracy.[90]

Governor-General of the Sudan edit

Besides working to end slavery, Gordon carried out a series of reforms such as abolishing torture and public floggings where those opposed to the Egyptian state were flogged with a whip known as the kourbash made of buffalo hide.[91]

The Europeans whom the Egyptians had hired to work as civil servants in the Sudan proved to be just as corrupt as the Egyptians.[70] The bribes that the slave traders offered for bureaucrats to turn a blind eye to the slave trade had far more effect on the bureaucrats than did any of Gordon's orders to suppress the slave trade, which were simply ignored.[70] Licurgo Santoni, an Italian hired by the Egyptian state to run the Sudanese post office, wrote about Gordon's time as Governor-General that:

as his exertions were not supported by his subordinates, his efforts remained fruitless. This man's activity with the scientific knowledge which he possesses is doubtless able to achieve much, but unfortunately, no one backs him up and his orders are badly carried out or altered in such a way as to render them without effect. All the Europeans, with some rare exceptions, whom he has honoured with his confidence have cheated him.[70]

Relations between Egypt and Abyssinia (later renamed Ethiopia) had become strained due to a dispute over the district of Bogos, and war broke out in 1875. An Egyptian expedition was completely defeated near Gundet. A second and larger expedition under Prince Hassan was sent the following year and was routed at Gura. Matters then remained quiet until March 1877, when Gordon proceeded to Massawa, hoping to make peace with the Abyssinians. He went up to Bogos and wrote to the king proposing terms. He received no reply as the king had gone southwards to fight with the Shoa. Gordon, seeing that the Abyssinian difficulty could wait, proceeded to Khartoum.[92]

In 1876, Egypt went bankrupt. A group of European financial commissioners led by Evelyn Baring took charge of the Egyptian finances in an attempt to pay off the European banks who had lent so much money to Egypt. With Egypt bankrupt, the money to carry out the reforms Gordon wanted was not there.[64] With over half of Egypt's income going to pay the 7% interest on the debt worth 81 million Egyptian pounds that Isma'il had run up, the khedive was supportive of Gordon's plans for reform, but unable to do very much as he lacked the money to pay his civil servants and soldiers in Egypt, much less in the Sudan.[93]

Gordon travelled north to Cairo to meet with Baring and suggest the solution that Egypt suspend its interest payments for several years to allow Isma'il to pay the arrears owed to his soldiers and civil servants, arguing that once the Egyptian government was stabilised, then Egypt could start paying its debts without fear of causing a revolution.[93] Faught wrote that Gordon's plans were "farsighted and humane", but Baring had no interest in Gordon's plans to suspend the interest payments.[94] Gordon disliked Baring, writing he had "a pretentious, grand, patronizing way around him. We had a few words together ... When oil mixes with water, we will mix together".[94]

Gordon's attempts to end the slave trade but faced resistance, most notably Rahama Zobeir, known as the "King of the Slavers" as he was the richest and most powerful of all the slave traders in the Sudan. An insurrection had broken out in Darfur province led by associates of Zobeir and Gordon went to deal with it. On 2 September 1877, Gordon clad in the full gold-braided ceremonial blue uniform of the Governor-General of the Sudan and wearing the tarboush (the type of fez reserved for a pasha), accompanied by an interpreter and a few bashi-bazouks, rode unannounced into the enemy camp to discuss the situation.[95] Gordon was met by Suleiman Zobeir, the son of Rahama Zobeir, and demanded, in the name of the Khedive of Egypt, that the rebels end their rebellion and accept the authority of their lord and master, telling Zobeir that he would "disarm and break them" if the rebellion did not end at once.[96] Gordon also promised that those rebels who laid down their arms would not be punished and would all be given jobs in the administration.[73]

One chief then pledged his loyalty to the Khedive, including Suleiman Zobeir himself, though the remainder retreated to the south.[73] Gordon visited the provinces of Berber and Dongola, and then returned to the Abyssinian frontier, before ending up back in Khartoum in January 1878. Gordon was summoned to Cairo, and arrived in March to be appointed president of a commission. The Khedive Isma'il was deposed in 1879 in favour of his son, Tewfik, by the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II following heavy diplomatic pressure from the British, French and Italian governments after Isma'il had quarrelled with Baring.[97]

Gordon returned south and proceeded to Harrar, south of Abyssinia, and, finding the administration in poor standing, dismissed the governor. In 1878, Gordon fired the governor of Equatoria for corruption and replaced him with his former chief medical officer from his time in Equatoria, Dr. Emin Pasha, who had earned Gordon's respect. Gordon then returned to Khartoum, and went again into Darfur to suppress the slave traders. His subordinate, Gessi Pasha, fought with great success in the Bahr-el-Ghazal district in putting an end to the revolt there. In July 1878, Suleiman Zobeir had rebelled again, leading Gordon and his close friend Gessi to take to the field.[98]

In March 1879, Gessi had inflicted a sharp defeat on Zobeir even before Gordon had joined him to pursue their old enemy.[98] After several months of chasing Zobeir, Gessi and Gordon met at the village of Shaka in June 1879 when it was agreed that Gessi would continue the hunt while Gordon would return to Khartoum.[99] On 15 July 1879, Gessi finally captured Suleiman Zobeir together with 250 of his men and executed them.[100]

Gordon then tried another peace mission to Abyssinia. The matter ended with Gordon's imprisonment and transfer to Massawa. He returned to Cairo and resigned his Sudan appointment. He had gone to the Sudan with hope that he could reform the system.[64] According to Urabn, almost all of Gordon's reforms failed owing to the bureaucracy of the system which remained slow, corrupt, and oppressive.[64] At the end of his Governor-Generalship of the Sudan, Gordon had to admit that he had been a failure, an experience of defeat that so shattered him that he had a nervous breakdown. As Gordon travelled via Egypt to take the steamer back to Britain, a man who met him in Cairo described him as a broken man who was "rather off his head".[64] Before Gordon boarded the ship at Alexandria that was to take him home, he sent off a series of long telegrams to various ministers in London full of Biblical verse and quotations that he said offered the solution to all of the problems of modern life.[64] After Gordon resigned, Muhammad Rauf Pasha succeeded him as governor general of Sudan.[101]

In March 1880, Gordon recovered for a couple of weeks in the Hotel du Faucon in Lausanne, 3 Rue St Pierre, famous for its views on Lake Geneva and because several celebrities had stayed there, such as Giuseppe Garibaldi, one of Gordon's heroes,[102] and possibly one of the reasons Gordon had chosen this hotel. In the hotel's restaurant, now a pub called Happy Days, he met another guest from Britain, the reverend R. H. Barnes, vicar of Heavitree near Exeter, who became a good friend. After Gordon's death, Barnes co-authored Charles George Gordon: A Sketch (1885),[103] which begins with the meeting at the hotel in Lausanne. The Reverend Reginald Barnes, who knew him well, describes him as "of the middle height, very strongly built".[104]

Other offers edit

On 2 March 1880, on his way from London to Switzerland, Gordon had visited King Leopold II of Belgium in Brussels and was invited to take charge of the Congo Free State. Leopold tried very hard to convince Gordon to enter his service, not least because Gordon was known to be modest in his salary demands, unlike Leopold's current agent in the Congo, Henry Morton Stanley, who received a monthly salary of 300,000 Belgian francs.[105]

Gordon rejected Leopold's offers, partly because he was still emotionally attached to the Sudan and partly because he disliked the idea of working for Leopold's Congo Association, which was a private company owned by the King.[105] In April, the government of the Cape Colony offered him the position of commandant of the Cape local forces, which Gordon declined.[106] A deeply depressed Gordon wrote in his letter declining the offer that he knew, for reasons that he refused to explain, that he had only ten years left to live, and he wanted to do something great and grand in his last ten years.[106]

In May, the Marquess of Ripon, who had been given the post of Governor-General of India, asked Gordon to go with him as private secretary. Gordon accepted the offer, but shortly after arriving in India, he resigned. In the words of the American historian Immanuel C. Y. Hsu, Gordon was a "man of action" unsuited to a bureaucratic job.[107] Gordon found the life of a private secretary to be, in his words, a "living crucifixion" that was unbearably boring, leading him to resign with the intention of going to East Africa, particularly Zanzibar, to suppress the slave trade.[107]

Hardly had Gordon resigned when he was invited to Beijing by Sir Robert Hart, inspector-general of customs in China, saying his services were urgently needed in China as Russia and China were on the verge of war. Gordon was nostalgic for China, and knowing of the Sino-Russian crisis, he saw a chance to do something significant.[108] The British diplomat Thomas Francis Wade reported, "The Chinese government still holds Gordon Pasha in high regard", and were anxious to have him back to fight against Russia if war should break out.[109]

An exchange of telegrams ensued between the War Office in London and Gordon in Bombay about just what exactly he was planning on doing in China, and when Gordon replied that he would find out when he got there, he was ordered to stay.[11] He disobeyed orders and left on the first ship to China, an action that very much angered the Army's commander, the Duke of Cambridge.[110] Gordon arrived in Shanghai in July and met Li Hongzhang, and learned that there was risk of war with Russia. After meeting his old friend, Gordon assured Li that if Russia should attack he would resign his commission in the British Army to take up a commission in the Chinese Army, an action that if taken, risked prosecution under the Foreign Enlistments Act.[111]

Gordon informed the Foreign Office that he was willing to renounce his British citizenship and take Chinese citizenship as he would not abandon Li and his other Chinese friends should a Sino-Russian war begin. Gordon's willingness to renounce his British citizenship in order to fight with China in the event of war did much to raise his prestige in China.[112]

Gordon went to Beijing and used all his influence to ensure peace. He clashed repeatedly with Prince Chun, the leader of the war party in Beijing, who rejected Gordon's advice to seek a compromise solution as Gordon warned that the powerful Russian naval squadron in the Yellow Sea would allow the Russians to land at Tianjin and advance on Beijing.[113] At one point during a meeting with the Council of Ministers, an enraged Gordon picked up a Chinese–English dictionary, looked up the word idiocy, and then pointed at the equivalent Chinese word 白痴 with one hand while pointing at the ministers with the other.[113]

Gordon further advised the Qing court that it was unwise for the Manchu elite to live apart from and treat the Han Chinese majority as something less than human, warning that this not only weakened China in the present, but would cause a revolution in the future.[114] After speaking so bluntly, Gordon was ordered out of the court in Beijing, but was allowed to stay at Tianjin.[115] After meeting with him there, Hart described Gordon as "very eccentric" and "spending hours in prayer", writing that: "As much I like and respect him, I must say he is 'not all there'. Whether religion or vanity, or the softening of the brain — I don't know, but he seems to be alternatively arrogant and slavish, vain and humble, in his senses and out of them. It's a great pity!" Wade echoed Hart, writing that Gordon had changed since his last time in China, and was now "unbalanced", being utterly convinced that all of his ideas came from God, making him dangerously unreasonable since he now believed that everything he did was the will of God.[115]

Gordon was ordered home by London as the Foreign Office was not comfortable with the idea of him commanding the Chinese Army against Russia if war should break out, believing that this would cause an Anglo-Russian war and Gordon was told that he would be dishonourably discharged if he remained in China.[116] Although the Qing court rejected Gordon's advice to seek a compromise with Russia in the summer of 1880, Gordon's assessment of China's military backwardness and his stark warnings that the Russians would win if a war did break out played an important role in ultimately strengthening the peace party at the court and preventing war.[117]

Gordon returned to Britain and rented a flat on 8 Victoria Grove in London. In October 1880, he paid a two-week visit to Ireland, landing at Cork and travelling over much of the island. Gordon was sickened by the poverty of the Irish farmers, which led him to write a six-page memo to the Prime Minister, William Gladstone, urging land reforms in Ireland.[118] Gordon wrote: "The peasantry of the Northwest and Southwest of Ireland are much worse off than any of the inhabitants of Bulgaria, Asia Minor, China, India, or the Sudan".[119] Having been to all of those places and thus speaking with some authority, Gordon announced the "scandal" of poverty in Ireland could only be ended if the government were to buy the land from the Ascendency families, as the Anglo-Irish elite was known, and give it to their poor Irish tenant farmers.[119]

Gordon compared his plans for rural reform in Ireland to the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833, and ended his letter with the assertion that if this were done, the unity of the United Kingdom would be preserved as the Irish would appreciate this great act of justice and the Irish independence movement would cease to exist as "they would have nothing more to seek from agitation".[119] Besides championing land reform in Ireland, Gordon spent the winter of 1880–81 in London socialising with his family and his few friends, such as Florence Nightingale and Alfred Tennyson.[119]

 
Gordon caricatured by Ape in Vanity Fair in 1881.

In April 1881, Gordon left for Mauritius as Commander, Royal Engineers. He remained in Mauritius until March 1882. The American historian John Semple Galbraith described Gordon as suffering from "utter boredom" during his time there.[120] Gordon saw his work in building forts to protect Mauritius from a possible Russian naval attack as pointless, and his main achievement during his time there was to advise the Crown to turn the Seychelles islands, whose beauty had greatly moved Gordon, into a new crown colony as Gordon argued it was impossible to govern the Seychelles from Port Louis.[119]

In a memo to London, Gordon warned against over-reliance on the Suez Canal, where the Russians could easily sink one ship to block the entire canal, thus leading Gordon to advise upon improving the Cape route to India with Britain developing a series of bases in Africa and in the Indian Ocean. Gordon visited the Seychelles in the summer of 1881 and decided the islands were the location of the Garden of Eden.[119] On the island of Praslin in the Valle de Mai, Gordon believed that he found the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the form of a coco de mer tree which fruit bore a close resemblance to a woman's body.[121] Gordon was promoted to major-general on 23 March 1882.[122]

Being unemployed, Gordon decided to go to Palestine, which at the time was part of the Ottoman vilayet of Syria,[123] a region he had long desired to visit, where he would remain for a year (1882–83). During his "career break" in the Holy Land, the very religious Gordon sought to explore his faith and biblical sites.[124]

In Jerusalem, Gordon lived with an American lawyer, Horatio Spafford, and his wife, Anna Spafford, who were the leaders of the American Colony in the Holy City.[125] The Spaffords had lost their home and much of their fortune in the Great Chicago Fire and then had seen one of their sons die of scarlet fever, four of their daughters drowned in a shipwreck, followed by the death of another son from scarlet fever, causing them to turn to religion as consolation for unbearable tragedy, making them very congenial company for Gordon during his stay in Jerusalem.[125] After his visit, Gordon suggested in his book Reflections in Palestine[126] a different location for Golgotha, the site of Christ's crucifixion. The site lies north of the traditional site at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and is now known as "The Garden Tomb", or sometimes as "Gordon's Calvary".[127] Gordon's interest was prompted by his religious beliefs, as he had become an evangelical Christian in 1854.[128]

King Leopold II then asked Gordon again to take charge of the Congo Free State.[129] He accepted and returned to London to make preparations, but soon after his arrival, the British requested that he proceed immediately to the Sudan, where the situation had deteriorated badly after his departure — another revolt had arisen, led by the self-proclaimed Mahdi, Mohammed Ahmed. The Mahdi is a messianic figure in Islam which tradition holds will appear at the dawn of every new (Islamic) century to strike down the enemies of Islam.[130]

The year 1881 was the Islamic year 1298, and to mark the coming of the new century, Ahmed announced that he was the Mahdi, and proclaimed a jihad against the Egyptian state. The long exploitation of the Sudan by Egypt led many Sudanese to rally to the Mahdi's black banner as he promised to expel the Egyptians, whom Ahmed denounced as apostates, and he announced he would establish an Islamic fundamentalist state marking a return to the "pure Islam" said to have been practised in the days of the Prophet Mohamed in Arabia.[130]

Additionally, Baring's policy of raising taxes to pay off the debts Isma'il had run up sparked much resentment in both Egypt and the Sudan.[131] In 1882, nationalist rage in Egypt against Baring's economic policies led to the revolt by Colonel Urabi Pasha, which was put down by Anglo-Egyptian troops. From September 1882 onwards, Egypt was a de facto British protectorate effectively ruled by Baring, through in theory, Egypt remained an Ottoman province with a very wide degree of autonomy until 1914. With Egypt under British rule, the British also inherited the problems of Egypt's colony, the Sudan, which the Egyptians were losing control of to the Mahdi.[132]

Mahdist uprising edit

Mission to Khartoum edit

 
Muhammad Ahmad, the self-proclaimed Mahdi.

The Egyptian forces in the Sudan were insufficient to cope with the rebels, and the northern government was occupied with the suppression of the Urabi Revolt. By September 1882, the Egyptian position in the Sudan had grown perilous. In September 1883, an Egyptian Army force under Colonel William Hicks set out to destroy the Mahdi. The Egyptian soldiers were miserable fallāḥīn conscripts who had no interest in being in the Sudan, much less in fighting the Mahdi, and morale was so poor that Hicks had to chain his men together to prevent them from deserting.[133]

On 3–5 November 1883, the Ansar (whom the British called "Dervishes"), as the Mahdi's followers were known, destroyed the Egyptian army of 8,000 under Colonel Hicks at El Obeid, with only about 250 Egyptians surviving and Hicks being one of the slain.[133] The Ansar captured a large number of Remington rifles and ammunition cases together with many Krupp artillery guns and their shells.[124] After the Battle of El Obeid, Egyptian morale, never high to begin with, simply collapsed, and the black flag of the Mahdi soon flew over many towns in the Sudan.[133] By the end of 1883, the Egyptians held only the ports on the Red Sea and a narrow belt of land around the Nile in northern Sudan. In both cases, naval power was the key factor, as gunboats in the Red Sea and on the Nile provided a degree of firepower with which the Ansar could not cope.[134]

The only other place to hold out for a time was a region in the south held by the Governor of Equatoria, Emin Pasha. Following the destruction of Hicks's army, the Liberal Prime Minister, William Ewart Gladstone, decided that the Sudan was not worth the trouble it would take to keep, and that the region should be abandoned to the Mahdi. In December 1883, the British government ordered Egypt to abandon the Sudan, but that was difficult to carry out, as it involved the withdrawal of thousands of Egyptian soldiers, civilian employees, and their families.[135]

At the beginning of 1884, Gordon had no interest in the Sudan and had just been hired to work as an officer with the newly-established Congo Free State. Gordon — despite or rather, because of his war hero status — disliked publicity and tried to avoid the press when he was in Britain.[134] While staying with his sister in Southampton, Gordon received an unexpected visitor, namely William Thomas Stead, the editor of The Pall Mall Gazette, to whom Gordon reluctantly agreed to give an interview.[136] Gordon wanted to talk about the Congo, but Stead kept on pressing him to talk about the Sudan. Finally, after much prompting on Stead's part, Gordon opened up and attacked Gladstone's Sudan policy, coming out for an intervention to defeat the Mahdi.[137] Gordon offered up a 19th-century anticipation of the domino theory, claiming:

The danger arises from the influence which the spectacle of a conquering Mahometan Power established close to your frontiers will exercise upon the population which you govern. In all the cities of Egypt, it will be felt that what the Mahdi has done, they may do; and, as he has driven out the intruder, they may do the same.[138]

Stead published his interview on 9 January 1884, on the front page of the Pall Mall Gazette alongside an editorial of his titled, "Chinese Gordon for the Sudan".[138] Urban wrote: "With this leader, William Stead's real motive in going to Southampton revealed itself at last. As to who tipped him off that the general would be staying here for just a couple of nights, we can only speculate".[139]

Stead's interview caused a media sensation and led to a popular clamour for Gordon to be sent to the Sudan.[140] Urban wrote: "The Pall Mall Gazette articles, in short, began a new chapter in international relations; powerful men using media manipulation of public opinion to trigger war. It is often suggested that that campaign by William Randolph Hearst's paper that led to the US invasion of Cuba in 1898 was the world's first episode of this kind, but the British press deserves these dubious laurels for its actions a full fourteen years earlier".[140] The man behind the campaign was the Adjutant General, Sir Garnet Wolseley—a skilled media manipulator who often leaked information to the press to effect changes in policy—and who was strongly opposed to Gladstone's policy of pulling out of the Sudan.[141]

In 1880, the Liberals had won the general election on a platform of overseas retrenchment, and Gladstone had put his principles into practice by withdrawing from the Transvaal and Afghanistan in 1881. There was a secret "ultra" faction in the War Office led by Wolseley that felt that the Liberal government was too inclined to withdraw from various places all over the globe at the first sign of trouble, and who were determined to sabotage the withdrawal from the Sudan.[142] Gordon and Wolseley were good friends (Wolseley being one of the people Gordon prayed for every night), and after a meeting with Wolseley at the War Office to discuss the crisis in the Sudan, Gordon left convinced that he had to go to the Sudan to "carry out the work of God".[133]

With public opinion demanding that Gordon be sent to the Sudan, on 16 January 1884, the Gladstone government decided to send him there, albeit with the very limited mandate to report on the situation and advise on the best means of carrying out the evacuation.[143] Gladstone had gone to his estate at Hawarden to recover from illness and thus was not present at the meeting on 18 January where Gordon was given the Sudan command, but he was under the impression that Gordon's mission was advisory, whereas the four ministers present at the meeting had given Gordon the impression that his mission was executive in nature.[144]

Gladstone felt that this was a deft political move. Public opinion would be satisfied with "Chinese Gordon" going to the Sudan, but at the same time, Gordon was given such a limited mandate that the evacuation would proceed as planned. The Cabinet felt highly uncomfortable with the appointment, as they had been pressured by the press to send a man who was opposed to their Sudan policy to take command there. The Foreign Secretary, Lord Grenville, wondered if they had just committed a "gigantic folly".[145] Gordon made a short trip to Brussels to tell King Leopold that he would not be going to the Congo after all, news that enraged the King.[11]

 
General Gordon in Khartoum.

The British government asked Gordon to go to Khartoum to report on the best method of carrying out the evacuation. Gordon started for Cairo in January 1884, accompanied by Lt. Col. J. D. H. Stewart. At Cairo, he received further instructions from Sir Evelyn Baring, and was appointed Governor-General with executive powers by the Khedive Tewfik Pasha, who also gave Gordon an edict ordering him to establish a government in the Sudan. This Gordon would later use as a reason for staying in Khartoum.[146] Baring disapproved of sending Gordon to the Sudan, writing in a report to London that: "A man who habitually consults the Prophet Isaiah when he is in a difficulty is not apt to obey the orders of anyone".[147] Gordon immediately confirmed Baring's fears as he started to issue press statements attacking the rebels as "a feeble lot of stinking Dervishes" and demanded he be allowed to "smash up the Mahdi".[148] Gordon sent a telegram to Khartoum reading: "Don't be panic-stricken. Ye are men, not women. I am coming. Gordon".[146]

Urban wrote that Gordon's "most stupid mistake" occurred when he revealed his secret orders at a meeting of tribal leaders on 12 February at Berber, explaining that the Egyptians were pulling out, leading to almost all of the Arab tribes of northern Sudan declaring their loyalty to the Mahdi. Given that Gordon himself in his interview with Stead had stated: "The moment it is known that we have given up the game, every man will go over to the Mahdi", his decision to reveal that the Egyptians were pulling out remains inexplicable.[148] Shortly afterwards, Gordon wrote what Urban called a "bizarre" letter to the Mahdi telling him to accept the authority of the Khedive of Egypt and offered him the chance to work as one of Gordon's provincial governors. The Mahdi contemptuously rejected Gordon's offer and sent back a letter demanding Gordon convert to Islam.[148]

The Mahdi ended his letter with the remark: "I am the Expected Mahdi and I do not boast! I am the successor of God's Prophet and I have no need of any sultanate of Kordofan or anywhere else!"[149] Even Wolseley had cause to regret sending Gordon, as the general revealed himself to be a loose cannon whose press statements attacking the Liberal government were "obstructing rather than furthering his plans to take over the Sudan".[148] Travelling through Korosko and Berber, he arrived at Khartoum on 18 February, where he offered his earlier foe, the slaver-king Rahama Zobeir, release from prison in exchange for leading troops against Ahmed.[150]

Gordon's abrupt mood swings and contradictory advice confirmed the Cabinet's view of him as mercurial and unstable.[11] Even an observer as sympathetic as Winston Churchill wrote about Gordon: "Mercury uncontrolled by the force of gravity was not on several occasions more unstable than Charles Gordon. His moods were capricious and uncertain, his passions violent, his impulses sudden and inconsistent. The mortal enemy of the morning had become a trusted ally by night".[151]

The novelist John Buchan wrote that Gordon was so "unlike other men that he readily acquired a spiritual ascendency over all who knew him well and many who did not", but at the same time, Gordon had a "dualism", in that "the impression of single-heartedness was an illusion, for all his life his soul was the stage of conflict".[151] Gordon's attempt to have his former archenemy Zobeir—the "King of the Slavers" whom he had hunted for years and whose son he had executed—installed as the new Sultan of the Sudan appalled Gladstone and offended his former admirers in the Anti-Slavery Society.[146]

Preparing the defence of Khartoum edit

 
The maximum extent of the Mahdist State from 1881 to 1898, with national boundaries as of 2000 displayed.

After arriving in Khartoum, Gordon announced that on the grounds of honour, he would not evacuate Khartoum, but rather, would hold the city against the Mahdi.[146] Gordon was well-received by a crowd of about 9,000 during his return to Khartoum where the crowd continually chanted, "Father!" and "Sultan!" Gordon assured the people of Khartoum in a speech delivered in his rough-hewn Arabic that the Mahdi was coming with his Army of Islam marching under their black banners, but to have no fear as here he would be stopped.[149] Gordon had a garrison of about 8,000 soldiers armed with Remington rifles, together with a colossal ammunition dump containing millions of rounds.[152]

Gordon commenced the task of sending the women, the children, the sick, and the wounded to Egypt. About 2,500 people had been removed before the Mahdi's forces closed in on Khartoum. Gordon hoped to have the influential local leader, Sebehr Rahma, appointed to take control of Sudan, but the British government refused to support a former slaver. During this time in Khartoum, Gordon befriended Irish journalist Frank Powers, The Times (London) correspondent in the Sudan. Powers was delighted that the charismatic Gordon had no anti-Catholic prejudices and treated him as an equal.[153] The hero-worshiping Powers wrote about Gordon: "He is indeed I believe the greatest man of this century". Gordon granted Powers privileged access and in return, Powers started to write a series of popular articles for The Times depicting Gordon as the solitary hero taking on a vast horde of fanatical Muslims.[153]

Gordon made all of his personal dispatches to London public (there was no Official Secrets Act at the time) in attempts to win public opinion over to his policy, writing on one dispatch: "Not secret as far as I am concerned".[154] At one point, Gordon suggested in a telegram to Gladstone that the notoriously corrupt Ottoman Sultan Abdul-Hamid II could be bribed into sending 3,000 Ottoman troops for the relief of Khartoum and if the British government was unwilling and/or unable to pay that amount, he was certain that either Pope Leo XIII or a group of American millionaires would be.[155]

The advance of the rebels against Khartoum was combined with a revolt in the eastern Sudan. Colonel Valentine Baker led an Egyptian force out of Suakin and was badly defeated by 1,000 Haddendowa warriors who declared their loyalty to the Mahdi under Osman Digna at Al-Teb with 2,225 Egyptian soldiers and 96 officers killed.[71] Because the Egyptian troops at Suakin were repeatedly defeated, a British force was sent to Suakin under General Sir Gerald Graham, which drove the rebels away in several hard-fought actions. At Tamai on 13 March 1884, Graham was attacked by the Haddendowa (whom the British nicknamed "Fuzzy Wuzzies") whom he defeated, but in the course of the battle, the Haddendowa broke a Black Watch square, an action later celebrated in the Kipling poem "Fuzzy-Wuzzy".[156]

The ferocity of the Haddendowa attacks astonished the British, and Graham argued that he needed more troops if he were to advance deeper into the Sudan while one newspaper correspondent reported that the average British soldiers did not understand why they were in the Sudan fighting "such brave fellows" for "the sake of the wretched Egyptians".[154] Gordon urged that the road from Suakin to Berber be opened, but his request was refused by the government in London, and in April Graham and his forces were withdrawn and Gordon and the Sudan were abandoned. The garrison at Berber surrendered in May, and Khartoum was completely isolated.[157]

Gordon decided to stay and hold Khartoum despite the orders of the Gladstone government to merely report about the best means of supervising the evacuation of the Sudan.[146] Powers, who acted as Gordon's unofficial press attaché, wrote in The Times: "We are daily expecting British troops. We cannot bring ourselves to believe that we are to be abandoned".[158] In his diary, Gordon wrote: "I own to having been very insubordinate to Her Majesty's Government and its officials, but it is my nature, and I cannot help it. I fear I have not even tried to play battledore and shuttlecock with them. I know if I was chief I would never employ myself for I am incorrigible".[146]

Due to public opinion, the government dared not sack Gordon, but the Cabinet was extremely angry about Gordon's insubordination, with many privately saying if Gordon wanted to defy orders by holding Khartoum, then he only deserved what he was going to get. Gladstone himself took Gordon's attacks on his Sudan policy very personally.[158] One Cabinet minister wrote: "The London newspapers and the Tories clamor for an expedition to Khartoum, the former from ignorance, the latter because it is the best model of embarrassing us ... Of course it is not an impossible undertaking, but it is melancholy to think of the waste of lives and the treasure which it must involve".[158] The Cabinet itself was divided and confused about just what to do about the Sudan crisis, leading to a highly dysfunctional style of decision-making.[11]

 
10 piastre promissory note issued and hand-signed by Gen. Gordon during the Siege of Khartoum (26 April 1884)[159]

Gordon had a strong death wish, and clearly wanted to die fighting at Khartoum, writing in a letter to his sister: "I feel so very much inclined to wish it His will might be my release. Earth's joys grow very dim, its glories have faded". In his biography of Gordon, Anthony Nutting wrote that Gordon was obsessed with "the ever-present, constantly repeated desire for martyrdom and for that glorious immortality in union with God and away from the wretchedness of life on this earth".[146]

Because his Turkish and Egyptian (and many Sudanese) troops were Muslim, Gordon refrained in public from describing his battle with the Mahdi as a religious war, but Gordon's diary showed he viewed himself as a Christian champion fighting against the Mahdi just as much for God as for his nation. The Mahdi and his followers had been fighting a jihad since 1881 and looked forward to taking on the famous General Gordon as a chance to win glory for Allah.[160]

Gordon energetically organised the defence of Khartoum right from the moment he arrived in Khartoum, using his training as a military engineer to turn the city into a fortress.[152] Additionally, Gordon had guns and armoured plating attached to the paddle wheel steamers stationed at Khartoum to create his own private riverine navy that served as an effective force against the Ansar.[161] The Turkish troops at Khartoum were not part of the Ottoman Army, but rather bashi-bazouks, irregulars whom Gordon commented were good for raids, but useless in battle.[161]

The Shaggyeh (one of the few Arab tribes who did not rally to the Mahdi) drove Gordon to distraction, with Gordon writing in his diary about them: "Dreadful lot! How I look forward to their disbandment".[162] Gordon had a low opinion of the Egyptian, Turkish, and Arab Sudanese troops under his command—whom he constantly described as a mutinous, badly disciplined, and ill-trained rabble good only for looting — but had a much higher opinion of his Black Sudanese soldiers, most of them former slaves who would rather die fighting as free men than live as slaves again; it was well known that the Mahdi's forces were going to enslave the Blacks of Khartoum once they took the city.[162] The black Sudanese troops, many from what is now South Sudan, proved to be Gordon's best troops at Khartoum and numbered about twenty-three hundred.[71]

The siege of Khartoum edit

The siege of Khartoum by the Mahdist forces, commanded by the Mahdi himself, started on 18 March 1884. Initially, the siege of Khartoum was more in nature a blockade rather than a true siege as the Mahdi's forces lacked the strength to wage a proper siege, for example, cutting the telegraphy lines only in April 1884.[158] The British government had decided to abandon the Sudan, but it was clear that Gordon had other plans, and the public increasingly called for a relief expedition. Gordon's last telegrams were clearly meant for the British public, with one message addressed to Baring reading: "You state your intention of not sending any relief force up here to Berber ... I shall hold on here as long as I can, and if I can suppress the rebellion, I shall do so. If I cannot, I shall retire to the Equator and leave you with the indelible disgrace of abandoning the garrisons".[163]

Gladstone was opposed to hanging onto the Sudan, saying in a speech in the House of Commons that sending a relief force to Khartoum would be "a war of conquest against a people struggling to be free. Yes, these are people struggling to be free and rightly struggling to be free".[164] Khartoum was surrounded by the Ansar in March 1884, but was not cut off from the outside world for a considerable time afterward.[165] Gordon's armoured steamers continued to sail in and out of Khartoum with little difficulty for the first six months of the siege, and it was not until September 1884 that the armoured steamers first had trouble reaching the city.[165]

Gordon had a low opinion of his enemy, writing that the Ansar besieging him were "some 500 determined men and some 2,000 rag-tag Arabs".[165] Nutting wrote that Gordon "could have withdrawn at almost any moment between March and May" if only he had been willing. American historian James Perry wrote: "But instead of following instructions, he stayed put, longing for martyrdom. It wasn't exactly fair to the Egyptian garrisons he had been sent to evacuate; they had no death wish".[165] On 25 July 1884, the Cabinet, over the objections of the Prime Minister, voted to send a relief expedition to Khartoum. On 5 August 1884, the House of Commons voted to send the relief force with a budget of £300,000.[165]

During this time, Gordon, when he was not organising the besieged garrison with incredible energy, spent his time writing a somewhat rambling diary containing his reflections on the siege, life, fate, and his own intense, idiosyncratic version of Protestantism.[166] Gordon waged a very vigorous defence, sending out his armoured steamers to engage the Ansar camps along the Blue Nile while he regularly made raids on the besiegers that often gave the Madhi's forces a "bloody nose". Elated by these successes, Gordon wrote in his diary: "We are going to hold out here forever".[166]

To keep up morale, Gordon had a military band perform concerts in the central plaza every Friday and Sunday evenings for free, and cast his own decorations for his men.[167] Though the telegraph lines to Cairo were cut, Gordon used the remaining telegraph lines to build his own telegraph network within Khartoum linking the men holding the walls of Khartoum to the Governor-General's palace, thus keeping him well-informed of what was happening. To slow down the Ansar assaults, Gordon built primitive landmines out of water cans stuffed with dynamite and to confuse the enemy about his numbers, he put up wooden dummies in uniform along the walls of Khartoum facing the Blue Nile.[167]

It was not until August 1884 that the government decided to take steps to relieve Gordon, with the British relief force, called the Nile Expedition, or, more popularly, the Khartoum Relief Expedition or Gordon Relief Expedition (a title that Gordon strongly deprecated). The relief force, under the command of Gordon's old friend, Field Marshal Sir Garnet Wolseley, was not ready until November 1884. Wolseley had earlier served in Canada where he had commanded the Red River expedition of 1870, during which time he gained considerable respect for the skills of French-Canadian voyageurs, and now insisted he could not travel up the Nile without the voyageurs to assist his men as river pilots and boatmen.[168]

It took considerable time to hire the voyageurs in Canada and bring them to Egypt, which delayed the expedition. Some of the voyageurs who arrived in Egypt turned out to be lawyers led by an alderman from Toronto who wanted to see "the fun" of war and were useless as boatmen.[168] Wolseley was a bureaucratic general whose talents lay in administrative work, and as a field commander, Wolseley was slow, methodical, and cautious, making him, in the opinion of Urban, supremely unqualified to lead the relief expedition as he found one excuse after another to proceed up the Nile at a sluggish pace.[169] For example, Wolseley could have hired Egyptian boatmen who knew the Nile to serve as river pilots instead of bringing over voyageurs from Canada, who knew nothing of the Nile, and moreover, Wolseley called for the voyageurs only after his arrival in Egypt.[168]

On the brink edit

On 4 September 1884, Gordon's fortunes took a turn for the worse when the most able of his subordinates, Mohammed Aly, together with about 1,000 of Gordon's best troops, were killed in an ambush while conducting a raid.[166] Gordon wrote in his diary that Mohammed Aly had captured "a lad of 12 or 14 years of age, and the little chap spoke out boldly, and said he believed Mohamed Ahmed was the Mahdi and that we were dogs. He was shot! Before I heard of our defeat I heard of this, and I thought, 'THAT will not pass unavenged'."[166]

On 9 September 1884, an armoured steamer, the Abbas, on its way to Cairo, was captured by the Ansar for the first time and all aboard were killed.[160] Among the dead were Gordon's unofficial spokesman, the passionate wordsmith and Times journalist Frank Powers, Gordon's Chief of Staff, Colonel Stewart, and the French consul in Khartoum, Léon Herbin [fr], all of whom Gordon was sending to Cairo to plead for relief.[160][170] Gordon received a letter from the Mahdi taunting him over the murders of his friends Powers and Stewart, warning that he would be next if he did not surrender. Bitterly, Gordon wrote in his diary: "It is impossible to have any more words with Mohammed Achmed, only lead."[171]

Among the papers captured on the Abbas was the cipher key Gordon used to code his messages in and out of Khartoum, which meant he could no longer read the messages he received, leading him to write in his diary: "I think cipher-messages are in some countries, like this, a mistake".[166] During this period, Gordon was lionised by the British press, which portrayed him as a latter-day Christian crusader and a saint, a man of pure good, heroically battling the Mahdi, who was depicted as a man of pure evil.[172] The Pall Mall Gazette, in a front page leader, wrote that Gordon stood "out in clear relief against the Eastern sky. Alone in [Africa], dauntless and unfaltering, he discharges his great trust, holding the capital of the Sudan against the beleaguering hordes".[173] The defences Gordon had built with lines of earthwork, mines, and barbed wire presented the Ansar with much difficulty and their attempts to storm Khartoum failed, but the Ansar made good use of their Krupp artillery to gradually batter down the defences.[160] To counter Gordon's armoured steamers, the Mahdi built a series of forts along the Nile equipped with Krupp guns that over time proceeded to make it almost impossible for Gordon's navy to operate.[160]

 
A cartoon of Charles Gordon greeting reinforcements at Khartoum in 1885. Published before Gordon's death was known.

By the end of 1884, both the garrison and the population of Khartoum were starving to death; there were no horses, donkeys, cats, or dogs left in Khartoum as the people had eaten all of them.[174] Gordon told the civilians of Khartoum that anyone who wished to leave, even to join the Mahdi's army, were free to do so.[174] About half of the population took up his offer to promptly leave the city.[174] A note written by Gordon and dated 14 December was sent out by a messenger from Khartoum, who reached Wolseley's army on 30 December 1884.[175]

The note read "Khartoum all right. Can hold out for years. C. G. Gordon", but the messenger (who knew very little English) had memorised another, darker message from Gordon, namely: "We want you to come quickly".[11][175] In the same month, Gordon received a letter from the Mahdi offering safe passage out of Khartoum: "We have written to you to go back to your country ... I repeat to you the words of Allah, Do not destroy yourself. Allah Himself is merciful to you".[174]

Gordon and the Mahdi never met, but the two men, both charismatic and intensely religious soldiers who saw themselves as fighting for God, had developed a grudging mutual respect.[174] However, Faught wrote that there was a fundamental difference between Gordon and the Mahdi in that Gordon never tried to convert the Muslims of the Sudan to Christianity whereas the Mahdi was an "Islamic extremist" who believed he would establish a worldwide caliphate, looking forward to the day when he would "see the world bow before him".[176]

During November–December 1884, Gordon's diary showed the stressful effects of the siege, as he was in a state of mental exhaustion, a man on the brink of madness.[160] In his final months, Gordon oscillated between a longing for martyrdom and death versus an intense horror at the prospect of his own demise as the hour of his destruction rapidly approached.[160] Even if the relief force had reached him, it is not clear if he would have left Khartoum, as Gordon wrote in his diary: "If any emissary or letter comes up here ordering me to come down I WILL NOT OBEY IT, BUT WILL STAY HERE, AND FALL WITH THE TOWN!"[160]

At another point, a death-obsessed Gordon wrote in his diary: "Better a bullet to the brain than to flicker out unheeded".[160] In a letter that reached Cairo in December, Gordon wrote: "Farewell. You will never hear from me again. I fear that there will be treachery in the garrison, and all will be over by Christmas."[177] On 14 December 1884, Gordon wrote the last entry in his diary, which read: "Now MARK THIS, if the Expeditionary Force and I ask for no more than two hundred men, does not come in ten days, the town may fall; and I have done my best for the honour of our country. Goodbye, C. G. Gordon".[178] A chain-smoking Gordon constantly paced the roof of his palace during the day, looking vainly for smoke on the Nile indicating that the steamers were coming, while spending much of the rest of his time in prayer.[174]

On 5 January 1885, the Ansar took the fort at Omdurman, which allowed them to use their Krupp artillery to bring down enfilading fire on the defences of Khartoum.[160] In one of the last letters Gordon had smuggled out, he wrote: "I expect Her Majesty's Government are in a precious rage with me for holding out, and so forcing their hands".[160] In his last weeks, those who knew Gordon described him as a chain-smoking, rage-filled, desperate man wearing a shabby uniform who spent hours talking to a mouse that he shared his office with when he was not attacking his Sudanese servants with his rattan cane during one of his rages.[179]

A particular aspect of Gordon's personality that stood out was his death wish, as everyone who knew him was convinced that he wanted to die.[160] When a Lebanese merchant visited Gordon in the evening, the Ansar began an artillery bombardment, leading the frightened merchant to suggest that perhaps Gordon ought to dim the lights to avoid drawing enemy fire down on the palace.[160] The merchant recalled Gordon's response: "He called up the guard and gave the orders to shoot me if I moved" and ordered all of the lamps in the palace to be lit up as brightly as possible.[180] Gordon defiantly told the merchant: "Go tell all the people of Khartoum that Gordon fears nothing, for God has created him without fear!"[180]

The capture of Khartoum edit

The relief force under General Wolseley, which set out from Wadi Halfa, was divided into two columns at Korti—a 1,200-strong "flying column" or "desert column" of camel-borne troops which would cross the Bayuda desert to reach Metmemma on the Nile and meet Gordon's gunboats there, and the main column which would continue to advance along the Nile heading for Berber. The troops reached Korti towards the end of December, the small "Desert Column" reaching Metemma on 20 January 1885, fighting the Battle of Abu Klea[171] on 18 January and Abu Kru (or Gubat) en route. There they found four gunboats which had been sent north by Gordon four months earlier, and prepared them for the trip back up the Nile. When the news of the defeats reached Ansar besieging Khartoum, terrible cries of lamentation rose from the besieging force, which led Gordon to guess that the Ansar had been defeated in battle and that Wolseley must be close.[171]

On 24 January, two of the steamers, under Sir Charles Wilson, carrying 20 soldiers of the Sussex Regiment wearing red tunics to clearly identify them as British, were sent on a purely reconnaissance mission to Khartoum, with orders from Wolseley not to attempt to rescue Gordon or bring him ammunition or food.[181] On the evening of 24 January 1885, the Mahdi met with his generals, whose leading spokesman was his uncle Muhammad Abd al-Karim, who told him that, with the Nile low and Wolseley close, it was time to either storm Khartoum or retreat.[182] As dawn broke on the morning of 26 January 1885, the Ansar regiments, led by their riflemen and followed by their spearmen, marched out of their camps under their black banners.[182]

The Ansar began their final attack by storming the city via the gap in the defence caused by the low Nile and after an hour's fighting, the starving defenders had abandoned the fight and the city was theirs.[182] The Ansar took no prisoners and all of the approximately 7,000 defenders were killed.[177] On arriving at Khartoum on 28 January, the reconnaissance gunboats found that the city had been captured and Gordon had been killed just two days before, coincidentally, two days before his 52nd birthday. Under heavy fire from Ansar warriors on the bank, the two steamers turned back downriver.[183]

The British press criticised the relief force for arriving two days late, but the main relief force was nowhere near Khartoum by then and only the reconnaissance party under Sir Charles Wilson on two gunboats had attempted to reach Khartoum, though it was later argued that the Mahdi's forces had good intelligence, and if the camel corps had advanced earlier, the final attack on Khartoum would also have come earlier. Finally, the boats sent were not there to relieve Gordon, who was not expected to agree to abandon the city, and the small force and limited supplies on board could have offered scant military support for the besieged in any case.[181]

Death edit

 
General Gordon's Last Stand, by George W. Joy.

The manner of Gordon's death is uncertain, but it was romanticised in a popular painting by George William JoyGeneral Gordon's Last Stand (1893, currently in the Leeds City Art Gallery), and again in the film Khartoum (1966) with Charlton Heston as Gordon. The most popular account of Gordon's death was that he put on his ceremonial gold-braided blue uniform of the Governor-General together with the Pasha's red fez and that he went out unarmed, except with his rattan cane, to be cut down by the Ansar.[11] This account was very popular with the British press as it contained much Christian imagery with Gordon as a Christlike figure dying passively for the sins of all humanity.[11]

Gordon was apparently killed at the Governor-General's palace about an hour before dawn. The Mahdi had given strict orders to his three Khalifas not to kill Gordon.[184] The orders were not obeyed. Gordon's Sudanese servants later stated that Gordon for once did not go out armed only with his rattan cane, but also took with him a loaded revolver and his sword, and died in mortal combat fighting the Ansar.[185]

Gordon died on the steps of a stairway in the northwestern corner of the palace, where he and his body servant, Agha Khalil Orphali, had been firing at the enemy. Orphali was knocked unconscious and did not see Gordon die. When he woke up again that afternoon, he found Gordon's body covered with flies and the head cut off.[186]

A merchant, Bordeini Bey, glimpsed Gordon standing on the palace steps in a white uniform looking into the darkness. The best evidence suggests that Gordon went out to confront the enemy, gunned down several of the Ansar with his revolver and, after running out of bullets, drew his sword only to be shot down.[11]

Reference is made to an 1889 account of the General surrendering his sword to a senior Mahdist officer, then being struck and subsequently speared in the side as he rolled down the staircase.[187] Rudolf Slatin, the Austrian governor of Darfur who had been taken prisoner by the Ansar, wrote that three soldiers showed him Gordon's head at his tent before delivering it to the Mahdi.[188] When Gordon's head was unwrapped at the Mahdi's feet, he ordered the head transfixed between the branches of a tree "where all who passed it could look in disdain, children could throw stones at it, and the hawks of the desert could sweep and circle above."[189] His body was desecrated and thrown down a well.[189]

 
Depiction of Gordon's head shown to Slatin.

In the hours following Gordon's death, an estimated 10,000 civilians and members of the garrison were killed in Khartoum.[189] The massacre was finally halted by orders of the Mahdi. Many of Gordon's papers were saved and collected by his two sisters, Helen Clark Gordon, who married Gordon's medical colleague in China, Dr. Moffit, and Mary Augusta, and possibly his niece Augusta, who married Gerald Henry Blunt. Gordon's papers, as well as some of his grandfather's (Samuel Enderby III), were accepted by the British Library around 1937.[190]

The failure to rescue General Gordon's force in Sudan was a major blow to Prime Minister Gladstone's popularity. Queen Victoria sent him a telegram of rebuke which found its way into the press.[191] Critics said Gladstone had neglected military affairs and had not acted promptly enough to save the besieged Gordon. Critics inverted his acronym, "G.O.M." (for "Grand Old Man"), to "M.O.G." (for "Murderer of Gordon"). Gladstone told the Cabinet that the public cared much about Gordon and nothing about the Sudan, so he ordered Wolseley home after learning of Gordon's death.[192] Wolseley, who had been led to believe that his expedition was the initial phase of an operation to re-conquer the Sudan, was furious, and in a telegram to Queen Victoria contemptuously called Gladstone "the tradesman who has become a politician".[192]

In 1885, Gordon achieved the martyrdom he had been seeking at Khartoum as the British press portrayed him as a saintly Christian hero and martyr who had died nobly resisting the Islamic onslaught of the Mahdi.[193] As late as 1901, on the anniversary of Gordon's death, The Times wrote in a leader (editorial) that Gordon was "that solitary figure holding aloft the flag of England in the face of the dark hordes of Islam".[172] Gordon's death caused a huge wave of national grief all over Britain with 13 March 1885, being set aside as a day of mourning for the "fallen hero of Khartoum".[191] In a sermon, the Bishop of Chichester stated: "Nations who envied our greatness rejoiced now at our weakness and our inability to protect our trusted servant. Scorn and reproach were cast upon us, and would we plead that it was undeserved? No; the conscience of the nation felt that a strain rested upon it".[191]

Baring—who deeply disliked Gordon—wrote that because of the "national hysteria" caused by Gordon's death, saying anything critical about him at present would be equal to questioning Christianity.[191] Stones were thrown at the windows at 10 Downing Street as Gladstone was denounced as the "Murderer of Gordon", the Judas figure who betrayed the Christ-like figure of Gordon. The wave of mourning was not just confined to Britain. In New York, Paris, and Berlin, pictures of Gordon appeared in shop windows with black lining as all over the West, the fallen general was seen as a Christ-like man who sacrificed himself resisting the advance of Islam.[11]

Despite the popular demand to "avenge Gordon", the Conservative government that came into office after the 1885 election did nothing of the sort. The Sudan was judged to be not worth the huge financial costs it would have taken to conquer it, the same conclusion that the Liberals had reached.[11] After Khartoum, the Mahdi established his Islamic state which restored slavery and imposed a very harsh rule that, according to one estimate, caused the deaths of 8 million people between 1885 and 1898.[194] In 1887, the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition under Henry Morton Stanley set out to rescue Dr. Emin Pasha, still holding out in Equatoria against the Ansar. Many have seen the attempt to save Emin Pasha, a German doctor-biologist-botanist who had converted from Judaism first to Lutheranism and then (possibly) to Islam, and who had not been particularly famous in Europe until then, as a consolation prize for Gordon.[195]

Egypt had been in the French sphere of influence until 1882 when the British had established control over Egypt. In March 1896, a French force under the command of Jean-Baptiste Marchand left Dakar with the intention of marching across the Sahara with the aim of destroying the Mahdiyah state. The French hoped that conquering the Sudan would allow them to lever the British out of Egypt, and thus restore Egypt to the French sphere of influence.[11]

To block the French, a British force under Herbert Kitchener was sent to conquer the Mahdiyah state and defeated the Ansar at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898. It was thus their rivalry with the French, not a desire to "avenge Gordon", that led the British government to annex the Mahdiyah state in 1898.[11] However, the British public and Kitchener himself saw the expedition as one to "avenge Gordon". As the Mahdi was long dead, Kitchener had to content himself with blowing up the Mahdi's tomb as revenge for Gordon's death.[196] The body of the Mahdi was disinterred and beheaded.[197] This symbolic decapitation echoed General Gordon's death at the hands of the Mahdist forces in 1885. The headless body of the Mahdi was thrown into the Nile.[198][199] Lord Kitchener kept the Mahdī's skull and it was rumoured that he intended to use it as a drinking cup or ink well.[200]

After the Battle of Omdurman, Kitchener opened a letter from the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, and for the first time learned the real purpose of the expedition had been to keep the French out of the Sudan and that "avenging Gordon" was merely a pretext.[201]

Personal life edit

Personal beliefs edit

Gordon had been born into the Church of England, but he never quite trusted the Anglican Church, instead preferring his own personal brand of Protestantism.[91] In his worn-out state, Gordon had some sort of religious rebirth, leading him to write to his sister Augusta: "Through the workings of Christ in my body by His Body and Blood, the medicine worked. Ever since the realisation of the sacrament, I have been turned upside down".[202] The eccentric Gordon was very religious, but he departed from Christian orthodoxy on a number of points. Gordon believed in reincarnation. In 1877, he wrote in a letter: "This life is only one of a series of lives which our incarnated part has lived. I have little doubt of our having pre-existed; and that also in the time of our pre-existence we were actively employed. So, therefore, I believe in our active employment in a future life, and I like the thought."[203] Gordon was an ardent Christian cosmologist, who also believed that the Garden of Eden was on the island of Praslin in the Seychelles.[204] Gordon believed that God's throne from which He governed the universe rested upon the earth, which was further surrounded by the firmament.[11]

Gordon believed in both predestination—writing that, "I believe that not a worm is picked up by a bird without the direct intervention of God"—and free will with humans choosing their own fate, writing, "I cannot and do not pretend to reconcile the two".[205] These religious beliefs mirrored differing aspects of Gordon's personality as he believed that he could choose his own fate through the force of his personality and a fatalistic streak often ending his letters with D.V (Deo volente – Latin for "God willing", i.e. whatever God wants will be).[205] Gordon was well-known for sticking Christian tracts onto city walls and to throw them out of a train window.[11] The Romanian historian Eric Tappe described Gordon as a man who developed his own "very personal peculiar variety of Protestantism".[59]

Personality edit

In his book Eminent Victorians, Lytton Strachey portrays Gordon in the following manner:[206]

Gordon possessed an inherently reclusive nature; he had an aversion to social gatherings and formal attire, particularly in the presence of women, especially those of high society. He was unfamiliar with the comfortable indulgences typical of his social class and status; his clothing bordered on being threadbare, and he partook in frugal meals at a table equipped with a drawer, where he hastily concealed his bread and plate when impoverished visitors approached. The sole book he engaged with was the Bible.

Strachey continued by highlighting the fear his subordinates held for Gordon's temper:[206]

There were instances when his anger became utterly uncontrollable, and the gentle servant of God, who spent his days quoting religious texts... would, in fits of sudden rage, strike his Arab aide-de-camp across the face or assault his Alsatian servant, subjecting him to kicks until he screamed

Sexuality edit

Gordon's charitable work for the boys of Gravesend led to assertions later in the 20th century that he was a homosexual.[207] The Dictionary of National Biography described Gordon as a great "boy lover".[208] Urban wrote:

It is possible that he had sexual feelings for these urchins, but there is no evidence that he ever acted upon them. We can only speculate that his increasing religious devotion may have been an outward manifestation of an internal struggle against sexual temptation.[209]

Gordon never married and is not known to have had a sexual or romantic relationship with anyone. He claimed that his army service and frequent travels to dangerous places made it impossible for him to marry. He could only hurt a potential wife because it was inevitable that he would die in battle.[210] Gordon's parents expected him to marry and were disappointed about his lifelong bachelorhood.[211] Urban wrote that the best evidence suggests Gordon was a latent homosexual, whose sexual repression led him to funnelling his aggression into a military career with a special energy.[212] The British historian Denis Judd, wrote about Gordon's sexuality:

Like two other great Imperial heroes of his time, Kitchener and Cecil Rhodes, Gordon was a celibate. What this almost certainly meant was that Gordon had unresolved homosexual inclinations which, like Kitchener, but unlike Rhodes, he kept savagely repressed. The repression of Gordon's sexual instincts helped to release a flood of celibate energy which drove him into weird beliefs, eccentric activities, and a sometimes misplaced confidence in his own judgement.[11]

The American historian Byron Farwell strongly implied in his 1985 book Eminent Victorian Soldiers that Gordon was a homosexual, for instance writing of Gordon's "unwholesome" interest in the boys he took in to live with him at the Fort House, and his fondness for the company of "handsome" young men.[213]

Gordon, at the age of 14,[214] said that he wished he had been born a eunuch, which has been taken to suggest that he wanted to annihilate all of his sexual desires and, indeed, his sexuality altogether.[215] Together with his sister Augusta, Gordon often prayed to be released from their "vile bodies" in which their spirits were "imprisoned" so that their souls might be joined with God.[216] Faught argued that no-one at the time suspected Gordon of having sexual relations with the legions of teenage boys living with him at the Fort House. Faught also pointed out that the first hints that Gordon might secretly have been having sex with the boys of the Fort House were made by Lytton Strachey in his book Eminent Victorians (published 1918) which, in Faught's opinion, may have said more about Strachey than it did about Gordon.[208]

Faught maintained that Gordon was a heterosexual whose Christian beliefs led him to maintain his virginity right up to his death, because he believed that sexual intercourse was incompatible with his faith.[217] The frequent references in Gordon's letters about his need to resist "temptation" and "subdue the flesh", Faught argued, related to women rather than men who were "tempting" him.[217] The South African minister Dr. Peter Hammond denied that Gordon was a homosexual, citing the numerous statements made by Gordon condemning homosexuality as an abomination, charging that the claim that Gordon was a homosexual was a theory with no foundation in fact.[218] The British historian Paul Mersh has suggested that Gordon was not a homosexual, but rather his awkwardness with women was due to Asperger syndrome, which made it extremely difficult for him to express his feelings for women properly.[219]

Charity work edit

 
Gordon Gardens, Gravesend

Gordon returned to Britain and commanded the Royal Engineers' project around Gravesend, Kent, to erect forts for the defense of the River Thames. After he arrived in Britain, Gordon announced to the press that he "did not want to board the tram of the world" and asked to be left alone.[59] Gordon disapproved of the forts he was building at the mouth of Thames to guard against a possible French invasion, regarding them as expensive and useless.[220] When the Duke of Cambridge, the Army's commander, visited one of the forts under construction and praised Gordon for his work, he received the reply: "I had nothing to do with it, sir; it was built regardless of my opinion, and, in fact, I entirely disapprove of its arrangement and position".[220] Gordon's father was against his son working in Chinese service, an estrangement that had not been settled at the time of his death, and Gordon felt immense guilt that his father had died before they were reconciled.[220]

Following the death of his father, he undertook extensive social work in Gravesend, feeding homeless boys whom he found begging on the street while also attempting to find them homes and jobs.[209] Many of the "scuttlers," as Gordon fondly called the homeless boys, were lodged at his own home, the Fort House.[221] Together with Mrs. Sarah Mackley, his housekeeper, he adapted two rooms at Fort House to serve as classrooms and basic needs resource rooms for boys living on the streets. He also rented a small house in East Terrace for working boys to be taught for free.[222] Gordon's closest friends were a couple, Frederick and Octavia Freese, whose son Edward, became Gordon's surrogate son.[223] Persuaded by his friends in 1867, he became a trustee for the local Ragged school committee.[13] Before 1870, there was no universal school system in Britain, and the Ragged Schools were a network of privately-funded schools that gave a free education to children whose parents were too poor to afford the school fees.[223] Outside of the Fort House were graffito written on the wall by one of the evidently less-educated boys that read: "God Bless the Kernel".[208] Another "scuttler" later recalled: "He made me feel, first of all, the meaning of the phrase, the Goodness of God. Goodness become to me, through Gordon, the most desirable of ideas...We were under the spell of Gordon's personality. We lived in the magic of his mystery-enchanted".[208]

Octavia Freese published a book in 1894 about his charity work and Christian beliefs.[224] The council subsequently acquired the gardens of his official residence, Fort House (now a museum), for the town.[225]

His favourite books were The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis, Christ Mystical by Joseph Hall, and the poem The Dream of Gerontius by John Henry Newman.[226]

Every year, Gordon gave away about 90% of his annual income of £3,000 (equivalent to £351,000 in 2021) to charity.[128] Gordon did not enjoy his celebrity status, and though extremely charismatic, he only kept a limited circle of friends and found dealing with strangers difficult.[55] A colleague recalled that Gordon's time at Gravesend was the "most peaceful and happy of his life", but Gordon was often bored, and constantly asked the War Office for an assignment to somewhere dangerous.[208] Gordon often spoke nostalgically of his service in China, and wished he could return to that country.[227]

Memorials edit

 
Rebuilt Gordon Hall near Haihe River in Tianjin, China
 
The Gordon Hospital in Bloomburg Street, London
 
General Charles George Gordon Statue in Gravesend
 
Statue in Gordon Reserve, Melbourne, Australia
 
Statue of General Gordon on the Victoria Embankment, London
 
General Gordon's Memorial at Queen's Park Southampton

News of Gordon's death caused an outpouring of public grief across Britain. A memorial service, conducted by the Bishop of Newcastle, was held at St. Paul's Cathedral on 14 March. The Lord Mayor of London opened a public subscription to raise funds for a permanent memorial to Gordon; this eventually materialised as the Gordon Boys Home, now Gordon's School, in West End, Woking.[228][229]

Statues were erected in Trafalgar Square, London, in Chatham, Gravesend, Melbourne (Australia), and Khartoum. Southampton, where Gordon had stayed with his sister, Augusta, in Rockstone Place before his departure to the Sudan, erected a memorial in Porter's Mead, now Queen's Park, near the town's docks.[228] On 16 October 1885, the structure was unveiled; it comprises a stone base on which there are four polished red Aberdeen granite columns, about twenty feet high. The columns are surmounted by carved capitals supporting a cross. The pedestal bears the arms of the Gordon clan and of the borough of Southampton, and also Gordon's name in Chinese. Around the base is an inscription referring to Gordon as a soldier, philanthropist, and administrator and mentions those parts of the world in which he served, closing with a quotation from his last letter to his sisters: "I am quite happy, thank God! and, like Lawrence, I have tried to do my duty."[230] The memorial is a Grade II listed building.[231]

Gordon's memory, as well as his work in supervising the town's riverside fortifications, is commemorated in Gravesend; the embankment of the Riverside Leisure Area is known as the Gordon Promenade, while Khartoum Place lies just to the south. Located in the town centre of his birthplace of Woolwich is General Gordon Square, formerly known as General Gordon Place until a major urban landscaped area was developed and the road name changed. In addition, one of the first Woolwich Free Ferry vessels was named Gordon in his memory.[232]

In 1886, the Western Hospital for Fistula, Piles and other Diseases of the Rectum, at 278 Vauxhall Bridge Road, and backing onto Vincent Square London,[233] was renamed in honour of Gordon. It underwent a series of name changes until 1941 when it moved to its current location in Bloomburg Street, Westminster, as the Gordon Hospital.[234] Shut for the closing years of World War II, it reopened in 1947 under the same name, but serving as a psychiatric unit operated by the Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust.[235]

In 1888, a statue of General Gordon by Hamo Thornycroft was erected in Trafalgar Square, London, exactly halfway between the two fountains. It was removed in 1943. In a House of Commons speech on 5 May 1948, then opposition leader Winston Churchill spoke out in favour of the statue's return to its original location: "Is the right honorable Gentleman [the Minister of Works] aware that General Gordon was not only a military commander, who gave his life for his country, but, in addition, was considered very widely throughout this country as a model of a Christian hero, and that very many cherished ideals are associated with his name? Would not the right honorable Gentleman consider whether this statue [...] might not receive special consideration [...]? General Gordon was a figure outside and above the ranks of military and naval commanders." However, in 1953 the statue, minus a large slice of its pedestal, was reinstalled on the Victoria Embankment, in front of the newly-built Ministry of Defence main buildings.[236]

An identical statue by Thornycroft—but with the pedestal intact—is located in a small park called Gordon Reserve, near Parliament House in Melbourne, Australia.[237]

The Corps of Royal Engineers, Gordon's own Corps, commissioned a statue of Gordon on a camel. It was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1890 and then erected in Brompton Barracks, Chatham, the home of the Royal School of Military Engineering, where it still stands.[238] Much later, a second casting was made. In 1902, it was placed at the junction of St Martin's Lane and Charing Cross Road in London. In 1904, it was moved to Khartoum, where it stood at the intersection of Gordon Avenue and Victoria Avenue, 200 metres south of the new palace that had been built in 1899. It was removed in 1958, shortly after the Sudan became independent. This is the figure which, since April 1959, stands at the Gordon's School in Woking.[239]

Gordon's Tomb (in fact a cenotaph), which was carved by Frederick William Pomeroy, lies in St Paul's Cathedral, London.[240][241]

The Church Missionary Society (CMS) work in Sudan was undertaken under the name of the Gordon Memorial Mission. This was a very evangelical branch of CMS and was able to start work in Sudan in 1900 as soon as the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium took control after the fall of Khartoum in 1899. In 1885, at a meeting in London, £3,000 were allocated to a Gordon Memorial Mission in Sudan.[242]

In the Presidential Palace in Khartoum (built in 1899), in the west wing on the ground floor, there was, at least until 1936, a stone slab against the wall on the left side of the main corridor when coming from the main entrance with the text: "Charles George Gordon died—26 Jan 1885", on the spot where Gordon was killed, at the foot of the stairs in the old Governor-General's Palace (built around 1850).[243] A memorial plaque was still present as of 2014.[244]

Media portrayals and legacy edit

Charlton Heston played Gordon in the 1966 epic film Khartoum, which deals with the siege of Khartoum. Laurence Olivier played Muhammad Ahmad.[245] The British historian Alex von Tunzelmann criticised the film for portraying Gordon and the Mahdi regularly meeting and as frères ennemis, though she added that it is true that Gordon and the Mahdi did exchange letters.[246]

For the six months after the British public learned of Gordon's death, newspapers and journals published hundreds of articles celebrating Gordon as a "saint".[172] The American historian Cynthia Behrman wrote that the articles all commented upon "Gordon's religious faith, his skill with native peoples, his fearlessness in the face of danger (a recurrent motif is Gordon's habit of leading his troops into battle armed with no more than a rattan cane), his honor, his resourcefulness, his graciousness to subordinates, his impatience with cant and hypocrisy, his hatred of glory and honors, his dislike of lionization and social rewards, and on and on. One begins to wonder whether the man had any faults at all".[172] "The reading public wanted heroes, it wanted to read about one lone Englishmen sacrificing himself for glory, honour, God, and the Empire."[247]

Such was the popularity of Gordon that the first critical book by a British author was not published until 1908, when Baring—by this time raised to the peerage as Viscount Cromer—published his autobiography, which was notable as the first British book to portray Gordon in an unflattering manner, though Lord Cromer also tried to be fair and emphasised what he felt were Gordon's positive, as well as his negative, traits.[248] About the charge that if only Gladstone had listened to Gordon, the disaster would have been avoided, Cromer wrote that in the course of one month, he received five telegrams from Gordon offering his advice, each one of which completely contradicted the previous telegram, leading Cromer to charge that Gordon was too mercurial a figure to hold command.[249]

As a young man, Winston Churchill shared in the national consensus that Gordon was one of Britain's greatest heroes.[192] During a meeting in 1898 in Cairo where Churchill interviewed Baring to gather material for his 1899 book The River War,[250] Baring challenged Churchill about his belief that Gordon was a hero. After his conversation with Baring, Churchill wrote: "Of course there is no doubt that Gordon as a political figure was absolutely hopeless. He was so erratic, capricious, utterly unreliable, his mood changed so often, his temper was abominable, he was frequently drunk, and yet with all that, he had a tremendous sense of honour and great abilities".[192]

Many biographies have been written of Gordon, most of them highly hagiographic, such as the one by William Butler. The British sinologist Demetrius Charles Boulger published a biography of Gordon in 1896 which depicted him as a staunch patriot and a Christian of immense virtue who displayed superhuman courage in the face of danger.[251] By contrast, Gordon is one of the four subjects discussed critically in Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey, one of the first texts about Gordon that portrays some of his characteristics which Strachey regards as weaknesses. Notably, Strachey emphasises the claims of Charles Chaillé-Long that Gordon was an alcoholic, an accusation dismissed by later writers like Alan Moorehead[252] and Charles Chenevix Trench.[253]

Strachey, a member of the Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals, depicted Gordon as a ludicrous figure, a bad-tempered, deranged egomaniac with a nasty habit of knocking out Arabs whenever he was unhappy, and who led himself into disaster.[254] Even more devastatingly, Strachey depicted Gordon as a monumental hypocrite, noting the contrast between Gordon's lofty Christian ideas of love, compassion, charity, grace, and hope vs. a career full of hate, war, carnage, death, and destruction.[254] Strachey ended his essay on Gordon on a cynical note: "At any rate, it all ended very happily—in a glorious slaughter of twenty-thousand Arabs, a vast addition to the British Empire and a step in the Peerage for Sir Evelyn Baring".[248]

Long after his death, and despite the popularity of Strachey's essay in Eminent Victorians, the appeal of the Gordon legend lived on. As late as 1933, the French historian Pierre Crabitès wrote in his book Gordon, le Soudan et l'esclavage (Gordon, the Sudan and Slavery) that as a Frenchman, the Gordon legend had meant nothing to him when he began researching his book, but after examining all of the historical evidence, he could not help but admire Gordon, who "died as he lived, a Christian, a gentleman, and a soldier".[248]

In the 20th century, many British military leaders came to have a critical view of Gordon, with Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery writing that Gordon was "unfit for independent command, mentally unbalanced, a fanatic, self-imposed martyr", adding that he should never have been sent to the Sudan and the Gladstone–Gordon relationship was a case study in dysfunctional civil–military relations.[255] In 1953, the British novelist Charles Beatty published a Gordon biography, His Country was the World: A Study of Gordon of Khartoum, which focused on Gordon's religious faith, but for the first time noted what a tormented figure Gordon was: a man of deeply felt Christian convictions, full of guilt and self-loathing over his own sinfulness and inability to live up to his own impossibly high standards over what a Christian should be and desperately longing to do something to expiate his sinfulness.[256] Like Strachey, Beatty found Gordon a ridiculous figure, but unlike Strachey, who had nothing but contempt for Gordon, Beatty's approach was a compassionate one, arguing that Gordon's many acts of charity and self-sacrifice were attempts to love others since he was unable to love himself.[256]

Another attempt to debunk Gordon was Anthony Nutting's Gordon, Martyr & Misfit (1966). Nutting's book was noteworthy as the first book to argue that Gordon had a death wish.[257] Nutting noted that Gordon had often recklessly exposed himself to Russian fire while fighting in the Crimea and stated he hoped to die in battle against the Russians before leaving for the Crimea.[257] On the basis of such statements and actions, Nutting argued that Gordon's suicidal courage of going into battle armed only with his rattan cane, which so impressed the Victorian public, reflected darker desires. Nutting made the controversial claim that the basis of Gordon's death wish was that he was gay, noting that Gordon never married, is not known to have had a relationship with any women, and often wished that he had been born a eunuch, which strongly suggested that Gordon wished to have no sexual desires at all.[257]

 
Statue of Gordon, seated on a camel, which stood in front of the palace in Khartoum prior to Sudanese independence in 1956

Nutting contended that the conflict between Gordon's devoutly-held Christian ideals and his sexuality made Gordon deeply ashamed of himself and he attempted to expiate his wretched, sinful nature by seeking a glorious death in battle.[257] Behrman wrote that the first part of Nutting's thesis, that Gordon had a death wish, is generally accepted by historians, but the second part, that Gordon was homosexual, is still the subject of much debate.[257] In his Mission to Khartum – The Apotheosis of General Gordon (1969), John Marlowe portrays Gordon as "a colourful eccentric—a soldier of fortune, a skilled guerrilla leader, a religious crank, a minor philanthropist, a gadfly buzzing about on the outskirts of public life", who would have been no more than a footnote in today's history books, had it not been for "his mission to Khartoum and the manner of his death", which were elevated by the media "into a kind of contemporary Passion Play".[258]

More balanced biographies are Charley Gordon: An Eminent Victorian Reassessed (1978) by Charles Chenevix Trench and Gordon: The Man Behind the Legend (1993) by John Pollock. Mark Urban argued that Gordon's final stand was "significant" because it was "a perversion of the democratic process" as he "managed to subvert government policy", making the beginning of a new era where decision-makers had to consider the power of media.[259] In Khartoum – The Ultimate Imperial Adventure (2005), Michael Asher puts Gordon's works in the Sudan in a broad context. Asher concludes: "He did not save the country from invasion or disaster, but among the British heroes of all ages, there is perhaps no other who stands out so prominently as an individualist, a man ready to die for his principles. Here was one man among men who did not do what he was told, but what he believed to be right. In a world moving inexorably towards conformity, it would be well to remember Gordon of Khartoum."[260]

Gordon also left a legacy in China and Sudan as well, two nations where he spent large parts of his career. His legacy in China has been influenced by subsequent political developments, as the Qing dynasty was overthrown in the Xinhai Revolution and replaced by a republic. This eventually led to the Warlord Era and the Chinese Civil War which saw the communists defeat the nationalists and establish control over China. Due to many aspects of the Taiping ideology resembling Chinese communism, the Taipings are treated sympathetically by Chinese historians who portray them as prototypical communists, with Hong Xiuquan foreshadowing Mao. As such, Gordon's role in suppressing the rebellion has caused his reputation to suffer in China, in addition to his role as a general in service of the Manchu-dominated Qing government, which systematically oppressed the Han Chinese majority.[39]

No monuments to Gordon exist in China today, though the British journalist Rob Stallard noted that the modest Gordon would have no doubt wanted it that way.[39] In a 2008 article, Stallard argued that Chinese historiography has largely neglected Gordon, which Stallard felt was undeserved. In the article, Stallard pointed to the egalitarianistic attitudes displayed by Gordon towards the Chinese, and argued that if Chinese historians paid closer attention to the activities of Gordon in China, it would improve Anglo-Chinese relations.[39] In Sudan, Sudanese historians have traditionally focused on the Mahdi and his rebellion, with Gordon only being relevant as the enemy general during the Siege of Khartoum, and his abolitionist work largely ignored.[176]

In 1982, a documentary on Gordon's life was written and presented by the actor and historian Robert Hardy, entitled "Gordon of Khartoum".[261]

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Sources edit

  • Allen, Bernard M. (October 1941). "How Khartoum Fell". Journal of the Royal African Society. 40 (161): 327–334. JSTOR 717439.
  • Asher, Michael (2005). Khartoum: The Ultimate Imperial Adventure. Penguin. ISBN 978-0-14-025855-4.
  • Barnes, Reginald (1885). Charles George Gordon – A Sketch. London: Macmillan & Co.
  • Barnhart, David (2007). Living in the Signs of the Times. Maitland, Xulon Press. ISBN 978-1-60477-052-0.
  • Behrman, Cynthia (1971). "The After-Life of General Gordon". Albion. 3 (2): 47–61. doi:10.2307/4048413. JSTOR 4048413.
  • Beresford, John (1936). Storm and Peace. London: Cobden-Sanderson.
  • Butler, Daniel Allen (2007). First Jihad: Khartoum, and the Dawn of Militant Islam. Casemate. ISBN 978-1-932033-54-0.
  • Chenevix Trench, Charles (1978). Charley Gordon: An Eminent Victorian Reassessed. London: Allen Lane. ISBN 0-7139-0895-5.
  • Cleveland, William; Bunton, Martin (2009). A History of the Middle East. Boulder: Westview Press. ISBN 978-0-8133-4833-9.
  • Cuhaj, George S., ed. (2009). Standard Catalog of World Paper Money Specialized Issues (11 ed.). Krause. ISBN 978-1-4402-0450-0.
  • Ellens, J. Harold (2013), Winning Revolutions: The Psychosocial Dynamics of Revolts for Freedom, Fairness, and Rights, ABC-CLIO, ISBN 978-1-4408-0373-4
  • Ewans, Martin (2002). European Atrocity, African Catastrophe: Leopold II, the Congo Free State and its Aftermath. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-7007-1589-3.
  • Farwall, Bryon (1985). Eminent Victorian Soldiers: Seekers of Glory. W.W. Norton, New York. ISBN 0-393-30533-3.
  • Faught, C. Brad (2008). Gordon Victorian Hero. Dulles, Potomac. ISBN 978-1-59797-145-4.
  • Flint, John (1978). The Cambridge History of Africa. Vol. 5. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-20701-0.
  • Galbraith, John (June 1971). "Gordon, Mackinnon, and Leopold: The Scramble for Africa, 1876–84". Victorian Studies. Vol. 14, no. 4. pp. 369–388. JSTOR 3825957.
  • Goldschmidt, Arthur; Davidson, Lawrence (2006). A Concise History of the Middle East. Boulder: Westview Press. ISBN 978-0-8133-4275-7.
  • Grant, James (1885). Cassell's history of the war in the Soudan. Cassell.
  • Hsu, Immanuel (May 1964). "Gordon in China, 1880". Pacific Historical Review. Vol. 33, no. 2. pp. 147–166. JSTOR 3636593.
  • Karsh, Efraim; Karsh, Inari (1999). Empires of the Sand: The Struggle for Mastery in the Middle East, 1789–1923. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-00541-9.
  • Jones, M. (2014). "'National Hero and Very Queer Fish': Empire, Sexuality and the British Remembrance of General Gordon, 1918–72". Twentieth Century British History. 26 (2): 175–202. doi:10.1093/tcbh/hwu050. ISSN 0955-2359. PMID 26411064.
  • Latimer, E.W. (1895). "Gordon and the Mahdi". Europe in Africa in the Nineteenth Century (PDF) (4th ed.). Chicago: A.C. McClurg.
  • Liben, Paul H. (August 1995). "Murder in the Sudan". First Things. Retrieved 4 September 2018.
  • MacGregor-Hastie, Roy (1985). Never to be Taken Alive – A Biography of General Gordon. Sidgwick & Jackson. ISBN 0-283-99184-4.
  • Marlowe, John (1968). Mission to Khartum: Apotheosis of General Gordon. Littlehampton. ISBN 978-0-575-00247-0.
  • Messenger, Charles (2001). Reader's Guide to Military History. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-57958-241-8.
  • Monick, S. (December 1985). "The Political Martyr: General Gordon and the Fall of Kartum". Military History Journal. South African Military History Society. 6 (6). Retrieved 4 September 2018.
  • Moorehead, Alan (1960). The White Nile. London: Hamish Hamilton.
  • Moore‐Harell, Alice (1998). "Slave trade in the Sudan in the nineteenth century and its suppression in the years 1877–80". Middle Eastern Studies. 34 (2): 113–128. doi:10.1080/00263209808701225. ISSN 0026-3206.
  • Neufeld, Charles (1899). A Prisoner of the Khaleefa. London: Chapman & Hall.
  • Nutting, Anthony (1967). Gordon: Martyr and Misfit. Reprint Society.
  • Pakenham, T. (1991). The Scramble for Africa 1876–1912. Random House. ISBN 978-0-349-10449-2.
  • Perry, James (2005). Arrogant Armies: Great Military Disasters and the Generals Behind Them. Edison: Castle Books. ISBN 978-0-7858-2023-9.
  • Platt, Stephen R. (2012). Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War. Knopf. ISBN 978-0-307-95759-7.
  • Pollock, John (1993). Gordon: The Man Behind the Legend. London: Constable. ISBN 0-09-468560-6.
  • Slatin, R. (1922). Fire and Sword in the Sudan. London: Edward Arnold.
  • Sparrow, Gerald (1962). Gordon: Mandarin and Pasha. London: Jarrolds.
  • Strachey, Lytton (1988) [1918]. Eminent Victorians (Illustrated ed.). London: Bloomsbury. ISBN 0-7475-0218-8.
  • Tappe, Eric (June 1957). "General Gordon in Rumania". The Slavonic and East European Review. Vol. 35, no. 85. pp. 566–572. JSTOR 4204859.
  • Taylor, Miles (2007). Southampton: Gateway to the British Empire. I.B. Tauris. ISBN 978-1-84511-032-1.
  • Urban, Mark (2005). Generals: Ten British Commanders Who Shaped The Modern World. London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 978-0-571-22487-6.
  • Warburg, Gabriel (2013). Sudan Under Wingate: Administration in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (1899–1916). Routledge. ISBN 978-1-135-15725-8.

Further reading edit

  • Elton, Godfrey, Lord (1954). General Gordon. London: Collins.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  • Gillmeister, Heiner (1996). "The Maloja Mystery, or the Case of the Living Pictures". ACD–The Journal of the Arthur Conan Doyle Society. 7: 53–69.
  • Hill, George Birkbeck (1881). Colonel Gordon in Central Africa, 1874–1879. London: Thomas De La Rue and Co.
  • Smith, George Barnett (1896). General Gordon The Christian Soldier and Hero. London: S.W. Partridge & Co.
  • Vetch, Robert Hamilton, ed. (1900). Gordon's Campaigns in China by Himself: with an Introduction and Short Account of the Tai-Ping Rebellion by Colonel R. H. Vetch C.B. London: Chapman and Hall.
  • White, Adam (1991). Hamo Thornycroft & the Martyr General. Leeds: The Henry Moore Centre for the Study of Sculpture. ISBN 978-0-901981-47-9.
  • Wortham, Hugh Evelyn (1933). Gordon : An Intimate Portrait. London: Harrap. (Published as Chinese Gordon in USA by Little, Brown, and Co.)

External links edit

  • Chinese Gordon on the Soudan, Gordon's famous interview to the Pall Mall Gazette, 1884
  • analysis of Gordon's war strategy by Gary Brecher
  • The Journals of Major-Gen. C. G. Gordon, C.B., at Kartoum Project Gutenberg
  • Newspaper clippings about Charles George Gordon in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW
  • Material on Major-General Charles Gordon held at Churchill Archives Centre
Government offices
Preceded by Interim Governor-General of the Sudan
1880–1885
Succeeded by
Mahdist State

charles, george, gordon, major, general, january, 1833, january, 1885, also, known, chinese, gordon, gordon, pasha, gordon, khartoum, british, army, officer, administrator, action, crimean, officer, british, army, however, made, military, reputation, china, wh. Major General Charles George Gordon CB 28 January 1833 26 January 1885 also known as Chinese Gordon Gordon Pasha and Gordon of Khartoum was a British Army officer and administrator He saw action in the Crimean War as an officer in the British Army However he made his military reputation in China where he was placed in command of the Ever Victorious Army a force of Chinese soldiers led by European officers which was instrumental in putting down the Taiping Rebellion regularly defeating much larger forces For these accomplishments he was given the nickname Chinese Gordon and honours from both the Emperor of China and the British Charles George GordonGordon between 1878 and 1885Nickname s Chinese Gordon Gordon Pasha Gordon of KhartoumBorn28 January 1833Woolwich Kent EnglandDied26 January 1885 1885 01 26 aged 51 Khartoum Mahdist SudanAllegianceUnited KingdomService wbr branchBritish ArmyEver Victorious ArmyYears of service1852 1885RankMajor GeneralCommands heldEver Victorious ArmyGovernor General of the SudanBattles warsCrimean War Siege of Sevastopol Battle of Kinburn Second Opium War Taiping Rebellion Battle of Cixi Battle of Changzhou Mahdist War Siege of Khartoum AwardsCompanion of the Order of the Bath United Kingdom Order of the Osmanieh Fourth Class Ottoman Empire Order of the Medjidie Fourth Class Ottoman Empire Chevalier of the Legion of Honour France Order of the Double Dragon China Imperial yellow jacket China SignatureHe entered the service of the Khedive of Egypt in 1873 with British government approval and later became the Governor General of the Sudan where he did much to suppress revolts and the local slave trade He then resigned and returned to Europe in 1880 A serious revolt then broke out in the Sudan led by a Muslim religious leader and self proclaimed Mahdi Muhammad Ahmad In early 1884 Gordon was sent to Khartoum with instructions to secure the evacuation of loyal soldiers and civilians and to depart with them In defiance of those instructions after evacuating about 2 500 civilians he retained a smaller group of soldiers and non military men In the months before the fall of Khartoum Gordon and the Mahdi corresponded Gordon offered him the sultanate of Kordofan and the Mahdi requested Gordon to convert to Islam and join him which Gordon declined Besieged by the Mahdi s forces Gordon organised a citywide defence that lasted for almost a year and gained him the admiration of the British public but not of the government which had wished him not to become entrenched there Only when public pressure to act had become irresistible did the government with reluctance send a relief force It arrived two days after the city had fallen and Gordon had been killed Contents 1 Early life 2 From Crimea to the Danube 3 China 3 1 Arrival in China 3 2 Command of the Ever Victorious Army 3 3 Capture of Kunshan 3 4 Capture of Yesing Liyang and Kitang 4 Service with the Khedive 4 1 From the Danube to the Nile 4 2 Equatoria Building Egypt s empire in the Great Lakes region 5 Governor General of the Sudan 6 Other offers 7 Mahdist uprising 7 1 Mission to Khartoum 7 2 Preparing the defence of Khartoum 7 3 The siege of Khartoum 7 4 On the brink 7 5 The capture of Khartoum 8 Death 9 Personal life 9 1 Personal beliefs 9 2 Personality 9 3 Sexuality 9 4 Charity work 10 Memorials 11 Media portrayals and legacy 12 References 13 Sources 14 Further reading 15 External linksEarly life editGordon was born in Woolwich Kent a son of Major General Henry William Gordon 1786 1865 and Elizabeth 1792 1873 daughter of Samuel Enderby Junior The men of the Gordon family had served as officers in the British Army for four generations and as a son of a general Gordon was raised to be the fifth generation the possibility that Gordon would pursue anything other than a military career seems never to have been considered by his parents 1 All of Gordon s brothers also became Army officers 1 Gordon grew up in England Ireland Scotland and the Ionian Islands which were under British rule until 1864 as his father was moved from post to post 2 He was educated at Fullands School in Taunton Taunton School and the Royal Military Academy Woolwich 3 In 1843 Gordon was devastated when his favourite sibling his sister Emily died of tuberculosis writing years later humanly speaking it changed my life it was never the same since 4 After her death her place as Gordon s favourite sibling was taken by his very religious older sister Augusta who nudged her brother towards religion 5 As a teenager and an army officer cadet Gordon was known for his high spirits a combative streak and tendency to disregard authority and the rules if he felt them to be stupid or unjust a personality trait that held back his graduation by two years when teachers decided to punish him for flouting the rules 6 As a cadet Gordon displayed exceptional talents at map making and in designing fortifications which led to his career choice of the Royal Engineers or sappers in the Army 7 He was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Royal Engineers on 23 June 1852 8 completing his training at Chatham and he was promoted to full lieutenant on 17 February 1854 9 The sappers were an elite corps who performed reconnaissance work led storming parties demolished obstacles in assaults and undertook rear guard actions in retreats and other hazardous tasks 10 As an officer Gordon showed strong charisma and leadership but his superiors distrusted him on account of his tendency to disobey orders if he felt them to be wrong or unjust 7 A man of medium stature with striking blue eyes the charismatic Gordon had the ability to inspire men to follow him anywhere 11 Gordon was first assigned to construct fortifications at Milford Haven Pembrokeshire Wales During his time in Milford Haven Gordon was befriended by a young couple Francis and Anne Drew who introduced him to evangelical Protestantism 12 Gordon was especially impressed with Philippians 1 21 where St Paul wrote For to me to live is Christ and to die is gain a passage he underlined in his Bible and often quoted 12 He attended diverse congregations including Roman Catholic Baptist Presbyterian and Methodist Gordon who once said to a Roman Catholic priest that the church is like the British Army one army but many regiments never aligned himself with or became a member of any church 13 From Crimea to the Danube editWhen the Crimean War began Gordon was assigned to his boyhood home of Corfu but after several letters to the War Office he was sent to Crimea instead 14 He was sent to the Russian Empire arriving at Balaklava in January 1855 He first displayed his death wish as he wrote at the time that he had gone to the Crimea hoping without having a hand in it to be killed 15 In the 19th century Russia was Britain s archenemy with many people in both nations seeing an ideological conflict between Russian autocracy and British democracy and Gordon was anxious to fight in the Crimea 15 He was put to work in the Siege of Sevastopol and took part in the assault of the Redan from 18 June to 8 September As a sapper Gordon had to map out the Russian fortifications at the city fortress of Sevastopol designed by the famous Russian military engineer Eduard Totleben It was a highly dangerous job that frequently put him under enemy fire and led to him being wounded for the first time when a Russian sniper put a bullet into him 16 Gordon spent much time in the Quarries as the British called their section of the trenches facing Sevastopol 16 During his time in Crimea Gordon made friendships that were to last for the rest of his life most notably with Romolo Gessi Garnet Wolseley and Gerald Graham all of whom would cross paths with Gordon several times in the future 16 On 18 June 1855 the besieging British and French armies began what was intended to be the final assault that would take Sevastopol which began with a huge bombardment As a sapper Gordon was in a front line trench where he was under intense fire men fell all around him and he was forced to take cover so often that he was covered literally from head to toe with mud and blood 17 Despite the best efforts of the Allies the French failed to take the Malakhov fortress while the British failed to take the Redan fortress on 18 June 17 The casualties on the Allied side were quite high that day 17 Gordon spent thirty four consecutive days in the trenches around Sevastopol and earned a reputation as an able and brave young officer 18 It was said at the British HQ that If you want to know what the Russians are up to send for Charlie Gordon 18 Gordon took part in the expedition to Kinburn and returned to Sevastopol at the war s end During the Crimean war Gordon picked up an addiction to Turkish cigarettes which was to last for his rest of his life and many commented that smoking was Gordon s most conspicuous vice as he always seemed to have a cigarette at his lips 19 For his services in Crimea he received the Crimean war medal and clasp 3 For the same services he was appointed a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour by the Government of France on 16 July 1856 20 nbsp Gordon from a photograph taken shortly after the Crimea Following the peace he was attached to an international commission to mark the new border between the Russian Empire and the Ottoman Empire in Bessarabia When Gordon first arrived in the city of Galatz modern Galați Romania in the Ottoman protectorate of Moldavia he called the city very dusty and not desirable at all as a place of residence 21 As he travelled to Bessarabia he commented in his letters home about the richness and fertility of the Romanian countryside which produced delicious fruits and vegetables in great abundance and the poverty of the Romanian peasants 22 After a visit to Jassy modern Iași Gordon wrote The boyers live most of their lives in Paris and society is quite French The prince keeps a great state and I was introduced to him with much ceremony The English uniform produces an immediate sensation 23 Gordon did not speak Romanian but his fluency in French allowed him to socialise with the Francophile Romanian elite who were all fluent in French 24 As the maps that delineated the Russian Ottoman frontier were all old and inaccurate Gordon spent much time clashing with his Russian counterparts about where precisely the frontier was and soon discovered that the Russians were very keen to have the frontier on the Danube which Gordon had orders from London to prevent 24 Gordon called the Romanians the most fickle and intriguing people on the earth They ape the French in everything and are full of ceremony dress etc The employees sent by the Moldovan government to take over the ceded territory have been receiving bribes and trafficking in the most disgraceful manner 25 Afterwards Gordon was sent to delineate the frontier between Ottoman Armenia and Russian Armenia the highlight of which was tobogganing down Mount Ararat 26 Gordon continued surveying marking off the boundary into Asia Minor During his time in Anatolia Gordon embraced the new technology of the camera to take what the Canadian historian C Brad Faught called a series of evocative photographs of the people and landscape of Armenia 26 Throughout his life Gordon was always a keen amateur photographer and was elected a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society to honour him for his Armenian photographs 27 Gordon returned to Britain in late 1858 and was appointed as an instructor at Chatham He was promoted to captain on 1 April 1859 28 China editArrival in China edit nbsp Charles Gordon as a tidu Captain General Gordon was bored with garrison duty in Chatham and often wrote to the War Office begging them to send him anywhere in the world where British arms were seeing action 29 In 1860 Gordon volunteered to serve in China in the Second Opium War 30 When Gordon arrived at Hong Kong he was disappointed to learn he was just too late for the fighting 31 Gordon had heard of the Taiping Rebellion long before he had set sail for China and he was at first sympathetic towards the Taipings led by Hong Xiuquan who proclaimed himself to be the younger brother of Jesus Christ viewing them as somewhat eccentric Christians 31 After stopping in Shanghai Gordon visited the Chinese countryside and was appalled at the atrocities committed by the Taipings against the local peasants writing to his family he would love to smash this cruel army with its desolating presence that killed without mercy 31 He arrived at Tianjin in September 1860 He was present during the capture of Peking and at the destruction of the Summer Palace Gordon agreed with Lord Elgin that after the Chinese authorities had murdered a group of British and French officers travelling under a white flag to parley that a reprisal was in order but called the burning of the Summer Palace vandal like and informed his sister in a letter that it made one s heart sore to burn it 32 The Anglo French force remained in northern China until April 1862 then under General Charles William Dunbar Staveley withdrew to Shanghai to protect the European settlement from the rebel Taiping army 33 Following the successes in the 1850s in the provinces of Guangxi Hunan and Hubei and the capture of Nanjing in 1853 the rebel advance had slowed For some years the Taipings gradually advanced eastwards but eventually they came close enough to Shanghai to alarm the European inhabitants A militia of Europeans and Asians was raised for the defence of the city and placed under the command of an American Frederick Townsend Ward and occupied the country to the west of Shanghai 34 The British arrived at a crucial time Staveley decided to clear the rebels within 30 miles 48 km of Shanghai in co operation with Ward and a small French force 34 Gordon was attached to his staff as engineer officer Jiading northwest suburb of present Shanghai Qingpu and other towns were occupied and the area was fairly cleared of rebels by the end of 1862 34 nbsp A scene of the Taiping Rebellion Estimates of the war dead from the Taiping Rebellion range from 20 to 70 million to as high as 100 million 35 Ward was killed in the Battle of Cixi and his successor H A Burgevine an American was disliked by the Imperial Chinese authorities 36 Burgevine was an unsavory character known for his greed and alcoholism 37 Moreover Burgevine made little effort to hide his racism and his relations with the Chinese were very difficult at the best of times 37 Li Hongzhang the governor of the Jiangsu province requested Staveley to appoint a British officer to command the contingent Staveley selected Gordon who had been made a brevet major in December 1862 and the nomination was approved by the British government 36 Given Burgevine s alcoholism open corruption and tendency to engage in acts of mindless violence when drunk the Chinese wanted a man of good temper of clean hands and a steady economist as his replacement 38 These requirements led Staveley to choose Gordon 38 Li was impressed with Gordon writing It is a direct blessing from Heaven the coming of this British Gordon He is superior in manner and bearing to any of the foreigners whom I have come into contact with and does not show outwardly that conceit which makes most of them repugnant in my sight What an elixir for a heavy heart to see this splendid Englishman fight If there is anything that I admire nearly as much as the superb scholarship of Zeng Guofan it is the military qualities of this fine officer He is a glorious fellow With his many faults his pride his temper and his never ending demand for money but he is a noble man and in spite of all I have said to him or about him I will ever think most highly of him He is an honest man but difficult to get on with 39 Gordon was honest and incorruptible and unlike many Chinese officers did not steal the money that was meant to pay his men but rather insisted on paying the Ever Victorious Army on time and in full 39 Gordon s insistence on paying his men meant that he was always pressing the Imperial government for money something which often irritated the mandarins who did not understand why Gordon did not just let his men loot and plunder as a compensation for wages 39 Gordon designed the uniform for the Ever Victorious Army which consisted of black boots together with turbans jackets and trousers that were all green while his personal bodyguard of 300 men wore blue uniforms 40 Command of the Ever Victorious Army edit In March 1863 Gordon took command of the force at Songjiang which had received the name of Ever Victorious Army 36 Without waiting to reorganise his troops Gordon led them at once to the relief of Changsu a town 40 miles northwest of Shanghai The relief was successfully accomplished and Gordon quickly won the respect of his troops Gordon made a point of treating POWs well to encourage the Taipings to surrender and many of his men were former Taipings who chose to enlist in the Ever Victorious Army 38 Unlike Ward and Burgevine Gordon realised that the network of canals and rivers that divided the Chinese countryside were not obstacles blocking an advance but were rather arteries for allowing an advance as Gordon decided to move his men and supplies via the waterways 41 Gordon s task was made easier by innovative military ideas Ward had implemented in the Ever Victorious Army Gordon was quite critical of the way Chinese generals fought the war observing that the Chinese were willing to inflict and accept gargantuan losses in battle an approach Gordon disapproved of 42 Gordon wrote The great thing is to cut off their retreat and the chances are they will go without trouble but attack them in the front and leave their rear open and they fight most desperately 42 Gordon always preferred to outflank the Taiping lines rather than to take them on frontally an approach that caused much tension with his counterparts in the Chinese Imperial Army who did not share Gordon s horror at the huge numbers of casualties caused by frontal assaults 42 On the morning of 30 May 1863 the Taiping forces guarding the town of Quinsan were astonished to see an armoured paddle steamer the Hyson armed with a 32 pounder cannon on the bow sailing up a canal at whose prow stood Gordon Following the Hyson was a fleet of 80 junks converted to gunboats 43 Aboard the Hyson were 350 men from the elite 4th Regiment of the Ever Victorious Army 42 Under fire from the Taiping forces Gordon s men chopped up the wooden stakes the Taipings had placed in the canal thereby allowing Gordon to outflank the main Taiping defence line and to enter the main canal connecting Quinsan to Suzhou 42 Gordon s breakthrough caught the rebel army off guard and caused thousands of the enemy to panic and flee 42 Gordon disembarked the 4th Regiment with orders to take Quinsan while he sailed up and down the main canal in the Hyson using the 32 pounder gun to blast apart the Taiping positions on the canal 42 At times Gordon feared that assaults by the Taiping would take the Hyson but all the attacks were repulsed 44 The next day Quinsan fell to the 4th Regiment which led a proud Gordon to write The rebels did not know its importance until they lost it 45 In its last years the Taiping movement had oppressed the Chinese peasantry and as the Taipings retreated in the face of fire from the Hyson Chinese peasants emerged from their homes to cut down and hack to death the fleeing Taipings 45 After the battle Gordon was hailed as a liberator from the Taipings by the ordinary Chinese people 45 One British officer serving with the Ever Victorious Army described Gordon at this time as a light built wiry middle sized man of about thirty two years of age in the undress uniform of the Royal Engineers The countenance bore a pleasant frank appearance eyes light blue with a fearless look in them hair crisp and inclined to curl conversation short and decided 46 The Ever Victorious Army was entirely a mercenary force whose only loyalty was to money and whose men were interested in fighting only in order to gain the chance to plunder 46 Gordon felt very uncomfortable commanding this force and at one point had to order the summary execution of one of his officers when the latter tried to take the Ever Victorious Army over to the Taipings who had offered a generous bribe for switching sides 46 Gordon had to impose strict discipline on the Ever Victorious Army and worked hard to prevent the Army from engaging in its tendency to loot and mistreat civilians 39 Gordon also had the pleasure of defeating Burgevine whom Gordon detested who had raised a mercenary force and joined the Taipings 47 After Gordon had surrounded Burgevine s force outside of Suzhou the latter had abandoned his own men and attempted to rejoin the Imperial side leading Gordon to arrest him and send him to the American consul in Shanghai together with a letter asking that Burgevine be expelled from China 48 As Gordon travelled up and down the Yangtze River valley he was appalled by the scenes of poverty and suffering he saw writing in a letter to his sister The horrible furtive looks of the wretched inhabitants hovering around one s boats haunts me and the knowledge of their want of nourishment would sicken anyone they are like wolves The dead lie where they fall and are in some cases trodden quite flat by passers by 46 The suffering of the Chinese people strengthened Gordon s faith as he argued that there had to be a just loving God who would one day redeem humanity from all this wretchedness and misery 39 During his time in China Gordon was well known and respected by friend and foe alike for leading from the front and going into combat armed only with his rattan cane Gordon always refused to carry a gun or a sword a choice of weapon that almost cost him his life several times 39 Gordon s bravery in battle his string of victories apparent immunity to bullets and his intense blazing blue eyes led many Chinese to believe that Gordon had supernatural powers and had harnessed the Qi the mystical life force traditionally believed in China to govern everything in some extraordinary way 42 Capture of Kunshan edit Gordon then reorganised his force and advanced against Kunshan which was captured at considerable loss Gordon then took his force through the country seizing towns until with the aid of Imperial troops capturing the city of Suzhou in November 36 After its surrender Gordon personally guaranteed that any Taiping rebel who laid down his arms would be humanely treated 49 The Ever Victorious Army which was inclined to looting had been ordered not to enter Suzhou and only Imperial forces entered the city 46 Gordon was thus powerless when the Imperial forces executed all of the Taiping POWs an act that enraged him 50 A furious Gordon wrote that executing POWs was stupid writing if faith had been kept there would have been no more fighting as every town would have given in 50 In China the penalty for rebellion was death Under the Chinese system of familial responsibility all family members of a rebel were equally guilty even if they had nothing to do with the rebellious individual s acts The mandarins were thus much inclined to execute not only Taipings but also their spouses children parents and siblings as being all equally guilty of treason 50 Gordon believed this approach was militarily counterproductive as it encouraged the Taipings to fight to the death which Gordon felt to be very unwise as the Taiping leader Hong Xiuquan had become murderously paranoid conducting bloody purges of his followers Many Taipings were willing to surrender only if the Imperial government would spare their lives and those of their families Even more importantly Gordon had given his word of honour that all of the Taipings who surrendered would be well treated and regarded the massacre as a stain on his honour 50 On 1 January 1864 Gordon was informed that a messenger from the Tongzhi Emperor was coming to see him and that he should put on his finest uniform 50 When the Emperor s messenger arrived he had with him servants carrying boxes of silver taels coins numbering 10 000 in total together with banners written in the most eloquent calligraphy celebrating Gordon as a great general and a letter from the Emperor himself written in the best calligraphy on yellow silk thanking Gordon for taking Suzhou and offering all these presents as rewards 50 Gordon refused all these gifts and wrote on the Emperor s silk message Major Gordon receives the approbation of His Majesty the Emperor with every gratification but regrets most sincerely that owing to the circumstances which occurred since the capture of Soochow he is unable to receive any mark of His Majesty the Emperor s recognition 50 The Emperor was much offended when he received Gordon s message at the Forbidden City and Gordon s military career in China was effectively over for a time 50 A Scotsman who knew Gordon in China wrote he shows the Chinese that if even an able and reliable man such as he is is unmanageable 50 Following a dispute with Li over the execution of rebel leaders Gordon withdrew his force from Suzhou and remained inactive at Kunshan until February 1864 36 Gordon then made a rapprochement with Li and visited him in order to arrange for further operations The Ever Victorious Army resumed its high tempo advance leading to the Battle of Changzhou and culminating in the capture of Changzhou Fu the principal military base of the Taipings in the region Gordon wrote in his diary The HOUR GLASS BROKEN and predicted that the war would soon be won 51 The Ever Victorious Army did not take part in the final offensive that ended the war with the Capture of Nanking as the Imps as Gordon called the Imperial Army wanted the honour of taking Nanking the Taiping capital for themselves 51 Capture of Yesing Liyang and Kitang edit Instead the Ever Victorious Army was given the task of taking the secondary cities of Yesing Liyang and Kitang 51 At Kitang Gordon was wounded for the second time on 21 March 1864 when a Taiping soldier shot him in the thigh The wound was only slight and Gordon was soon back in action fighting his last battle at Chang chou in May 1864 51 Gordon then returned to Kunshan and disbanded his army in June 1864 50 During his time with the Ever Victorious Army Gordon had won thirty three battles in succession 50 Gordon wrote a letter home that his losses were no joke as 48 of his 100 officers and about 1 000 of 3 500 soldiers had been killed or wounded in action 52 The Emperor promoted Gordon to the rank of tidu 提督 Chief commander of Jiangsu province a title equal to field marshal decorated him with the imperial yellow jacket and raised him to Qing s Viscount first class but Gordon declined an additional gift of 10 000 taels of silver from the imperial treasury 53 54 Only forty men were allowed to wear the Yellow Jacket which was the Emperor s ceremonial bodyguard and it was thus a signal honour for Gordon to be allowed to wear it 55 The British Army promoted Gordon to lieutenant colonel on 16 February 1864 56 and he was appointed a Companion of the Order of the Bath on 9 December 1864 57 The traders of Shanghai offered Gordon huge sums of money to thank him for his work commanding the Ever Victorious Army Gordon declined all honours of financial gain writing I know I shall leave China as poor as I entered it but with the knowledge that through my weak instrumentality upwards of eighty to one hundred thousand lives have been spared I want no further satisfaction than this 55 The British journalist Mark Urban wrote People saw a brave man who acted with humanity in an otherwise ghastly conflict standing out from the other mercenaries adventurers and cut throats in wanting almost nothing for himself 55 In a leader in August 1864 The Times wrote about Gordon the part of the soldier of fortune is in these days very difficult to play with honour but if ever the actions of a soldier fighting in foreign service ought to be viewed with indulgence and even with admiration this exceptional tribute is due to Colonel Gordon 55 The savage Taiping Rebellion which was the bloodiest war of the entire 19th century taking somewhere between 20 and 30 million lives is largely forgotten in the West today but at the time the civil war in China attracted much media attention in the West and Gordon s command of the Ever Victorious Army received much coverage from British newspapers 55 Gordon also gained the popular nickname Chinese Gordon 55 Service with the Khedive editFrom the Danube to the Nile edit In October 1871 he was appointed British representative on the international commission to maintain the navigation of the mouth of the River Danube with headquarters at Galatz Gordon was bored with the work of the Danube commission and spent as much time as possible exploring the Romanian countryside whose beauty enchanted Gordon when he was not making visits to Bucharest to meet up with his old friend Romolo Gessi who was living there at the time 58 During his second trip to Romania Gordon insisted on living with ordinary people as he travelled over the countryside commenting that Romanian peasants live like animals with no fuel but reeds and spent one night at the home of a poor Jewish craftsman whom Gordon praised for his kindness in sharing the single bedroom with his host his wife and their seven children 59 Gordon seemed pleased by his simple lifestyle writing in a letter that One night I slept better than I have for a long time by a fire in a fisherman s hut 59 During a visit to Bulgaria Gordon and Gessi become involved in an incident when a Bulgarian couple told them that their 17 year old daughter had been abducted into the harem of an Ottoman pasha and asked them to free their daughter 60 Popular legend has it that Gordon and Gessi broke into the pasha s palace at night to rescue the girl but the truth is less dramatic 60 Gordon and Gessi demanded that Ahmed Pasha allow them to meet the girl alone had their request granted after much arm twisting and then met the girl who ultimately revealed she wanted to go home 61 Gordon and Gessi threatened to go to the British and Italian press if she was not released at once a threat that proved sufficient to win the girl her freedom 61 Gordon was promoted to colonel on 16 February 1872 62 In 1872 Gordon was sent to inspect the British military cemeteries in the Crimea and when passing through Constantinople he made the acquaintance of the Prime Minister of Egypt Raghib Pasha The Egyptian Prime Minister opened negotiations for Gordon to serve under the Ottoman Khedive Isma il Pasha who was popularly called Isma il the Magnificent on the account of his lavish spending In 1869 Isma il spent 2 million Egyptian pounds the equivalent to 300 million U S dollars in today s money just on the party to celebrate the opening of the Suez Canal in what was described as the party of the century 63 In 1873 Gordon received a definite offer from the Khedive which he accepted with the consent of the British government and proceeded to Egypt early in 1874 After meeting Gordon in 1874 the Khedive Isma il had said What an extraordinary Englishman He doesn t want money 64 The French educated Isma il Pasha greatly admired Europe as the model for excellence in everything being an especially passionate Italophile and Francophile saying at the beginning of his reign My country is no longer in Africa it is now in Europe 65 Isma il was a Muslim who loved Italian wine and French champagne and many of his more conservative subjects in Egypt and the Sudan felt alienated by a regime that was determined to Westernise the country with little regard for tradition 65 The languages of Khedive s court were Turkish and French not Arabic The Khedive s great dream was to make Egypt culturally a part of Europe and he spent huge sums of money attempting to modernise and Westernise Egypt in the process going very deeply into debt 66 At the beginning of his reign in 1863 Egypt s debt had been 3 million Egyptian pounds When Isma il s reign ended in 1879 Egypt s debt had risen to 93 million pounds 67 During the American Civil War when the Union blockade had cut off the American South from the world economy the price of Egyptian cotton known as white gold had skyrocketed as British textile mills turned to Egypt as an alternative source of cotton causing an economic blossoming of Egypt that ended abruptly in 1865 66 As the attempts of his grandfather Muhammad Ali the Great to depose the ruling Ottoman family in favour of his own family had failed due to the opposition of Russia and Britain the imperialistic Ismai il had turned his attention southwards and was determined to build an Egyptian empire in Africa planning on subjugating the Great Lakes region and the Horn of Africa 68 As part of his Westernisation programme Isma il often hired Westerners to work in his government both in Egypt and in the Sudan Ismai il s Chief of General Staff was the American general Charles Pomeroy Stone and other veterans of the American Civil War were commanding Egyptian troops 69 Urban wrote that most of the Westerners in Egyptian pay were misfits who took up Egyptian service because they were unable to get ahead in their own nations 70 Typical of the men that Khedive Isma il Pasha hired was Valentine Baker a British Army officer dishonorably discharged after being convicted of raping a young woman in England that he had been asked to chaperon After Baker s release from prison Isma il hired him to work in the Sudan 71 John Russell the son of the famous war correspondent William Howard Russell was another European recruited to serve on Gordon s staff 72 The younger Russell was described by his own father as an alcoholic and spendthrift who was beyond help as it was always the same story idleness self indulgence gambling and constant promises broken time after time leading his father to get him a job in the Sudan where his laziness infuriated Gordon to no end 72 Equatoria Building Egypt s empire in the Great Lakes region edit nbsp General Gordon in Egyptian uniform The Egyptian authorities had been extending their control southwards since the 1820s Right up to 1914 Egypt was officially a vilayet province of the Ottoman Empire but after Mohammed Ali become the vali governor of Egypt in 1805 Egypt was a de facto independent state where the authority of the Ottoman Sultan was more nominal than real An expedition was sent up the White Nile under Sir Samuel Baker which reached Khartoum in February 1870 and Gondokoro in June 1871 Baker met with great difficulties and managed little beyond establishing a few posts along the Nile 73 The Khedive asked for Gordon to succeed Baker as the governor of Equatoria province that comprised much of what is today South Sudan and northern Uganda 73 Isma il Pasha told Gordon that he wished to expand Equatoria into the rest of Uganda with the ultimate aim of absorbing the entire Great Lakes region of East Africa into the empire that Isma il wanted to build in Africa 74 Baker s annual salary as governor of Equatoria had been 10 000 Egyptian pounds about US 1 million in today s money and Ismail was astonished when Gordon refused that salary saying that 2 000 per year was more than enough for him 75 After a short stay in Cairo Gordon proceeded to Khartoum via Suakin and Berber In Khartoum Gordon attended a dinner with the Governor General Ismail Aiyub Pasha entertained with barely dressed belly dancers whom one of Gordon s officers drunkenly attempted to have sex with leading to a disgusted Gordon walking out saying he was shocked that Aiyub allowed these things to happen in his palace 76 Joining Gordon on the journey to Equatoria was his old friend Romolo Gessi and a former US Army officer Charles Chaille Long who did not get along well with Gordon 75 From Khartoum he proceeded up the White Nile to Gondokoro During his time in Sudan Gordon was much involved in attempting to suppress the slave trade while struggling against a corrupt and inefficient Egyptian bureaucracy that had no interest in suppressing the trade 77 Gordon soon learned that his superior the Governor General of the Sudan Ismail Aiyub Pasha was deeply involved in the slave trade and was doing everything within his power to sabotage Gordon s anti slavery work by denying him supplies and leaking information to the slavers 78 Gordon also clashed with Chaille Long whom he accused of working as an informant for Aiyub Pasha and called him to his face a regular failure 79 Chaille Long in return painted a very unflattering picture of Gordon in his 1884 book The Three Prophets whom he portrayed as a bully a raging alcoholic an incompetent leader and a rank coward 79 Faught argued that since no one else who knew Gordon in Equatoria described him in these terms and given that Gordon s accusation that Chaille Long was a spy for Aiyub Pasha seems to be justified that Chaille Long was engaging in character assassination as an act of revenge 79 Gordon despite his position as an official in the Ottoman Empire found the Ottoman Egyptian system of rule inherently oppressive and cruel coming into increasing conflict with the very system he was supposed to uphold later stating about his time in the Sudan I taught the natives they had a right to exist 64 In the Ottoman Empire power was exercised via a system of institutionalised corruption where officials looted their provinces via heavy taxes and by demanding kickbacks known as baksheesh some of the money went to Constantinople with the rest being pocketed by the officials 77 Gordon established a close rapport with the African peoples of Equatoria such as the Nuer and Dinka who had long suffered from the activity of Arab slave traders and who naturally supported Gordon s efforts to stamp out the slave trade 73 The peoples of Equatoria had traditionally worshipped spirits present in nature but were steadily being converted to Christianity by missionaries from Europe and the United States which further encouraged Gordon in his efforts as governor of Equatoria who notwithstanding his position working for the Egyptian government saw himself as doing God s work in Equatoria 73 Gordon was not impressed with the forces of the Egyptian state The soldiers of the Egyptian Army were fallaḥin peasant conscripts who were both ill paid and ill trained 73 The other force for law and order were the much feared bashi bazouks irregulars who were not paid a salary but were expected to support themselves by looting The bashi bazouks were extremely susceptible to corruption and were notorious for their brutality especially to non Muslims 70 Gordon remained in the Equatoria province until October 1876 He quickly learned that before he could establish stations to crush the slave trade he would have to first explore the area to find the best places for building them 80 A major problem for Gordon was malaria which decimated his men and led him to issue the following order Never let the mosquito curtain out of your sight it is more valuable than your revolver 80 The heat greatly affected Gordon as he wrote to his sister Augusta This is a horrid climate I seldom if ever get a good sleep 79 Gordon had succeeded in establishing a line of way stations from the Sobat confluence on the White Nile to the frontier of Uganda where he proposed to open a route from Mombasa In 1874 he built the station at Dufile on the Albert Nile to reassemble steamers carried there past rapids for the exploration of Lake Albert Gordon personally explored Lake Albert and the Victorian Nile pushing on through the thick humid jungle and steep ravines of Uganda amid heavy rains and vast hordes of insects in the summer of 1876 with an average daily temperature of 95 F 35 C down to Lake Kyoga 81 Gordon wrote in his diary It is terrible walking it is simply killing I am nearly dead 81 Besides acting as an administrator and explorer Gordon had to act as a diplomat dealing carefully with Muteesa I the Kabaka king of the Buganda who ruled most of what is today southern Uganda a man who did not welcome the Egyptian expansion into the Great Lakes region 82 Gordon s attempts to establish an Egyptian garrison in the Buganda had been stymied by the cunning Muteesa who forced the Egyptians to build their fort at his capital of Lubaga making the 140 or so Egyptian soldiers his virtual hostages 81 Gordon chose not to meet Muteesa himself instead sending his chief medical officer a German convert to Islam Dr Emin Pasha to negotiate a treaty wherein in exchange for allowing the Egyptians to leave the Buganda the independence of the kingdom was recognised 83 Moreover considerable progress was made in the suppression of the slave trade 84 Gordon wrote in a letter to his sister about the Africans living a life of fear and misery but in spite of the utter misery of Equatoria that I like this work 85 Gordon often personally intercepted slave convoys to arrest the slavers and break the chains of the slaves but he found that the corrupt Egyptian bureaucrats usually sold the freed Africans back into slavery and the expense of caring for thousands of freed slaves who were a long away from home burdensome 86 Gordon grew close to the British and Foreign Anti Slavery Society an evangelical Christian group based in London dedicated to ending slavery all over the world and who regularly celebrated Gordon s efforts to end slavery in the Sudan Urban wrote that Newspaper readers in Bolton or Beaminister had become enraged by stories about chained black children cruelly abducted being sold into slave markets and Gordon s anti slavery efforts contributed to his image as a saintly man 64 Gordon had come into conflict with the Egyptian governor of Khartoum and Sudan over his efforts to ban slavery The clash led to Gordon informing the Khedive that he did not wish to return to the Sudan and he left for London During his time in London he was approached by Sir William Mackinnon an enterprising Scottish ship owner who had gone into partnership with King Leopold II of the Belgians with the aim of creating a chartered company that would conquer central Africa and wished to employ Gordon as their agent in Africa 87 He accepted their offer believing in Leopold s and Mackinnon s assurances their plans were purely philanthropic and they had no interest in exploiting Africans for profit 88 but the Khedive Isma il Pasha wrote to him saying that he had promised to return and that he expected him to keep his word 89 Gordon agreed to return to Cairo and was asked to take the position of Governor General of the entire Sudan which he accepted He thereafter received the honorific rank and title of pasha in the Ottoman aristocracy 90 Governor General of the Sudan editBesides working to end slavery Gordon carried out a series of reforms such as abolishing torture and public floggings where those opposed to the Egyptian state were flogged with a whip known as the kourbash made of buffalo hide 91 The Europeans whom the Egyptians had hired to work as civil servants in the Sudan proved to be just as corrupt as the Egyptians 70 The bribes that the slave traders offered for bureaucrats to turn a blind eye to the slave trade had far more effect on the bureaucrats than did any of Gordon s orders to suppress the slave trade which were simply ignored 70 Licurgo Santoni an Italian hired by the Egyptian state to run the Sudanese post office wrote about Gordon s time as Governor General that as his exertions were not supported by his subordinates his efforts remained fruitless This man s activity with the scientific knowledge which he possesses is doubtless able to achieve much but unfortunately no one backs him up and his orders are badly carried out or altered in such a way as to render them without effect All the Europeans with some rare exceptions whom he has honoured with his confidence have cheated him 70 Relations between Egypt and Abyssinia later renamed Ethiopia had become strained due to a dispute over the district of Bogos and war broke out in 1875 An Egyptian expedition was completely defeated near Gundet A second and larger expedition under Prince Hassan was sent the following year and was routed at Gura Matters then remained quiet until March 1877 when Gordon proceeded to Massawa hoping to make peace with the Abyssinians He went up to Bogos and wrote to the king proposing terms He received no reply as the king had gone southwards to fight with the Shoa Gordon seeing that the Abyssinian difficulty could wait proceeded to Khartoum 92 In 1876 Egypt went bankrupt A group of European financial commissioners led by Evelyn Baring took charge of the Egyptian finances in an attempt to pay off the European banks who had lent so much money to Egypt With Egypt bankrupt the money to carry out the reforms Gordon wanted was not there 64 With over half of Egypt s income going to pay the 7 interest on the debt worth 81 million Egyptian pounds that Isma il had run up the khedive was supportive of Gordon s plans for reform but unable to do very much as he lacked the money to pay his civil servants and soldiers in Egypt much less in the Sudan 93 Gordon travelled north to Cairo to meet with Baring and suggest the solution that Egypt suspend its interest payments for several years to allow Isma il to pay the arrears owed to his soldiers and civil servants arguing that once the Egyptian government was stabilised then Egypt could start paying its debts without fear of causing a revolution 93 Faught wrote that Gordon s plans were farsighted and humane but Baring had no interest in Gordon s plans to suspend the interest payments 94 Gordon disliked Baring writing he had a pretentious grand patronizing way around him We had a few words together When oil mixes with water we will mix together 94 Gordon s attempts to end the slave trade but faced resistance most notably Rahama Zobeir known as the King of the Slavers as he was the richest and most powerful of all the slave traders in the Sudan An insurrection had broken out in Darfur province led by associates of Zobeir and Gordon went to deal with it On 2 September 1877 Gordon clad in the full gold braided ceremonial blue uniform of the Governor General of the Sudan and wearing the tarboush the type of fez reserved for a pasha accompanied by an interpreter and a few bashi bazouks rode unannounced into the enemy camp to discuss the situation 95 Gordon was met by Suleiman Zobeir the son of Rahama Zobeir and demanded in the name of the Khedive of Egypt that the rebels end their rebellion and accept the authority of their lord and master telling Zobeir that he would disarm and break them if the rebellion did not end at once 96 Gordon also promised that those rebels who laid down their arms would not be punished and would all be given jobs in the administration 73 One chief then pledged his loyalty to the Khedive including Suleiman Zobeir himself though the remainder retreated to the south 73 Gordon visited the provinces of Berber and Dongola and then returned to the Abyssinian frontier before ending up back in Khartoum in January 1878 Gordon was summoned to Cairo and arrived in March to be appointed president of a commission The Khedive Isma il was deposed in 1879 in favour of his son Tewfik by the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II following heavy diplomatic pressure from the British French and Italian governments after Isma il had quarrelled with Baring 97 Gordon returned south and proceeded to Harrar south of Abyssinia and finding the administration in poor standing dismissed the governor In 1878 Gordon fired the governor of Equatoria for corruption and replaced him with his former chief medical officer from his time in Equatoria Dr Emin Pasha who had earned Gordon s respect Gordon then returned to Khartoum and went again into Darfur to suppress the slave traders His subordinate Gessi Pasha fought with great success in the Bahr el Ghazal district in putting an end to the revolt there In July 1878 Suleiman Zobeir had rebelled again leading Gordon and his close friend Gessi to take to the field 98 In March 1879 Gessi had inflicted a sharp defeat on Zobeir even before Gordon had joined him to pursue their old enemy 98 After several months of chasing Zobeir Gessi and Gordon met at the village of Shaka in June 1879 when it was agreed that Gessi would continue the hunt while Gordon would return to Khartoum 99 On 15 July 1879 Gessi finally captured Suleiman Zobeir together with 250 of his men and executed them 100 Gordon then tried another peace mission to Abyssinia The matter ended with Gordon s imprisonment and transfer to Massawa He returned to Cairo and resigned his Sudan appointment He had gone to the Sudan with hope that he could reform the system 64 According to Urabn almost all of Gordon s reforms failed owing to the bureaucracy of the system which remained slow corrupt and oppressive 64 At the end of his Governor Generalship of the Sudan Gordon had to admit that he had been a failure an experience of defeat that so shattered him that he had a nervous breakdown As Gordon travelled via Egypt to take the steamer back to Britain a man who met him in Cairo described him as a broken man who was rather off his head 64 Before Gordon boarded the ship at Alexandria that was to take him home he sent off a series of long telegrams to various ministers in London full of Biblical verse and quotations that he said offered the solution to all of the problems of modern life 64 After Gordon resigned Muhammad Rauf Pasha succeeded him as governor general of Sudan 101 In March 1880 Gordon recovered for a couple of weeks in the Hotel du Faucon in Lausanne 3 Rue St Pierre famous for its views on Lake Geneva and because several celebrities had stayed there such as Giuseppe Garibaldi one of Gordon s heroes 102 and possibly one of the reasons Gordon had chosen this hotel In the hotel s restaurant now a pub called Happy Days he met another guest from Britain the reverend R H Barnes vicar of Heavitree near Exeter who became a good friend After Gordon s death Barnes co authored Charles George Gordon A Sketch 1885 103 which begins with the meeting at the hotel in Lausanne The Reverend Reginald Barnes who knew him well describes him as of the middle height very strongly built 104 Other offers editOn 2 March 1880 on his way from London to Switzerland Gordon had visited King Leopold II of Belgium in Brussels and was invited to take charge of the Congo Free State Leopold tried very hard to convince Gordon to enter his service not least because Gordon was known to be modest in his salary demands unlike Leopold s current agent in the Congo Henry Morton Stanley who received a monthly salary of 300 000 Belgian francs 105 Gordon rejected Leopold s offers partly because he was still emotionally attached to the Sudan and partly because he disliked the idea of working for Leopold s Congo Association which was a private company owned by the King 105 In April the government of the Cape Colony offered him the position of commandant of the Cape local forces which Gordon declined 106 A deeply depressed Gordon wrote in his letter declining the offer that he knew for reasons that he refused to explain that he had only ten years left to live and he wanted to do something great and grand in his last ten years 106 In May the Marquess of Ripon who had been given the post of Governor General of India asked Gordon to go with him as private secretary Gordon accepted the offer but shortly after arriving in India he resigned In the words of the American historian Immanuel C Y Hsu Gordon was a man of action unsuited to a bureaucratic job 107 Gordon found the life of a private secretary to be in his words a living crucifixion that was unbearably boring leading him to resign with the intention of going to East Africa particularly Zanzibar to suppress the slave trade 107 Hardly had Gordon resigned when he was invited to Beijing by Sir Robert Hart inspector general of customs in China saying his services were urgently needed in China as Russia and China were on the verge of war Gordon was nostalgic for China and knowing of the Sino Russian crisis he saw a chance to do something significant 108 The British diplomat Thomas Francis Wade reported The Chinese government still holds Gordon Pasha in high regard and were anxious to have him back to fight against Russia if war should break out 109 An exchange of telegrams ensued between the War Office in London and Gordon in Bombay about just what exactly he was planning on doing in China and when Gordon replied that he would find out when he got there he was ordered to stay 11 He disobeyed orders and left on the first ship to China an action that very much angered the Army s commander the Duke of Cambridge 110 Gordon arrived in Shanghai in July and met Li Hongzhang and learned that there was risk of war with Russia After meeting his old friend Gordon assured Li that if Russia should attack he would resign his commission in the British Army to take up a commission in the Chinese Army an action that if taken risked prosecution under the Foreign Enlistments Act 111 Gordon informed the Foreign Office that he was willing to renounce his British citizenship and take Chinese citizenship as he would not abandon Li and his other Chinese friends should a Sino Russian war begin Gordon s willingness to renounce his British citizenship in order to fight with China in the event of war did much to raise his prestige in China 112 Gordon went to Beijing and used all his influence to ensure peace He clashed repeatedly with Prince Chun the leader of the war party in Beijing who rejected Gordon s advice to seek a compromise solution as Gordon warned that the powerful Russian naval squadron in the Yellow Sea would allow the Russians to land at Tianjin and advance on Beijing 113 At one point during a meeting with the Council of Ministers an enraged Gordon picked up a Chinese English dictionary looked up the word idiocy and then pointed at the equivalent Chinese word 白痴 with one hand while pointing at the ministers with the other 113 Gordon further advised the Qing court that it was unwise for the Manchu elite to live apart from and treat the Han Chinese majority as something less than human warning that this not only weakened China in the present but would cause a revolution in the future 114 After speaking so bluntly Gordon was ordered out of the court in Beijing but was allowed to stay at Tianjin 115 After meeting with him there Hart described Gordon as very eccentric and spending hours in prayer writing that As much I like and respect him I must say he is not all there Whether religion or vanity or the softening of the brain I don t know but he seems to be alternatively arrogant and slavish vain and humble in his senses and out of them It s a great pity Wade echoed Hart writing that Gordon had changed since his last time in China and was now unbalanced being utterly convinced that all of his ideas came from God making him dangerously unreasonable since he now believed that everything he did was the will of God 115 Gordon was ordered home by London as the Foreign Office was not comfortable with the idea of him commanding the Chinese Army against Russia if war should break out believing that this would cause an Anglo Russian war and Gordon was told that he would be dishonourably discharged if he remained in China 116 Although the Qing court rejected Gordon s advice to seek a compromise with Russia in the summer of 1880 Gordon s assessment of China s military backwardness and his stark warnings that the Russians would win if a war did break out played an important role in ultimately strengthening the peace party at the court and preventing war 117 Gordon returned to Britain and rented a flat on 8 Victoria Grove in London In October 1880 he paid a two week visit to Ireland landing at Cork and travelling over much of the island Gordon was sickened by the poverty of the Irish farmers which led him to write a six page memo to the Prime Minister William Gladstone urging land reforms in Ireland 118 Gordon wrote The peasantry of the Northwest and Southwest of Ireland are much worse off than any of the inhabitants of Bulgaria Asia Minor China India or the Sudan 119 Having been to all of those places and thus speaking with some authority Gordon announced the scandal of poverty in Ireland could only be ended if the government were to buy the land from the Ascendency families as the Anglo Irish elite was known and give it to their poor Irish tenant farmers 119 Gordon compared his plans for rural reform in Ireland to the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833 and ended his letter with the assertion that if this were done the unity of the United Kingdom would be preserved as the Irish would appreciate this great act of justice and the Irish independence movement would cease to exist as they would have nothing more to seek from agitation 119 Besides championing land reform in Ireland Gordon spent the winter of 1880 81 in London socialising with his family and his few friends such as Florence Nightingale and Alfred Tennyson 119 nbsp Gordon caricatured by Ape in Vanity Fair in 1881 In April 1881 Gordon left for Mauritius as Commander Royal Engineers He remained in Mauritius until March 1882 The American historian John Semple Galbraith described Gordon as suffering from utter boredom during his time there 120 Gordon saw his work in building forts to protect Mauritius from a possible Russian naval attack as pointless and his main achievement during his time there was to advise the Crown to turn the Seychelles islands whose beauty had greatly moved Gordon into a new crown colony as Gordon argued it was impossible to govern the Seychelles from Port Louis 119 In a memo to London Gordon warned against over reliance on the Suez Canal where the Russians could easily sink one ship to block the entire canal thus leading Gordon to advise upon improving the Cape route to India with Britain developing a series of bases in Africa and in the Indian Ocean Gordon visited the Seychelles in the summer of 1881 and decided the islands were the location of the Garden of Eden 119 On the island of Praslin in the Valle de Mai Gordon believed that he found the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the form of a coco de mer tree which fruit bore a close resemblance to a woman s body 121 Gordon was promoted to major general on 23 March 1882 122 Being unemployed Gordon decided to go to Palestine which at the time was part of the Ottoman vilayet of Syria 123 a region he had long desired to visit where he would remain for a year 1882 83 During his career break in the Holy Land the very religious Gordon sought to explore his faith and biblical sites 124 In Jerusalem Gordon lived with an American lawyer Horatio Spafford and his wife Anna Spafford who were the leaders of the American Colony in the Holy City 125 The Spaffords had lost their home and much of their fortune in the Great Chicago Fire and then had seen one of their sons die of scarlet fever four of their daughters drowned in a shipwreck followed by the death of another son from scarlet fever causing them to turn to religion as consolation for unbearable tragedy making them very congenial company for Gordon during his stay in Jerusalem 125 After his visit Gordon suggested in his book Reflections in Palestine 126 a different location for Golgotha the site of Christ s crucifixion The site lies north of the traditional site at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and is now known as The Garden Tomb or sometimes as Gordon s Calvary 127 Gordon s interest was prompted by his religious beliefs as he had become an evangelical Christian in 1854 128 King Leopold II then asked Gordon again to take charge of the Congo Free State 129 He accepted and returned to London to make preparations but soon after his arrival the British requested that he proceed immediately to the Sudan where the situation had deteriorated badly after his departure another revolt had arisen led by the self proclaimed Mahdi Mohammed Ahmed The Mahdi is a messianic figure in Islam which tradition holds will appear at the dawn of every new Islamic century to strike down the enemies of Islam 130 The year 1881 was the Islamic year 1298 and to mark the coming of the new century Ahmed announced that he was the Mahdi and proclaimed a jihad against the Egyptian state The long exploitation of the Sudan by Egypt led many Sudanese to rally to the Mahdi s black banner as he promised to expel the Egyptians whom Ahmed denounced as apostates and he announced he would establish an Islamic fundamentalist state marking a return to the pure Islam said to have been practised in the days of the Prophet Mohamed in Arabia 130 Additionally Baring s policy of raising taxes to pay off the debts Isma il had run up sparked much resentment in both Egypt and the Sudan 131 In 1882 nationalist rage in Egypt against Baring s economic policies led to the revolt by Colonel Urabi Pasha which was put down by Anglo Egyptian troops From September 1882 onwards Egypt was a de facto British protectorate effectively ruled by Baring through in theory Egypt remained an Ottoman province with a very wide degree of autonomy until 1914 With Egypt under British rule the British also inherited the problems of Egypt s colony the Sudan which the Egyptians were losing control of to the Mahdi 132 Mahdist uprising editSee also Mahdist War Mission to Khartoum edit nbsp Muhammad Ahmad the self proclaimed Mahdi The Egyptian forces in the Sudan were insufficient to cope with the rebels and the northern government was occupied with the suppression of the Urabi Revolt By September 1882 the Egyptian position in the Sudan had grown perilous In September 1883 an Egyptian Army force under Colonel William Hicks set out to destroy the Mahdi The Egyptian soldiers were miserable fallaḥin conscripts who had no interest in being in the Sudan much less in fighting the Mahdi and morale was so poor that Hicks had to chain his men together to prevent them from deserting 133 On 3 5 November 1883 the Ansar whom the British called Dervishes as the Mahdi s followers were known destroyed the Egyptian army of 8 000 under Colonel Hicks at El Obeid with only about 250 Egyptians surviving and Hicks being one of the slain 133 The Ansar captured a large number of Remington rifles and ammunition cases together with many Krupp artillery guns and their shells 124 After the Battle of El Obeid Egyptian morale never high to begin with simply collapsed and the black flag of the Mahdi soon flew over many towns in the Sudan 133 By the end of 1883 the Egyptians held only the ports on the Red Sea and a narrow belt of land around the Nile in northern Sudan In both cases naval power was the key factor as gunboats in the Red Sea and on the Nile provided a degree of firepower with which the Ansar could not cope 134 The only other place to hold out for a time was a region in the south held by the Governor of Equatoria Emin Pasha Following the destruction of Hicks s army the Liberal Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone decided that the Sudan was not worth the trouble it would take to keep and that the region should be abandoned to the Mahdi In December 1883 the British government ordered Egypt to abandon the Sudan but that was difficult to carry out as it involved the withdrawal of thousands of Egyptian soldiers civilian employees and their families 135 At the beginning of 1884 Gordon had no interest in the Sudan and had just been hired to work as an officer with the newly established Congo Free State Gordon despite or rather because of his war hero status disliked publicity and tried to avoid the press when he was in Britain 134 While staying with his sister in Southampton Gordon received an unexpected visitor namely William Thomas Stead the editor of The Pall Mall Gazette to whom Gordon reluctantly agreed to give an interview 136 Gordon wanted to talk about the Congo but Stead kept on pressing him to talk about the Sudan Finally after much prompting on Stead s part Gordon opened up and attacked Gladstone s Sudan policy coming out for an intervention to defeat the Mahdi 137 Gordon offered up a 19th century anticipation of the domino theory claiming The danger arises from the influence which the spectacle of a conquering Mahometan Power established close to your frontiers will exercise upon the population which you govern In all the cities of Egypt it will be felt that what the Mahdi has done they may do and as he has driven out the intruder they may do the same 138 Stead published his interview on 9 January 1884 on the front page of the Pall Mall Gazette alongside an editorial of his titled Chinese Gordon for the Sudan 138 Urban wrote With this leader William Stead s real motive in going to Southampton revealed itself at last As to who tipped him off that the general would be staying here for just a couple of nights we can only speculate 139 Stead s interview caused a media sensation and led to a popular clamour for Gordon to be sent to the Sudan 140 Urban wrote The Pall Mall Gazette articles in short began a new chapter in international relations powerful men using media manipulation of public opinion to trigger war It is often suggested that that campaign by William Randolph Hearst s paper that led to the US invasion of Cuba in 1898 was the world s first episode of this kind but the British press deserves these dubious laurels for its actions a full fourteen years earlier 140 The man behind the campaign was the Adjutant General Sir Garnet Wolseley a skilled media manipulator who often leaked information to the press to effect changes in policy and who was strongly opposed to Gladstone s policy of pulling out of the Sudan 141 In 1880 the Liberals had won the general election on a platform of overseas retrenchment and Gladstone had put his principles into practice by withdrawing from the Transvaal and Afghanistan in 1881 There was a secret ultra faction in the War Office led by Wolseley that felt that the Liberal government was too inclined to withdraw from various places all over the globe at the first sign of trouble and who were determined to sabotage the withdrawal from the Sudan 142 Gordon and Wolseley were good friends Wolseley being one of the people Gordon prayed for every night and after a meeting with Wolseley at the War Office to discuss the crisis in the Sudan Gordon left convinced that he had to go to the Sudan to carry out the work of God 133 With public opinion demanding that Gordon be sent to the Sudan on 16 January 1884 the Gladstone government decided to send him there albeit with the very limited mandate to report on the situation and advise on the best means of carrying out the evacuation 143 Gladstone had gone to his estate at Hawarden to recover from illness and thus was not present at the meeting on 18 January where Gordon was given the Sudan command but he was under the impression that Gordon s mission was advisory whereas the four ministers present at the meeting had given Gordon the impression that his mission was executive in nature 144 Gladstone felt that this was a deft political move Public opinion would be satisfied with Chinese Gordon going to the Sudan but at the same time Gordon was given such a limited mandate that the evacuation would proceed as planned The Cabinet felt highly uncomfortable with the appointment as they had been pressured by the press to send a man who was opposed to their Sudan policy to take command there The Foreign Secretary Lord Grenville wondered if they had just committed a gigantic folly 145 Gordon made a short trip to Brussels to tell King Leopold that he would not be going to the Congo after all news that enraged the King 11 nbsp General Gordon in Khartoum The British government asked Gordon to go to Khartoum to report on the best method of carrying out the evacuation Gordon started for Cairo in January 1884 accompanied by Lt Col J D H Stewart At Cairo he received further instructions from Sir Evelyn Baring and was appointed Governor General with executive powers by the Khedive Tewfik Pasha who also gave Gordon an edict ordering him to establish a government in the Sudan This Gordon would later use as a reason for staying in Khartoum 146 Baring disapproved of sending Gordon to the Sudan writing in a report to London that A man who habitually consults the Prophet Isaiah when he is in a difficulty is not apt to obey the orders of anyone 147 Gordon immediately confirmed Baring s fears as he started to issue press statements attacking the rebels as a feeble lot of stinking Dervishes and demanded he be allowed to smash up the Mahdi 148 Gordon sent a telegram to Khartoum reading Don t be panic stricken Ye are men not women I am coming Gordon 146 Urban wrote that Gordon s most stupid mistake occurred when he revealed his secret orders at a meeting of tribal leaders on 12 February at Berber explaining that the Egyptians were pulling out leading to almost all of the Arab tribes of northern Sudan declaring their loyalty to the Mahdi Given that Gordon himself in his interview with Stead had stated The moment it is known that we have given up the game every man will go over to the Mahdi his decision to reveal that the Egyptians were pulling out remains inexplicable 148 Shortly afterwards Gordon wrote what Urban called a bizarre letter to the Mahdi telling him to accept the authority of the Khedive of Egypt and offered him the chance to work as one of Gordon s provincial governors The Mahdi contemptuously rejected Gordon s offer and sent back a letter demanding Gordon convert to Islam 148 The Mahdi ended his letter with the remark I am the Expected Mahdi and I do not boast I am the successor of God s Prophet and I have no need of any sultanate of Kordofan or anywhere else 149 Even Wolseley had cause to regret sending Gordon as the general revealed himself to be a loose cannon whose press statements attacking the Liberal government were obstructing rather than furthering his plans to take over the Sudan 148 Travelling through Korosko and Berber he arrived at Khartoum on 18 February where he offered his earlier foe the slaver king Rahama Zobeir release from prison in exchange for leading troops against Ahmed 150 Gordon s abrupt mood swings and contradictory advice confirmed the Cabinet s view of him as mercurial and unstable 11 Even an observer as sympathetic as Winston Churchill wrote about Gordon Mercury uncontrolled by the force of gravity was not on several occasions more unstable than Charles Gordon His moods were capricious and uncertain his passions violent his impulses sudden and inconsistent The mortal enemy of the morning had become a trusted ally by night 151 The novelist John Buchan wrote that Gordon was so unlike other men that he readily acquired a spiritual ascendency over all who knew him well and many who did not but at the same time Gordon had a dualism in that the impression of single heartedness was an illusion for all his life his soul was the stage of conflict 151 Gordon s attempt to have his former archenemy Zobeir the King of the Slavers whom he had hunted for years and whose son he had executed installed as the new Sultan of the Sudan appalled Gladstone and offended his former admirers in the Anti Slavery Society 146 Preparing the defence of Khartoum edit nbsp The maximum extent of the Mahdist State from 1881 to 1898 with national boundaries as of 2000 displayed After arriving in Khartoum Gordon announced that on the grounds of honour he would not evacuate Khartoum but rather would hold the city against the Mahdi 146 Gordon was well received by a crowd of about 9 000 during his return to Khartoum where the crowd continually chanted Father and Sultan Gordon assured the people of Khartoum in a speech delivered in his rough hewn Arabic that the Mahdi was coming with his Army of Islam marching under their black banners but to have no fear as here he would be stopped 149 Gordon had a garrison of about 8 000 soldiers armed with Remington rifles together with a colossal ammunition dump containing millions of rounds 152 Gordon commenced the task of sending the women the children the sick and the wounded to Egypt About 2 500 people had been removed before the Mahdi s forces closed in on Khartoum Gordon hoped to have the influential local leader Sebehr Rahma appointed to take control of Sudan but the British government refused to support a former slaver During this time in Khartoum Gordon befriended Irish journalist Frank Powers The Times London correspondent in the Sudan Powers was delighted that the charismatic Gordon had no anti Catholic prejudices and treated him as an equal 153 The hero worshiping Powers wrote about Gordon He is indeed I believe the greatest man of this century Gordon granted Powers privileged access and in return Powers started to write a series of popular articles for The Times depicting Gordon as the solitary hero taking on a vast horde of fanatical Muslims 153 Gordon made all of his personal dispatches to London public there was no Official Secrets Act at the time in attempts to win public opinion over to his policy writing on one dispatch Not secret as far as I am concerned 154 At one point Gordon suggested in a telegram to Gladstone that the notoriously corrupt Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II could be bribed into sending 3 000 Ottoman troops for the relief of Khartoum and if the British government was unwilling and or unable to pay that amount he was certain that either Pope Leo XIII or a group of American millionaires would be 155 The advance of the rebels against Khartoum was combined with a revolt in the eastern Sudan Colonel Valentine Baker led an Egyptian force out of Suakin and was badly defeated by 1 000 Haddendowa warriors who declared their loyalty to the Mahdi under Osman Digna at Al Teb with 2 225 Egyptian soldiers and 96 officers killed 71 Because the Egyptian troops at Suakin were repeatedly defeated a British force was sent to Suakin under General Sir Gerald Graham which drove the rebels away in several hard fought actions At Tamai on 13 March 1884 Graham was attacked by the Haddendowa whom the British nicknamed Fuzzy Wuzzies whom he defeated but in the course of the battle the Haddendowa broke a Black Watch square an action later celebrated in the Kipling poem Fuzzy Wuzzy 156 The ferocity of the Haddendowa attacks astonished the British and Graham argued that he needed more troops if he were to advance deeper into the Sudan while one newspaper correspondent reported that the average British soldiers did not understand why they were in the Sudan fighting such brave fellows for the sake of the wretched Egyptians 154 Gordon urged that the road from Suakin to Berber be opened but his request was refused by the government in London and in April Graham and his forces were withdrawn and Gordon and the Sudan were abandoned The garrison at Berber surrendered in May and Khartoum was completely isolated 157 Gordon decided to stay and hold Khartoum despite the orders of the Gladstone government to merely report about the best means of supervising the evacuation of the Sudan 146 Powers who acted as Gordon s unofficial press attache wrote in The Times We are daily expecting British troops We cannot bring ourselves to believe that we are to be abandoned 158 In his diary Gordon wrote I own to having been very insubordinate to Her Majesty s Government and its officials but it is my nature and I cannot help it I fear I have not even tried to play battledore and shuttlecock with them I know if I was chief I would never employ myself for I am incorrigible 146 Due to public opinion the government dared not sack Gordon but the Cabinet was extremely angry about Gordon s insubordination with many privately saying if Gordon wanted to defy orders by holding Khartoum then he only deserved what he was going to get Gladstone himself took Gordon s attacks on his Sudan policy very personally 158 One Cabinet minister wrote The London newspapers and the Tories clamor for an expedition to Khartoum the former from ignorance the latter because it is the best model of embarrassing us Of course it is not an impossible undertaking but it is melancholy to think of the waste of lives and the treasure which it must involve 158 The Cabinet itself was divided and confused about just what to do about the Sudan crisis leading to a highly dysfunctional style of decision making 11 nbsp 10 piastre promissory note issued and hand signed by Gen Gordon during the Siege of Khartoum 26 April 1884 159 Gordon had a strong death wish and clearly wanted to die fighting at Khartoum writing in a letter to his sister I feel so very much inclined to wish it His will might be my release Earth s joys grow very dim its glories have faded In his biography of Gordon Anthony Nutting wrote that Gordon was obsessed with the ever present constantly repeated desire for martyrdom and for that glorious immortality in union with God and away from the wretchedness of life on this earth 146 Because his Turkish and Egyptian and many Sudanese troops were Muslim Gordon refrained in public from describing his battle with the Mahdi as a religious war but Gordon s diary showed he viewed himself as a Christian champion fighting against the Mahdi just as much for God as for his nation The Mahdi and his followers had been fighting a jihad since 1881 and looked forward to taking on the famous General Gordon as a chance to win glory for Allah 160 Gordon energetically organised the defence of Khartoum right from the moment he arrived in Khartoum using his training as a military engineer to turn the city into a fortress 152 Additionally Gordon had guns and armoured plating attached to the paddle wheel steamers stationed at Khartoum to create his own private riverine navy that served as an effective force against the Ansar 161 The Turkish troops at Khartoum were not part of the Ottoman Army but rather bashi bazouks irregulars whom Gordon commented were good for raids but useless in battle 161 The Shaggyeh one of the few Arab tribes who did not rally to the Mahdi drove Gordon to distraction with Gordon writing in his diary about them Dreadful lot How I look forward to their disbandment 162 Gordon had a low opinion of the Egyptian Turkish and Arab Sudanese troops under his command whom he constantly described as a mutinous badly disciplined and ill trained rabble good only for looting but had a much higher opinion of his Black Sudanese soldiers most of them former slaves who would rather die fighting as free men than live as slaves again it was well known that the Mahdi s forces were going to enslave the Blacks of Khartoum once they took the city 162 The black Sudanese troops many from what is now South Sudan proved to be Gordon s best troops at Khartoum and numbered about twenty three hundred 71 The siege of Khartoum edit The siege of Khartoum by the Mahdist forces commanded by the Mahdi himself started on 18 March 1884 Initially the siege of Khartoum was more in nature a blockade rather than a true siege as the Mahdi s forces lacked the strength to wage a proper siege for example cutting the telegraphy lines only in April 1884 158 The British government had decided to abandon the Sudan but it was clear that Gordon had other plans and the public increasingly called for a relief expedition Gordon s last telegrams were clearly meant for the British public with one message addressed to Baring reading You state your intention of not sending any relief force up here to Berber I shall hold on here as long as I can and if I can suppress the rebellion I shall do so If I cannot I shall retire to the Equator and leave you with the indelible disgrace of abandoning the garrisons 163 Gladstone was opposed to hanging onto the Sudan saying in a speech in the House of Commons that sending a relief force to Khartoum would be a war of conquest against a people struggling to be free Yes these are people struggling to be free and rightly struggling to be free 164 Khartoum was surrounded by the Ansar in March 1884 but was not cut off from the outside world for a considerable time afterward 165 Gordon s armoured steamers continued to sail in and out of Khartoum with little difficulty for the first six months of the siege and it was not until September 1884 that the armoured steamers first had trouble reaching the city 165 Gordon had a low opinion of his enemy writing that the Ansar besieging him were some 500 determined men and some 2 000 rag tag Arabs 165 Nutting wrote that Gordon could have withdrawn at almost any moment between March and May if only he had been willing American historian James Perry wrote But instead of following instructions he stayed put longing for martyrdom It wasn t exactly fair to the Egyptian garrisons he had been sent to evacuate they had no death wish 165 On 25 July 1884 the Cabinet over the objections of the Prime Minister voted to send a relief expedition to Khartoum On 5 August 1884 the House of Commons voted to send the relief force with a budget of 300 000 165 During this time Gordon when he was not organising the besieged garrison with incredible energy spent his time writing a somewhat rambling diary containing his reflections on the siege life fate and his own intense idiosyncratic version of Protestantism 166 Gordon waged a very vigorous defence sending out his armoured steamers to engage the Ansar camps along the Blue Nile while he regularly made raids on the besiegers that often gave the Madhi s forces a bloody nose Elated by these successes Gordon wrote in his diary We are going to hold out here forever 166 To keep up morale Gordon had a military band perform concerts in the central plaza every Friday and Sunday evenings for free and cast his own decorations for his men 167 Though the telegraph lines to Cairo were cut Gordon used the remaining telegraph lines to build his own telegraph network within Khartoum linking the men holding the walls of Khartoum to the Governor General s palace thus keeping him well informed of what was happening To slow down the Ansar assaults Gordon built primitive landmines out of water cans stuffed with dynamite and to confuse the enemy about his numbers he put up wooden dummies in uniform along the walls of Khartoum facing the Blue Nile 167 It was not until August 1884 that the government decided to take steps to relieve Gordon with the British relief force called the Nile Expedition or more popularly the Khartoum Relief Expedition or Gordon Relief Expedition a title that Gordon strongly deprecated The relief force under the command of Gordon s old friend Field Marshal Sir Garnet Wolseley was not ready until November 1884 Wolseley had earlier served in Canada where he had commanded the Red River expedition of 1870 during which time he gained considerable respect for the skills of French Canadian voyageurs and now insisted he could not travel up the Nile without the voyageurs to assist his men as river pilots and boatmen 168 It took considerable time to hire the voyageurs in Canada and bring them to Egypt which delayed the expedition Some of the voyageurs who arrived in Egypt turned out to be lawyers led by an alderman from Toronto who wanted to see the fun of war and were useless as boatmen 168 Wolseley was a bureaucratic general whose talents lay in administrative work and as a field commander Wolseley was slow methodical and cautious making him in the opinion of Urban supremely unqualified to lead the relief expedition as he found one excuse after another to proceed up the Nile at a sluggish pace 169 For example Wolseley could have hired Egyptian boatmen who knew the Nile to serve as river pilots instead of bringing over voyageurs from Canada who knew nothing of the Nile and moreover Wolseley called for the voyageurs only after his arrival in Egypt 168 On the brink edit On 4 September 1884 Gordon s fortunes took a turn for the worse when the most able of his subordinates Mohammed Aly together with about 1 000 of Gordon s best troops were killed in an ambush while conducting a raid 166 Gordon wrote in his diary that Mohammed Aly had captured a lad of 12 or 14 years of age and the little chap spoke out boldly and said he believed Mohamed Ahmed was the Mahdi and that we were dogs He was shot Before I heard of our defeat I heard of this and I thought THAT will not pass unavenged 166 On 9 September 1884 an armoured steamer the Abbas on its way to Cairo was captured by the Ansar for the first time and all aboard were killed 160 Among the dead were Gordon s unofficial spokesman the passionate wordsmith and Times journalist Frank Powers Gordon s Chief of Staff Colonel Stewart and the French consul in Khartoum Leon Herbin fr all of whom Gordon was sending to Cairo to plead for relief 160 170 Gordon received a letter from the Mahdi taunting him over the murders of his friends Powers and Stewart warning that he would be next if he did not surrender Bitterly Gordon wrote in his diary It is impossible to have any more words with Mohammed Achmed only lead 171 Among the papers captured on the Abbas was the cipher key Gordon used to code his messages in and out of Khartoum which meant he could no longer read the messages he received leading him to write in his diary I think cipher messages are in some countries like this a mistake 166 During this period Gordon was lionised by the British press which portrayed him as a latter day Christian crusader and a saint a man of pure good heroically battling the Mahdi who was depicted as a man of pure evil 172 The Pall Mall Gazette in a front page leader wrote that Gordon stood out in clear relief against the Eastern sky Alone in Africa dauntless and unfaltering he discharges his great trust holding the capital of the Sudan against the beleaguering hordes 173 The defences Gordon had built with lines of earthwork mines and barbed wire presented the Ansar with much difficulty and their attempts to storm Khartoum failed but the Ansar made good use of their Krupp artillery to gradually batter down the defences 160 To counter Gordon s armoured steamers the Mahdi built a series of forts along the Nile equipped with Krupp guns that over time proceeded to make it almost impossible for Gordon s navy to operate 160 nbsp A cartoon of Charles Gordon greeting reinforcements at Khartoum in 1885 Published before Gordon s death was known By the end of 1884 both the garrison and the population of Khartoum were starving to death there were no horses donkeys cats or dogs left in Khartoum as the people had eaten all of them 174 Gordon told the civilians of Khartoum that anyone who wished to leave even to join the Mahdi s army were free to do so 174 About half of the population took up his offer to promptly leave the city 174 A note written by Gordon and dated 14 December was sent out by a messenger from Khartoum who reached Wolseley s army on 30 December 1884 175 The note read Khartoum all right Can hold out for years C G Gordon but the messenger who knew very little English had memorised another darker message from Gordon namely We want you to come quickly 11 175 In the same month Gordon received a letter from the Mahdi offering safe passage out of Khartoum We have written to you to go back to your country I repeat to you the words of Allah Do not destroy yourself Allah Himself is merciful to you 174 Gordon and the Mahdi never met but the two men both charismatic and intensely religious soldiers who saw themselves as fighting for God had developed a grudging mutual respect 174 However Faught wrote that there was a fundamental difference between Gordon and the Mahdi in that Gordon never tried to convert the Muslims of the Sudan to Christianity whereas the Mahdi was an Islamic extremist who believed he would establish a worldwide caliphate looking forward to the day when he would see the world bow before him 176 During November December 1884 Gordon s diary showed the stressful effects of the siege as he was in a state of mental exhaustion a man on the brink of madness 160 In his final months Gordon oscillated between a longing for martyrdom and death versus an intense horror at the prospect of his own demise as the hour of his destruction rapidly approached 160 Even if the relief force had reached him it is not clear if he would have left Khartoum as Gordon wrote in his diary If any emissary or letter comes up here ordering me to come down I WILL NOT OBEY IT BUT WILL STAY HERE AND FALL WITH THE TOWN 160 At another point a death obsessed Gordon wrote in his diary Better a bullet to the brain than to flicker out unheeded 160 In a letter that reached Cairo in December Gordon wrote Farewell You will never hear from me again I fear that there will be treachery in the garrison and all will be over by Christmas 177 On 14 December 1884 Gordon wrote the last entry in his diary which read Now MARK THIS if the Expeditionary Force and I ask for no more than two hundred men does not come in ten days the town may fall and I have done my best for the honour of our country Goodbye C G Gordon 178 A chain smoking Gordon constantly paced the roof of his palace during the day looking vainly for smoke on the Nile indicating that the steamers were coming while spending much of the rest of his time in prayer 174 On 5 January 1885 the Ansar took the fort at Omdurman which allowed them to use their Krupp artillery to bring down enfilading fire on the defences of Khartoum 160 In one of the last letters Gordon had smuggled out he wrote I expect Her Majesty s Government are in a precious rage with me for holding out and so forcing their hands 160 In his last weeks those who knew Gordon described him as a chain smoking rage filled desperate man wearing a shabby uniform who spent hours talking to a mouse that he shared his office with when he was not attacking his Sudanese servants with his rattan cane during one of his rages 179 A particular aspect of Gordon s personality that stood out was his death wish as everyone who knew him was convinced that he wanted to die 160 When a Lebanese merchant visited Gordon in the evening the Ansar began an artillery bombardment leading the frightened merchant to suggest that perhaps Gordon ought to dim the lights to avoid drawing enemy fire down on the palace 160 The merchant recalled Gordon s response He called up the guard and gave the orders to shoot me if I moved and ordered all of the lamps in the palace to be lit up as brightly as possible 180 Gordon defiantly told the merchant Go tell all the people of Khartoum that Gordon fears nothing for God has created him without fear 180 The capture of Khartoum edit The relief force under General Wolseley which set out from Wadi Halfa was divided into two columns at Korti a 1 200 strong flying column or desert column of camel borne troops which would cross the Bayuda desert to reach Metmemma on the Nile and meet Gordon s gunboats there and the main column which would continue to advance along the Nile heading for Berber The troops reached Korti towards the end of December the small Desert Column reaching Metemma on 20 January 1885 fighting the Battle of Abu Klea 171 on 18 January and Abu Kru or Gubat en route There they found four gunboats which had been sent north by Gordon four months earlier and prepared them for the trip back up the Nile When the news of the defeats reached Ansar besieging Khartoum terrible cries of lamentation rose from the besieging force which led Gordon to guess that the Ansar had been defeated in battle and that Wolseley must be close 171 On 24 January two of the steamers under Sir Charles Wilson carrying 20 soldiers of the Sussex Regiment wearing red tunics to clearly identify them as British were sent on a purely reconnaissance mission to Khartoum with orders from Wolseley not to attempt to rescue Gordon or bring him ammunition or food 181 On the evening of 24 January 1885 the Mahdi met with his generals whose leading spokesman was his uncle Muhammad Abd al Karim who told him that with the Nile low and Wolseley close it was time to either storm Khartoum or retreat 182 As dawn broke on the morning of 26 January 1885 the Ansar regiments led by their riflemen and followed by their spearmen marched out of their camps under their black banners 182 The Ansar began their final attack by storming the city via the gap in the defence caused by the low Nile and after an hour s fighting the starving defenders had abandoned the fight and the city was theirs 182 The Ansar took no prisoners and all of the approximately 7 000 defenders were killed 177 On arriving at Khartoum on 28 January the reconnaissance gunboats found that the city had been captured and Gordon had been killed just two days before coincidentally two days before his 52nd birthday Under heavy fire from Ansar warriors on the bank the two steamers turned back downriver 183 The British press criticised the relief force for arriving two days late but the main relief force was nowhere near Khartoum by then and only the reconnaissance party under Sir Charles Wilson on two gunboats had attempted to reach Khartoum though it was later argued that the Mahdi s forces had good intelligence and if the camel corps had advanced earlier the final attack on Khartoum would also have come earlier Finally the boats sent were not there to relieve Gordon who was not expected to agree to abandon the city and the small force and limited supplies on board could have offered scant military support for the besieged in any case 181 Death edit nbsp General Gordon s Last Stand by George W Joy The manner of Gordon s death is uncertain but it was romanticised in a popular painting by George William Joy General Gordon s Last Stand 1893 currently in the Leeds City Art Gallery and again in the film Khartoum 1966 with Charlton Heston as Gordon The most popular account of Gordon s death was that he put on his ceremonial gold braided blue uniform of the Governor General together with the Pasha s red fez and that he went out unarmed except with his rattan cane to be cut down by the Ansar 11 This account was very popular with the British press as it contained much Christian imagery with Gordon as a Christlike figure dying passively for the sins of all humanity 11 Gordon was apparently killed at the Governor General s palace about an hour before dawn The Mahdi had given strict orders to his three Khalifas not to kill Gordon 184 The orders were not obeyed Gordon s Sudanese servants later stated that Gordon for once did not go out armed only with his rattan cane but also took with him a loaded revolver and his sword and died in mortal combat fighting the Ansar 185 Gordon died on the steps of a stairway in the northwestern corner of the palace where he and his body servant Agha Khalil Orphali had been firing at the enemy Orphali was knocked unconscious and did not see Gordon die When he woke up again that afternoon he found Gordon s body covered with flies and the head cut off 186 A merchant Bordeini Bey glimpsed Gordon standing on the palace steps in a white uniform looking into the darkness The best evidence suggests that Gordon went out to confront the enemy gunned down several of the Ansar with his revolver and after running out of bullets drew his sword only to be shot down 11 Reference is made to an 1889 account of the General surrendering his sword to a senior Mahdist officer then being struck and subsequently speared in the side as he rolled down the staircase 187 Rudolf Slatin the Austrian governor of Darfur who had been taken prisoner by the Ansar wrote that three soldiers showed him Gordon s head at his tent before delivering it to the Mahdi 188 When Gordon s head was unwrapped at the Mahdi s feet he ordered the head transfixed between the branches of a tree where all who passed it could look in disdain children could throw stones at it and the hawks of the desert could sweep and circle above 189 His body was desecrated and thrown down a well 189 nbsp Depiction of Gordon s head shown to Slatin In the hours following Gordon s death an estimated 10 000 civilians and members of the garrison were killed in Khartoum 189 The massacre was finally halted by orders of the Mahdi Many of Gordon s papers were saved and collected by his two sisters Helen Clark Gordon who married Gordon s medical colleague in China Dr Moffit and Mary Augusta and possibly his niece Augusta who married Gerald Henry Blunt Gordon s papers as well as some of his grandfather s Samuel Enderby III were accepted by the British Library around 1937 190 The failure to rescue General Gordon s force in Sudan was a major blow to Prime Minister Gladstone s popularity Queen Victoria sent him a telegram of rebuke which found its way into the press 191 Critics said Gladstone had neglected military affairs and had not acted promptly enough to save the besieged Gordon Critics inverted his acronym G O M for Grand Old Man to M O G for Murderer of Gordon Gladstone told the Cabinet that the public cared much about Gordon and nothing about the Sudan so he ordered Wolseley home after learning of Gordon s death 192 Wolseley who had been led to believe that his expedition was the initial phase of an operation to re conquer the Sudan was furious and in a telegram to Queen Victoria contemptuously called Gladstone the tradesman who has become a politician 192 In 1885 Gordon achieved the martyrdom he had been seeking at Khartoum as the British press portrayed him as a saintly Christian hero and martyr who had died nobly resisting the Islamic onslaught of the Mahdi 193 As late as 1901 on the anniversary of Gordon s death The Times wrote in a leader editorial that Gordon was that solitary figure holding aloft the flag of England in the face of the dark hordes of Islam 172 Gordon s death caused a huge wave of national grief all over Britain with 13 March 1885 being set aside as a day of mourning for the fallen hero of Khartoum 191 In a sermon the Bishop of Chichester stated Nations who envied our greatness rejoiced now at our weakness and our inability to protect our trusted servant Scorn and reproach were cast upon us and would we plead that it was undeserved No the conscience of the nation felt that a strain rested upon it 191 Baring who deeply disliked Gordon wrote that because of the national hysteria caused by Gordon s death saying anything critical about him at present would be equal to questioning Christianity 191 Stones were thrown at the windows at 10 Downing Street as Gladstone was denounced as the Murderer of Gordon the Judas figure who betrayed the Christ like figure of Gordon The wave of mourning was not just confined to Britain In New York Paris and Berlin pictures of Gordon appeared in shop windows with black lining as all over the West the fallen general was seen as a Christ like man who sacrificed himself resisting the advance of Islam 11 Despite the popular demand to avenge Gordon the Conservative government that came into office after the 1885 election did nothing of the sort The Sudan was judged to be not worth the huge financial costs it would have taken to conquer it the same conclusion that the Liberals had reached 11 After Khartoum the Mahdi established his Islamic state which restored slavery and imposed a very harsh rule that according to one estimate caused the deaths of 8 million people between 1885 and 1898 194 In 1887 the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition under Henry Morton Stanley set out to rescue Dr Emin Pasha still holding out in Equatoria against the Ansar Many have seen the attempt to save Emin Pasha a German doctor biologist botanist who had converted from Judaism first to Lutheranism and then possibly to Islam and who had not been particularly famous in Europe until then as a consolation prize for Gordon 195 Egypt had been in the French sphere of influence until 1882 when the British had established control over Egypt In March 1896 a French force under the command of Jean Baptiste Marchand left Dakar with the intention of marching across the Sahara with the aim of destroying the Mahdiyah state The French hoped that conquering the Sudan would allow them to lever the British out of Egypt and thus restore Egypt to the French sphere of influence 11 To block the French a British force under Herbert Kitchener was sent to conquer the Mahdiyah state and defeated the Ansar at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898 It was thus their rivalry with the French not a desire to avenge Gordon that led the British government to annex the Mahdiyah state in 1898 11 However the British public and Kitchener himself saw the expedition as one to avenge Gordon As the Mahdi was long dead Kitchener had to content himself with blowing up the Mahdi s tomb as revenge for Gordon s death 196 The body of the Mahdi was disinterred and beheaded 197 This symbolic decapitation echoed General Gordon s death at the hands of the Mahdist forces in 1885 The headless body of the Mahdi was thrown into the Nile 198 199 Lord Kitchener kept the Mahdi s skull and it was rumoured that he intended to use it as a drinking cup or ink well 200 After the Battle of Omdurman Kitchener opened a letter from the Prime Minister Lord Salisbury and for the first time learned the real purpose of the expedition had been to keep the French out of the Sudan and that avenging Gordon was merely a pretext 201 Personal life editPersonal beliefs edit Gordon had been born into the Church of England but he never quite trusted the Anglican Church instead preferring his own personal brand of Protestantism 91 In his worn out state Gordon had some sort of religious rebirth leading him to write to his sister Augusta Through the workings of Christ in my body by His Body and Blood the medicine worked Ever since the realisation of the sacrament I have been turned upside down 202 The eccentric Gordon was very religious but he departed from Christian orthodoxy on a number of points Gordon believed in reincarnation In 1877 he wrote in a letter This life is only one of a series of lives which our incarnated part has lived I have little doubt of our having pre existed and that also in the time of our pre existence we were actively employed So therefore I believe in our active employment in a future life and I like the thought 203 Gordon was an ardent Christian cosmologist who also believed that the Garden of Eden was on the island of Praslin in the Seychelles 204 Gordon believed that God s throne from which He governed the universe rested upon the earth which was further surrounded by the firmament 11 Gordon believed in both predestination writing that I believe that not a worm is picked up by a bird without the direct intervention of God and free will with humans choosing their own fate writing I cannot and do not pretend to reconcile the two 205 These religious beliefs mirrored differing aspects of Gordon s personality as he believed that he could choose his own fate through the force of his personality and a fatalistic streak often ending his letters with D V Deo volente Latin for God willing i e whatever God wants will be 205 Gordon was well known for sticking Christian tracts onto city walls and to throw them out of a train window 11 The Romanian historian Eric Tappe described Gordon as a man who developed his own very personal peculiar variety of Protestantism 59 Personality edit In his book Eminent Victorians Lytton Strachey portrays Gordon in the following manner 206 Gordon possessed an inherently reclusive nature he had an aversion to social gatherings and formal attire particularly in the presence of women especially those of high society He was unfamiliar with the comfortable indulgences typical of his social class and status his clothing bordered on being threadbare and he partook in frugal meals at a table equipped with a drawer where he hastily concealed his bread and plate when impoverished visitors approached The sole book he engaged with was the Bible Strachey continued by highlighting the fear his subordinates held for Gordon s temper 206 There were instances when his anger became utterly uncontrollable and the gentle servant of God who spent his days quoting religious texts would in fits of sudden rage strike his Arab aide de camp across the face or assault his Alsatian servant subjecting him to kicks until he screamed Sexuality edit Gordon s charitable work for the boys of Gravesend led to assertions later in the 20th century that he was a homosexual 207 The Dictionary of National Biography described Gordon as a great boy lover 208 Urban wrote It is possible that he had sexual feelings for these urchins but there is no evidence that he ever acted upon them We can only speculate that his increasing religious devotion may have been an outward manifestation of an internal struggle against sexual temptation 209 Gordon never married and is not known to have had a sexual or romantic relationship with anyone He claimed that his army service and frequent travels to dangerous places made it impossible for him to marry He could only hurt a potential wife because it was inevitable that he would die in battle 210 Gordon s parents expected him to marry and were disappointed about his lifelong bachelorhood 211 Urban wrote that the best evidence suggests Gordon was a latent homosexual whose sexual repression led him to funnelling his aggression into a military career with a special energy 212 The British historian Denis Judd wrote about Gordon s sexuality Like two other great Imperial heroes of his time Kitchener and Cecil Rhodes Gordon was a celibate What this almost certainly meant was that Gordon had unresolved homosexual inclinations which like Kitchener but unlike Rhodes he kept savagely repressed The repression of Gordon s sexual instincts helped to release a flood of celibate energy which drove him into weird beliefs eccentric activities and a sometimes misplaced confidence in his own judgement 11 The American historian Byron Farwell strongly implied in his 1985 book Eminent Victorian Soldiers that Gordon was a homosexual for instance writing of Gordon s unwholesome interest in the boys he took in to live with him at the Fort House and his fondness for the company of handsome young men 213 Gordon at the age of 14 214 said that he wished he had been born a eunuch which has been taken to suggest that he wanted to annihilate all of his sexual desires and indeed his sexuality altogether 215 Together with his sister Augusta Gordon often prayed to be released from their vile bodies in which their spirits were imprisoned so that their souls might be joined with God 216 Faught argued that no one at the time suspected Gordon of having sexual relations with the legions of teenage boys living with him at the Fort House Faught also pointed out that the first hints that Gordon might secretly have been having sex with the boys of the Fort House were made by Lytton Strachey in his book Eminent Victorians published 1918 which in Faught s opinion may have said more about Strachey than it did about Gordon 208 Faught maintained that Gordon was a heterosexual whose Christian beliefs led him to maintain his virginity right up to his death because he believed that sexual intercourse was incompatible with his faith 217 The frequent references in Gordon s letters about his need to resist temptation and subdue the flesh Faught argued related to women rather than men who were tempting him 217 The South African minister Dr Peter Hammond denied that Gordon was a homosexual citing the numerous statements made by Gordon condemning homosexuality as an abomination charging that the claim that Gordon was a homosexual was a theory with no foundation in fact 218 The British historian Paul Mersh has suggested that Gordon was not a homosexual but rather his awkwardness with women was due to Asperger syndrome which made it extremely difficult for him to express his feelings for women properly 219 Charity work edit nbsp Gordon Gardens GravesendGordon returned to Britain and commanded the Royal Engineers project around Gravesend Kent to erect forts for the defense of the River Thames After he arrived in Britain Gordon announced to the press that he did not want to board the tram of the world and asked to be left alone 59 Gordon disapproved of the forts he was building at the mouth of Thames to guard against a possible French invasion regarding them as expensive and useless 220 When the Duke of Cambridge the Army s commander visited one of the forts under construction and praised Gordon for his work he received the reply I had nothing to do with it sir it was built regardless of my opinion and in fact I entirely disapprove of its arrangement and position 220 Gordon s father was against his son working in Chinese service an estrangement that had not been settled at the time of his death and Gordon felt immense guilt that his father had died before they were reconciled 220 Following the death of his father he undertook extensive social work in Gravesend feeding homeless boys whom he found begging on the street while also attempting to find them homes and jobs 209 Many of the scuttlers as Gordon fondly called the homeless boys were lodged at his own home the Fort House 221 Together with Mrs Sarah Mackley his housekeeper he adapted two rooms at Fort House to serve as classrooms and basic needs resource rooms for boys living on the streets He also rented a small house in East Terrace for working boys to be taught for free 222 Gordon s closest friends were a couple Frederick and Octavia Freese whose son Edward became Gordon s surrogate son 223 Persuaded by his friends in 1867 he became a trustee for the local Ragged school committee 13 Before 1870 there was no universal school system in Britain and the Ragged Schools were a network of privately funded schools that gave a free education to children whose parents were too poor to afford the school fees 223 Outside of the Fort House were graffito written on the wall by one of the evidently less educated boys that read God Bless the Kernel 208 Another scuttler later recalled He made me feel first of all the meaning of the phrase the Goodness of God Goodness become to me through Gordon the most desirable of ideas We were under the spell of Gordon s personality We lived in the magic of his mystery enchanted 208 Octavia Freese published a book in 1894 about his charity work and Christian beliefs 224 The council subsequently acquired the gardens of his official residence Fort House now a museum for the town 225 His favourite books were The Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis Christ Mystical by Joseph Hall and the poem The Dream of Gerontius by John Henry Newman 226 Every year Gordon gave away about 90 of his annual income of 3 000 equivalent to 351 000 in 2021 to charity 128 Gordon did not enjoy his celebrity status and though extremely charismatic he only kept a limited circle of friends and found dealing with strangers difficult 55 A colleague recalled that Gordon s time at Gravesend was the most peaceful and happy of his life but Gordon was often bored and constantly asked the War Office for an assignment to somewhere dangerous 208 Gordon often spoke nostalgically of his service in China and wished he could return to that country 227 Memorials edit nbsp Rebuilt Gordon Hall near Haihe River in Tianjin China nbsp The Gordon Hospital in Bloomburg Street London nbsp General Charles George Gordon Statue in Gravesend nbsp Statue in Gordon Reserve Melbourne Australia nbsp Statue of General Gordon on the Victoria Embankment London nbsp General Gordon s Memorial at Queen s Park SouthamptonNews of Gordon s death caused an outpouring of public grief across Britain A memorial service conducted by the Bishop of Newcastle was held at St Paul s Cathedral on 14 March The Lord Mayor of London opened a public subscription to raise funds for a permanent memorial to Gordon this eventually materialised as the Gordon Boys Home now Gordon s School in West End Woking 228 229 Statues were erected in Trafalgar Square London in Chatham Gravesend Melbourne Australia and Khartoum Southampton where Gordon had stayed with his sister Augusta in Rockstone Place before his departure to the Sudan erected a memorial in Porter s Mead now Queen s Park near the town s docks 228 On 16 October 1885 the structure was unveiled it comprises a stone base on which there are four polished red Aberdeen granite columns about twenty feet high The columns are surmounted by carved capitals supporting a cross The pedestal bears the arms of the Gordon clan and of the borough of Southampton and also Gordon s name in Chinese Around the base is an inscription referring to Gordon as a soldier philanthropist and administrator and mentions those parts of the world in which he served closing with a quotation from his last letter to his sisters I am quite happy thank God and like Lawrence I have tried to do my duty 230 The memorial is a Grade II listed building 231 Gordon s memory as well as his work in supervising the town s riverside fortifications is commemorated in Gravesend the embankment of the Riverside Leisure Area is known as the Gordon Promenade while Khartoum Place lies just to the south Located in the town centre of his birthplace of Woolwich is General Gordon Square formerly known as General Gordon Place until a major urban landscaped area was developed and the road name changed In addition one of the first Woolwich Free Ferry vessels was named Gordon in his memory 232 In 1886 the Western Hospital for Fistula Piles and other Diseases of the Rectum at 278 Vauxhall Bridge Road and backing onto Vincent Square London 233 was renamed in honour of Gordon It underwent a series of name changes until 1941 when it moved to its current location in Bloomburg Street Westminster as the Gordon Hospital 234 Shut for the closing years of World War II it reopened in 1947 under the same name but serving as a psychiatric unit operated by the Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust 235 In 1888 a statue of General Gordon by Hamo Thornycroft was erected in Trafalgar Square London exactly halfway between the two fountains It was removed in 1943 In a House of Commons speech on 5 May 1948 then opposition leader Winston Churchill spoke out in favour of the statue s return to its original location Is the right honorable Gentleman the Minister of Works aware that General Gordon was not only a military commander who gave his life for his country but in addition was considered very widely throughout this country as a model of a Christian hero and that very many cherished ideals are associated with his name Would not the right honorable Gentleman consider whether this statue might not receive special consideration General Gordon was a figure outside and above the ranks of military and naval commanders However in 1953 the statue minus a large slice of its pedestal was reinstalled on the Victoria Embankment in front of the newly built Ministry of Defence main buildings 236 An identical statue by Thornycroft but with the pedestal intact is located in a small park called Gordon Reserve near Parliament House in Melbourne Australia 237 The Corps of Royal Engineers Gordon s own Corps commissioned a statue of Gordon on a camel It was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1890 and then erected in Brompton Barracks Chatham the home of the Royal School of Military Engineering where it still stands 238 Much later a second casting was made In 1902 it was placed at the junction of St Martin s Lane and Charing Cross Road in London In 1904 it was moved to Khartoum where it stood at the intersection of Gordon Avenue and Victoria Avenue 200 metres south of the new palace that had been built in 1899 It was removed in 1958 shortly after the Sudan became independent This is the figure which since April 1959 stands at the Gordon s School in Woking 239 Gordon s Tomb in fact a cenotaph which was carved by Frederick William Pomeroy lies in St Paul s Cathedral London 240 241 The Church Missionary Society CMS work in Sudan was undertaken under the name of the Gordon Memorial Mission This was a very evangelical branch of CMS and was able to start work in Sudan in 1900 as soon as the Anglo Egyptian Condominium took control after the fall of Khartoum in 1899 In 1885 at a meeting in London 3 000 were allocated to a Gordon Memorial Mission in Sudan 242 In the Presidential Palace in Khartoum built in 1899 in the west wing on the ground floor there was at least until 1936 a stone slab against the wall on the left side of the main corridor when coming from the main entrance with the text Charles George Gordon died 26 Jan 1885 on the spot where Gordon was killed at the foot of the stairs in the old Governor General s Palace built around 1850 243 A memorial plaque was still present as of 2014 244 Media portrayals and legacy editCharlton Heston played Gordon in the 1966 epic film Khartoum which deals with the siege of Khartoum Laurence Olivier played Muhammad Ahmad 245 The British historian Alex von Tunzelmann criticised the film for portraying Gordon and the Mahdi regularly meeting and as freres ennemis though she added that it is true that Gordon and the Mahdi did exchange letters 246 For the six months after the British public learned of Gordon s death newspapers and journals published hundreds of articles celebrating Gordon as a saint 172 The American historian Cynthia Behrman wrote that the articles all commented upon Gordon s religious faith his skill with native peoples his fearlessness in the face of danger a recurrent motif is Gordon s habit of leading his troops into battle armed with no more than a rattan cane his honor his resourcefulness his graciousness to subordinates his impatience with cant and hypocrisy his hatred of glory and honors his dislike of lionization and social rewards and on and on One begins to wonder whether the man had any faults at all 172 The reading public wanted heroes it wanted to read about one lone Englishmen sacrificing himself for glory honour God and the Empire 247 Such was the popularity of Gordon that the first critical book by a British author was not published until 1908 when Baring by this time raised to the peerage as Viscount Cromer published his autobiography which was notable as the first British book to portray Gordon in an unflattering manner though Lord Cromer also tried to be fair and emphasised what he felt were Gordon s positive as well as his negative traits 248 About the charge that if only Gladstone had listened to Gordon the disaster would have been avoided Cromer wrote that in the course of one month he received five telegrams from Gordon offering his advice each one of which completely contradicted the previous telegram leading Cromer to charge that Gordon was too mercurial a figure to hold command 249 As a young man Winston Churchill shared in the national consensus that Gordon was one of Britain s greatest heroes 192 During a meeting in 1898 in Cairo where Churchill interviewed Baring to gather material for his 1899 book The River War 250 Baring challenged Churchill about his belief that Gordon was a hero After his conversation with Baring Churchill wrote Of course there is no doubt that Gordon as a political figure was absolutely hopeless He was so erratic capricious utterly unreliable his mood changed so often his temper was abominable he was frequently drunk and yet with all that he had a tremendous sense of honour and great abilities 192 Many biographies have been written of Gordon most of them highly hagiographic such as the one by William Butler The British sinologist Demetrius Charles Boulger published a biography of Gordon in 1896 which depicted him as a staunch patriot and a Christian of immense virtue who displayed superhuman courage in the face of danger 251 By contrast Gordon is one of the four subjects discussed critically in Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey one of the first texts about Gordon that portrays some of his characteristics which Strachey regards as weaknesses Notably Strachey emphasises the claims of Charles Chaille Long that Gordon was an alcoholic an accusation dismissed by later writers like Alan Moorehead 252 and Charles Chenevix Trench 253 Strachey a member of the Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals depicted Gordon as a ludicrous figure a bad tempered deranged egomaniac with a nasty habit of knocking out Arabs whenever he was unhappy and who led himself into disaster 254 Even more devastatingly Strachey depicted Gordon as a monumental hypocrite noting the contrast between Gordon s lofty Christian ideas of love compassion charity grace and hope vs a career full of hate war carnage death and destruction 254 Strachey ended his essay on Gordon on a cynical note At any rate it all ended very happily in a glorious slaughter of twenty thousand Arabs a vast addition to the British Empire and a step in the Peerage for Sir Evelyn Baring 248 Long after his death and despite the popularity of Strachey s essay in Eminent Victorians the appeal of the Gordon legend lived on As late as 1933 the French historian Pierre Crabites wrote in his book Gordon le Soudan et l esclavage Gordon the Sudan and Slavery that as a Frenchman the Gordon legend had meant nothing to him when he began researching his book but after examining all of the historical evidence he could not help but admire Gordon who died as he lived a Christian a gentleman and a soldier 248 In the 20th century many British military leaders came to have a critical view of Gordon with Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery writing that Gordon was unfit for independent command mentally unbalanced a fanatic self imposed martyr adding that he should never have been sent to the Sudan and the Gladstone Gordon relationship was a case study in dysfunctional civil military relations 255 In 1953 the British novelist Charles Beatty published a Gordon biography His Country was the World A Study of Gordon of Khartoum which focused on Gordon s religious faith but for the first time noted what a tormented figure Gordon was a man of deeply felt Christian convictions full of guilt and self loathing over his own sinfulness and inability to live up to his own impossibly high standards over what a Christian should be and desperately longing to do something to expiate his sinfulness 256 Like Strachey Beatty found Gordon a ridiculous figure but unlike Strachey who had nothing but contempt for Gordon Beatty s approach was a compassionate one arguing that Gordon s many acts of charity and self sacrifice were attempts to love others since he was unable to love himself 256 Another attempt to debunk Gordon was Anthony Nutting s Gordon Martyr amp Misfit 1966 Nutting s book was noteworthy as the first book to argue that Gordon had a death wish 257 Nutting noted that Gordon had often recklessly exposed himself to Russian fire while fighting in the Crimea and stated he hoped to die in battle against the Russians before leaving for the Crimea 257 On the basis of such statements and actions Nutting argued that Gordon s suicidal courage of going into battle armed only with his rattan cane which so impressed the Victorian public reflected darker desires Nutting made the controversial claim that the basis of Gordon s death wish was that he was gay noting that Gordon never married is not known to have had a relationship with any women and often wished that he had been born a eunuch which strongly suggested that Gordon wished to have no sexual desires at all 257 nbsp Statue of Gordon seated on a camel which stood in front of the palace in Khartoum prior to Sudanese independence in 1956Nutting contended that the conflict between Gordon s devoutly held Christian ideals and his sexuality made Gordon deeply ashamed of himself and he attempted to expiate his wretched sinful nature by seeking a glorious death in battle 257 Behrman wrote that the first part of Nutting s thesis that Gordon had a death wish is generally accepted by historians but the second part that Gordon was homosexual is still the subject of much debate 257 In his Mission to Khartum The Apotheosis of General Gordon 1969 John Marlowe portrays Gordon as a colourful eccentric a soldier of fortune a skilled guerrilla leader a religious crank a minor philanthropist a gadfly buzzing about on the outskirts of public life who would have been no more than a footnote in today s history books had it not been for his mission to Khartoum and the manner of his death which were elevated by the media into a kind of contemporary Passion Play 258 More balanced biographies are Charley Gordon An Eminent Victorian Reassessed 1978 by Charles Chenevix Trench and Gordon The Man Behind the Legend 1993 by John Pollock Mark Urban argued that Gordon s final stand was significant because it was a perversion of the democratic process as he managed to subvert government policy making the beginning of a new era where decision makers had to consider the power of media 259 In Khartoum The Ultimate Imperial Adventure 2005 Michael Asher puts Gordon s works in the Sudan in a broad context Asher concludes He did not save the country from invasion or disaster but among the British heroes of all ages there is perhaps no other who stands out so prominently as an individualist a man ready to die for his principles Here was one man among men who did not do what he was told but what he believed to be right In a world moving inexorably towards conformity it would be well to remember Gordon of Khartoum 260 Gordon also left a legacy in China and Sudan as well two nations where he spent large parts of his career His legacy in China has been influenced by subsequent political developments as the Qing dynasty was overthrown in the Xinhai Revolution and replaced by a republic This eventually led to the Warlord Era and the Chinese Civil War which saw the communists defeat the nationalists and establish control over China Due to many aspects of the Taiping ideology resembling Chinese communism the Taipings are treated sympathetically by Chinese historians who portray them as prototypical communists with Hong Xiuquan foreshadowing Mao As such Gordon s role in suppressing the rebellion has caused his reputation to suffer in China in addition to his role as a general in service of the Manchu dominated Qing government which systematically oppressed the Han Chinese majority 39 No monuments to Gordon exist in China today though the British journalist Rob Stallard noted that the modest Gordon would have no doubt wanted it that way 39 In a 2008 article Stallard argued that Chinese historiography has largely neglected Gordon which Stallard felt was undeserved In the article Stallard pointed to the egalitarianistic attitudes displayed by Gordon towards the Chinese and argued that if Chinese historians paid closer attention to the activities of Gordon in China it would improve Anglo Chinese relations 39 In Sudan Sudanese historians have traditionally focused on the Mahdi and his rebellion with Gordon only being relevant as the enemy general during the Siege of Khartoum and his abolitionist work largely ignored 176 In 1982 a documentary on Gordon s life was written and presented by the actor and historian Robert Hardy entitled Gordon of Khartoum 261 References edit a b Faught p 1 Faught p 2 a b Vetch Robert Hamilton 1890 Gordon Charles George In Stephen Leslie Lee Sidney eds Dictionary of National Biography Vol 22 London Smith Elder amp Co Faught p 3 Faught pp 3 4 Faught pp 4 5 a b Faught p 5 No 21336 The London Gazette 6 July 1852 p 1890 No 21522 The London Gazette 17 February 1854 p 469 Hammond Peter August 1998 General Charles Gordon and the Mahdi Faith Under Fire in the Sudan Reformation Society Archived from the original on 1 December 2017 Retrieved 9 October 2016 a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p Judd Denis General Charles George Gordon The British Empire Retrieved 29 February 2016 a b Faught p 6 a b Charles George Gordon 1833 1885 A Brief Biography Victorianweb org 9 June 2010 Retrieved 11 September 2016 Faught pp 7 8 a b Faught p 11 a b c Faught p 13 a b c Faught p 14 a b Faught p 16 Faught 2008 p 13 No 21909 The London Gazette 4 August 1856 p 2705 Trappe p 567 Tappe E D pp 567 568 Tappe E D p 567 a b Tappe E D p 568 Tappe E D p 569 a b Faught p 18 Faught p 19 No 22246 The London Gazette 5 April 1859 p 1414 Faught pp 19 21 Ch ing China The Taiping Rebellion Archived from the original on 11 December 2007 a b c Faught p 25 Faught p 26 Charles Staveley Worcester Regiment Retrieved 5 March 2016 a b c Platt Part II Order Rising Cao Shuji 2001 Zhongguo Renkou Shi A History of China s Population Shanghai Fudan Daxue Chubanshe pp 455 509 a b c d e Platt Ch 15 a b Faught p 28 a b c Faught p 29 a b c d e f g h i Stallard Robert Summer 2008 Chinese Gordon China Eye Archived from the original on 23 January 2018 Retrieved 23 February 2016 Farwall 1985 p 107 Faught p 30 a b c d e f g h Urban 2005 p 154 Urban 2005 p 153 Urban 2005 pp 154 155 a b c Urban 2005 p 155 a b c d e Urban 2005 p 156 Faught p 31 Faught pp 31 32 Urban 2005 pp 156 157 a b c d e f g h i j k Urban 2005 p 157 a b c d Faught p 33 Farwall 1985 p 111 Urban 2005 pp 157 158 Pollock 1993 p 84 85 a b c d e f g Urban 2005 p 158 No 22820 The London Gazette 16 February 1864 p 724 No 22919 The London Gazette 9 December 1864 p 6483 Faught p 41 a b c d Tappe E D p 570 a b Tappe 1957 p 571 a b Tappe 1957 p 572 No 23851 The London Gazette 23 April 1872 p 2022 Goldschmidt amp Davidson p 188 a b c d e f g h Urban 2005 p 163 a b Cleveland amp Bunton p 95 a b Cleveland amp Bunton p 97 Goldschmidt amp Davidson p 189 Karsh amp Karsh p 45 Karsh amp Karsh p 45 a b c d e Urban 2005 p 164 a b c Perry 2005 p 178 a b Farwall p 116 a b c d e f g Urban 2005 p 162 Galbraith John p 371 a b Faught p 46 Farwall 1985 pp 117 118 a b Urban 2005 pp 162 163 Faught p 47 a b c d Faught p 49 a b Faught p 48 a b c Faught p 51 Faught pp 48 51 Faught pp 51 52 Moore Harell 1998 Farwell 1985 p 118 Farwell 1985 p 119 Galbraith John p 375 Galbraith John p 376 Galbraith John p 377 Sudan World Statesmen Retrieved 5 March 2016 a b Perry 2005 p 172 Flint 1977 pp 96 98 a b Faught p 58 a b Faught p 59 Urban 2005 p 161 Urban 2005 pp 161 162 Egypt World Statesmen Retrieved 5 March 2016 a b Faught p 60 Faught pp 60 61 Faught p 61 Ellens 2013 p 121 MacGregor Hastie 1985 p 26 Barnes Reginald Brown Charles 1885 Charles George Gordon A Sketch Macmillan Barnes 1885 p 1 a b Galbraith John p 380 a b Galbraith John p 382 a b Hsu 1964 p 147 Hsu 1964 p 148 Hsu 1964 p 150 Hsu 1964 pp 153 154 Hsu 1964 pp 156 157 Hsu 1964 pp 157 158 a b Hsu 1964 p 159 Hsu 1964 p 160 a b Hsu 1964 p 161 Hsu 1964 p 165 Hsu 1964 p 166 Faught pp 68 69 a b c d e f Faught p 69 Galbraith John p 384 Vallee de Mai Nature Preserve Atlas Obsura 17 September 2011 Retrieved 29 November 2015 No 25097 The London Gazette 21 April 1882 p 1787 General Charles Chinese Gordon Reveals He is Going to Palestine SMF Primary Source Documents Shapell Manuscript Foundation Archived from the original on 5 July 2013 a b Urban 2005 p 165 a b Barnhart 2007 p 292 Gordon Charles George 1884 Reflections in Palestine London Macmillan amp Co Faught p 73 a b Mersh Paul 11 May 2016 Charles Gordon s Charitable Works An Appreciation The Victorian Web Retrieved 18 July 2016 Ewans 2002 p 45 a b Liben 1995 Farwall 1985 p 125 The Battle of Tel el Kebir National Archives Retrieved 5 March 2016 a b c d Perry 2005 p 174 a b Urban 2005 p 166 Butler 2007 p 91 Urban 2005 pp 165 166 Urban 2005 pp 166 167 a b Urban 2005 p 167 Urban 2005 pp 167 168 a b Urban 2005 p 168 Urban 2005 pp 168 169 Urban 2005 pp 167 169 Urban 2005 pp 169 170 Faught 2008 pp 79 80 Urban 2005 p 170 a b c d e f g Perry 2005 p 176 Perry 2005 p 175 a b c d Urban 2005 p 172 a b Faught 2008 p 84 Beresford pp 102 103 a b Perry 2005 p 173 a b Perry 2005 pp 176 177 a b Urban 2005 p 173 a b Urban 2005 p 174 Perry 2005 p 180 Perry 2005 p 179 Intended burning of Berber and surrender of Soudan The Mercury Hobart 23 September 1884 p 2 col H Retrieved 5 March 2016 a b c d Urban 2005 p 175 Cuhaj 2009 pp 1069 1070 a b c d e f g h i j k l m Urban 2005 p 178 a b Perry 2005 p 177 a b Perry 2005 pp 177 178 Urban 2005 p 176 Perry 2005 pp 179 180 a b c d e Perry 2005 p 180 a b c d e Perry 2005 p 181 a b Perry 2005 p 177 a b c Perry 2005 p 182 Urban 2005 p 179 Perry 2005 pp 180 181 a b c Faught p 91 a b c d Behrman 1971 p 50 Behrman 1971 p 49 a b c d e f Perry 2005 p 189 a b Perry 2005 p 184 a b Faught p x a b Hickman Kennedy 18 March 2015 Mahdist War Siege of Khartoum About education Archived from the original on 4 July 2016 Retrieved 18 July 2016 Perry 2005 p 193 Urban 2005 pp 178 179 a b Urban 2005 p 179 a b Pakenham 1991 p 268 a b c Perry 2005 p 191 Pakenham 1991 p 268 Allen 1941 pp 327 334 Perry 2005 pp 192 193 Neufeld 1899 Appendix II pp 332 337 Latimer 1903 Slatin 1922 pp 206 207 a b c Pakenham 1991 p 272 Gordon Charles George 1833 1885 Major General National Archives Retrieved 5 March 2016 a b c d Urban 2005 p 180 a b c d Urban 2005 p 181 Perry 2005 p 264 Urban 2005 p 196 Green David 22 October 2015 A Self declared Pasha and African Explorer Is Killed Haaretz Retrieved 9 October 2016 Urban 2005 p 195 Gordon Michelle Viewing Violence in the British Empire Images of Atrocity from the Battle of Omdurman 1898 Journal of Perpetrator Research 2 2 2019 p 81 Retrieved December 23 2020 The Guardian Research department 2011 21 February 1899 Treatment of the Mahdi s body condemned The Guardian Retrieved December 23 2020 Nicoll Fergus and Nusairi Osman last updated 2020 Finial of the Mahdi s qubba Making African Connections Retrieved December 23 2020 Moorehead Alan The White Nile Hamish Hamilton 1971 p 335 Urban 2005 p 194 Perry 2005 pp 172 173 Chenevix Trench 1978 p 128 Colley Linda 2 September 2011 Ghosts of Empire by Kwasi Kwarteng review The Guardian Retrieved 3 September 2011 a b Farwall p 114 a b Britain s colonial adventures The truth about Gordon of Khartoum The Independent 11 May 2006 Retrieved 11 October 2023 Jones 2014 a b c d e Faught p 40 a b Urban 2005 p 159 Urban 2005 pp 158 159 Urban p 158 Urban 2005 pp 158 308 Farwell 1985 pp 103 amp 114 Last Stands Custer General Gordon and Being a Christian Warrior Speculative Faith 2 July 2021 Retrieved 10 February 2022 Nutting 1967 p 319 Farwell 1985 p 114 a b Faught p 7 Hammond Peter August 1998 General Charles Gordon and the Mahdi Reformation Society Archived from the original on 1 December 2017 Retrieved 9 October 2016 Mersh Paul August 2000 Did General Charles Gordon Have Aspergers Syndrome The Victorian Web Retrieved 18 July 2016 a b c Faught p 36 Faught p 39 General Gordon Discover Gravesham Retrieved 5 May 2021 a b Faught p 39 Freese Octavia 1894 More about Gordon by One who Knew Him Well London Richard Bentley and Son General Gordon Discover Gravesham Retrieved 13 March 2016 Faught p 38 Faught pp 40 41 a b Taylor 2007 pp 83 92 Gordon s School Gordons surrey sch uk Retrieved 27 January 2013 Grant 1885 p 146 Historic England Monument to General Gordon 1302093 National Heritage List for England Retrieved 13 May 2012 Rogers Robert Woolwich Ferry The Newham Story Archived from the original on 19 August 2014 Retrieved 27 August 2012 Gordon Hospital London The National Archives Retrieved 4 October 2018 AIM25 collection description Gordon Hospital Vincent Ward Ebury Ward Gerrard Ward CNWL NHS www cnwl nhs uk Archived from the original on 5 October 2018 Retrieved 4 October 2018 Statue of General Gordon Victoria Embankment Gardens National Archives Retrieved 5 March 2016 General Charles Gordon Memorial E Melbourne Retrieved 5 March 2016 Memorial to General Gordon Brompton Barracks Gillingham British listed buildings Retrieved 5 March 2016 The Statue Gordon s School Archived from the original on 6 March 2016 Retrieved 5 March 2016 Tomb of General Gordon by Frederick William Pomeroy 1857 1924 The Victorian Web Retrieved 5 March 2016 Memorials of St Paul s Cathedral Sinclair W p 460 London Chapman amp Hall Ltd 1909 Warburg 2013 Sudan Khartoum A cornor i e corner in palace hall Tablet indicates where General Gordon was killed Jan 25 1885 Library of Congress Retrieved 5 March 2016 Timberlake Ian A soldier named Gordon returns to Khartoum yahoonews Retrieved 22 November 2023 Khartoum at IMDb nbsp Tunzelmann Alex von 12 November 2009 Khartoum blackface Olivier scrapes the bottom of some macabre barrels The Guardian Retrieved 18 July 2016 Messenger 2001 p 195 a b c Behrman 1971 p 55 Behrman 1971 p 53 Churchill Winston Sir 1899 The River War New York Carroll amp Graf ISBN 0 7867 0751 8 a href Template Cite book html title Template Cite book cite book a CS1 maint multiple names authors list link Behrman 1971 p 51 Moorehead 1960 p 179 Chenevix Trench 1978 p 95 a b Urban 2005 p 183 Urban 2005 p 182 a b Behrman 1971 p 56 a b c d e Behrman 1971 p 57 Marlowe 1969 pp 1 134 Urban 2005 p 181 Asher 2005 p 413 Gordon of Khartoum 1982 British Film Institute Archived from the original on 8 November 2016 Retrieved 7 February 2023 Sources editAllen Bernard M October 1941 How Khartoum Fell Journal of the Royal African Society 40 161 327 334 JSTOR 717439 Asher Michael 2005 Khartoum The Ultimate Imperial Adventure Penguin ISBN 978 0 14 025855 4 Barnes Reginald 1885 Charles George Gordon A Sketch London Macmillan amp Co Barnhart David 2007 Living in the Signs of the Times Maitland Xulon Press ISBN 978 1 60477 052 0 Behrman Cynthia 1971 The After Life of General Gordon Albion 3 2 47 61 doi 10 2307 4048413 JSTOR 4048413 Beresford John 1936 Storm and Peace London Cobden Sanderson Butler Daniel Allen 2007 First Jihad Khartoum and the Dawn of Militant Islam Casemate ISBN 978 1 932033 54 0 Chenevix Trench Charles 1978 Charley Gordon An Eminent Victorian Reassessed London Allen Lane ISBN 0 7139 0895 5 Cleveland William Bunton Martin 2009 A History of the Middle East Boulder Westview Press ISBN 978 0 8133 4833 9 Cuhaj George S ed 2009 Standard Catalog of World Paper Money Specialized Issues 11 ed Krause ISBN 978 1 4402 0450 0 Ellens J Harold 2013 Winning Revolutions The Psychosocial Dynamics of Revolts for Freedom Fairness and Rights ABC CLIO ISBN 978 1 4408 0373 4 Ewans Martin 2002 European Atrocity African Catastrophe Leopold II the Congo Free State and its Aftermath Routledge ISBN 978 0 7007 1589 3 Farwall Bryon 1985 Eminent Victorian Soldiers Seekers of Glory W W Norton New York ISBN 0 393 30533 3 Faught C Brad 2008 Gordon Victorian Hero Dulles Potomac ISBN 978 1 59797 145 4 Flint John 1978 The Cambridge History of Africa Vol 5 Cambridge University Press ISBN 978 0 521 20701 0 Galbraith John June 1971 Gordon Mackinnon and Leopold The Scramble for Africa 1876 84 Victorian Studies Vol 14 no 4 pp 369 388 JSTOR 3825957 Goldschmidt Arthur Davidson Lawrence 2006 A Concise History of the Middle East Boulder Westview Press ISBN 978 0 8133 4275 7 Grant James 1885 Cassell s history of the war in the Soudan Cassell Hsu Immanuel May 1964 Gordon in China 1880 Pacific Historical Review Vol 33 no 2 pp 147 166 JSTOR 3636593 Karsh Efraim Karsh Inari 1999 Empires of the Sand The Struggle for Mastery in the Middle East 1789 1923 Cambridge Harvard University Press ISBN 978 0 674 00541 9 Jones M 2014 National Hero and Very Queer Fish Empire Sexuality and the British Remembrance of General Gordon 1918 72 Twentieth Century British History 26 2 175 202 doi 10 1093 tcbh hwu050 ISSN 0955 2359 PMID 26411064 Latimer E W 1895 Gordon and the Mahdi Europe in Africa in the Nineteenth Century PDF 4th ed Chicago A C McClurg Liben Paul H August 1995 Murder in the Sudan First Things Retrieved 4 September 2018 MacGregor Hastie Roy 1985 Never to be Taken Alive A Biography of General Gordon Sidgwick amp Jackson ISBN 0 283 99184 4 Marlowe John 1968 Mission to Khartum Apotheosis of General Gordon Littlehampton ISBN 978 0 575 00247 0 Messenger Charles 2001 Reader s Guide to Military History Routledge ISBN 978 1 57958 241 8 Monick S December 1985 The Political Martyr General Gordon and the Fall of Kartum Military History Journal South African Military History Society 6 6 Retrieved 4 September 2018 Moorehead Alan 1960 The White Nile London Hamish Hamilton Moore Harell Alice 1998 Slave trade in the Sudan in the nineteenth century and its suppression in the years 1877 80 Middle Eastern Studies 34 2 113 128 doi 10 1080 00263209808701225 ISSN 0026 3206 Neufeld Charles 1899 A Prisoner of the Khaleefa London Chapman amp Hall Nutting Anthony 1967 Gordon Martyr and Misfit Reprint Society Pakenham T 1991 The Scramble for Africa 1876 1912 Random House ISBN 978 0 349 10449 2 Perry James 2005 Arrogant Armies Great Military Disasters and the Generals Behind Them Edison Castle Books ISBN 978 0 7858 2023 9 Platt Stephen R 2012 Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom China the West and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War Knopf ISBN 978 0 307 95759 7 Pollock John 1993 Gordon The Man Behind the Legend London Constable ISBN 0 09 468560 6 Slatin R 1922 Fire and Sword in the Sudan London Edward Arnold Sparrow Gerald 1962 Gordon Mandarin and Pasha London Jarrolds Strachey Lytton 1988 1918 Eminent Victorians Illustrated ed London Bloomsbury ISBN 0 7475 0218 8 Tappe Eric June 1957 General Gordon in Rumania The Slavonic and East European Review Vol 35 no 85 pp 566 572 JSTOR 4204859 Taylor Miles 2007 Southampton Gateway to the British Empire I B Tauris ISBN 978 1 84511 032 1 Urban Mark 2005 Generals Ten British Commanders Who Shaped The Modern World London Faber and Faber ISBN 978 0 571 22487 6 Warburg Gabriel 2013 Sudan Under Wingate Administration in the Anglo Egyptian Sudan 1899 1916 Routledge ISBN 978 1 135 15725 8 Further reading editElton Godfrey Lord 1954 General Gordon London Collins a href Template Cite book html title Template Cite book cite book a CS1 maint multiple names authors list link Gillmeister Heiner 1996 The Maloja Mystery or the Case of the Living Pictures ACD The Journal of the Arthur Conan Doyle Society 7 53 69 Hill George Birkbeck 1881 Colonel Gordon in Central Africa 1874 1879 London Thomas De La Rue and Co Smith George Barnett 1896 General Gordon The Christian Soldier and Hero London S W Partridge amp Co Vetch Robert Hamilton ed 1900 Gordon s Campaigns in China by Himself with an Introduction and Short Account of the Tai Ping Rebellion by Colonel R H Vetch C B London Chapman and Hall White Adam 1991 Hamo Thornycroft amp the Martyr General Leeds The Henry Moore Centre for the Study of Sculpture ISBN 978 0 901981 47 9 Wortham Hugh Evelyn 1933 Gordon An Intimate Portrait London Harrap Published as Chinese Gordon in USA by Little Brown and Co External links edit nbsp Wikimedia Commons has media related to Charles George Gordon category nbsp Wikiquote has quotations related to Charles George Gordon Chinese Gordon on the Soudan Gordon s famous interview to the Pall Mall Gazette 1884 Gordon s tactics an alternative view analysis of Gordon s war strategy by Gary Brecher The Journals of Major Gen C G Gordon C B at Kartoum Project Gutenberg Newspaper clippings about Charles George Gordon in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW Material on Major General Charles Gordon held at Churchill Archives CentreGovernment officesPreceded byAbdallahi ibn Muhammad as Mahdi of Sudan Interim Governor General of the Sudan1880 1885 Succeeded byMahdist State Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Charles George Gordon amp oldid 1186507569, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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