Eminent Victorians, Lytton Strachey [books to improve english TXT] 📗

he recognised the road he was on and its destination; but there was still time to turn back.

It was he who had insisted upon the withdrawal of the English army from the Eastern Sudan. The imperialists were sadly disappointed. They had supposed that the old lion had gone to sleep, and suddenly he had come out of his lair, and was roaring. All their hopes now centred upon Khartoum. General Gordon was cut off; he was surrounded, he was in danger; he must be relieved. A British force must be sent to save him. But Mr. Gladstone was not to be caught napping a second time. When the agitation rose, when popular sentiment was deeply stirred, when the country, the Press, the Sovereign herself, declared that the national honour was involved with the fate of General Gordon, Mr. Gladstone remained immovable. Others might picture the triumphant rescue of a Christian hero from the clutches of heathen savages; before his eyes was the vision of battle, murder, and sudden death, the horrors of defeat and victory, the slaughter and the anguish of thousands, the violence of military domination, the enslavement of a people.

The invasion of the Sudan, he had flashed out in the House of Commons, would be a war of conquest against a people struggling to be free. “Yes, those people are struggling to be free, and they are rightly struggling to be free.” Mr. Gladstone⁠—it was one of his old-fashioned simplicities⁠—believed in liberty. If, indeed, it should turn out to be the fact that General Gordon was in serious danger, then, no doubt, it would be necessary to send a relief expedition to Khartoum. But, he could see no sufficient reason to believe that it was the fact. Communications, it was true, had been interrupted between Khartoum and Cairo, but no news was not necessarily bad news, and the little information that had come through from General Gordon seemed to indicate that he could hold out for months. So his agile mind worked, spinning its familiar web of possibilities and contingencies and fine distinctions. General Gordon, he was convinced, might be hemmed in, but he was not surrounded. Surely, it was the duty of the government to take no rash step, but to consider and to inquire, and, when it acted, to act upon reasonable conviction. And then, there was another question. If it was true⁠—and he believed it was true⁠—that General Gordon’s line of retreat was open, why did not General Gordon use it?

Perhaps he might be unable to withdraw the Egyptian garrison, but it was not for the sake of the Egyptian garrison that the relief expedition was proposed; it was simply and solely to secure the personal safety of General Gordon. And General Gordon had it in his power to secure his personal safety himself; and he refused to do so; he lingered on in Khartoum, deliberately, wilfully, in defiance of the obvious wishes of his superiors. Oh! it was perfectly clear what General Gordon was doing: he was trying to force the hand of the English Government. He was hoping that if he only remained long enough at Khartoum, he would oblige the English Government to send an army into the Sudan which should smash up the Mahdi. That, then, was General Gordon’s calculation! Well, General Gordon would learn that he had made a mistake. Who was he that he should dare to imagine that he could impose his will upon Mr. Gladstone? The old man’s eyes glared. If it came to a struggle between them⁠—well, they should see! As the weeks passed, the strange situation grew tenser. It was like some silent deadly game of bluff. And who knows what was passing in the obscure depths of that terrifying spirit? What mysterious mixture of remorse, rage, and jealousy? Who was it that was ultimately responsible for sending General Gordon to Khartoum? But then, what did that matter? Why did not the man come back? He was a Christian hero, wasn’t he? Were there no other Christian heroes in the world? A Christian hero! Let him wait until the Mahdi’s ring was really round him, until the Mahdi’s spear was really about to fall! That would be the test of heroism! If he slipped back then, with his tail between his legs⁠—! The world would judge.

One of the last telegrams sent by Gordon before the wire was cut seemed to support exactly Mr. Gladstone’s diagnosis of the case. He told Sir Evelyn Baring that, since the government refused to send either an expedition or Zobeir, he would “consider himself free to act according to circumstances.” “Eventually,” he said, “you will be forced to smash up the Mahdi,” and he declared that if the government persisted in its present line of conduct, it would be branded with an “indelible disgrace.” The message was made public, and it happened that Mr. Gladstone saw it for the first time in a newspaper, during a country visit. Another of the guests, who was in the room at the moment, thus describes the scene: “He took up the paper, his eye instantly fell on the telegram, and he read it through. As he read, his face hardened and whitened, the eyes burned as I have seen them once or twice in the House of Commons when he was angered⁠—burned with a deep fire, as if they would have consumed the sheet on which Gordon’s message was printed, or as if Gordon’s words had burned into his soul, which was looking out in wrath and flame. He said not a word. For perhaps two or three minutes he sat still, his face all the while like the face you may read of in Milton⁠—like none other I ever saw. Then he rose, still without a word, and was seen no more that morning.”

It is curious that Gordon himself never understood the part that Mr. Gladstone was playing in his destiny. His Khartoum Journals put this beyond a doubt. Except for one or two slight and jocular references