Gordon

Gordon by Roger Pocock (1912)

Roger Pocock's Gordon is a biographical sketch of Charles George Gordon, tracing his career from an early act of personal courage to his death at Khartoum and the posthumous recognition he received from Britain and its empire. The account opens with an episode from the Crimean War in which a young subaltern displayed fear unbecoming an officer. A slightly senior lieutenant, who proved to be Gordon, invited the man onto the ramparts and walked arm in arm with him, conversing lightly about the weather while enemy fire swept around them, teaching courage by example rather than by rebuke. From this beginning the narrative moves to Gordon's arrival at Shanghai, where he took command of the Ever Victorious Army, a force of four thousand Chinese soldiers with white officers that had consistently failed against the Taiping rebels. The rebels numbered one and a half million, held cities of immense strength, and threatened British merchants. Gordon's tactical innovation was to use steamers on the canals that laced the flat country, allowing him to bypass frontal assaults and appear unexpectedly in an enemy's rear, cutting supply lines before battering down walls with artillery and sending storming parties up the rubble. He wept at the slaughter these assaults caused. He captured Taiping prisoners and converted them into soldiers for his own force, and he protected white adventurers who had fought for the rebels. After his third siege reduced the rebel capital and the Taiping generals surrendered to him on the guarantee of their lives, Li Hung Chang had the generals murdered. Gordon, furious, spent an entire day hunting Li through the streets of Soo Chow with a revolver, but Li concealed himself under matting in a boat until Gordon's anger subsided. Throughout all of this Gordon's personal weapon had been nothing more than a small bamboo cane, which the Chinese called his Magic Wand of Victory. The emperor offered four thousand pounds and various honors, but Gordon returned the decree with a note of refusal, scratched out the inscription on a gold medal and donated it to a charity bazaar, and came home carrying only the unused uniform of the Chinese princedom he had been awarded. Back in England, Gordon performed garrison duty at Gravesend, kept ducks, taught Sunday school, raised slum boys, and distributed charity in the parish. He served briefly as British commissioner on the Danube before Egypt borrowed him in 1874 to serve as viceroy of the equatorial provinces. There his task was to suppress the slave trade, develop prosperity, and raise tax revenue, all against the resistance of corrupt Egyptian officials, a European staff that died of fever, and a population largely at war with the Egyptian government. Riding alone on a swift camel far ahead of his escort, dressed in a gold-laced uniform and carrying no weapon, he compelled obedience by reputation and force of character, cutting off water supplies from tribes that defied him. After five years of effort against the slave trade, against the Egyptian government, and against the British ministry, he judged himself to have failed. In 1884, with Egypt under British supervision, the Mahdi had united the Arabs in a holy war, wiped out an Egyptian army, and thrown the entire Soudan into crisis. The British government decided to withdraw from the Soudan entirely, recognising that the Egyptians left behind would be massacred but choosing to send Gordon alone rather than an army. He was ordered to bring the Egyptians to the coast, and the government then allowed the Arabs to cut off his line of retreat, leaving him isolated in Khartoum. Gordon immediately began evacuating the most vulnerable people, getting some two thousand five hundred women, children, and servants out before the siege closed and eventually sending the Englishmen, Europeans, and forty-five soldiers down the Nile to safety. He himself remained. For nine months he fortified Khartoum with earthworks, planned mines and raids, maintained discipline among starving troops, and kept the Union Jack flying above the palace while he prayed for the relief army he continued to believe his country would send. The army was sent too late. When the city finally fell he led the last fifty men of his garrison and died, the text notes, glad not to have outlived England's honor. In the years that followed, the British army fought back through the desert to reclaim what Gordon's death had cost, and his grave was eventually found as a heap of bloodstained ashes where Khartoum had been. A statue of Gordon now stands in Trafalgar Square, and the account concludes that his truest monument is a new Soudan living in peace under the Union Jack, where slavery has been brought permanently to an end.

By Roger Pocock · First published 1912 · Genre: Biography, Military History, Historical Non-fiction · 1,778 words

First lines

A. D. 1885

During the Crimean war, when our men in the trenches before Sebastopol crowded under their earthworks to escape the Russian fire, one of the subalterns showed fear unbecoming an officer. The young chap meant no harm, but as he had to be taught manners, a lieutenant slightly his senior, invited him up upon the ramparts. There, arm in arm, the two walked up and down, the senior making amusing remarks about the weather, while the storm of lead swept round them, and the Tommies watched horror-struck, expecting both to fall. That officer who gave lessons in courage, was Charles George Gordon.

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biography · historical fiction · military history · Sudan · 19th century · British Empire · adventure · colonial history · political drama · character study · war and conflict · leadership

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