Chinese Gordon: "Honour not Honours"

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

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