January 26, 1885: The Battle of Khartoum is fought. It becomes one of the great "last stands" in military history, and a rare example of a man becoming a legend in defeat.
Charles George Gordon was born on January 28, 1833, in Woolwich, then in Kent, now a part of South-East London. He saw action in the Crimean War of the 1850s, 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 in 1864, regularly defeating much larger forces. For these accomplishments, he was given the nickname "Chinese Gordon," and honors from both his own country's government and China's.
With British government approval, he entered the service of Isma'il Pasha, the Khedive of Egypt, in 1873, and later became the Governor-General of the Sudan, then a British colony, where he did much to suppress revolts and the local slave trade. He then resigned and returned to Europe in 1880.
Gordon's abrupt mood swings and contradictory advice confirmed the Cabinet's view of him as mercurial and unstable. 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."
Gordon never married, and historians agree on the reason, if not on the cause. He was a "married to his work" type, putting his life into his service, and thus repressing his urges and converting them into patriotism and a religious fervor. It's also been suggested that he had Asperger's syndrome, which made him uncomfortable when talking to women. It has also been theorized -- mostly in books published well after he died -- that he was gay, and thus, with his strong religious beliefs, he had to repress himself so much that martyrdom eventually became a wish.
A serious revolt, the Mahdist War, broke out in the Sudan, led by Muhammad Ahmad bin Abdullah bin Fahal, a Muslim religious leader who claimed to be the Mahdi: A prominent figure who is believed to appear at the End of Time, to rid the world of evil and injustice. He is said to be a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, who will appear shortly before the Prophet ʿĪsā (the Muslim name for Jesus, who is honored in Islam, as is his mother, Mary), and will lead the Muslims to rule the entire world. That's the mythology, anyway. Muhammad Ahmad played on this to gain many followers.
In early 1884, Gordon was sent to the Sudanese capital of 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. The Mahdi requested Gordon to convert to Islam and join him, which Gordon declined.
Besieged by the Mahdi's forces, Gordon organized a citywide defense that lasted for almost a year (the Siege of Khartoum beginning on March 13, 1884), and gained him the admiration of the British public, but not of the government, led by Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone, who 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.
Timing is everything: It arrived 2 days after the city had fallen and Gordon had been killed. The Mahdi had given strict orders not to kill Gordon, but they disobeyed.
His death, at the age of 51, was romanticized in General Gordon's Last Stand, a popular painting produced in 1893 by George William Joy. It showed Gordon wearing 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 Mahdi's followers, the Ansar. 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.
In the hours following Gordon's death, an estimated 10,000 civilians and members of the garrison were killed in Khartoum. 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 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. As late as 1901, on the anniversary of Gordon's death, The Times (of London) wrote in a leader (an editorial) that Gordon was "that solitary figure holding aloft the flag of England in the face of the dark hordes of Islam." (And you thought the American media was loaded following 9/11. The Battle of Khartoum was more than 3 "9/11s.") For the psyche of Victorian England, used to feeling higher than America ever has, this was Pearl Harbor, the JFK assassination, and 9/11 all wrapped up into one.
The failure to rescue 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. Critics said Gladstone had neglected military affairs, and had not acted promptly enough to save the besieged Gordon. Critics called him "Judas," and inverted his acronym, "G.O.M." (for "Grand Old Man"), to "M.O.G." (for "Murderer of Gordon"). Stones were thrown at the Prime Minister's official residence at 10 Downing Street in London.
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."
Evelyn Baring, the 1st Earl of Cromer, and then the Consul-General of Egypt, was among the British officials who had deeply disliked Gordon. Nevertheless, he immediately recognized the symbolism of his death: Because of the "national hysteria" caused by it, saying anything critical about him at present would be equal to questioning Christianity.
Gladstone bowed to reality and resigned on June 9, 1885. The Conservative Party's Leader, Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, formed the new government. Despite the popular demand to "avenge Gordon," Lord Salisbury 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. The Conservatives lost an election later in the year, and Salisbury ended up resigning on January 28, 1886. Gladstone was back in, but his government split over the Irish Home Rule question, and Salisbury was back 6 months later.
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. But Muhammad Ahmad was not there to preside over most of it. Nature had done what the combined might of the British Empire at its peak could not: "The Mahdi" died on June 21, from typhus, at 41. In 1898, General Herbert Kitchener led Britain to victory in the Battle of Omdurman, ending the Mahdist State, and, in the minds of many "avenging Gordon."
Sudan achieved independence in 1956, and has been ruled by dictatorships for most of its history, including an Islamic one of which Muhammad Ahmad would surely have approved.
Charlton Heston played Gordon in the 1966 film Khartoum. The very English Laurence Olivier played a whitewashed version of Muhammad Ahmad, perhaps a final revenge.
With the passage of time, and his no longer being considered an untouchable figure, there came to be a joke about Gordon. Every day, a man would walk his son to school, passing a statue of Gordon on horseback. The first time, the father told the son Gordon's story. Passing the statue every day, the son would occasionally ask the father to again tell him the story of Gordon's heroism.
One day, during their walk, the son said, "Father, I have a question about Gordon. Who is that silly man riding him?"
*
January 26, 1885 was a Monday. Baseball and football were out of season. Hockey was not yet organized. And basketball had not yet been invented. So there were no scores on this historic day.
No comments:
Post a Comment