Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [91]
He was a very singular man. Although he was the ninth child of a general and his body had worn a British military uniform for nearly forty years, his head buzzed with metaphysical abstractions. He had no taste for money (in fact, he demanded his salary be reduced). He had no taste for women. He had no taste for comfort. His religious beliefs having convinced him of an afterlife, he also seems to have had an authentic death-wish. He had used a rather less testing time, in command of the Royal Engineers detachment in Mauritius, to work out the location of the Garden of Eden (he could demonstrate conclusively that it was on an island in the Seychelles). He had stalked alone into confrontations with killers on a previous mission in Sudan and shown a maverick wisdom in trying to defuse tension in Basutoland. In China he had led a rag-bag army which extinguished a rebellion. In South Africa he inspected his troops in a shabby frock coat and top hat. He had calculated the precise positions in the Holy Land of the crucifixion and burial of Christ. He was, in short, courageous, self-reliant and slightly loopy. ‘Much as I like and respect him,’ said a friend who found his mood-swings incomprehensible, ‘I must say, he is not all there.’
This strange man had been on his way to take up an appointment in the king of the Belgians’ appalling slave colony of the Congo when his ship stopped in Southampton. News of his presence in England reached the great newspaperman W. T. Stead, a journalistic genius lucky enough to live at a time when his own ambition ran in step with the growing expectations of the British people. Stead had the three essential requirements for a successful journalist: a knack for the vivid sentence, an unshakeable conviction that he was right, and an intuitive understanding of public feeling. He also had a healthy suspicion of established authority and a lively social conscience. (His greatest coup came in July 1885, with a series of still horrifying articles in which he exposed the existence of under-age brothels in London: newspaper vendors besieged the Pall Mall Gazette offices, clamouring for more copies, after which parliament raised the age of consent from thirteen to sixteen.) Stead recognized in the ascetic, visionary, independent-minded Gordon an imperial hero and took himself down to Southampton to conduct an interview. The problem of the moment was called the Mahdi, a man eleven years younger than Charles Gordon, claiming an even closer relationship with God. The Mahdi swore he was God’s elect, ‘the chosen one’, who would lead the people of Sudan in a holy war to throw off the exploitative rule of the Egyptians and create a society of equals (apart from their slaves, of course). The problem for London was that, since the British ran Egypt, the Mahdi’s uprising was also a revolt against the empire. In November 1883, an army under the command of Colonel William Hicks (‘Hicks Pasha’) was dispatched to deal with the revolt. The force contained a handful of European officers and thousands of poorly trained and largely useless local recruits. When the Mahdists’ green banners swept down on them they were wiped out. Delirious with belief in the Mahdi’s genius, some of his followers now began to drink the water in which he had washed, convinced that it would cure their illnesses. This was the sort of enemy to delight any decent journalist, and Stead was one of the best. When he met Gordon, the Sudan crisis was the focus of his interview.
Stead was convinced he had found the man to assert British values against fundamentalist jihad.* Gordon was politic enough in conversation with the reporter to stress that he did not want to embarrass the British government. His only concern, he claimed, was the welfare of the local people, for whom he had developed a genuine affection during earlier service in the country in the 1870s. ‘The Soudanese