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By Root 1189 0

are very nice people,’ he said, who ‘deserve the sincere compassion and sympathy of all civilized men.’ Yet they were being abandoned to ‘their Turkish and Circassian oppressors’, and ‘they deserve a better fate’. Stead – who like many great journalists combined puritan zeal with low guile – immediately recognized a cause: delivering ‘a better fate’ was the central conviction of all those who believed in the destiny of the British Empire. The Mahdi promised the usual jihadi stuff about a paradise in which no one drank, smoked, danced, clapped their hands or spent too much time with the opposite sex. Gordon was the man to offer something different.

Gladstone’s government was in no mood to send another force up the Nile. But the newly emergent mass media began to behave in a way which has since become tediously familiar. The Pall Mall Gazette bellowed that Gordon must be dispatched to Khartoum and soon the entire herd was mooing. In no time, there were crowds in the streets chanting ‘Gordon Must Go!’ and the government caved in. But he was emphatically not being sent there to bag another colony: Gordon was to go to Khartoum, evacuate all those who wished to leave, and then report back. The Foreign Secretary himself came to Charing Cross station to see him off at the start of his journey, although Gladstone’s secretary was wise enough to spot the risks of sending someone like Gordon to a place where he would be beyond any effective control. ‘He seems to be a half cracked fatalist,’ he reflected, ‘and what can one expect from such a man?’ ‘Half cracked fatalist’ was right. Gordon made his way up the Nile towards Khartoum in a buzz of thoughts, counter-thoughts, flashes of inspiration, second thoughts, third thoughts and fourth thoughts which he fired back to Evelyn Baring in Cairo by telegraph, sometimes at the rate of twenty or thirty a day – a pattern which was to continue until the (rapidly approaching) end of his life. Baring soon decided that the only way to deal with Gordon’s dispatches was to let them pile up, and then to settle down in the evening and attempt to make out what was going on in his head. General Gordon reached Khartoum in the middle of February, declaring that he came without soldiers, but with God on his side, and entered the city promising to leave. Yet soon he was speaking not about evacuation, but about the fact that for Egypt to be secure, ‘the Mahdi must be smashed up’.

In a matter of weeks, however, he was in no position to smash up anyone. He was stuck in Khartoum, surrounded by 30,000 jihadists. His earlier announcement that he would not be staying had had the predictable – if not predicted – effect of ensuring that there was no incentive for anyone to join him. What had begun as an evacuation had turned into a siege. There were occasional negotiations, in one of which the Mahdi’s emissaries invited Gordon to surrender and become a Muslim. The rest of the time, it was a question simply of enduring. The Mahdi aimed to starve the town into surrender. Gordon – in careless disobedience of his orders – lived in hope of a relief column arriving.

But it was not only Gordon who was besieged. So too were Gladstone and his government, for Gordon continued to send his torrent of messages, some of which were published, and the public clamoured for the cabinet to dispatch a force to rescue a national hero. Gladstone hated the idea, but finally gave in when his Secretary for War, Lord Hartington, threatened to resign. General Wolseley was ordered to assemble a relief expedition. ‘It’s funny that a man whom it took one journalist to send should take our only general, two thousand camels, a thousand boats, and ten thousand men to bring back,’ remarked a knowing diplomat. But it was already too late. The expedition took months to make its way towards Khartoum, while inside the town things went from difficult to dreadful. Gordon was virtually alone in his rooms in the palace, scanning the landscape beyond the town through his telescope, praying, reading his Bible and writing his journal on scraps of paper and