Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [94]
News of the catastrophe reached London in the first week of February. The poet and anti-imperialist Wilfrid Scawen Blunt had despised the whole venture, characterizing the rescue force as ‘a mongrel scum, of thieves from Whitechapel and Seven Dials, commanded by young fellows … without beliefs, without traditions, without other principle’, so he was one of the very few people not to see it as a disaster. He said he could ‘not help singing all the way down in the train’ from London to the countryside. For public opinion generally, the news struck like a torrential thunderstorm. By choosing to defend Khartoum, instead of merely evacuating those who wished to leave the city, Gordon had disobeyed his orders and he freely conceded in his diary that if he had been in charge, he would never have employed himself, ‘for I am incorrigible’. As Baring remarked later, ‘A man who habitually consults the Prophet Isaiah when he is in a difficulty is not apt to obey the orders of anyone.’
But Gordon’s wilfulness and disobedience didn’t matter – to the public he was a hero. And more than a hero, a martyr, whose death sanctified the imperial mission. For days crowds gathered at Downing Street in the hope of jeering Gladstone for having failed to send the rescue mission soon enough – the Grand Old Man, or GOM, as he had previously been known, became the MOG – Murderer of Gordon. Queen Victoria wrote a letter in her own hand to Gordon’s sister. ‘That the promises of support were not fulfilled – which I so frequently and so constantly pressed on those who asked him to go – is to me grief inexpressible! Indeed it has made me ill … I do so keenly feel, the stain left upon England, for your dear Brother’s cruel, though heroic fate!’ The composer Sir Edward Elgar planned to write a symphony about him. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote that ‘England stands before the world dripping with blood and daubed with dishonour.’ General Wolseley was said to have taught his dog to growl at the mention of Gladstone’s name. Gordon’s chief advocate in the press, Stead, depicted a saint who had broken off from his military duties during the siege ‘to try to nurse a starving little black baby into life’ and who had seen himself as no more than ‘the passive instrument of a Higher Power’. The tribute he wrote for the Pall Mall Gazette even now reads as if tear-stained. ‘In him were incarnate the characteristics of the heroes of our national story. The chivalry of Arthur of the Round Table, the indomitable valour and saintly life of the Great Alfred, and the religious convictions of Oliver the Protector.’ It ended: ‘If in the defence of England’s honour it is necessary to go to Khartoum, it is not to avenge Gordon’s death,’ because the general had taken himself there only out of duty to God, to empire and to ‘the poor Soudanese’. Britain owed it to its own higher calling to destroy the Islamists.
Charles Gordon should never have been allowed anywhere near Khartoum. There was sufficient scuttlebutt to suggest that he might have had a drink problem. He was certainly impulsive, emotional, religiously obsessed (he compared himself during the siege to Uriah the Hittite, the soldier abandoned in battle by King David, in order that he could steal his wife, Bathsheba), bad-tempered, unreliable, obstinate and self-absorbed. When the Consul General in Cairo reflected on the hero of Khartoum, he concluded that ‘General Gordon does not