Emma’s War: Love, Betrayal and Death in the Sudan. Deborah Scroggins
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were required to place their plunder in a communal treasury. Beautiful women were the only indulgence the Mahdi allowed himself and his men; there were terrible punishments in his camp for drinking or smoking. In this as in all else, he claimed to follow the model of the prophet Muhammad.
There were signs and portents in the Mahdi’s favour. In 1882 the appearance of a comet had foretold that the town of El Obeid would fall to the Mahdi. Eleven months later the Egyptian government sent 10,000 men under the command of a British officer, Colonel William Hicks, to recapture the town. The Ansar annihilated Hicks and his men and seized their guns, machine guns and rifles. ‘Nothing could have exceeded the savage grandeur of the Mahdi’s triumphal entry into El Obeid after the battle,’ wrote Rudolf Slatin, the young Austrian whom Gordon had appointed governor of southern Darfur. ‘As he passed along, the people threw themselves at him and literally worshipped him.’ Slatin was abandoned by his men and forced to surrender to the Mahdi and to convert to Islam. Gordon’s other Austrian appointee, Dr Emin or Emin Bey, hung on in Equatoria but was increasingly isolated. The Mahdi was ready to march upon Khartoum.
The uprising in Sudan presented Britain’s Liberal government with a conundrum familiar to modern Western governments. The London government wanted not so much to do anything about this African catastrophe as to be seen to do something about it. Prime Minister William Gladstone freely admitted that he cared nothing for Egypt’s southern possessions. Gladstone had a sneaking sympathy for the Mahdi as a nationalist. ‘Yes, those people are struggling to be free and they are rightly struggling to be free!’ he told the House of Commons when urged to action. But within his own Liberal Party anti-slavery sentiment was strong, and there was a worry that the Mahdi was a front for Sudan’s slave-traders. Forced to take a stand, the government came out in favour of evacuating all the Egyptian garrisons south of Wadi Halfa. But that was more easily said than done. Thousands of Egyptians as well as a few hundred Europeans were scattered throughout the country in distant, isolated stations. How were they to reach Egypt without falling into the hands of the Mahdi, as Hicks and the European missionaries had already done. The British establishment was agreed that it was not worth spending British lives or treasure to save the Sudan. At the same time, Britain did not want to injure its sense of propriety by allowing people, most especially white Europeans under its de facto protection, to fall into harm.
In the midst of this debate, the influential Pall Mall Gazette came up with its own solution. Why not send Gordon, the hero, to extricate the Egyptian garrisons? ‘We cannot send a regiment to Khartoum, but we can send a man who on more than one occasion has proved himself more valuable in similar circumstances than an entire army.’ Here was a painless, cost-free way out of the quagmire and one that the British public, fed for years on a diet of stories about Gordon’s near-magical abilities, enthusiastically endorsed. Even Queen Victoria took up the call. Gordon behaved as if he believed as much as anyone in his own legend. Though he had opined that it was necessary to defend Khartoum at all costs, he accepted the charge to evacuate the besieged city. On 18 January 1884 he set off for Sudan so quickly that, as Strachey later wrote, it almost seemed as if he had wanted to be back there all along. From Cairo he travelled south by train to the end of the line at Asyut. There he boarded a sailing boat. As he left Egypt, Gordon assured a huddle of well-wishers that he knew what he was doing. ‘I feel quite happy, for I say, If God is with me, who can or will be hurtful to me?’ Arriving in Khartoum on camel-back exactly one month from the day he left London, he told the crowd assembled for his opening address that he had been unhappy away from them. ‘I come without soldiers, but with God on my side to redress the evils of the Sudan. I will not fight with any weapons but justice,’ he said.
The crowd cheered, and the young correspondent for The Times travelling along with Gordon was rapturous. ‘In that distant city on the Nile where a few days before all was misery, despondency and confusion, the coming of one noble-hearted Englishman, resolute, righteous and fearless, has changed despair into hope and turned mourning into joy,’ he wrote. But without weapons Gordon could in fact do very little. To Slatin, imprisoned in the Mahdi’s camp, he seemed disastrously delusional. ‘The mere fact that Gordon had come without a force at his back proved to these people that he depended on his personal influence to carry out his task; but, to those who understood the situation, it was abundantly clear that personal influence was at this stage a drop in the ocean…. Had Gordon not been informed of the Mahdi’s proclamations, sent to all tribes after the fall of El Obeid? Was he not aware that these proclamations enjoined all the people to unite in a religious war against Government authority, and that those who disobeyed the summons and were found guilty of giving assistance to the hated Turk, were guilty of betraying the faith and as such would not only lose their money and property, but their wives and children would become slaves of the Mahdi and his followers?… How could Gordon’s personal influence avail him for an instant against the personal interests of every man, woman and child in the now abandoned Sudan?’
In Gordon’s mind, it was a point of honour that he not leave without handing over power to some sort of government, however hastily contrived. To do otherwise would be to admit that all the ‘progress’ of the last few decades was lost. Gordon knew there was no such thing as an anti-slavery party in Sudan. Everyone with any power was involved in the trade; the differences among them on the issue were a matter of degree. But when he attempted to cobble together a Sudanese coalition that might conceivably stand against the Mahdi, first by announcing that his government would not interfere with slave-owners and then by proposing that Egypt set up the notorious Sudanese slaver Zubayr Pasha as his successor, he infuriated anti-slavery opinion in Britain. ‘What is the use of his prestige if he has to do this?’ sputtered one influential London daily. Gordon claimed that Zubayr, the former governor of Bahr el-Ghazal, would at least try to curtail the slave trade (in exchange for a hefty Egyptian subsidy), whereas the Mahdi openly called for its revival. But the Anti-Slavery Society denounced his plan, calling it ‘a degradation to England and a scandal to Europe’. Better to abandon the slaves to the Mahdi than for Britain to sully its honour by consorting with known slavers. The cabinet was ready to veto Gordon’s proposals, but in a barrage of telegrams the general persisted in arguing the point. At last the Mahdi stepped in and ended the debate. On 10 March his forces swooped down on the telegraph line south of Khartoum and cut the copper wire that had been laboriously laid under the Egyptian regime. The line to the outside world went dead.
Gordon and the few Europeans left in the city could have escaped. The Mahdi sent word offering Gordon safe passage if he would simply go without a fight. But he refused to abandon the Egyptian and Sudanese troops who had remained loyal to him to face the Mahdi alone. Instead he tried to act as a sort of human shield to force the British into evacuating his men. He sent messages to Cairo warning that ‘I will not leave the Sudan until everyone who wants to go down is given the chance to do so, unless a government is established that relieves me of the charge; therefore if any emissary or letter comes up here ordering me to come down, I WILL NOT OBEY IT BUT WILL STAY HERE AND FALL WITH THE TOWN AND RUN ALL RISKS.’ Slowly and reluctantly, the British government began preparations to send a relief expedition. As the siege intensified, Gordon sat in his shuttered palace along the Nile, chain-smoking, writing in his journal and reading his Bible. Food ran low. His tribal allies betrayed him. He sent boats down the Nile warning that the city could not hold out much longer. The Mahdi captured them and killed their British commander along with all his crew. In the end, there was nothing left but the sheer spectacle of Gordon’s quixotic belief that he ought to be able to save the place. ‘I am ready to die for these poor people,’ he wrote, and yet it is not clear whether the Sudanese for whom he thought he wanted to give his life had the foggiest notion of what he was doing there. In a last angry scribble to the British government, he wrote, ‘You send me no information though you have lots of money. C.G.G.’ He died in the fighting around the palace on 26 January 1885, the day the Mahdi’s forces finally overran Khartoum.
Hearing sounds of rejoicing, Gordon’s former protégé Rudolf Slatin crawled out of his tent in the Mahdi’s camp on the afternoon of the twenty-fifth. Three of the Mahdi’s slave soldiers were marching towards him at the head of a noisy crowd. One carried a bloody bundle in his hand. As the slaves approached Slatin, they stopped for a moment, smirking. Then the one holding the bundle unwrapped the bloody thing. It was Gordon’s head.
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