well read in three or four literatures and eagerly receptive to all that was fine in art and life. He was an excellent companion, too; told a good story with subtle humour and was essentially large-hearted and generous. In memory I put Fred Burnaby almost with Dick Burton among the noblest men I've known. After the dinner he told me quietly he didn't intend to come back alive. 'It seems funny,' he remarked in the air, 'to be under sentence of death, but within a month or so I shall have entered the great 'Perhaps', as Danton I think called 'the undiscovered country'.'
I argued passionately against his decision, told him his life and achievements as a great adventurer loomed bigger in my eyes than the whole corps of officers. 'I'd give a wilderness of monkeys and mediocrities,' I cried, 'for one Burnaby. For God's sake, get hold of yourself and live out a great life to a noble end.'
'Perhaps you don't know of the way I'm boycotted?' he asked.
'I've heard of it through Broadley,' I replied; but I had heard, too, that Colonel Ralph Vivian, who was immensely popular, had turned away from Burnaby markedly a few weeks before in Hyde Park, and I had realized for months past that Burnaby was wounded to the soul.
Now he unburdened his pent-up sorrow.
'Life's a more difficult game than we are apt to imagine in youth,' he began.
'Who could have a better start than I? Fairly well born with perfect health, great strength, height, too, and not so ugly as a wolf, as the French say; endowed besides, with fair brains, good verbal memory, love of adventure and travel and minded seriously to make the best of all my advantages. At thirty-five invited to Windsor, a personage in society with an uncommon reputation, and the position of a Colonel of the Guards; and at forty through no crime, no fault of my own an outlaw, an outcast.' (He spoke with intense bitterness.) 'I have no chance of recovery and am the worse off that the outside is still brilliant. Thank God, I know how to die!' And the whole face was transfigured, lit up by indomitable resolution and joyous courage.
'Don't talk like that!' I cried, appalled by the chill of death in the air. 'I can't listen to you; it's not worthy of your brains or sense. You have done no intentional wrong,' I went on. 'Your position is really the revolt of commonplace idiots against a personality, someone of distinction and achievement. It's your business to live it all down, walk through it unheeding.
You remember Goethe said, 'When the King rides abroad, the village curs all bark at his horse's heels.' Let 'em bark.'
But Burnaby would not be encouraged. 'If things were different at home,' he sighed, 'I might try. But no, I'm a failure, Harris; have come to grief everywhere, so 'one fight more, the best and the last''; and again the eyes, gladly.
I can't reproach myself. I did all I knew, argued with him, assured him that the highest public opinion would not condemn him; begged him for the sake of all of us who cared for him to play the game out. At length he interrupted me:
'The die is cast: I'm going out to the Sudan at the beginning of the week. I'll consider what you've said and I'm infinitely obliged to you for saying it, but each man, my friend, must 'drie his own weird'.'
Tears were in my eyes and my heart was sore as we parted. All the world knows how nobly Burnaby gave his life in the battle of Abou Klea in the Sudan. The Arab rush had broken the British square and the next moment the dervishes would have entered and swept away the formation, when the giant Burnaby hurled himself into the gap in front of his old comrades of the Blues and stemmed the torrent. As the square reformed behind him, Burnaby still fighting, though bleeding from a dozen wounds, went down with an Arab spear through his throat. He had saved a thousand lives and turned disaster into victory. Bennett Burleigh, the famous war correspondent of the Telegraph, wrote to me afterwards that Burnaby saved 'all our lives.'
As I read of his heroic death I cried like a child and then wondered whether his fellow officers were still proud of their idiotic boycott. To me dear Fred Burnaby was the hero of the Sudan, and not Charles Gordon.
I never cared for Chinese Gordon greatly, perhaps because he was so extolled on all hands, beslobbered with the cheap adulation of those who didn't even know him by sight. I went to interview him for the Evening News when he came over from Brussels at Gladstone's behest and was about to start for the Sudan to free the garrisons beleaguered by the forces of the Mahdi.
Perhaps because I didn't expect much, I got little or nothing from him.
According to Stead and the Pall Mall Gazette, he was a 'Christian hero…
Christ's warrior,' a blasphemous contradiction in terms only possible in England or America. Charles Gordon was un-English in one respect: there was absolutely no 'side' about him; he was transparently simple and sincere.
He was good-looking too, with a remarkable forehead, both broad and high.
But I discounted large foreheads, for my experience rather justified the German word:
Gross Stirn
Wenig Gehirn. though Victor Hugo's praise is apt to infect all of us. Hugo said finely that a large forehead had much the same effect as an expanse of sky in a landscape.
I certainly did not understand Gordon. When I asked him why he gave up his intention to go to the Congo in order to go to Khartoum instead, he smiled, saying the need in the Sudan was more urgent. 'He would go to the Congo later,' he added, 'if God willed.' I gathered that he looked on himself as an instrument in God's hands to do whatever he was called upon to do. His fatalistic belief seemed to me childish, the result of success and much praise working on a poor brain. His conceit or, if you will, his faith, went beyond reason. He had no insight into men or events. As soon as he reached Khartoum he startled Baring and shocked Gladstone by asking that his old enemy, Zebehr Pasha, the notorious slave-trader, should be sent up from Cairo to help him. Now some of us remembered that Zebehr Pasha's son, Suleiman, got up a rebellion in 1879 in Darfour against Gordon and his lieutenant, Gessi. Gessi beat Suleiman in battle, took him prisoner, and then in cold blood had him executed. Baring was of the opinion that Zebehr would do Gordon harm, and Gladstone's prejudice against the slave-dealer being insuperable, Zebehr was denied to Gordon.
As if to mock his belief in providence, events fought against Gordon from the beginning. Scarcely had he reached Khartoum when the Mahdi's lieutenant, Osman Digna, took Sinkat by storm and put not only the Egyptian garrison, but every man, woman and child in the place to the sword. No wonder the garrison at Tokar made friends with their savage foe and surrendered on terms, a great many going over, heart and hand, to the enemy. Then Khartoum was threatened and a Christian England forced Gladstone's hand and a military expedition was set on foot to save the saviour.
General Wolseley of course led the British forces and he determined, in memory, I imagine, of his Red River Expedition, to go up the Nile instead of taking the short cut by Suakim and Berber. The whole, silly tragicomedy discovered to me as by a lightning flash all the unspeakable stupidity of government by democracy, which means today by an ill-informed press and a sentimental loud-voiced minority.
Yet amid all the hubbub there came suddenly the voice of an authentic man.
One morning The Times published a letter from the Mahdi, if I remember rightly, to the English government. It was astoundingly well written and translated into pure Biblical English of the best. I haven't got it, I'm sorry to say, but it made an indelible impression on me as the greatest document published in my time, superior even to the letter Parnell published when Gladstone threw him over in the O'Shea divorce case. The Mahdi asked the English why they were coming out against him with horse, foot and artillery?
Didn't they know that if they were working with God and for His high purpose, a small force would be invincible? Whereas if their aim was selfish and cruel, no force would be sufficient. Tell me what you want, he said practically, and if it is right and just, you will have no difficulty; on the other hand, if your purpose is secret and evil, you are only ploughing the sand.
Addressed really to Gladstone, the wording of the appeal was irresistibly comic; the old Christian rhetor hoist on a petard of his own manufacture.
The whole summer England followed the expedition up the Nile with breathless interest. At length in December, after the victory of Abou Klea, a dash to Khartoum was resolved on. As if to demonstrate the utter worthlessness of his judgment, Gordon sent down a message on 29 December that 'Khartoum was all right and could hold out for years.' But Wolseley knew better and early in January, Sir Charles Wilson made his dash for Khartoum; he found the town had already fallen and the Mahdist forces fired on his steamer from the walls. 'Gordon a prisoner' was the first report; and then came the truth. Hearing the noise of the Mahdist inrush, Gordon ran out of his palace with drawn sword and was stabbed to death in the entrance to his palace. The whole costly expedition
