BOOKS
Friend of empires and ragamuffins
John Keegan
NEVER TO BE TAKEN ALIVE: A BIOGRAPHY OF GENERAL GORDON by Roy MacGregor-Hastie
Sidgwick & Jackson, f13.95
THE GORDON HERITAGE by Derek Boyd
Robert Hale, f8.95
There is a small corner of West Surrey that seems to have a magnetic attraction for displaced memorials. In the crypt of the Benedictine Abbey at Farnborough rests the sarcophagus of Napoleon III, formerly interred at Cricklewood. The statue of his son, the Prince Imperial, originally at Woolwich, now keeps watch for an approaching Zulu impi over the Second Eleven cricket pitch at Sandhurst. Five miles away, just across the Hampshire border, a gigantic equestrian figure of Wellington, which used to crown the triumphal arch at Hyde Park Corner, hides inside a grove of beech behind the Alder- shot garrison church. And a mile south of the M3, on the outskirts of Woking, General Gordon bestrides the camel he once rode outside Government House, Khartoum.
Gordon has the best reason of the four for being where he presently is. For the spot where his caravan now rests is in the grounds of the Gordon Boys' School, founded as a memorial to him in the year of his death. The apostrophe, moreover, is crucial. This was not a Gordon School for boys; it was a school for Gordon Boys, a home for the sort of unloved and unpri- vileged child to whom he had devoted almost all the time he had been given during the short period he had served in England during his military career. In this century his bachelor dedication to adoles- cents of his own sex would no doubt have been interpreted, if not in the worst possi- ble, then certainly in a thoroughly ambi- guous light. The Victorians, whom we are learning to identify as a good deal less naive than Lytton Strachey made them out to be, accepted the nature of his involve- ment for what it was, a genuine Christian philanthropy directed at the group most accessible to his ministration. Not that they were the only object of his philanthropy. He also, while senior engineer officer at Chatham, gave garden parties for the elderly poor of the district and, when he found that they enjoyed the gardens as much as the nourishing fare he provided, had the ground divided up into allotments so that they would have a ready excuse to get out to them from their hovels during the summer; in the winter he visited them to bring broth and coal.
One of the strengths of Professor Has- tie's new biography of Gordon is its thor- oughly un-Stracheyesque tone. He tackles the question of Gordon's sexuality in a matter-of-fact way, agrees that he was probably homosexual at a level so latent that he himself was not aware of it, and leaves it at that. Far more interesting, to the author's thinking, are the issues of his Christianity and his relationship with equals. His Christianity was not, as we might surmise, the effect -of a particular upbringing, and certainly not some infan- tile escape. On the contrary; though he had a tediously evangelical sister, who memor- ialised him interminably while he was a Woolwich cadet, he was not born again until the age of 21, and then at the promptings of a brother officer, who was not even a Sapper. Sappers, as we all know, were held by the rest of the army to be 'Mad, married or Methodist'. The un- married Gordon was certainly not mad and never sectarian. In later years he became increasingly eclectic in his religious prac- tice; there is even a suggestion that he was on his way to Mass when he was struck down by the Mandi's men at Khartoum.
His lifelong and greatest friend, Romolo Gessi, was the strong Catholic influence in his life. But Gessi was a thoroughly Latin Catholic, dedicated to the feminine princi- ple in its physical as well as spiritual form, and quite as interested in doing well as in doing good. Gordon helped him to do well, bailing him out with government jobs when his businesses failed or palled. He did so entirely because Gessi cheered him up, amused him and took him out of himself. It was thus that Gessi came to spend so much of his time in odd spots where Gordon had the top job. Gordon, contrarily, had no interest in doing well at all — he went to elaborate lengths to avoid personal enrich- ment — but a passionate concern to do good. And, unlike many do-gooders, his achievements were genuinely constructive. He was emotionally tough. Commissioned by the Chinese court to put down the Taiping rebellion, one of those populist movements which always arose to threaten central government in China at moments of imperial weakness, he did so not merely with efficiency but ruthlessness. Like Montgomery, he was punished for bullying as a cadet; in both, the bullying streak translated into a conquering impulse on the field of battle.
Yet Gordon was not wholly a soldier, in the way that Havelock was, or Outram or Napier. They were servants of the Crown. He was the servant of a more complicated principle, what that of 'international peacekeeping' might be today if the peacekeepers were allowed teeth. The Chinese interlude apart, Gordon's career was almost wholly bound up with the disintegration of Ottoman power and the turbulence caused by Ottoman decline in the regions where the Sultan's word had once been law. He had his first military experience in the Crimea and his first 'aid' job, as it would now be called, in the ex-Ottoman Balkans. After the Chinese interlude, he was employed almost ex- lusively in the Ottoman periphery, trying to restor order in regions where the failure of Turkish dynamism had given a foothold to warlords, slave-traders, tribal imperial- ists, religious triumphalists, adventurers and a clutch of other assorted miscreants.
In the medium term, the vacuum left by Ottoman collapse would be filled by the outright imperialism of European powers, Britain, France and Italy, operating under their own flags or that of the League of Nations. In the long term, no one would prove capable of filling it, as the sorry state of the world bounded by the Gulf and the Nile demonstrates all too clearly today. The Ottomans, like the British in the successful parts of their empire, had ruled in their hey-day by a mixture of brutality, calculated devolution, finely-tuned en- couragement of communal antipathies, selective favouritism of elites, benign neg- lect and aggressive external defence, all informed by sublime racial pride. When their external defensive system failed, in the face of superior Western technology, racial pride turned to self-doubt, which they tried to assuage by hiring foreign experts. The Ottomans had a long tradition of recruiting foreign talent to do the imperial will; the Janissaries were its best- known embodiment. But the Janissaries had, technically, been slaves. Not only was Gordon not servile by temperament, essentially he acknowledged no earthly master, which made him, of course, an impossible temporal subordinate. He had managed, in a fairly short life (1833-85) to annoy British generals, Chinese man- darins, Ottoman officials, the Viceroy of India, orthodox Christian opinion (by locating the Holy Sepulchre outside the Old City) and a host of the self-seeking, office-holding and merely pompous in the Victorian imperial world; it is not surpris- ing that he ended by gravely embarrassing the British Government of Egypt, the Foreign Office and Mr Gladstone. Profes- sor Hastie concludes his fascinating, perceptive analysis of what Gordon was really about in his last year with the suggestion that he intended to leave the Sudan to the Mandi and rule equatorial Africa from the Horn to the Atlantic in the name of King Leopold of the Belgians. He would no doubt have taken the keenest pleasure in thrusting Virtue down the throat of Vice and watching Old Forkbeard have to swallow it.
Yet it would be wrong to leave the impression — and the author does not - that Gordon was a self-righteous fanatic.
Like the Knights of St John, who pray for `Our Lords the Sick', he acknowledged a fundamental obedience to the wants of the world's poor and despised. It is entirely appropriate that his most lasting memorial is the Gordon Boys' School, founded to assist soldiers' orphans into modest wage- earning. They were the boys he called his `kings'. Derek Boyd's unassuming little history of the school reveals that many now transcend the boundaries the Victorian founders set for its products and that some find their way into the Royal Military Academy where he began his career. 'How far better', he said during his days at Chatham with his ragamuffins, `to be allowed to be kind to a little scrub than to govern the greatest kingdoms.' Gordon's strange camel ride has unquestionably brought him home, in so far as his uneasy spirit could find any home this side of paradise.
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