‘At that date he was incensed by the murder of his friend Colonel Stewart, who he had sent down from Khartoum to supposed safety in the steamer Abbas a few days before,’ Wolseley said. ‘Now perhaps he will be less agitated and see more reason.’
‘Or see no reason at all,’ Buller said. ‘He has been under fire since the end of October, when the Mahdi arrived with his army outside Khartoum. Kitchener tells me that his garrison lives on tree gum and tobacco dregs and bread made from the pith of palm trees. As for the civilians, they must have eaten the last of the rats weeks ago. The dead will be strewn in the streets, and one shudders to think what the living eat now. There are those who say that Gordon has rigged the palace to explode if it is taken; ever the engineer. They say that he sleeps by day and stays up at night, sitting framed by his window in the palace deliberately backlit by candles, as if he’s asking for a bullet. I ask you: are these the acts of a man who can any longer see reason?’
Kitchener snorted. ‘General Gordon is an officer of the Royal Engineers. He will have calculated the distance across the Nile to the nearest sharpshooters, and know perfectly well that their Remingtons would stand little chance of hitting him at that range. And he will also have calculated the uplifting effect on his Egyptian and Sudanese garrison of seeing him night after night seemingly impervious to gunfire. If it makes him seem a god in their eyes, then it can only be to the good in his present situation.’
‘It’s not their perception of his godlike status that matters to me; it’s whether he has that perception himself,’ Buller rumbled. ‘Gods don’t need to be rescued by mere mortals like us.’
Wolseley tapped his pencil on the table. ‘Twenty years ago I watched him deliberately expose himself above the parapets at Sebastopol in the Crimea. He was drawing the fire of Russian sharpshooters so that the smoke would reveal their positions. He’s not the only one among us who seems to relish a dice with death.’ He glanced at Burnaby, who flicked the ash of his cigarette and looked impassively on. ‘In February, Gordon arrived in Khartoum alone, like a penitent holy man. He presented himself to the people of Sudan as their saviour, and also as one who was at their mercy should they choose to disbelieve him. He depends for survival on his own heroic self-image. That is how you garner loyalty among these people.’
‘Heroic, or foolish,’ Buller muttered.
‘He has the heroic qualities of authenticity and honour,’ Kitchener replied. ‘He will not be swerved from what he thinks is right, and he will not let down those who have given their loyalty to him. He will not leave Khartoum without his people,’ he reiterated.
‘The fate of that place and its people is beyond our control,’ Wolseley replied.
‘Then so, it seems, is the fate of General Gordon,’ said Kitchener.
Wolseley waved the piece of paper again. ‘But our latest intelligence suggests otherwise. This message was written only days ago, and is buoyant.’
‘We would be wrong to believe such assurances,’ Buller rumbled. ‘With Colonel Stewart gone, Gordon no longer has Europeans to advise him, only Egyptians and Sudanese who regard him not as a general but as a holy man, their own version of the Mahdi. He even wants a slave-trader to be his deputy, I tell you.’
‘Zubayr of the Ja’aliyyin,’ Kitchener said. ‘A venal man by the standards we suppose that we have, but the Sudanese tribesmen understand a slave-trader and respect him more than they do the Ottoman and Egyptian officials.’
‘It’s just as it was in China,’ Wolseley muttered. ‘He has always surrounded himself with mavericks and foreigners. His closest confidants have never been men of his own background we can trust, but others like himself who take him even further from our control. In China he locked himself away and brooded for two months before finally capturing Soochow and killing the rebel leaders. He may be in the same state now, and have a surprise in store for us yet.’
Buller grunted. ‘From what Kitchener tells us, he is now very far from the logic that we propose to apply to his rescue. He may even wish to dig himself deeper into that pestilential hole that looks as if it will become his tomb.’
‘He has done everything to increase his isolation,’ added Earle. ‘Even before the telegraph line was cut, he packed up his cipher book and sent it away with his belongings in the steamers. Why did he do that, deliberately cutting himself off from us?’
‘A fit of pique,’ Buller said. ‘Disgust that he was being made a sacrificial lamb.’
‘It would take someone with a saint’s powers to endure what he has gone through without cracking.’
‘It is a test he’s set himself. He’s dragging his own cross through the streets to Calvary. No wonder he was so interested in finding the location of Golgotha on his recent trip to Jerusalem. He was pacing out his march to apotheosis.’
‘Gordon’s isolation began before he left England,’ Wolseley said. ‘His furtive departure from Waterloo station in February, with the commander-in-chief packing his bag for him and Lord Baring handing him money, like parents sending off a miscreant son to exile in the colonies. The die was cast the moment that train pulled out of the station. And then the brief for his role at Khartoum which every-one knew he would discard in favour of his own mission, to save the people. I cannot help but see Mr Gladstone behind this.’
‘Gladstone does not want a martyr,’ Buller said.
‘It might serve him for Gordon to make a fool of himself.’
‘There is a fine line between a fool and a martyr.’
‘That’s Gladstone’s gamble, and perhaps Gordon’s too.’
‘This rescue mission has been hampered from the start by Whitehall,’ Buller said, slapping the table. ‘Who, I wonder, could be behind that? And there is another possibility. Gordon could go down in flames with his city, or he could survive and be captured. That would be the worst of all outcomes for Gladstone. The image of Gordon standing alongside the Mahdi in chains must keep him awake at night.’
‘Or not in chains,’ Wolseley said. ‘That would be his worst nightmare.’
‘Then we must do everything we can to prevent it.’
‘That is why we are here, gentlemen. On with the planning.’
Mayne felt the sweat prickling on his face. He glanced at Wilson, who appeared to be concentrating on the map. The conversation had veered dangerously close to their own secret purpose in being in the Sudan, and he was beginning to feel on edge.
Buller banged his hand on the table again. ‘The longer he strings it out, the more intractable he becomes. If he has gone seeking personal redemption like the children of Israel, then I fear he may have become lost in the wilderness.’
‘This is a military and logistical matter, not one requiring us to delve into the mind of a latter-day prophet,’ Wolseley said sharply.
‘In that you are, in my opinion, entirely wrong,’ Kitchener said quietly.
Wolseley glared at him, and then put a finger on the map. ‘We are here to discuss a rescue mission. We are at Korti on the Nile. From here, the column under General Stewart will advance across the Bayuda desert, rejoining the Nile where it loops around some hundred miles to the south of us. Meanwhile the column under Earle will continue to make their way up the river through the cataracts.’ He swept one hand across the desert and the other over the eastward loop of the Nile, bringing them together on the river at a point about halfway between Korti and Khartoum. ‘The two columns will meet here at Metemma. Stewart’s column will arrive first, and an advance force will be sent forward to Khartoum in Gordon’s three river steamers that should be waiting for us. When Earle’s river column arrives, the rest of the force will embark on the whaleboats and follow. If the advance contingent in the steamers is successful in retrieving Gordon, then the rest of the force will turn around and withdraw to Korti and the Egyptian border. If we do have to go forward into Khartoum and raise the siege, then so be it. But our intention, gentlemen, is not to save Khartoum or the Sudan. It is to rescue General Gordon.’