This picture, of course, is only one take on these extraordinary events, and there is another, darker version, full of ambiguity and apparent contradiction. As I moved beyond my boyhood fascination and went on to study classical antiquity, I was much influenced by the ‘big man’ theory, in which domineering personalities provide the main driving force in history. Applying this prism to the events of 1884–5, against a backdrop of world events that would seem to have their own momentum – the resurgence of Islamic jihad, and the crystallisation of power politics in Europe that would eventually lead to the First World War – it is the extraordinary personalities that stand out, some with motivations far removed from the heroic ideal. The Victorian military, especially the more cerebral branches such as the Royal Engineers, could attract men of ambition, intellect and idiosyncrasy who were often given free rein in the field. The personalities in this story could not have been greater: Gordon himself, inscrutable and fascinating, with a messianic charisma that gripped the world during those months; Muhammad Ahmad, the self-styled Mahdi (Chosen One), a former boatbuilder and Sufi, who held more men under his sway than any European ruler; Lord Wolseley, the outstanding British general of his day, a fastidious stickler for detail and control; and men of lesser rank but expansive personality, including the flamboyant Colonel Fred Burnaby, arguably the greatest adventurer of the late Victorian age, and Major Herbert Kitchener of the Royal Engineers, future nemesis of the Mahdist revolt and commander-in-chief who would lead the British army into the bloodbath of the First World War.
Whether Gordon himself in the end really wanted to be rescued and whether those who were sent to rescue him ever really intended to do so are questions not easily answered. Looming in the background are the figures of Queen Victoria, ardent supporter of Gordon and spokeswoman for the vox populi, and Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone, a man who professed not to be able to abide Gordon, despite their shared fascination with the ancient history of Palestine and the lands of the Bible. Gladstone has appeared elsewhere in my fiction, in The Mask of Troy, where he sees the fall of Troy as a dark portent of modern times, yet where his aversion to war is tinged by realism. Once it had become clear that Gordon could not, or would not, be rescued, Gladstone may have been obliged to exercise a directive of appalling necessity in order to ensure that he was not captured; the image of Gordon in chains would have enraged public opinion and severely damaged British prestige at a time when international brinksmanship was the order of the day. Any sign of weakness might have led Russia to order the invasion of British India, as could have happened when the Russians clashed with the Afghans in the ‘Panjdeh incident’ of March 1885, a mere matter of weeks after the fall of Khartoum. Gordon the martyr was perhaps a weight that Gladstone could more easily have borne than Gordon the pitiful captive – or, worse still, Gordon the convert to Islam, driven to shocking apostasy by government indifference to the plight of his beloved Sudanese, standing alongside the Mahdi. If these were indeed Gladstone’s calculations, then events were to bear him out, conflict with Russia being avoided and British prestige left intact, though the great European war he most feared was only forestalled by a few decades, and the final destruction of the Mahdist revolt by Kitchener at Omdurman in 1898 did little to extinguish the flame of jihad kindled in the desert in the 1880s that has become such a dominating threat to world peace today.
The basis for the account in this novel of the Gordon relief expedition includes unpublished material related to my great-great-grandfather, Colonel Walter Andrew Gale, Royal Engineers (RE), who was a personal friend of Lord Kitchener and in charge of the Gordon Relics Committee while he was secretary of the RE Institute from 1889 to 1894. His Report of the Gordon Relics Committee (1894) is in the RE Library at Chatham, where the museum contains a fascinating collection of Gordon memorabilia that provided much initial inspiration for this story. Among published sources, I have relied where possible on first-hand accounts, notably Colonel Sir Charles Wilson’s From Korti to Khartoum (1885), Colonel William Francis Butler’s The Campaign of the Cataracts (1887) and Lieutenant Colonel E. W. C. Sandes’ The Royal Engineers in Egypt and the Sudan (1937), the last incorporating eyewitness records of RE officers present during the campaign.
Many contemporary accounts of Gordon are overtly hagiographical, extolling both his heroic attributes and his religious zeal; the same applies to many biographies of Lord Kitchener. I have sought to understand both men by reading their own writings and correspondence, in the case of Kitchener his contributions to the multi-volume Survey of Western Palestine, published in 1881–5 when he was in his early thirties, as well as accounts from 1884–5 that reveal a man of extraordinary energy and presence, a fearless adventurer quite distinct from the later image of the First World War field marshal so fixed in popular memory.
The essential source for Gordon is the compendious diary he wrote while besieged at Khartoum – unfortunately not including anything he might have written in his final days – published in 1885 as The Journals of Major-General C. G. Gordon, CB, at Kartoum, printed from the original mss; something of his religious vision is also revealed in the account of his time in Jerusalem, Reflections in Palestine, 1883, published after Gordon was already in Khartoum and possibly never seen by him.
Ironically, given the mystique that was built up around the man, his journals allow a more intimate, detailed picture of Gordon than is possible for any other of the main characters in this story. The tenor is overwhelmingly practical, not mystical; his daily concerns included the food supply, the likely arrival of the relief expedition, and the other professional checklists of a besieged garrison commander, including ammunition expended, a tally of incoming fire from the Mahdist forces, and lists of wounded and killed. His emphatic instructions to edit out extraneous material suggest that he would have been appalled by the notes that his admirers had seen fit to include in Reflections in Palestine. Several of the incidents he recounts in the fictional encounter with Mayne come from his journal, including the faulty ammunition in a Remington rifle that nearly blinded him (12 December), and his reflection on Abraham Lincoln and slavery (23 November, when he incorrectly identified 18 December as the date in 1862 of Lincoln’s proclamation). In creating dialogue, I have used words and phrases from the journal to represent his use of language, including his reference to the Mahdist forces as ‘Arabs’, as was the case for most of the British officer accounts of the campaign including that of Colonel Butler.
Gordon’s last journal entry, quoted at the front of this novel, has an air of finality about it, like Scott’s final entry from the Antarctic. Yet it was written on 14 December when he still had more than five weeks to live, and the assumption has to be that he continued to keep a journal to the end. Whether or not he would have chosen to reflect on his archaeological and ethnographic collections is unknown. However, he had shown much interest in these matters years earlier when he had even invited Heinrich Schliemann to join him, and several of his appointees to administrative and army positions in the Sudan, including the American adventurer Charles Chaillé-Long, had something of the treasure-hunter about them. It may never be possible truly to know what Prime Minister Gladstone thought of Gordon, but it is conceivable that their shared fascination with biblical history and archaeology would in private have transcended the gulf that had appeared between them publicly, one that widened after Gordon’s death when Gladstone was vilified for failing to order a rescue expedition in time.