Eminent Victorians - Lytton Strachey (essential books to read TXT) 📗

Kitchener, the officer in command of the Egyptian Intelligence Service, hardly any messengers ever reached Khartoum; and when they did, the information they brought was tormentingly scanty. Major Kitchener did not escape the attentions of Gordon’s pen. When news came at last, it was terrible: Colonel Stewart and his companions had been killed. The Abbas, after having passed uninjured through the part of the river commanded by the Mahdi’s troops, had struck upon a rock; Colonel Stewart had disembarked in safety; and, while he was waiting for camels to convey the detachment across the desert into Egypt, had accepted the hospitality of a local Sheikh. Hardly had the Europeans entered the Sheikh’s hut when they were set upon and murdered; their native followers shared their fate. The treacherous Sheikh was an adherent of the Mahdi, and to the Mahdi all Colonel Stewart’s papers, filled with information as to the condition of Khartoum, were immediately sent. When the first rumours of the disaster reached Gordon, he pictured, in a flash of intuition, the actual details of the catastrophe. “I feel somehow convinced,” he wrote, “they were captured by treachery⁠ ⁠… Stewart was not a bit suspicious (I am made up of it). I can see in imagination the whole scene, the Sheikh inviting them to land⁠ ⁠… then a rush of wild Arabs, and all is over!” “It is very sad,” he added, “but being ordained, we must not murmur.” And yet he believed that the true responsibility lay with him; it was the punishment of his own sins. “I look on it,” was his unexpected conclusion, “as being a Nemesis on the death of the two Pashas.”

The workings of his conscience did indeed take on surprising shapes. Of the three ex-governors of Darfur, Bahr-el-Ghazal, and Equatoria, Emin Pasha had disappeared, Lupton Bey had died, and Slatin Pasha was held in captivity by the Mahdi. By birth an Austrian and a Catholic, Slatin, in the last desperate stages of his resistance, had adopted the expedient of announcing his conversion to Mohammedanism, in order to win the confidence of his native troops. On his capture, the fact of his conversion procured him some degree of consideration; and, though he occasionally suffered from the caprices of his masters, he had so far escaped the terrible punishment which had been meted out to some other of the Mahdi’s European prisoners⁠—that of close confinement in the common gaol. He was now kept prisoner in one of the camps in the neighbourhood of Khartoum. He managed to smuggle through a letter to Gordon, asking for assistance, in case he could make his escape. To this letter Gordon did not reply. Slatin wrote again and again; his piteous appeals, couched in no less piteous French, made no effect upon the heart of the Governor-General.

“Excellence!” he wrote, “J’ai envoyé deux lettres, sans avoir recu une réponse de votre excellence.⁠ ⁠… Excellence! j’ai me battu 27 fois pour le gouvernement contre l’ennemi⁠—on m’a feri deux fois, et j’ai rien fait contre l’honneur⁠—rien de chose qui doit empêché votre excellence de m’ecrir une réponse que je sais quoi faire. Je vois prie, Excellence, de m’honoré avec une réponse. P.S. Si votre Excellence ont peutêtre entendu que j’ai fait quelque chose contre l’honneur d’un officier et cela vous empêche de m’ecrir, je vous prie de me donner l’occasion de me defendre, et jugez apres la verité.”

The unfortunate Slatin understood well enough the cause of Gordon’s silence. It was in vain that he explained the motives of his conversion, in vain that he pointed out that it had been made easier for him since he had, “perhaps unhappily, not received a strict religious education at home.” Gordon was adamant. Slatin had “denied his Lord,” and that was enough. His communications with Khartoum were discovered and he was put in chains. When Gordon heard of it, he noted the fact grimly in his diary, without a comment.

A more ghastly fate awaited another European who had fallen into the hands of the Mahdi. Olivier Pain, a French adventurer, who had taken part in the Commune, and who was now wandering, for reasons which have never been discovered, in the wastes of the Sudan, was seized by the Arabs, made prisoner, and hurried from camp to camp. He was attacked by fever; but mercy was not among the virtues of the savage soldiers who held him in their power. Hoisted upon the back of a camel, he was being carried across the desert, when, overcome by weakness, he lost his hold, and fell to the ground. Time or trouble were not to be wasted upon an infidel. Orders were given that he should be immediately buried; the orders were carried out; and in a few moments the cavalcade had left the little hillock far behind. But some of those who were present believed that Olivier Pain had been still breathing when his body was covered with the sand.

Gordon, on hearing that a Frenchman had been captured by the Mahdi, became extremely interested. The idea occurred to him that this mysterious individual was none other than Ernest Renan, “who,” he wrote, in his last publication “takes leave of the world, and is said to have gone into Africa, not to reappear again.” He had met Renan at the rooms of the Royal Geographical Society, had noticed that he looked bored⁠—the result, no doubt, of too much admiration⁠—and had felt an instinct that he would meet him again. The instinct now seemed to be justified. There could hardly be any doubt that it was Renan; who else could it be? “If he comes to the lines,” he decided, “and it is Renan, I shall go and see him, for whatever one may think of his unbelief in our Lord, he certainly dared to say what he thought, and he has not changed his creed to save his life.” That the mellifluous author of the Vie de Jésus should have determined to end his