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Conqueror of the Soudan: Founder of the Gordon

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Memorial College

HERE are two ways of looking at England's conquest of the Soudan. One is that stated by Mr. G. W. Steevens: "We were humiliated and we were out of pocket. . . . We could not sit down until the defeat was redeemed. We gave more money; we gave the lives of the men we loved-and we conquered the Soudan again." The other is that expressed by General Kitchener in his appeal for the founding of a Gordon Memorial College at Khartoum: "A responsible task is henceforth laid upon us, and those who have conquered are called upon to civilize. In fact, the work interrupted since the death of Gordon must now be resumed." When General Kitchener's appeal for education and civilization in the Soudan met with an almost instant and richly generous response-half a million dollars was subscribed for the Gordon Memorial College in two weeks-the English people put itself on record as holding that the justification of the scientific slaughter at the battle of Omdurman lay, not in revenge or the restoration of a military self-respect partly lost through the blunders and vacillation of former Soudanese campaigns, but solely in the acquired power to push forward security, law, order, knowledge, where heretofore have been violence, tyranny, cruelty, and ignorance. That a man of Kitchener's type, a soldier and a representative of force, should turn almost his first thought after conquest to such a project is of serious import. And of equal serious import is a a declaration made the other day by Lord Cromer, England's executive power in Egypt (nominally a diplomatic agent, really viceroy over the nominal Egyptian Viceroy), at the laying of the foundationstone of the College at Khartoum. Lord Cromer promised in the name of the Queen that there should be no attempt to create an Anglicized Soudanese people, but that, on the other hand, a self-governing people would be created. If this

promise be kept, there will arise a greater memorial than the College for that Gordon who, when he returned from his Chinese campaign victorious but " as poor as when he entered China," devoted the greater part of his spare time for six years in personally relieving poverty and wretchedness, and particularly in teaching, feeding, and clothing destitute boys. To extend civilization by conquest may or may not be the true method, but there is a world-wide difference between the Spanish system of degrading and plundering a subject province and the English method of beginning, the month after a conquest, to plan for the education and upbuilding of a people. The College at Khartoum is to teach agriculture, engineering, and other practical things; it is to employ the Arabic tongue for teaching; it is to avoid religious propagandism; it is to try and make a new country; for Mr. Steevens truly says of the Soudan, "It is not a country; it has nothing that makes a country. Some brutish institutions it has and some bloodthirsty chivalry. But it is not a country; it has neither nationality, nor history, nor arts, nor even natural features."

In two memorable civil ceremonies at Khartoum Lord Kitchener has taken a leading part-one for the future, the laying of the College's corner-stone; one for the past, the memorial service to General Gordon. eral Gordon. The Sunday following the Friday of the great battle of Omdurman were held the funeral services for the man who died at his post fourteen years before. British and Egyptian troops joined in the military honors in the service which immediately followed the raising of the joint flags of the army of occupation. Catholic, Anglican, Presbyterian, and Methodist chaplains in turn said a prayer. Even the Soudanese troops under the Sirdar's command sang a Christian hymn. Eye-witnesses tell us that, for the only time in his public career, the Sirdar himself, man of iron as

he is, showed deep emotion. The party bitterness that obscured to some extent Gordon's aim and character in life has died away, and now, we imagine, there are few Englishmen who would not join heartily in the Quaker Whittier's tribute to the man who fought the African slave trade: "A providential man, his mission in an unbelieving and selfish age revealed the mighty power of faith in God, selfabnegation, and the enthusiasm of humanity."

Apropos of Whittier's characterization of Gordon just quoted, it is interesting to note that (as is set forth in correspondence just published in the "Independent" by Mr. S. T. Pickard) the poet was not shaken in his opinion by the efforts of John Bright to convince him that Gordon was solely a man of war, and hence an advocate of barbarism. To the end Whittier kept on his wall a portrait of Gordon in the red coat of a British soldier and the fez of an Egyptian officer, and to Mr. Bright he reaffirmed his admiration of Gordon's faith, courage, and self-abnegation, "while lamenting his war training and his reliance on warlike means to accomplish a righteous end." And even this qualifying sentence the poet seems to have written reluctantly, for he hastens to add: "As it is, he was a better man than David or Joshua-he was humane, and never put his prisoners into brick-kilns nor under hammers."

Of Lord Kitchener's enthusiastic reception on his return to London, and of the civic honors paid him, we do not need to speak. A characteristic incident was his reply to an official inquiry as to what he most needed in the Soudan: "Young men fitted to learn to govern." His service in Egypt has extended over fifteen years, and for eight years he has been Sirdar or commander-in-chief of the Egyptian forces and their British allies. His patient, systematic advance from Cairo to Khartoum up the Nile; the capture of Berber; the easy victory at Atbara; the final defeat of the great army of the Khalifa, the Mahdi's successor, before the walls of Omdurman, the town across the Nile from the ruins of Khartoum-all these events stand for only a small part of the Sirdar's work. He fought not only the Dervishes but the desert. Step by step with him advanced a railroad which may some time reach

from Cairo to the Cape. Precision, thoroughness, knowledge of men, discipline, all find in him a wonderful exemplar. In the decisive battle over eleven thousand of the Dervishes' forces were killed, sixteen thousand wounded, and four thousand taken prisoners, while the combined English and Egyptian army lost less than sixty killed and about four hundred wounded! Such a disproportion in losses has perhaps never before occurred on land, and it can be paralleled only by the naval battles at Manila and Santiago. The savage Arabs and Soudanese rushed on to certain death against Maxim guns and long-trained infantry fire with marvelous courage, seeking heaven in the Mohammedan fatalism. Lord Kitchener's military capacity was shown not so much by the winning of the battle as by his masterly handling of his forces to bring about the end quickly, with small loss and with certainty.

The whole story of the Anglo-Egyptian expedition into the Soudan has been told with fine journalistic dash and spirit by the English war correspondent, Mr. G. W. Steevens, in his book "With Kitchener to Khartoum." Some chapters of this book were hurried to the press from Egypt by cable, making this, we think, a unique, as it certainly is an immensely readable, volume.

By special permission of the American publishers of "With Kitchener to Khartoum "-Messrs. Dodd, Mead & Co.—we reprint below Mr. Steevens's pen-portrait of Lord Kitchener.

THE SIRDAR1

Major-General Sir Horatio Herbert Kitchener is forty-eight years old by the book; but that is irrelevant. He stands several inches over six feet, straight as a lance, and looks out imperiously above most men's heads; his motions are deliberate and strong; slender but firmly knit, he seems built for tireless, steel-wire endurance rather than for power or agility: that also is irrelevant. Steady, passionless eyes shaded by decisive brows; brick-red, rather full cheeks; a long mustache beneath which you divine an immovable mouth-his face is harsh, and neither appeals for affection nor stirs dislike. All this is irrelevant too: neither age, nor figure, nor face, nor any accident

1 Copyright, 1898, Dodd, Mead & Co., New York.

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of person, has any bearing on the essential Sirdar. You could imagine the character just the same as if all the externals were different. He has no age but the prime of life, no body but one to carry his mind, no face but one to keep his brain behind. The brain and the will are the essence and the whole of the man-a brain and a will so perfect in their workings that, in the face of extremest difficulty, they never seem to know what struggle is. You cannot imagine the Sirdar otherwise than as seeing the right thing to do and doing it. His precision is so inhumanly unerring, he is more like a machine than a man. You feel that he ought to be patented and shown with pride at the Paris International Exhibition. British Empire: Exhibit No. I., hors concours, the Soudan Machine.

It was aptly said of him by one who had closely watched him in his office, and in the field, and at mess, that he is the sort of feller that ought to be made manager of the Army and Navy Stores. The aphorist's tastes lay perhaps in the direction of those more genial virtues which the Sirdar does not possess, yet the judgment summed him up perfectly. He would be a splendid manager of the Army and Navy Stores. There are some who nurse a desperate hope that he may some day be appointed to sweep out the War Office. He would be a splendid manager of the War Office. He would be a splendid manager of anything.

But it so happens that he has turned himself to the management of war in the Soudan, and he is the complete and only master of that art. Beginning life in the Royal Engineers a soil reputed more favorable to machinery than to human nature--he early turned to the study of the Levant. He was one of Beaconsfield's military vice-consuls in Asia Minor; he was subsequently director of the Palestine Exploration Fund. At the beginning of the Soudan troubles he appeared. He was one of the original twenty-five officers who set to work on the new Egyptian army. And in Egypt and the Soudan he has been ever since on the staff generally, in the field constantly, alone with natives often, mastering the problem of the Soudan always. The ripe harvest of fifteen years is that he knows everything that is to be learned of his subject. He

has seen and profited by the errors of others as by their successes. He has inherited the wisdom and the achievements of his predecessors. He came at the right hour, and he was the right man.

Captain R.E., he began in the Egyptian army as second-in-command of a regiment of cavalry. In Wolseley's campaign he was Intelligence Officer. During the summer of 1884 he was at Korosko, negotiating with the Ababdeh sheiks in view of an advance across the desert to Abu Hamed; and note how characteristically he has now bettered the then abandoned project by going that way to Berber and Khartoum himself-only with a railway! The idea of the advance across the desert he took over from Lord Wolseley, and indeed from immemorial Arab caravans; and then, for his own stroke of insight and resolution, amounting to genius, he turned a raid into an irresistible certain conquest, by superseding camels with the railway. Others had thought of the desert route; the Sirdar, correcting Korosko to Halfa, used it. Others had projected desert railways; the Sirdar made one. That, summarized in one instance, is the working of the Soudan machine.

As Intelligence Officer Kitchener accompanied Sir Herbert Stewart's desert column, and you may be sure that the utter breakdown of transport which must in any case have marred that heroic folly was not unnoticed by him. Afterwards, through the long decade of little fights that made the Egyptian army, Kitchener was fully employed. In 1887 and 1888 he commanded at Suakim, and it is remarkable that his most important enterprise was half a failure. He attacked Osman Digna at Handub, when most of the Emir's men were away raiding; and although he succeeded in releasing a number of captives, he thought it well to retire, himself wounded in the face by a bullet, without any decisive success. withdrawal was in no way discreditable, for his force was a jumble of irregulars and levies without discipline. But it is not perhaps fanciful to believe that the Sirdar, who has never given battle without making certain of an annihilating victory, has not forgotten his experience of haphazard Bashi-Bazouking at Handub.

The

He had his revenge before the end of 1888, when he led a brigade of Soudanese

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