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Updated: June 25, 2025
Since then that young Englishman has become famous as Field-Marshal Viscount Kitchener of Khartoum. But the National Guards insisted on carrying my father and myself to the chief cafe of Laval. They would take no refusal.
The quotation which I am at the moment anxious to make use of is, "The mills of the gods grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small." Time the avenger had all but fulfilled the meed of punishment for the evil day of 26th January 1885, when the streets of Khartoum ran with blood, and the headless body of General Gordon was left to be hacked and hewn by ferocious hordes of dervishes.
"It would be impossible to deliver slaves to the Soudan this season, as an Egyptian regiment had been stationed in the Shillook country, and steamers were cruising to intercept the boats from the interior in their descent to Khartoum; thus the army of slaves then at Gondokoro would be utterly worthless.
The river recalls the names; the mind at once brings up the face and every trick of speech of some youth met for a few hours, maybe, in a train on the way to Egypt of the old days. Both name and face had utterly vanished from one's memory till then. It was another generation that picked up the ball ten years later and touched down in Khartoum.
These men are quiet enough now that they have learnt the British power, but not so long ago they were inflamed with fanatical hatred. You have heard of the dervishes who were killed in thousands at Omdurman, outside Khartoum, in the great battle at which Lord Kitchener won his title when he freed the Soudan from the power of the Mahdi?
He could not be wholly ignorant of the world outside Coniston; though sometimes for weeks together he tried to ignore it, and refused to read a newspaper. The time when General Gordon went out to Khartoum was one of these periods of abstraction, devoted to mediæval study. Somebody talked one morning at breakfast about the Soudan.
With Lord Roberts came, as Chief of the Staff, Lord Kitchener of Khartoum, a hard and ready man who for fifteen years had been scouring the Nile. All his war service had been in Egypt, where recently he had not only smashed the dervishes and secured the Soudan, but by his diplomatic tact in the Fashoda affair had relaxed the tension of a dangerous international situation.
Among all the deeds of his varied and remarkable career he never succeeded in quite the same degree in winning fame and in commanding success. At Khartoum the eyes of the world were on him, but the Mahdi was allowed to remain victorious, and the Soudan still awaits fresh conquest. But during the two Taeping campaigns he was completely successful, and closed his work with an unqualified triumph.
From there he could see if the Mahdi's armies were approaching, or if help were coming to save Khartoum and the Soudan. All the time he kept up the hearts of the people, and encouraged work at the school and everywhere else. The blowing up of the Palace is the simplest, while the other means long and weary humiliation and suffering of all sorts.
Even at the last moment, they had countermanded their orders for the purchase of camels, which, had they been available, would have enabled General Stewart's desert column to march straight across, instead of being obliged to send the camels backwards and forwards; and in that case the steamers would have arrived in time to save Gordon, for it was but two days before they reached Khartoum that the town had fallen.
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