The Road to Khartoum - A Life of General Charles Gordon

Of all the British Empire's peculiar champions, General Charles Gordon most exactly fulfilled the expectations and the heroic imaginings of the great public. He was brave; he was holy; he adventured in distant lands; he had marvelous eyes; and he died a martyr's death at Khartoum in the Sudan in 1884 when the English garrison was overrun by the Moslem fanatics of the Mahdi. But if Gordon was flawless as a legend, those closer to him knew a different side of his personality. Gladstone, who in public referred to Gordon as a hero of heroes, was privately infuriated by his eccentricities and independence. He was a chain smoker, a heavy drinker, and ever since Lytton Strachey's shocking, debunking portrait in Eminent Victorians, the hint of homosexuality has been attached to Gordon's name. Whereas Gordon once seemed a plaster saint, he appears to us now as something of a maverick. The unflinching courage might today be called neurosis, and even his simple, fundamentalist Christianity now seems to have its darker side. In constructing this full-length, splendidly researched portrait of a many faceted man, Charles Chenevix Trench confronts the central fact of Gordon's career and personality: the unaccountable fascination which he exercised over others. Time and again in these pages we meet men who were willing to uproot their lives and endure appalling hardships, just to follow Gordon: to China, to South Africa, to Khartoum. It was an extraordinary power, and simply by exerting it, Gordon, like T. E. Lawrence, influenced the course of world history....