Back in the days of Victorian England there were few to compare in popularity and respect with Charles George Gordon, British army officer, evangelical Christian, quirky misfit, headstrong moralist, genius in the ways of the "primitive" lands so voyeuristically cherished by the newspaper readers of England, and martyr of Khartoum. The man, a legend in his own times, was revered in life, and mourned at the moment that Fate finally caught up with his stubborn will and persistent longing for rest beyond the imperfect world which both tempted and tormented him.

In my childhood, exposed to the legend from history books, I fell in love with this man and adopted him into my pantheon of heroes. The age of deconstruction was still young and had not yet compelled me to face its facts. Race relations in the light of "all men are created equal", hollow consumerism, unnecessary poverty, violent imperialism, the madness of nuclear war ingrained into our military mind, were all in the process of being exposed, questioned, and challenged; at the same time, the skeletons of history were being dug up, the crimes underneath our feet disinterred. Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee came out, and Custer fell from grace. Slavery came back with a black beret demanding an apology. My Lai said, "I’ve been here before, you never heard of Sand Creek?" Yet for many, shaped by schools committed to myths and reared by families loyal to their generation’s eyes, when World War II lifted our nation onto a moral pedestal compared to the Nazi, the work of deconstruction did not overwhelm us all at once. Rather, it trickled into our lives little by little; we conceded abominations, but insisted they were only superficial wounds. We jumped from stone to stone over the dark water, we did not want to know how deep or wide the lake of our transgressions was, did not want the fairy tales that hid the moral price of empire to be dismantled. Like the child who is told he was brought by the stork, and thus spared the shocking tale of the penis and vagina, so we wanted to believe our nation flew into the world like an angel, untainted by the vices of other lands. We surrounded our self-esteem with bad history, with thick and convincing books of blindspots, encircled our national sins with villains who had been defeated, or moral apemen who we had evolved beyond, thus removing our flaws from the foreground where they continued to manifest, shrouded in denial. In a storm of confrontation and disillusionment, we considered ourselves patriots. We kept the faith.

But time, slowly, did its work. The grand illusions of our self-deception were methodically deconstructed, and finally resisted only by the visceral reflexes of the unredeemable. White surrendered its sword to gray, and the moss was cleared off of the tombstones. This shift in consciousness, refined from voices of protest, took root on the college campus, and a new generation was shaped by relentless inquiry, and accustomed to smashing yesterday’s idols into bits. Nihilistic in appearance, and served by petty ants delighted to carry off dead flies, as well as by genuine visionaries unphased by centuries of misrepresentation, it was an intellectual effort to empty our self-perception of falsehoods so that the truth could enter. It was the destructive prelude to creation, and though, at many times, it stalled out before bearing new fruit, leaving us with a desert in the place of a false garden, it was as useful as it was painful. One cannot blame the destroyer of lies for not giving birth to a palatable truth; he has done enough and it is up to the desolate to build a new and better world, where there is now space to do so. Whenever obsessive accuracy and debilitating precision paralyze Man’s great leaps, new approximations that enable him to act must be salvaged from the talons of iconoclasm. Man will always depend on sweeping concepts to sustain him, never long submit to wear the crown-of-thorns of footnotes that carve his passion into scholarly fiefdoms. Though his mind may reduce the temple into rubble, his heart must always find a way to put it back together. And there must come a time when his desire to be informed will succumb to his desire to be inspired. Deconstruction must lead us to new convictions, to new faiths and new heroes, if the debris of past illusions is not to be reconstituted into the old lies we thought we had left behind, but did not have the strength to live without.

In this new world of cold but necessary deconstruction, amidst shattered temples and abandoned altars, it came about, at last, one day, that my attachment to my boyhood hero, Charles George Gordon, aka Chinese Gordon, aka Gordon Pasha, had to be reconsidered.

This was no small thing, for heroes are not merely trifling accessories to our lives, who can be easily dispensed with and replaced, they are like stars in the sky which we navigate our lives by; they are voices in the night that hold us up when we are falling, souls of lions we pray to when we are at risk, brothers and sisters in our loneliness, friends who deter us from suicide, angels who place us onto the map at the point where they could not go on. We are part of the same river, flowing with waters they gave to us. We keep their candles lit, lay fresh flowers on their graves, and in return, they rescue our hearts from despair and loan us their courage from the Beyond. In the pages of books they await the coming of kindred spirits, to waylay with their passion, and ignite, with ancient fire, in new times and new places. It is a perfect symbiosis, this connection between the dead and the living, the hero and the novice, the past and the present. You cannot extricate yourself from a fallen hero without breaking your soul. You cannot surrender him to the ruthless truth-seeking of deconstruction, without a fight. But neither can you be left holding the bag of a historical charlatan, defending the flat earth of someone you love when the earth is really round. And so, you have no choice but to look deconstruction in the eyes and say, at last: Tell me, who was this man? And after deconstruction has spoken, to look at him anew, and if you need to, to search among the fallen stones for something that did not fall. For some sign of beauty amidst the scars of deconstruction, some straw to grasp at before you drown in a heroless universe.

Charles George Gordon was born on January 28, 1833, at Woolwich, England, son of a career army officer coming from a long line of soldiers, and a shipowner’s daughter and devout Christian woman who spent hours reading the Bible to her children. Given his heritage, and the nature of his family, which was guided by strong parents committed to spending the time and energy needed to imprint their values upon their young, it was inevitable that Charles and his brothers would end up in the military, carrying on the soldierly tradition of their ancestors. At the age of fifteen, after a childhood that was simultaneously free-spirited and receptive, in which he was both a joyful prankster and a deeply-affected disciple of his mother’s religious training, Charles entered the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, aiming to become an artillery officer as his father; but problems in the school, stemming from his bad temper, which led him to head butt a superior and knock him down a flight of stairs, as well as to too severely punish a subordinate for some fault (which was, to Gordon, intolerable) finally forced him to graduate late, qualifying him, instead, for a possible career with the royal engineers, whose standards were, it seems, a notch lower. This was probably for the best, since he had already shown an uncommon ability for map-making and the design of fortifications.

Charles’ first military action occurred in the Crimea in 1855, where England and France had joined together with the faltering Ottoman Empire to resist the threat of Russian expansion, which was aimed at gaining control of the Dardanelles and Bosporus from Turkey, and penetrating into the Balkans. The Crimean War (1853-1856) was a morally murky conflict based on competing national self-interests attuned to geopolitical principles. There was a clear logic, if no particular moral high ground, to the confrontation, which was distinguished by long and grueling sieges, hunger, misery, and disease on all sides, and bitter weather. Men who were not killed by the bullet or the artillery shell, froze to death in their trenches, or asphyxiated in the smoke of the charcoal fires they lit to try to stay warm. For the most part, glory was replaced by endurance, and brilliance by tenacity, as two ghost armies slugged it out in a demoralizing battle of attrition. One exception was the infamous "Charge of the Light Brigade", in which British and Irish cavalry units, acting on misinterpreted orders, were suicidally hurled against Russian artillery batteries and entrenched riflemen with devastating consequences which, nonetheless, amazed all who witnessed the attack with the nearly limitless capacity of human courage ("it is magnificent, but it is not war," said one French officer, horrified to see such brave men thrown away). Although bravery abounded in the war, aside from this tragically misused display of spirit and other, less glorified wastes of the anonymous, it was mainly submerged in the daily ordeals of the soldiers, and the militarily indecisive dangers which they were constantly exposed to. The clearest hero of all in the war, when all is said and done, was actually a woman and non-combatant, Florence Nightingale, who with a small band of volunteer nurses came to care for the wounded and the sick, who hitherto had been inadequately attended to, crowded into unclean barrack beds and cots which were, in cases, immediately adjacent to open cesspools; and who were in other ways neglected and allowed to languish, to die of simple wounds from which they should have recovered. Florence Nightingale, "like an angel with a lantern of love walking through the halls of Hell" - a healer braving the fabricated nightmare of man’s stupidity - helped to turn the situation around with her compassion and her empathy, her solid grasp of hygiene and her professional nursing skills, and most of all, with her ability to shake and move the indifferent: to spearhead a total overhaul of the inept healthcare system which she first found in the Crimea. As many men as the generals threw away, that many or more she may have saved with her kindness, and the talent it compelled itself to acquire.

In this conflict, in which Charles’ older brothers Henry and Enderby also served, the younger Gordon was one of the many brave and nearly invisible, commended but not elevated. He improved the quarters for the troops, dug rifle pits and inspected trenches, conducted reconnaissance operations close to enemy lines, came under fire at various times, and was slightly wounded when an artillery shell exploding nearby hurled debris his way, striking him in the head with a stone which momentarily stunned him. After the war, which was won by the alliance of Britain, France, and Turkey, Gordon was praised (and even looked at askance) for his extraordinary coolness under fire, and for his invaluable knowledge of enemy positions, gained by putting himself at risk.

With the end of the Crimean War, various tasks, important as small strands in the construction and maintenance of imperial power, but insignificant in and of themselves, and with no possible avenue for heroics, absorbed Gordon’s attention; or, perhaps one could say, caused it to wander. Gordon was not in his element in the grip of bureaucracy. It was not until 1860, as Britain became embroiled in a new conflict in China, that he was once again called back to action, and this time to a setting where he was destined to make his mark.

From the British point of view, China was "acting up." Of course, to see things in that way was the very epitome of egocentrism. In the Opium War (1839-1842) the British had attacked China in support of the right of British merchants to continue selling opium in China, which the Chinese rulers had attempted to prohibit. How did this morally amazing situation arise? The British East India Company, which had established connections in China and actually controlled large parts of India via its economic influence, its alliances with various native princes, and its private army comprised of a core of British soldiers and technically advanced weapons, supplemented by large bodies of Indian troops known as sepoys, had, by this time, constructed a complex web of international trade intimately binding the fates of China, India, and Britain. It imported Indian cotton and spices to England, and sold English goods to India; through plunder, trade, and taxes, it siphoned off vast amounts of gold and jewels gathered by centuries of Indian and Mogul history, and sent these treasures back to England where they provided the financial fuel for the Industrial Revolution, which decisively pushed Europe into the driver’s seat of world affairs. [1] In the case of China, as soon as the company had a foothold, it began to import tea, silk and porcelain, into England at great profit. However, a problem arose. How to pay for the imports? The British government sought to limit movement from its silver reserves back to China (it wanted to maintain its financial power as intact as possible, not to squander it on consumption which would enrich other lands); and China was not particularly enthused by British goods at the time. That’s when the East India Company came up with the brilliant, unscrupulous idea to sell opium cultivated in India to China; the profits from this trade would allow the company to pay for Chinese goods, without tapping into the British silver supply. At the same time, increased revenues in India from the opium trade would increase the Indians’ purchasing power, better enabling them to buy British manufactured goods.

As a result of the Opium War, which Britain won, the Chinese ceded Hong Kong to Britain, expanded Britain’s trade access to their country (opening up ports such as Canton and Shanghai to British merchants), agreed to limits on their ability to tax British imports (obliterated their own tariff defenses), and granted British citizens the right of extraterritoriality, meaning that British citizens accused of committing crimes in China would now be tried in British courts instead of Chinese. And, of course, the opium trade was allowed to resume. The British Empire, too steeped in its own self-righteous mythology and imagined devotion to Christianity to fully comprehend its actions, had, incredibly, forced opium down China’s throat and climbed up another stair of history as nothing more than a glorified drug dealer.

In 1856, China’s reluctance to comply with the provisions of the Treaty of Nanking, which it had signed with a gun to its head, as well as the angry behavior of Chinese mobs offended by the arrogance of members of the new European community thrust into their midst, drew a new "international response." British and French forces initiated joint military operations aimed at forcing China to comply more fully with the treaty, and to provide a more stable and secure environment for the conduct of business.

In 1857, Britain was distracted (but not deterred) from this endeavor by the unexpected fury and power of the "Sepoy Rebellion", a massive mutiny of the East India Company’s native Indian troops, who were driven to revolt by a long list of unresolved grievances, and by the undeniable bad taste of foreign domination. As time went on, the mutiny took on aspects of a national war for independence, although its true intent and scale remains in dispute to this day. What is not in dispute is that the violence was terrible, with appalling brutality committed by both sides. Back in Britain, the moments when rage consumed the enemy and drove him to excess, were used to reinforce preexisting images of the savage, uncivilized, dark races of Asia who needed to be tamed and caged like tigers within firm structures of Western control; while British excesses were seen as justifiable retaliations which had been provoked, and were either fully tolerated as necessities of war, criticized (while being understood in the light of the enemy’s "bestiality"), or else allowed to pass unregistered by the selective filters of moral codes weighted towards one’s own side. While the enemy’s atrocities stood out vividly, producing passionate reactions, one’s own receded into the shadowy nether-world of numbness, in which they were neither approved of nor condemned. Instead, they were shrugged off like monotonous scenery on the side of the road, which the exhausted traveler passes by with only the faintest sign of recognition. In defense of empire, whole villages were razed to the ground; there were mass hangings of rebels and alleged rebel sympathizers, slaughters of civilians who were shot down and bayoneted in the streets, and cases of prisoners forced to lick blood up from the ground, before being fired out of cannons and blown to bits. These acts of brutality, utterly reprehensible from the moral point of view, were nonetheless consistent with the behavior of many conquering nations and peoples of the past, who had used terror and fearsome retribution to quell the fires of revolt; but given the British pretense of moral superiority and Christian virtue, they were absolutely stunning. The disparity between self-image and reality was practically beyond comprehension: hypocrisy in its purest form. In 1858, as a result of this bloody rebellion, the British government took over direct control of India from the East India Company, installing a governor-general or viceroy to lead a new government there, and implementing political, bureaucratic and military measures to fully incorporate India as a colony of the British Empire.

Meanwhile, back in China, British and French arms had once again prevailed and led to a new peace agreement with the Chinese government, embodied in the Tientsin treaties of 1858. When this new agreement was "not honored", as the foreigners saw it, yet another advance was launched in 1860, this time aimed directly for Peking. It was at this moment that Gordon arrived in China and, as a brevet major, took part in the European campaign to force the "stubborn and deceitful" Emperor to "stop backtracking on the treaties." As merely one more cog in the war machine, Gordon participated in setting up artillery batteries just outside Peking, but, to his soldier spirit’s disappointment, the enemy surrendered the city before his work could prove its worth. In anger at discovering of the torture and death of several European peace emissaries who had been sent to Peking before the commencement of hostilities, Lord Elgin, the British commander, ordered the burning of the Emperor’s summer palace, a magnificent and revered historical treasure. Days before, Gordon, with his eye for architecture and design, had admired the spectacular edifice. Now he was among those detailed to burn it to the ground. "Demoralizing work" he called it. No sooner had his eyes perceived beauty, than his hands were commanded to destroy it. Soundly beaten, the Chinese government had no choice but to sign a new treaty, the Peking conventions, which opened up still more ports to foreign merchants and extended European trading zones inland. The principle of extraterritoriality, which seemed to make foreigners "above the law" and to provide them with legal protection for any potential outrage, was reaffirmed, and permission was granted to evangelical missionaries to spread the Christian gospel and "fish for souls" in China without impediment.

This is the environment into which Charles George Gordon was inserted in 1860: a man destined to be adored and admired, in his country and in his time, and beyond his country and his time, as a gallant, noble, and pious, if somewhat peculiar, hero. And yet, withdrawing one’s focus from the man - zooming out, as it were, to look at the broader picture to see what he was a part of - detaching from his personality to see the context in which his work took place - one can say that Gordon, magnificent and well-meaning though he may have been, served the imperialistic project of a nation insensitive to the aspirations and, at times, even the bare necessities of others; a nation determined to be supreme among nations, whatever the moral cost; a nation endowed with an extraordinary sense of entitlement, seeming to perceive domination as its right; a nation filled with racist attitudes and arrogant prejudices; a nation committed to wealth and power on the earth, in direct contradiction of the teachings of Jesus, who it prayed to every Sunday; a nation ingenious in mining the world’s weak spots, in tossing about the apple of discord and reaping the treasures of division: subtle whenever possible, openly violent when not (preferably after drawing the victim to strike first, so as to cloak its aggression as defense).

As many such nations, Great Britain during the age of Queen Victoria kept a myriad of justifications in its arsenal to enable it to lead its fabulously rewarding double life. Like Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, there was the refined and cultured gentleman, and the ruthless killer, all inside a single skull. In its own eyes, Britain was a nation blessed by a culture of moderation and compromise, ever since the days of Runnymede, and later, the Bill of Rights; and by a system which reverentially preserved the familiar, while pragmatically welcoming the new. In this way, the unifying aura of the monarchy which, at times, seemed capable of embodying the national soul and serving as a rallying point for a troubled land, remained, while Parliament and the Prime Minister and his cabinet, reflecting the expectations, demands, and realities of the democratic age, carried on the real work of government. In this same way, many time-honored customs, traditions, and social mores persisted, albeit in sometimes tattered and strained ways, while the doors to change were flung wide open, leading to absolute revolutions in technology, finance, trade, and production. Unlike Spain, which in the 16^th and 17^th centuries destroyed its might with a rigid commitment to the past, Britain innovated, adapted, bent like a reed before what it perceived to be the principles of power, rather than standing in the way of time like a mighty oak made fragile by intransigence. It had ideals, but its ideals were more elastic than 16^th-century Spain’s; better able to stretch and to fit the changing form of history.

The British regarded their system as politically advanced, and their culture as humane and civilized. They considered themselves realists: astute students of the lessons of history, which taught them that kingdoms, nations, and empires lived in a constant state of competition and rivalry, and that to survive with dignity, one must cultivate and preserve power. Power, in their age, they believed stemmed from economic wealth and prosperity, which was mainly to be won through manufacture and trade, protected by, and at times promoted by, military might, which was elevated to new heights by technology and industry, and made efficient by clever political strategies which reduced the amount of brute force needed to accomplish objectives. In its age of preeminence, Britain realized that the key to its economic power lay in the mastery of a complex and far-flung system of international trade, which could vastly amplify the potential of its own, island-bound economy by incorporating potential markets and sources of raw materials from around the world. In the manner of the Portuguese and Dutch before them, trading outposts were established around the world. Native leaders were enriched by trade and co-opted to further British interests. Whenever problems arose, such as nationalist awakenings or rebellions, "divide and conquer" strategies were utilized, to maximize the impact of British military interventions. Ethnic and religious divisions, jealousies amidst ruling families, the ambitions of usurpers and opportunists, were brilliantly detected and exploited, as required. European competitors, at a serious disadvantage due to Britain’s extraordinary maritime abilities, which led to its command of the seas, were fought off when necessary. (In this way, the French were driven out of Canada and India). Spheres of influence, protectorates, and outright colonies were established. For the British, global expansion and the formation of empire were natural and inevitable processes which could not be avoided, in the face of intense competition with other European nations. For all of these nations, the colonization of vulnerable parts of the world was not only a means of self-aggrandizement, but also an armament in their struggle with each other. Colonies were weapons. Just as one cannot remain with the bow-and-arrow when one’s neighbor has acquired a gun, so the imperative for European nations during the great ages of colonization and imperialism which physically fortified them and morally degraded them, was to acquire colonies, in order to match the growth of their rivals. No one was willing, in the name of morality, to remain the same height, while their potential enemies, feeding on a diet of other lands, grew steadily into giants.

Besides this external dynamic impelling British imperialism, there were also crucial internal dynamics at work. In addition to the obvious impulse to consume, which the Industrial Revolution cultivated and elevated in order to sustain itself, there was the need to bridge the gap between rich and poor, at least to the extent of quieting the fires of discontent. The Industrial Revolution - a technical revolution - had accomplished amazing miracles of production on the backs of a new and impoverished working class, descended from dispossessed peasants, and it now threatened to engender a social revolution. Marx and Engels had turned out "The Communist Manifesto" in 1848, and workers throughout Europe had responded with increased agitation and, in cases, revolutionary actions, threatening to overthrow the capitalist class, which they blamed for paying them obscenely low salaries, subjecting them to unsafe, dehumanizing working conditions, and driving them to live in wretched slums. Meanwhile, a vast profit was being made from their work, and used to enrich the entrepreneurial class. While Marx and the radicals attacked the system by means of revolutionary politics, others, such as Charles Dickens, attacked it by means of literature, with novels such as A Christmas Carol and Oliver Twist, hoping to transform it by holding its sins up before its eyes and appealing to the collective conscience to insist on remedies. Christian reformers also sought to improve conditions for the poor without the necessity of a violent revolution, by raising awareness of existing injustices, and attempting to re-instill Christian love into society, and to inspire men to live up to the compassionate ideals of their religion. Progress was made as a result of these moral appeals, but it was slow. In this uncertain setting, British imperialism played a crucial role, for it increased the flow of wealth into Britain which allowed the capitalist class, pressed by the labor movement, to retain its enormous fortune, while simultaneously raising the living standards of the poor to the point where, although injustices remained, revolution was no longer a temptation; economic expansion into the international environment and the accumulation of new wealth from abroad nullified the need for a redistribution of existing wealth at home, and thus enabled the capitalist class and workers to avoid a collision on British soil. In the end, much of the British working class remained closely linked to the elites which dominated them; they were bound together, by nationalism, in loyalty to the imperialistic projects which sustained them both.

Once again, of course, these projects, in order to be palatable to a society which imagined itself to be idealistic and enlightened, required some form of justification beyond the pragmatic needs of realpolitik and the demands of class tensions. This justification came in the form of a mental reframing process, whereby domination was reshaped into a form of generosity, and conquest was turned into an act of munificence. In Asia and Africa, Britain’s principal zones of imperial interest [2], life was said to be materially backward, morally and culturally bereft, and spiritually adrift.

In the material realm, Britain chose to measure the accomplishments of other civilizations according to its own standards, overlooking the destabilizing social processes that had been necessary to achieve those results. It, therefore, might judge a country poor that did not have cities with the amenities of London, or modern rail networks connecting its population centers, while neglecting to take into consideration alternative cultural visions motivating that country’s people, or alternative cultural assets compensating for that country’s lack of material showpieces: assets such as the social safety nets implicit in the community-centered life of self-supporting peasant villages, which Britain often sought to uproot, and whose manpower it sought to transplant into plantation environments oriented towards the global market. Here, surely, there was greater profit to be made by the entrepreneurs, but for the common man, a heightened state of precariousness, as the pre-modern institutions which had protected him now lay smashed to bits, or else badly damaged, leaving him at the mercy of impersonal processes and strangers, to whom his own, tiny fate mattered very little. For Britain, international trade, and especially "free trade", was a kind of religion, an economic faith whose devotees would be enriched by the massive scale of commerce made possible; and it felt that the whole world must be won over and plugged into this mutually-beneficial system (which it was soon forced to manipulate, however, in order to prevent certain equalizing dynamics of free trade from eroding its supremacy). [3] Thus, it came knocking onto the door of the world, an economic evangelist determined to make converts, ostensibly for the benefit of all, but in reality, especially for itself. Inevitably, in less well-defended parts of the globe, it would find native friends eager to cooperate, and it would use them as an "in" to hook the native countries into the master scheme. These collaborators were deemed "progressive" and "forward looking", and endeared to the British public, while opponents in the native countries were labeled as "backward", and "primitive." Once resistance to foreign domination erupted into the open, the British would not so much "invade" the country in question, as "rescue" their "forward-looking friends" from the "violent enemies of progress", and help them to establish an ordered and effective government, which, "coincidentally", also served British interests. In cases, when the native people seemed "incapable" of forming a "stable, modern government" on their own (on behalf of the British), the British would step into the political vacuum, assuming the role of "benevolent parent" (colonial master) to the "incapable child" (colonial subject), who must be educated, socialized, and given time to grow into cultural adulthood (beaten into submission and molded) before being left to fend for himself. Many British unquestioningly accepted this adult-child metaphor for their relationship with their colonial subjects. As you could not morally leave a child alone to play with matches in a house, so these countries needed, and if you cared for them, deserved, guidance from a more mature people. Compassion compelled intervention. If economic profit and military advantage were side-effects of one’s concern, so be it. Myopic though this view was, it had emotional power in the center of the empire, and turned millions of decent, if rather manipulable people, into avid supporters of the imperialistic project.

Whenever possible, this mental construct - this self-perceptual transmutation of imperialism into a form of international parenting - was reinforced by tales of primitive savagery, barbaric customs, and moral depravity in the target countries. The annals of human history are rife with unfair practices, and instances of exploitation, cruelty, superstition, and caprice; so, not surprisingly, it was almost always possible to point out offensive aspects of the cultures slated for subjugation. In China, there was the custom of concubinage, particularly horrifying to the Victorian Christian ethos, as well as the cruel binding, and culturally-sanctioned deformation of women’s feet. In India, there was the practice of suttee (in which the living widow of a deceased husband would be burned, with him, on his funeral pyre) and also widespread female infanticide. In some parts of tropical Africa ("the heart of darkness") there were human sacrifices and there was cannibalism. In the north of Africa, long after the abolition of slavery in England and its possessions (1833), there remained a thriving slave trade. To oppose these practices on moral grounds was surely worthy. To use them as cover to gain access to other lands under the pretense of being a champion of human rights, and to then perpetuate new, more modern forms of abuse behind the smokescreen of one’s moral concern, was less so. In the place of obvious outrages, new, sometimes more subtle ones were implemented, foremost among them being the enclosure of vast sectors of the world into an imperialistic space which, by destroying the viability of old systems without permitting fully functional replacements to be reached, ended up sucking the life and future out of many countries, casting them into the economic and social pit they remain in to this day.

The "White Man’s Burden", as the "duty" of the "civilized peoples of the world" to raise up the "uncivilized races" of the earth came to be known - the duty to bring the torch of hope and progress into the night in which the "primitive and simple peoples" of the world lived - was really little more than sugar added to the cup of domination, sweetening it to the palate of those who craved its rewards, without tasting the bitterness of its cost to others. Although it consisted of many components - political, social, economic, technical, and spiritual - the pillar of this civilizing project, which was the purifying force of the imperialistic project, was Christianity: the "humanizing, uplifting" faith of the West, calculated to soften the rough edges of the human spirit with its ideals of compassion, charity, mercy, kindness, and respect for others. ("Love one’s neighbor as oneself.") There was also the more fundamentalist belief, that only through faith in Jesus as one’s savior, could one’s eternal soul be saved from damnation. ("For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.") The introduction of Christianity to the "dark, uncivilized, and morally flawed" regions of the earth was not, therefore, only an act intended to humanize them, to rescue them from their "primitive savagery" and "rampant vices", but also an act of supreme compassion, to save their souls from extinction or eternal torture, depending on one’s interpretation of the Bible. Of course, this view was utterly ethnocentric. The spiritual resources of Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism (mixed with Confucianism) and various "pagan" creeds were dismissed in absolute confidence of the superiority of Christianity, which was the "one and only true religion." Kindness derived from arrogance is rarely helpful, and in this case, provided only one more excuse for conquest, and one more source of aggravation for the conquered. Evangelical missionaries threw themselves wholeheartedly into the work of trying to convert the masses of Asia and Africa to their faith, attempting to tear their way through the rich fabric of preexisting religions, in order to introduce their own. In the process, not only "souls" were at stake, but also the foundations of national identity and the potential for native resistance, as conversion to a foreign religion frequently weakened the ties which natives felt to their own country and culture.

Besides this, the evangelical crusade also threatened to repress the vibrancy, sensuality, and life force of the native cultures: to impose the guilt-ridden cloud of misguided righteousness, puritan gray, on lands of color. Native women, from Africa to Polynesia, were made to feel shameful about their bodies, and, wherever possible, wrapped in clothing. Christian mores regarding sexual relationships and moral propriety were also pushed. History, today, remembers Victorian England as one of the most prudish, uptight, self-repressed cultures of all times, and yet, due to its extraordinary power, it felt entitled to impress its sickness upon the world. [4] Of course, there are many who say that the puritan restriction of human sexuality led to a massive redirection of human energy, via sublimation, into the processes of building civilization, accounting for many extraordinary achievements in the realms of technology, production, and art. [5] At the same time, Victorian prudery generated an erotic and, at times, distinctly kinky subculture among elements of the leisure class, as a response to frustration on the surface; while part of the appeal of imperialism for the masses was precisely the fact that many of the regions brought to their attention on account of it, were "untamed", "exotic", filled with strange and sometimes erotic customs that resuscitated the cramped imagination, and somehow rekindled life’s extinguished light; somehow brought fresh air into a stale room. Whole multitudes, demoralized and bored out of their minds, internally crushed by the accomplishments and methods of their civilization, peered, as voyeurs, into other lands through the window which imperialism opened for them. Colonialism became not only a means of economic survival, but a resource for psychological survival as well. In the process of "taming the primitive", the joy of seeing him still "savage and unclothed" was derived, and the dangerously low life force of the conqueror elevated, his pulse restored. As much as he needed new sources of raw materials in the distant lands of Asia and Africa to keep his economy going, he need new sources of excitement and life, to undo the damage which his commitment to "Christian virtue" had wrought upon his soul. Hidden in the evangelicalism which he subjected foreign peoples to, was the peeping tom of his thwarted psyche. As one native observer, providing a final assessment on the impact of Christianity on his land, put it: "When you [Europeans] came, you had the Bible and we had the land. Now we have the Bible, and you have the land."

By such complicated methods as these, Victorian England constructed a mental framework for perceiving its scheme of global domination in ways that did not inhibit it. Self-image was preserved without abandoning the imperialistic project. The vices of the subjugated were emphasized, as were the virtues of the conqueror. The aggression was kneaded with delusions, and often real intentions, of bettering the lot of the victim. Conquest did not require anyone to abdicate his goodness, the brutality of the project was buried underneath a multitude of justifications, and there was always some villain to put in the balance to outweigh one’s own transgressions. The arrogance was so thoroughly ingrained that it was not even detected.

Is this, in any way, an excuse for the behavior of Victorian England? No; it is, instead, an explanation of how this behavior came to pass, without resorting to demonology; a diagram, in words, of the human engine that was necessary to power this project, without postulating the existence of monsters in every nook and cranny of the British Isles. It is my contention that imperialism was a product of mainly decent people, selectively decent people, warped by their culture, allowing themselves to be warped by their culture, into supporters or tolerators of terrible injustices. This does not absolve imperialism’s human tools of their role, nor dull the blade of introspection which we must soon undergo ourselves; and, in fact, it is more frightening to consider that such acts of domination may be carried out by people as charming as my neighbor, instead of by mythological beasts, who I need never live among, nor fear becoming.

Into this self-deluded world, causing injury and believing itself civilized and grand, I must now insert my boyhood hero, Charles George Gordon, a soldier in the British army, a warrior in the imperialist project. Is it possible, any longer, to cherish a man in such a place? Is it possible to forgive him or admire him, and others caught in a similar position: men like Robert E. Lee who nobly fought on behalf of America’s slave-holding states, or Erwin Rommel, whose brilliant generalship and nerve lifted the fortunes of the Third Reich? What happens when a hero is dipped into a poison dye? Does he come out the color of his country’s sins, or the color of his individual worth? Is his own inward-driven velocity the measure of who he is, or the direction his culture imparts to it? Is his gallantry erased by the cause he is conditioned to fight for, or does something in his soul prevail in spite of it, persisting to become a legacy for all? Can intentions ever redeem consequences; is vision beyond one’s place and time a necessary condition for being revered? Perhaps this is not a question which can be answered by theory. Perhaps it is necessary to examine the details of a life in order to decide its fate; like some mythological scribe of the underworld, to take up a pen, and write once in the book of sins and once in the book of virtues, to see which page holds more, before deciding the final destination of those we once loved.

As you may remember, we last left Charles Gordon in Peking, standing beside the smoldering ruins of the Summer Palace which he was instructed to destroy. He was very much a product of his culture and his family, and subject to the inertia of his lineage; a fresh, yet already aged and deeply imprinted soul, passed through the hands of dark angels to a new world and its onerous tasks. At the same time, Charles Gordon was a unique and independent spirit with the power of self-creation. His soul had weight, enough to sink below the surface of his times and its assumptions into the depths of the heart’s wisdom. In him, duty and honor were innate callings, but to what should they attach? To nation or to God? To what should the prodigally sincere spirit, longing to serve, lend its great nobility? To the collective direction or the individual’s lonely vision? In blessed moments, there was an overlap, a place where the two great demands on loyalty did not conflict, but at other moments, there seemed to be a tension, a competition between them, as in the Biblical warning, "you cannot serve two masters" - and Gordon was plunged into doubt, sometimes knowing the cause, at other times simply tormented and depressed without fully understanding why.

After the Chinese capitulation to the foreign army which had demanded its submission to Europe’s imperialistic designs, Gordon was placed in charge of providing and maintaining quarters for the occupying garrison at Tientsin. This garrison was to insure Chinese compliance to the latest treaty. In 1861, Gordon’s focus on technical details and the poor quality of the British troops stationed at Tientsin was temporarily relieved by a short but severe bout with smallpox, which, alarming though it was, resulted in a shift of inner tectonic plates, and a deepening commitment to his religion. As he wrote to his elder sister, Augusta, in the wake of his battle with the illness: "The disease has brought me back to my Saviour, and I trust in future to be a better Christian than I have been hitherto." [6]

For any understanding of Gordon to be reached, his relationship with his faith must be considered. As previously stated, Gordon was reared in a deeply Christian home, by a mother absolutely devoted to the lessons of the Bible. Later, his prime correspondent in life would be his sister Augusta, twelve years his elder, with whom he exchanged multitudinous pages of thought, reflection, and ideas on God, faith, the divine mysteries and life. In these days, in the West, Christianity was still the prime ideological vessel for containing and transporting moral sentiments, and many a naturally sensitive and compassionate individual soon found his innate reaching-out to others encumbered with the doctrines and contortions of this spiritual framework that both justified and encouraged his goodwill, yet also burdened it with many life-denying demands and afflicted it with thwarted instincts that were turned into neuroses. Gordon was both an absorber and a nonconformist; a victim of his faith, and a man saved by it.

Regarding the Christian attitude towards violence - or, should it be said, the Christian attitude ever since Constantine, after the pacifism of the early Christians was infected by the ambitions of states that needed to preserve their capacity for violence - Gordon was, without a doubt, an absorber. He inherited the tradition of the "Christian soldier", the "crusader for Christ", which had been consolidated by centuries of European history, and he did not swerve from his belief that one could be both a Christian and a warrior, love Jesus and kill one’s enemy. Violence has always been a troubling matter for moral people. Yet most, in the end, reject absolute pacifism, reasoning in the following way: what if a killer were to burst into my home and threaten to kill my loved ones? Wouldn’t love compel me to protect them from the killer, and wouldn’t I be justified in using violence against him, if that were necessary to stop him? Once that principle is established, and most people readily accept it, there follows the next step: what if the killer were to burst into my neighbor’s house? Should I stand aside and let him die, limit my love to my own family? Shouldn’t my love extend beyond my own house, beyond my own locked door? And if it does, shouldn’t I, therefore, come to the defense of my neighbor who is in danger, and if necessary, resort to violence to protect his life? Once that principle is established, the question then arises, where do I draw the line? If I am compassionate, must I not defend all who are in danger who I am able to defend, the same as I would defend my own family, and my neighbor? Even people who are threatened in other lands? The use of violence, morally justified under the most direct and obvious conditions, can be expanded by extending outwards the principle that allows it under those conditions, giving rise to the birth of armies and the self-defense of nations on their own soil and, once a little strategy is absorbed, on battlefields in other lands, as well as the rescue of other nations from their own, distant predators. In this environment, seemingly constructed by a widening of one’s morality, which grows to encompass the people of the entire world, spectacular new opportunities for deceit are born; selfish manipulators are able to confuse the well-intentioned, to blur the lines between caring and despising, aiding and exploiting. For the Christian of the Victorian era, violence was expected to be undertaken with solemnity, as a last resort, after serious efforts on behalf of peace had been made (although, in practice, it was often embarked on, especially against "primitive peoples", with all the joy and pageantry of a fox hunt). [7] Old Testament values of righteous warfare, conducted by a race favored by God, against those who stood in the way of its destiny, were internalized by Great Britain by this time, and Jesus’ rather impractical push for absolute pacifism, based upon a level of faith not possible in the face of the material output of the Industrial Revolution, was quietly pushed to the side. Then, as now, the Bible was selectively used to make spirituality pragmatic; to empower earthly agendas, not derail them. Gordon, whose wild-horse spirit bucked many a rider of his mind, did not throw off this concept. He suffered more than most soldiers for the bitter harvests reaped by war, and yet he did not reject violence or its high expression, war, but rather, integrated it into his Christian worldview. His religion did not cause him to beat his sword into a plowshare, but it did alert him to his own pride and to the secret craving for glory that horrified him, which he sought, most of his life, to escape from. Like many great warriors of history, he was stimulated by the intellectual and physical demands which warfare placed upon him; by the high-stakes puzzles which it allowed him to solve, proving the brilliance of his mind, and by the dangers, beyond the ken of peace, which it allowed him to face, proving the courage in his heart. Like climbing a mountain, battle gave him a chance to find out the state of his soul, and a medium in which to grow. But this was a mountain whose crags and slopes were made of living men, families, and a world; it was not just one man against the snow and the wind, and it could not be climbed in innocence. Gordon was aware of this, and nearly torn in two between his mode of self-expression, and its consequences. His spirit was both elevated and eclipsed by the gift that covered him with its shadow.

In addition to his religion’s reconciliation with warfare, Gordon also seemed to absorb the most extreme content of its distrust of sex. While many spiritual systems throughout the world have left ample mental space for the enjoyment of sensual pleasure without thereby giving way to pure hedonism, or drowning society in its libido, Christianity has frequently set pleasure at odds with the sacred, portraying the body as a barrier to reaching a true commitment to God. With great frequency throughout the Bible, the ascetics come off as upright, while the wicked are described as sensual and decadent: slaves of their carnal senses, who are diverted, by their bodies, from spiritual attainment. Adam is corrupted by Eve who cannot resist the apple, Samson is undone by the charms of Delilah which he is not mighty enough to deny, Sodom and Gomorra are punished for their joyful, corrupted ways which turn their eyes from the sky, Herod is led to kill a great prophet by a dancing girl, Babylon is the whore that tempts the holy to damnation. In "1 Corinthians", the Apostle Paul urges man and woman to marry if that is necessary to prevent them from committing the sin of "fornication" - sex between the unwed: "Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind." [8] However, for those who have spiritual discipline and strength as he does, it is even better to refrain from sexual relations altogether: "It is good for a man not to touch a woman… I say therefore to the unmarried and widows, It is good for them if they abide [in chastity] even as I. But if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn." [9] Seen, in this light, pleasure is virtually the opposite of faith, and the body and its senses are impediments to meeting the divine, which depends upon renunciation, and the intense focus which only deprivation can produce. The sincerest and strongest Christian is therefore led to celibacy. The good Christian who is not up to this stringent standard, at least knows his limitations, and flees into the shelter of a formal, monogamous marriage in order to satisfy his desires within a socially-accepted space, where no sin will be committed, no taboo violated, and no neighborly bond broken.

Gordon, bombarded from childhood by the Biblical slant of righteous Victorian women, and naturally driven beyond the masses and their compromises by an irrepressible force of idealism that seemed to haunt him from birth, was doubtless set on a trajectory towards this Christian extreme at an early age. At the age of fourteen, he wrote in a journal that he wished he were a eunuch, a most curious comment for a youth to make, which leads some to wonder if any unusual or traumatic event may have occurred to him around this time, or if this sentiment only represented the clash of his adolescent awakening with the ascetic sensibilities instilled in him by his mother’s version of Christianity. Throughout his life, Gordon would display the physical resistance of a priest to the sexual act, although his appreciation of women, as friends and ideals to be cherished and respected in the chivalrous manner of the knight, was evident. Today, Gordon’s behavior would be considered bizarre and prudish; back then, it was only regrettable (to the ladies who were interested in him), but otherwise wholly consistent with the sincerest fringe of Christian believers, who the rest of Humanity could not (and chose not to) follow. Celibacy, however, was not without its cost for Gordon. It was not dictated by his body, it was a genuine sacrifice. Gordon’s senses were not dead. He could frequently be found reading the Bible while sipping a glass of cognac or brandy, and he loved to smoke… From an early age, he seemed to suffer from attacks of angina, especially brought on by stress. These attacks, which helped to keep him on God’ short leash, and to prevent him from forgetting the fragility of Man, who lives constantly at the mercy of the divine, may have, at the same time as they deepened his spirituality, stemmed from it. For the lack of touch in the midst of so challenging a life, must surely have wrought a physical toll on him. Gordon spent much of his life, propelled by passionate emotions within an enclosed space, bouncing off of the walls of things he had renounced with an energy far too great for his self-imposed limitations. It was, perhaps, one of the secrets of his outward achievement, as well as, ultimately, one of the secrets of his demise.

Although a straightforward, if overly zealous, absorber of the Christian ethos he was exposed to, in other spiritual ways Gordon was an eccentric and nonconformist. His literal attention to Scripture, exaggerated even for those days (in which men were learning to view its stories as literature instead of history), led him to propose all sorts of theories which horrified geographers and Biblical scholars alike. Before his life was over, he would determine an alternative site in Jerusalem for the crucifixion of Christ, determine unorthodox locations for the Garden of Eden and the final resting place of Noah’s Ark, and calculate the exact date of Jesus’ second coming. Gordon also adhered, for many years, to the theory of predestination, which by then was very much out of favor in most Christian circles. He believed that everything to be in this world was already decided, and wondered, at moments of inner torment and anxiety, why he was still suffering over his decisions as though the future of men’s lives depended on him, and were not already written into the unfolding fabric of the Universe. Yet, suffer he did. He did not abdicate his sense of responsibility on the doorstep of his theory, and that fact, in itself, troubled him, as though it meant he were somehow deficient in his faith. Gordon also had an off-and-on relationship with the Holy Eucharist, or the ceremony in which the Christian believer drinks the wine that symbolizes the blood of Christ, and eats the cracker that symbolizes his body, in a ritual "ingestion" of divine spirit. In the same way that food, once eaten, is digested and absorbed to become a part of the body, so, by means of this ritual, the spirit of Christ is said to enter a man’s heart, and to be absorbed by him. In the future, after his Chinese experience, Gordon would one day come upon an open Bible at a friend’s house, and find these words leaping out at him from its pages: "Whosoever confesseth that Jesus is the Son of God, God dwelleth in him and he is God." [10] This powerful concept, which he sometimes accessed by means of the Eucharist, stunned and transformed Gordon, taking his spiritual development to a higher level, for now he was able to smash through the feeling of being detached and separate from his God, always pining for what was beyond him and unreachable, to a feeling of oneness, a fusion of the mortal with the divine. Now he could be possessed, disappear within, become a part of, become an instrument. In his moments of greatest esoteric lucidity, Gordon could feel God looking out of his eyes at the world, and using him, as a tool in His plan. In such a state, Death seemed only an illusion, because one was no longer oneself, but God, immortal and divine; and Death, should it come, would only restore consciousness, battered back from the outpost of a man, to its original source. Gordon called this mystical, empowering knowledge "the secret", and never let it corrupt his confidence into a sense of superiority. It did not inflate him, it balanced him; it did not inhibit him with his preciousness, it unleashed his courage and led him to expose himself, as the great must always do. But, of course, Gordon was human and not always at his best. His faith waxed and waned, his certainty gave way to doubt, and demanded new attention; his inner towers could crash to the ground in a single instant, collapsed by his pride, his perfectionism, his ideals and his passions; he fled daily into the Bible to renew himself, and when necessary, to fight with himself, gripping the throat of one Gordon to save the other. Gordon’s life as a Christian was turbulent; his was no bland faith, no superficial, one-time pep talk left to the side of his life. It was a true commitment, a path into the unknown, an adventure, a sounding of the depths. There was a constant growing, dying, and rebirth in it, and a sincerity that made it seem half-mad to many, accustomed by now to the faded colors of a religion that had retreated from the world into the church, except when an alibi was needed. It was hypocrisy that now made Gordon seem insane to the brightest minds of the day, for he took seriously what was meant to be a farce. But many of the common people, nostalgic by the hole in their dead faith, were grateful to have someone to remind them of what had once filled that hole, and preferred to view him as a saint.

Although Gordon’s faith was still a work in progress (as it would always be), it emerged quite strongly from his 1861 bout with smallpox. Fused with his military prowess and his growing experience in warfare, it was ready to make an impact on the battlefields of China, beginning in 1863. In this year, Gordon, with the approval of British authorities, accepted command of a 3,000-man mercenary force known as the "Ever Victorious Army", strangely enough under the employ of the very same Chinese government he had come to tame in 1860. As many of the environments into which Gordon would be inserted throughout his career, this one was complex, politically convoluted, a labyrinth of competing, collaborating, and often uncertain loyalties and interests.

Ever since 1850, China had, in addition to suffering the encroachment and interference of foreign merchants, missionaries, and armies, been embroiled in a fierce and bloody civil war which was destined to cost as many as 200 million lives. [11] China, at the time, was ruled by the Manchu Dynasty [12], which replaced the Ming Dynasty in the 17^th Century. Dominated by ethnic Manchus, who swept southwards into China from Manchuria, and imposed outward signs of submission onto the populace, by forcing all Chinese males to adopt the Manchu hairstyle - a shaved head with a pigtail hanging down from the back - this dynasty was considered "foreign" by many Chinese, and correspondingly resented. At the same time, however, the Dynasty preserved the civil service bureaucracy, social system, and guiding Confucian philosophy which had long sustained China and provided continuity in the midst of its political upheavals and dynastic changes, so that Manchu rule was not so much an imposition upon Chinese culture, as it was an infiltration of Chinese culture and domination from within. Its conquest was softened as the country it had seized absorbed it, and remade it in its own image - much as China had begun to ingest Kublai Khan in the 13^th Century. Nonetheless, in 1850, a great revolt was born: the Taiping Rebellion, spearheaded by a controversial mystic, Hung Hsiu-ch’uan, or T’ien Wang (the "Heavenly King"), a strange yet gifted man who, during a physical and emotional collapse brought on by his failure to pass the civil service exam (the key to a better life), was transformed by a series of visions into believing he was the savior of China. In his feverish spiritual journeys at death’s door - journeys colored by the partly-digested influence of Christian missionaries - he saw himself as Jesus Christ’s younger brother, come to the world as its new Messiah, and charged with the divine task of purifying the country of its demons: men who had been taken over by evil forces, and institutions which reflected and provided structural outlets for those evil forces to manifest and harm the people. Hung was a man of many dimensions. In some ways, he was progressive: he called for an end to the practice of binding women’s feet, and advocated equality for women, who should be allowed to participate in the civil service on the same footing as men. In some ways, he was extreme: he called for an end to the private ownership of land, proposing that the State should expropriate and own all land, and lend it to the peasants according to need. This idea was, in fact, "Communist", and a precursor of the Maoist revolution of the 1930s and 1940s. In the manner of that revolution, Hung was in favor of abolishing the landlord class altogether, and executions of landowners were, in fact, widely practiced by the Taiping rebels as they swept through the countryside. Hung was also a cultural revolutionary, willing to upset and to try to uproot centuries of intellectual and philosophical custom, by displacing the writings of Confucius and other Chinese classics from the study repertoire of the civil service exams, and replacing them with the Christian Bible, which would become the new source of ethics, and the new force for molding life, in China. Consistent with the Christian sensibility, concubinage was to be ended and monogamy promoted as the virtuous path for rich and poor alike. However, Hung and his principal leaders appeared to maintain large personal harems in spite of this moralizing campaign, which seems to have been meant for others. Power has a way of creating its own reality, as the concrete means to attain almost always defeat abstraction.

Hung was, by all accounts, a dynamic and charismatic leader, and many in China were ready for his message. First received by marginalized "ethnic" peoples in the south, including his own Hakka minority, the message was soon consolidated and began to spread. In some ways arrogant (in its goal to smash the old and to remake China with material not of its own culture), the Taiping movement also exuded a sincerity and zeal in its early years that were captivating to a people weary of corruption, high taxes, poor services, widespread insecurity and rampant banditry (many locales, unable to depend upon the Manchu regime for adequate protection, had been forced to form their own self-defense societies to establish some semblance of order). Disciplined, committed, and brave, the Taiping rebels flourished in the half-ruled landscapes of a fading dynasty. Wearing their hair long, in defiance of Manchu codes of submission, they defeated Imperial forces, established a revolutionary capital at Nanking, grew more powerful from their acquisition of foreign firearms (available through trade), threatened to take over the entire country, were beaten back, consolidated control in a virtually impervious revolutionary zone, and sought, again, to extend their power from that base. In the beginning, Europeans tended to idealize the rebellion. It was, after all, Christian in origin, and they hoped that it might conquer and transform China into a Christian nation, more amenable to the West, less surly and resistant to trade. However, after a while, the "honeymoon" began to fade. The "Christian" basis of the revolt began to seem less and less like a legitimate and recognizable expression of Christianity, and more like the utterly personal creation of a very ill man who had grazed Christianity, and carried off shattered pieces of it to place in his mosaic of visions. The missionaries who thought he was a protégé realized that he was, instead, a heretic who would not bend to their interpretation; he was, they came to realize, a "Christian" only by chance, a lost soul who had collided with their religion and staggered away in a self-righteous daze, covered with its dust. Others, also, were forced to contend with the dark underside of the "heavenly revolt." Victorious Taiping forces were clearly responsible for some horrendous, large-scale massacres and were repeatedly proven ruthless towards their enemies. Their victims included not only imperial troops and wealthy landlords, but also great numbers of peasants, who did not properly support them or in other ways antagonized them. Although Imperial forces were also cruel, it was hard to glorify the rebels who would not take the higher ground.

In this milieu, as the romantic mystique of the Taiping Rebellion began to fade in the eyes of European observers - as its violence, radicalism, spiritual incongruity, political unreliability, and rather unnerving zeal began to take center stage - its appeal began to wane. Whereas the European "public" was slow to abandon its idealization, European policy-makers were far ahead of them in deciding that the best card to play in China was actually supporting the corrupt and decaying Manchu regime against the Taiping rebels. The Manchus, already having submitted to European demands, were a known quantity, whereas the stance the Taiping rebels might take after winning control of China was unknown. The Manchu Dynasty was weak, and highly susceptible to European predation, a regime far removed from its initial force, from the velocity of its genesis, like a spent bullet at the end of its trajectory, whereas the Taiping movement was vigorous, young, and close to the power of its inception. The Manchus were like a garden with its doors open for imperialism, the Taipings had not yet been subjugated; they were a movement with an unbroken spirit. Around the time that Gordon was placed in command of the Ever Victorious Army, the issue was not so much whether the Taipings would gain mastery over all of China, for Imperial forces had already driven back their northern advance, but whether the Taipings might destabilize and threaten the vital port of Shanghai which was significant to European commerce; and whether the continuation of the civil war, itself, might not impede the further advances of imperialism, by blocking off the interior of China from foreign penetration, and disrupting economic activity throughout widespread areas of China.

Originally formed in 1860, through the efforts of Shanghai merchants fearing a Taiping invasion, and local Chinese officials who felt that the Manchu army might not properly defend their city, the Ever Victorious Army was a mercenary force comprised of foreign soldiers and Chinese recruits, led by an American adventurer, Frederick Townsend Ward. For some months, Ward successfully led this army against nearby Taiping commanders, fighting to give Shanghai more breathing room by clearing its environs of rebels. In 1862, however, Ward fell in battle, and local merchants, Chinese officials, and American and British diplomats struggled to find an acceptable replacement. At the end of a long and contested political process, thanks mainly to the efforts of the local Chinese governor, Li Hung-chang, Gordon was selected, and the die of his destiny cast.

Officially, Gordon was registered as an officer in the Imperial (Manchu) Chinese army, reporting to Li Hung-chang, with the blessing of the British army and political establishment. He was also made a Mandarin (by the Chinese), as a means of guaranteeing him a level of respect which would enhance his authority over native troops. Why Gordon, of all men, should have received this appointment is not absolutely clear, for although he had performed well in all military duties to date, he had not yet proved himself outside of the capacity of engineer, where he was known for his competence and skill, as well as for his fearless explorations and sketches of the front lines. Perhaps the main reason, at this time, lay in his ability to relate to and to impress the locals with his sincere and open energy, which presented a rare mix of humility (he saw men of other races as his equals, and acted accordingly) and his confidence (he was clear, focused, and believed in his judgment, as a soldier). He did not look down his nose at the Chinese, as many Europeans, nor insult them with condescension - nor did he reek of imperialist designs, he seemed blissfully unaware of his role in the grand imperialist blueprint, living in a smaller, more direct world of concrete problems to be faced and overcome, exuding decency, fairness, and honesty in that limited, but intense environment. Li liked Gordon’s fearlessness in cutting to the chase, and observed that he was "direct and businesslike" and "had the stamp of an excellent soldier." [13] He felt he could get results from him. More than that, Li wrote in his journal, soon after meeting Gordon: "It is a direct blessing from Heaven, I believe, the coming of the British Gordon… He is superior in manner and bearing to any of the foreigners I have come into contact with and does not show outwardly that conceit which makes most of them repugnant to my sight." [14]

Militarily, Gordon’s main challenge in dealing with the Taiping Rebels was to overcome the difficulty of the local terrain, which was crisscrossed by rivers and canals sheltering numerous rebel-held towns and forts, which made an advance over land against them difficult and dangerous. The solution, already pioneered by Ward, was to turn the waterways from impediments into assets by bringing steamships with artillery into play, which could spearhead all advances made against enemy positions and allow the Ever Victorious Army to infiltrate and divide the Taiping strongholds. This basic concept was solidified on the operational level by acquiring and outfitting the military boats, and by the careful disciplining and training of the mercenary army, whose recruits were tirelessly drilled in everything from laying down accurate artillery fire to rushing up siege ladders to storm enemy-held walls. The work was tremendously complicated by seemingly incessant plots and machinations fueled by the shadowy motives of Taiping leaders, Imperial Chinese commanders (operating independently from the Ever Victorious Army), mutinous officers and men within the Ever Victorious Army, and rival mercenaries going over to the Taipings. Much of Gordon’s work centered on getting control of his own force, weeding out the unruly and the unreliable, fighting to put an end to the looting which Ward had permitted his men as a reward for their success, and supplanting pillage with a reliable system of pay, in order to lay the economic foundations for the moral elevation of the troops. Where possible, he replaced American mercenaries with British soldiers loaned to him by the British army, for these were far more responsive to his command; and he worked to cultivate native Chinese troops, who he related well to.

The conquest of Taiping-held territory west of Shanghai was methodical and careful, the reduction of one fortress or walled town often being required before the Ever Victorious Army could proceed against another. Gordon, himself, conducted painstaking reconnaissance operations to lay the groundwork for successful assaults, meticulously mapping the terrain and sketching the fortifications to be overcome. In the interim between Ward’s death and Gordon’s assumption of command, the Ever Victorious Army had been led in one disastrous attack on the city of Taitsan, when its acting commander failed to correctly gauge the width of a moat, and, without proper equipment to bridge it, got hung up trying to pass over it as defenders fired down on his forces. Over 450 men had been lost on that day. Gordon would commit no such mistake, always building victory from the ground up with scrupulous preparation. This is not to say that his eye was not quick, and that inspiration did not play a role in his triumphs. The great commander is always one-part designer, and one-part opportunist. But as much as possible, Gordon insured victory and the lives of his men with conscientious planning. In many cases, as in the capture of the Taiping fort at Chanzu, he relied on bombardments from his steamboats, this time positioned in a nearby canal, to open up a hole in the walls of the enemy’s defenses, which his storming party would then rush through. The capture of Taitsan, which had already beaten off one attack by the Ever Victorious Army and another by Li’s brother, who had been lured with many Chinese troops into a trap, expecting to be aided by Taiping defectors, was more difficult. Following the formula used at Chanzu, Gordon’s steamers blasted a gaping hole into the city’s walls, into which an infantry assault was hurled. Well-armed with rifles, and aided by European mercenaries of their own who directed deadly barrages of artillery at the attackers, the Taipings resisted two assault waves, inflicting heavy losses. Finally, Gordon himself took direct charge of a third assault, moving forward with his men, armed only with a walking stick which came to be known as the "wand of victory." As bullets flew all about, his amazing coolness under fire inspired his own men and unnerved the enemy, who could not seem to bring him down no matter how hard they tried. Skillfully, Gordon guided his troops over the contested approach to the city, and through the breach, until victory was at last theirs. Back in England, reports of this courageous victory, which forever imprinted on the British mind the image of Gordon advancing across the battlefield, chewing on a cigar and carrying nothing more than a cane, reached deeply into the collective psyche. Subdued by pragmatism, subordinated to a regimen of practicality - yoked for life to hard work with no outlet for valor, or else to leisure with its secret cracks of self-despising - the majority of the British public was hungry for someone to live through, someone to fulfill their longing to rise up from the soot or the polo lawn to be glorious, someone to represent who they wished to be, but were thwarted from being, either by society or by themselves. Gordon was the perfect answer, and they harnessed their ache to be more than they were to him, and chose him to drag their wounded souls through the world of their failures, towards his unbowed vision.

Meanwhile, in China, Governor Li Huang-chang was equally impressed. In the near future, he would go on to write: "What a sight for tired eyes and elixir for a heavy heart to see this splendid Englishman fight!… Fight - move - fight again - move again - landing his men - planning by night and executing by day - planning by day and executing by night! He is a glorious fellow!" [15]

Perhaps Gordon’s most brilliant victory came not long afterwards, at Quinsan, which he captured with what strategists would call a near-perfect example of the "indirect approach." Rather than confront its formidable fortifications head-on, Gordon made a wide detour around the city, bearing down with steamers against the causeway which connected Quinsan with other Taiping strongholds, such as Soochow. This move, by threatening to cut off Quinsan from its sources of supply and reinforcement, led the defenders to sally out in an effort to clear away Imperial Chinese forces who were in the vicinity, so that they could effect a retreat. At this juncture, the artillery on Gordon’s steamers opened up with devastating results, raking the masses of Taiping fighters with withering firepower, which led to an absolute rout. By the time the battle was over, up to 5,000 Taipings were dead, and 2,000 captured; Quinsan had fallen, and Gordon’s own losses were two men. Although every man is sacred, for an officer in the midst of combat men are not the sons of mothers and fathers, but part of a calculation, the mathematics of a higher purpose that, at the price of condemning some homes to eternal darkness, seeks to cover the rest in sunshine. Gordon suffered acutely for his losses, but being a soldier, he knew that the results at Quinsan were spectacular. It is apparent that he also felt great pity for the masses of the Taiping dead who were, in some ways, the material out of which his victory was built.

Next began the operations against Soochow, which Gordon aimed to capture by taking positions along its lines of communication, and forcing its abandonment or surrender with a minimum of fighting. The equation of power was temporarily tilted against him when a prominent American mercenary who had formerly served in the Ever Victorious Army, Henry Burgevine, went over to the Taipings with a band of well-armed mercenaries, and succeeded in stealing a steamboat to boot. Gordon sought to convince Burgevine, whose force added a formidable core of fighters capable of stiffening Taiping resistance, to abandon his new alliance with the enemy. Burgevine, in a secret meeting with Gordon, then came up with a stunning counterproposal: that the two of them join forces to overthrow the Chinese government, and rule China for themselves! Of course, Gordon would have no part in it. In the end, Burgevine was finally successfully separated from the Taipings, and Gordon went back to the work of hemming in the city by taking its outlying forts. In one battle, at the Leeku stockades, a fellow officer standing next to Gordon was hit by a bullet in the head and fell, dead, into Gordon’s arms. He, himself, thought some, seemed to invite death, walking about in the thick of battle, often in a bright red coat, as though he wished to die and be returned to his Maker. For Gordon, surrounded by the dead who infested his conscience, there was consolation in knowing that he shared the dangers of those he had sent to die, that he was equally exposed, and as ready to be torn from the world, in the name of his plans, as they. He followed the orders that he gave. There was also something deeply religious in his actions, a kind of pilgrimage hiding inside the war, a visit to his trust in God, and a submission to God’s will, every time that the bullets started to fly. As soldiering, in some ways, drew Gordon further away from God, it also brought him closer. He was both diminished as a Christian, and enhanced.

At last, Gordon’s patient work outside Soochow seemed ready to bear results. The rebels were cramped by his gains and their losses, and felt the inevitability of defeat closing in. Under these circumstances, they listened to Gordon’s overtures for peace, and divining his sense of honor and the merciful heart that his profession could not fully eradicate, they considered trusting him. It seemed, in total earnestness, that he was asking them to help him to lay aside his military brilliance in order to save their lives and his soul; to help him throw water over the flame of his glory, in the name of Humanity. After Gordon was able to secure, for the garrison, a promise from Governor Li that Soochow would not be subjected to the massacres and pillaging which frequently followed a surrender in this war, the Taiping leaders agreed to give up their arms. What followed next, was one of the most painful moments of Gordon’s entire life. After he and the Ever Victorious Army had left the area, Chinese Imperial troops, triggered or not by disorder within the city that had yielded to them, went on a terrible rampage of looting and killing, perpetrating an awful massacre on the inhabitants of Soochow, and murdering the Taiping leaders who, trusting in Gordon, had been persuaded to surrender. As soon as Gordon found out, he returned to the scene of the crime to try to restore order, and only by the slimmest of margins managed to avoid destruction himself in the chaos that engulfed the city. Simultaneously outraged at Li for betraying the terms of surrender (Gordon was rumored to be looking for him with a pistol), and distraught because of the death of those who had believed in his word, Gordon emerged from the city with the severed head of the Taiping commander, which was pointed out to him by an informant among various mutilated corpses. Gordon retained the head in his possession until it was able to be reunited with the commander’s body, and given a proper burial. In the meantime, his sense of having been used, of having had his honor manipulated to lure victims to their death, then cast aside as though it were nothing but a worthless piece of bait that had served its purpose, drove him to a state of near madness. Some days after, a messenger found him lying on his bed, sobbing, with the decomposing head of the slain rebel leader still in his possession. Later still, a European observer noted that Gordon was in "a truly sorrowful state. He could not speak from emotion, his eyes were full of tears, he did nothing but walk about the room in a distracted manner." [16] Li sought to engineer a reconciliation with Gordon, who, at first, would have nothing of it, but rather, refused to lead the Ever Victorious Army and stayed on the sidelines of the civil war, sulking like Achilles wronged by Agamemnon. Finally, after some months, a British investigator produced a report supporting some aspects of Li’s justification for the massacre, describing it as an action that was not premeditated, but which emerged as a result of uncertainty regarding the genuineness of the surrender, as some Taiping units may have commenced fighting after Li’s party was in Soochow; whereupon Li, fearing the same kind of treachery which had resulted in his brother’s murder at Taitsan, executed the Taiping leaders, and simultaneously lost control of his undisciplined troops, who used street riots flaring up throughout the city as a pretext for embarking on a binge of killing and looting. Li formally absolved Gordon of all responsibility for the massacre, and took the blame for having failed to control the situation. At the same time, British agents pressured Gordon to return to the field, in order to help restore unity and order to China and end the Taiping threat once and for all. As one such agent stated, "The Destiny of China is at present moment in the hands of Gordon more than any other man.." [16b] Gordon, shaken and sorrowful, was finally convinced that the world would best be served if the work begun were finished, and the civil war that had cost China so dearly laid to rest.

In the engagements that followed, Gordon conducted himself more recklessly than ever, thrusting himself to the edge of the precipice of his well-laid plans, finding danger for himself in the midst of strategies constructed to minimize danger for his men. It was almost as though he were propelled by a personal death wish, driven by a desire to join the ghosts of those who were the victims of their trust in him.

In his first major action since Soochow, Yesing was captured easily, his own troops giving him a harder time than the enemy’s. The Ever Victorious Army was upset about being restrained from looting, which was commonplace in that time and place. They felt left out, barricaded from the natural right of the victor to seize the spoils of war by their commander’s exaggerated scruples. In order to retain control of his soldiers, Gordon was forced to have one of his own men shot. He would not have another Soochow on his conscience. Perhaps the single most outstanding impression left on Gordon’s mind from Yesing, was the extent of the poverty which he encountered. There was mass starvation and hunger everywhere, streets filled with the unburied dead, men with a little more strength stealing food from their own friends who were weaker, even acts of cannibalism. Horrified, Gordon forced open some local granaries whose doors had remained shut in spite of the catastrophe, and handed out supplies to the survivors. His commitment to end the war which was ruining China, disorganizing it to the point where it could no longer even take care of its basic necessities, was renewed. He must push on, past the demoralization wrought by Soochow, past the knowledge that both sides might be "equally rotten", as the soldier of fortune Burgevine had once told him. [18] He must gain victory in the name of order and the restoration of uninterrupted life cycles - cycles of human life, and cycles of agriculture, not reduced to chaos by the intrusion of war - and he must do so as quickly as possible, which meant stamping out the Taiping Rebellion: the fastest path to a return to normalcy.

However, as Gordon came closer to finishing off the Taipings, the ferocity of their resistance grew. With their backs to the wall, there was less possibility of half-hearted defense or withdrawal; the "flight" part of the fight-or-flight response was becoming increasingly untenable. At Kitang, the Taipings stood up admirably to Gordon’s artillery, and furiously resisted his advance, even after a breach had been opened in the city’s walls. Gordon’s troops, dismayed by the level of resistance and the still-intact firepower of the enemy, held back from the attack, leaving Gordon, who advanced without them, virtually on his own. This time, his "magic" wand of victory did not protect him, and he was shot in the leg. His troops, drawn forward to protect him, swarmed about him as he continued to push forward until finally, faint from loss of blood, he could not go on, and had to be carried from the field. After that, the attack collapsed. Kitang held on, and the Taipings celebrated.

With Gordon temporarily out of the picture, the Taipings mounted a series of dangerous counterattacks in the area, and Gordon’s stand-in in the Ever Victorious Army lost an important battle due to a poor sense of timing, prematurely converting a prelude into an attack. Governor Li took to visiting Gordon daily, expending great efforts to nurse his "gift from Heaven" back to health.

When at last Gordon was ready to return to the front, the fortified city of Ch’ang-chou had become the strategic center of the campaign. Here, too, resistance was fierce. After blasting down a section of the city’s walls with artillery, Gordon was required to construct defenseworks opposite the city’s moat, and to throw a barrel bridge across it to enable his storming party to effectively attack. Even so, his men were beaten back, requiring Gordon, at last, to personally lead a charge into the heavily-defended breach. There, as he maneuvered through the terrain, jumping from spot to spot amidst the deadly rain of bullets, his men following the directions of his familiar cane, he came face to face with a piece of heavy artillery, a big gun that had been removed from the steamship Firefly, previously stolen by Burgevine and sold to the Taipings. Pointed straight at him, the gun was fired, but it did not go off. Conventional explanations surmise that the round was thwarted by damp powder, though others attributed the gun’s failure to an act of God, or to the magical powers of Gordon, himself. Before the astonished Taiping gun crew could recover and prepare their 32-pounder for another shot, Gordon’s men had overrun their position. Filled with a sense of invincibility in the presence of Gordon’s "powers", the Ever Victorious Army swept forward irresistibly, and went on to capture the city; this triumph, in turn, opened up the path to the Taipings’ last significant stronghold, the capital of their revolutionary movement: Nanking.

Gordon, always the brilliant mapmaker and appraiser of fortifications, conducted the reconnaissance of the city and its environs which laid the groundwork for the attack, but the actual conquest of Nanking was left to the forces of the Imperial Chinese Army, who wished to take credit for the victory. They did not want to have to say that they had depended on foreigners to win the war. And yet, that is precisely what captured rebel leaders stated before their execution: "It was not Li Hung-chang, but the foreign devils who were capable of capturing Soochow and other districts…" [19] Nanking, isolated and gravely weakened by Gordon’s victories all around it, fell to the Chinese army in July of 1864; the Taiping Messiah Hung Hsiu-ch’uan committed suicide, and the last vestiges of his army were destroyed, thousands in battle, and thousands by their own hand, in massive acts of self-immolation; the Taiping Rebellion, which had thrown China into chaos and shaken it to its very foundations for fifteen years, was finally brought to a decisive close.

With the fall of Nanking, Gordon’s work in China was essentially done. There were some months of unremitting congratulations and praise, before he was able, in January of 1865, to return to England, where he was greeted as a full-fledged Victorian hero, popularly referred to as "Chinese Gordon." In retrospect, the war to repress the Taiping Rebellion had not been black and white, not offered, to anyone, the comforting lines of good versus evil. The suppression of the revolt had, ultimately, served the interests of the British imperialists, operating inside an ambiguous ethical space in which they were neither absolute villains nor morally elevated saviors. Within this space, Gordon, as an individual, had shone. While British merchants and farsighted politicians recognized the importance of the victory in terms of the possibility of expanded commerce and an overall enhancement of Britain’s global strategic position, for the general public it had generated a personal and heroic story capable of filling the empty places in their hearts and souls. Captain Charles George Gordon, promoted, now, to Brevet Lieutenant Colonel, had become an integral part of their lives.

Of course, the British public wanted to get to know its hero better. To both its disappointment and delight, it found Gordon to be surprisingly uncooperative in this regard: elusive quarry for its adulation. Motivated by a Christian sense of humility - forever at war with his desire for recognition, and only able to suppress it by means of the extreme reaction of hiding from all who sought to glorify him, and avoiding those who might feed his ego until he lost all hope of purifying his motives - he desperately evaded the circuit of banquets and social gatherings intended for him, upon his return to England as a hero. It is true that Gordon also disliked the pretenses, forms, and appearances of Victorian social occasions, which he found to be superficial features of a world which had drifted away from God. As one biographer writes: "Never one to enjoy social niceties, he became an artful dodger of all manner of invitations… Even there [in seclusion], fawning matrons and hopeful spinsters would try to capture him as a social prize." [20] In order to politely decline unwanted invitations, Gordon would frequently invent an excuse, stating that he would be out of town at the time of the scheduled party; then, driven by his compulsion to be honest, he would be forced to purchase a ticket and take a train out of town, a custom which protected the integrity of his word, but caused him a great deal of inconvenience and lost time. Gordon’s evasiveness, in this terrain, made him a precious character in the eyes of the public, for it pointed to the earnestness of his spirit, which seemed truly to be in search of something greater than vanity, something deeper than earthly success. He would not, as Epictetus might have said, stoop to climb the social ladder; nor, as Cyrano might have said, "scratch the back of any swine that roots up gold for me." [21] For Gordon, a man’s rise should be based on talent, not social charm, and his rise should serve a worthy cause, not merely his own fortunes in the world. The thought of ingratiating himself into a position of influence or authority, rather than earning such a place through genuine merit, horrified him; and although his attitude seems to have offended some whom it directly affected, a great many others respected him for it, sensing that here was a man above the corrupt and self-serving games which set the norm for a mediocre world. Additionally, some observers found a deep and strangely inviting reservoir of vulnerability in the Colonel’s peculiar sociophobic behavior - an awkwardness and discomfort that elicited the strongest of maternal instincts from his female admirers - traces of a loner who could not fit, yet truly loved, and longed to help, the people he felt compelled to hide from.

In a society stratified by culture, ideologically and industrially contained by both the truth and the myth of wealth, rigidly bound to superficial and laborious principles of etiquette which were, nonetheless, deeply-imbedded tools of social evaluation and portals to inclusion, and vigorously policed by law and the muscle of the law, eccentricity became the alternative to revolution: the revolt of the individual replacing the revolt of the collective. In this new order, what was strange and what was quirky, so long as they retained a certain degree of innocence, became tolerable forms of sedition. Stress within the system was released, and negative examples of the price of rebellion (the "defeat of the nonconformists") were created. However, for those who survived the consequences of their eccentricity, admiration was in order; for to many who were marginalized by the system and came to loathe its burden of customs, and for others on the opposite end of achievement, who came to despise the means of their success - their facades of energy and competence encompassed by submission - the aberrations of the eccentric smacked of bravery; there was something beautiful in his strange gait, and misfit ways: the head of the human spirit held above the water of servitude, in which the world seemed to be drowning. In Freudian terms, whenever a nonconformist blossomed, the system stood, but the symbols of its domination were overthrown in the psyche, a fantasy liberation was attained. In an oppressively socialized culture, such small signs of life as this were enough to appease the inner enemy of civilization which dwells inside the human heart, perpetually challenging its right to exist. Simultaneously, the eccentric, by his mere presence, made the barren landscape bearable, and pointed towards horizons beyond sterility.

Gordon, instantly recognizable as an eccentric, was quickly subject to the curiosity, reproach, and admiration, due his kind. In Victorian England, this was far more so than it would be today. Gordon’s flight from the social stage, his sometimes unpolished frankness, his extreme sincerity regarding religion, which he would not allow to remain within the confines of doctrines established for him by others, but sought to explore and to develop in his own way, all marked him as a very different sort of person. Even something so trivial as the bizarre way he stepped over cracks in the pavement while walking, perhaps motivated by the superstition "Step on a crack, break your mother’s back", attracted interest and attention. Gordon was observed to perpetually adjust his gait as he walked from place to place, sometimes shortening his stride, sometimes taking discordant leaps, in order to avoid the cracks in his path. What might today be diagnosed as mere neurosis was, in the context of that asphyxiated environment, viewed as humanizing. (But, of course, there were others who thought Gordon mad, and hoped that he would never receive an important military command, with British lives at stake.)

Not long after his return to England, Gordon’s demanding and difficult father - a man who had never approved of his son’s service in China, as the leader of an irregular, mercenary band - passed away. The long death watch and drawn-out lesson of human mortality impressed Gordon deeply. It set off a new cycle of spiritual searching, which grew within his melancholy, as he meditated by his father’s grave.

Gordon’s principal military assignment, after returning from China, was to supervise the construction of a series of forts in the area of the Thames, aimed at making the invasion of England by outside forces more difficult. The project was more a product of nerves than any real threat, and an opportunity for the military to prove its usefulness at home. Gordon, based at Gravesend, received the project from higher authorities, and was merely to be its executor. He found the whole concept to be flawed, mere psychological chaff thrown to the newspaper-aroused masses, since, in his opinion, the forts could easily be bypassed by an invader. Nonetheless, he loaned his technical expertise to the fantasy, providing concrete and efficient forms to the illusion of defense, at the same time as his sense of duty compelled him to vigorously criticize its underlying premise. In the end, more than any specific military accomplishment, Gordon’s time at Gravesend stands out for the human and spiritual development which took place on the side of his professional activities. At Gravesend, Gordon made important connections with Christian friends who served as sources for new ideas, and as sounding boards for his own internal dialogue, helping to enrich the idiosyncratic tendencies of his passionate search, and to provide balance whenever he teetered on the edge of spiritual vertigo. It was at Gravesend that he came upon "the secret", the idea of God’s in-dwelling in Man (once faith opened space for Him to enter), a concept of tremendous impact that infused Gordon with a sense of mystical empowerment, and seemed sometimes to turn him into a channel of the divine. Or so, at least, thought many who described the overpowering charisma transmitted by his clear, blue-gray eyes, which left them with the impression of a great soul peering directly into their hearts. In Gordon’s eyes, one could feel a great force of sincerity, and also the lack of a hiding place, for his perceptions seemed capable of "penetrating stone." There could flash the anger of the betrayed prophets, triggered by little things that were the harbingers of great ills. There could also enter remarkable compassion, kindness pushing aside the warrior, who was but the wounded expression of his love, limping brilliantly in an unhealed world. At other times, Gordon’s eyes became deep pools of calm, angelic and disconcerting to those who were displeased with themselves. Everyone knew instantly that they could trust him, and that they could depend on him, whether friend or foe, to pursue the honorable path - to stand loyally by them as a comrade, or to face them with dignity, and attention to the fragile moral codes of war, as an enemy. Wrote one observer: "The steady, truthful gaze of the blue-gray eyes seemed a direct appeal from the upright spirit within him"; while a child he would one day rescue during his travels in Africa, would later explain that at first Gordon frightened him: he thought the Englishman had supernatural powers, and could see in the dark, because "he had the light inside him!" [21] Although the impact of Gordon’s eyes must have grown as he began to internalize "the secret" at Gravesend, and to attain fleeting moments of being "the perfect instrument" of God, it is likely that his eyes were always expressive of his earnestness and courage; for already, in China, they had won over stalwart haters of the "foreign devils" and "white barbarians" of Europe, and inspired men of flesh and blood, under his command, to face and overcome enormous dangers.

Introduced, through his Gravesend connections, to social workers who were committed to applying principles of Christian charity to the woes of British society, Gordon soon began to undertake activities of his own to benefit the despairing and the destitute. He took to visiting the old and the sick at a local infirmary, to impart what cheer and comfort he could, intruding on their sense of loneliness and abandonment; and became actively involved in the feeding, clothing, education, and spiritual guidance of homeless youths, including the infamous "fisher-boys", or the unwanted kids, runaways, and drop-outs who hung out at the local docks, surviving on whatever fish they could catch. Gordon worked hard to better their situation, spending his own money to provide for them, and infusing them with a new sense of worth, as he shared the revelation of "the secret", which transformed them, in their own minds, from rejected paupers into vessels of divinity: expressions of God who deserved better than to be thrown away, and ought not to cooperate in their squandering. Gordon eventually found jobs for many of these "kings", and helped to set them on a "straight life path." In one highly-touted gesture of appreciation, cherished by the British press because of the sentiment and the poor spelling, which somehow attested to the deprived places into which Gordon’s humanity reached, one of the colonel’s "kings" scrawled "God Bless the kernel" onto a wall beside his home. British society knew that it did not take care of its own; that its economic and social system were responsible for committing great sins, for impoverishing and degrading multitudes, even within its own borders. Capitalism, by twisting Christianity’s arm to give it room to romp, or else discrediting it with science’s new discoveries in order to lower the volume of its moral exhortations, was, in fact, destroying it. People sensed this, but entranced by the spectacular fruits of industry and trade, which were squeezed out of the dynamics of injustice, found it hard to resist. Whenever they saw someone who remained faithful to the original spirit of their hollowed-out religion, they could not help but be moved by this counterbalance to their own weakness or hypocrisy. For the poor, a man such as this had not sold out, he had remained true to the spirit of Christ, who came to the earth preaching compassion without limits; for the wealthy, a man such as this was a blessing, a welcome fool who took upon himself the unfulfilled obligations of society, which had dumped its responsibilities onto the shoulders of conscientious individuals, whose helpless sense of brotherhood aided in dimming the threat of revolution.

Gordon, who performed these acts of charity out of genuine care, and with clear attempts to insulate them from his vanity, grew in popular stature as a result of them. In addition to this widely-admired work, the public loved to read about the colonel’s evangelical passion, which led him to write his own religious tracts, and to seek to distribute them to farmers and townsfolk in the area of his assignment. It is said that some of Gordon’s troops enjoyed watching him go about with his pamphlets, spying on him through a telescope to see how well or poorly his missionary work went. While to some, Gordon’s zeal was unsettling, and led them to doubt his reliability, Gordon was always careful about evangelizing when abroad, acutely aware of the way in which Christian missionary work could impact alien cultures, and create resentment in the hearts of devout men of other faiths. In other countries, whether in China or the Sudan, he was always careful not to undermine political-military projects with religious proselytizing; which is to say that although his religion motivated and drove him as an individual, it did not blind him to the practical realities of his projects, and was never permitted, by his strategic self, to destabilize them.

As mentioned before, Gordon’s spiritual development was not painless or easy. The man had a heart full of instincts natural to one of his talent and history. A huge, glory-craving alter-ego thrashed around inside him, a creature who he feared and had great difficulty in containing. In one illustrative example, a friend of Gordon, who he, in his humility, had sheltered from knowledge of his Chinese exploits (this man thought that the famous Gordon was "another Gordon"), asked him if he had seen anything of the Taiping Rebellion during his days in China. Gordon, unable to discipline his offended alter-ego, exclaimed: "I should think I did; why it was I who put an end to it!" [23] He wanted to do great things without succumbing to his pride, but found that it was not easy to achieve great things without a vibrant ego. Was it only upon a black horse that one could free Jerusalem? It was a dilemma that would haunt Gordon for the rest of his life, the battle between the sharp sword of vanity, and the blunt sword of modesty, competing for his allegiance on the earth. In a pinch, which sword would he reach for? Which of his two selves, crashing together in the paradox of the Christian warrior, would prevail? In the face of things he wished to accomplish, Gordon craved the beauty and speed of the black horse, and yet, the horse he wanted himself to love was the lame white stallion.

Besides this life-long struggle with his ego, Gordon was sometimes visited by tempests of rage, provoked by acts of ineptitude, selfishness, or hypocrisy which he could not tolerate; he was no unflappable saint, although he was fair to his men, too genuinely respectful of others to be turned into a tyrant by his passions. He was also frequented by long spells of melancholy and depression, which he referred to as "the doles" (short for "the doldrums"). His religion grew greater from his immersion in dark times, bursting out of them with the answers that were required to prevent his collapse. God’s colors grew more vivid, as survival demanded it. Some would say that his spiritual path failed, in that it did not free him from despair, but only used despair to construct itself. Those who say this do not understand that spiritual development is a companion to men on the earth; that it is intertwined with their failings, and grows with them, and alongside them, not above them. Sometimes it does not close one’s wounds, but only replenishes the blood which is being lost through those wounds. Sometimes, in its progress, it creates new sources of suffering in the place of old ones. Gordon’s spirituality did not end his suffering; it accompanied him on his journey of suffering, on his long walk through a world filled with tears and cries for help which he could hear, but not answer.

Gordon, in spite of his spiritual quest and his embrace of the eternal, as promised by the Bible, also suffered acutely from thoughts of mortality while at Gravesend. For him, Time was a precious commodity, and his obsession with it went beyond the mere ambition to accomplish material acts. He had one boat in which he traveled between work sites, which was fitted with a single pair of oars, replaced by another which was fitted with two, so that he could be propelled more quickly to his destination and cut down on lost time. He was often seen glancing at his pocket watch, muttering, "Another five minutes gone… we shall never have them again." [24] Although he fervently believed in a paradise beyond the confines of the earth, a part of him could not help running from Time, fleeing from its merciless pursuit, seeking constant refuges of forgetfulness, sanctuaries of action to shelter him from its relentless passing. Its ticking clock was everywhere, a testament to Gordon’s connection to his mortal state - and to the hard work of his Christian faith, which sought to hew stairs to God in the side of a very human mountain. In Gordon’s struggles, transparent through his journals and his letters, and through the recollections of his friends, one sees the ambition, and the reality which defined the effort; the ideal, and the raw material it was given to work with; and vicariously, through it, the process each of us faces, according to our own beliefs, our own aspirations, and our own limitations, to better ourselves. It was Gordon’s human frailties which, ultimately, made his spiritual achievements so compelling.

Important though Gordon’s days at Gravesend were for his spiritual development, and for the enrichment of his legend, which was facilitated by the close view his deployment in Britain afforded the populace, Gordon was destined for other, more turbulent assignments capable of liberating his greatness from underutilization. He knew it, and his admirers knew it. In 1871, he took up an assignment with a British commission based at Galatz, which was charged with helping to supervise navigation along the Danube as part of an international effort begun after the Crimean War. This was not the active assignment which Gordon, or his public, longed for. In 1873, the British army moved against the King of Ashanti in West Africa in one of its innumerable "little wars" intended to advance the cause of colonialism. The British press clamored for the inclusion of its hero, Gordon, who it touted as "the best leader of irregulars the world contains", insisting that he was the perfect match for the task at hand. [25] However, Gordon was left out of the action; left to "rot in the uneventful backwater of Galatz." Was the British army loath to use its greatest asset, perhaps deterred by his eccentricity and reputation for doing things in his own way? Did the traits which endeared Gordon to the British public, produce the opposite effect in leadership circles of the British military?

Whatever the answer to these questions, Gordon was at last retrieved from the margins of history, by the unexpected arrival of an extraordinary new opportunity to serve a foreign leader, with the blessings of his government. In 1874, he arrived in Egypt, charged with governing an important swath of tropical Africa to the south, and eliminating the slave trade from the Sudan.

What was the context of this most unusual assignment? As in Gordon’s last real challenge, China, there was a convoluted political situation with clear geopolitical stakes; a chance of adventure for Gordon, and for his nation the possibility of subtly insinuating itself into the driver’s seat of the East, and discreetly fashioning Egypt into a client state.

At this point in time, Egypt was a part of the Ottoman Empire, that faltering expression of Turkish power which both France and England had supported in the Crimean War against the threat of Russian expansion. It was ruled by a Turkish viceroy, or Khedive, who was actually of Albanian descent. Although, in theory, Egypt was subordinate to the Turkish authority, this was a case in which the tail could wag the dog, and many felt that Egypt, with its great size and strength ought to break away from the Turks to rule itself. However, both Britain and France preferred, for the time being, that Egypt remain within the Ottoman Empire, which they did not wish to see debilitated, since they envisioned the Turks as a counter to the Russians, who otherwise might push deeper into Europe, the Middle East, and South Asia. France and Britain, therefore, discouraged the idea of revolt, and worked, instead, to support the quasi-independence of Egypt within a formula of nominal allegiance to Turkey, at the same time as they sought to increase their influence in Egypt in order to gradually subvert its semi-autonomy and turn it into a European colonial enclave within an Ottoman shell. In 1869, the importance of Egypt to the Europeans increased exponentially, as the construction of the Suez Canal, undertaken by the Frenchman Ferdinand de Lesseps, was finally completed, and that vital waterway, connecting the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea, and thence, to the Indian Ocean, was opened to international traffic. The tremendous advantage of using the new canal to travel between Europe and the incredible economic possibilities of Asia, compared to the previous, far lengthier route around the cape of South Africa, greatly enhanced the strategic value of the country in which the canal was located and turned it into an important new focus of geopolitical concern. The power of Europe, based upon ceaseless extension and growth, fed upon the markets and the resources of Asia, and the canal, by providing a shortcut to the lands from which that power was sucked, and increasing the velocity of aggrandizement and the possible rate of ascendancy among nations, potentially placed whoever could control it in the driver’s seat of world politics. Open to all, founded upon a philosophy of shared access, the canal could not be allowed to fall to a rival power! Knowing full well the weakness of ideals in the face of self-interest, both France and Britain angled to implant their influence in Egypt, so as to be in a better position to guarantee their use of the canal in the event of an international meltdown.

In the beginning, of course, the advantage lay with France, which had played the pivotal role in constructing the canal. However, by 1875, one year after Gordon’s arrival in Egypt, economic woes had forced the Khedive Ismail to put Egypt’s shares in the canal up for sale, and Britain pounced on the opportunity, thereby gaining financial control of the waterway. Now all that was necessary was to consolidate the regional political power that would make that financial control defensible. For Britain (as well as for France, which was still in the running), finding ways to be useful to the Khedive was the principal avenue to achieving this end. They supported him through economic arrangements, with investments, loans, and technical support, and with indirect military aid, as in the case of Britain "loaning out" Gordon, who was given room to serve in the Khedive’s government, supposedly as an independent operator, but with the understanding that gratitude for his services ought to be expressed towards his country of origin.

At the time Gordon arrived in Egypt, the Khedive was ambitiously attempting to extend Egyptian power south, creating an empire of his own in East Africa. Sudan was clearly within Egypt’s zone of influence, and was, in fact, administered by a Governor-General based at Khartoum, who reported to the Khedive. Under the control of the Governor-General of the Sudan were also certain provinces, known as Equatoria, leading into sub-Saharan Africa; these provinces did not yet reach, but were pointed towards, the upper waters of the Nile and the regions of the great lakes, Victoria and Albert, which were home to the independent African kingdoms of Buganda and Bunroyo (present-day Uganda). The Khedive wished to gradually bring these kingdoms under his influence, as well as to definitively locate the source of the Nile, and one day consolidate Egyptian power along the river’s entire course, from start to finish, in order to guarantee the life of his land which depended on its waters.

However, there was one crucial obstacle to the procurement of British support for this project, and that was the existence of slavery in Egypt and the Sudan, and throughout the Ottoman Empire. Britain, which had once vigorously approved of and profited from slavery, especially in Jamaica and in the American colonies, had finally revolted against the moral shame of this pernicious institution, and abolished slave trafficking in 1807. Slavery persisted for a time, based upon the procreation of the already captive population, but was definitively outlawed in Great Britain and its possessions in 1833. ("Coincidentally", this moral awakening took place at the exact historical moment when new modes of production and systems of organizing labor had arisen in Great Britain to render slavery economically obsolete.) The moral struggle against slavery, which had spawned an active and influential abolitionist community in Great Britain, remained an important factor in British politics, leading the British navy to conduct patrols against slave traffickers off the African coast in an effort to put an end to the trade, although the perpetuation of slavery based upon the reproduction of existing slave populations in countries such as the United States (until 1865) and Brazil (until 1871), was beyond their control. Certainly, British abolitionists who had just recently savored the collapse of slavery in the United States, had no interest in seeing their nation deepen its commitment to countries which were wed to slavery.

And so, as a concession to this sentiment, and in an effort to keep the pump of foreign investment primed, the Khedive declared slave trading to be illegal within his domains, and proclaimed his intent to stamp it out. Slavery, itself, would remain. The local economy and way of life was too dependent upon it to extricate itself at a moment’s notice; the political and economic shock of liberating huge masses of slaves all at once would be too great, and the potential repercussions too sweeping and destabilizing to contemplate. The weaning and the unraveling would take time. For British abolitionists, the attack on slave trading was, at least, a good start. Many of them, idealistic though they were, could understand that no matter how much they wished it, slavery was not going to end overnight, and that the cessation of slave trafficking - the active pursuit and capture of slaves - would do much to weaken the institution, which they hoped would gradually wither into extinction, once denied its source. Given the dynamics of slavery as practiced in the Muslim world, this was actually reasonable, as the rate of manumission and absorption of slaves into the Islamic community, led to a high percentage of "slave depletion" from generation to generation, requiring a constant influx of new captives in order to keep the system functioning.

Once the Khedive proclaimed his intention to end the slave trade in his domains, abolitionist resistance to British participation in his projects was not only removed, but support gained. The more, in fact, that the Khedive was able to extend his effective control to the south, deeper into the Sudan and into the tropical heart of Africa, the better it would be, from the humanitarian point of view. His conquests would block off large areas of Africa from the slavers; the side effect of his ambition would be the eradication of a great sin. At the same time, the British imperialist project, advancing subtly within the Khedive’s designs, would benefit greatly, laying the groundwork for the future domination of East Africa. The crusade against slavery was the moral "in", the justification that would lead the way for the weapons of realpolitik. And, of course, who better to lead the advance than "Chinese Gordon", the beloved hero of the British public, renowned for his idealism and Christian virtue: the perfect instrument for the destruction of the slave trade, gullible enough or one-side enough in his perceptions to fight the good fight, while darker ambitions, traveling down the paths he cleared, infiltrated the lands he came to save.

What, exactly, was the state of the East African slave trade at the time of Gordon’s arrival in Egypt? The trade was dominated by Arabs, as it had been for centuries, who sometimes led large-scale raids against black African villages in order to procure captives themselves, or else established trading relations with local chiefs and kings, who would provide them with slaves in exchange for guns and other trade items. These African chiefs and kings would sell captives, gained in warfare against other tribes, to the Arabs; or sometimes sell their own people, as a punishment for crimes committed. In cases, the chiefs and kings would expand the definition of what constituted a crime, in order to widen the sector of the populace available for enslavement In its heyday, the East African slave trade drew upon three principal sources: the central Sudan, including Bahr al-Ghazal, Darfur, and Kordofan, which was described, in the 1800s, as "one vast hunting ground"; the basin of the upper Nile, extending into the region of the great lakes (Lake Victoria, Lake Albert, and Lake Kyoga); and far to the south, well beyond the reach of Egypt, the region of Lake Nyasa (which lies in the interior of present-day Tanzania and Mozambique). The destinations of the slaves, primarily slated for use in the Muslim world, ranged from Egypt and the Sudan itself, to other parts of North Africa, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Turkey, and, in days gone by, even India and China, where there were Arab colonies. To reach these destinations, the captives were most often moved over land, some to the coast of the Indian Ocean where they were shipped to the island of Zanzibar and from there, dispersed throughout the Muslim world by sea; others along grueling caravan trails winding their way through the Sahara, usually to points within North Africa. There was also a traffic in slaves up the Nile, into Egypt, as either a destination or a staging area.

Today, the history of the East African slave trade is as much a battleground of political agendas as it is the search for an objective memory of the past. Some Western scholars claim th