Britannia's Gamble: The Dawlish Chronicles March 1884 – February 1885 by Antoine Vanner

Author:Antoine Vanner [Vanner, Antoine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Old Salt Press
Published: 2017-10-07T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

No volleys over Bradley’s grave, only Dawlish’s quiet recitation, from memory, of the burial service. Latham speaking briefly, his voice catching. The terrible moment when the first soil was scraped over the recumbent figure. Exhausted, dejected as they were, his shipmates had stripped away the bloodied Ansar shirt and had washed Bradley’s torso as best they could before laying his uniform tunic over it and covering his face with his blanket. A small ridge of sand and stones grew over the grave in a darkness lit only by the stars. Afterwards they ate in a silence broken by the current lapping around the moored steamer.

For Dawlish, this was the worst night so far. There had been uncertainty before today, and fear, and danger, but there had been a reasonable hope that surprise would cancel out all disadvantage. That was almost certainly gone now. There could be no surprise arrival at Khartoum, only the prospect of a disputed passage, of fire from either bank. He could feel the desperation rising around him, recognition of odds growing more unfavourable by the hour, of the chances of survival diminishing. His show of outward confidence was greeted with glum resignation when he made his rounds. Even Adnan, always unobtrusively brotherly, had sensed his underlying depression and did not press conversation. He could feel self-doubt – that most insidious of enemies – beginning to grow and he knew he must resist the truths it used as weapons: recognition of the weaknesses that he could never admit to, not even to Florence, over-confidence, ambition carried beyond reason. And perhaps, most shaming of all, callousness.

He tried now to remember Gordon. The name had lost connection to a living man, had become an abstract goal, as abstract as honour or glory. But now, as the greatest trial of all was at hand, he realised that he had no idea of what Gordon now was. In almost a quarter-century he himself had grown from a shocked and terrified boy into a man who could master his fear and inspire others to master theirs. Gordon would have changed no less. The public career was well known – the service against the Tai-Ping rebels that had made him “Chinese Gordon”, his years in the seventies as Governor General of the Sudan, where his campaign against slavery had earned so much admiration in Britain, his scholarly investigations of sacred sites in Palestine. Since his return to Khartoum the previous year, and since clamour for his rescue had risen in the British press, there had been revelations about the extent of his private charity which he would probably have preferred to be unknown. Confronted by cruelty and greed, thirsty for responsibility, Gordon did not seem to have been corrupted. Neither riches nor ambition had tempted him.

Dawlish suspected that the private man was still what he had been when they had met in China. There had been sincerity, and indeed a sense of selflessness, about Gordon that had apparently not coarsened in the intervening years.

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