ABSTRACT

Ministers were in a quandary. They wanted to do their duty. Their patriotism was unassailable. They did not know what was transpiring at Khartoum. They appear to have assumed that the Foreign Office instructions, sent after 1 1 th March, had reached Gordon, because not a few of his messages and those of The Times correspondent had passed through the Mahdist barrier and had reached London after that date. They overlooked two salient factors. The first was Gordon’s magnetic personality which made men willingly risk their lives to render him a service. The second was far simpler. It was that it was much easier to get a messenger to carry a note from a city under artillery fire to the outer world than it was to find a person who was willing to run the gauntlet of being killed in order to find refuge under shot and shell.