The Story of General Gordon

When boys read the old fairy tales, and the stories of King Arthur's Round Table, and the Knights of the Faerie Queen, they sometimes wonder sadly why the knights that they see are not like those of the olden days.

Knights now are often stout old gentlemen who never rode horses or had lances in their hands, but who made much money in the City, and who have no more furious monsters near them than their own motor-cars.

Only a very few knights are like what your own grandfather was.

"I wish I had lived long ago," say some of the boys. "Then I might have killed dragons, and fought for my Queen, and sought for the Holy Grail. Nobody does those things now. Though I can be a soldier and fight for the King, that is a quite different thing."

But if the boys think this, it is because they do not quite understand.

Even now there live knights as pure as Sir Galahad, as brave and true as St. George. They may not be what the world calls "knights"; yet they are fighting against all that is not good, and true, and honest, and clean, just as bravely as the knights fought in days of old.

And it is of one of those heroes, who sought all his life to find what was holy, who fought all his life against evil, and who died serving his God, his country, and his Queen, that I want to tell you now.

Your friend,

JEANIE LANG.

CONTENTS

Chapter

I. "Charlie Gordon" II. Gordon's First Battles III. "Chinese Gordon" IV. "The Kernel" V. Gordon and the Slavers VI. Khartoum

ILLUSTRATIONS

He would lead the troops onwards with the little cane he nearly always carried . . . . . . . . . Frontispiece

The Corporal was butted downstairs

The shell struck the ground five yards in front of him

With his own hands he dragged him from the ranks

Gordon appeared with soap, towels, a brush, a sponge, and a fresh suit of clothes

In the Soudan buying two children for a basketful of dhoora

There rode into their camp Gordon Pasha

Looking for the help that never came

THE STORY OF

GENERAL GORDON

CHAPTER I

"CHARLIE GORDON"

Sixty years ago, at Woolwich, the town on the Thames where the gunners of our army are trained, there lived a mischievous, curly-haired, blue-eyed boy, whose name was Charlie Gordon.

The Gordons were a Scotch family, and Charlie came of a race of soldiers. His great-grandfather had fought for King George, and was taken prisoner at the battle of Prestonpans, when many other Gordons were fighting for Prince Charlie. His grandfather had served bravely in different regiments and in many lands. His father was yet another gallant soldier, who thought that there was no life so good as the soldier's life, and nothing so fine as to serve in the British army. Of him it is said that he was "kind-hearted, generous, cheerful, full of humour, always just, living by the code of honour," and "greatly beloved." His wife belonged to a family of great merchant adventurers and explorers, the Enderbys, whose ships had done many daring things on far seas.

Charlie Gordon's mother was one of the people who never lose their tempers, who always make the best of everything, and who are always thinking of how to help others and never of themselves.

So little Charlie came of brave and good people, and when he was a very little boy he must have heard much of his soldier uncles and cousins and his soldier brother, and must even have seen the swinging kilts and heard the pipes of the gallant regiment that is known as the Gordon Highlanders.