Book Review - England's Pride by Julian Symons

 England's Pride: the story of the Gordon Relief Expedition by Julian Symons

London: White Lion Publishers, 1974 (first published by Hamish Hamilton 1965)

ISBN 085617548X

Many years ago I, like tens of thousands of other Melburnians, emerged from the underground railway station at Parliament and walked past a statue of General Gordon on my way to work. Paid for by public subscription, it is an indicator of how shocking to the Empire his death was, and in how much esteem he was held. I wonder how many commuters today even know who he is?

Certainly in 1884 everyone in England knew him - a hero from his service in China, and seen as a moral exemplar owing to his efforts to eradicate slavery in Africa, "Chinese" Gordon seems the quintessential Victorian hero - doing good work in far-flung places, wildly eccentric, and a favourite of the Queen.

Gordon ended up in the Sudan mainly owing to Gladstone's unwillingness to spend money on a military intervention there. In fact he had decided that the Anglo-Egyptian force in Khartoum should be withdrawn, rather than face the forces of the Mahdi, who's rebellion was gathering strength. The newspapers were pushing for a relief force to be sent, but the Government decided that they could just send Gordon, hoping his cachet would be enough to enable an orderly withdrawal, assuage public opinion, and curtail any unnecessary expense.

Unfortunately for Gladstone and his government, Gordon was a poor choice for such an assignment. Firstly, Gordon was a Christian visionary: hardly a good choice to try and pacify an Islamic insurgency. Secondly, he followed his own path, revealed to him by God, as he thought. Sent to arrange a retreat he instead fortified Khartoum and set himself to withstand a siege.

Soon enough he was surrounded by Mahdist forces, and it was public opinion - whipped up again by the newspapers - that forced the Government to send an expedition to relieve Gordon and bring him safely back to Egypt. If the Mahdi was defeated in the process, all the better.... so much for saving money!

England's Pride is the story of the expeditionary force that was sent up the Nile to relieve Gordon: a story of success and failures, of battles and massacres, and of Victorian attitudes and characters such as Generals Wolseley, Buller and Stewart, Colonels Barnaby and Butler, Lord Charles Beresford and most famous probably today Kitchener, who played a minor but important role in what came to pass in 1884-5.

Once Gladstone was finally convinced that rescue of Gordon was needed, the army decided the best course of action was to trans-ship the force up the Nile in small whaling boats to a forward base at Korti, and then send a force across the desert on camel to Metemmeh before continuing on to Khartoum.

The story therefore is mainly one of logistics and movement rather than fighting: the logistics and movement were in fact bigger obstacles to the army than any of the Arab warriors that they met on the battlefield. Moving thousands of men up the Nile over multiple cataracts (some of which were at the time un-mapped) was a huge undertaking, requiring mammoth efforts not only from the troops themselves, by the boatbuilders who built over 400 whalers in quick time, and also the Canadian guides (voyageurs) who were employed to manoeuvre the boats up the river safely to their destination (which in great part they managed).

The provision of camels proved to be a major problem. There were never enough for the army's needs and those they did have became severely over-worked. In fact one of the main reasons that reprisal against the Mahdi's forces for his sack of Khartoum (which occurred two days before the first British steamer came in sight of the town) was discontinued was that the British had too few camels to engage in effective campaigning.

Symons maps all this out well, and also provides a good synopsis of the final days of Gordon and the battle of Abu Klea. He charts the fate of those involved in the expedition - who prospered and who didn't, and a useful chapter speculating whether there was any chance that relief of Gordon was ever a realistic prospect. Symons thinks that those who became scapegoats at the time were unfairly treated and concludes that if anyone was to blame, it was Gordon for not communicating his position effectively enough to Wolseley, and Gladstone for delaying his decision to send a relief force. Wolseley's army, all things considered, did about as well as it could have in the situation.

What struck me most in this retelling of a great Victorian epic was how the situation rings through the ages - vacillating politicians and bickering military leaders leading to disaster is a story as old as time, and as recent and tomorrow's news.

England's Pride is a solid exposition of an interesting, if now semi-forgotten, piece of Empire history.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Murder in Amsterdam by Ian Buruma

 Murder in Amsterdam: the Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance by Ian Buruma

London: Atlantic Books, 2006            ISBN 1843545470

It's a little shocking to me that the murder of Theo van Gogh was nearly 17 years ago: the world has moved on in many ways from the horrible days of van Gogh's murder and the London bombings, and yet the issues Buruma raises in this thoughtful foray into the mind of not only a murderer, but a country, are still coursing through the Western world.

Buruma - who is Dutch - returned to his homeland after the murder to try not only to discover why Mohammed Bouyeri shot and stabbed van Gogh, but also to see what had happened to The Netherlands, a country that was proud of its multiculturalism and peaceful ways.

In a series of vignettes, interviews, and history lessons, Buruma unpeels the way Dutch history and the traditions of Africa, the Middle East, and Islam came together to create not only van Gogh and Bouyeri, but also the "new" Netherlands that is so unlike the country in which Buruma spent his early years.

The perpetual plight of the immigrant is at the core of this book - a story of generations. The first generation of guest workers come without expectations, without experience, and in the case of many Moroccans in Holland, without literacy. Their expectations - of a better material life - were met. The second generation, who were born Dutch, did not have such a simple life. They were brought up to expect the benefits of citizenship, but that is denied them by the intrinsic and implicit racism and discrimination that occur even when the will is there to transcend such things. They are unable to tap into the underlying culture of the country, the "proper" way to behave, because they have no support from their parents to do so, as those parents are trapped in a limbo between their traditional life and the modern world into which they've moved.

This leads to many second-generation children of migrants to be cut adrift: unable to make the best of themselves, and unable in many ways to make sense of their situation, they are prey to any form of "stability" and "identity" that may come their way - some may choose gangs, some may choose Islamic fascism.

Buruma maps this history out carefully, noting the particular way it panned out in Holland, where a deep-seated guilt over the way the country behaved during World War Two meant that the political class were not only unwilling to face problems to do with religion or race, but also over-reacted when such issues did surface. Buruma writes of the peculiar Dutch Calvinistic attitude - a strident moralism - which in some ways mimics the strident moralism of the Islamic fascists. This Dutch moralism asserts itself vigorously when it comes to free speech, and angry free speech at that. Buruma quotes van Gogh and other Dutch commentators writing frankly vulgar smears, vulgar smears that were published in mainstream newspapers, vulgar smears that would not see the light of day in reputable publications in many other European countries, or other Western democracies.

This willingness to offend so brazenly was an understood part of the Dutch polity, an accepted way of behaving between members of the Dutch political and media class. It was a way of behaving that did not fit with the multicultural society that The Netherlands had become, as it did not take into account the way public discourse must change when society changes. Van Gogh was always a stirrer and from his earliest years loved to shock, but because of his sheltered upbringing did not understand that his activities may have unforeseen consequences.

Ayaan Hersi Ali (who wrote the film that van Gogh directed which lead to his death), although a migrant herself, willingly adopted not only the free speech, but also the anger that Buruma describes as a Dutch trait. Her target, the Islamic faith, was misguided although she spoke much truth when describing the way The Netherlands and other Western countries were allowing a cancer to grow inside them by allowing unfettered immigration and lack of education to create ghettos of marginalised people that were identifiable by their race, colour, or creed. She became a lightning rod for both "progressives", who tarred her with the Nazi brush (a common way of shooting down opponents in The Netherlands), and for traditional Muslims, who could not understand why she was including them within the groups of people that she said must change and throw away their whole lives and become darker copies of the white Dutch.

Buruma glides more lightly over the bewilderment and sense of loss of the older white Dutch, who have seen their country change in so many ways since the War. They, like the Moroccans, Turks and Surinamese, have not been educated about the change, and so too have become lost inside their own country. Unlike frontier societies such as the USA and Australia, there was no history in The Netherlands of new people or groups moving into their country and staking a place, and no willingness from the political powers to do much to assist that transition.

Which brings us to the Islamic fascism that drove Mohammed Bouyeri to murder. I do wonder whether Buruma takes this seriously enough in this book. I think when the West did start to take it seriously was when we started to win the war against it: when we engaged more with Muslim countries and worked together to show it as a flawed ideology that only led to suffering and death and had little to do with the Islam that the vast majority of people follow, it was the beginning of the end for the fascists.

Buruma sees Bouyeri's fundamentalism as more Dutch than Islamic: he quotes from Mohammad's speech at his trial to draw comparisons with what he had gleaned from his "study" with the Dutch Calvanistic tradition of moralism, and finds many similarities. Buruma also quotes other Dutch Muslims who laugh at Bouyeri's hotch-potch of beliefs, gained variously from ancient texts, bogus imams, and internet propaganda.

History since this book was written has shown that it is wiser to take much of what people like Bouyeri say at face value: they believe what they say, and what they say has the power to kill. Buruma has much to say on how young men (and women) like Bouyeri come to be in the position to be seduced by this rubbish, and much of what he says is food for thought for those in power in many Western countries: don't leave your guest workers or immigrants behind, don't let them fester in ghettos. If you are willing to allow them into your country, then you must be willing and able to integrate them into your culture. Which doesn't necessarily mean that they have to leave their old culture behind.

Buruma does have some rays of light in this book - immigrants who have made a success of themselves despite the hardships, Muslims who can easily reconcile their religion with living in a Western democracy, and some Muslims who are working toward some sort of "enlightenment" within Islam, understanding that - at this point in history - it is only in the West that questioning of their faith can occur.

As with all of Buruma's writing Death in Amsterdam is both thoughtful and thought-provoking: even though a world of history seems to have gone by since the death of Theo van Gogh, there is still much in this book that is of interest.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell