Within a very short time disorganisation was replaced by discipline, despair by confidence, and the Ever-Victorious Army was once more made worthy of its name. It was here that Gordon really began his career as a soldier of fortune. When he took command he told Li-Hung-Chang that he would turn the rebels out of the score of walled cities which they had captured and strengthened, and put the rebellion down within eighteen months. As a matter of fact he did it in fifteen. The story of the doing of this so clearly shows the extraordinary capacity that Gordon possessed for both the organisation and the execution of a military campaign, as well as the faculty of inspiring confidence in all sorts and conditions of men, that it is simply amazing that the home authorities did not immediately recognise the fact that he was something a good deal more than they had hitherto taken him for. This, however, it was to take them some twenty years more to find out. Still there was one incident at the close of the rebellion which might have shown even the official mind very clearly what sort of man this Major of Engineers was. The last incident of the war was the surrender of the great lake-city of Soo-Chow, and the Wangs, or chiefs of the rebels, laid down their arms on a guarantee of safety and good treatment. The Chinese way of acting up to this was to chop the heads off the whole lot. Now Gordon considered himself in a measure responsible for this guarantee, and the way in which he marked his sense of the breach of faith was characteristically unique. The brilliancy of his services was recognised by a money gift of 10,000 taels (between three and four thousand pounds of English money). Gordon acknowledged it by writing on the back of the Imperial letter: “Major Gordon regrets that, owing to the circumstances which occurred since the capture of Soo-Chow, he is unable to receive any mark of his Majesty the Emperor’s recognition.” If ever a sceptred monarch got the snub direct the Son of Heaven must have got it then, although the probability is that the 10,000 taels never found their way back to the Imperial treasury. Gordon also wanted to throw up the whole business, but the rebellion suddenly broke out again in another place, and so he went on with his work until it was finally crushed, for he was not the sort of man who liked to begin a thing and not get through with it. His brilliant success in every single operation that he conducted clearly proved, as I have said, that in Gordon Britain possessed a true leader of men and master of affairs; in other words an Empire-Maker of the first order. And yet she first ignored and undervalued him, and then, as David did with Uriah, put him in the forefront of the battle and left him there to die.