The English ministers then bethought themselves of General Gordon, one of the most remarkable characters of the nineteenth century. His career had been a strange and eventful one. After serving with distinction as a Royal Engineer in the Crimea, the chances of war carried him to the Far East where he played his part in the Anglo-French expedition to China. When the object of the campaign was accomplished, peace was signed with the Emperor of China, but the end of the war found some of the most fertile provinces of the Celestial Empire in the hands of great hordes of insurgents, with whom the Chinese authorities were wholly unable to cope. Gordon was lent to the Emperor to command a force of Chinamen, raised by himself and officered by adventurers of mixed nationality. With a rare combination of military talent and personal courage, readiness to assume responsibility, power of influencing his subordinates, and complete absence of self-seeking, he welded his unpromising material into good soldiers, with whom he stormed many walled towns and won battles innumerable against vastly superior numbers. After a long struggle, in which his men earned the title of “the ever-victorious army,” he completely crushed the rebels; and then, disbanding the troops who had learned to look upon him as invincible, he returned to Europe with the justly earned reputation of a born leader of men. During his five years’ sojourn in the Soudan Gordon had acquired great influence over its inhabitants. The fighting men had learned to follow, the slave-hunters to fear him: the traders respected his stern and evenhanded justice: all classes knew that his word, once pledged, was never broken, and that his orders must be obeyed to the letter. At a few hours’ notice, Gordon was sent to Egypt to secure the retreat of the garrison of Khartoum and of the thousands of civilians who would probably wish to accompany it, and also to effect the evacuation of the remainder of the Soudan. For this enormous task he was allowed one Staff officer, Colonel D. Stewart,[254] 11th Hussars, with whom he reached Khartoum on February 18, 1884.