Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (10 page)

T
HE world watched thoughtfully. ‘My dear, you know I am not proud,’ wrote the Tsar Nicholas II to his sister during the Boer War, ‘but I
do
like
knowing
that
it
lies
solely
with
me
in the last resort to change the course of the war in Africa. The means is very simple—telegraph an order for the whole Turkestan army to mobilize and march to the Indian frontier. That’s all.’

He was exaggerating in fact, for until his central Asian railway system was complete he had no way of getting the Turkestan army to the Indian frontier, but he was only expressing the instinct of the nations. The Boer War had cracked the British mirror; the Jubilee was over; the Empire had grown too big for itself. It had seemed to most of its citizens invulnerable because of its very size, but now, it seemed, it was size that made it vulnerable. Empire gave the British a finger on every pulse, a say in every conference; but at the same time it made them subject to all the world’s anxieties, innately responsive not merely to the Mauser of a Boer, but to the whim of any foreign despot.

The Boer War showed that it was getting too much for them. In the 1860s Matthew Arnold had portrayed Great Britain as a weary Titan—

This prophetic picture would have been unrecognizable only five years before, but in 1902 the world, thoughtfully watching, saw its outline dimly delineated in the aftermath of war.

The scale of the Empire, which so sustained the confidence of the British themselves, had bemused other nations no less. The Empire was so inescapable, seemed so old, bore itself so majestically, that it had become a universal fact of life, something natural to the world.

It spilt far beyond its own frontiers, too, for its power was tacitly present everywhere, wherever a merchantman docked, a banker checked an exchange rate, or a statesman contemplated a course of action. It was protean in its forms. To Americans the Empire was Canada, or the Caribbean, or Pacific power, or sea-blockade, or hard cash from the City. To the Russians it was India, the Mediterranean and the Eastern Question. To France it was Africa. To Germany it was the Royal Navy. To the Japanese it was an instructive model. To the Chinese it was a cultural humiliation—‘I began to wonder’, wrote the young revolutionary Sun Yat Sen, ‘how it was that … Englishmen could do such things as they have done with the barren rock of Hong Kong within 70 or 80 years, while in 4,000 years China had achieved nothing like it….’

Sea-captains of every nationality knew the Empire as a chain of harbours and coaling-stations, and the most ubiquitous of maritime aids. Financiers saw it as the power of the pound sterling, the king of currencies. To Argentinian commuters it was the Buenos Aires Tramways Company, British owned and operated. To Italian railwaymen it was the familiar Adriatic specials, the trains which, speeding from Calais to the waiting India liners at Brindisi, sent the Anglo-Indians back to their labours in the east. To the pleasure cities of Europe it was bronzed but skinny tourists with money to spend, talking to each other in inexplicable jargon, and frequently meeting colleagues in the public gardens—‘Dammit, Hodgson, Helen, good to see you! Well I never! Care for a spot of tiffin? Found yourselves somewhere decent to stay? Damme,
what
a
long way from Jacobabad, ain’t it?’

The ampleness of it all impressed foreigners despite themselves. It was sometimes hard not to be obliged by its noblesse, and some of the Empire’s most vicious foreign critics were relieved, nevertheless, to cross a distant frontier and see before them, billowing on fort or hilltop, the Union Jack that promised them order, security and a cup of thick sweet tea. The Royal Navy especially, that supreme emblem of Empire, found loyalties everywhere. When the Americans began to build a new Navy of their own, in the 1890s, they adhered so closely to the British manner that the first of their new armoured ships, the
New
York,
even had an admiral’s walk at the stern, a direct and quite unfunctional tribute to the Nelsonic tradition.
1
As for Admiral von Tirpitz, the creator of the new German Navy, he carried his respect to still further extremes, and sent his daughter to be educated at Cheltenham Ladies’ College.

The spectacle of the Boer War tempered all these emotions, and presented the British Empire in less flattering lights. It was clear to everybody now, as it had been clear to the Tsar, that a single colonial war, against an enemy with a population half that of Birmingham, had tried the Empire to its limits. The British admitted as much. Arthur Balfour, who succeeded Lord Salisbury as Prime Minister, said publicly that its drain upon the imperial resources had reduced Britain in effect to a third-rate Power. The Viceroy of India had been warned, at the height of the war, that the last division was mobilized, and that if Russia did attack, he might expect no help from home. Lord Kitchener said the imperial armies were incapable of fulfilling all their commitments—‘we are in the position of a firm which has written cheques against a non-existent balance.’

This was a far cry from the rodomontade of the Jubilee, and the nations responded predictably. The first humiliations of Black Week, which convinced many Europeans that the British were actually
going to lose the war, had vividly revealed foreign feelings about the Empire. The British indeed had supporters in every country, from the Anglophiles of the eastern United States, who hardly felt themselves to be foreigners at all, to Greek and Italian liberals who still saw in Britain the old champion of their freedoms. But they had far more enemies. ‘Splendid isolation’ had been a flattering Canadian conception of Britain’s lonely magnificence,
1
but in the worst days of the Boer War it acquired an uncomfortable new meaning—as though, wrote Salisbury himself, ‘the large aggregations of human forces which lie around our Empire seem to draw more closely together, to assume … a more and more aggressive aspect.’

The German Kaiser Wilhelm II, Queen Victoria’s own grandson, kindly though he had cabled Rhodes at Kimberley, had been openly pro-Boer ever since the Jameson Raid. The Boers were armed mostly with German weapons, and their artillery was actually officered by Germans. After Black Week most of the other European States declared their sympathies too, if only unofficially. Editorialists damned the British, cartoonists lampooned them, public opinion everywhere was at once shocked by Britain’s policies, and entertained by her discomfitures. From many parts of the world young men volunteered to fight with the Boers: Germans, Frenchmen, Americans, and a ferocious and treasonable corps of Irishmen, Blake’s Brigade. A Scandinavian corps played an important part in the defence of Magersfontein. ‘Fashoda is revenged!’ a Frenchman cried as he climbed to the roof of a captured British fort outside Mafeking, carrying a bottle of brandy.
2

They were inspired partly by idealism, partly by a taste for adventure in an adventurous age, but largely by the resentment with which, beneath the unwilling respect, the world had long regarded the British Empire. It was a resentment often envious and often hypocritical (was Europe, incredulously asked the playwright Henrik Ibsen,
really
on the side of Kruger and his Bible?), but none the less profound. To the British themselves the Empire might seem
a mighty force for good in the world, to their foreign contemporaries it was all too often an overweening, greedy and sanctimonious cabal—‘a kind of octopus’, as Lord George Hamilton, a percipient Under-Secretary of State at the India Office, interpreted the general feeling, ‘with gigantic feelers stretching out all over the habitable globe … preventing foreign nations from doing that which in the past we have done ourselves’.

The artist Pablo Picasso, who was eighteen at the start of the war, expressed these antipathies aptly when, one day during the war years, he scribbled a few doodles on his writing-pad: for there, out of his subconscious perhaps, he idly portrayed a cast of British comi-villains in the veld—toothy and monocled young subalterns, all drawl and languid stoop, preposterous apoplectic generals, bovine Tommies in approximate Highland dress looking at once ridiculous, brutal and half-witted. It was not at all how the British saw their brave troops, on the souvenir plates, cards, flags and albums which were lucrative by-products of the war.

For the first time since the Indian Mutiny people wondered how long the British could hold their Empire. ‘The fact is’, said Henry Campbell-Bannerman, ‘we cannot provide for a fighting Empire, and nothing can give us that power.’ The white colonies had staunchly supported the Mother Country in the struggle. Some 17,000 Australians, 8,500 Canadians, 8,000 New Zealanders had fought in South Africa, and there were white volunteers too from India, the Malay States, Burma, Ceylon and most of the scattered island possessions.

Black and brown volunteers, however, were not invited, and among the coloured subject peoples the loyalty was not so absolute. Though the Nation-State was still an unfamiliar concept in Africa and Asia, the Boer War gave some encouragement to those few visionary leaders who saw that the British Empire would not last for ever. It took vision indeed to see it, from the wrong side of the colour-line. Across the globe the British presence still lay apparently immovable, and so immeasurably superior was the white race in all
the techniques of command, so cowed were the coloured peoples by European technology and assurance, that the Empire really did have an eternal look. Governors and Commissioners moved freely about without bodyguards, and the Viceroy of India sometimes went walking all by himself through the Calcutta slums; for the Englishman was to his subject peoples, Gandhi thought, as the elephant was to the ants.

But in the years after the Boer War the ants began to stir. In Ireland, where patriotism had survived 800 years of British occupation, the old undercurrent still ran, secret societies drilled and plotted, and the Irish people only needed another in their long line of heroes to inspire them into rebellion. In Burma the Young Men’s Buddhist Association, building upon its Christian model, advanced from healthy sports and social work into nationalist discussion. In West Africa the Sokoto people rebelled, in South Africa the Zulus, in East Africa the black tribes of Kenya. In Egypt a wave of anger and sorrow followed the public hanging and flogging of some villagers accused of attacking British officers on a pigeon-shoot—‘everyone I met’, wrote the Egyptian writer Qasim Amin, ‘had a broken heart and a lump in his throat.’ Most tellingly of all, in India, much the greatest of all the imperial possessions, a thin tide of patriotism was beginning to flow.

Indian nationalism had already found a voice in the Indian National Congress, originally dedicated to co-operation with the Raj, later developing more militant postures, and it had an inspiring spokesman in the Hindu visionary Bal Gangadhar Tilak, who had already been imprisoned for subversion, but was irrepressible. No country, though, was less likely to coalesce in rebellion than India—fragmented into a thousand parts by race, religion, history and geography, held so long in fee to the British that the habit of obedience was deeply ingrained in the people, and most citizens could no more conceive of an end to the Raj than an end to the world itself. Since the Indian Mutiny, half a century before, India had been held severely in check, even the Indian Army, the pride of Anglo-India, being deprived of artillery and watchfully attended, wherever it was, by British Army units. It was only after the Boer War that a mass of the people first took part in a nationalist demonstration,
and the most prescient of their leaders began to see how independence might one day be achieved.

In 1905 the British decreed the partition of Bengal, the most intractable province of British India, whose population was rather larger than England’s. They proposed to divide it into two lesser provinces, one predominantly Hindu, one predominantly Muslim, and their intention was self-evident: divide and rule. They brushed aside Indian objections—‘if we are weak enough to yield to their clamour now,’ the Viceroy reported to London, ‘we shall not be able to dismember or reduce Bengal again; and you will be cementing and solidifying a force already formidable and certain to be of increasing trouble in the future.’

At first the leaders of Congress objected in constitutional terms. The British were unimpressed, being for the most part thoroughly contemptuous of Congress and all it represented, but as the day of partition approached they found themselves faced by a very different kind of protest. There were none of the habitual Indian riots, which were a nuisance indeed, but were easily enough suppressed by Indian policemen with their batons, or if necessary Indian sepoys with their bayonets. Instead, at Tilak’s inspiration, thousands of Bengalis protested passively, with a silent boycott of everything British. This was a new phenomenon. Shoppers would not buy British goods. Students would not do their examinations on British paper. Washerwomen would not wash British clothes. Cobblers would not mend British shoes. Children would not suck British sweets. Lancashire textiles were ceremonially burnt in the streets. As the weeks passed, boycott went further, and those who broke it were themselves boycotted. Relatives and neighbours refused to see them, tradesmen refused to serve them, even priests and physicians denied them solace.