Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (11 page)

This was the beginning of
swadeshi
, economic boycott, which was to become one of the chief weapons of Indian revolution, and even of a greater instrument still, passive resistance. The British realized its power very soon, and some of them recognized it as the first stirring of a decisive revolutionary process. So did some of the Indians. At the height of the anti-partition demonstrations 50,000 people assembled for the Bengali festival of Durga Puja, in the temple
of Kali at Kalighat in south Calcutta. This was always one of the great days of the Bengali year, but now it had a special meaning, for the goddess Durga had acquired a new cult as the personification of Motherland. The Puja of 1905 was celebrated, for the first time, as a festival of Indianness.

It was an event of theatrical effect. The temple was brilliant with the lamps of the devotees, and crammed to its high railings with their bodies, pressing around the sacrificial block in the middle of its courtyard, crowding up the steps to the Natmadnir, the shrine beyond. The air was heavy with sickly smells, flowers, incences, perfumes, and loud with thousands of voices, and bells, and the rumble of the traffic in the street outside. The pilgrims entered the shrine in groups, and there before the Brahmin priests they made a solemn vow to Durga, ‘before thy holy presence and in this place of sanctity’, never to buy British goods, never to use British shops, never to employ Englishmen.

As the long ceremony proceeded a violent storm blew up, and the rain teemed furiously upon Calcutta, turning the temple courtyard into a quagmire and drenching the thin clothes of the devotees. The fury of the night, though, only gave the oath a deeper meaning, and through the storm the waiting crowd could hear, over and over again, the Sanskrit injunction of the priests, as they dismissed the pilgrims batch by batch: ‘Swear to serve your Motherland! Offer your lives to her service! Worship the Motherland before all other deities!’

Even more significantly, the world observed a first hesitation of British morale at home. A tremor, a fitful doubt, passed across the nation for all to see, in the aftermath of the Boer War.

This was the national mood, chastened and bewildered, expressed here by Rudyard Kipling himself. It was a deep and subtle disillusionment, and though it was overlaid still by pride, patriotism and the joy of victory, though it lay dormant or impotent for years to come, still it was a seed that grew with time, to change the nation, the Empire and the world.

On the surface Kipling was simply attacking military incompetence, and arguing for an end to the class-ridden structure of the old army, its officers so often courageous dunderheads, its men such unreasoning serfs. In this many soldiers agreed with him. They were all ‘ashamed for England’, reported the war correspondent G. W. Steevens after one humiliating skirmish—‘not
of
her, never that! but
for
her!’ ‘We are only sportsmen,’ one wounded officer was heard to say with a sigh, as he hauled himself crippled with fever, dysentry and loss of blood towards the chaos of a field hospital, ‘only sportsmen, after all….’

Before the Boer War the British, enjoying for the first and last time in their history a militaristic phase, had assumed their armies to be the best in the world, and watched their exploits with a robust pride, adequately expressed by the poet G. Flavell Hayward: 

This vicarious swashbuckle was now extinguished. The British had never suffered such terrible casualties before, while the run of defeats in South Africa came as a terrible psychological shock, the first of a series which progressively whittled away the British taste for glory, and even perhaps for honour. ‘Please understand,’ the Queen had declared during Black Week, ‘there is no one depressed in
this house’—but who could have imagined, five or ten years before, that she could ever make such a remark, of a war fought by the flower of her armies against 35,000 untrained bucolics?

On a deeper level, though, Kipling was reflecting a more general malaise, an unease which might not affect the Jingoist masses, but already troubled more sensitive citizens. He wrote of ‘obese, unchallenged old things that stifle and overlie us’. He wrote of ‘flannelled fools at the wicket, muddied oafs at the goals’. The conduct of the war had hinted at fundamental flaws in the imperial assumptions: flatulent old assumptions which, unchallenged in the euphoria of success, did lie deadweight upon the nation, and suggested themselves in failure. Britain was at the end of her aristocratic period. The public was still half-educated, half-enfranchised, and by and large the upper classes still dictated the course of events. The Labour movement was in its infancy; the new electorate was easily swayed, and inhibited too by traditional loyalties; most Members of Parliament still represented landed, agricultural interests. For the most part, in the Britain of the 1900s, what the gentry said, went.

Now this old hierarchy, which lay at the root of Empire too, was vaguely but significantly discredited. The British gentleman was not, it seemed, organically constructed to command, not entitled to success as a birthright. Calvinist dame schools of the
dorps
made better generals than Eton and Sandhurst. The British soldier’s traditional loyalty to his social betters was evidently no longer enough. The great regiments of the British Army, the Guards, the Highlanders, the cavalry of the line, were of all British institutions the most devoted to the old order: yet these proud brotherhoods had been seen running for their lives through the South African night, or pinned humiliatingly among the thorn-bushes with the sun blistering the backs of their kilted knees.

Before 1900, wrote the polemicist Arnold White in his
exposé
Efficiency
and
Empire,
1
the ‘accepted creed of average Englishmen’ included the following clauses:

By the end of the war, as White commented, every one of those propositions was disputable, and some were obvious falsehoods. And if the system failed in war, how long would it succeed in peace? Could this archaic society keep pace with more modern rivals, better educated, fresher, less circumscribed by class and tradition? Or might it be that the nation was becoming effete? Curzon certainly thought the British were beginning to show ‘a craven fear of being great.’ The preposterously imperialist Poet Laureate, Alfred Austin, put the same thought into a different sort of verse, as he saw the audience for his bombast so disconcertingly diminished:

There were also doubts of a yet more debilitating kind, about the morality of the war and so of the Empire itself. The British Empire had never been unanimous. There had been opposition always to the imperial idea, and several imperial wars of the past had been hotly criticized, in Press and in Parliament, as immoral or unworthy. Gladstone’s famous Midlothian election had been concerned immediately with the injustice of the Afghan campaign of 1879—‘Remember the rights of the savage! Remember that the happiness of his humble home, remember that the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan … is as inviolable in the eye of Almighty God as is your own!’ Britons of many kinds supported him. There were humanitarians who thought imperialism a sin, moralists who thought it a fraud, radical politicians who thought it an error, economists who thought it an unnecessary fiscal device and socialists
who thought with Karl Marx that it was merely an undesirable extension of capitalism. ‘This has been a day of consolation’, the poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt wrote in his diary when he heard of the capture of Khartoum by the Mahdists and the death of General Gordon, ‘and I could not help singing all the way down in the train.’

The Boer War, however, revealed dissensions on an altogether different scale. There had been powerful opposition to it from the start. General Sir William Butler, the outspoken Commander-in-Chief in South Africa before the war, had resigned his office rather than be involved in it, and these are the headlines with which
Reynold’s
Newspaper
announced its beginning: