Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (17 page)

The Dalai Lhama had fled. There were no Russians. Except for the extraordinary palace, there was scarcely a building of interest in the place. The streets were filthy, with pools of scummy water everywhere, piles of rubbish, open sewers running between the houses, scavenging dogs, pigs and birds of carrion. Swarms of ragged monks watched with surly resentment as the Fusiliers marched spick-and-span through these disagreeable surroundings, but the ordinary citizens displayed only a vacuous unconcern—‘idiotic-looking people’, one Briton thought them, and pictures of the scene do indeed show some less than intellectual faces, peering in perhaps syphilitic listlessness around the frames of muddy photographs.

For several weeks nothing much happened. The Dalai Lama was well on his way to Outer Mongolia, and the National Assembly of senior lamas was frightened to reach decisions without him. The British set up their main camp outside the gates of the city, and soon erected the familiar paraphernalia of Empire. The flag flew, the bugles sounded. Servants polished officers’ boots in the sunshine, grooms combed ponies’ manes, troops drilled on the dusty parade-ground, the gunners greased their beloved guns, whitewash and regimental crests blossomed in the scree. They organized gymkhanas, race meetings and football matches, they fished in the Pygong river, they went bird-watching, they hunted wild donkeys in the hills outside the city.
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Far, far away into the distance from
their camp, the signallers’ telegraph poles carried the cable wire all the way back to India, and so to London: when asked by curious Tibetans what it was for, they said tactfully that it was to show them the way home again.
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Meanwhile Younghusband patiently groped his way towards a treaty. At first the National Assembly rejected all his demands, and very reasonably suggested that far from the Tibetans paying the British reparations, it ought to be the other way round. Day by day, nevertheless, argument by argument, Younghusband won them over, sometimes by charm, sometimes by threat. The filthy lamas grew on him: he now thought them, though ‘intangible’ and ‘unget-at-able’, still ‘extraordinarily quaint and interesting’, and even ‘good fellows’. He himself believed that the most important requirement was the stationing of a British Agent in Lhasa: once he was there, he thought, all else would be plain sailing—in trade, in foreign relations, Tibet would fall easily enough into the pattern of the imperial buffer-States. London, though, had specifically forbidden any such demand, so that while on the one hand Younghusband was trying to persuade the Tibetans into compliance, on the other he was hoping to evade the direct instructions of Whitehall.

He managed it in the end, if only briefly, and the scene of the signing of the Anglo-Tibetan Convention, though it had been won at a terrible cost of innocent lives, against the instincts of the British people themselves, and despite the agonized opposition of the Tibetans, remains among the jollier spectacles of the imperial pageant. Early in the afternoon of September 7, 1904, Younghusband and his staff, covered by a battery of artillery, escorted by mounted infantry, and dressed in their fullest fineries, rode across Lhasa to the long sloping causeway which, striking diagonally across the face of the Potala hill, gave access to the palace. Here, dismounting,
they found their aplomb put to the test, for the cobbles of the causeway were so slippery that in their nailed boots they could hardly get up it. They were like men bewitched in a fairy tale. Slithering all over the place, their plumes erratically waving, their Sam Brownes and decorations pushed awry, the representatives of advanced civilization clambered farcically up the hill of bigotry, to disappear at last, panting with the altitude and hastily straightening their accoutrements, into the dim and dirty corridors of the palace, where monks with butter-lamps guided them to their appointment.

The treaty was signed in the Dalai Lama’s audience hall, a large pillared room already crowded, as the British delegates entered it, with dignitaries—the Regent of Tibet, the Amban, the Abbots of the three greatest monasteries, the Tongsa Penlop of Bhutan, the Nepalese Resident—and with monks, British officers, Sikhs, Gurkhas and Royal Fusiliers. The British had arranged this peculiar Durbar didactically. ‘Those who have lived among Asiatics’, Younghusband later wrote, ‘know that the fact of signing the treaty in the Potala was of as much value as the treaty itself.’ When it came to the point, though, the ceremony was more boisterous than instructive. The dead of the long road were forgotten, the brutal intrusion of Empire was apparently forgiven, and the bonhomie of the Tibetans presently infected the British too, so that they themselves became, as one of them recorded, ‘rather a rowdy lot, and made a beastly noise’.

Tea was served, with dried fruits, and the Tibetans handed the several copies of the agreement around with jokes and pleasantries. It took an hour for everyone to sign them, and then Colonel Younghusband made an amiable if schoolmasterly speech, reproaching the Tibetans for their former disrespect, but hoping that friendship and peace between the two countries would now last for ever. Everybody clapped, and smiled, and laughed, and shook hands, and drank more tea, and ate more fruit, and the proceedings broke up in high good humour. The British had been disconcerted, clambering so ludicrously up the causeway for the start of the ceremony, but going down again they found hilarious. So did the Tibetans. As the departing officers scrabbled and slid away down the ramp, almost convulsed themselves with the ridiculousness of it,
they heard guffaws and high-pitched laughter somewhere above them, and looking up to the great face of the palace-monastery, saw the monks of the Potala, high on their serried terraces, merrily observing their predicament.

Younghusband had not abided by Brodrick’s prim telegram of the preceding year. His treaty obliged the Tibetans to accept a British Agent at Gyangtse, with the right to visit Lhasa when necessary, and to deal with no foreign Powers without British consent. They were to pay an indemnity of
£
50,000, in seventy-five annual instalments, and until it was paid—until, that is, the year 1979—the British would occupy the whole Chumbi Valley. The British Empire in return promised nothing whatever.

This harsh agreement apparently satisfied the Tibetans, who had found the British at least more pleasant to deal with than the Chinese—‘when one has known the scorpion’, as one of their proverbs had it, ‘the frog seems divine.’ It did not, however, please the British Government in London. They had been at pains to convince the Powers, and especially Russia, that the British had no acquisitive ambitions in Tibet, but were merely concerned to regularize existing arrangements. Younghusband, in the manner of earlier imperialists, had boldly exceeded his orders, but the British of 1904 were not excited by his initiative. The days of splendid isolation were over, Britain could no longer behave as though she held the world in fief, and when the terms of the convention became known the Russian, German, American, French and Italian Ambassadors all called at the Foreign Office to protest. King Edward himself was shocked, and thought Younghusband had acted in an ‘extraordinary’ way, ‘in direct and deliberate defiance of instructions’.

Having sanctioned, however reluctantly, an expedition which, after a year of danger and difficulty, had succeeded in reaching an agreement with the most evasive Power on earth, the British Government now repudiated it. The indemnity was reduced by two-thirds, and the Chumbi Valley was to be evacuated in 1908.
When the British left Lhasa, six weeks later, the Chinese resumed their old ascendancy, and not until 1936 did the British have their own Agent in the capital. None of it mattered anyway, as it turned out, and the course of imperial history would have been altogether unaffected if the Mission to Tibet had never been invented.

The expedition itself had gone exactly as Curzon had planned, in its gradual development from a negotiating body to a military campaign, from talks on the Sikkim frontier to the occupation of Lhasa itself. It returned safely to India like so many imperial columns before it, its soldiers receiving a handsome medal engraved with a picture of the Potala, and a campaign bar, ‘Tibet 1903–4’, to add to the battle-honours of the regiments. A couple of thousand men went home, briefly to enrich the folklore of Norfolk or Punjab with their tales of Tibet.

But it was an anachronism already, so soon after the excitements of
Following
the
Flags
, or the frenzies of Mafeking night. Even the thrills of penetrating the unknown, even the satisfactions of bringing enlightenment to the barbarians, had lost their appeal for the British. Only a Power of supreme strength and confidence could embark upon such ventures with the requisite assurance, strong enough to ignore or defy all rivals, confident enough to be sure that the deaths of poor peasants, innocent tribesmen and unquestioning soldiers could be justified by results. Ten years before Britain had been such a Power, but no longer, and the invasion of Tibet never attracted much attention in the school history books of England.

As for its participants, only Younghusband, perhaps, paradoxically found what he wanted in Tibet. He was blamed for the diplomatic embarrassments of Lhasa, being awarded only the lowest order of knighthood for his achievement, and always around his name there was to hang the suggestion, growing dimmer over the years, of an obscure disgrace. His control of the expedition, though, had been admirable, and the journey itself had been one of the most remarkable in military history, involving the highest battle ever fought—at 19,000 feet on the pass of Karu-la.

More importantly, he really did encounter in the Forbidden Land that sublime essence he pined for. When, on September 23, the
British left Lhasa and began the long march home to India, they pitched their tents on the first night within sight of the Potala. As the camp settled down to sleep, Younghusband climbed a hill nearby and looked back at the towering mass of the palace, serene now in the evening light, and bathed for him in an aura of success and reconciliation. Alone there on the hill he experienced a moment of ecstasy. An intoxicating happiness overcame him, like a transfiguring drug injected into the bloodstream. ‘This exhilaration of the moment grew and grew until it thrilled through me with overpowering intensity. Never again could I think evil, or even again be at enmity with any man. All nature and all humanity were bathed in a rosy glowing radiancy; and life for the future seemed naught but buoyancy and light.’

Sure enough, presently he abandoned the imperial service, and never went to war again. He devoted the rest of his life to mysticism, religion and peaceful geography, and was buried when the time came in a Dorsetshire churchyard, beneath a bas-relief of Lhasa.
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I
N 1905 a Liberal Government came to power in London, under Henry Campbell-Bannerman. With its advent, the New Imperialism died: it was the end of Jingo—what the new Prime Minister had once called ‘the vulgar and bastard imperialism of irritation and provocation and aggression … of grabbing everything even if we have no use for it ourselves’. The British people, Edward Grey said, were back to normal. This was fortunate, for by now Salisbury’s threatening ‘aggregation of human forces’ seemed more menacing every year. There was war in the air, not simply the running colonial war in which the British had been engaged for a century or more, but the greater international conflict which their own dominant power had so long prevented. All the symptoms were brewing; economic rivalries, patriotic frustrations, the ambitions of leaders, dynastic squabbles, the general sense that an epoch was disintegrating and could only be cleared away by violence.

The British could not escape this gathering maelstrom, however pacific their new mood. They were traditionally the regulating Power of the world. Their navy made them militarily significant beyond their size, their command of raw materials gave them unique economic leverage, their possessions everywhere gave them a universal stake, while the immense accumulated wealth of the City of London was a hidden factor even in the banks and chanceries of Europe. The Pax Britannica really had kept the peace of the world for three generations. Now, for the first time since the end of the Napoleonic wars, the task seemed beyond it.

So we see the British, so recently all-confident, apprehensively looking for allies. The newly federated German Empire, under Wilhelm II, was emerging as the potential enemy: almost anybody
would do as a friend. Nation by nation the British patched up their relationships, in agreements, concessions or full-blown alliances: with Japan, with France, by 1907 even with Russia, when the Great Game was ended at last in an Anglo-Russian convention. Within the Empire, too, they repaired their friendships. Lord Kitchener toured the Dominions to enlist their military potential. An Imperial General Staff was established. Churchill devised a scheme for an Imperial Squadron of warships from all the major colonies, to be based upon Gibraltar and sent wherever it was needed.

If there was a slight air of desperation to these preparations, it was because time was running short. The Edwardian age, that mellow epilogue of Victorianism, died with its eponymous patron in 1910‚ and the world became more urgent. There were repeated naval scares, when tales of the vast new German battle-fleet cast a chill over England. Louis Blériot flew the English Channel, making the islanders feel a little less insular, and the liner
Titanic
sank on her maiden voyage, making them feel rather less titanesque. The trade deficit grew bigger every year: by 1910 the profits Britain made from invisible exports, insurance, banking, services of many kinds, no longer covered it, so that for the first time the British could not pay their way in the world by their own skills, but depended upon investment income from abroad.

In this shifting world only the Empire itself seemed to stand firm, still maintaining in its strongpoints and bases across the continents a posture of unassailable power: and this magnificent façade exerted a profound psychological effect upon its enemies, as well as upon itself. Just as the British economy now depended upon investments made by a previous generation, so the British reputation rested upon the constructions of earlier imperialists. For a century the imperial outposts had been an inescapable reminder of the British purpose, from Esquimalt at one end of the Empire to Hong Kong at another, and between them they kept an ostentatious watch upon the world: Bermuda covered the Atlantic, Simonstown and Trincomalee commanded the Indian Ocean, Singapore looked out to Japan and Australia, Gibraltar and Alexandria were sentinels of the Mediterranean. The very sight of them on the map, let alone from the bridge of a reconnoitring warship, had been an
inhibition to the Powers. As Thackeray had written long before,

Far in the east the jealous foreigner, sailing up the China coast, would discover the Crown Colony of Hong Kong, by which the British staked their authority throughout the further East. Not so long before it had been supposed that one day Queen Victoria might add China itself to her dominions, and it was said of the British in Hong Kong that they had cut a notch in China as a woodsman marks a tree—‘to mark it for felling at a convenient opportunity’. In the event the British had stopped short of an empire in China, and now shared Chinese Spheres of Influence with several European Powers: when in 1900 the Chinese rose against foreign interference in the Boxer Riots, Britain was only one of eight nations which sent troops to put them down. Hong Kong, nevertheless, kept a watching brief upon the affairs of the Chinese land-mass, and regularly sent its gunboats up the Chinese rivers to protect the vast British interests there. Further north the British possessed another base on the China coast, the naval anchorage of Wei-hai-wei: but Hong Kong was the centre of their power in the Far East, and seemed to stand there four-square and perpetual as an earnest of British stability. Every Englishman must feel a thrill of pride, Curzon once wrote, to visit this ‘furthermost link in the chain of fortresses which … girdles half the globe’: and every foreigner, the intention was, should feel a
frisson
of respect.

Its nerve-centre was the Peak, the rocky promontory which crowned Victoria Island, and upon whose slopes were concentrated the military, economic and social power of the colony. There the flag pointedly flew, there the morning bugles sounded, and there up the elevated railway the tired rich Englishmen went home in the afternoon, to their delectable garden villas above the heat. Hong
Kong was overwhelmingly Chinese in the mass: besides the island, it included a slice of territory, leased for ninety-nine years in 1898, which was actually part of the Chinese mainland, and looked it, with its walled villages and its shuttered temples, the willow-patterns of its country scenes and the immemorial postures of the workers in its paddy-fields. In the particular, though, nowhere in the Empire was more unquenchably British, for an element of defiance heightened its imperial attitudes, and made of it, so unsympathetic visitors sometimes thought, almost a caricature.
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The great men of Hong Kong were the taipans, the British merchants who had been in the colony from the beginning, and had never relaxed their grip upon its trade. They lived very grandly, sometimes in Hong Kong, sometimes in country houses at home in England, and their firms were household names throughout the east—Jardine Matheson, Butterfield Swire, names which spanned the generations, and seemed changeless constituents of eastern life. The taipans were opportunists by definition, quick, clever, rich men, who had absorbed some of the Chinese qualities themselves in so many years upon the coast, and who were there not for the sake of the Empire, still less to undertake a share of the White Man’s Burden, but to maintain their annual profits. Their attitudes were imperial nevertheless, and often dazzled foreign visitors by sheer hubris. The colour bar in Hong Kong was absolute, and the British held themselves almost psychotically aloof from the swarming Chinese who were their work-force. They seldom spoke Chinese,
and to heighten the lordly effect their servants talked to them in pidgin English, a literal translation from the Cantonese which gave their employees an air of child-like dependency. The British residents of Hong Kong genuinely, without affectation, thought of the Chinese as foreigners in the colony, and themselves as true natives.

The colony’s government was, of course, altogether British. The Governor lived in lavish style on the slopes of the Peak, guarded by soldiers at his gate.
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The administrators and generals and admirals of the island lived hardly less consequentially. They ran it with a paternal authoritarianism, making few concessions to liberal thought, and almost none to Chinese susceptibilities. Everywhere the symptoms of Empire showed: the ships always steaming in from India, Australia or Britain itself, the Indian soldiers who often formed its garrison, the Sikh policemen and hotel doormen, the Australian jockeys who won all the races at Happy Valley, above all the British mesh of the place, the webs of money, style and sovereignty which bound the colony so unmistakably to the imperial capital far away. English equity was the basis of Hong Kong’s trade, with British cash to keep it flowing, and British power to back it.
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There was a caravanserai feeling to Hong Kong, a feeling of
movement and opportunity and intelligence, as a ceaseless flow of traders, scholars, refugees and wanderers moved through it in and out of Asia. This gave a cogent impression of British omniscience. The colony’s newspapers were always full of Chinese news, commercial information from Shanghai, trade reports from up the Yangtze, rumours from Tibet or Mongolia, lists of travellers arriving from Canton or Vladivostock. The Peninsula Hotel, one of the supreme imperial hostelries, was associated with the Grand Hotel des Wagons Lits in Peking, and the red brick and mahogany railway station, down by the water-front at Kowloon, was linked by daily train with Canton and the Chinese capital. It was a caravanserai, though, conducted strictly to the imperial rules: undesirables were briskly deported, and the very first thing the new arrival saw, when he stepped out of the train from Shanghai, Peking or even Moscow, was a trimly uniformed British policeman, in pith helmet and khaki at the end of the platform.

It was very beautiful. At first most visitors were intoxicated by the setting of the place, and did not grasp its full meaning. The colony lay there all a’bustle, with the ferry-boats passing and repassing across the crowded harbour, the steam-launches sweeping away from the quay outside the Peninsula, the ships steaming in and out, the flags, die trams and the rickshaws, the carriages crawling up the flowered Peak, the deep tireless hum of life from the Chinese tenements. Away down the coast lay lesser islands, green and silent in the sun, and in crystal bays the junks lay anchored, awkward but elegant, looking as though they never moved from their moorings at all, but lay there for ever as upon a china plate. Outside their barracks the sentries stamped and strutted: in a thousand workshops the Chinese diligently worked their crafts, the apothecaries and the silversmiths, the tailors and the magicians, the shipwrights and the bookbinders and the calligraphers, bringing to the island some profounder stability from China itself.

But the beauty was misleading, for the real purposes of Hong Kong were brutal. The colony had been acquired to facilitate the selling of opium to the Chinese, and even in 1912 a quarter of its revenue came from the official monopoly in the opium trade. It was there to make money, by means fair or relatively foul—and by being
there, by seeming to bristle with bayonets, riggings, wealth and self-assurance, to advertise the Law of Empire.
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Far away, and even more explicit, lay Malta. This had been one of the great British naval bases since its acquisition in 1814, and its sole purpose now was to serve and display the Royal Navy’s Mediterranean Fleet. Half-way between Gibraltar and the Suez Canal, it was at once a defensive station on the imperial route to India, and a watch-post off the southern flank of Europe, and no fortress on earth looked more satisfyingly commanding. The ramparts of the Grand Harbour, built by the Knights of St John during the two centuries of their regime, were colossal in themselves, but doubly so when they sheltered, mirrored in the still waters of the haven, the towered and turreted battleships of His Majesty’s Fleet.

The Navy was dominated still by its capital ships. Some of them were always based at Malta, for everyone to see, and their tremendous shapes were inescapable in Valletta, the capital, glimpsed at the end of city streets, or basking in the sun, like sea-monsters, below the public gardens. In 1910 there were six on station, a sixth of the Royal Navy’s battlefleet. Four were vessels of the
Duncan
class, looking stolid, almost ecclesiastical, with their close-set funnels like pince-nez and their bridges like church chancels. Two others were the striking
Triumph
and
Swiftsure
, built originally for the Chilean fleet, and still curiously exotic—tall, slim ships, with slender funnels and ornamental prows, and large goose-neck cranes, between the masts, which made their silhouettes unmistakable to the
sailors of any Navy.
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Flotillas of cruisers, destroyers, torpedo boats and submarines attended these great ships, and the Commander-in-Chief, Mediterranean, flew his flag sometimes on his flagship,
Cornwallis
, and sometimes from the yardarm of his comfortable Admiralty House ashore.

In British eyes Malta was an extension of this fleet. They saw the island specifically in terms of firepower, fuel and repair works. Here there were no hinterlands to be defended, spheres of influence to be disputed, squabbling chiefs to be pacified, or even taipans to pursue alternative priorities. Malta was a fortress, no more, no less, and nobody who went ashore on the island could escape the fact. Malta felt both powerful and permanent, for the British were of the opinion that the base was absolutely essential to the security of the Empire, and therefore destined to be British for ever and ever.

As it happened, too, this was one place in the Empire where the British had a true respect for their environment, or at least for its history. Towards the contemporary Maltese they had adopted a benevolent, tolerant, but superior pose, erecting a kind of imaginary colour bar (Maltese being not much swarthier than Welshmen), excluding Maltese from the best clubs, and seldom inviting them to dinner-parties. Towards the previous rulers of the island, though, they could scarcely be patronizing. Not even a British sub-lieutenant could sneer at the Knights of the Order of St John of Jerusalem. In many ways they had behaved just as the British did themselves, and honoured similar values. Fighting capacity, a taste for splendour, the team spirit and the family tradition—all these characteristics of the Order exactly matched the British imperial ethos, and made the Knights in retrospect seem a very decent lot.