Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (18 page)

So a towering sense of continuity dignified the British presence in Malta, and made it seem more formidable still. The magnificent architecture of the Knights, the white ramparts above the Grand Harbour, the great gates and the stepped city streets, had become by symbiosis part of the British imperial tradition. The house of the Commander of Galleys was now the house of the Dockyard Captain. The Fort of St Angelo flew the White Ensign as naval
headquarters, and its slave dungeons were used as ammunition stores. Where the galleys had careened the cruisers refitted. The narrow alley called Strait Street, a byword among the Knights for sex and skulduggery, had long been adopted by the bravos of the Navy too, and was known throughout the Fleet as ‘The Gut’. And in the Palace of the Grand Masters themselves, where generations of soldier-priests had ruled the island, a British Governor now sat in similar authority, distributing the pomp of Empire in a very knightly manner.

It all looked down to the Fleet. All the sailors’ bars, the Happy Return, the Cricketers’ Arms—all the whorehouses and cafés and cheap souvenir shops—the Union Club, the Opera House, the bosomy Methodist Church, the Anglican Cathedral spired above the harbour—the dock-workers streaming home when the evening hooter sounded, the sentries with their bayonets fixed at the Main Guard in Palace Square—all the mass and life of Malta, stacked there so vividly above the sea, looked always towards the warships in its lee. A visit to Malta was less an experience than an indoctrination, and among the grandest historical spectacles of the day was the return of the Mediterranean Fleet, after exercises at sea, to its incomparable haven.

For its commanders this was a supreme professional moment, and they handled it theatrically, hoping foreigners were watching. Some Admirals preferred the approach stately, the grey ships treading steadily and regally to their moorings; some liked to do it at maximum speed, with froth, hiss, split timing and brilliant displays of seamanship. Either way, the impact was tremendous. Crowds hastened to the quays to watch the fleet come in, flags ran up poles and yardarms, children hopped about in excitement, wives chatted happily beneath their most fetching parasols. The distant thump of a band, the muffled thudding of engines—and there they were! First the destroyers, smoke streaming, swept past the harbour mouth to their Sliema moorings. Then the big ships approached in line ahead, their decks lined with ratings, their lamps
flashing, their Marine bands overlapping in rich discord as, one by one, they entered Grand Harbour to the strains of ‘Rule, Britannia’ or ‘Hearts of Oak’. Presently, in an atmosphere of festive splendour, they were at their moorings, and the Commander-in-Chief, piped overboard from his flagship in the sunshine, was scudding across the water in his steam-barge to pay his respects to the Governor.
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All the ships were moored facing out to sea, for it was a maxim of Malta that the Mediterranean Fleet was ready for instant action at all times, against all comers.
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Such, many times multiplied, was the show of power. The majesty of it all, and especially the arcane and gorgeous ritualism of the Navy, certainly helped to overawe potential enemies of the Crown, even as the century entered its second decade, for it gave an impression of strength more than merely military or economic, but actually organic. The Empire provided a kind of talismanic screen, like the mystery of ikons and war-banners behind which mediaeval armies went into battle.

But it was only half true. In many ways the Empire made the British weaker rather than stronger—it presented, John Morley the Liberal had said in 1906, ‘more vulnerable surface than any empire the world ever saw’. Now the British reluctantly attended to their less recondite defences. In 1908 Campbell-Bannerman was succeeded as Prime Minister by Herbert Asquith, a rather less liberal Liberal. In 1910 Edward VII was succeeded as King by George V, a more imperial Emperor. A succession of reformers
worked to implement in the British Army the lessons of Spion Kop and Magersfontein: its structure was altered top to bottom, its tactics and weaponry were drastically revised, at last the hidebound traditions of the parade-ground and the open square were jettisoned in favour of field-craft and initiative. By 1914 it was no longer an imperial army in the old sense, trained specifically for the imperial purposes. Its core was now a highly professional expeditionary force ready for service anywhere, but particularly against European enemies.

At the same time Admiral Fisher, now a volcanic and visionary First Sea Lord, prepared the Royal Navy for duties more demanding than patrolling the China coast, showing the flag in South America, or entertaining sheikhs to wardroom dinner parties. Ruthlessly he cut away the dead wood of the Fleet, most of it the rot of Empire: ships that were good only for showing the flag, drills that were performed only for exhibitionism, unnecessary stations, irrelevant exercises. Oil power was introduced, and the British Government acquired a controlling interest in the oilfields of southern Persia, specifically for the fuelling of the new warships. The focus of the Fleet was shifted, from the blue waters and the far horizons to greyer waters nearer home: the commander of the home fleet, Fisher used to say, was the only man who could lose a war in an afternoon. By the summer of 1914 almost all the great ships were home, ready to face a European enemy in northern waters—of all the Royal Navy’s battleships, only seven were on the imperial stations.

They were just in time. In 1897 the Kaiser, already in possession of Europe’s most powerful army, had ordered the construction of a German High Seas Fleet. He had seen it from the start as a deliberate challenge to Britain’s command of the seas, and so to the established order of things. One day, he told his admirals and constructors, it would be God’s Instrument of Justice—‘until then, silence and work’. By 1914 the work was done, the silence broken, and as Europe burst like an abscess into war, Queen Victoria’s Empire
found itself challenged by equal force of arms for the first time since she had succeeded to the throne, almost eighty years before. The grand illusion was collapsing. The Powers no longer waited, straightening their ties or adjusting their ribbons, upon Admiral Napier, KCB.

T
HE Pax Britannica came to an end in August 1914, and the British Empire entered its first general war. It was not really an imperial war, but many an old imperial preoccupation, the Eastern Question, the Overland Route, Cape-to-Cairo, Freedom of the Seas, the Supremacy of Race, now came home to roost. From distant seas and perfumed stations the cruisers came hurrying back, and men whose most formidable enemies had been the fugitive commandos of the veld armed themselves to face the greatest army in Europe. The recruiting offices of the Empire were besieged once more by volunteers, as they had been fifteen years before at the start of the Boer War: but now the patriots offered themselves in a different spirit, a spirit of willing sacrifice, almost of sacrament, knowing that this was a conflict separate in scale, in kind and in consequence. They went to South Africa to the jingles of Alfred Austin and the music-hall balladeers. They went to the world war with a very different Poet Laureate, Robert Bridges:

To
Beauty
through
blood
. The entire British Empire went to war with Germany and her allies that August, all 450 million subjects of the Crown being bound by a single declaration from the King-Emperor. The imperial mobilization was presided over by the most famous of all the imperial fighting men, Lord Kitchener, who was immediately appointed War Minister, and the Empire’s response surprised even the British themselves. ‘Our duty is quite clear‚’ announced the Prime Minister of Australia, ‘to gird up our loins and remember that we are Britons.’ Within ten days New Zealand had despatched an expeditionary force of 8,000 men. Within two months 31,000 Canadians had been recruited, drilled and sent to Europe. The South Africans, led by the conciliatory Smuts and Louis Botha, the victor of Spion Kop, not only sent soldiers to Europe, but also took on the task of evicting the Germans from their colonies in south-west Africa, while from every last island, promontory or protectorate came volunteers, offers of money or at least flowery messages of support.

There were dissenters. In Ireland, as we shall presently see, old enemies of the Empire obeyed an old Irish dictum—‘England’s trouble is Ireland’s chance.’ In India and in black Africa a few premature nationalists chose this moment of crisis to rebel. In South Africa 10,000 ‘last-ditch’ veterans of the Boer War rose to arms rather than support the war, and had to be put down by their old comrades-in-arms. In Canada many French-Canadians opposed the war as a matter of sectarian principle. Generally, though, the Empire attained a unity in conflict which it had never achieved in peace, and the fact of war in Europe gave an unexpected boost to the imperial ideal. The war propaganda of the British was rich in Sons of Empire, Bonds Across the Sea, posters of stalwart Sikhs or devoted Sudanese, cartoons of Britannia attended by her statesmen, her young men of the frontiers, or her familiar imperial menagerie—lion, tiger, emu, springbok, kangaroo and beaver.
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To the wife of a volunteer in Winnipeg or Alice Springs, to the Sikh rifleman from Amritsar or the illiterate Gold Coast askari, the bugles must have sounded distant indeed. Why were they going? What were they fighting for? The first Gurkha detachments for Europe, approaching Calcutta for embarkation, sharpened their kukris as the train drew into the city, supposing that they were nearing the battlefront. The epicentre of the war was western Europe, its issue was essentially the balance of power in Europe, its deepest causes lay not in the overseas enterprises of the Powers, but in cloudier and more complex differences within their own cramped neighbourhoods.

The imperial soldiers found themselves transported, all too often, direct from their own sunlit spaces to the mud and drizzle of Flanders and France, where they floundered and died, were gassed or mined or mutilated, shivered in the unaccustomed cold or miserably ate their alien rations, year after year, trench after trench, sadness after sadness to the end. But the war reached out to the imperial territories, too. German ships were hunted down in atolls of the Pacific or in African creeks, campaigns were fought to capture the German colonies of Africa and the Pacific, and at the back of British strategic thinking there often lay an imperial aim or instinct. The more imaginative of the British strategists cast their eyes beyond the confined butchery of western Europe, towards the greater landscapes and grander chances of their imperial tradition. Kitchener himself was baffled by the trench fighting in France—‘this isn’t
war
’, he used to say—and his planners were divided into rival schools, ‘westerners’ who believed the whole effort should be directed towards victory in Europe, ‘easterners’ who responded to
these more liberated impulses. The latter looked in particular towards an old arena of imperial intrigue and aspirations, the Ottoman Empire.

The Turks entered the war on the German side in October 1914. Theoretically they were suzerains of almost all the Arab World, even including Egypt, and their emergence now as enemies conveniently clarified the anomalous British position in the Middle East. Traditionally the British had supported Turkey—whatever happened to the Ottoman Empire, Lord Salisbury had decreed, could only be for the worse, ‘and therefore it is in our interest that as little should happen as possible’. Also the Sultan of Turkey, in his capacity as Caliph of the Faithful, commanded the spiritual allegiance of some 70 million Indian Muslims, and was not lightly to be antagonized by the temporal rulers of India. The British already possessed, though, a shadow-empire of their own in the countries that lay between India and the Mediterranean. They ruled Egypt and Aden, they controlled the Persian Gulf, as the greatest Muslim Power they felt themselves to have special interests in Arabia, the Holy Land of Islam. Their oil supplies came
from southern Persia, which they had declared a British sphere of influence, and all over the Arab countries they had agents and emissaries, from the diplomats of the Levant Consular Service to the young men who, from time to time, struck out from Kuwait or Bahrein to make contact with the Bedouin of the Arabian interior.

Now all was clearer. By April, 1915, an official committee was discussing what ought to be done with the Ottoman Empire after the war—divided among the victorious allies, partitioned into zones of influence, or set up as some kind of independent State. Whatever happened, the committee agreed, British interests must first be safeguarded, in an area particularly important to the Empire: and the best way to safeguard interests, as everyone knew, was to control the place yourself, whether you did it frankly or covertly. The war against Turkey
was
an imperial war. The Turks, whose military reputation was dim but whose armies were powerfully stiffened by German generals, officers and men, presently called for a
jihad
, a Muslim holy war against infidels.
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Unsuccessful attacks were made upon Aden and the Suez Canal. The British responded in kind, and embarked upon three offensives against the Turks. One was a miserable kind of victory. One was a resplendent success. One was a great defeat, and gave to the imperial annals the most poignant of all their tragedies.
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The Turkish possession called Mesopotamia, the Land of the Two Rivers, now Iraq, had been a subject of British anxiety for years. It was one way to get to India. British explorers, surveyors and spies knew it well, and a British company, Lynch Brothers, had a monopoly of steam navigation on its rivers. In recent years the Germans had been active there, building their Berlin to Baghdad Railway, and the imperial strategists had long been agitated by the thought of an enemy moving down the line of the Tigris and Euphrates to the Persian Gulf. By 1914 they were concerned too for the security of the Persian oilfields. The oil was pumped to a refinery on the island of Abadan, at the head of the Gulf, which lay directly across a narrow channel from the Mesopotamian port of Basra. Once Turkey came into the war, the British assumed, it might only be a matter of hours before the oil was cut off, the refinery destroyed and half the Royal Navy immobilized.

The invasion of Mesopotamia—‘Mespot’ to the British Army—began then as an operation to seal off the Persian Gulf, and protect Abadan by seizing Basra. The Gulf had always been supervised from India rather than Britain, so it was an Indian Army expedition, commanded by an elderly Anglo-Indian general, equipped from Indian sources, escorted by the battleship
Ocean
from the East Indies Station, which in November 1914 sailed up the Gulf in four transports and successfully disembarked in the port of Basra. The Turkish authorities, such as they were, fled. The local Turkish forces, consisting mainly of Arab conscripts, did not long resist. The rambling mud city behind its waterside palms readily submitted, and in no time at all there was a British Political Office there, and an indefatigable Political Officer, Percy Cox, Indian Political Service, brisk behind his files in his upstairs office.

Well and good: Turkish counter-attacks were beaten off: but a new general, Sir John Nixon, assumed the command in the spring of 1915, and he had plans to go further, and to move his troops northward up the line of the rivers. He was partly concerned to push his defence lines further inland, by the truest principles of the
Forward Policy, but he was also impelled by profounder imperial instincts. In this he was not alone. In London the War Cabinet felt that, with Abadan safe, the expedition’s task was done: but the activists of the Indian Empire had their eyes on greater prizes, on Baghdad, everyone’s epitome of an oriental city, and on Mesopotamia itself, which to some strategists, as well as many theologians, was truly the heartland of the world. Cox had already proposed an advance to Baghdad. Nixon had been ordered to prepare plans. ‘So far as we can see’, minuted the Indian General Staff in Simla, ‘all advantages, political and strategical, point to as early a move on Baghdad as possible.’

Southern Mesopotamia, where the Tigris and the Euphrates flowed, first separately, then united, towards the Persian Gulf, was more beguiling in history than in fact. Here were Babylon and Nineveh, here Sennacherib had fought his battles, here indeed, some said, had been the Garden of Eden at the start of the world. But it was a fearful country now. Much of it was empty desert, inhabitated by lawless predatory Arabs who loathed nearly everyone, the rest wide and foetid fen, inhabited by amphibious marshmen who detested everyone else. The irrigation works of the ancients had long since crumbled, and the long years of Turkish rule had left only decay and depression. There were no paved roads, no railways. Such towns as existed were hardly more than excretions of mud, like piles of rubbish in the wasteland, relieved only by the minarets of shabby mosques, or the lugubrious walls of forts. In the summer it was indescribably hot, in the winter unbearably cold. In the dry season everything was baked like leather, in the wet season 10,000 square miles were flooded, the waters gradually oozing away to leave malodorous wastes of marsh. Fleas, sand-flies and mosquitoes tormented the place, and its inhabitants lived lives of ignorant poverty, enlivened only by sporadic excitements of crime or brigandage, the illusions of religion and the consolations of sex.