Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (2 page)

This was the imperial class. Its members stood to gain directly from the existence of Empire, in jobs, in dividends, or at least in adventurous opportunity. The mass of the British people were far more remote from the imperial enterprise, and until the last decades of the century had in fact taken little notice of their Empire, except when they wished to emigrate or join the Army. But the grand sweep of Victorian history had by 1897 turned the whole nation briefly into enthusiasts. The new penny press, preaching to a newly literate and newly enfranchised audience, was stridently propagandist, and the events of the past twenty-five years had swept the people into a highly enjoyable craze of Empire.

What events they had been! Anybody over thirty, say, at the time of the Diamond Jubilee had experienced a period of British history unexampled for excitement. What theatre! The tragedy of Isandhlwana, the thrilling defence of Rorke’s Drift! Gordon martyred at Khartoum! ‘Dr Livingstone I presume’! The redcoats helter-skelter from the summit of Majuba, Sir Garnet Wolseley burning the charnel-houses of Kumasi! Never a year passed without some marvellous set-piece, of triumph or of tragedy. Champions rose to glory, the flag forever flew, the Empire grew mightier yet.

And across the world the graveyards spread, as generation after generation contributed its quota to the imperial sacrifice. Young men died in battle, young women died in tropical childbirth, children died of smallpox or cholera, heatstroke or food poisoning, a hundred thousand expatriates died of the climate, or of homesickness, or of plain exhaustion.
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The Empire was a pageant, but it was reality too. Its pretences were all on the surface. The knowledge of its power and of its responsibilities gave a corporate pride to the British people, buttressing their sense of family, so that a sigh passed across the nation when a hero died or a regiment was
humiliated, and on Jubilee night the bonfires burnt brightly on hilltop and beacon from Cornwall to Cromarty.

There were few in 1897 to question the morality of the British Empire. It was grand, and it was honourable. What it did for the nation materially, nobody really knew: its profits were great but so were its expenses, and the burdens of it matched the assets. But there was no denying its stimulation to the national spirit. In the 1890s Imperialism had reached an ebullient and aggressive climax. The politicians, habitually aloof to the Empire and its causes, had taken it up, and a hazy movement called the New Imperialism was busily publicizing the glory of it all. In 1895 the Conservatives and their Liberal Unionist allies, the party of Empire, had won an overwhelming victory over the Liberals: the nation talked Empire, thought Empire, dreamed Empire. Two geniuses, Rudyard Kipling and Edward Elgar, were translating the emotions into art, and a thousand lesser practitioners were putting it into jingle, march or tableau.

There was calculation to this climax, of course, the cunning of financiers, the opportunism of politicians, the ambitions of soldiers, merchants and pro-consuls. By their own best standards the British of the 1890s were beneath themselves, their patriotism coarsened and their taste debased. This was hardly the England that Burke had idealized, ‘sympathetic with the adversity or with the happiness of mankind, [feeling] that nothing in human affairs was foreign to her’. The England of the Diamond Jubilee was essentially insular, for its people saw the whole wide Empire, even the world itself, only as a response to themselves.

Yet it was not a conscious arrogance, and the New Imperialism was seldom malicious. The British Government of the time was a fastidiously aristocratic regime, one of the last in Europe: Lord Salisbury the Prime Minister, the last to sit in the House of Lords, saw the Empire more as an instrument of diplomatic policy than a source of glory—to calculate its worth, he once mordantly observed, ‘you must divide victories by taxation.’ The unprecedented expansions
of the last half-century, especially in Africa, were not part of any concerted policy of aggrandisement, but occurred haphazardly, often in reflex, generally for
ad
hoc
reasons of economics or strategy. The British as a whole would have been shocked at any notion of wickedness to their imperialism, for theirs was a truly innocent bravado. They really thought their Empire good, like their Queen, and they were proud of it for honest reasons: they meant no harm, except to evil enemies, and in principle they wished the poor benighted natives nothing but well.

These were brittle times—times of change and sensationalism, of high stakes and quick fortunes, outrageous fashions and revolutionary ideas. Socialism was an intellectual fad, the New Woman smoked her cigarettes ostentatiously in the Café Royal, and only a month before the Jubilee Oscar Wilde had ended his sentence in Reading Gaol. The grand Victorian synthesis of art, morals and invention was already fading, and with it would presently fade the certainty and the optimism. Only a sexually restrained society, warned the psychologist J. D. Unwin, would continue to expand: and there were many Britons in 1897 who, looking around them at the feverish high jinks of the capital, saw omens of disillusionment to come. The times were too gaudy to be safe. The mood could crack, or be shattered by a stray note.

Part of the triumph was bluff anyway. The people might think themselves citizens of the happiest, richest, strongest and kindest Power: their leaders knew that Great Britain was no longer beyond challenge. The Germans and the Americans were fast overtaking her in technique, brute power and public education. She had few friends in the world, and no allies. Her creed of Free Trade, which had served her well in the days of absolute supremacy, was not so infallible in a world of competitive tariffs. The basis of her immense prestige was fragile really. Bismarck said the German police force could easily arrest the British Army, and there was nothing sacrosanct to the British command of the seas—any Power could defy it, if prepared to put enough money into a fleet. The very state of the world was increasingly precarious to the Empire: Germany, France and Russia were all potential enemies, the moribund Ottoman Empire was a perpetual problem, an unstable
Austria-Hungary threatened instability to everyone else, a derelict China seemed an incitement to colonial rivalries.

To seers, then, there was a detectable element of disquiet to the celebrations of 1897, an unease not often declared, nor even perhaps realized, but intuitive. It was a thunderstorm feeling—a heaviness in the air, an unnatural brightness to the light. Queen’s Weather it might have been on Jubilee Day, but the outlook was changeable.

Still the public at large felt no premonitions, for the Empire was grand above all in the idea of it, in the grand illusion of permanence and paramountcy. Its strongest loyalties were loyalties to a Crown, or a Throne, or a Way, or a Duty, or a Heritage, and all over the world people responded to its call emotionally, out of their hearts. In India that Jubilee year people sacrificed goats before images of Her Majesty. In Canada Red Indians swore oaths by the Great White Queen. In Kansas City, Missouri, the children of the Brown family, recent emigrants from England, ‘assumed a lofty and haughty air’, while in Milton, Massachusetts, another English exile must surely have infuriated some of her neighbours, even at Jubilee time, with the song she so often loved to sing around the place:

The Diamond Jubilee might be contrived, as a boost to the imperial confidence—the British were past-masters at the suggestive
display—but its emotions were deeper than its intentions, and were to survive, in a clutch at the throat, a chill down the spine, a cross on a distant grave, when the physical structure of Empire was dismantled and discredited. As the inscription said upon the sundial at Government House in Mauritius, one of the Queen-Empress’s least necessary dependencies:

Sensations profounder still, too, were aroused by the Diamond Jubilee, for the Queen’s embodiment of the imperial power reached far back into the people’s folk-memory, conjuring atavistic spirits out of the past. Hardly less than peasants of India or Australian aboriginals, simple Britons, especially country people, regarded the power of the Throne with an almost superstitious veneration. Old gods were honoured by the majesty of the Jubilee, by the welling-up of the corporate enthusiasm, and by the spectacle of the aged Queen, her black moiré dress embroidered with silver symbols, attended by her marshals, clerics and statesmen through the streets of London. The bonfires that blazed that night were like rituals of this instinct. A watcher in Worcestershire counted more than forty, flickering far into the distance on beacon hills across the breadth of England: and their scattered lights in the darkness, their glow in the night sky, were reminders of older urges behind the pride of Empire, beliefs and battles long ago, mysteriously linking the very soil of the imperial island with reef and tundra, desert and distant veld.
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T
HE tumult and the shouting slightly died, as Jubilee year came to an end, but on the frontiers the British Empire tremendously proceeded—especially in Africa, the last undeveloped continent, where the imperial dynamic was providing a whole new pantheon of heroes, saints and martyrs. Two of them in particular were in the public mind, for far away on the Upper Nile General Sir Herbert Kitchener, the rising star of the British Army, was avenging the death of ‘Charlie’ Gordon, ‘the noblest man who ever lived’.

Since 1882 the British had been effectual rulers of Egypt, and had thus become concerned in the affairs of the Sudan, an Egyptian dependency of a million square miles immediately to the south. For years the Sudan had been in a state of rebellion under a fiery Sufi mystic who called himself the Mahdi, ‘The Leader’, and who formally announced the End of Time, a conception particularly unwelcome to the British just then. In 1884 it had been decided to abandon the country, and to organize the withdrawal the British Government sent to Khartoum, the capital, General Charles Gordon, Royal Engineers, everyone’s archetype of the Christian soldier, ‘not a man but a God’. Trapped in Khartoum by his own death-wish, in January 1885 Gordon was killed by the Mahdists, and so capped his already legendary career with an imperial apotheosis.

It had been one of the great romantic tragedies of the Victorian age. Ever since the British had dreamed of recovering the Sudan, and avenging the memory of the martyr. The Mahdi died in 1885, but his successor, the Khalifa, held similarly apocalyptic views, and by the 1890s the Reconquest was at hand. The obvious man to conduct it was Kitchener, whose hooded eye, huge figure and commanding bearing were imperial factors in themselves. Kitchener was
made Sirdar, Commander-in-Chief, of the Egyptian Army, which was in effect an imperial force, and for years he grimly planned the operation. A complicated man, sometimes hesitant, a bachelor of somewhat dilettantish tastes, he was made for the retributive role. His forte was organization, and with infinite care and thoroughness he prepared the campaign, designing his own gunboats for the passage up the Nile, and commissioning his own railway to take his armies out of Egypt towards Khartoum.

It was slow, but it was inexorable. By the end of 1896 Kitchener had an army of 25,000 men, 8,000 of them British, the rest Egyptian and Sudanese, deep in the Sudan. His method of campaign was barbarically deliberate and symbolic. The soldiers went into action crying ‘Remember Gordon!’. Gordon’s nephew directed the shelling of the Mahdi’s tomb at Omdurman, and Kitchener seriously thought of keeping The Leader’s skull as a souvenir. It all went like very slow clockwork. By Jubilee Day Kitchener was preparing his advance upon Khartoum, and by the autumn of 1898 he had annihilated the Mahdist army in the battle of Omdurman, killing at least 10,000 Sudanese for the loss of 28 Britons.
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On the morning of Sunday, September 4, 1898, he crossed the Nile into the ruined capital, where the shattered remains of Gordon’s Residency lay as a wreck of rubble and undergrowth beside the river; and there, in a famous Victorian moment, we shall join the conqueror ourselves.

Beside that sacred ruin, on the Nile, the British sealed their victory with a requiem. Its altar was the Residency itself, upon whose surviving walls, their windows still barricaded with bricks and sandbags, the Union Jack was triumphantly hoisted, together with a very much smaller Egyptian flag. Moored at the bank were two of Kitchener’s gunboats, swirled in steam, and beside them were assembled men from every regiment and corps in the campaign—British guardsmen, Egyptians in white tarbooshes, pipers in sun-helmets and sporrans, dismounted cavalrymen holding their pennanted lances.
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Many celebrities of Empire were in the congregation, some already famous, some tipped for fame to come—Colonel Reginald Wingate, Kitchener’s brilliant intelligence chief, Colonel John Maxwell, the most promising younger officer of the Egyptian Army, young Douglas Haig, its most dashing cavalryman. Brigadier ‘Andy’ Wauchope of the Black Watch was there, ‘the pride of Scotland’. So was Lord Edward Cecil, the Prime Minister’s son and one of the wittiest men in the Empire. That faintly oriental figure in the front rank, with slit eyes and long moustaches, is the disturbing young firebrand Charles Townshend, hero of the Chitral siege on the Indian frontier; the young naval lieutenant who hoisted the Union Jack so reverently is C. M. Staveley, who is certain to go far; elbowing his way to a better view of the ceremony, we may be sure, is the most bumptious subaltern of the whole army, Lieutenant Winston Churchill.

And at the head of his men, ramrod stiff, one hand on the hilt of his curved scimitar, one booted foot raised upon a convenient boulder, Kitchener himself stood impassive and immaculate. A salute was fired by a gunboat at the quay.
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Three cheers for the Queen were called. As the solemn men’s voices sang the old words of ‘Abide with Me’, Gordon’s favourite hymn, to the uncertain harmonies of a Sudanese band, a tear was seen to roll down the Sirdar’s brown and flinchless cheek. ‘The sternness and harshness had dropped from him for the moment’, wrote one of the war correspondents, all of whom he despised, ‘and he was gentle as a woman.’ The parade had to be dismissed by the Chief of Staff, so incapacitated was the victor by his emotions.

When he returned to his camp at Omdurman across the river, though, General Kitchener was recalled at once to harsher realities. He knew that sacramental revenge was not the true purpose of the Army of the Nile. On the previous day he had opened sealed orders from London, to be read immediately after the capture of Khartoum. They required him to proceed at once still further up-river, to forestall any French annexation of the Upper Nile. Gordon had been given his memorial service, but a more truly imperial monument
would be British control, once and for all, of the entire White Nile and its headwaters.

Britain’s was not the only European empire. Portugal, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Italy, all had overseas possessions of their own. The chief arena of their ambitions was Africa, in which there was then proceeding the unlovely process of grab and self-justification known as the Scramble. Most of the imperial Powers were concerned with this free-for-all, and though it had been to some degree regulated by international agreement in 1885, still it was
au fond an
exercise in which few holds were barred. Black Africans, in those days, hardly counted as real people, and the idea of Europeans simply seizing African territories, to rule, improve or exploit them by their own methods, was generally considered quite justifiable. It was also perhaps inevitable, as the technical power of the West sought out, almost despite itself, vacuums and victims. Most of the Empire-building was peaceful anyway. Africans were persuaded into submission with promises or treaties, or awed into it with demonstrations. Sometimes they asked to be taken under imperial protection: only occasionally did they have to be bludgeoned.

The British had got the lion’s share. They had possessed footholds in West and South Africa for generations. By the 1890s they were also established in Egypt, Kenya and Uganda, and in the vaguely defined territories between the Limpopo and the Zambezi. They had gained their ends by a variety of means—diplomacy, economic pressure, deceit, gasconade. Sometimes they acted openly, sometimes conspiratorially, sometimes as servants of the Crown, sometimes as agents of commercial companies, sometimes in the name of the Khedive of Egypt, or even of his hypothetical overlord, the distant Sultan of Turkey.
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At the end of the century the general direction of their expansion was north-south. Their most remarkable activist, the South African financier Cecil Rhodes, foresaw a British axis running from Cairo to the Cape, fed by access lines to the coast east and west, and giving the Empire effective domination of the whole continent. Though this scheme was blocked for the moment by the presence of the Germans in Tanganyika, still the proposed railway line was already north of the Limpopo River at one end, south of the Egyptian frontier at the other: the first of its feeder lines, from Mombasa to Lake Victoria, was nearly finished, and Kitchener had presciently built his Sudan railway to the South African gauge. Essential to the vision was British control of the whole Nile Valley, and to secure this without war was Lord Salisbury’s principal imperial purpose. ‘If you want to understand my policy in any part of the world,’ he said himself, ‘in Europe, Asia, Africa or the South Seas, you will have constantly to remember that.’

The French, who were the principal contenders for African mastery, thought transversely, east to west. Besides their large possessions in North Africa, they were strongly established on the Niger, in the west, and had an east-coast port at Djibouti, in Somaliland. They looked always across the continent, and they dreamed of uniting their eastern and their western footholds to establish their supremacy throughout Central Africa. This ambition clashed with the British, and took the two Empires on a collision course. By their occupation of Egypt the British had staked a claim to the whole Nile valley, and the further their forces advanced up the river, whether their purposes were sentimental, intuitive or purely practical, the less the French chances of a corridor across Africa.

The French overseas empire possessed a brilliance all its own, chiefly because of the extraordinary individuals who administered it in the field, but it had been weakly supported from France, where Governments succeeded each other in febrile succession, and it lacked the strong economic and technical base that gave the British Empire its power. Empire was a sideline for the French: between 1880 and 1889 Britain had seven different Ministers responsible for the Colonies, but France had twenty-one. In 1894, though, the
formidable Gabriel Hanotaux became Foreign Minister, and for the first time the imperial urge in France was given a forceful and daring direction. Fortified by a new alliance with Russia, the French turned their eyes upon the Upper Nile. In Hanotaux’ opinion it belonged to nobody. The southern Sudan was in a state of rebellion, and any Power, or at least any
civilized
Power, had a right to step in. From their base at Brazzaville on the Congo, the outpost of their central African activities, the French set to work on a ‘drive to the Nile’, and the French Press openly discussed the chances of reaching its headwaters from the west or east before the British could get there from the north or south.

In 1893 a well-known French hydrologist, Victor Prompt, had suggested that the key to the control of the Nile valley might lie in the area, some 300 miles south of Khartoum, where the River Sobat joined the greater river. There was nothing much there except an isolated riverain fort called Fashoda, used by the Mahdists as a penal colony, and an attendant hamlet of the Shilluk tribespeople: but Prompt suggested that a dam there might effectively control the flow of water into Egypt. Since Egypt depended entirely upon the flow of the White Nile, control of Fashoda could mean command of Egypt: a French presence there, it was argued, could paralyse British activities down-river, and give the Quai d’Orsay an almost unanswerable bargaining power in Africa.

So as the British strengthened their hold on Egypt, and majestically advanced southwards through the Sudan, the French resolved to make a race of it, and prepared an expedition to travel from Brazzaville clean across Africa to the Upper Nile. Reports of the plan greatly disturbed the British. ‘The advance of a French expedition … from the other side of Africa’, Sir Edward Grey of the Foreign Office had told the House of Commons, ‘into a territory over which our claims have been known for so long, would not merely be an inconsistent and unexpected act, but it must be perfectly clear to the French Government that it would be an unfriendly act, and would be so viewed by England.’ The French responded merely by hastening their preparations, and in the summer of 1897, Jubilee summer in England, Captain Jean-Baptiste Marchand of the French Marines set out to cross the continent and
‘establish French claims in the region of the Upper Nile’. He took with him 12 Frenchmen and 150 Senegalese riflemen, and his destination was Fashoda.

The day after the Khartoum memorial service, while Kitchener was still considering his secret orders, British outposts on the river south of the city intercepted a small steamer flying the crescent flag of the Mahdists. Its crew, who were unaware that Khartoum had fallen to the British, were taken ashore for questioning, and said they had been far up the Nile foraging for the Khalifa’s armies. Near the mouth of the Sobat, they said, they found a strange flag flying over the old fort at Fashoda, and had been fired upon by white men. Several of their crew had been killed.

The British interrogators were startled by this tale. Were the strange Europeans British, working down the Nile from Uganda, or were they foreigners? Wingate asked the Mahdist captain to draw in the sand the flag he had seen at Fashoda, and to describe its colours, and thus learnt that it was the French tricolour. So the French were there already! Five days later Kitchener sailed southward from Omdurman with five gunboats and a dozen barges, with 100 Cameron Highlanders and 2,500 Sudanese askari, with field guns and Maxims and Lord Edward Cecil, and orders to proceed at his own discretion, but to dislodge the French.

So one of history’s famous meetings came about. Purposeful up the Nile went the imperial flotilla, its trim little steamers in line ahead—
Dal,
Nasir,
Sultan,
Abu
Klea,
Fateh.
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Lashed alongside or towed behind were the barges that carried the troops, the Camerons lounging in the sunshine with sun-helmets over their faces, the askaris jostled, cheerful and sometimes breaking into song—‘Oh, them golden slippers’ was a particular favourite of the Sudanese. Kitchener wore civilian clothes, and spent much of his time sprawled
on a deck-chair beneath an awning on the
Dal,
contemplating the baked brown landscape streaming by, or talking to Wingate and Edward Cecil. It was a week’s voyage from Omdurman to Fashoda, and the flotilla made good speed, the stern-wheels of its steamers frothing the muddy waters, the smoke from their funnels billowing far away downstream, to disperse hours later as a murky black cloud across the desert.