Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (24 page)

Not
one
corner
of
a
foreign
field

But
a
span
as
wide
as
Europe,

Deep
as
(  ).

I
looked
and
saw.

An
appearance
of
a
titan
’
s
grave,

And
the
length
thereof
a
thousand
miles.

It
crossed
all
Europe
like
a
mystic
road,

Or
as
the
Spirits?
Pathway
lieth
on
the
night.

And
I
heard
a
voice
crying,

This
is
the
Path
of
Glory.

Sleep
on,
dear
Howard,
in
your
foreign
grave,

Your
life
to
your
country
you
nobly
gave,

Though
we
did
not
see
you
to
say
goodbye,

Now
in
God’s
keeping
you
safely
lie.

God
Took
Our
Norman,

It
Was
His
Will.

Forget
Him,
No,

We
Never
Will.

1
Published in
The
Times,
on August 8, 1914, four days after the declaration  of war. Before the year was out it was set to music by Arthur M. Goodhart, and dedicated to ‘
LORD
ROBERTS
and to all Etonians serving in the War’. 5‚687 were to serve: 1,160 were killed.

1
Or sometimes, when a more stately Canadianism was required, moose.

1
Killed in France, 1915, aged twenty.

1
‘You are enjoined to make war against the infidels even though this maydisplease you: for you may well be displeased by that which is to your good, as it may be that you like a thing which instead is harmful to you: but God knoweth and you know not’:
Koran
, 11: 216.

‘Oh Muslims! Embrace ye the foot of the Caliph’s throne and join in the
ühad
‚ the Holy War. Warfare is ordained for you. Your enemies will not cease until they have made you renegades from your religion if they can. Drive them out! If they attack you, slay them! Such is the reward of unbelievers’:
Sultan
Mehmed
V
‚
the
Caliph
‚
November
1914.

The title of Caliph was abolished after the war, and has never been revived.

2
I have disarranged the order of them, in telling the story. Here is the correct chronology: 

1
Still seriously incapacitated by an attempt on his life in Delhi two years before. It is not true, Mr John Bowle the historian assures me, that when the bomb exploded in his howdah the Viceroy cried ‘Save the elephant!’

1
Which the British gunners were forbidden to shell, even if the Turks used it as an observation post. The Arch is crumbling slowly anyway—Victorian travellers reported far more of it—and is nested in nowadays by rollers, greenish-blue birds like big jays, who find its brick construction convenient.

1
‘When the
Mejidieh
was about 300 yards off’, wrote one medical officer, describing the arrival of a hospital ship at Basra, ‘it looked as if she was festooned with ropes. The stench when she was close was quite definite, and I found that what I mistook for ropes were dried stalactites of human faeces … the whole of the ship’s side was covered.’ When he complained about conditions, he was described by Nixon’s supply chief, General Cowper, as ‘an interfering faddist’.

1
The Turks, refloating the boat and taking possession of her cargo, renamed her
The
Gift
. They shot her navigator, who was awarded a posthumous VC.

1
Stigma of another kind attached itself to Townshend, for he was blamed for neglecting his troops in captivity. The Turks released him shortly before the end of the war to arrange terms of surrender, but though he was knighted and elected to Parliament, he received no further military appointments, and died disgruntled in 1924.

1
Nixon died in eclipse, in 1921, having been blamed by a Commission of Inquiry for the catastrophe of Kut (‘his confident optimism was the main cause’). He outlived the beloved and victorious Maude, though, who died of cholera in Baghdad in November, 1917, and was buried there. This is what Colonel Dickson, Maude’s South African Director of Local Resources, wrote of the event:

1
‘I was convinced’, the statesman later wrote, ‘that this work was a better guide to a military leader whose task was to reach Jerusalem than any survey to be found in the pigeon-holes of the War Office.’ Lloyd George’s own copy of the atlas is now mine, and I have used it in writing this chapter.

1
Among them volunteers from the United States, Canada and the Argentine. David Ben Gurion, future Prime Minister of Israel, and Jacob Epstein the sculptor both served in this force, whose motto was said to be ‘No Advance Without Security.’

1
Meinertzhagen survived to write the standard work on the birds of Arabia, dying aged eighty-nine in 1967. Though not Jewish, he became a passionate Zionist. In this he was following the example of his great-grandmother, who had launched a Return of her own, setting off for Palestine with a white donkey and a group of Jewish adherents, but getting no further than Calais.

1
The Kaiser did not actually pass through the gate, though, for a neighbouring section of the city wall had been pulled down, and a roadway laid, to allow him a more ample access.

1
So many armies have fought over this ground, before and after Allenby’s, that few traces of his campaign are left. When I soldiered in Palestine, thirty years later, every blue-eyed Arab was said to have had an Australian father, there was a bust of Allenby beside the wells at Beersheba, and the main crossing over the River Jordan was Allenby Bridge, erected by the Royal Engineers in 1918. Even then, though, the most vivid memorial of the campaign was the inscription cut by the imperial army in the rocks of Nahr el Kelb, north of Beirut, where passing conquerors since the days of the Pharaohs have left their graffiti: it was a fine thing, I thought, to see Allenby commemorated there among such company—Rameses II, Nebuchadnezzar, Tiglath-Pileser III, Sennacherib, Marcus Aurelius and Selim the Turk.

Allenby himself became a viscount (Lord Allenby of Megiddo and Felixstowe), a field-marshal, Gold Stick in Waiting and High Commissioner in Egypt, before going to his grave in Westminster Abbey in 1936.

1
They had done it once before. In 1807 Admiral Sir John Duckworth forced a passage with seven ships of the line, but beat a rather too hasty retreat while the going was good, and became Governor of Newfoundland.

1
The ‘fierce-face’ look peculiar to French battleships since the 1870s, and defined by Sir Oscar Parkes as ‘piled-up superstructure, preposterous masts, uncouth funnels, tumble-home sides and long ram bows’.

1
King George V thought he ought to be hanged at the yardarm for desertion, but the old admiral, growing rather grotesque in his last years, remained a national figure until his death in 1920. He was entered for the Navy by the last of Nelson’s captains, his first ship was HMS
Victory,
and he died in the presence of the Duchess of Hamilton.

1
So called because of a map error—it is really Achi Tepe.

1
The E11 survived the war, to be broken up at Malta in 1921. The gunboats were presently dispersed all over the Empire, many of them lasting until the
next
world war, when four were destroyed by enemy action in the Mediterranean and the China Sea. The
River
Clyde
outsailed them all: refloated in 1919, she was bought by Spanish owners, and sailed the Mediterranean first as
Angela,
then as
Maruja
y
Aurora
,
until she was sold for scrap in 1966.

2
The general in command, Sir Frederick Stopford, had been Military Secretary to Redvers Buller in South Africa, and was said to have been the only officer in his confidence at the battle of Spion Kop. Stopford was relieved of his Gallipoli command after only ten days, and though he lived until 1929, that was professionally the end of him.

1
Hamilton never commanded again, but he lived to an honoured old age, dying in 1947. It was to Monro, who became Governor of Gibraltar and died in 1929, that Churchill bitterly attributed the apothegm: ‘I
came, I saw, I capitulated.’

1
I felt their presence still, when I stood on the very same spot in 1975, looking through a morning mist to the straits below, for Gallipoli is
the most truly haunted place I know. Long after the war much of it was planted with trees, but they were destroyed in a fire in 1974, and when I was there the peninsula must have looked much as it
did sixty years before. Until 1964 it remained a closed military area, and not many people go there even now. The landing-beaches are unchanged, many of the trenches may still be traced, and cemeteries scattered over the hills mark the sites of old redoubts, Lone Pine, Twelve Tree Copse, Dunn’s Post or The Nek. To this day the bones of dead soldiers are still found in the more remote ravines.

At Cape Helles the British erected a commanding memorial, magnificently greeting the visitor with the roster of the great ships whose heyday ended here. At the Narrows the Turks have made two more. One is simply a date, marked out in white stones on a hillside above the strait: 18:3:15. The other is a figure of a soldier, on the bluffs above Kilid Bahr, with a quotation beside it from the poet Mehmet Akif Ersoy: ‘Stop, passer-by! The earth you have just unknowingly trodden is the spot where an era ended and where the heart of a nation beats.’

1
The Empire’s central memorial to its dead was the Cenotaph, erected in Whitehall in 1920, the first of more than fifty war memorials designed by Edwin Lutyens. Sir Fabian Ware, who devoted his later life to the Imperial War Graves Commission, calculated that if the dead of the Empire were to march four abreast through London, they would take three and a half days to pass this monument, and one of the most vivid memories of my own first visit to London in the 1930s is that of the Londoners respectfully and unselfconsciously removing their hats when they walked by it.