Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (25 page)

S
O the British Empire moved out of the old order, which it had dominated and to some degree moulded, into a new and unfamiliar world. The Kaiser had lost the war, but had achieved at least one of his purposes—to shift the pattern of power. Everybody recognized that
la
belle
é
poque
was over, but not everyone realized that Britain’s hegemony had gone, too, for the victory had been so complete in the end, the Empire’s part in it had been so tremendous, and the imperial spirit seemed to have been so rejuvenated by the comradeship of conflict, that if anything the Flag appeared to fly across the world more masterfully than ever. The doubts of the 1900s were momentarily expunged by the defeat of the great enemy, and after so many triumphs and sacrifices the British Empire’s status seemed uniquely privileged. As Leopold Amery observed to Lloyd George at the end of the war, if out of such heroic effort the British Empire grew stronger and greater than before, ‘who has the right to complain?’

If it had not been an imperial war, it had been an imperial victory, for Britain’s fundamental weapon had remained that oldest instrument of Empire, the Royal Navy. The Navy might have failed to intimidate the Turks, but it had succeeded in inhibiting its greater opponent, the German High Seas Fleet, and won the war in the end simply by existing—the profoundest use of sea-power. The Germans gave at least as good as they got in the great naval battle of Jutland, distinctly a Trafalgar
manqué
for the British, but for most of the war their magnificent surface ships stayed uselessly in harbour, blockaded by an idea. ‘The surrender of the German Fleet’, the Admiralty signalled to the commander of the British Grand Fleet, Admiral Sir David Beatty,
quondam
captain of the gunboat
Fateh
, ‘will remain for all time the example of the wonderful silence and sureness with which sea power attains its ends.’

That surrender took place on November 21, 1918, stage-managed in the classic Spithead style, and pictured like a sombre regatta in magazines and newsreels across the world. Everyone knew its meaning. It was a victory of Order over Anarchy, of the Real Thing over Upstarts, of permanent, organic values over petty ambitions and impertinences. The surrendering German fleet was very large—14 capital ships, 56 cruisers and destroyers—but it was led into Scottish waters by a single British cruiser, HMS
Cardiff
(4,290 tons), flying a huge Blue Ensign, the flag of the Royal Naval Reserve, as a recognition signal at her foremast. In line ahead the German warships, bedraggled from the demoralizing last months of the war, approached the mouth of the Firth of Forth: and there the Royal Navy was waiting for them. Admiral Ludwig von Reuter, the German commander, had hoped for foggy weather to obscure the British triumph, but in fact the day was sunny, and the Royal Navy at its most complacent. The entire Grand Fleet was assembled there (370 ships, 20 admirals, 90,000 men), flying from every mast and staff, as was the Navy’s custom when going into action, all available White Ensigns. The warships formed themselves into two parallel lines, and taking up position on each side of the Germans, proceeded towards the Firth with all their crews at action stations, guns trained fore and aft on the surrendered enemy.

Thirteen squadrons of British capital ships and cruisers escorted their defeated rivals into captivity. The
Queen
Elizabeth
was flagship, nearly four years after her debut at the Dardanelles, and the forty-one battleships and battlecruisers included the
Canada,
the
Australia,
the
Malaya,
the
New
Zealand
and the
Emperor
of
India.
Three miles behind steamed a host of destroyers, their black smoke clouding the horizon, as though they were bringing the curtain down. As the German ships dropped anchor at the entrance to the Firth, at three o’clock that afternoon, Beatty sent a lordly signal to Admiral von Reuter. ‘The German flag’, it said, ‘will be hauled down at sunset today, Thursday, and will not be hoisted again without permission.’ By evening hundreds of yachts, motor-boats, skiffs and pleasure-steamers were milling festively about the humiliated High Seas
Fleet, as the sightseers had swarmed around HMS
Bellerophon
, bearing the captive Napoleon, in Torbay long before.

What could be more absolute? The Germans themselves bitterly recognized the style of it, the style of Empire itself. Was this not the Navy of Lord Nelson? Had it not been continuously at sea, manned often by the same families, from the same towns, since the Middle Ages? Was it not officered by dukes and princes, and directed from stately panelled palaces? Was its flag not honoured and familiar in every creek, channel and dockyard of the world? On the battleship
Royal
Oak
, it was said, a mysterious drum-beat was heard to sound as the German Fleet sailed in. Twice messengers were sent from the bridge to investigate, but it was unexplained, and continued to sound from nowhere until anchor was dropped and the enemy was safely in captivity.

Drake’s Drum, the popular newspapers romantically suggested, beating a last tattoo as England’s danger ended: but at least one German captain found the Royal Navy, when a boarding party  came to inspect his cruiser, less daunting in the detail than in the grand display. Half a dozen ragamuffin ratings formed the party, and they were led by a scruffy and distinctly plebeian lieutenant, patently not a duke at all, smoking a fag-end.
1

The British Empire had more than survived the war, it had sizeably grown. Nothing had been lost, territorially, and much had been gained. Convinced imperialists had been influential in the conduct
of the war, and had their say in the shaping of the peace; the Coalition Government formed in 1919 included Curzon as Foreign Secretary, Milner as Colonial Secretary, and as the Government’s spokesman on colonial affairs in the House of Commons, Leopold Amery, to whom the freedom to develop and expand the Empire had been the ‘first and foremost’ war aim.

They had to work more subtly than before. The straightforward annexation of colonies was unacceptable now, as distasteful to the mass of the British people as it was to the world at large, and the prevailing orthodoxy was President Wilson’s concept of ‘self-determination’—the right of every people to decide its own future. ‘Peoples may now be dominated or governed’, Wilson optimistically told Congress in February 1918, ‘only by their own consent’. His Fourteen Points, the basis of the peace settlement, did indeed theoretically end the imperialist age, for they specified that the interests of the subject peoples should have equal weight with those of the imperial powers, and when the League of Nations was formed its Covenant declared that the ‘well-being of peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the conditions of the modern world … forms a sacred trust of civilization’.

In practice the British Empire took shrewd advantage of the peace terms to extend its power and safeguard its security. Under American inspiration the victorious States devised the system of Mandates, trusteeships over former enemy territories awarded by the hopeful League to liberally-minded Powers, generally, as it happened, those which had overrun the territories in war—‘the crudity of conquest,’ suggested the historian H. A. L. Fisher, ‘draped in the veil of morality’. This concept served the Empire usefully. In theory the League of Nations retained supervisory rights over the territories: in effect the British ruled their Mandated acquisitions as parts of the Empire, administering them like any other Crown Colonies, and colouring them red, or at least red-
hatched,
on the map of the world.

Most of the imperialists’ war aims were satisfied. Nearly a million square miles was added to the Empire, with 13 million new subjects, and several old dreams seemed to be coming true. In the Pacific most of the former German colonies went to Australia and New
Zealand, as antipodean expansionists had been hoping for years.
1
In Africa the Empire gained control not only of South-West Africa, satisfactorily rounding off Imperial South Africa, but also of Tanganyika, at last fulfilling the vision of an all-red Cape to Cairo corridor. In the Middle East Iraq, Transjordan and Palestine became British Mandates, and Persia was virtually a British protectorate, so that India was linked with Egypt and the Mediterranean by a continuous slab of British-controlled territory, and one could travel overland from Cape Town to Rangoon without once leaving the shelter of British authority. The Empire seemed, on the face of it, safe and solid as never before. The Dominions had proved their loyalty. The subject races had remained mostly subject. These great new acquisitions seemed to make the whole structure complete, its gaps filled, its weak points reinforced. What other worlds, as ‘Billy’ Hughes had cried, had they to conquer?

But it was only a spasm of the old energy. The euphoria of victory made the British feel they were still masters of their own destiny, and encouraged the ageing imperialists to revive their fading dreams. They were soon disillusioned in their hopes. The nation had lost the panache of Empire, and the mass of the people resisted all attempts to make them imperialists again. Among the social hazards of the post-war years was the conversation of a Milnerite, droning once more over a brandy about the chances of imperial federation, or the insular indifference of the electorate. (
‘
Thank
God
that’s
over
darling.
We
had
old
D
.
sermonizing
again
’
.
‘
Not
the
beastly
old
Empire
again
darling
’
.
‘That’s
the
one!
My
sainted
aunt,
you
’
d
think
we
were
still
fighting
the
fuzzy-wuzzies
….’)

The truth was that Britain was changed for ever by the war, and was in no mood or condition for a revival of the New Imperialism. How could it be otherwise, when 700,000 young men had died?
Even the imperialist balladeers were muted now, and it was Sir Henry Newbolt himself, author of
Play
the
Game!
,
who spoke for them all in his poem
The
War
Films
:

Here was a silence more terrible than the breathless hush in the close that night, and though the British soon recovered their natural jollity, and entered the 1920s in a spirit of resolute escapism, still the old splendour was shaded.

Britain had ended the war apparently the strongest of all States. Her industries were intact, her finances far from crippled, she possessed the strongest air force and the strongest navy in the world, and one of the strongest armies. But in the sadness of it all she had lost the
brio
of success, and she had no grand idea to offer, no message of hope or change, to answer the challenges of Communism from revolutionary Russia, Wilsonian liberalism from America. At Versailles, where the peace treaty with Germany was signed and the future of the world decided, the British did not play the decisive role. On the one hand they failed to curb the vindictive intentions of the French: on the other, though their chief representative was the inspired and fascinating Lloyd George, though their delegations were attended by all the glamour of the Empire’s age, scale and experience, still they were upstaged in the Hall of Mirrors by the presence of the Americans. The British Empire represented tradition and continuity, but the USA represented a fresh beginning, and the idealism of the new world seemed marvellously
hopeful and exciting, set against the plumed and fatal loyalties of the old.

For though self-determination was a clumsy word, it was full of lucid suggestion. It spoke not merely of national freedoms, but of personal liberties too, of all those inalienable rights that the Americans had won for themselves, and now seemed to be claiming on behalf of everyone else. And just as the British Empire had been the enemy of the Founding Fathers, so inevitably it seemed to stand now as a vast and ancient barrier to these aspirations. The very notion of self-determination was incompatible with the Empire’s survival; the whole trend of affairs, the whole conception of a world order embodied in the League of Nations, ran directly counter to British imperial positions. The British Empire delegates at Versailles, mustered by the Australians, narrowly prevented the inclusion of a clause in the League Covenant actually declaring all races to be inherently equal, a close shave indeed for the imperial comfort.

Sir William Orpen painted a conversation piece of the signing of the peace treaty in the Hall of Mirrors. It is mannered, but telling. Physically it is dominated by the British Empire, for around the compelling figure of Lloyd George, centre-stage, are assembled aides and delegates from all the great overseas possessions of the Crown—a turbanned Indian officer over Clemenceau’s shoulder, a swarthy Boer at the edge of the scene, the ponderous Sir Robert Borden from Canada, the mercurial William Hughes from Australia, besides the familiar imperial figures of Balfour, Curzon, and, his tie askew, Lord Milner of Cape Town and St James.