Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (26 page)

But somehow the eye strays, away from the Maharaja of Bikaner, away from the mordant Milner, away even from Clemenceau and Lloyd George, until it alights upon the stiff ascetic person of President Wilson: for he is looking directly, deliberately at the artist, with an almost accusatory expression, as though he is staring hard into the future, and willing it his way.
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The peace treaty was signed not only by Great Britain, but by Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand and India. This seemed at first a majestic demonstration of imperial brotherhood. When the League of Nations met for the first time, in 1920, all the Dominions were again represented by their own delegates, giving the Empire six separate votes. The Americans had withdrawn from the League; the Germans and Russians were excluded from it; to foreigners it sometimes seemed that it would be dominated by a British caucus, voting imperially against the world as Rhodes and Joe Chamberlain would have wished it.

But it was really less a declaration of imperial solidarity than of Dominion independence. In 1917, when the imperial Prime Ministers assembled in London in conference, they had unanimously voted that after the war the Dominions should have an ‘adequate voice in foreign policy and in foreign relations’. Smuts indeed described them frankly as ‘autonomous nations’, and thought they should not consider themselves an Empire any more, but a British Commonwealth of Nations. The victory had strengthened these impulses. The white colonials had gone to war trustingly, innocently almost, satisfied for the most part to be loyal assistants to the Mother Country. They had been inexperienced still, as soldiers and as statesmen, and they were as indoctrinated as the British at home in their ingenuous respect for British traditions and achievements. Though they often made fun of the British, their toffs, their drawls and their domesticity, they still looked up to the Old Country, and believed as the British did themselves in the value of its systems and the skill of its leaders.

But they had gone home with different feelings. If they had been patronized at the start of the war, at the end of it they were patronizing themselves, sometimes scornfully. They had seen the structure of British society forlornly exposed once more, and the myth of omniscience, to which they had been educated, proved a fraud. The British private soldier, so passive, so uncomplaining, they looked upon with a fraternal sympathy, often offering him cigarettes from
their own more plentiful supplies, or giving him a pair of their superior boots. The British senior officer they grew to despise.
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Their impertinence to the brass, which began as a cheerful lark, grew into an expression of resentment, as they saw all their high purposes, their journeys across half the world, the lives of their comrades, so often wasted by the incompetence of the British high command. They believed themselves to be better soldiers than the English, with some reason—most people agreed, for instance, that the Canadians were the best troops on the western front—and thought they were all too often given the bloodiest jobs and the least reward. In the early years of the war the boys at Scotch College, Melbourne, had actually cried when they heard the stanzas of ‘Bugles of England’: after 1918 their eyes were drier.

Their leaders too, loyally though they supported the war to the end, chafed against the leading-strings of Westminster. From the start the Canadians had demanded complete control of their own armies, and among Australians the story of Gallipoli, which began as heroic legend, degenerated into object-lesson—it had been planned without reference to the Dominions at all, but never again would Australian divisions be committed to war under absolute British command. The British were often antagonized by the colonials, too. General Sir Douglas Haig, the British commander in France during the later stages of the war, found his colonial generals ‘ignorant and conceited’, and described a delegation of visiting Canadian politicians, including the Minister of War, as ‘well-meaning but second-rate sort of people’. As for the Australians, their soldiers were said to exert such a bad influence on the English that they were kept as far apart as possible—their desertion rate was four times higher than that of any British unit, and twelve times as many of them went absent without leave.

These rancours found political form after the war, when the colonials contemplated their own growing strength. The Canadians in particular, who had always led the way in constitutional reforms,
rebelled against the last trappings of imperial authority. It was a quarter of a century since Rudyard Kipling, in a famous poem, had commemorated Canada’s decision to impose her own tariffs upon foreign goods, regardless of British policies—

Now it was the Canadians again who forced into definition a new relationship between Britain and the Dominions—daughters still perhaps, in poetic or propagandist terms, but distinctly come of age.

In September 1922 the British found themselves looking apprehensively once more towards the Dardanelles. Under the peace treaty Turkey had been dismembered: the Greeks occupied parts of Asia Minor, the British maintained garrisons along the Dardanelles. In 1920, however, a virile new Turkish State was formed, centred upon Ankara in the heart of Asiatic Turkey, under the leadership of the visionary Mustafa Kemal, a general who had played a brilliant part in the defeat of the British at Gallipoli. Kemal repudiated the peace agreements, and resolved to rid his country of foreign troops. First he drove the Greeks out, without much trouble, then he turned his attention to the British. The main British outpost on the Asian side of the Dardanelles was Chanak, whose ramparts and minarets we glimpsed so tantalizingly that June morning on the Lone Pine Ridge, and upon this little town the Turkish armies now threateningly advanced.

In itself Chanak was not much: a shabby little Muslim town at the water’s edge, with a row of foreign consulates along the waterfront, for it was the port of entry to the Strait, a clutter of high-walled crooked streets, and a fortress still badly knocked about by the guns of the Royal Navy. For Kemal to threaten it, though, was an astonishing challenge. He was the representative of a defeated lesser Power: the British not only represented all the victorious
nations, but were themselves, in their imperial capacities, now the towering suzerains of all the Middle East. To the British Government under Lloyd George the situation was charged with emotional nuance.

The Colonial Secretary was Winston Churchill, who had first sent the imperial fleets and armies to the Dardanelles, and it was he who addressed an ‘inquiry’ to all the Dominion Governments, asking if they would send troops to the straits if fighting broke out. At the same time he told the Press what he had done. This was, in the context of 1922, a terrible gaffe. The Dominions had been left altogether in the dark about British policy towards Turkey, and they were infuriated by Churchill’s presumption. Mackenzie King, the prickly Prime Minister of Canada, first heard about the ‘inquiry’ when he read about it in his own Sunday newspaper, and all the Dominion leaders were affronted by what seemed to be a bland British assumption of their support. ‘Although the Dominions may speak with many voices for themselves as individuals,’
The
Times
had imprudently declared, ‘they speak as one when the time comes to speak for the Empire’: but nothing could be less true, when it came to this dubious imperial summons. The Dominions were tired of European squabble, intrigue and bloodshed, and they were notably disinclined to send their young men once again to the Dardanelles, where so many of their brothers lay uselessly buried.

Only New Zealand and Newfoundland, the most thoroughly British of all the Dominions, unequivocally agreed to send troops if needed. The Australians agreed under protest. The South Africans did not answer. But the Canadian reply was the conclusive one. The Canadian Prime Minister was not competent, Mackenzie King coldly cabled, to commit troops to the Dardanelles upon a British request—such an action required the consent of the Canadian Parliament. Only eight years after George V’s unilateral declaration of war on behalf of his entire Empire, this was a portentous rebuff, and Mackenzie King well realized its meaning. ‘If membership in the British Empire’, he wrote in his diary, ‘means participation by the Dominions in any and every war in which Great Britain becomes involved, without consultation, conference or agreement of any kind in advance, I can see no hope for an enduring relationship.’

So the white settler Empire, the bedrock of the whole imperial structure, which had demonstrated its kinship so movingly in war, displayed its maturity in the new world of the peace. The Chanak affair finally dispersed any movement towards a centralist Empire, with a single foreign policy or executive, and paved the way for an altogether different imperial machinery, paradoxically at once more formal and less binding. The crisis itself came to nothing, for the British presently concluded an agreement with Kemal, and the town was never attacked after all: but the episode presented a very different imperial image from those brave assemblies of loyal statesmen which had expressed the unanimity of Empire in the flush of victory.
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Though the Empire was to expand still further, and there were stil men eager to pursue the imperial mission, and propagate the imperial faith, from now on the story of the Empire would be the story of decline. Year by year the British vision would contract, and the abilities of the nation would chiefly be applied, not to projects of aggrandisement, risk or experiment, but to social reform at home. Economics rather than diplomacy would be the first preoccupation of British statesmen, and the prospect of dominion would no longer excite the nation’s young men. The British were becoming a more ordinary people in their wisdom. Nothing revealed this truth more frankly to the world than the surrender by the British Empire, four years after that triumph at the Firth of Forth, of the maritime supremacy which had been its inalienable prerogative, and its surest protection, since the Battle of Trafalgar a century before.

In the heyday of Empire it had been a maxim of British policy that the Royal Navy should be equal in power to any two navies that might combine to oppose it—in practical terms, that it must be beyond challenge. Any lesser margin, it was thought, would be
suicidal, and in the 1890s the British were spending twice as much on their fleet as any other Power. By 1918 this tremendous criterion was untenable. Wasted by the war, Britain could no longer afford to maintain such overwhelming odds. Besides, two of her allies, Japan and the United States, were now great maritime Powers themselves, with oceanic commitments of their own. In 1922, symbolically in Washington D.C., a new ratio of sea-power was devised by international agreement, and for the first time since Nelson’s day the Royal Navy was no longer the guarantor of the world’s seas, nor even
primus
inter
pares.
In future, it was agreed, the navies of Great Britain, the United States and Japan would be limited to the ratio 5:5:3, with those of France and Italy at 1.75. The Royal Navy would no longer be able to design its ships to its own imperial requirements, for there was agreement too on what type of ships each fleet might have, and what size they might be. Even Britain’s imperial fortresses, Fisher’s ‘keys to the lock of the world’, were no longer hers to use as she pleased: under the Washington Treaty she specifically undertook not to develop Hong Kong as a base, in deference to American and Japanese opinion, and presently, under the same pressures, she would withdraw from Wei-hai-wei altogether.
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As a result of this treaty the British scrapped 657 ships, with a total displacement of 1,500,000 tons: they included 26 battleships and battlecruisers, among them many a proud stalwart of Beatty’s Grand Fleet. Never again would a Fisher at the Admiralty be free to set the standards of the world’s navies according to British requirements. No such magnificent fighting ships as the
Queen
Elizabeth,
the apex of British naval assurance, were ever again constructed in British dockyards. Compromise set in. So ended Britain’s absolute command of the seas, the mainstay and in some sense the
raison
d’être
of her Empire.

The British public did not object, and even the representatives of the Dominions signed the treaty without demur. As it turned out the Washington Treaty was the only international armaments agreement that ever really worked—the Powers abided by its terms, and it provided a decade of respite from naval scares and extravagances. Hard times were coming for the British people, as the world declined into economic depression, and only sailors, imperialists and shipyard men much resented, or perhaps even noticed, the end of Rule Britannia. The glory days were gone already. Better a safe job and a home of your own than heavenly commands to splendour.