Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (31 page)

The whitemen did not as a rule consider the treatment they treated their subjects bad, but the Easter Rising gave them cause to think more deeply about it, and slowly over the years it dawned upon many of them, as they contemplated the deaths of many another Patrick Pearse, many a nameless Chilembwe—as they struggled first to subdue, then to understand, finally to make friends with subject patriots across the world—gradually it occurred to them that perhaps their opponents were right after all, and that the idea of Empire itself, the very conception of one race having the right to rule another, was unjust.

The concept of fair play was the truest ideology of the English, and it had been violated too often in Ireland. Herbert Asquith the Prime Minister soon realized that the British had gone too far, in their savage response to the Easter Rising. He sacked General Maxwell, and, hoping to undo some of the harm done, went over to Dublin himself. There he visited some of the prisoners of the Rising, held by the British Army in Richmond Barracks, and found them ‘Very good-looking fellows, with such lovely eyes…’.

The Ulster Volunteer Force, volunteering almost to a man when war broke out, went to France virtually
in
toto
as the Ulster Division, wearing the Red Hand of Ulster as its shoulder badge, suffering fearful casualties and fighting with a stubborn gallantry to the end of the war. After the armistice, when British Governments turned their attention to Ireland once again, Ulster was rewarded for its loyalty, or its contumacy, was specifically excepted from Irish independence arrangements, and became a self-governing province of the United Kingdom.

The Catholic Irish, on the other hand, became ever less loyal to the Crown as the years went by, and mere Home Rule was never again a possibility. Kitchener, an Ascendancy man himself, refused to allow Irish Catholics to fight under their own officers, or form their own division, and almost as soon as the war was over the Connaught Rangers, ‘The Devil’s Own’, one of the most celebrated of the Irish regiments of the British Army, mutinied in India and were disbanded. Ireland itself fell into chaos, until out of the turmoil of rebellion and civil war, recrimination and revenge, there emerged in 1923 the Irish Free State—within the Empire still, subject to the Imperial Crown, shorn of six counties of the Protestant north, but at least a nation of its own, with its own Government and its own Parliament.

So the Irish won in a way: but they lost too, for they never made friends with themselves, and
Asgard
never sailed in consort with
Clydevalley.
1
The old enmity of sect and loyalty was to simmer on,
sometimes latent, sometimes murderous, until the British across the water no longer much cared what happened to Ireland, and the British Empire itself, the cause of all these sadnesses, was hardly more than a memory.

E
LSEWHERE the Empire, like an old father of young sons, was finding a temporary new lease of life, for the conquered possessions of the Ottoman Empire offered fresh fields of enterprise. There was almost a new empire in itself out there, extending with territories old and new from the frontiers of Libya in the west to the hills of Kurdestan in the far north-east. Much of it was mandated territory, but in one form or another by the 1920s the British Empire among the Arabs comprised Egypt, Palestine, Transjordan, Iraq, much of the western shore of the Persian Gulf, most of the southern Arabian coast and the haggard port of Aden, considered by many imperialists the least desirable of all the imperial properties. It was a vast and vital region. A new class of imperialists, the Anglo-Arabs, came into being to administer it, and some people hoped it might one day mature into a new brown Dominion, standing loyal, grateful and useful in oil between India and the Mediterranean.

For centuries the British had dealt with the Arabs. The Levant Company had begun operations in Syria in 1581, twenty years before foundation of the East India Company, and for generations Britons had been familiar figures in most of the Arab countries. The British had governed Aden since 1839, had effectively ruled Egypt since 1882, and had long been
de
facto
suzerains of the Persian Gulf. In the Levant they maintained a special consular service, demi-imperial in character, and Cooks the travel agents so dominated the Middle Eastern travel market that even the Kaiser Wilhelm II
availed himself of their services, when he took his white horse and eagle-helmet to the Holy Land. British merchants, explorers, surveyors, spies, had wandered everywhere in these countries: they ran the steamers on the Nile and on the Tigris, they controlled the Suez Canal and the Persian oilfield, and they had maintained their own Anglican Bishop in Jerusalem since 1841.

Inevitably, when war with Turkey seemed likely, they coveted this half-familiar territory for themselves. The implanting of British power there was one of the earliest and most consistent of their war aims—they might be past their expansionist prime, but every instinct told them that no other Power must dominate the land-mass between Europe and India. Anglo-Indians wanted to create an Arab province of British India, governed absolutely in the Indian manner; Anglo-Egyptians wanted to clinch their control of the Suez Canal; strategists and financiers eyed the Mosul oil deposits in Kurdistan; War Office planners dreamed of a Haifa to Basra railway line; men of God wanted to restore the Holy Land to Christian guardianship. Milner envisaged an enormous imperial protectorate to include the whole of Arabia and Persia—from India to the left bank of the Don, he argued, ‘is our interest and our preserve’. Fisher wanted a new canal cut from Alexandretta to the Persian Gulf, giving the Royal Navy an alternative route to India. Asquith was attracted by the idea of a new Viceroyalty of the Middle East, with its imperial capital at Baghdad. Kitchener wanted to be its first Viceroy.

Before the war the British had dealt warily with the Arabs of the Arabian peninsula, theoretically subjects of Turkey, in practice largely autonomous. The sheikhs of the Persian Gulf, as we have seen, they made more or less their vassals, but the chieftains of the interior they generally left well alone. ‘The cardinal factor of British policy’, said a Foreign Office minute in 1913, ‘is to uphold the integrity of the Turkish dominions in Asia,’ and even when the redoubtable Ibn Saud of Nejd openly revolted against the Turks that year, he was told that there was no chance of concluding a treaty with the British Empire instead. Still, they kept in touch with him, from their bases on the Persian Gulf: and at the same time, on the other side of the peninsula, they cautiously contacted the Grand Sharif Hussein of Mecca, head of the Hashemite clan, descended
directly from the Prophet Mohammed, which held the hereditary guardianship of the Holy Places.

They liked the desert Arabs. The Bedouin struck a responsive chord in them. With his patrician style and his picturesque appearance, his great flocks of goats and camels, his taste for coffee and beautiful boys, his blend of arrogance and hospitality, his love of pedigree, his fighting ability and what would later be called his
machismo
, the Bedouin was every Englishman’s idea of nature’s gentleman. He seemed almost a kind of Englishman himself, translated into another idiom. It was upon this romantic fixation, this idealization of a type or a legend, that the British were precariously to build their new positions in the Middle East.

Their chosen vessels were the Hashemites, the most high-flown and ornate of the Bedouin clans, whose desert rawness had been smoothed by long acquaintance with Turkish habits, and who had pretensions to some kind of primacy, religious and temporal, over all the Arabs. Hussein was a picaresque but highly ambitious figure, coveting the position of Caliph, spiritual leader of all the Muslims, which was held
ex
officio
by the Sultan of Turkey. He had no love for the Turks, having spent some years as a political prisoner in Constantinople, and after the outbreak of war he had conspired with the British to rise against the Ottoman Empire, in return for British arms, money and expertise, and promises of favours to come.

The Empire’s compact with the Hashemites was deliberately vague and opportunist. It was wartime, and the British were concerned first to win the war. The Arab Revolution, to be led by Hussein and his sons, was thus seen differently by its several participants. The Hashemites represented it as a national movement, to unite all the Arabs in an independent united kingdom. Their rivals in the peninsula, notably Ibn Saud, saw it as an unprincipled attempt by one Arab clan to impose its hegemony on the others. Their tribal levies saw it as a kind of prolonged
ghazu,
a war raid in pursuit of booty. The sophisticated Arabs of Syria and Lebanon, who had their own revolutionary movements, saw it as an
archaic threat to the Arab future, mounted by bucolics out of the wilderness.

And the British saw it as a tool of their own intent. The conspiracy with Hussein was hatched from Cairo and Khartoum, and fostered by an intelligence agency called the Arab Bureau, working under the British High Commissioner in Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon. The men in Cairo did not really know much about the desert Arabs: they had none of the long tradition of expertise which gave the Indian Political Service its insight into Arabian affairs. McMahon himself was a cautious freemason who spoke neither Arabic nor French, and was ignorant of Arabian matters. His advisers were mostly men of extreme intelligence but somewhat amateur enthusiasm, fired by the exigency of war and intrigued by the allure of Arabness from across the Arabian Sea. Everything about the liaison was at once vague and disingenuous. McMahon’s promises to Hussein were deliberately vague; Hussein’s claims to universal Arab leadership were necessarily vague; the geographical
terms employed were unavoidably vague, for nobody had really defined, for example, the limits of Syria or the extent of Palestine. All was veiled in a courteous opacity, and the messages which McMahon exchanged with Hussein, encouraging him to rebellion, were to become, as ‘The McMahon Letters’, synonymous with diplomatic ambivalence.

They were not a treaty, had no legal force, and carefully left all British options open, but their implication seemed to be that in return for his help Hussein would be recognized after the war as the titular head of an independent Arab kingdom, embracing much of the old Turkish Empire. The British treated Hussein with a skimble-skamble deference, couching their letters in sickly honorifics, and addressing Hussein as ‘The excellent and well-born Sayid, the descendant of Sharifs, the Crown of the Proud, Scion of Mohammed’s Tree and Branch of the Koreishite Trunk, him of the Exalted Presence and of the Lofty Rank, Sayid son of Sayid, Sherif son of Sherif, the Venerable, Honoured Sayid, His Excellency the Sherif Hussein, Lord of the Many, Emir of Mecca the Blessed, the Lodestar of the Faithful, and the cynosure of all devout Believers, may his Blessing descend upon the people in their multitudes!’ They designed a flag for his new kingdom, symbolizing Arab unity—black for the Abbasids of Baghdad, white for the Ommayads of Damascus, green for the Alids of Karbala, red for the Mudhars. Careful though they were to avoid commitments, still their assurances to Hussein came to be regarded, at least by the Grand Sharif himself, as a pledge: if he rebelled against the Turks, they would make him King of the Arabs.

In fact they did not take him very seriously, or perhaps the Arabs either. ‘What we have to arrive at now’, McMahon wrote, ‘is to tempt the Arab people into the right path, detach them from the enemy, and bring them on to our side. This, on our part, is at present largely a matter of words, and to succeed we must use persuasive terms and abstain from haggling over conditions.’ Hussein they regarded generally as a tiresome and faintly comic old rogue, knowing very well that there were moments when he seriously considered joining the other side after all, and the idea of a true Arab State, taking its place in the comity of the nations,
probably seemed so remote to them that their assurances of Arab independence were given lightly and heedlessly.

Far from frivolous, however, were the assurances they gave elsewhere about the future of the Middle East, for in fact the British were working to contradictory plans. With the Grand Sharif they had apparently agreed that the Hashemites should rule over the whole of Syria, Transjordan and Palestine, the northern provinces of Iraq, and most of the Arabian peninsula, though they had ambivalently excluded from this promise ‘portions of Syria lying to the west of the districts of Damascus, Horns, Hama and Aleppo’, whatever that might mean. With their French allies they had concluded a quite separate pact, ‘greatly confusing’, as Winston Churchill observed, ‘the issue of principles’. Under this, the Sykes-Picot agreement, Syria, Lebanon, Transjordan and Iraq would be divided into British and French spheres of influence or exploitation, with Palestine under some kind of international control, and the Arabs only truly independent within the Arabian peninsula. Finally, in another
quid
pro
quo
,
they made a fateful pledge to the leaders of the Zionist Movement, the powerful international organization dedicated to the establishment of a Jewish National Home in Palestine. Jewish money, talent and sympathy were very important to a Britain at war, and the British Government promised the Zionist leaders that they would encourage the development of a Jewish National Home in Palestine—a country whose population was, in 1916, 93 per cent Arab. The British saw advantages to themselves in a Jewish State there, British-sponsored and perhaps British-protected: ‘A Jewish Commonwealth’, Lloyd George envisaged, while Chaim Weizmann, the most eminent of the Zionists, said that they aimed to make Palestine ‘as Jewish as England is English’.

All these cross-purposes, equivocations and contradictions entramelled imperial policy towards the Arabs. The British in the field never lost their affection for the desert Arab, but they never lost either a nagging feeling of dishonesty or betrayal, a guilt-sensation that would never have troubled their forebears in the robuster imperial adventures of old.
1

For it was to prove a febrile relationship, and the man who set the tone of it, the showiest figure in the acquisition of these new provinces, was perhaps the most introspective of all the varied activists of Empire. We have glimpsed him once already, when we followed Allenby through the Jaffa Gate to accept the submission of Jerusalem in 1917: he was the untidy young staff officer in what appeared to be borrowed uniform, with a long sensitive face, a slight but sinewy body, and a donnishly distracted air.
1
This was T. E. Lawrence, archaeologist, scholar of Jesus College, Oxford, the confused and enigmatic exhibitionist who was to be known to the world as Lawrence of Arabia.

He entered the arena modestly enough. He had worked as an archaeologist in northern Syria, spoke Arabic and had taken part in a clandestine intelligence survey in Sinai. When the war came he was recruited into the Geographical Section of the General Staff and posted to Cairo; and from there he was sent to the Hejaz as one of the British officers lent to Hussein to stiffen his revolt. Lawrence was an amateur soldier of a kind more familiar in the Empire’s later
campaigns, an Oxford intellectual who remained obdurately and often infuriatingly civilian beneath his uniforms. His pose was shy but superior, in the maddening Oxford way, but for every man he antagonized with his self-conscious theatricals, he entranced another with the riddle of his style and sexuality.
1

His was a strange genius. Confused in his own spirit by doubts and anxieties of the profoundest kind, sexually ambivalent and perhaps despairing, he exerted an astonishing power over the most unlikely subjects—statesmen, common soldiers, society women, Arab tribesmen, even regular soldiers of the British Army. He was a very good man, kind, generous, and perhaps this, the deepest trait of his nature, was apparent to people of perception beneath the flummery and the deceit (for he was a gifted and enthusiastic liar). Nobody remotely like Lawrence had ever played a part in the extension of the British Empire, but though it was only the chance of war that made him an Empire-builder, and though he later persuaded himself that he was doing it all for the Arabs, still he was one of those who saw the Arab countries as a potential Dominion of the British Empire—‘our first brown dominion, not our last brown colony.’