Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (33 page)

See him there now, in the garden of his palace. He is sitting in a deck-chair beneath a fronded tree, wearing a dark suit in the brilliant sunshine, smoking a Turkish cigarette. Before him, in the shade, the young king is playing chess with his brother, using big wooden chess men on a carved table, but Abdulillah is not watching them. His legs elegantly crossed, he is looking thoughtfully across the lawn towards the distant roofs of the capital, spiked by minarets and hazed in dust. It is a highly suggestive scene, but in a charged way: the two boys intent upon their game, the enamelled guardian aloof and preoccupied at his cigarette. It seems timeless, changeless, as though the three figures have always been there, and are condemned to remain for ever motionless in that Baghdadi garden: but at the same time it seems a fictional or contrived tableau, arranged there by some producer of plangent gifts. Will they ever grow up, those young innocents? Will that urbane regent ever be old? Are they real princes, or only tokens, placed there for a purpose, like pieces on a wider board themselves?

Among and around the Hashemites a group of Anglo-Arab satraps rose to power. Some were Arabs themselves, like the Iraqi politician Nuri-es-Said, who became a living emblem of the British connection.
Many more were Britons, discovering for themselves fine opportunities for adventure and advance. The ruling establishments of the British, swiftly erected through the Arab countries, became at once late outposts of the imperial idea.

In Jerusalem the British High Commissioner first occupied the great Augusta Victoria Hospital, originally built to commemorate the Kaiser’s visit, but supposedly designed as the Government House of a German-conquered Palestine: later he was given a palace of finely dressed Jerusalem stone, golden as the city itself, encouched in pine trees, and there, looking splendidly out across the Holy City, he was constantly reminded that he stood in direct descent from Pontius Pilate in the imperial satrapy. In Amman, the capital of Transjordan, the British Resident was so much more powerful than the King that the affairs of the country revolved naturally not around the royal palace on its hilltop but around the Residency in the valley. And beside the Tigris in Baghdad the British High Commissioner’s headquarters very soon assumed a somewhat baleful dominance, with its wide gravelled courtyard and its Persian gardeners, its lions and unicorns and punctilious aides, its dogs, its hunting talk, its flowering verbena, its familiar dinner lists of visiting grandees and fawning locals, its languid Union Jack above the river, its varnished motor launches, its statue of General Maude the conqueror—a structure, born by the Great War out of the Indian Raj, which became the truest monument to the British presence among the Arabs.

There was no shortage of Britons to man these frontiers. Not many were needed anyway, and bright young men who had soldiered in those parts welcomed the chance to make careers there. Some were veterans of the Revolt itself. Here is Fred Peake, for instance, ‘Peake Pasha’, the founder of the Transjordan Arab Legion, wearing an Arab headdress with his khaki uniform, standing with a hand on his stomach among a troop of his Bedouin swashbucklers: with his piercing blue eyes and his beautifully cut Saxon features, he looks just like one of the fighting Anglo-Indian patriarchs of a century before, and indeed he had come to the Arabs by way of India and the Egyptian Army. Here is Alec Kirkbride, Abdullah’s chief British adviser, a huge kindly Scot whose pungent
friendship with the Emir gave extra subtleties to the imperial theme. (‘Why don’t you like that idea?’ Abdullah asked him once of a new development scheme. ‘Who said I didn’t like it, Sidi?’ ‘Nobody, but I know that when you flick your head away like that, it means you disapprove.’) Here is Charles Belgrave, Adviser to the Ruler of Bahrein, tall, worldly, witty, almost theatrically handsome, who got his job by answering an advertisement in the personal column of
The
Times
,
whose tastes ran to roulette, pantomime, watercolour painting and
The
Fairchild
Family
, and whose ugly house above the water-front bulged in every cranny, corridor and bathroom with the books of his eclectic library. Or here is John Bagot Glubb, the most famous of them all, nicknamed by the Arabs Abu Hunaik, Father of the Little Chin, because of a disfigurement of his jaw: succeeding Peake as commander of the Arab Legion, he went much further, and with his merry Irish smile, his quiet manners and his quick emotions, became in the end the grey eminence of Anglo-Arabia.

Few of these men went to the Arab countries with any imperial mission. The basis of this enterprise was pure opportunism: its protagonists seldom pleaded moral obligation or White Man’s Burden. At least towards the desert Arabs, the British felt no prejudice or even condescension, and most of this new imperial class went to the Middle East partly because they relished the adventure of it all, but partly because they genuinely admired the Bedouin ethos. On a personal level, it was a meeting of equals. Most of the Britons were men of the rural gentry, and they felt at ease and at home with Arab gentlemen, affectionate and paternal, like squires or conscientious subalterns, towards the Arab rank and file. They were happy men, probably the happiest of all the imperialists. More than any colonial servants since the great days of British India, they felt themselves fulfilled: they believed the British presence to be good for the Arabs and for the world in general, they felt, some of them,. that they were expiating a betrayal, and they genuinely wished their subjects well.

For a couple of decades it worked. What Britain needed in the Middle East, Balfour once said, was ‘supreme economic and political control, to be exercised … in friendly and unostentatious cooperation with the Arabs, but nevertheless, in the last resort to be exercised.’ This is exactly what she got. For thirty years the British were able to safeguard their oil supplies and their strategic interests at minimum cost to themselves, and more than any other of their suzerainties, more even perhaps than their Empire in India, it was their position in the Middle East that kept them among the ranks of the Great Powers into the middle years of the century.

Arab nationalist opinion, of course, soon turned against them. They did little enough to conciliate the younger patriots. Their puppet regimes were essentially law-and-order governments, and their affinities were with the traditional ruling classes of Islam. The kings, emirs, sheikhs, princes, and sultans of the Middle East saw in Britain their best protector against the dimly perceived but all too clearly apprehended dangers of radicalism: the British believed that by bolstering the conservative forces of Islam, the ruling families, the desert heritage, they could best maintain the stability of Arab society. They often quoted Curzon’s dictum about the most unselfish page in history, and they continued to claim, until the end of the Empire, a particular kinship between Englishman and Bedouin Arab—‘we understand each other you see, we use the same language so to speak….’

But it was to go sour in the end, all the spirited pleasure of the British presence, all the comradeship of Briton and Hashemite, even the devotion of so many British administrators to the ideal of Arabness. In the Middle East the British never had time to acquire the profound expertise they had gathered over so many generations in India, while die Arabs, especially the urban intellectuals, proved to be nationalists of a sophistication and intensity unknown to the imperialists elsewhere. The British, so late in the imperial day, were nagged by a sense of incongruity: the Arab patriots believed the whole imperial structure in their midst, disguised as it was in
mandate, protectorate or formal independence, to be false.

So it was. Iraq and Transjordan, the bulwarks of the British position, were only semi-nations. Their kings were creatures, their diplomatic missions were mere sops to their self-esteem, their trade, commerce and industry were ancillary to imperial needs, their armies were trained, equipped and often commanded by Britons. The British Empire was a true ally of reaction in the Middle East, depending as it did upon the alliance of sheikhs and princes, distrustful of urban values and intellectual tastes. The progressives were bound to rebel against its presence, sooner or later, and their antipathies were given an extra focus by the problem of Palestine, where the Zionists were busily building their National Home under British auspices—a permanent imperialist bridgehead, as every Arab agreed, upon the shore of Islam.

The Arab Awakening, as it came to be called, was sporadic and scattered—an assassination in Egypt, a mutiny in Iraq, a riot in Palestine—but it was never altogether quiescent. As the decades passed the British stance among the Arabs became more and more defensive, and the High Commissioners, the Residents, the Advisers, the General Officers Commanding, the Conservators of Forests, fortified themselves with their sheikhly partners against the assaults of change.

We will take a journey now, through the British Middle East some time in the 1930s, when the imperial suzerainty was complete still, but precarious—powerful, but challenged nearly everywhere by subversion and dissent.

We will start from Cairo, then as always the power-base of the British presence—from the Embassy in fact, formerly the Residency, before that the Agency, in whose offices the Anglo-Arab conspiracy had first been hatched. This is a building of sombre dominance, set among wide lawns on the edge of the Nile, with its back to the mediaeval city and its front to the pyramids. British sentries stand guard at its gates, and when the Ambassador drives out, ostentatiously from the mudguards of his Rolls fly the twin flags of his
plenipotence.
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Through the gates we pass ourselves, accepting to the manner born the crash of the sentry’s salute, and drive away through the tumultuous streets of the capital. Everywhere, though this is a sovereign kingdom now, the British Empire shows. There stand the hideous brown barracks of Kasr-el-Nil, with the soldiery’s khaki shirts drying from its windows, and there to the right is the Turf Club, awnings down against the sun
2
—and we wave to Reggie and Lorna taking breakfast on the terrace of Shepheard’s, and catch a glimpse of the 9th Lancers polo team limbering up beyond the hedges of the Gezira Sporting Club. My goodness, are they
never
going to get that Anglican Cathedral finished?
3
Great God, isn’t that Andrew Holden there, in the tarboosh, just getting off the tram? Doing things the hard way, isn’t he?
4

Away we sweep beside the Sweet Water Canal, a thin thread of green through the eastern desert, and in an hour or two, as we approach Ismailia, we see the masts and upperworks of ships eerily gliding above the banks of the Suez Canal. British of course, we discover to our gratification when we scramble up the levee to watch them go by, and very British too is the luncheon they give us at the officers’ mess up the road (‘What a bloody awful place,’ says our host as he waves us away. ‘Do we
have
to have an Empire?’) Over the canal next, and at Kantara, on the east bank, a troop train stands in the siding waiting to move into Palestine (‘Keep your fingers off the window-ledge, lads, or the wogs’ll get ’em for wedding-rings’):
5
the soldier who waves us through the check-point into
Sinai is an Egyptian in a tarboosh, but the officer you may see behind him in his office, chatting over a cup of coffee with a fat Arab in a green sports coat and
khuffiya,
looks remarkably like that fellow Jarvis, you know the man, used to write those frightfully funny skits in the ship’s paper coming out….
1

By the evening we are in Palestine. Here the British seem to be embattled. There are ancient armoured cars on patrol, and roadblocks, and when the District Commissioner of Gaza, in his straw hat and suede shoes, meets us at the garden gate of his bungalow above the town, we find it guarded by watchful infantrymen. ‘Welcome to the Holy Land!’ he says. ‘They shot poor Andrews up in Galilee last night. You will keep your eyes skinned, won’t you, when you get up towards Bethlehem tomorrow?—always a tricky spot, Bethlehem.’

But Bethlehem is quiet in the sun, and before long we are in the streets of Jerusalem. The Holy City is full of police and soldiers, but retains something of its old serenity nonetheless. The Arabs meditate in the courtyard of the Dome of the Rock, the Jews touch the Wailing Wall reverently with their foreheads, the British laugh over their gins-and-tonics in the bar of the King David Hotel or are to be heard blasphemously banging balls about on the tennis courts of the YMCA. The sun-bleached streets are orderly, but watchful. Rolls-Royce armoured cars trundle through the shadows of the Jaffa Gate. At dinner an Arab economist tells us Islamic unity is inevitable, a man from the Jewish Agency expounds the nature of
kibbutzim
,
and Mrs T explains how to get to a dear little shop near the Citadel that sells divine embroideries.

Next morning Wing-Commander W kindly flies us to Baghdad, in the back seat of his Wapiti biplane. We resolve to press our suits and get our hair done, as we check into the Regent Palace Hotel
(
cuisine
anglaise
,
and conveniently up the road from the Eastern Bank), for Anglo-Arab life on the Tigris is very formal. You never know whom you may meet, in the shady old Turkish houses, dusty in the palm groves along the river, in which the English community prefers to live. Sniffy will be the conversation after the soirée, if you neglect your curtsey to the Regent, or speak to him too frankly, man to man.
1
With luck, it is true, we may bump into the delightful Freya Stark, home in the flower of her enthusiasm from some unimaginable journey, and we are sure to meet Lady Drower, whose speciality is the language of the Mandaeans, or even Agatha Christie the popular novelist, whose husband is excavating up at Nineveh. Look out for Sir X Y, though, we have been warned, mind your Arab sympathies in front of Mrs Z, and whatever you do, don’t go spouting any Fabian nonsense to Nuri Pasha.