Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (34 page)

And before we leave these neo-imperial scenes, pleasure bound to Isfahan perhaps, or back to duty in Baluchistan, we must be sure to attend a parade of the Assyrian Levies, who guard the British airfields in Iraq. They will leave a proper after-taste, for if any of the Middle Eastern peoples are protégés of the Empire, these are they. The Empire indeed brought them here, snatching them from Turkish persecution in the confused aftermath of the war, and now they are the Empire’s devoted wards. Their commanding officer is very proud of them. Splendid little chaps. Almost like Gurkhas. One would never know, would one, that they had been bullied, massacred, exiled and humiliated so constantly down the centuries?

They’re safe now, anyway, many of them with English names, many more with English manners, every one of them loyal to the Crown. Whatever the Iraqis do, we can always depend upon the Assyrians! They march by in their stocky hundreds, brown and solemn in puttees and forage caps, with no trade but their soldiering, no loyalty but to the British Empire, no pride except pride of service
—heads very high, arms swinging to the regulation height, marching and counter-marching in the Mesopotamian heat to the strains of a florid Colonel Bogey from the Levy band.
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‘I say, your car’s waiting. Don’t want to rush you, but you’ve got a long way to go, haven’t you? Do remember me to Molly, if she’s still in Karachi….’

They are sad scenes really, ironic scenes: an Empire in menopause, ruling with a benevolent obscurantism a people just realizing its potential. Soon it will all be swept away, leaving very little behind: but though it is a transient and infertile association, still there is much charm to it, and much goodwill. Let us cheat now, and return just for an evening to Amman, that modest country capital in the hills of Moab: for there we may pay a call upon the most beguiling of all the Anglo-Arab chieftains, Abdullah ibn Hussein, the second son of the old Sharif, and now a greybeard in his own right.

No need to be nervous or diplomatic, as he was himself when, half a lifetime ago, he first encountered the British Empire in the person of Lord Kitchener of Khartoum, eyes ablaze upon the steps of the Cairo Residency. Abdullah is a hospitable prince, and hardly have we signed the book at the British Residency than we are invited up to the palace for dinner that evening. Here is Empire at its happiest, an ambiance without grand principles or purposes perhaps, but without arrogance or sycophancy either. The palace stands on a ridge outside the town, guarded by long-haired Arab Legionaries in the street outside, by stalwart Circassian bodyguards, in astrakhan hats and polished jack-boots, inside its high gates. The evening is fresh; the food smells excellent; an evening with the Emir Abdullah is likely to be fun.

The style of it is cosmopolitan. Though neither of the Emir’s
two wives are present, nor his black concubine either, there are several Englishwomen at the table: and though there is no alcohol there is excellent Turkish food, stuffed aubergines, sizzling kebabs, baklava or savoury pastries. Abdullah loves his victuals and the black Berberine servants silently keep his plate well-stocked, or replenish the table with steaming silver platters. The conversation is variously in Arabic, Turkish and English. The English guests are in evening clothes; the Emir wears a black Turkish frock-coat, with a white waistcoat buttoning up to his neck, and a spotless white turban on his head.

He is in his merriest form, his face all a-twinkle, and as he worries his kebab he chaffs the imperturbable Kirkbride, making outrageous comments in Arabic or Turkish, or telling him comic stories. Glubb is there, rubicund and amiable, and Lancaster Harding, the Director of Archaeology, describes his new dig at Jerash, and all the wives laugh a good deal, and all the men wish they had a drink. It is a homely evening. Arab and Briton, they have been brought into each other’s lives by the processes of history, and share the same experiences of war and peace. Artificial though it is, still there is to the occasion a wistful breath of might-have-been; and here, authentically to capture its fugitive beguilement, is the Emir’s own after-dinner story, a favourite of his for many years, and fondly familiar to all his guests. It is called the Tale of the Upstairs Donkey.

On the outskirts of my native Mecca (the Emir Abdullah says) there used to be a haunted house, empty for many a year. One day the merchant Abdel Kader, passing it on his way home, heard sounds of revelry from its upper floors. He was a sceptical man, and thought some young bloods were having a party up there. When he stopped beside the gate to listen the noise stopped and a voice called to him out of the darkness: ‘Come up, Abdel Kader, come up!’ Determined to teach the young rascals a lesson, he tethered his donkey and entered the house. At once the noise started again, but the higher he climbed the stairs, the higher the revelry seemed to be, until when at last he reached the flat roof of the house, there was nobody there.

As he stood there cursing, though, he heard a peal of raucous laughter from the garden below, and set off angrily down the
stairs again. Again there was nobody in the house, and nobody in the garden, and nobody at the gate: but when he reached the street once more, he found that his donkey had vanished into the dark. Poor Abdel Kader, how he cursed now! but as he stood there in the half-light, vowing retribution and reviling the younger generation, he heard another peal of laughter, high above his head. He looked up at the roof above him, determined to catch a glimpse of his tormentors, and this time saw a head silhouetted against the parapet of the house, clear against a starlit sky.

It was (concludes the Emir Abdullah, spitting out a datestone and half-winking at Mrs Glubb), his donkey.
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I
N the meantime, while this frail new empire came fitfully into being, a terrible event occurred in the greatest of the old possessions, India, providing one of those markers in time, like the Indian Mutiny or the Boer War, by which imperial patterns can best be traced. It was the massacre at Amritsar, which was recognized even then as the worst of all stains upon the imperial record.

It happened in a public enclosure, something between a square, a rubbish dump and a garden, called the Jallianwalla Bagh, in the very heart of Amritsar. This was a venerable city of the Punjab, and it contained the holiest shrine of the Sikhs, the Golden Temple, where the splendid major-domos of the faith, sashed and staved, all day long marshalled the pilgrims towards their holy places beside the pool. The city was a brown maze of narrow streets, mud-paved, always crowded, with open-fronted bazaar shops, and toppling merchants’ houses, and foetid lanes with open drains. It was a highly-strung and volatile place, like most such sacred sites, and in April 1919 it was in a state of uproar. A wave of nationalist protest had been sweeping India, yet another epilogue to the Great War, and in Amritsar there had been riots and demonstrations, culminating in the deaths of five Englishmen and an assault upon an English woman missionary, riding her bicycle innocently through the town.

Nobody doubted that the British would retaliate, but by now the city was too inflamed to count the risk; though public assemblies had been forbidden, on April 13 some hundreds of people deliberately and defiantly crowded into the Jallianwalla Bagh for a political meeting. It was an ominous scene. The Bagh, surrounded by high walls, was sunk below the level of the surrounding streets, and
overlooked on all sides by towering houses, and this gave it rather the feeling of a prison exercise yard, or a place of execution. There were only three entrances: two gates at the southern end, and a narrow passage, hardly wide enough for two men to pass, at the north-west corner.

Near this passage a patriotic orator, clambering on to a pile of rubble, began to read to the crowd a passionate poem of liberty. With every word the tension rose. The people swayed, stirred, sighed, and sometimes shouted responses: and the heat was so great, the place so jammed, the emotion of the occasion so high, that one could almost feel the heart of the crowd thumping there, and hear its excited breathing. This was elemental India—‘life chained to an imperfect mind’, as the poet Rabindranath Tagore described it—uncouth but innocent, too big for itself, furious when excited, docile and endearing when calm. It was a crowd in short, like most Indian crowds, assembled there partly out of conviction, partly in the hope of profit, partly for something to do. It was a dangerous crowd.

Suddenly there was a rumble of heavy automobile engines outside the walls, and people near the entrance passage could see, gleaming in the street outside, the brown steel shape of an armoured car. In a moment the corridor was full of armed men, pushing their way fiercely into the garden, and on to the higher ground behind the speaker. One or two were English officers, some were Baluchis, some were Gurkha riflemen, taut purposeful little mercenaries like tamed wild beasts, with rifles in their hands and kukris at their belts. In a matter of moments they were briskly deployed along the top of the garden, and were kneeling with loaded rifles facing the crowd.

The speaker did not at first notice the commotion behind him, but some of the crowd at once made for the gates, or took cover behind a small stone shrine that stood half-way down the garden. When the orator looked over his shoulder, and saw the soldiers kneeling there, he shouted to the crowd not to be alarmed—they would never shoot—they only had blank cartridges. Hardly had he spoken than a command rang out, and the impassive Gurkhas, obedient as machines, began to shoot at point-blank range into the
crowd. The panic was frightful. People fought each other to get to the gates. They scrabbled at high walls, they trampled one another down, they rushed this way and that, they tried to hide, to take shelter behind each other, to lie flat on the ground. The Gurkhas were unmoved. Loading in their own time, they aimed especially at the two exits at the bottom of the garden, until the gates were jammed with dead and wounded Indians, and nobody else could escape.

The shooting went on for about six minutes. When the soldiers withdrew again down the alley, and the armoured cars returned to their barracks with a reverberation of gear changes among the city lanes, 379 people had been killed, and another 1,500 wounded. The Bagh was littered with corpses and wounded men, blood trickled through the dust, and when dusk fell upon the carnage, and the last survivors had left the square terrified and aghast, women and children crept around the garden searching for their menfolk—turning bodies over, inspecting shattered faces, or simply squatting helplessly among the horror. Later the jackals and pi-dogs arrived: and since a curfew was in force, by ten o’clock there was scarcely a sound in the Jallianwalla Bagh, but the rustling and gnawing of these animals, the moaning of the wounded, and the echoing voices of the British patrols outside, tramping with cocked rifles through the shuttered streets.
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This was the tragedy of Amritsar, when Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer, CB, felt it his duty to make an object lesson of the demonstrators in the Jallianwalla Bagh. He was obliged to resign his commission, but he had many supporters, for he believed he was forestalling another Indian Mutiny. His superior officers condoned his action; the guardians of the Golden Temple enrolled him into the Brotherhood of Sikhs; the House of Lords passed a motion in his support; the readers of the
Morning
Post
subscribed a
£
25,000 testimonial; in his attitude as in his orders he was only reflecting an innate sense of inadequacy that would presently debilitate the British in India. Still, as Winston Churchill said, it was an episode ‘without precedent or parallel in the modern history of the British Empire … an extraordinary event, an event which stands in singular and sinister isolation’.

This was true: at least since 1858, the British had seldom behaved murderously towards their subjects, except in battle. But then the situation in India in the years after the Great War was itself without precedent or parallel. The truth was dawning on the British rulers of the sub-continent that their dominion, still absolute after so many generations, was foreseeably coming to an end. India was not like any other British possession, not a casual acquisition, or a hazily conceived name in a statistical chart, or a colony settled in by cousins, or even a fashionably recommended investment. India was part of the British truth, the other half of a mirror, ‘the stern step-mother of our race’. So long as anyone remembered Britons had been coming and going between the two countries, noblemen to be Viceroys, vicars’ sons to be civil servants, Army officers, missionaries, poor cousin Ethel off to find a husband, young Tom from the Queen’s Arms going to sweat it out in Poona or Bangalore, and good riddance to ’un.

India had long since filtered back to Britain, too. Maharajahs were common figures of London society. Indian cricketers and polo players were popular performers. There had been Indian Members of Parliament, Indian university professors, even an Indian peer—
Lord Sinha of Raipur, Privy Councillor and Freeman of the City of London.
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Monuments of the Indian connection were scattered across Britain, from war memorials to the country houses of nabobs, from village wells donated by benevolent Maharajahs to the cemetery, high on the Sussex hills, of the Indian soldiers who had died at their hospital in Brighton during the Great War. India was more than Empire. In an illogical way it was, to the British and to many Indians too, a part of England, a distant part that only a minority knew, but so interwoven with English destinies that the association seemed indivisible.

There was profit in it, even now. India was one of the most valuable fields of British investment—in 1914 some
£
800 million of capital was invested there. Rubber, coffee, indigo, tea, coal, jute, railways—all these Indian industries were very profitable to British financiers: jute mills in the 1920s were said to be making an annual profit of 90 per cent. India provided a sizeable army for the imperial defence (paid for out of Indian revenues), not to speak of the prestige and authority which accrued from the mastery of this vast possession in the east, and generations of Englishmen had benefited directly from the Indian link.

But the relationship went much deeper. Most men entering the Indian services now had some family connection with the country, and families like the Rivett-Carnacs, the Maynes, the Ogilvies, the Birdwoods, the Lawrences or the Cottons felt themselves to be almost of dual nationality, so old were their links with India. The Anglo-Indians had long since idealized their purposes in the east, and evolved folk-myths of their own.
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They looked at the affairs of the sub-continent with a vision peculiar to themselves, part paternal, part loving, part contemptuous. They were selective in their affections. The simpler and more martial the Indian the better, and the more rural the countryside. Many of them went through life in a profound condition of love-hate, detesting the filth, disease and corruption of India as a whole, passionately devoted to their own
chosen aspects of it. Nobody pleased an Anglo-Indian more than an upright Rajasthani soldier of the old school: nobody repelled him more absolutely than some young law graduate of Bengal, with his progressive ideas and his never quite perfect English. In fact the British were still strangers in the land, for their knowledge of Indian culture was seldom profound, even after generations in the country, and they saw the great sub-continent only through their own experiences. The Indian totality was as baffling to them as to anyone else—‘I felt’, wrote one more than usually frank British District Officer, describing his relationship with his subjects, ‘like a man wandering about with a dim lantern in the dark.’

By the 1920s the ancient association was changing. The British were losing interest in their Empire, and there was a falling-off of recruitment for the Indian services. The Indians were restive and disillusioned, and joined the nationalist movement in their hundreds of thousands. A million Indians had served the British during the Great War, and everybody expected concessions of independence in return. The moderates wanted Dominion status, like the white settler colonies, the extremists wanted to be quit of the Empire altogether. They were angry and disappointed when all the British conceded was the system called dyarchy, which certainly gave Indians a far greater share in government, but was a long way from liberty. The British genuinely thought dyarchy a great step forward—‘the war had compelled England’, wrote Lionel Curtis of it, ‘to recognize that the principles for which she was fighting … must be extended to Asia and Africa.’ The Indians thought it a miserable reward for their loyalty, or alternatively an inadequate concession to their demands.

So a sense of impending change came over India, in the years after the Great War, not unlike the rumours and superstitions that had swept through the country before the Indian Mutiny. ‘The people are restless’, reported a percipient Deputy Commissioner to his superiors in 1918, ‘and discontented and ripe for the revolution’: and in that very year the revolution had begun. The Rowlatt Acts, giving the British Government almost unlimited powers against Indian subversives, were its spark. Mahatma Gandhi was its prophet.

We last saw Gandhi toiling down the slopes of Spion Kop as a humble and loyal stretcher-bearer, but since then he had become a celebrity. The son of a palace official in the minuscule Gujarati princedom of Porbandar, on the shore of the Arabian Sea, he had been trained as a lawyer in London, and had briefly Anglicized himself, dressing in high white collar and dark suit, cultivating the art of small talk, even learning the violin, before gravitating to South Africa as legal adviser to an Indian firm in Durban. There he had taken to politics, by way of the grievances of the Indian community, and had become well known as a champion of Indian rights and self-respect. Returning to India in 1914, he plunged at once into the furious world of nationalism, arguing first for Indian Home Rule, later for complete independence, and reverted to his Indian origins. Now he dressed altogether Indian style, professed a frugal vegetarianism, and year by year prepared himself for the vatic role he was to play in the struggle for Indian liberty.

Nobody then, nobody later, knew quite what to make of Gandhi—Mahatma Gandhi, Gandhi the Pure Soul, Gandhi of the round disarming spectacles and the toothless smile. He shared with T. E. Lawrence the quality of enigma, so that he seemed to one man a saint, to another a hypocrite, and sometimes seemed to exchange the roles from one day to the next. A very small man, 5 foot 4 inches, and slight to the point of emaciation, he had vivid black eyes, spoke very pure English with a vestigial South African accent, and enthralled nearly everyone with his suggestion of almost unearthly wisdom. ‘The unknown looked out at us through his eyes’, said the most worldly of his disciples, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Lloyd George reported that when Gandhi visited him at his home in Surrey, an unknown black cat bounded through the window to settle on Gandhi’s lap—it left when the Mahatma left, and was never seen again.

Gandhi was sweet-natured, but sly. He was truly innocent in some ways, calculating and self-conscious in others. Like Lawrence again, he well understood the value of publicity. Like many another
Indian
guru
, he veiled his shrewdness in platitudes and truisms, and sometimes cheapened it with opportunism. There was something sterile about him. Not only did he forswear, in middle life, all sexual activities, but he had no eye for nature, and his equipoise was essentially uncreative. His repeated political fasts to the death never
were
to the death, as the British wryly noted, and there was to him an irritating element of crankiness and faddism, not to mention sanctimony—‘I cannot free myself from that subtlest of temptations,’ he once wrote in all solemnity, ‘the desire to serve.’ ‘The saint has left our shores’, General Smuts wrote when Gandhi left South Africa for the last time, ‘I sincerely hope for ever’: yet Smuts fell beneath his charm too, for even at his most contumacious Gandhi remained a being of consummate serenity and appeal—‘like a good night’s sleep’, is how one contemporary described the effect of his presence.