Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (4 page)

Salisbury mischievously described poor Marchand as ‘an explorer in difficulties on the upper Nile’, and in fact the French presence at Fashoda, invested north and south by British power, did
become more and more ridiculous. By the time Paris recognized realities, in November 1898, the six Frenchmen and seventy Senegalese left at Fashoda felt themselves cruelly betrayed and humiliated. They withdrew that December, after five months in the fort, and were played away to Djibouti (they refused an easier passage down the Nile to Egypt) by the strains of the ‘Marseillaise’ from the Sudanese band of the British garrison—‘sad yet proud’, as one of them recorded, ‘with moist eyes yet with our heads held high’.

‘Now’, wrote Churchill, ‘the British people may … tell some stonemason to bring his hammer and chisel and cut on the pedestal of Gordon’s statue in Trafalgar Square the significant, the sinister, yet the not unsatisfactory word, “Avenged”.’ In fact Gordon was doubly avenged, by the defeat of his murderers and by the final extension of British power to the headwaters of the Nile. In the end, too, the unhappy Fashoda episode had happier consequences, for it was the last dangerous clash between the British and the French Empires. Tempers cooled, as the two nations recoiled from the brink. The French recognized Britain’s supremacy on the Upper Nile, the British accepted French paramountcy in Morocco. Within a decade the Fashoda incident, with all its acrimonies, had been succeeded by the Entente Cordiale.

Marchand, a French hero in the classic mould, was made a Commander of the Legion of Honour and promoted to Lieutenant-Colonel.
1
Kitchener was awarded the Grand Cross of the Bath, raised to the peerage as Lord Kitchener of Khartoum, voted a Parliamentary grant of
£
30,000 and appointed Governor-General of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. Fashoda itself disappeared from the maps. The dwindling remains of its fort remained there among the swamp, slowly disintegrating over the years, and for a while it was a relay station on the British telegraph line to Uganda: but in deference to French feelings the imperial surveyors changed the name of it, and it was known henceforth as Kodok, after the Shilluk settlement nearby—a fateful but forgotten spot, 9°51’N, 32°07’E, where a
possible highway from Nigeria to Somaliland might cross a putative railway from Cairo to the Cape.
1

T
HE British at home were cock-a-hoop, glorying in Kitchener’s successes and half hoping for war with France. (‘It was a pity it could not have come off just now’, wrote Admiral Fisher, regretfully putting away his charts of Devil’s Island, ‘I think we should have made rather a good job of it.’) The bourgeoisie, in particular, revelled in their colonial wars, and a picture popular around the end of the century portrayed them doing it.

It was called
Following
the
Flags
. On the left sits Papa, wearing a frogged smoking-jacket and holding that morning’s
Times
. On the right are grouped his family: mother in lace jabot and speckled muslin, daughter with ribboned hair over her striped blouse, son in Eton collar and kilt. On the table between them lies a map of the current campaign, wherever it happens to be, stuck about with Union Jacks, and as the paterfamilias reads out the latest despatch from the front, his children eagerly move the flags and assess the tactical situation—for all the world as though they are indulging in some favourite nursery game, whose conquered territories are only imaginary, and whose dead are make-believe. The British were not merely interested in imperial affairs. At this climactic moment of the Empire’s history they were imperially brain-washed.

There was hardly a moment of the day then, hardly a facet of daily living, in which the fact of Empire was not emphasized. From exhortatory editorials to matchbox lids, from children’s fashions to parlour games, from music-hall lyrics to parish-church sermons, the imperial theme was relentlessly drummed. Empire was the plot of
novels, the dialogue of plays, the rhythm of ballads, the inspiration of oratorios. It was as though the whole nation was being deliberately disciplined into the imperial fervour.

That small kilted boy, for instance, when he returns to his preparatory school at the end of the holidays, will not often be allowed to forget that he is born to an imperial heritage. Every day’s curriculum reminds him. School prayers, for a start, will doubtless include a prayer for the Queen-Empress and her subjects across the world, may well include a sermon about imperial responsibilities or missionary needs, and is very likely to end with some devotional hymn of Empire. Refulgent upon the classroom wall will hang the map of the world, on Mercator’s projection preferably, for no other shows to such advantage the lavish slabs of red which mark the authority of the British—and perhaps a shipping chart, demonstrating by its distribution of boat-shaped blobs how overwhelming is the British maritime power—and possibly some inspiring steel engraving too, Caton Woodfield’s famous picture of the Khartoum memorial service, or one of Lady Butler’s celebrated reconstructions of British gallantry in the field.

Is it history this morning? No flabby internationalism in the 1890s. History was not only firmly Anglo-centric, it was also frankly designed to impress upon a pupil the superiority of all things British, and the privilege of being born to the Flag. Or is it Eng Lit? What better textbook than Arthur Stanley’s recent anthology of patriotic verse, with its introduction by the Lord Bishop of Calcutta, late headmaster of Harrow? ‘The song that nerves a nation’s heart’, as is very properly quoted from Tennyson on the title-page, ‘is itself a deed’, and within these pages art and action are certainly allied. Here is ‘The Song of the English Bowmen’, and ‘Private of the Buffs’—here Drake’s Drum sounds down the years, and here Wolfe dies once more on the Plains of Abraham—all to the glory of Britain and her Empire, for as the Bishop observes rather obscurely in his preface, an Empire lives not by bread alone.
1

Luncheon nevertheless, in school hall, and perhaps there is some
old boy at high table, home from the war, swaggering in red and gleaming brass, and reminiscing airily to the envious masters all about. To the cricket field next, nursery of England’s style, where Newbolt’s verses echo always, if not among the players, at least among the umpires—

And when our little friend goes to bed after prep that night, to a good read under the blankets, there G. A. Henty awaits him no doubt, with his tales of healthy British adventure, or Rider Haggard’s vision of Africa, or perhaps just the
Boy’s
Own
Paper,
the
B.O.P
., in which the pluck of British youth is for ever matched, and for ever victorious, against wickedness, savagery and foreignness.

There was no escaping it, breakfast to lights out, and to most people, in the full flush of Omdurman and Fashoda, it simply seemed inevitable. The Empire was as immemorial as the Palace of Westminster itself—which, though it had been built less than half a century before, was popularly assumed to be as old as anything.

This was partly because the long reign of Queen Victoria had given the British a sense of organic permanence. Foreign countries had coups or revolutions, invaded one another, replaced kings with Emperors. Britain progressed differently, quietly, steadily, as though
the history of a nation was a direct paradigm of human life, and was simply part of the universal ageing process. So it surely was with the Empire. The idea that Kitchener had not really gone to the Sudan to avenge Gordon, but to forestall foreign competition in Africa, would strike most people as sophistry, if not actually sacrilege. Every Englishman was born, wrote George Bernard Shaw, with a miraculous power that made him master of the world. ‘When he wants a thing, he never tells himself he wants it. He waits patiently until there comes into his mind, no one knows how, a burning conviction that it is his moral and religious duty to conquer those who possess the thing he wants. Then he becomes irresistible.’

Even the rank and file of the imperial activists, the soldiers, the administrators, the merchants in the field, did not generally think of imperialism as power politics. The Empire was there, it was patently beneficial, they would do their best for it. The old idea of an imperial trusteeship had been transmuted by Kipling into the more readily comprehensible image of the White Man’s Burden—

Most rank-and-file British imperialists, at the end of the nineteenth century, would probably admit to these sentiments as their own, especially as they were tinged with complaint—‘the blame of those ye better, the hate of those ye guard’. The Empire-builder often felt himself to be unappreciated. The ingratitude of subjects, the lack of material reward, the interference of politicians, the ignorance of intellectuals—all these figured often in letters home from Kodok or Kidderpore, and perhaps made the writers feel all the more noble. It was seldom, however, a grumble about the life itself. For many imperialists theirs was a true calling, often transmitted through generations in the imperial service.

For on this, the professional level of Empire, the idea of service really was paramount. The imperial classes, trained with such precision by the public schools and ancient universities, were bred
to it, and Joseph Conrad the Pole thought love of service, even more than love of adventure, to be the first characteristic of the Englishman in his Empire.

And if to the public at home Empire was a craze, to the man in the field it was often a perennial fascination, for the imperial profession catered for every preference. The most esoteric speciality could be pursued somewhere under the Crown, and over the years the Empire had built up a vast corporate body of knowledge, scientific, anthropological, strategic, economic. Each extension of Empire widened this expertise. Hardly were the imperial soldiers on the Upper Nile than the imperial hydrologists were following them: after the gun came the butterfly net.

Only in the British Army, for instance, would there be supply officers ready to demonstrate that the number of camels needed to carry
x
loads
y
stages into Afghanistan might vary according to the formula
14x
((15/32)
y—1
). Only a British diplomat, perhaps, told by a Persian Prince that the ink-stain on a new treaty was ‘a mole upon its face’, would be able instantly to reply with a quotation from Hafiz—‘I would give all Samarkand and Bokhara for the Indian-dark mole on the face of my lady-love.’ The handful of Englishmen who supervised the affairs of Sikkim in the 1890s produced a huge folio volume listing everything there was to know about the State, its flora and fauna, its history, its legal code, its folk-customs, its geology, its religion, down to Scorpion Charms against Injury by Demons and Jungle Fruits, &c, Eaten by Lepchas.
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The literary works of Elias Ney, British Agent at Meshed in 1896, included
An
Apocryphal
Inscription
in
Khorassan,
A
Journey
Through
Western
Mongolia,
an introduction to the history of the Shans of Upper Burma, and a translation with learned notes of
The
Tarikh-i-Rashidi,
by Miza Haidar of Kashgar. Flora Annie Steel’s
Complete
Indian
Housekeeper
, 1892, dedicated to ‘Those English Girls to whom Fate
may assign the task of being Housemothers in our Eastern Empire’, told its readers how to build a camp-oven, how to make snipe pudding or mange ointment for dogs, how to treat cows with colic or husbands with prickly heat, the best means of keeping sparrows out of the house, the cost of hiring a bullock-drawn van in Ootacamund, the Tamil word for horse-barley, the right underwear to take to the Punjab, the proper way to load a camel and the only correct recipe for boot-dubbin (fish oil, mutton suet and resin).

Languages especially were an imperial concern. The Englishman might be notorious for his inability to learn French or German, but the most unlikely members of the imperial services, dim infantry subalterns or district officers reserved to the point of misanthropy, seemed able to master Burmese or Arabic, Nguni or Fijian. Many languages were first lexicographed by the British: some were first put into writing by them. The young Charles Bell, Indian Civil Service, posted to Darjeeling in 1900, so mastered Tibetan that in only four years he was able to publish his indispensable Tibetan Dictionary: the hooked alphabet of the Cree language was the only surviving memorial to the Welsh Wesleyan missionary James Evans, otherwise expunged from history owing to alleged misconduct with squaws.

The mastery of technique was the key to authority, whether it was knowing more about soil composition, or understanding the historical origins of Honduran folklore, and most of the imperial administrators were diligent in their specialities. It was a diligent Empire. As ‘A Gentleman of Experience’ wrote in his
Guide
to
the
Native
Languages
of
Africa
(1890), ‘In the matter of language it is always better to go to a little more trouble and learn the exact equivalent if possible. “I am an Englishman and require instant attention to the damage done to my solar topee” is far better than any equivocation that may be meant well but will gain little respect.’

Behind this decency and conscientiousness, though, beyond the naive ardour of the general public, very different energies directed the affairs of Empire. Of the few dozen men who really ran the British
Empire in the dangerous years after the Diamond Jubilee, scarcely one or two were English gentlemen as the world knew the breed. Some were cosmopolitans. Some were eccentrics outside the genial English pattern. Some had married foreigners. Some
were
foreigners.

Lord Salisbury the Prime Minister was an aristocratic original, an amateur electrician whose hobby was riding a tricycle around his ancient estate, and who often did not recognize his own Cabinet colleagues. Joseph Chamberlain the Colonial Secretary was a Birmingham screw manufacturer, a Unitarian by creed, a dandy by pose, who had seized upon Empire as a means of political advance. Lord Cromer the ruler of Egypt was the great-grandson of a Hamburg merchant. Lord Milner the High Commissioner in South Africa was a German-trained lawyer of authoritarian principles. Lord Curzon the Viceroy of India was an intellectual landowner of almost preposterous grandeur, with a faint Midlands accent and an insatiable ambition. Lord Kitchener had spent so long abroad that he knew almost nothing of English life. Cecil Rhodes was a half-crazed visionary who wanted the whole world British—‘the moon too, I often think of that.’ Edward Elgar the maestro of Empire, having left school at fifteen, conducted the band of a Worcestershire lunatic asylum, married the daughter of an Indian Army general, and was a devout Catholic. Rudyard Kipling the imperial laureate, having started life as a newspaper reporter in Lahore, married a domineering American, dabbled in mysticism and wrote short stories no simple soldier could understand.