Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (54 page)

They were not of course really as straightforward as that. That was the projection. Some in fact were unhappy men, working out
their disappointments, some were running away from more complex challenges, some were very conceited, some fiercely ambitious to be famous. Some were neurotics, some poseurs. One disappointed his comrades by packing his bags and disappearing the moment their expedition seemed to have failed—not, they thought, the proper team spirit. One presently took to running nude through the lounges of respectable Swiss hotels. This is how George Leigh Mallory, who died on Everest in 1924, wrote home about the adventure: ‘I sometimes think of this expedition as a fraud from beginning to end invented by the wild enthusiasm of one man—Younghusband, puffed up by the would-be wisdom of certain pundits in the Alpine Club, and imposed upon the youthful ardour of your humble servant.’

Mallory, the author of that sublime bathos ‘Because it’s there’, was variously described by his contemporaries and climbing colleagues as a ‘stout-hearted baby’, an ‘unimaginable English boy’, and ‘the magical spirit of youth personified’—‘George Mallory!’ quivered Lytton Strachey. ‘My hand trembles, my heart palpitates, my whole being swoons away at the words—oh heavens! heavens!’ Howard Somervell, who reached 28,000 feet on Everest in 1924, stayed in India for twenty-two years as a mission doctor in Travancore, abandoning his career as a London consultant, becoming an admirer of Gandhi and an advocate of Love as the ultimate political force. Hugh Boustead, who went in 1933, was the first man to be pardoned for deserting the Royal Navy, having jumped ship to join the army in search of action in the Great War. Three Everesters became university professors, three became generals, one became a Conservative MP and one Governor of the Gambia.

So they were very varied men really, individualists, often of striking and unexpected talent. To the monks of Rongbuk, nevertheless, they doubtless looked all of a piece, and to the public at home too, which watched the successive Everest attempts with a less than hysterical interest, the Everesters seemed a homogeneous company. They were gentlemen-adventurers of the imperial frontiers. Their doings were reported in despatches exclusive to
The
Times.
Their leaders were generals, or landed gentry. They talked Oxford English, and they liked to come down from the mountain, if possible, to
champagne and chicken in aspic—or alternatively, to porridge and a cold bath. They were sahibs—a Party of Sahibs, as the Tibetans rightly said—and as such they were figures of Empire, a type becoming more remote, more misty, a little more risible as the decades drew on, but still recognizable as a category of Briton, lounging gregariously beneath the flag on meadow, scree or ice-flow.
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So long as the Raj lasted in India, they never succeeded in climbing Everest, but that was not the point.

More than ever now, perhaps, when success no longer seemed a national privilege, the British cherished their heroic failures. Of all the Great War battles, the all-but-victory of Gallipoli most bewitched the British imagination, and of all the imperial adventurers, none stirred the British memory like Captain Robert Falcon Scott, courageous always, gentlemanly to the last, devoted, diligent, second to the South Pole, and dead.
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Perhaps it was the elegiac instinct: as though the British sensed that ahead of them lay one last great adventure of another kind,
unwanted, unprofitable but magnificent, in which they would sacrifice not simply their lives, but their greatness too. In 1935 T. E. Lawrence, having withdrawn into pseudo-anonymity as an aircraftsman in the Royal Air Force, riding his motorcycle fast through Dorset, crashed and killed himself. A rumour ran through the country then, an Arthurian whisper, that he was not killed at all, but that, spirited away by Authority to secret duties, he would reappear when the moment came, when Drake’s Drum beat perhaps, to lead the British once more triumphantly against their enemies.
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For if the spirit of Empire flickered dimly among the British now, the sense of destiny lay there still. This was a people bred to great things, after all, feeling itself a great nation still, equipped socially and historically for high enterprise. The Britain of the 1930s, timid and insular as it seems in retrospect, did not feel itself to be provincial. On the contrary, most Englishmen, of all classes, believed Piccadilly Circus to be the centre of the world, and assumed as a matter of course that in any new historical movement, any change in the world’s direction, the British would play a leading part. There was a part of the British instinct which hungered still for challenge: the collective unconscious, to use Carl Jung’s recently fashionable phrase, seemed to demand an element of trial or sacrifice, so that the people were at their best in times of hardship. The imperial adventurers of the post-war decades may have seemed anachronistic, compensating for the tremendous past in often unnecessary derring-do, but they were perhaps more representative than they seemed, and there were ordinary working men in England then who looked back to the miseries of the Somme itself as the richest period of their lives.

The British were no longer an aggressive or even an expansionist people. The imperial urge was over, and they no longer felt it to be their duty, still less their privilege, to be the arbiters of the world. But they were still intensely patriotic, convinced that on the whole
their ways were superior to foreign ways, and still, as a rule of thumb, dedicated to Fair Play as the British approximation of the Sermon on the Mount.

If it was their weakness diplomatically, it was their truest moral strength: and so it led them in the end into the noblest of all their adventures, the most Pyrrhic of their victories, the last war of the British Empire.

H
ITLER went to war, wrote King George VI of England in his diary in September 1939, ‘with the knowledge that the whole might of the British Empire would be against him’. Fair Play was at stake, besides much else. As the good and simple monarch added, the British people were ‘resolved to fight until Liberty and Justice are once again safe in the World’. Political theorists would argue that the Second World War had economic causes, or sprang from the inequities of the Treaty of Versailles. To most Britons, though, as to their King, it was started by an evil man in pursuance of wicked ends, and the rightness of the cause was never in doubt. Hitler and his allies were Bad: in this context at least Britain and her Empire were Good.

So the Last War assumed, for the British, a heroic quality. They alone fought the three great enemies—Germany, Japan and Italy—first to last. They alone held the breach in the dangerous months after the fall of France in 1940. Once again, and for the last time, their fleets and armies fought across the world, and the imperial strongholds from Bermuda to Hong Kong stood to their arms. The Empire did not always fight well. There were sorry defeats, timid failures, constant muddles and recriminations. Generals were all too often in the Great War mould.
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Still on the whole it was a grand performance in a noble purpose, a swan song of some splendour, and a worthy last display of the imperial scale and brotherhood. ‘Alone at last!’ ran the caption in a 1940 cartoon by David Low, and went 
on to answer itself, for there behind the resolute Tommy, steel-helmeted on the Dover cliffs, extended in endless line of march the soldiers of the overseas Empire, massed once more. A cherished cable from the Caribbean was received in Whitehall that same summer. ‘Carry on Britain!’ it said. ‘Barbados is behind you!’

This time it was unmistakably an imperial war. Hitler himself professed to have no quarrel with the British Empire, and would certainly have preferred the British as allies rather than as enemies. Like so many foreigners, he was seduced by history. He thought of the Empire as it had been, as history and legend made it still. He conceived of it as aristocratic, ubiquitous, imperturbable, immensely experienced. He admired the supposed consistency of British policy—‘foreign policy become a tradition’—and the latent brutality and toughness that was, he said, common both to the national leaders of England and to the mass of its peoples. ‘I do not wish the crown of the British Empire to lose any of its pearls, for that would be a catastrophe to mankind.’ Common-sense, he said, suggested a free hand for Germany in Europe, for Britain elsewhere. Otherwise a great Empire would be utterly destroyed, ‘an Empire which it was never my intention to harm’.

But the British Empire, when once the die was cast, would have none of him. Mackenzie King, the Prime Minister of Canada, warned him that if he ever turned against England ‘there would be great numbers of Canadians anxious to swim the Atlantic’, and so it proved. ‘In that dark, terrific, and also glorious hour’, wrote Winston Churchill in retrospect of 1940, ‘we received from all parts of His Majesty’s Dominions, from the greatest to the smallest… the assurance that we would all go down or come through together.’ This was, besides being not absolutely true, by no means a foregone conclusion, for by 1939 the Empire was far more diffuse than it had been in 1914. Then the King had declared war, in a single proclamation, on behalf of all his peoples. Now he was several kings in one, and there was no formal alliance among his separate Dominions, no constitutional obligation to go to war at all.

Ireland indeed never did, and was represented in Germany throughout the war by an Ambassador accredited in the name of King George. The Australians and New Zealanders declared war at once, soon sending almost all their trained soldiers to the other side of the world, but the South Africans decided only after bitter Parliamentary debates which side they wanted to be on, while the Canadians declared war on Germany after Great Britain, on Japan before Great Britain, and never declared war on Bulgaria at all. As for the 400 million people of India, they were committed to war by the sole word of their Viceroy, a Scottish nobleman, who consulted no Indians on the matter.

Still, as the King said, ‘the whole might of the Empire’ was presently mustered—even the Catholic Irish volunteered in their thousands for the British Army. The British had no expansionist war aims this time. They hoped the Empire and Commonwealth would survive the struggle intact, but no more. They coveted no new provinces. Their purposes were as altruistic as political purposes ever are, sharpened perhaps by a sense of shame about the indecisive years between the wars. If they did not go into battle in the sacramental spirit of 1914, they had apparently not inherited the disillusionment of 1918. Few of the old imperialist issues were at stake now—the British were no longer Thinking Imperially, as Joe Chamberlain had urged them to—but many of the imperial impulses found a fresh fulfilment. That old yearning for excitement came into its own once again, and helped the people through the ordeals of blitz, battle and separation. The aggressive instinct resurfaced, legitimized by war. Racy characters of the imperial legend reappeared from clubs or offices, to rediscover themselves in commando raids, parachute drops or weird prodigies of intelligence. The nation came to life again, as it had in the ebullient years of the New Imperialism, in a last flare of the commanding spirit.

This time the very existence of the Empire was at stake. Germany might have no designs upon it, but Japan and Italy certainly did. The Japanese envisaged a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere embracing all the British eastern territories, India to Hong Kong, and perhaps Australia and New Zealand too. The Italians let it be known that they wanted Malta and Cyprus as Italian possessions, 
Egypt, Iraq and the Sudan as Italian protectorates, and Gibraltar as an international port.

At the same time Britain’s chief foreign allies in the struggle were hardly less dedicated to the redistribution of the Empire. Nations seldom go to war for old times’ sake, and in the Second World War the British Empire was fighting alongside allies whose ideologies were specifically hostile to the imperial idea. The United States had actually come into being in reaction to Empire, and still earnestly supported the principle of self-determination for all peoples, while the Soviet Union equated Imperialism with Capitalism as surely as the muscular Christians of the previous century had associated cleanliness with God. It was plain that when the war against Hitler’s Axis was over, these ambiguous associates would see to it that the British imperial era was ended. Britain would obviously be bled white by the war, and had no chance of remaining one of the great Powers, when the world sorted itself out again after the battle. Even the staunch Dominions, loyally though they sprang yet again to arms, could hardly suppose that the British Empire would survive another such reshuffling of interests, and subtly shifted their attitudes and allegiances as the war progressed.

But the British put it all out of their minds, and fought on, once more, as though they meant it. Theatrical arts had always been essential to their imperial methods, and in this their last exhibition they excelled themselves. Their initial defeat, their expulsion from the European mainland in 1940, they presented as the triumph of Dunkirk. Their initial success, the Battle of Britain later that year, they shamelessly exploited and exaggerated. Hitler thought their war propaganda ‘wonderful’, and by their skill in it, by the magic of their historical reputation, they convinced half the world that they were uniquely brave in adversity, subtlest in perception, most unanimous in patriotism. The BBC was much the most trusted of the wartime broadcasting services, and the legend of the British patrician style, eccentric and assured, was assiduously cherished—handsome Lord Lovat at the head of his Lovat Scouts, General Carton de Wiart with his arm-sling and his black patch, or the astonishing Admiral Sir Walter Cowan, who had won the DSO with Kitchener in the Sudan in 1898, and got a bar to it when he was 
seventy-three for his services with the Royal Marine Commandos.

And persistently it was as an Empire that the British presented themselves. In fact the possession of the Empire vastly increased their burdens and anxieties, but they interpreted it as a mighty asset, so that it never occurred to their own people, whatever their enemies sometimes thought, that on balance they might be safer without it. On the face of it, as David Low had suggested, it was an enormous reservoir of manpower and materials. More than 5 million fighting troops were raised by the British Empire, and there was hardly a campaign in which imperial troops did not play a part, sometimes a predominant part. Australians and New Zealanders fought in North Africa, Italy, the Far East, the Pacific. South Africans fought in North and East Africa and Italy. Canadians provided half the front-line defence of England in 1940, a quarter of the pilots of the RAF, and a sizeable proportion of the invasion force that went back to the European continent in 1943. Indians, forming the largest volunteer army in history, fought almost everywhere, and volunteers from the remotest and most insignificant of the imperial possessions, from Ascension Island and the Seychelles, from the Falklands and British Guiana, somehow found their way across the oceans to the British forces, the flashes sewn to their uniform tunics bringing an uplifting suggestion of far-flung brotherhood to the wartime London scene. Thousands of Englishmen were trained to fly in Canada. Jan Smuts, twenty years on and Prime Minister of South Africa again, resumed his place in the imperial councils, and this time became a Field Marshal too.

At their head, from the summer of 1940, stood that incorrigible imperialist romantic, Winston Churchill. His view of Empire was flexible, but he played the old theme unblushingly. If Britain fell, he said, he would continue the war from Canada, and thither the fleets and armies of the Crown would sail with him—‘I have not become the First Minister of the Crown in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire!’
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When the apes of Gibraltar, traditionally the custodians of British rule, seemed likely to die out, Churchill personally saw to it that new stock was brought in from 
Morocco, and his speeches and messages reverberated with the imperial idiom—‘From all over the Empire and from the bottom of our hearts we send to the Armies of the Nile every good wish for the New Year’—‘I am proud to be a member of that vast commonwealth and society of nations and communities gathered in and around the ancient British monarchy’—‘If the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “this was their finest hour!”’

Churchill lived the imperial theatre. He knew that Powers, like people, are taken at their own valuation, and he behaved always as though Britain were a super-Power, the leader of a great disciplined Empire destined to last a millennium. He approached President Roosevelt the American, Marshal Stalin the Russian, not simply as personal equals, but as political equals too. He spoke as he might have spoken if the Victorian Empire were still at his back, in its unchallengeable zenith. He spoke in imperial hyperboles, saw with an imperial vision, and gave to the British themselves, for the last time, the feeling that they were a special people, with honourable duties all their own.

Without her equivocal allies Britain could never have won the war, and she could no longer defend her Empire single-handed. In the first months of the war the Channel Islands, the oldest overseas possessions of the Crown, were surrendered to the Germans without resistance. Thereafter many an imperial property was attacked, and many lost. British Somaliland, Hong Kong, Burma, Malaya, Singapore, many islands of the Pacific, were taken by the King’s enemies. Egypt was invaded, Australia was bombed, Malta was almost obliterated, enemy submarines penetrated the harbours of Sydney, Muscat and St Lucia. Even the frontiers of India were crossed by enemy armies at last, fulfilling one of the Empire’s oldest nightmares.

Just as, in 1915, the British sought to make a decisive assault by way of the Ottoman Empire, so a generation later they still saw the Middle East as the epicentre of their struggle. The Suez Canal had
become, if not in fact at least in theory, the fulcrum of their power in the world: their oil supplies, their links with India, their dominance of the Arab land mass—all seemed to depend upon their power in Egypt. Before the war their only standing expeditionary force was designed to go, not to France, but to Egypt: at the most crucial moment of the Battle of Britain, when an assault on England seemed imminent, they sent 100 aircraft and an armoured brigade to the eastern Mediterranean. Whatever else might happen Egypt, threatened first by the Italians, then by the Germans, must not fall.

If we think of the imperial armies in the First World War, we think of France and Flanders and Gallipoli. If we think of them in the Second we think of them first, perhaps, in Cairo. Cairo in the 1940s was the last great assembly-point of the imperial power, the last place where, in a setting properly exotic, the imperial legions mingled in their staggering variety. Every kind of imperial uniform was to be spotted in Cairo, in the first years of the war. There were kilts and turbans and tarbooshes, slouch hats and jodhpurs. There were Kenyan pioneers, and Indian muleteers, and Australian tank crews, and English gunners, and New Zealand fighter pilots, and South African engineers. There were scholarly staff officers straight from their Oxford colleges, and swaggering extroverts back from secret missions in the Balkans, and rumbustious troopers of the sheep-station and the surfing beach (‘I look to you to show the Egyptians,’ General Sir Archibald Wavell told the Australians, when they first arrived in Cairo, ‘that their notions of Australians as rough, wild, undisciplined people given to strong drink are incorrect’—but alas, their notions were all too often confirmed).

Cairo had been a pseudo-imperial city for sixty years, and although since 1936 Egypt had been nominally independent, and was officially neutral in the war,
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the whole capital was now in effect a British military base. The British Army still occupied the dismal old Kasr el Nil barracks, in the centre of town beside the Nile, and the British Middle East Command had its headquarters in Garden City, conveniently close to the British Embassy. From Cairo, during the first years of the war, operations were directed all over the nearer 
East. The North African campaigns, the battles for Greece and Crete, the reconquest of British Somaliland, the capture of Ethiopia, the invasion of Syria, the reoccupation of Iraq, the occupation of southern Persia, guerilla war in Jugoslavia—all were organized from Garden City. Aircraft passed this way to India and East Africa. The Royal Navy’s Mediterranean headquarters was up the road at Alexandria.