Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (58 page)

It was too late anyway. The return to the conquered territories might provide a transient satisfaction to the British, but it convinced nobody, least of all the subject inhabitants. The Empire could never be the same again. As the war proceeded the British had become progressively weaker than their gigantic allies, and more dependent upon American supplies and equipment. We see Churchill still sitting as an equal with Roosevelt and Stalin at the Yalta Conference, deciding the future of the world; we find Lord Wavell, Viceroy of India, deciding in 1944 that the British were ‘a very great nation, greater than the American, and would remain so’; but it was more force of habit, or hope, than political truth. There was pathos to Churchill’s insistence, after the collapse of Germany in 1945, that the American fleets in the Pacific should be joined by a British battle-fleet—so slow, so ill-equipped, so inexperienced in Pacific fighting, that it was an embarrassment to its American commanders. When it all ended the British were unmistakably junior partners in the Grand Alliance, and the grandeur of the reassembled Empire, as its Governors and District Commissioners resumed their plumes, privileges and responsibilities, was a somewhat hollow kind of consequence.

Yet as the world generously recognized, it had been, all in all, a fine conclusion to all the struggles, honourable and iniquitous, victorious or disastrous, by which the British Empire had established its presence across the world. It had been a last glimpse of greatness for the British—through the muddle and the miseries, as Churchill said, ‘weary and worn, impoverished but undaunted, we had a moment that was sublime.’ For a year or two the British peoples everywhere, whatever their colour, shared in the triumph and the honour. Who could ever forget the dark days of 1940, the Colonial Chaplain of British Honduras asked his congregation at a victory thanksgiving service? Not, it seemed, the British Hondurans, several thousand miles though they were from the nearest bomb or shell. ‘It was with firm eyes and dry lips,’ the clergymen reminded his listeners, ‘and with a pregnant silence which surprised the world that we met those very dark days….’

The full meaning of the Last War escaped the British at the time. They thought they were destroying a truly bestial enemy, but they
were also destroying themselves and their heritage. Even their leaders, it seemed, seldom perceived this truth, and read in the story of the war only its heroic texts. Harold Macmillan, a future Prime Minister of Great Britain, was present at the victory parade in Tunis which marked the end of the campaigns in North Africa—the first in which American arms participated. The omens he read into the occasion were inspiring, but altogether false. First in the parade came the French and their colonial troops, brisk and colourful, then the Americans, young, tall and rather callow. A long pause followed, and Macmillan began to wonder if there had been a hitch in the arrangements. But no: faint, strange and magnificent over the crest of the road came the skirl of bagpipes, and then in a slow and steady pace the massed pipers of the British armies swung tremendously past the reviewing stand, followed by 14,000 bronzed and cocky British veterans of the desert war, each division led by its general. ‘These men seemed on that day’, Macmillan recorded, ‘masters of the world and heirs of the future.’

In one sense they were. Even when the war ended, when Russian and American power was vastly greater than British, they controlled more territory than they ever had before. Not only was the whole of their Empire restored to them, not only did they share with their allies the governance of Germany, Austria and Italy, but to an unprecedented degree the Mediterranean was a British lake. It was an imperialist’s dream. The whole of the North African littoral, the whole of the Levant was held by British arms, southern Persia was occupied and even Greece was more or less a British sphere of influence. With imperial armies deployed across the world, with a Royal Navy of 3,500 fighting ships and a Royal Air Force of unparalleled prestige, in theory the British Empire was a Power as never before, and the ageing Churchill, intoxicated by the honour of it all, was determined to keep it so. Things had worked out pretty well, he told an exuberant London audience. ‘The British Commonwealth and Empire stands more united and more effectively powerful than at any time in its long romantic history.’

And if it was illusory, if the British victory was a defeat disguised, if the propagandists had given the people some false ideas about themselves and their prospects, if the Empire was not so united and
powerful as Churchill suggested, if the grand euphoria of 1945 was all too soon to dissolve, still there was much to be proud of. They had stayed the terrible course, start to finish. They had lived up to the best in themselves and their civilization. For a few years the British Empire had achieved the condition, nothing to do with imperialism, which Burke had desired for England long before—not an England ‘amusing itself with the puppet-show of power’, but ‘sympathetic with the adversity or with the happiness of mankind, feeling that nothing in human affairs was foreign to her’.

I
T did not last long. The Churchills and the Macmillans might respond to glory still, the blood-bonds of Empire were momentarily strengthened by the experience of victory, British prestige in Europe stood higher than ever before, but still the mass of the British people were not interested in power or influence. A tremendous home-sickness seized the exhausted armies, and a sense of duty completed, chapters closed, lay upon the now shabby homeland. The people wanted only to live quietly and comfortably, and disillusioned as they had been by the torments of slump and unemployment in the 1930s, they saw in the aftermath of war the chance to make a fresh start—not in the distant fields of Empire, but in their own familiar island. They would not be gulled again by illusions of splendour. Churchill was dismissed from office at the first chance, and went smouldering off to write his war memoirs and to complete his
History
of
the
English-Speaking
Peoples.
1
The Labour Government which took office under Clement Attlee in 1945 dedicated itself to social reform at home, internationalism abroad. The British Empire was held momentarily in abeyance, so to speak, while the new rulers of Great Britain decided what best to do with it.

Foreigners had firmer ideas, and the general opinion was, in the years after the Second World War, that it should now be abolished. Hitler indeed, before his death in 1945, had announced it to be doomed already, and called Churchill its grave-digger. ‘It is at an end’, he wrote venomously in the last weeks of his life. ‘It has been mortally wounded. The future of the British people is to die of hunger and tuberculosis in their cursed island.’

The Americans viewed the British Empire confusedly. There was still a powerful class of Anglophiles in the United States, especially in the Protestant Establishment of the east, and there was an inherited respect for the presence and the experience of the English, and for the common origins of the two nations—the imperial troops under his command, said a victory message from the American General Douglas MacArthur to Mr Attlee, had proved themselves ‘fully worthy of the immortal tradition of our race’. British influence was still strong in Washington, for all the new disparities of power: through personal friendships and family connections, through the Common Law and analogous institutions, through the presence, always around the seats of power, of American Rhodes Scholars from Oxford. The Special Relationship, the Anglo-American axis forged during the war, survived into the peace, and made Britain, even in her straitened circumstances, more than a client State, but rather like a family adviser past the peak of his career.

This esteem and understanding did not generally extend to the British Empire. Nearly all Americans had been brought up to distrust the very notion of imperialism, whether they were descendants of American revolutionaries or refugees from the old tyrannies of the European continent. The Americans had experienced an imperialist spasm themselves, in the 1890s, when Kipling was moved to urge them to ‘take up the White Man’s burden’ by occupying the Philippines. They had soon grown out of it, though, and indeed considered themselves the divinely appointed executors of universal self-determination, rather as the British had considered themselves entitled to interfere with slavery anywhere in the previous century. They had neglected the sacred task between the wars, by abandoning the League of Nations and withdrawing into isolationism, but the end of imperialism in the abstract, which meant British imperialism in the palpable, was certainly among their aims in the Second World War. They were astonishingly ignorant about the nature of the British Empire—it was commonly supposed even in Detroit and Chicago that Canada was ruled from London:
1
but they were
generally convinced that whatever its nature was, it was reprehensible.

In July 1941 Churchill went to Newfoundland to draw up with President Roosevelt the Atlantic Charter, a pietistic declaration of war aims. Churchill was determined to do it in the imperial style. He sailed on board the battleship
Prince
of
Wales
,
fresh from the battle in which the greatest of German warships,
Bismarck
,
had been sunk in the north Atlantic, six months from her own end in the China Sea: and it was beneath her 14-inch gun turrets, as the ship lay in Placentia Bay, off the southern coast of the island, that the two leaders were photographed at the end of their talks, surrounded by all the ancient circumstance of the Royal Navy. The Charter, however, which the Prime Minister found himself obliged to sign was anything but an imperial document, for it referred specifically to ‘the right of all people to choose the form of Government under which they live’. Churchill tried vainly to write in a clause excluding the British Empire from this awkward philosophy, and lamely explained, when he returned to London, that it was ‘primarily intended to apply to Europe’. It was not, though. It was intended to apply to Empires everywhere, not least Churchill’s own.

The Americans certainly did not propose to support the British Empire after the war, however special the Special Relationship. Roosevelt himself was a vehement critic of the Empire—‘the British would take land anywhere in the world,’ he once remarked, ‘even if it were only a rock or a sandbar.’ ‘Quit fighting a war to hold the Empire together’,
Life
magazine demanded in 1942, and wherever in the course of the fighting the Americans came into contact with the imperial presence, they nibbled away at its authority, by diplomacy, by economic strategy, by example. As early as 1942 Roosevelt was suggesting to Churchill that India should be given immediate Dominion status, with freedom to secede from the Empire altogether—but of course, he disingenuously added, ‘all you good people know far more about it than I do.’ In the following year Lord Linlithgow, the Viceroy, had to ask the India Office to stop the 
flow of ‘well-meaning sentimentalists from the United States to India, so that we may mind here what is still, I suppose, our own business’. In the last years of the war Colonel Louis Johnson, Roosevelt’s personal representative in New Delhi, frequently maddened the British with his interfering ways, though Churchill, recognizing the priorities of the day, always restrained his resentments—‘Anything like a serious difference between you and me’, he wrote to Roosevelt after one particularly irritating intervention, ‘would break my heart.’

In the Far East the Americans were especially determined that Hong Kong, when it was liberated from the Japanese, should be handed over to their Chinese ally Chiang Kai-shek. They considered themselves to have special interests in China, and the end of the British Empire on the Chinese coast became almost an
idée
fixe
of the State Department. In 1941 it was suggested that Britain should sell the colony to the Chinese, the cost being met by the U.S. Treasury. In 1943 Roosevelt urged that Britain should give it up ‘as a gesture of good will’. At Yalta he suggested privately to Stalin that it might be internationalized as a free port. When Hong Kong was liberated in 1945 it was only the immediate action of one Briton, the former Colonial Secretary Franklin Gimson, that kept it British—the moment he emerged from Stanley Prison, after three years of imprisonment, he ran up the Union Jack over Government House and resumed the colonial administration on his own initiative.

Nor were the American anti-imperialists much appeased by the disappearance of the die-hard Churchill and the advent of a pacific and reformist Socialist Government in Britain. On the contrary, now they feared the development of a
socialist
Empire—tea, rubber, tin and cocoa, reported the
New
Y
ork
Times
gloomily in August 1945, would probably all be nationalized. For economically the Americans were determined that in the reformed post-war world they would be dominant. They had always resented the imperial tariff systems, and they saw in the melee of the war their chance to break into vast new imperial markets. By 1946 their commerce was irresistible. The dollar had succeeded the pound as the chief world currency, and the American industrial machine, far from being debilitated by the war, like the British, was buoyant and productive as never before. Britain
had lost enormous overseas assets, a loss calculated by John Maynard Keynes as thirty-five times that of the United States, while Lend-Lease, the American programme of war aid for Britain, had ensured that the entire British industrial machine was devoted to war production, so that when peace came again British technology could not compete with American. By 1946 Great Britain, for so long the greatest exporter in the world, was outclassed by the United States: American products of every kind, backed often by American loans, flooded the markets of the world, satisfying demands frustrated by four years of war, and elbowing out of the way many an old British trader, trying to recover customers and profits after the catastrophe.

By their example too, their style and their irresistible panache, the Americans irrevocably damaged the Empire. Their fleets and armies, pouring into the imperial territories, were like Hollywood come to life, offering dazzling new substitutes for the imperial way. Wherever they went the Americans presented an overwhelming image of opulence, vigour and generosity, more compelling by far than the dry modes of Empire. They cheerfully disregarded the old imperial taboos and superstitions, like the vital necessity of wearing topees in the tropic sun.
1
They lacked the proper sahibs’ aloofness, they laughed at the carefully devised orthodoxies of the imperial system, passed so reverently from generation to generation of imperialist. And they had quite patently inherited from the British the magnetism of power. It was the Pax Americana now. ‘Australia looks to America,’ declared the Australian Prime Minister, John Curtin, ‘free of any pangs as to our traditional link or kinship with the United Kingdom,’ and young men throughout the Empire, of all races, turned to the American example as successor to, or relief from, the British manner of things.

All this was not immediately plain. It was like a shifting of transparent screens, the one set subtly, almost imperceptibly, replacing another. The existence of the Empire made the two Powers feel more like equals, and few Englishmen realized that the population
of Great Britain was now no more than a third that of the United States (in 1897, Diamond Jubilee year, it had been almost a half). On most conscious levels Britons and Americans remained friends and allies. The Pilgrim Society still avidly toasted Anglo-American amity,
1
the Rhodes Foundation still welcomed its scholars from Yale or Idaho, American servicemen paid sentimental visits to their wartime airfields in East Anglia, the Daughters of the American Revolution devotedly recalled the unvarying dukedoms of their English pedigree. Churchill was far more devoutly honoured in America than he was in England.

But it was happening all the same, and as the British presence began to fade beneath palm and pine, so the Americans stepped in with a jazzier hymn and a bourbon on the rocks—making a welcome change, so even some Englishmen thought, from the eternal gin and tonic.

A more baleful view of the Empire prevailed in Moscow. This was only to be expected. Even in Tsarist days, as we have seen, Russia was considered the most insidious of the Empire’s enemies, and the Bolshevik Revolution had done nothing to ease the mutual suspicion. Just the opposite, for while the Tsarist threat had been purely strategic, the massive pressure of one expanding empire upon another, the Communist threat was profoundly ideological. Lenin had defined imperialism as the last stage of capitalism, and Ireland had always been the Marxist archetype of oppression: now the anathema was extended to the whole colonial empire. Over the Himalaya in Tsarist times there had been an enemy indeed, but an enemy not so different in kind from the British themselves, whose Mongolian agents and Cossacks in disguise talked much the same language as the spies and adventurers sent from British India. Now there brooded beyond the steppes a different kind of enemy altogether, altogether alien and virtually beyond communication.

Now there was no frontier with Russia—or rather, the frontier was everywhere, and the Great Game was played in every continent.
The very name of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics indeed, containing as it did no territorial reference at all, implied that frontiers were artificial anyway, and eventually disposable. Churchill’s alliance with Soviet Russia, concluded in the desperation of war, was purely opportunist. He detested Communism, and had consistently and frankly opposed it since he had first sent troops to fight the Bolshevik armies in the winter of 1918. All his fine words about Russian heroism and brotherhood, the propaganda adulation of the Red Army, the jewelled Sword of Stalingrad sent to Russia in tribute by the British people, the perilous convoys taking supplies to Murmansk, the Hurricane fighters sent to fly with the Red Air Force—all this meant nothing, beyond the immediate necessities of war. There was hardly a true point of sympathy between the two Powers. They were altogether antipathetic, and
au fond
they wanted nothing better than the extinction of the other.

It was ‘ridiculous’, Stalin had once observed to Ribbentrop, Hitler’s Foreign Minister, ‘that a few hundred Englishmen should dominate India’. It was also heretical, for it did not fit the Communist dogma. The Marxist view of history as a purely economic process meant that Empire too was simply an instrument of capitalist profit. No allowance was made for quirk or anomaly, sentiment or habit. ‘Imperialism’ was something much more cruel, much more sinister than a handful of elderly Englishmen filling in forms in Simla. It was racialism, exploitation, capitalism, all mixed up, and was presently to become the favourite pejorative of the entire Marxist glossary.

For some years after the war the Russians seemed to let the Empire be. They were as exhausted as the British by the conflict, and they were inhibited perhaps by the fact that American nuclear power dictated the state of the world. Unlike the Americans, too, they seemed to miss the truth of the British decline, and far from depicting the Empire as a decaying and impotent tyrant, greatly overstressed its power. It was a decade before they achieved any obvious success in the imperial territories, and generally they behaved towards the British presence with no more than a timid kind of disrespect, like schoolboys trying to mock the headmaster.