Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (65 page)

But there, look, swinging briskly around the corner from the Abbey, courteously stepping into the gutter to overtake the pavement secretaries, oblivious it seems to the curses of taxi-drivers—there is a figure you will not find in Copenhagen! He is not a young man now, in his fifties perhaps, and he is slightly stooped, as though a succession of fevers has warped his spine. But he is slim, stringy, rather rangy, and his face is so heavily tanned, not simply a sunburn but a deep, ingrained tincture of brown, that physically he scarcely looks like an Englishman at all. Yet British he unquestionably is, the most British man in sight, his expression, his movement, his every gesture reflecting a Britishness that has almost vanished from England. Even his clothes are yesterday’s. He wears a brown floppy trilby hat, looking as though it has been repeatedly soaked in rainstorms and dried in the sun, and slightly scuffed suede shoes. His overcoat looks like a reconstituted British warm. Tucked under his arm to read in the bus (for one suspects he seldom uses the underground, disliking the fug down there), he carries a book from Harrod’s Library—General Slim’s new volume of memoirs, perhaps, or Alan Moorehead’s
The
White
Nile
—he doesn’t go in for fiction much. On his finger he wears a signet ring, and as he swings his arm one can just see, beneath the sleeve of his tweed sports coat, the glint of oval cuff-links. He wears braces, one wouldn’t wonder.

Is there something wistful to his worn if still agile figure? There is. He looks out of touch, out of time. He meets nobody he knows, for he has few friends in London now; even at the Office it’s all new faces, and he’s never bothered with any of those damned clubs. He
averts his eye from the passing crowd, for to be honest he doesn’t much like the style of Londoners these days. He is not much looking forward to his interview with Sir What’s It, who doesn’t know a bloody thing about Totseland anyway. He doesn’t like the climate. He doesn’t like the traffic. He detests what they’ve done to the South Bank. The young men need a haircut. That play at the Royal Court was a load of old rubbish.

He is a foreigner in his own capital. He is a true exotic among the cosmopolitans. He is the last of the British Empire-builders, home on leave and hating it.

Q
UITE suddenly it was to go, like the whisking away of an opera set on the revolving stage. The brief revival of purpose spluttered out, and even the sages of the Colonial Office acknowledged the truth. ‘Mankind has struck its tents’, pronounced Jan Smuts, ‘and is on the march’, and suddenly the imperial idea seemed not merely distasteful, but preposterous. It was like waking from a dream. Young men from England going out to rule the Ashanti, or preside over the courts of Sarawakis! English civil servants in plumed topees receiving the salaams of potentates! A huge department of State, in a middle-sized nation of western Europe, devoted to the governments of people thousands of miles away! What had seemed to the late Victorians romantically splendid seemed to mid-century Britons perfectly nonsensical. In the fantasies of the Groundnut Scheme and the New Town Plan for Totse City, the imperial conviction trailed away in absurdity.

It was inevitable, for by now the British Empire, for so long the backcloth of world events, had been replaced by newer sets, and players from other companies were in rehearsal. Even in Britain a generation was arising who had never experienced its stimulations, never thrilled to the red on the map, and as its elaborate old scenes were dismantled, one by one, only a few traditionalists in the stalls, English gentlemen, Indian princes, African Knights of the British Empire, sentimentally demanded curtain-calls.

It was in Palestine that the British imperialists, for the first time, frankly abandoned the imperial responsibilities, and there the last
retreat began. ‘No promotion’, Storrs had written, ‘after Jerusalem’, and in a way the possession of the Holy City, and the establishment there of the first Christian Government for a thousand years, had marked the summation of the Empire itself. Jerusalem had set a seal upon the adventure, and the governance of the Holy Land had been the crowning privilege of Victorian imperialism. Yet there the Empire first admitted impotence. The withdrawal from India could be rationalized, even romanticized: the withdrawal from Palestine was without glory.

Exalted though the duty was, Britain’s rule in Palestine had never been happy, for it was based upon equivocals. It was a Mandatory government, for one thing, so that in theory at least the British were not absolute masters. For another it was tinged with the suggestion of betrayal, since so many Arabs, and not a few Britons, believed that Palestine should properly have become part of an independent Arab kingdom. And it was embittered by the ambitions of the Zionists, who had professed to want only a National Home within a multi-racial Palestine, but who really aimed, it had long become apparent, at an independent Jewish State there. The little country, hardly 200 miles from north to south, sacred to three religions, was racked from the start by envy and suspicion, and the benign rule of the British Empire, which made it materially the most advanced country in the Middle East, degenerated over the years into a squalid regime of force and self-protection. Sometimes it was the Arabs who broke the peace, sometimes the Jews, and so inflammatory was the situation after the Second World War, when hundreds of thousands of European Jews desperately sought a new home, that the Holy Land became hardly more than an armed camp.

By now the Zionists, financed by Jews throughout the world, had rooted themselves in cities, farms and desert settlements all over Palestine. Though they were still only a third of the population, they were much better organized than the Arabs, and with their powerful supporters in America, far richer and more influential. The Arabs feared and loathed them, and the British by now, after fluctuations of sympathy, tended on the whole to agree. By 1947 the administration, though theoretically impartial, was virtually at war
with the Jewish activists. Terrorists kidnapped and murdered British soldiers; Jewish settlements were repeatedly raided and searched by the Army; there were ambushes and explosions and reprisals and threats; the whole country was in a state of fear, racked by violence and conspiracy, meshed with barbed wire, and patrolled always by the armoured cars of the Empire.

Jerusalem was ravaged by these miseries. The British had governed it for only thirty years, but with their gift for balance and decorum, their sense of history, their love of things rooted and traditional, they had made it more truly Jerusalem the Golden than it had been for centuries. Never had the Colonial Service possessed such a city, and its officers had guarded it lovingly. The walled city they preserved intact in all its mediaeval intricacy, its cavernous bazaars and its dusty wrinkled alleys—the Muslims meditating in the Haram esh-Sherif, the black-capped Jews pushing their paper supplications into the crevices of the Wailing Wall, the Catholics, the Greeks and the Monophysites incessantly processing, with bells, censers and harsh canonicals, from one shrine to the other of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

Outside the walls New Jerusalem had arisen under the imperial aegis, in golden stone too, but flat-roofed and spacious. Here a new mixture of cultures had been fostered. Here one could see the new generation of westernized Arabs, British-educated and gentlemanly, dressed often in well-cut tweeds or cavalry twill, speaking an exquisite English, and constituting the most highly skilled and widely cultured elite of the Arab world. Beside them the urban Jews flourished, refugees often from Vienna or Berlin, running bookshops, serving scrumptious cakes at Viennese cafés, rehearsing with the Palestine Philharmonic or presiding over intellectual tea-parties behind the Hebrew University. The members of these two communities were not natural enemies: they had much in common, and were much alike: it had been the highest ambition of the British to bring them together, fuse them into a governing class, and so bring their government of Palestine to an honourable conclusion.

But by 1947 they had no such high hopes, the city they had cherished with such pride was all barbed wire and sandbags, and their own presence was defensive, even furtive. Since the war they
had been repeatedly urged to admit more of the millions of Jewish refugees made homeless and destitute by Hitler’s war, and by now the floodgates were almost bursting. The Americans were pressing them; the Jews themselves, desperate from the slums and concentration camps of Europe, were sailing to Palestine in their own rickety steamers, half-submerged with the weight of their passengers, only to be driven off the beaches by British troops, or turned away to internment camps in Cyprus and Mauritius.

The Arabs were no less passionate in opposition, and were supported by the Arab States which ringed Palestine, and so Jerusalem festered in a state of incipient tragedy. High barbed-wire barricades closed the streets to Government offices, armoured cars rumbled ungainly through the city, patrols of infantry laboured along the pavements. Not a generation had passed since Allenby entered Jerusalem in triumph in 1917: yet here were the sons of his soldiers, angry and cynical, keeping the Holy City precariously in order by a perpetual show of weaponry. One wing of the King David Hotel, behind its festoons of wire, lay in ruins, having been blown up by Zionist terrorists. Many of the shops kept their shutters down all day, in case of trouble, and the few people in the streets did not loiter, but did their business briskly and hurried back indoors. Nobody felt safe in Jerusalem now, and sometimes one heard a shot from the suburbs, or a sudden rattle of machine-gun fire.

The British had planned to keep Palestine as a Middle Eastern power base, to replace the Suez Canal Zone, and even now they were building a new military complex near Gaza, in the south: but by the middle of 1947 it was obvious that they could be no more than policemen there. All their energies went into keeping Arabs and Jews from each other’s throats. Two divisions of British troops were committed to this unproductive task, and as the year proceeded, as Jewish pressures increased and Arab resentments mounted, it became more and more like war. Casualties were frequent, the cost was enormous, the public at home wanted nothing of it, the world at large watched the sordid drama without gratitude, blaming the British both for creating the problem, and for failing to solve it.

It had been the imperial intention to establish a self-governing
Arab-Jewish State in Palestine, but even before the war a commission of inquiry had declared the idea unworkable, and had suggested partitioning the country into three—an Arab State, a Jewish State, a British enclave around the Holy Places. After the war the United Nations came to a similar conclusion, and in November 1947 voted for the creation of Arab and Jewish States. The Arabs rejected the plan, the Jews accepted it, the British refused all responsibility for it. Nagged by the United Nations, pestered by the Americans, bewildered by the Zionists, insulted by the Arabs, excoriated by world opinion, exhausted by the strain of it, impoverished by the cost, disillusioned, embittered, in December 1947 the British Government announced that, like Pilate before them, they would have no more of it. They washed their hands of the Holy Land. On May 14, 1948 the last British soldiers embarked on their troopships at Haifa: and even as they sailed away, behind them the disputing peoples of the Holy Land, emerging from their fox-holes and secret arsenals, hurled themselves upon one another, and, splitting the country furiously between them, prepared to live savagely ever after.

Palestine was a declaration. The British would no longer fight to the finish. For old hands this was a bitter realization. Churchill, in opposition, foresaw ‘a steady and remorseless process of divesting ourselves of what has been gained by so many generations of toil, administration and sacrifice’. Many of his supporters argued that parts of the Empire were essential to Britain’s role in the world, however diminished her power. Ernest Bevin himself, Attlee’s Foreign Secretary, had staked his reputation upon finding a solution for Palestine. Later a Conservative Minister was to say of Cyprus that the British Empire could ‘never’ abandon the island of Cyprus, while one of his colleagues was to declare that there were some imperial possessions, Malta for example, which could not for strategic reasons ever hope to rule themselves. They all had to eat their words. The world had overtaken them. When it came to the point the British would never again stick it out to the end, though
partly in self-esteem, partly to ensure a stable succession, they often felt it necessary to offer a brief rearguard action.

So through the fifties and into the sixties, as people after people awoke to the realization of patriotism, or were goaded into it by politicians, the imperial retreat proceeded. The barbed wire and armoured cars of Palestine were duplicated across the world, as successive colonies flared into revolt, and the British Army whose power had so stirred Macmillan at Tunis a decade before was reduced to squalid duties of repression and withdrawal. It was the Easter Rising magnified a thousand times, and dispersed across the Empire: the same passions, the same ironies, the same waste, sometimes the same poetry, always, in the long run, the identical conclusion. For the rebels these eruptions of patriotic spirit were often splendid, and were to be commemorated for ever in street names, national holidays and heroic legend: for the British they were generally petty and often misguided, for it was apparent to nearly everyone that whatever else the subject peoples would get from independence, it would not be better government.

The British were spared, by their own common-sense, or perhaps lack of will, any such terrible conflicts as the French fought in Indo-China or Algeria. By now the nationalist rebels were generally abusing the converted, for most Britons felt, in the text of their own truest ideology, that it was no longer fair to coerce unwilling subjects. The British people would not have tolerated great wars of reaction: if the blacks wanted to rule themselves, all right then, good luck to them, let ’em get on with it. Nevertheless, in the twenty years after the Second World War they were seldom without a conflict somewhere in the old Empire—as they had seldom been without one, indeed, since the first days of Victoria’s rule. Once these skirmishes of Empire had been stimulating, good practice for the soldiers, good sport for the officers. Now they were good for nobody, but merely served to embitter the rebels, and turn the British themselves more wanly against the profession of arms, the pretension of prestige or even the pursuit of power. Furse, watching it all sadly from his retirement, as the last of his young men packed their bags and handed over their files, thought it was like ‘batsmen playing dangerously hurried strokes at hostile and unaccustomed
bowling, on a tricky wicket, in a bad light, confused by contradictory advice yelled at them from the pavilion and by the spectators generally …’.

We see them in every climate and every landscape, always at their roadblocks, barricaded in their barracks, guarding post offices, escorting pale English children to school or squatting behind sandbags on the roofs of Government Houses. In Cyprus, which had never proved of the slightest use to the Empire, they struggle year after year against Greek guerillas; in Lord Delamere’s White Highlands they fight the enigmatic and murderous Mau Mau; in Malaya they wearily stalk guerillas through Spencer-Chapman’s jungle; in Egypt they run down young patriots across Wolseley’s battlefield of Tel el Kebir; in the Shatt el Arab, where Townshend disembarked for Kut, the Royal Navy stands fruitless guard over the oil refineries of Abadan, soon to be nationalized by the Persians.

Often they succeeded, and curbing the impatient passions of the local patriots, managed to restore order in a colony before handing it over to their successors. In Malaya a patient and methodical campaign finally contained the Communist guerillas, returning them to their havens to await more propitious times, and allowing the Malaysian Federation to get off to a peaceful start. In Kenya a ruthless and sometimes brutal operation subdued the rebellious Kikuyu, enabling Jomo Kenyatta, the most famous of the tribe, to become Prime Minister. In British Guiana an inconvenient Communist coup was suppressed by British troops before independence was granted.