Empire

by Jeremy Paxman

  The endorsement of the ruling class of the time and the uniforms, hierarchies and badges were sufficient to condemn the movement in the growing ranks of critics of empire.* But Scouting became the most successful youth organization of all time not because it was part of a scheme for world domination but because it recognized the universal appetite for what seem to be adventures. By the second decade of the twenty-first century it had 400,000 members in the UK with 28 million others scattered across 216 countries, some – like the 4 million in India and the 4.5 million in the United States – citizens of former imperial possessions, but millions more – like the 17 million in Indonesia – who belong to nations which were never part of the empire. What’s not to like about an organization whose members are instructed to perpetrate a random good deed each day? (‘Such small things as these: sprinkle sand on a frozen road where horses are liable to slip; remove orange or banana skins from the pavement, as they are apt to throw people down …’)

  When Baden-Powell’s health collapsed he took himself off to live in Kenya, where the climate made it easier to sleep under the stars with his mouth shut. Even as he became frailer, he remained, in many ways, a child to the end, self-obsessed, enjoying nothing more than knots, campfires, songs and jokes. His final message to the Scouts of the world was written some time before his death and contains the advice that ‘happiness doesn’t come from being rich, nor merely from being successful in your career, nor by self-indulgence … the real way to get happiness is by giving out happiness to other people. Try and leave the world a little better than you found it and when your turn comes to die, you can die happy in feeling that at any rate you have not wasted your time but have done your best.’ He signed it: ‘Your Friend, Robert Baden-Powell.’

  Chapter Eleven

  ‘A thousand years scarce serve to form a state; An hour may lay it in the dust’

  Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 1812

  It was not Edward VII’s fault that his mother kept him from the throne by living such an unconscionably long time. But it was certainly his fault that he chose to spend so much of that apprenticeship at the card table, on the shooting field or in bed with other men’s wives. Just inside the front door at Sandringham were installed a set of sit-down scales, the kind that were used to weigh jockeys before a race: Edward wanted to make sure the guests at his shooting parties had eaten so well that they left heavier than they had been on arrival. From an empire point of view, his entire reign seems to have been spent in digestion.

  His inheritance was enormous. But it was quite strange. In India the British ruled an entire subcontinent, but in China they were contained in a few treaty ports. They had given up territories like the Mosquito Coast of Nicaragua, but clung to the Falkland Islands in the south Atlantic. They held Egypt, but not Persia, Burma but not Siam. The flag flew over enormous swathes of Africa and on tiny Pacific islands foisted on them by overexcited missionaries. As some jingoistic bean-counter at the St James’s Gazette delightedly pointed out when Edward succeeded his mother in 1901:

  His Majesty rules over one continent, a hundred peninsulas, five hundred promontories, a thousand lakes, two thousand rivers and ten thousand islands. Queen Victoria ascended the throne of an Empire embracing 8,329,000 square miles; she handed it down to King Edward with three million miles added to it … The Empire to which Victoria acceded in 1837 covered one-sixth of the land of the world; and that of King Edward covers nearly one-fourth.

  For the coronation of Edward the Caresser, an Eton schoolmaster, A. C. Benson, produced words to accompany Elgar’s stirring Pomp and Circumstance march. The resulting anthem, ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, was a hymn to empire, still sung at that festival of faded nationalism, the Last Night of the Proms. But it was out of joint with the times even when written, for in Edward’s reign the bounds of empire were hardly set wider still. There were a few administrative changes – a preposterous condominium with France in the New Hebrides,* altered status for British Somaliland, and so on, but no great tracts of territory were added to the motley variety of places marked in red. Indeed, when Francis Younghusband marched into the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, in 1904, the government was so worried about imperial overstretch that it told him to march out again, with the consolation prize of a minor decoration and more time to explore his strange ideas about mysticism. It was as if, having collected together an empire, no one was any longer quite sure what it was for. As H. G. Wells pointed out in 1914, the empire had ‘no economic, no military, no racial, no religious unity. Its only conceivable unity is a unity of language and purpose and outlook. If it is not held together by thought and spirit, it cannot be held together.’

  It would be a few years until everyone realized this was a trick that would never be pulled off, but in the meantime the smell of empire was almost permanently on the nation’s breath. If enthusiasm flagged, there was always the imperial foghorn sounding in the Daily Mail, with its noisy proprietor Alfred Harmsworth crying, ‘Empire first and parish after.’ Yet the louder the huzzas of the imperialists, the more resonant came the howls of dissent. For there was now an increasingly vocal body of opinion questioning the moral and political basis of the entire enterprise. It was forty years or more since the Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, Goldwin Smith, had declared that holding colonies wasn’t even protecting the national economy: the future lay with free trade. (The Times dismissed his ideas as being on a par with unworldly ‘projects for general disarmament or for equalizing the political rights of the sexes’.) Now, working people – the value of whose labour was undercut by colonial enterprise and who provided the cannon-fodder for imperial armies – had a vehicle for their own anxieties about what was being done in the country’s name. To the recently formed Independent Labour party, which brought working men into the House of Commons, the ‘civilizing mission’ was nonsense: ‘We can no more send our civilisation to central Africa than we can send our climate there,’ as one group of members put it. The true purpose of empire was to put off the day of reckoning between capital and labour. Clarion, newspaper of cycling and singing socialism, declared that it was on the side of those patriots who proclaimed ‘England for the English’, and would like to hear more of the less commonly shouted slogan, ‘Africa for the Africans’. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt marked 31 December 1900 by correctly prophesying that the newly dawning twentieth century would see the end of the British Empire.

  Even the true believers in empire were anxious. Lord Curzon shuddered to himself when he foresaw a Britain teeming with the starving unemployed, to which foreign tourists would flock to gaze upon the wonders of a dead civilization. The Boer War had shown how the mightiest power on earth could be brought low by a bunch of farmers, and recruitment for the army had demonstrated the appalling physical state of many of the slum-dwellers who were supposed to defend the flag. The nation could no longer feed itself, and the Germans were expanding their naval fleet. The upper classes were infiltrated by arrivistes who cared more for money than for duty. Trades unions were on the rise and industrial productivity was dropping. The worm of uncertainty ate away even at fervent imperialists like Joseph Chamberlain,* who complained to the 1902 Imperial Conference that ‘the weary Titan staggers under the too vast orb of its fate … We have borne the burden for many years … We think it is time that our children should assist us to support it.’ Even Rudyard Kipling had watched the vast diamond-jubilee review of the fleet at Spithead (over 150 ships including twenty-one battleships and fifty-six cruisers) and seen not present power but future powerlessness:

  Far-called our navies melt away –

  On dune and headland sinks the fire –

  Lo, all our pomp of yesterday

  Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!

  As it happened, the first British naval engagement of the First World War involved none of the enormous fleet Kipling had seen assembled at Spithead. It came in British imperial Africa.

  On 5 August 1914, Mr Webb, the District Commissioner in
the little trading station at Karonga, on the north-western shore of Lake Nyasa, received a coded telegram. ‘Tipsified Pumgirdles Germany Novel’ it read. After quickly consulting his code book, he began sending frantic messages to British residents in the area, warning them that their country was now at war. It would be hard to imagine a place more remote from the slaughter set off by a pistol shot in Sarajevo than Karonga, a sweltering former Arab slaving station on the shore of a Rift Valley lake in a British protectorate in east Africa. The town’s main use was as a base for the British trading company on the lake, and the military force available to Mr Webb consisted of four white men and a handful of African policemen. But the lake also lapped against the colony of German East Africa, and if the Germans could transport troops across the water, the empire was in danger. The colonial Governor, Sir George ‘Utility’ Smith, was adamant: the entire German naval presence on the lake had to be neutralized at once. This was in fact a single gunboat, the Hermann von Wissmann. It was to be ‘sunk, burned or otherwise destroyed’. The vessel chosen to accomplish this appointment with destiny was the British gunboat the Guendolen, captained by Commander E. L. Rhoades, RNVR, a short, red-haired, bearded man with a well-pickled liver and a vast repertoire of filthy songs. His enthusiasm for well-lubricated evenings of dirty jokes was shared by his good friend Herr Berndt. Until now, the fact that Herr Berndt was commander of the Hermann von Wissmann had not been a problem, and the two men often arranged for their training exercises to coincide: their evenings in the bar much enlivened when one or the other had managed to get his gunboat to stage a successful mock attack.

  Rhoades’s first problem on receiving the order to destroy his friend’s vessel was that no one knew how to fire the Hotchkiss gun with which the Guendolen was equipped. Eventually, he found an African Lakes Corporation salesman who had once learned the basics of gunnery years before. Then, having located some obsolete three-pound ammunition, Rhoades set out on 8 August to engage the Wissmann. To the commander’s delight he found his friend’s gunboat drawn up high and dry on the beach, undergoing repairs. He ordered the salesman to open fire. A cascade of shells now began to rain down upon the bush, as the rapidly recruited gunners attempted to counteract the effects of defective ammunition, lack of practice and the swell on the lake. Finally, after fifteen minutes, one of the shells found its mark. The sailors on the Guendolen raised a cheer and then were intrigued to see a man on the shore in white shorts and singlet jump into a small boat and begin to row furiously towards them. As he came nearer they recognized the oarsman and could hear him shouting. As one of them recalled later, he approached the Guendolen screaming, ‘Gott for damn, Rrrrhoades … Gott for damn: vos you dronk?’ Rhoades allowed Captain Berndt to clamber aboard, poured him a glass of whisky and then informed him he was a prisoner of war.

  It turned out that German officials in this part of Africa had a more developed sense of playing the game than the British, even when they discovered that their telegraph link across Nyasaland had been cut. Three days after the strike on the Wissmann, Webb’s counterpart on the German shoreline sent him a message by runner:

  Thanks to your extreme kindness in preventing the forwarding of despatches into our Colony, I am not clear whether England is at war with Germany or not … If you therefore wish to attack our province, I must most courteously remark that we are prepared to greet you in a somewhat unfriendly fashion. The position decidedly needs clearing up and therefore I beg you most politely and urgently to let me have a clear answer.*

  The war in Africa – such as it was – does not bulk large in the memory of the British, who, like most northern Europeans, see the First World War through a periscope poked over the trenches of Flanders, across a vast expanse of mud, barbed wire and mangled bodies. They see an armageddon in which industrialized killing destroyed tens of thousands in very small areas. But it was also an imperial war, triggered by an act of rebellion against the Austro-Hungarian Empire, envisaged by Germany as a way of destroying the British Empire, used by the French to augment their empire and delivering the last rites to the Ottoman Empire. ‘Take me back to dear old Blighty,’ sang the British soldiers wading through the mud, ‘put me on the train to London town.’ How many of them knew that ‘Blighty’ had come into the army from an Urdu word originally meaning ‘foreign’?* Great numbers of the empire soldiers who fought for the British had never set eyes on Blighty and never would. The British had been very quick at deploying them, though: within three months of the shot which killed the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914 and set off the war, Indian troops were being disembarked in Marseilles, to be transported north in support of the British Expeditionary Force. Of the 8.5 million troops who served in the British forces of the First World War, about a third were not British at all. Canada sent over 600,000 men. In Australia, the leader of the opposition Labor party invited a massive crowd in the town of Colac, Victoria, to think about what he called ‘the Mother Country’ and declared, ‘Australians will … help and defend her to our last man and our last shilling.’ Over 400,000 of his countrymen joined the imperial forces. Calculated per head of population, however, the most remarkable contribution came from New Zealand – 129,000 men, representing over half of those eligible for service.

  But the largest of all empire contributions came from India, whose total of 1.4 million was bigger than the sum of soldiers from Scotland, Wales and Ireland combined. British army movement orders listed the 51st Sikhs, the 28th Dogras or the 74th Punjabis alongside battalions made up of farm boys from Somerset or pals from industrial Manchester. Advertising posters at home drew the Indians in with promises – ‘Easy Life! Lots of Respect! Very Little Danger! Good Pay!’ – which inevitably turned out to fall very far short of reality. But Gandhi believed those who signed up had moral right on their side, too. ‘We are, above all, British citizens of the Great British Empire,’ he said, ‘our duty is clear: to do our best to support the British, to fight with our life and property.’ Sixty-four thousand of the Indians died, a further 67,000 were wounded.

  German empire-envy was well known. The Kaiser had dreamed of destroying British power by igniting a holy war, for example, which would spread to the empire’s huge numbers of Muslim subjects. ‘Our consuls in Turkey, in India,’ he scribbled in the margin of a diplomatic telegram, ‘must fire the whole Mohammedan world to fierce rebellion against this hated, lying, conscienceless nation of shopkeepers, for if we are to bleed to death, England shall at least lose India.’ This notion of a jihad which would expel the British from India had been a German fixation for years. The railway line being driven from Berlin to Baghdad was physical evidence of the German commitment to the Ottoman Empire, and offered the possibility of a German presence in the Gulf – and thereby a menace to imperial communications with India. In 1898 the Kaiser had visited the Ottoman possessions and declared himself a friend of Islam. There were even rumours in the Turkish press – which his officials did nothing to scotch – that he might become a Muslim himself. And in November 1914 the sultan of Turkey responded to his courtesy by duly declaring holy war on Britain and its allies.

  In 1917, after years when gains on the Western Front were measured in yards, the British government decided it was time for a dramatic victory in another theatre of the war. The commander chosen for this mission, Edmund Allenby, had initially been an imperial reject: even after an education at Haileybury, the former training school for the East India Company – augmented by sessions with a crammer – he still failed the exams for the Indian Civil Service. Twice. A career in an unglamorous Irish cavalry regiment, which at least offered the prospect of decent fox-hunting, had been a tolerable second-best and imperial soldiering turned out to suit him well. He emerged from the Boer War – which he had spent leading his troops on forays across the bush hunting out Afrikaner guerrillas – a colonel.* Allenby certainly looked the part – well over six feet tall, active, physically fit, the hair lacking on the dome of his head more than made up for by his bristl
ing moustache. As he rose up the chain of command, his natural sympathy for his men grew deeper and his temper shorter: the slightest thing could set him off, especially a failure to wear chinstraps properly. In June 1917, ‘the Bull’ was summoned to see the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, to be given a new task. The War Cabinet, he was told, wanted General Allenby to take command of a demoralized Egyptian Expeditionary Force, strike north and drive the Turks out of the remnants of their empire in the Middle East.

  It did not seem a particularly promising command. It was true that the British still held their number-one objective in the region, the Suez Canal, ensuring that they could continue to move troops from India and Australasia to the European theatre. With the help of their German allies the Turks had built a defensive line to block any British advance from the south, running from Gaza on the Mediterranean coast inland 30 miles to Beersheba. Allenby was to smash through it and seize Palestine. In contrast to the war in Flanders, where the sucking quality of the mud seemed to express the stagnation of the campaign, the Middle East assault was to be one of dash and movement. Its prize offered one of the most dramatic symbols of the entire conflict, Jerusalem.

  The force Allenby was to command was truly imperial, containing soldiers from across the empire, at perhaps its most exotic in the Imperial Camel Corps, a regiment made up of British, Australian and New Zealand cavalrymen, supported by artillery from the Hong Kong and Singapore Mountain Battery, which was made up of Indians. When he arrived to take command, he found the troops downcast, for the Turks looked immovable. The Bull immediately drew up a plan, ordered roads built, commandeered all the beer in Egypt for his men and then moved his headquarters to a wooden shed ten miles from the front line. Four months later, Allenby’s exotically assorted forces struck, not towards Gaza, which the Turks were expecting, but at Beersheba. One after another the Turkish strongholds fell, as Allenby poured troops through each gap he created. By early December 1917 he had captured 60,000 prisoners and taken hundreds of guns. His army stood at the walls of Jerusalem, where one morning a couple of squaddies out collecting water were accosted by the mayor of the city. He had come out looking for someone to whom he could surrender the keys of Jerusalem. A fawning biographer appreciated the historical echoes. ‘Israelite, Assyrian, Greek, Roman, Jew, Arab, Crusader, Turk had entered Jerusalem as conquerors before the British,’ he wrote. ‘None of these nations can have been represented by one more impressive or worthier of his race than was Allenby, physically or morally.’