After the Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  Although he convinced Colonel Stuart-Wortley, the Kaiser persuaded few English readers. The speaker at a miners’ rally in Swansea on 17 August 1908 was unusual:

  I have been astonished and grieved to read much of the wild language which has been used lately by people who ought to know better about our relations with Germany. I think it is greatly to be deprecated that persons should try to spread the belief in this country that war between Great Britain and Germany is inevitable … There is no collision of primary interests – big, important interests – between Great Britain and Germany in any quarter of the globe. Why, they are among our very best customers … Although there may be some snapping and snarling in the newspapers and in the London Clubs, these two great peoples have nothing to fight for, and have no place to fight in.

  This was the 33-year-old President of the Board of Trade in Asquith’s Liberal government: Winston Churchill. (‘As for Mr Churchill,’ wrote the king to the Prince of Wales, ‘he is almost more of a cad in office than he was in opposition.’)19

  In Germany, the hawks disliked the Kaiser’s conciliatory tone to the Daily Telegraph and the Social Democrats viewed it with as much incredulity as did the English king. While the English still saw him as a Hunnish warlord, his potential supporters in the Fatherland, the belligerent militarists, disliked his self-portrait in the English paper as an Anglophile leader of an Anglophobe nation. He was violently attacked in the Reichstag and questions were even asked about his fitness to continue as Kaiser. His chancellor, Bülow, who had egged him on to his most extreme positions of nationalism in earlier days, now did all in his power to undermine his royal master. After the exciting adrenalin of publicity, Willy felt such a corresponding let-down that Prince Fürstenburg, who had taken over the role of imperial best friend after the unfortunate ‘outing’ of Prince Eulenburg, decided to put on a little light-hearted entertainment at Court. Like so many things, especially farcical things, in Wilhelm II’s life, this piece of fun was destined to end in macabre fashion. The Kaiser was being entertained in Prince Fürstenburg’s Schloss. The orchestra was to play in the hall while General Dietrich von Hüber-Huseler, head of the military cabinet and a crucial figure in the armaments negotiations between Germany and Great Britain, appeared in one of Princess Fürstenburg’s voluminous ball gowns, complete with feathered hat and fan. He executed a graceful dance to the music, described by those who had seen him enact the turn on earlier occasions as a beautiful performance, if a little too dainty for a man in his position. The general acknowledged the applause gratefully, blew kisses to his audience, and exited to a passage off the improvised stage. The audience then heard a loud crash, and calls for a doctor. Two medics were summoned, but too late. The 56-year-old general had died of heart failure. While everyone panicked and wondered what to do, rigor mortis began to set in. His Imperial Majesty was terrified, in the light of the Eulenburg debacle, that the public, let alone the international press, should learn that one of his most trusted associates and military advisers had died in drag. An unseemly scene ensued in which Princess Fürstenburg’s ball gown was wrenched from the dead general, whose rapidly stiffening limbs were inserted into the breeches and epauletted tunic of his dress uniform.20

  The general had died too soon to be given a copy of an English book which the Kaiser presented to all his general staff and to his Admiralty to analyse. It was a futuristic novel entitled The Invasion of 1910, by William le Queux. The German translator changed the ending of the story so that instead of the Kaiser’s invasion being repulsed, the yarn ends with a triumphant German army marching through the shattered remains of a smoking London.21 Only nine years had passed since Queen Victoria’s funeral, when the English newspapers had heaped extravagant praises on his head. In 1901 the Daily Mail said, ‘it would be impossible to find in the records of our history a foreign Sovereign who has so much endeared himself to the British People as has the Kaiser’.22 By 1910 the Daily Mail had not only bought serial rights for le Queux’s anti-German invasion fantasy, but was advertising it with sandwich men in spiked helmets and Prussian military uniform goose-stepping along Oxford Street.23

  To those who know how the story will unfold – an assassination by a Serbian terrorist in Sarajevo of the heir to the Emperor Franz-Joseph leading to war between the Austro-Hungarian and the Russian empires; Germany entering the war on Austria’s side and invading Belgium; Britain, committed to an alliance with France, sending an expeditionary force to the Continent in late summer 1914 and hoping they would return by Christmas – there is something all but intolerable about reading the diplomatic history of King Edward’s reign. The tragedy is absolute. But so is the complexity, which is why so many books concentrate on the king’s role in it all. With his fluent French and German, his kinship with so many European monarchs, and his geniality, he did play a role in the story. But the thing is much more than a story of how Uncle Bertie got on with mad nephew Willy, or how King Edward charmed Delcassé, the French president, or the old Austrian emperor or his nephew Nicholas, last emperor of Russia. Behind each individual diplomatic triumph, or setback, behind each example of one European nation or another jockeying for position or threatening another, there is one quite simple demographic fact. It is summarized in one of those German compound words which in a later decade would resonate so sinisterly in European minds: Lebensraum. The industrialization of the Western world was accompanied by huge population growth. Industrialized capitalism did not know how to cope with its vast urban proletariat, either politically or physically. The increase of huge numbers of overworked and unhappy people was both the industrial world’s greatest problem and its greatest need – witness the scandal of Chinese labour being imported into Natal.

  When, in 1904, there was found to be a shortage of labour on the Rand, the mine-owners decided that they should import workers. It was the direct responsibility of the Balfour government that Chinese labourers were enlisted. By the end of 1904, 20,000 of these workers had been sent to the mines in the Rand, and 47,000 nine months later. The mine-owners had what they desired: cheap labour. The political consequences, not only for Arthur Balfour’s government but for Britain in the eyes of the world, were disastrous. The young Chinese were separated from their families. They worked long hours for minimal wages and were cooped up constantly with no society but their own. ‘The workmen spoke of it as slavery, and at least by Aristotle’s definition of slavery they were right.’24 Vice and rough punishment ruled the compounds where the young men lived, and when they broke their bounds, they terrorized the surrounding veldt farms. It was an ugly demonstration of how little the governing classes cared for human rights. Although the Liberals made capital out of it, and the notoriety of the ‘Chinese slavery’ issue harmed Balfour in the election of 1906, it was far from being a party issue. The Liberals, when they came to power, could end the ‘slavery’ of the Chinese in South African mines, but they could not end the wretched conditions of their own working class at home.

  Behind all the sabre-rattling, the military parades, the boastful phallic rivalries about whose navy was bigger than whose, lay the fear that the factories and mines which needed the Nibelungs to produce the national wealth would not be able to house them, or feed them, or appease their discontents. Hindsight may very well suggest to us that Britain, with its Empire, did not need Lebensraum in the way it was so desperately needed in, let us say, the Rhinelands, in Bohemia, in the Balkans. Britain, it might be argued, could go on shipping coolies and slaves as required to different parts of the world. The idea has a grisly attractiveness no doubt to some imperialists, but it was always questionable, both economically and morally, whether the British Empire could survive, once its subject peoples rejected its raison d’etre.

  The French and the Germans, the Dutch and the Belgians, all had colonies too, of course, but it was never a realistic proposition that surplus population, to use a cruel Malthusian phrase, could be exported, as the British had so calmly, and without international protest, expor
ted millions of their indigenous populations in Scotland and Ireland in the 1840s.

  When the prime minister of the only significant European republic, Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929), went to Marienbad to meet King Edward at the Hotel Weimar he had more on his mind than the superficial annoyance of Caesar the wire-haired terrier being present at the dinner table. (Wasn’t it illegal to bring a dog for short visits to the Continent? asked that canny, brave, cynical man. What about the quarantine laws? ‘Mais puisque c’est moi qui les fais,’ said the king.)25 What Clemenceau wanted to know, after a couple of years of tiptoeing round the matter with talk of Entente Cordiale, was, quite simply, what would Britain do if Germany repeated its destructive war of 1870–1? What was to stop the German army marching into France once again? The Kaiser and the newspapers were obsessed by the size of the British navy, but frigates and battleships were not much use in Alsace-Lorraine, or cruising down the Meuse. ‘Ce n’est pas à Trafalgar, qui était une bien brillante victoire navale, mais à Waterloo, qui était une bien petite bataille, que l’Angleterre à cassé le cou de Napoleon.’ When Clemenceau parted from the king he once again reiterated: ‘Surtout, Sire, soignez notre Armée.’26

  The advice was not heeded. A policy which might, conceivably, have acted as a deterrent to an invading German army in Belgium and France – namely the commitment of a colossal Anglo-French army, with the most up-to-date artillery – was never even considered in London. Instead, the obsession continued with the navy.

  Edward VII, who enjoyed travelling, and who had an easy conversational manner, came to be known as the Peacemaker after his performance as figurehead in the Entente Cordiale. On his first official visit to Paris, the royal entourage was booed, and the crowds cried ‘Vivent les Boers!’27 By the end of his reign there had been a genuine rapprochement between Britain and France. When the Russian chief minister Stolypin met Edward VII he was fascinated. ‘It was not only what he said but his manner bore the impression of an artist in international politics whom Europe regarded as the first statesman in Europe.’ But however great an impression Edward made on the Russian diplomatists, and although it was Edward who summoned an international conference in 1908 to discuss the crisis in Bosnia and Hercegovina, he could do nothing to calm the tension there, nor the rival claims of Serbian nationalism and Austro-Hungarian imperialism. The Dogger Bank dispute of a few years earlier showed the true Russian indifference to British feeling or interest – when Admiral Rozhdestvensky, en route for the Far East in October 1904 with about twenty warships, encountered some Hull trawlers fishing off the Dogger Bank and, fearing them to be Japanese torpedo vessels, opened fire. Several ships were seriously damaged, one was sunk with its captain on board. Even when their mistake had been made clear to them the Russians steamed on eastwards, only themselves to be sunk off Japan in May 1905.28

  Many of the political classes in England actually doubted the wisdom or helpfulness of Edward VII’s ‘hobnobbing’29 with a ‘blood-stained’ creature such as the Tsar, whose regime was so oppressive. And a more accurate picture of Edward VII’s diplomatic skills than Stolypin’s ‘artist in international politics’ is probably to be found in the rather cruel reflections of Count Zedlitz Trützschler, controller of the Kaiser’s household, who watched the king during his last visit to Berlin in 1909. It was a sad, nearly fatal visit. Edward was so bronchitic that at various moments he nearly passed out, and his attempts to reduce the growth of the German navy were vain.30

  ‘The King of England,’ wrote Trützschler,

  is so stout that he completely loses his breath when he has to climb upstairs, and has to save himself in many ways. The Emperor told us that at the first family dinner he fell asleep. At the lunch at the British Embassy he was indisposed for a few minutes, but he eats, drinks, and smokes enormously. He has an amiable, pleasant manner, and looks very shrewd. But I fancy the part he plays in the affairs of his country is smaller than we have imagined. He allows a great deal of independence to the persons who have been carefully chosen for their duties, and only takes a hand when there is something of special importance to call for his intervention, and then with his age and experience and thorough knowledge of the world he acts very adroitly. I can imagine that a sly and amiable smile steals over his face, when he thinks how the whole world looks upon him as the guiding spirit of all the solid and brilliant achievements of British diplomacy.31

  * The population of Germany rose from around 50 million in 1888 to 68 million in 1914.

  2

  Rupees and Virgins

  On 31 March 1904, a small army of some 1,200 men, accompanied by 10,000 bearers and 20,000 animals – mules, bullocks, buffaloes, ponies, yaks and camels – were making their way through the snowy, windswept terrain of southern Tibet. The military members of the expedition included Gurkha infantry, some Sikh pioneers, and British gunners of the Norfolk Regiment, who brought with them the comparatively newfangled machine gun invented by Sir Hiram Maxim and adopted into the British army in 1889.1

  The Maxim gun was sighted to 2,500 yards, and could fire about 450 rounds per minute. It was trundled along on a wheeled carriage.2 In Tibet, in 1904, they had never seen a wheeled carriage, let alone a machine gun.3

  The expedition as a whole was led by a short mustachioed figure called Colonel Francis Younghusband, of the King’s Dragoon Guards. The troops were commanded by Brigadier-General James Macdonald of the Royal Engineers. Their aim was to reach Lhasa, the monkish capital of that mountainous land. There, it was believed, they would find evidence of Russian weapon-emplacements, Russian spies and possibly even a Russian governor. It was to counteract this danger to the British Empire in India that Younghusband’s expeditionary force had set out, upon the instruction of the viceroy, to establish a British presence in the Tibetan mountains. A hundred miles inwards and upwards, they approached a hamlet called Guru.

  They had climbed to a height of 15,000 feet and were making their way down a track between an escarpment and a dry salt lake. On the gravel flats through which they went, the Tibetans had barred their progress by constructing a rough stone rampart. A group of Tibetan horsemen rode out to meet the invaders. Colonel Younghusband told the Tibetans that they had fifteen minutes to clear the road. They failed to do so. Everyone waited. Younghusband gave orders that no one should fire unless fired upon. In complete silence, the infantry advanced towards the barricade. On high ground to the east of this spot, the Norfolk Regiment had dragged up the Maxim guns and placed them strategically to look down on the thousands of Tibetans who milled about beneath them.

  The aim of the Gurkhas and the Sikhs was simple: to climb the escarpment and to manhandle the few Tibetan troops who were armed with antiquated muskets, matchlocks and swords. Having disarmed the enemy, they would then dismantle the roadblock and Younghusband would make his progress to Gyangtse, and then to Lhasa. Unfortunately, the Tibetan commander rode into the confused crowd, a Sikh attempted to grab his bridle, and he loosed off a pistol shot. The Tibetan commander shot an Indian soldier through the jaw – not fatally.

  Colonel Younghusband had never seen a war at close quarters. He was as much an explorer as he was a soldier, and he watched with horror as the Maxim guns, on the orders of Brigadier-General Macdonald, began their rapid mechanical chatter. Tseten Wangchuk, one of the Tibetans in the valley, recalled: ‘While we were waiting at the wall during the discussions, a hail of bullets came down on us from the surrounding hills. We had no time to draw our swords. I lay down beside a dead body and pretended I had been killed. The sound of firing continued for the length of time it would take six successive cups of hot tea to cool.’4

  The next morning, in a confidential memo to the viceroy of India, General Macdonald gave an account of what happened. His men had used 50 shrapnel shells, 1,400 machine-gun rounds, and 14,351 rounds of rifle ammunition. Their casualties were: six lightly wounded, six badly wounded, none killed. Some 628 Tibetans were killed in that very short space of time, with, as he reckoned, some 222 wo
unded.5

  Macdonald was a clumsy man, not a sadist. Neither the viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, who had authorized the expedition, nor Younghusband himself were by nature men of blood. On 4 April, Curzon wrote to Younghusband covering sixteen sides of paper.

  I know that you will have been rather miserable over the recent encounter, just as sickened and distressed as I was. For carnage is a horrible thing, even when justified by every law of necessity – and with the bulk of the poor wretches who were shot down we had no sort of quarrel. At the same time in so far as I know the facts – in the main from newspaper correspondents, I do not feel that there is ground to blame anybody except the Lhasa general and his men.

  In fact, when the killing-field was cleared, only three Russian rifles were found among the Tibetan dead and wounded.

  ‘I dare say,’ Lord Curzon continued, ‘the soldiers may have been slow to seize the provocation given: and the appetite for slaughter, once aroused, is not easily slaked.’6

  In spite of Younghusband’s disquiet at the killings, the expedition continued, now divided into two, with Macdonald leading one party, Younghusband the other. On 8 April a further 200 Tibetans were killed at Kala Tso, defending their position with ancient matchlocks.7 By 11 April the British had reached Gyangtse, and on 3 August they eventually got to Lhasa, the ‘forbidden city’ on the ‘roof of the world’. They were not the first Europeans to do so. Jesuit missionaries had arrived there in 1625 and kept a presence there for a century.8 What was new was the underlying political rationale for a British presence in this all but impenetrable place. Lord Curzon, antiquarian, linguist and historian, blanched at the prospect of British soldiers, at his behest, galumphing through historic sites. Writing to Younghusband from England from Walmer Castle, his official residence as Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, Curzon urged: