Ne Win has also been described as ‘xenophobic, capricious, superstitious and fascinated by the occult “science” of numerology’. Important events were staged on dates whose numbers, when added together, made nine. In 1987 he decided that all banknote denominations should be divisible by nine. He then introduced the 45-kyat and 90-kyat notes. Burmese who had hoarded 100-kyat notes lost their savings. While the majority of the people lived in poverty, Ne Win lived like an emperor. He married seven times, twice to the same woman; he loved golf; he was said to bathe in dolphin’s blood to regain his youth, but was ruthless or astute enough to amass a fortune estimated at US$4 billion.55
Until 2011, Burma was ruled by a long-standing military dictatorship under Ne Win’s less flamboyant successor Than Shwe. As well as being more or less a client state of China, the destitute country he ruled over was propped up by a strong narcotics trade and the export of illegal rubies. Rubies had been a motivating factor, if only a minor one, behind the British annexation. The Burma Ruby Mines Company had been floated on the London stock market in March 1889, when it had been the public offering of the year, prompting a scramble for the shares.56 In 2007, it was estimated that more than 90 per cent of the world’s rubies came from Burma. These were cut and polished in other countries to avoid customs duties, but the money derived from their sale supported the military junta.57 The junta itself had crushed a student-led protest movement in 1988, killing 3,000 students in the process. It had imprisoned, under house arrest, for nearly two decades Aung San’s daughter, Aung San Suu Kyi, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991. The army, now 400,000 strong, or four times the size of the British army in 2010, claimed to be the only force that could hold the country together. Burma is composed of more than a hundred ethnicities, some of whom are still waging unofficial war against the central government.58
In February 2011 Thein Sein became the country’s first civilian president after nearly fifty years of military rule. A career soldier who first joined the military government in 1997, Thein Sein was an ally of the outgoing President Than Shwe and, despite his vaunted status as a civilian, he was merely one of about twenty military chiefs who stepped down from their army posts before the 7 November election in order to run as civilian candidates. This development, critics said, was merely a device to prolong military control of government in Burma.59
The army’s success and strength has been a function of the power vacuum in Burma. There were no leaders, no real civic society, no institutions after the double shock of annexation and the Japanese invasion. Even in the 1940s, just as in the debates of the 1880s, some British politicians could see that the annexation of Burma had been misguided. As the Labour politician David Rees-Williams, later Lord Ogmore, observed:This annexation . . . I have long felt was a great mistake. It was a mistake to snuff out the independence of a proud people, it was a blunder to place Burma as a mere Province under India . . . What the British Government should have done was to elevate a respectable Burman royalty to the Throne and guide him and his officials into the way of sound administration and a democratic system . . . declaring the whole of Burma to be an independent sovereign state under the protection of the British Crown.60
This had actually been the policy in South-east Asia after the Indian Mutiny of 1857. Ironically, annexation had been avoided in Kashmir, where it would have made a great deal more sense, as there existed no traditional indigenous ruling family. In Kashmir, a new, alien dynasty, of a different faith from the overwhelming majority of the population, was installed. Precisely the opposite course of action was taken in Burma, where an old ruling dynasty was deposed, and over which direct control from India, and ultimately from London, was established. The absence of any traditional social order made it easier for the British army to impose its authority on the Burmese people. The consequences of Lord Randolph’s impulsiveness were all too apparent in the second decade of the twenty-first century.
PART IV
SUDAN: ‘BLACKS AND BLUES’
11
Kitchener: An Imperial Hero
Perhaps no figure represented the British Empire at its late Victorian zenith better than Lord Kitchener. Even today, his image is familiar because of one of the most famous poster campaigns of all time, in which the caption reads, ‘Your Country Needs You’. These words, of course, applied to the recruitment of British soldiers at the beginning of the First World War, but the origins of Kitchener’s extraordinary fame and success were in mid-Victorian Ireland, where he was born in 1850. Kitchener was not an Irishman and he would have agreed with the Duke of Wellington, who had also been born in Ireland, that ‘being born in a stable did not make one a horse’; despite his Irish birth, Kitchener never considered himself anything other than an Englishman. His father had been born on 19 October 1805, two days before Lord Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar and, as a tribute to the great admiral, Henry Kitchener had been given the middle name ‘Horatio’, which he also gave, as a middle name, to his son.1
Herbert Horatio Kitchener grew up in Ireland, under the watchful gaze of a doting mother and the stern discipline of a father who was twenty years older than his wife. His subsequent fame was not easily predicted by the rather obscure circumstances of his birth. For a man who ‘left an indelible mark on his generation and on British history’, Kitchener’s beginnings in Gunsborough Villa, a modest Victorian pile near Listowel, County Kerry, were hardly the stuff of imperial legend.2 His origins were distinctly middle class, perhaps even rather boring. His father had been a middle-ranking army officer who had retired to Ireland, the year before Kitchener’s birth, in order to save money. Henry Kitchener’s own family was undistinguished, but the young bride whom he married in 1845 was from the Chevallier family, French Huguenots who had settled as minor country squires at Aspall, a charming moated Jacobean manor near Debenham in Suffolk.
The delights of the Suffolk countryside were not found in Ireland, where the damp cold could often prove dangerous to people with weak constitutions. The general severity of the climate was not helped by Colonel Kitchener’s eccentricities. He was a martinet, a disciplinarian and general oddball, whose idiosyncratic tastes included an aversion to bed linen, which he avoided by forcing his family to use newspapers instead of blankets. The stories of Henry Kitchener’s foibles were often recounted in the countryside around the banks of the Shannon, where he had bought his derelict estate. The domestic staff were terrorized by a ruthless efficiency, and by a pedantic, grinding punctuality. The household was run ‘with military order and discipline, backed by forceful language’. A servant who brought breakfast to the dining room one minute after eight, the appointed hour, was scolded pitilessly by the infuriated Colonel. Mrs Sharpe, the young Kitchener’s nanny, remembered seeing Sarah, the parlour maid, standing outside Mrs Kitchener’s room with the breakfast tray on one hand and a watch in the other, waiting for the precise hour to enter the room. Mrs Sharpe, in the days of the young Kitchener’s fame, was not surprised to learn of his reputation as a strict disciplinarian: ‘it was bred in him’, she sighed.3
The picture that emerges of the young Kitchener’s upbringing is almost a parody of a Victorian nightmare of a childhood. And yet, through his mother, Kitchener and his elder brother Arthur were taught the gentler virtues. Frances Kitchener, the boys’ mother, encouraged them to recount the events of the day and to recite a hymn or read a New Testament passage, which she would explain to them. The Colonel, in his eccentricity, loathed all schools, and it was probably to the boys’ benefit that they were not sent to the public schools on the British mainland or their imitators in Ireland. Instead of the usual diet of Classical authors and grammar which was the mainstay of public school education at that time, Herbert Kitchener was taught about estate management and ‘rural improvement’. Unusually for their class and for the time, the boys, first under their father and later abroad, had a modern education, learning Mathematics, History, French and German, instead of Latin and Greek.4
A defining moment in th
e life of the young family came in 1863, when Frances Kitchener’s tuberculosis worsened and the doctors concluded that the damp conditions of south-west Ireland would never allow her to recover. The Colonel, with characteristic decisiveness, sold the estate and moved the family to Switzerland, which the doctors had recommended for its mountain air. This was a common prescription for tubercular and bronchial diseases in an age before the discovery of penicillin. The Kitchener family soon settled in the little spa town of Bex and the boys started attending a French school near Geneva. The move to Bex failed to improve Frances Kitchener’s health, and, in a desperate final attempt to remedy her condition, the family moved once again to Montreux, a town on the north-east shore of Lake Geneva, where a colony of British invalids and retired officers could be found. Unfortunately, this move did not have its intended effect, and Frances Kitchener died in the summer of 1864, at the age of thirty-nine.5
The loss of his mother, when he was only fourteen, was undoubtedly the great sorrow of Kitchener’s life. Already in Ireland, his mother had been sensitive to the young Herbert Kitchener’s shyness and tendency to hide or suppress his feelings. One day he had not told her about an injury he had suffered when a rock fell on his hand, and she remarked to the nanny that ‘Herbert is so very reserved about his feelings, I am afraid he will suffer a great deal from repression.’6 After her death, Kitchener’s shyness became even more pronounced. He was teased by pupils at the English boarding school at the Château du Grand Clos, in Switzerland, for his Irish accent and unsophisticated country ways. Yet his unusual education did provide him with a facility for languages, which, in his later career, would give him the opportunities he craved. He spoke fluent French and good German and, by the time he was admitted to the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich in 1868, he was a far more accomplished man of the world, in many ways, than his contemporaries who had emerged from their mid-Victorian English public schools.
Woolwich, or the ‘Shop’, as it was known, is one of those institutions which defined the British Empire, but which has now been largely forgotten. It had been founded in 1741, more than fifty years before the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, and was closed in 1939, only to be merged with Sandhurst in 1947. Before its closure, the Shop had its own distinct reputation. It was not as socially exclusive as Sandhurst, because it attracted more middle-class cadets, who were often brighter and more motivated than their counterparts at Sandhurst. Woolwich trained engineers and artillerymen, who had to pass exams to gain their commissions, while Sandhurst, before the abolition of the purchase of commissions in 1870, was little more than an upper-class finishing school. The discipline at the Shop was also notorious, provoking a mutiny by the cadets in October 1861, little more than seven years before Kitchener went there in January 1869. The mutiny, it has been noted, was caused by the ‘disgusting characteristics of the eggs that were being served’. That day, the cadets wilfully dropped their rifles on the parade ground, for which they were duly arrested. When the call for afternoon study sounded, it was ignored. The so-called mutiny was a series of pranks and minor acts of subordination, but the long term result of these disturbances was an improvement in the conditions of the cadets, particularly with regard to the meals which the Academy served.7
The daily timetable Kitchener and his colleagues endured was grinding and monotonous, with a reveille at 6.30 a.m. and lights out at 10.30 p.m. The last meal of the day was served at the absurdly early hour of 3.30 in the afternoon. Kitchener made little impression at the Shop, where he had come twenty-eighth out of fifty-six in the entrance exam. He seemed a mediocrity and there were few signs of future greatness in him. The Duke of Connaught, one of Queen Victoria’s younger sons, who had entered the Academy a year earlier, remembered him as ‘a tall lanky young man, very quiet and unassuming’.8 (Kitchener, at this stage, was six foot two.) He had a slight squint, which rendered him useless at games and thereby accentuated his natural tendency to remain aloof from his fellow cadets. It made him a terrible shot at the endless country-house parties to which he would later be invited, and he humorously acknowledged this defect in his shooting abilities by naming three gundogs Bang, Miss and Damn.9
Kitchener’s early career in the army was steady rather than spectacular and he was not one of those brilliant personalities who shine from earliest youth. In 1870 he was unfortunate enough to be in France, where his father had now moved to Brittany with his second wife on account of the relatively low cost of living there. During the Franco-Prussian War, which broke out that year, the young Kitchener attached himself to a field ambulance unit and saw the battle round Le Mans, where the fighting was fierce. There he witnessed, without ‘manifesting any visible sign of emotion’, the ‘slaughter of large numbers of men and horses’.10
Perhaps moved by the destruction he saw in France, Kitchener seems to have become more ambitious in his twenties and more eager to seize opportunities for travel. A decisive turning point occurred when he volunteered to help his friend Claude Conder on the Palestine Exploration Fund in 1874. In a bid for self-improvement, he was spending part of his leave in Hanover polishing his German when he was informed by Conder of the death in Palestine of the young civilian surveyor Charles Tyrwhitt-Drake. Lieutenant Kitchener grabbed his chance to take Tyrwhitt-Drake’s place and embarked on what promised to be an adventure, though the surveying work proved to be useful and dull rather than an obvious prelude to exciting military exploits. Palestine gave him the opportunity to learn Arabic, which accomplishment would define his career in Egypt and the Sudan, where he would make his name. Meanwhile, his steady progress brought him back to London in 1876, after eighteen months in Palestine, where he and Conder prepared twenty-six sheets of a great map of Palestine for their topological survey. The following year he went back to Palestine for more fieldwork, and he took to his tasks with an energy and gusto which now began to impress observers. The French archaeologist Charles Clermont-Ganneau noticed the ‘tall, slim and vigorous’ Lieutenant who had an ‘ardour for his work’ which ‘astonished us’.11
The steady ascent in Kitchener’s career at this stage may have been a little plodding, but no one could deny the young engineer’s ambition. His father, in his idiosyncratic way, had laughed at his son’s zeal, saying, ‘You’re too tall, only little men get to the top.’ But this did not discourage the younger Kitchener, and there is a sense by the late 1870s that he was growing into the persona which would later dominate and fascinate contemporaries. He next went to Cyprus in 1878 to conduct a survey similar to the one he had undertaken in Palestine. The outcome of his labours there was a work entitled A Trigonometrical Survey of the Island of Cyprus, published in April 1885. This great work is, unfortunately, as dull as its title.12 Yet it was in Cyprus that Kitchener developed two traits which would distinguish him: his famous moustache and a strange passion for pottery and porcelain, which puzzled his long-lived father, the Colonel–though he recognized, perhaps, in his son’s eccentricities the more bizarre traits of his own personality.
Cyprus was an odd outpost of empire, which had only recently been ceded to Britain by the Ottoman Empire at the Congress of Berlin of 1878. Kitchener impressed his commanding officer, Major General Sir Robert Biddulph, with his diligence and attention to detail, but by the middle of 1882 the thirty-two-year-old Kitchener was beginning to feel restless and unfulfilled. He was, he told Biddulph, ‘extremely anxious to see service in Egypt’ and was concerned that his ‘remaining here [in Cyprus] in a civil capacity while military service was offered me might be used against me in my future career’. In a rare burst of emotion, he lamented that his ‘greatest contribution up to the present has been to finish the map of Cyprus’.13 Like the young Julius Caesar, who wept when he saw a statue of Alexander the Great because at an age when Caesar was dallying in Spain Alexander had conquered the world, Kitchener was feeling the frustrations of early middle age. His career, it seemed, was going nowhere.
An opening in Egypt had arisen because Kitchener could speak
Arabic. It was his knowledge of this difficult language that distinguished him from his contemporaries in the army and, time and again, gave him opportunities to execute difficult and dangerous tasks. As Winston Churchill, a young officer in the British army of the 1890s, observed, ‘in 1874 accident or instinct led him to seek employment in the surveys that were being made of Cyprus and Palestine, and in the latter country he learned Arabic. For six years the advantage of knowing a language with which few British officers were familiar brought him no profit.’ Arabic in the 1870s was, in Churchill’s judgement, as ‘valueless as Patagonian’, but the year 1882 brought fresh chances when a British fleet bombarded Alexandria in order to protect British subjects from rioting Egyptians.14 The British government decided to send an expeditionary force to Egypt, and it was felt that an officer who knew Arabic would be useful. Kitchener was accordingly employed in the Egyptian army and won promotion to the rank of major. His methods, his thoroughness and his general demeanour of measured efficiency began to earn recognition and spread his fame. It was at the beginning of his service in Egypt that an Irish priest heard his name for the first time. The young priest was talking to soldiers in the Royal Irish Regiment in Plymouth, in the mid-1880s, just after their regiment had returned to Britain from Egypt when one man mentioned a remarkable officer: ‘Oh, he is not known, sir. But if you wish really to know, he is only a major in a black regiment.’ The priest asked the officer’s name. ‘Kitchener, sir. If you like to follow him, sir, he will run the whole of the British Army.’15
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