The Rise and Fall of the British Empire
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Turkey was the first target of the Easterners. Forcing the Straits would bring down the Ottoman empire and open a passage to Russia, which was showing signs of extreme strain. Furthermore, and this made the enterprise highly attractive to imperialists such as Churchill and Kitchener, Britain could take a share of Turkish provinces. The ‘scramble’ for Turkey had, in fact, already started; in November 1914 an Indian expeditionary force had occupied Basra and was tentatively moving northwards, while the Russians had invaded eastern Anatolia. Diplomatic preparations for a postwar division of the spoils were in hand. By the end of the year, Russia had been allocated the Straits, and after much wrangling the Sykes-Picot agreement of May 1916 defined the boundaries of the British and French official and unofficial empires in Syria, the Lebanon, Palestine and Mesopotamia.
So, according to the Easterners, operations against Turkey would puncture Germany’s ‘soft underbelly’; might lead to a Balkan front against Austria-Hungary; and provide an opportunity to extend the empire. If, as seemed likely between 1915 and 1917, it was impossible to break the deadlock in France, then a negotiated peace with Germany would follow. Britain had, therefore, to acquire some bargaining counters and look to the future. Sir Mark Sykes, a Yorkshire MP with a specialist, first-hand knowledge of the Middle East, argued in 1916 that by tightening its grip on southern Mesopotamia Britain would be better placed to resist post-war Russian encroachments in the region. He, like many others, assumed that when the war ended the great powers would restart their former global jockeying for influence and territory.
The Easterners’ arguments prevailed within the war cabinet and the result was the Dardanelles expedition in the spring of 1915. Its supporters not only claimed that it would knock Turkey out of the war, but it would be a spectacular affirmation of the military might of the British empire and France. This object lesson in imperial power quickly went awry. In all, 129,000 troops were landed, a third of them Anzacs, but Turkish resistance was dogged. The campaign dragged on into the autumn, and, when it was obvious that no breakthrough could be made, the war cabinet reluctantly approved a withdrawal.
The evacuation of the Gallipoli peninsula in December 1915 was a signal humiliation for the imperial powers, particularly Britain. The conventional imperial wisdom, expressed shortly after by a senior Indian army officer, held that, ‘We owe our position to the fundamental and inherent superiority of the European as a fighting man over the Asiatic.’16 But this no longer held true: a predominantly Turkish army had beaten a predominantly white one and proved that Europeans were not invincible. Gallipoli confirmed for the peoples of Asia and the Middle East the lesson of Russia’s defeat at the hands of Japan ten years before; white armies were not unbeatable. Mustapha Kamal Pasha, who had masterminded the defence of the Dardanelles and is better known by his post-war name, Kamal Atatürk, became the focus for and leader of the Turkish national movement, and an example to other Middle Eastern nationalists. A further blow to European supremacy was delivered in April 1916, when an Anglo–Indian army was forced to surrender at Kut-al-Amhara on the Tigris.
The reverses at Gallipoli and Kut damaged British prestige. The last confirmed the unfitness for modern warfare of the Indian army, or at least its high command. The ‘scramble’ for Turkey was proving a far harder task than its earlier counterparts in Africa and China. In terms of winning the war, the Gallipoli and Mesopotamian campaigns were, as the Westerners had always insisted, sideshows which wasted manpower needed to fight the real war in France.
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The Gallipoli campaign forms the background to John Buchan’s thriller Greenmantle, published in October 1916. The plot revolves around an attempt by the Turko-German high command to enkindle a mass uprising among the Muslims of North Africa, the Sahara, the Middle East and India in the name of a messianic holy man. The fictional holy war is prevented in the nick of time, but the possibility of a real one was a source of unending anxiety for British and Indian governments throughout the war. In November 1914 the Turkish Sultan, speaking as khalifah (spiritual head of all Sunni Muslims), had declared a jihad against Britain, France and Russia. These powers were the merciless enemies of Islam; they had made war on Muslims for a hundred years, and had taken their lands from them in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Now Muslims could unite, fight back, and, in the name of their faith, take back what had been theirs.
A nightmare was coming true. Three years before, Lord Fisher had foretold that, ‘The world has yet to learn what the Mohammedans can do if once their holy fervour seizes them.’17 His apprehension was shared by those proconsuls who governed predominantly Muslim areas. The jihad had an enormous potential for mischief, especially in India, whose 57 million Muslims were the main source of recruits for the army. Jihadic passion was strongest on the North-West Frontier, and sepoys from this region were always more likely to place faith before loyalty to the king emperor, and desert. A handful of Pathan deserters were known to be working with Turko-German intelligence during 1915 and 1916, and some may have returned to their homeland to foment uprisings against the British. Far more serious was a mutiny in November 1914, when men from the 130th Baluchis refused to fight against the Turks. There was a further, more violent mutiny in February 1915 by the 5th Native Light Infantry at Singapore during which the insurgents murdered European officers and civilians. In both instances the mutineers were rounded up, tried and the ringleaders publicly executed. An official enquiry after the Singapore affair revealed evidence of pan-Islamic subversion, and a widespread disquiet felt by many sepoys about reports of the heavy losses among Indian troops in France.
The Indian administration was severely shaken by these events and the prospect of further unrest. ‘I want every white soldier in India I can get,’ the Viceroy Lord Hardinge told Kitchener in March 1915.18 His panic was contagious; in April 1916 the war cabinet earmarked two divisions then in Egypt for transfer to India the moment there were signs of a jihadic uprising or an Afghan invasion19. Two months later, Wingate was badgering London and Cairo for troops at the onset of Ali Dinar’s revolt. Memories of the 1857 Mutiny in India and Mahdism in the Sudan were evergreen and contributed to the extreme jitteriness of officials, but their behaviour also suggests a deep-seated belief that Britain’s authority in the Muslim world was brittle.
As it turned out these alarms were exaggerated. The ambitious and potentially dangerous programme of pan-Islamic subversion planned by the Turko-German secret service failed because of poor management, internal squabbles and overstretched lines of communication. The dreaded explosion of fanaticism, the mutinies apart, proved to be a series of damp squibs. The Libyan Sanusi attack on Egypt in 1915, Ali Dinar’s revolt in the Sudan in 1916, and a string of rebellions in the French Sahara were all handled by local forces. The Sahara uprisings were partly suppressed by askaris of the Nigeria Regiment, loaned to the French in 1916–17, an interesting example of cooperation between the former imperial rivals.20
What helped dampen down Islamic fervour was the loyalty of those Muslim princes in India and Africa who owed their continued authority to Britain. The Aga Khan, the Sultan of Zanzibar and the emirs of northern Nigeria (who gave £188,000 to the British war chest) remained staunchly loyal and issued counter-jihadic appeals to their co-religionists which, among other things, argued that the khalifah’s jihad was no more than a cunning German stratagem. The spiritual influence of Hussain, sharif of Mecca, also added desperately needed weight to Britain’s propaganda campaign after June 1916, when he formally detached himself from the Ottoman empire and allied with Britain.
Hussain was the figurehead of what later became known as the Arab Revolt. What at first appeared an adroit imperial coup had been devised by a handful of dedicated Foreign and War Office officials and intelligence officers based on Cairo, of whom Captain, later Colonel T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) became the best known. By seducing Hussain, they had hoped to blunt the edge of the jihad and spark off a wholesale defection of Arabs from the Turkish to the
Allied cause. Politically, the ultra-conservative head of the Hashemite family was an ideal partner, but Hussain’s cause also attracted more radical Arab nationalists, who were looking ahead to post-war Arab nations arising from the wreckage of the Ottoman empire. The trouble was, and this became increasingly clear during 1917–18 as Arab forces guided by Lawrence moved northwards from the Hejaz, Britain and France had already staked out claims to lands which the Arabs hoped to have for themselves. Furthermore, the Indian government was laying plans for the post-war annexation of Mesopotamia, not only as a defensive measure, but as a colony which could be settled by Indian immigrants. By cultivating Arab nationalism, the London government was creating what Lord Hardinge prophetically described as ‘a Frankenstein’s monster’.21
Britain’s ability to mount an attack on the Dardanelles, give seaborne assistance to the Arabs in the Red Sea and shift troops from India and the dominions to wherever they were needed, depended on command of the world’s oceans. This had been achieved by the end of 1914. There had been one hiccough when a weak British squadron was all but destroyed by the German Far East squadron at Coronel, off the Chilean coast, in November. Within two months, prestige and local superiority had been restored at the battle of the Falkland Islands, where the German ships were defeated by a scratch force, including two battlecruisers, that had been hastily assembled and rushed from Britain.
The only large-scale fleet action was fought off Jutland at the end of May 1916, and concluded indecisively with the Germans returning to port after having inflicted heavier losses on the Grand Fleet. Nevertheless, the balance of seapower remained in Britain’s favour. The Royal Navy was free to continue the tight blockade of Germany that had been established in August 1914. The German response, briefly tried in 1915, was unrestricted U-boat warfare, which was reintroduced on 1 February 1917. The Kaiser predicted Britain’s doom and he was nearly right; the all-out attack on British and neutral shipping bound to and from British ports was intended to starve the country and overturn its economy within six months. Beatty, now commander-in-chief of the Grand Fleet, had guessed what was in store and, two days before the Germans opened their campaign, had gloomily summed up what would follow:
France is becoming exhausted. Italy is becoming tired. Neither can keep their factories going owing to the shortages of coal, and we cannot keep the supply because our steamers are all being sunk. Our armies might advance and slay the Hun by thousands, but the real race is whether we shall strangle them with our blockade before they defeat us by wiping out our Merchant Marine.22
There were now two wars of attrition in progress, one at sea and the other on land, and the Allies were faring badly in each. In the former, the German submarines were getting the upper hand by April 1917, when it seemed that Britain’s entire overseas trade was about to be paralysed. Disaster was averted at the last moment by the introduction of the convoy system in June, after Lloyd George had overruled the advice of those naval professionals who were certain the scheme could never work. Military professionals had got and continued to get their way in France, with results which brought final victory no nearer. British offensives on the Somme (July 1916), at Arras (April 1917) and Passchendaele (July 1917) and the French on the Aisne (April 1917) had failed to pierce the German line, and ended with the attackers suffering the heavier casualties. Moreover, the murderous battle of Aisne triggered widespread mutinies throughout the French army.
While the French will to fight on was beginning to crack, Russia’s fell apart completely. Czarist autocracy disintegrated in February 1917, and the successor Provisional Government found it impossible to sustain the war effort. In November 1917 the Bolsheviks effortlessly snatched power and within six weeks signed armistices with Germany and Turkey. The United States’s entry into the war in April 1917 had given comfort to the Allies, but at least a year was needed in which to recruit and equip American troops for service in France, where, it was believed, they would tip the balance. The Doughboys and the United States navy were welcomed by Britain, but not America’s voice in the direction of the war. The private apprehensions of Britain’s rulers were summed up by Robert Vansittart, a diplomat:
The United States, still holier than we, still mulling over British Imperialism, George III and the Easter Rebellion in Dublin, slid into the Great War. We wondered whether the new belligerent’s needs would interfere with ours.23
Seen from the bleak perspective of 1917 it appeared that the Allies might never beat the German army, whatever Haig and his acolytes said to the contrary. This conclusion, and its corollary, that the war would end with a negotiated settlement, permeated the minds of ministers and their advisers. If a treaty had to be arranged, it was assumed that it would be along the lines of the 1815 Vienna Settlement with a redistribution of territory and spheres of influence. It was therefore vital that when the fighting stopped, Britain was in a position to demand and get whatever was needed to safeguard and possibly extend her existing empire.
In many respects this view of British war aims was an extension of the Easterners’ philosophy, and it had an obvious appeal to the knot of imperialists who dominated Lloyd George’s inner war cabinet. The Prime Minister, who had once been a pro-Boer, anti-imperialist, was shifting his ground. In August 1918 he confessed his admiration for Disraeli and Chamberlain to an approving Leo Amery, although his knowledge of the empire was still hazy, since he once situated New Zealand somewhere to the west of Australia.24 No doubt his ignorance of imperial geography was compensated for by the imperial experience of his close colleagues, Milner and Curzon. They were joined after March 1917 by dominion prime ministers or their representatives, who were allowed to attend war cabinet meetings from time to time. Of these newcomers, the most able and energetic was Lieutenant-General Jan Smuts, the South African War Minister. An Afrikaner, he was a Cambridge-educated lawyer who led a kommando during the Boer War and then became an imperialist convert and a strong supporter of the Anglo-South African connection. Like the rest of the war cabinet, Smuts was a recipient of weekly analyses of the world situation prepared by two strongminded imperialists, Leo Amery and Sir Mark Sykes.
‘The defence and welfare of the British empire’ was for Amery the paramount aim of his country’s war policy. He had revealed how these objectives might be achieved in a memorandum of December 1916, which proposed that Britain allowed Germany to keep its colonies in return for untrammelled political control over a block of territory which stretched from the Red Sea to the Persian Gulf. ‘Pure Germanism’ was the response of Lord Robert Cecil, the Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office.25 But in terms of future imperial security, Amery’s political kite-flying made excellent sense. Within a few months Lloyd George had become committed to the post-war retention of Mesopotamia and Palestine, and in June he appointed General Sir Edmund Allenby to take command of the Egyptian Expeditionary Office with orders to capture Jerusalem by Christmas. The Prime Minister hoped that this victory would simultaneously embellish the reputation of his ministry and serve as an antidote to the war-weariness that was currently infecting many sections of British society.
Jerusalem fell according to schedule, and the official newsreel of Allenby’s entry was distributed to cinemas throughout the empire as a morale booster. Lloyd George, speaking in the Commons debate before the Christmas recess, referred to the fall of Jerusalem and that of Baghdad a few months before in terms of old-style imperial conquest:
I know there is a good deal said about sideshows. The British Empire owes a good deal to sideshows. During the Seven Years War, which was also a great European war … the events which are best remembered by every Englishman are not the great battles on the continent of Europe, but Plassey and the heights of Abraham.26
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The implication of these references was clear: Britain had kept Canada and Bengal and would, therefore, retain Palestine and Mesopotamia after the war. Lloyd George’s conversion to acquisitive imperialism must have pleased those high-ranking army officers who
were forever worrying about safe, defensible frontiers. A swathe of Middle Eastern lands would create a vast corridor which would connect Egypt with India and serve as a shield against aggression from the north. The Great War’s imperialists, like Cecil Rhodes, were thinking big. One, a staff officer with a long record of frontier service in Asia, believed that nothing like the advance of British armies had been seen in Mesopotamia and Palestine for nearly two thousand years. The natives, he believed, were impressed: ‘the dogged perseverance of our race … had opened their eyes as no Europeans opened them since the days of the Roman Empire.27
What was to happen in Europe after this new imperium had been founded on the sands of the Middle East? Here matters were complicated by the attitude of President Woodrow Wilson and his fourteen points, which he presented to Congress in January 1918 as the Allies’ war aims. His peace programme was concocted as a reply to the demands recently delivered to the Bolsheviks by Germany, which made it clear that the price of peace was German annexation of Russian territory. Wilson countered greed with idealism. His list of Allied conditions was a catalogue of impeccable rectitude and included pledges of post-war self-determination for the peoples of central and southern Europe, who had hitherto been under German or Austro-Hungarian rule. Article V tentatively extended this principle beyond Europe. Decisions as to the future of ex-German colonies and Ottoman provinces would be reached after balancing ‘the interests of the populations concerned’ with those of the imperial power claiming the territory in question. Wilson had been extremely hesitant about this proposal for fear of giving offence to Britain, but he persevered to find a form of words which, he hoped, would not distress America’s ally.28