Farewell the Trumpets Read online

  And of course, as in all great historical movements, the fundamental purpose was not a purpose at all, but simply an instinct. The British had reached an apogee. Rich, vigorous, inventive, more than 40 million strong, they had simply spilled out of their islands, impelled by forces beyond their own analysis. In this sense at least they were truly chosen. Destiny, an abstraction the imperialist poets loved to invoke, really had made of them a special kind of nation, and had distributed their ideas, their language, their ships and their persons uniquely across the world.

  4

  They were uniquely selected: were they uniquely qualified? Certainly by the end of the nineteenth century the British had fallen into an imperial posture, an imperial habit perhaps. Technically they were as well fitted as any to govern a quarter of the world. Their own country had escaped the social convulsions that shook the rest of Europe, to provide a model of liberal but traditional stability. Their original mastery of steam, and all that came from it, had given them a technological start over all other nations, an advantage they put to imperial uses. The flexibility of their unwritten constitution was handy for an expansionist State. The semi-divine nature of their monarchy gave them a mystic instrument that was often useful. Being islanders, they knew more about the world than most of their neighbours: they possessed more ships than all other nations put together, and there were few British families who had not sent a man abroad, if not to settle, at least to sail a vessel or fight a foreign war. They were an immensely experienced people. Compact, patriotic, paradoxically bound together by an ancient class system, theirs had been an independent State for nearly a thousand years, and this gave them punch and phalanx.

  Over the years they had, too, created an imperial elite to whom Empire was a true vocation. Everybody knew its members. They were products of those curious institutions, the English public schools. Within the last century the traditional schools of the landed gentry, Eton, Harrow, Winchester, had been widely copied, until all over England were the cricket pitches, the tall chapels, the cloisters and the dormitories of the Old School, whose friendships, slangs and values often lasted a man through life. These were the nurseries of Empire—as Sir Henry Newbolt wrote of his own school:

  The victories of our youth we count for gain

  Only because they steeled our hearts to pain‚

  And hold no longer even Clifton great

  Save as she schooled our wills to serve the State.1

  They taught a man to be disciplined, tough, uncomplaining, reserved, good in a team and acclimatized to order. The prefect system, in which boys exerted much of the school’s authority, gave a man an early experience of command. The cult of the all-rounder taught him to put his hand to anything. The carefully evolved code of schoolboy conduct told him when to hold his tongue, when a rule was made to be broken, and even something about the nature of love—for love between men, generally platonic but often profound, was an essential strain of the imperial ethic. The stiff upper lip, the maintenance of appearances, the sense of inner brotherhood, the simple code of fair play—all these provided a potent ju-ju for the few thousand Englishmen who, in the 1890s, ruled so much of the known world.

  This was the imperial class. Its members stood to gain directly from the existence of Empire, in jobs, in dividends, or at least in adventurous opportunity. The mass of the British people were far more remote from the imperial enterprise, and until the last decades of the century had in fact taken little notice of their Empire, except when they wished to emigrate or join the Army. But the grand sweep of Victorian history had by 1897 turned the whole nation briefly into enthusiasts. The new penny press, preaching to a newly literate and newly enfranchised audience, was stridently propagandist, and the events of the past twenty-five years had swept the people into a highly enjoyable craze of Empire.

  What events they had been! Anybody over thirty, say, at the time of the Diamond Jubilee had experienced a period of British history unexampled for excitement. What theatre! The tragedy of Isandhlwana, the thrilling defence of Rorke’s Drift! Gordon martyred at Khartoum! ‘Dr Livingstone I presume’! The redcoats helter-skelter from the summit of Majuba, Sir Garnet Wolseley burning the charnel-houses of Kumasi! Never a year passed without some marvellous set-piece, of triumph or of tragedy. Champions rose to glory, the flag forever flew, the Empire grew mightier yet.

  And across the world the graveyards spread, as generation after generation contributed its quota to the imperial sacrifice. Young men died in battle, young women died in tropical childbirth, children died of smallpox or cholera, heatstroke or food poisoning, a hundred thousand expatriates died of the climate, or of homesickness, or of plain exhaustion.1 The Empire was a pageant, but it was reality too. Its pretences were all on the surface. The knowledge of its power and of its responsibilities gave a corporate pride to the British people, buttressing their sense of family, so that a sigh passed across the nation when a hero died or a regiment was humiliated, and on Jubilee night the bonfires burnt brightly on hilltop and beacon from Cornwall to Cromarty.

  5

  There were few in 1897 to question the morality of the British Empire. It was grand, and it was honourable. What it did for the nation materially, nobody really knew: its profits were great but so were its expenses, and the burdens of it matched the assets. But there was no denying its stimulation to the national spirit. In the 1890s Imperialism had reached an ebullient and aggressive climax. The politicians, habitually aloof to the Empire and its causes, had taken it up, and a hazy movement called the New Imperialism was busily publicizing the glory of it all. In 1895 the Conservatives and their Liberal Unionist allies, the party of Empire, had won an overwhelming victory over the Liberals: the nation talked Empire, thought Empire, dreamed Empire. Two geniuses, Rudyard Kipling and Edward Elgar, were translating the emotions into art, and a thousand lesser practitioners were putting it into jingle, march or tableau.

  There was calculation to this climax, of course, the cunning of financiers, the opportunism of politicians, the ambitions of soldiers, merchants and pro-consuls. By their own best standards the British of the 1890s were beneath themselves, their patriotism coarsened and their taste debased. This was hardly the England that Burke had idealized, ‘sympathetic with the adversity or with the happiness of mankind, [feeling] that nothing in human affairs was foreign to her’. The England of the Diamond Jubilee was essentially insular, for its people saw the whole wide Empire, even the world itself, only as a response to themselves.

  Yet it was not a conscious arrogance, and the New Imperialism was seldom malicious. The British Government of the time was a fastidiously aristocratic regime, one of the last in Europe: Lord Salisbury the Prime Minister, the last to sit in the House of Lords, saw the Empire more as an instrument of diplomatic policy than a source of glory—to calculate its worth, he once mordantly observed, ‘you must divide victories by taxation.’ The unprecedented expansions of the last half-century, especially in Africa, were not part of any concerted policy of aggrandisement, but occurred haphazardly, often in reflex, generally for ad hoc reasons of economics or strategy. The British as a whole would have been shocked at any notion of wickedness to their imperialism, for theirs was a truly innocent bravado. They really thought their Empire good, like their Queen, and they were proud of it for honest reasons: they meant no harm, except to evil enemies, and in principle they wished the poor benighted natives nothing but well.

  These were brittle times—times of change and sensationalism, of high stakes and quick fortunes, outrageous fashions and revolutionary ideas. Socialism was an intellectual fad, the New Woman smoked her cigarettes ostentatiously in the Café Royal, and only a month before the Jubilee Oscar Wilde had ended his sentence in Reading Gaol. The grand Victorian synthesis of art, morals and invention was already fading, and with it would presently fade the certainty and the optimism. Only a sexually restrained society, warned the psychologist J. D. Unwin, would continue to expand: and there were many Britons in 1897 who, looking a
round them at the feverish high jinks of the capital, saw omens of disillusionment to come. The times were too gaudy to be safe. The mood could crack, or be shattered by a stray note.

  Part of the triumph was bluff anyway. The people might think themselves citizens of the happiest, richest, strongest and kindest Power: their leaders knew that Great Britain was no longer beyond challenge. The Germans and the Americans were fast overtaking her in technique, brute power and public education. She had few friends in the world, and no allies. Her creed of Free Trade, which had served her well in the days of absolute supremacy, was not so infallible in a world of competitive tariffs. The basis of her immense prestige was fragile really. Bismarck said the German police force could easily arrest the British Army, and there was nothing sacrosanct to the British command of the seas—any Power could defy it, if prepared to put enough money into a fleet. The very state of the world was increasingly precarious to the Empire: Germany, France and Russia were all potential enemies, the moribund Ottoman Empire was a perpetual problem, an unstable Austria-Hungary threatened instability to everyone else, a derelict China seemed an incitement to colonial rivalries.

  To seers, then, there was a detectable element of disquiet to the celebrations of 1897, an unease not often declared, nor even perhaps realized, but intuitive. It was a thunderstorm feeling—a heaviness in the air, an unnatural brightness to the light. Queen’s Weather it might have been on Jubilee Day, but the outlook was changeable.

  6

  Still the public at large felt no premonitions, for the Empire was grand above all in the idea of it, in the grand illusion of permanence and paramountcy. Its strongest loyalties were loyalties to a Crown, or a Throne, or a Way, or a Duty, or a Heritage, and all over the world people responded to its call emotionally, out of their hearts. In India that Jubilee year people sacrificed goats before images of Her Majesty. In Canada Red Indians swore oaths by the Great White Queen. In Kansas City, Missouri, the children of the Brown family, recent emigrants from England, ‘assumed a lofty and haughty air’, while in Milton, Massachusetts, another English exile must surely have infuriated some of her neighbours, even at Jubilee time, with the song she so often loved to sing around the place:

  Long may that brave banner flutter on high,

  O’er mountain, o’er desert, o’er sea,

  A beacon to friends but a terror to foes,

  The most glorious banner there be.

  And if there’s a despot who dares to defy

  The most glorious banner that ever did fly,

  We’ll show him an Englishman knows how to die

  For the Union Jack of Old England.1

  The Diamond Jubilee might be contrived, as a boost to the imperial confidence—the British were past-masters at the suggestive display—but its emotions were deeper than its intentions, and were to survive, in a clutch at the throat, a chill down the spine, a cross on a distant grave, when the physical structure of Empire was dismantled and discredited. As the inscription said upon the sundial at Government House in Mauritius, one of the Queen-Empress’s least necessary dependencies:

  God Save the Queen!

  For loyalty is still the same

  Whether it win or lose the game,

  True as the Dial to the Sun

  Although it be not shone upon.1

  Sensations profounder still, too, were aroused by the Diamond Jubilee, for the Queen’s embodiment of the imperial power reached far back into the people’s folk-memory, conjuring atavistic spirits out of the past. Hardly less than peasants of India or Australian aboriginals, simple Britons, especially country people, regarded the power of the Throne with an almost superstitious veneration. Old gods were honoured by the majesty of the Jubilee, by the welling-up of the corporate enthusiasm, and by the spectacle of the aged Queen, her black moiré dress embroidered with silver symbols, attended by her marshals, clerics and statesmen through the streets of London. The bonfires that blazed that night were like rituals of this instinct. A watcher in Worcestershire counted more than forty, flickering far into the distance on beacon hills across the breadth of England: and their scattered lights in the darkness, their glow in the night sky, were reminders of older urges behind the pride of Empire, beliefs and battles long ago, mysteriously linking the very soil of the imperial island with reef and tundra, desert and distant veld.2

  1 And who wore on his bridle that day the Afghan Medal, awarded him by the Queen’s express command. Roberts bought Vonolel, who was named after a dissident Assamese chieftain, from an Arab horse-dealer in Bombay in 1877, and buried him in 1899, aged twenty-seven, in London.

  1 They all died.

  2 It sank.

  1 He was: it extended from Portugal to the Caspian. The Archdeacon of Bloemfontein told me this story.

  2 Recorded, Mr Peter Ustinov tells me, by Colonel Weston Jarvis in his Jottings from an Active Life, together with a parallel aphorism from Lord Milner: ‘Everyone can Help’. ‘If only we carry these two declarations of two great men in the forefront of our minds,’ Colonel Jarvis commented, ‘there is very little doubt that democracy can still be educated along the right lines.’

  1 To this day its State flag contains the Union Jack in its upper quarter, while until her deposition in 1893 the last of the Hawaiian monarchs, Queen Lydia Liliuokalani, modelled her court upon that of Queen Victoria (except perhaps for its ceremonial robes, which were made from the tufted feathers of the o–o bird).

  1 Not a very ancient purpose. Clifton was founded in 1862, the year of Newbolt’s birth.

  1 Three Mourning Warehouses advertised themselves in Hart’s Army List, 1887.

  1 I heard about the Browns, whose family name I have changed, from a neighbour of theirs at the time (‘the boy was Arthur, the girl, poor plain thing, was Muriel’) while the song of the Milton patriot was kindly sent me by her granddaughter.

  1 It comes from Samuel Butler’s Hudibras‚ 1678, and is still there. So are the Virgilian quotations inscribed on the garden seats by a former governor of classical tastes, Sir George Bowen, who had been president of the University of Corfu, and who as author of Murray’s Handbook for Greece, 1854, gave his countrymen the immortal assurance: ‘Any Englishman having the usual knowledge of ancient Greek will be able to read the Athenian papers with ease.’

  2 If any resilient reader would like more in this vein, the entire central volume of this triology, Pax Britannica (London and New York, 1968) is devoted to an evocation of the Empire, what it was and how it worked, at the time of the Diamond Jubilee.

  CHAPTER TWO

  ‘An Explorer in Difficulties’

  THE tumult and the shouting slightly died, as Jubilee year came to an end, but on the frontiers the British Empire tremendously proceeded—especially in Africa, the last undeveloped continent, where the imperial dynamic was providing a whole new pantheon of heroes, saints and martyrs. Two of them in particular were in the public mind, for far away on the Upper Nile General Sir Herbert Kitchener, the rising star of the British Army, was avenging the death of ‘Charlie’ Gordon, ‘the noblest man who ever lived’.

  Since 1882 the British had been effectual rulers of Egypt, and had thus become concerned in the affairs of the Sudan, an Egyptian dependency of a million square miles immediately to the south. For years the Sudan had been in a state of rebellion under a fiery Sufi mystic who called himself the Mahdi, ‘The Leader’, and who formally announced the End of Time, a conception particularly unwelcome to the British just then. In 1884 it had been decided to abandon the country, and to organize the withdrawal the British Government sent to Khartoum, the capital, General Charles Gordon, Royal Engineers, everyone’s archetype of the Christian soldier, ‘not a man but a God’. Trapped in Khartoum by his own death-wish, in January 1885 Gordon was killed by the Mahdists, and so capped his already legendary career with an imperial apotheosis.

  It had been one of the great romantic tragedies of the Victorian age. Ever since the British had dreamed of recovering the Sudan, and avenging the
memory of the martyr. The Mahdi died in 1885, but his successor, the Khalifa, held similarly apocalyptic views, and by the 1890s the Reconquest was at hand. The obvious man to conduct it was Kitchener, whose hooded eye, huge figure and commanding bearing were imperial factors in themselves. Kitchener was made Sirdar, Commander-in-Chief, of the Egyptian Army, which was in effect an imperial force, and for years he grimly planned the operation. A complicated man, sometimes hesitant, a bachelor of somewhat dilettantish tastes, he was made for the retributive role. His forte was organization, and with infinite care and thoroughness he prepared the campaign, designing his own gunboats for the passage up the Nile, and commissioning his own railway to take his armies out of Egypt towards Khartoum.

  It was slow, but it was inexorable. By the end of 1896 Kitchener had an army of 25,000 men, 8,000 of them British, the rest Egyptian and Sudanese, deep in the Sudan. His method of campaign was barbarically deliberate and symbolic. The soldiers went into action crying ‘Remember Gordon!’. Gordon’s nephew directed the shelling of the Mahdi’s tomb at Omdurman, and Kitchener seriously thought of keeping The Leader’s skull as a souvenir. It all went like very slow clockwork. By Jubilee Day Kitchener was preparing his advance upon Khartoum, and by the autumn of 1898 he had annihilated the Mahdist army in the battle of Omdurman, killing at least 10,000 Sudanese for the loss of 28 Britons.1 On the morning of Sunday, September 4, 1898, he crossed the Nile into the ruined capital, where the shattered remains of Gordon’s Residency lay as a wreck of rubble and undergrowth beside the river; and there, in a famous Victorian moment, we shall join the conqueror ourselves.