Eckardstein and Chamberlain had met in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1889, after Chamberlain’s marriage to Mary Endicott. Over the years, Eckardstein had observed Chamberlain’s rise, and in 1895 he had reported to Berlin that the Colonial Secretary was “unquestionably the most energetic54 and enterprising personality of the Salisbury Government.” Then, in March 1898, Eckardstein arranged a meeting between Chamberlain and Count Hatzfeldt, the German Ambassador. Hatzfeldt was wary of the former screw manufacturer from Birmingham; he preferred to conduct diplomacy with an aristocrat like Lord Salisbury. Nevertheless, Salisbury had told him that Chamberlain would have the last word on colonial matters.
Ambassador Hatzfeldt faced a difficult task. In Berlin, Tirpitz’ first Navy Bill was before the Reichstag. Passage of the Bill was Kaiser William’s keenest political desire. Until this passage was achieved, relations with England must be managed so that Great Britain could continue to be presented as a threat. On the other hand, because the Royal Navy was so overwhelmingly superior, it did not seem politic to reject the British overture with excessive rudeness. “The English fleet,”55 Bülow wrote to Hatzfeldt, “according to the unanimous estimate of all our naval authorities—I name above all, Admiral Tirpitz—is not merely equal to the combined fleets of any other two Great Powers, but superior.” Tirpitz’ proposal for building the German Fleet warned of years of risk in the face of this superior force. Better, therefore, to manage England prudently, to dangle German friendship in front of Chamberlain, and to pick up what one could in the colonial sphere. Hatzfeldt understood this strategy and assured Berlin that he would impress on Chamberlain that before an Anglo-German rapprochement could be contemplated, the Colonial Secretary “would have to show himself56 responsive on certain colonial questions.”
Chamberlain and the German Ambassador met on March 29. Chamberlain emphasized, and Hatzfeldt agreed, that their conversation must be strictly unofficial. He would, of course, keep Mr. Balfour fully informed and ultimately no concrete step could be taken without the consent of Lord Salisbury. These things said, the Colonial Secretary then told Count Hatzfeldt that he favored a defensive alliance between Great Britain and Germany. On all great international issues, he argued, British and German interests were nearly identical. The Jameson Raid and the Kruger Telegram were aberrations. Britain, he confessed, needed friends: “I admitted57 that the policy of this country for many years had been isolation... [but this] may be changed.” If Germany stood by England now in the Far East, said Chamberlain, she could count on Britain’s help if she were attacked. Hatzfeldt listened carefully and confined his response to asking “if I thought that Parliament58 and the people... would accept the idea of an alliance.”
Hatzfeldt had often heard from Lord Salisbury that Britain’s security lay in isolation and that Parliament would never approve a peacetime alliance. Bülow, receiving Hatzfeldt’s report of the first conversation, raised the same objection. Under the British parliamentary system, any new Cabinet could reverse the policies of its predecessor. It was impossible, therefore, for Great Britain to be a reliable ally. At his next interview with the German ambassador, Chamberlain endeavored to address this issue. It was true, he admitted, that a treaty would have to be approved by the House of Commons. But if Hatzfeldt would look back over English history, he would find no case in which a treaty made by one party in power had been repudiated by its successor. That kind of reversal, he suggested, was more likely in countries where the personality of the monarch was key; Imperial Russia, for example.
From Berlin, Bülow and Holstein, opposed to an English alliance but unwilling to affront Joseph Chamberlain, supplied Hatzfeldt with questions and objections which he could use to keep the powerful English Minister at bay. The Kaiser, reading Hatzfeldt’s accounts, relished dangling a German alliance in front of England, but keeping it always just out of reach. It was satisfying to behold a senior minister of the British government admitting England’s weakness and pleading, even unofficially, for German support. “The Jubilee swindle59 is over!” William wrote in the margin of one of Hatzfeldt’s dispatches. On April 10, the Kaiser reminded the Wilhelmstrasse that he did not want an Anglo-German alliance. “At the same time,”60 he continued, “it is of great importance to keep official sentiment in England favorable to us and hopeful. A friendly-minded England puts another card against Russia in our hands as well as giving us the prospect of winning from England colonial and commercial concessions.... To Count Hatzfeldt’s skillful hands will fall the difficult task of putting off the conclusion of a formal alliance, not by a rejection wounding to English feeling, but so as to manifest a cordial wish for beneficent cooperation.” Meanwhile, William used the well-meaning Eckardstein as a decoy. The baron, hearing from Chamberlain that the talks with Hatzfeldt were mired in German reluctance, rushed back to Germany. On April 9 he had an interview with the Kaiser. For an hour after dinner, Eckardstein and the Emperor walked up and down a terrace. William encouraged the airy dreams of his Anglophile diplomat, and Eckardstein hurried back to London to tell Chamberlain that the Kaiser had “said to me at Homburg61 that an alliance with England would be the best thing in the world. It would secure the peace for fifty years.”
During his third and final interview with Hatzfeldt on April 25, Chamberlain heard nothing about this Imperial vision, only reiteration of the obstacles to an alliance. Perhaps someday, Hatzfeldt said, when feeling in Germany was warmer towards England, a closer relationship could be achieved. In the interim, the Ambassador suggested, nothing would be more helpful to advance that prospect than British colonial concessions. As the Birmingham screw manufacturer listened to the Rhineland aristocrat, his face grew hard. Chamberlain had been in business; he knew when he was being pushed too hard. There would be no buying of a future relationship with Germany by giving up bits of British territory. Instead, the Colonial Secretary swung the game around. Hatzfeldt’s report to Berlin of this conversation contained surprising news: “Mr. Chamberlain...62 [said] that if his idea of a natural alliance with Germany must be renounced, it would be no impossibility for England to arrive at an understanding with Russia or France.... Mr. Chamberlain meant very deliberately to indicate that in case of a definite rejection on our side, England, so far as he has to do with it, will work for an understanding with Russia or France.” In the margin of the dispatch, alongside Hatzfeldt’s mention of an English understanding with Russia or France, the Kaiser wrote, “Impossible!”63
This was the end of Joseph Chamberlain’s first attempt to achieve an Anglo-German alliance. When Lord Salisbury returned from Beaulieu at the end of April, Chamberlain reported in detail what had taken place. The Prime Minister, neither surprised nor unduly distressed, consoled his energetic colleague: “I quite agree with you64 that under the circumstances a closer relation with Germany would be very desirable. But how can we get it?” Chamberlain was disappointed. His first effort had failed; other than Eckardstein, no one in Britain or Germany had supported him. Nevertheless, the unpleasant facts, as he saw them, did not go away. On May 13, 1898, he spoke in Birmingham Town Hall: “Since the Crimean War,65 nearly fifty years ago, the policy of this country has been a policy of strict isolation. We have had no allies. I am afraid we have had no friends.... We stand alone.”
fn1 Austen, born in 1863, was Chancellor of the Exchequer, 1903–1905 and 1919–1921, and Foreign Secretary, 1924–1929. Neville, born in 1869, was Chancellor of the Exchequer, 1923–1924 and 1931–1937. From 1937 to May 1940, he was Prime Minister.
Chapter 13
Fashoda
Lord Salisbury refused to be agitated by the Far Eastern crisis which provoked Joseph Chamberlain’s first attempt to achieve an Anglo-German alliance. The Prime Minister, like the Colonial Secretary, understood that Britain alone did not have the strength to keep Russia out of North China. But, as Chamberlain’s reaction was to seek an ally, Salisbury’s was to step back from confrontation. Before undertaking new commitments, Salisbury always measured Britain’s resource
s; here he thought his country too weak. In April, a party of indignant fellow Cabinet ministers, come to urge strong action against Russia, learned something of his reasoning.
The delegation called on him in Arlington Street, where he lay ill with influenza. “His temperature was high1 and the doctor absolutely forbade an interview,” recorded his daughter, who was present. “His colleagues therefore wrote a short draft of the message which they suggested sending to Russia, and I was asked to take it up to him for approval or rejection. He read it over, observed that its transmission would probably mean war, and then, after a short pause, said, ‘Of course the Russians have behaved abominably and if it be any satisfaction to my colleagues I should have no objection to fighting them. But I don’t think we carry enough guns to fight them and the French together.’
“I expressed somehow,” Salisbury’s daughter continued, “my incomprehension of what the French had to do with the matter. He turned to me with a look of surprise.... ‘What had the French to do with it? Did I forget that Kitchener was actually on the march to Khartoum? In six months’ time,’ he went on, ‘we shall be on the verge of war with France; I can’t afford to quarrel with Russia now.’”
This message, brought downstairs to the waiting ministers, resulted in a milder dispatch to St. Petersburg. Six months later, as the Prime Minister had predicted, Britain was on the verge of war with France. In this confrontation, Salisbury made himself solely responsible for the foreign policy of England. He won his own last great diplomatic triumph, achieved in classic nineteenth-century British Imperial style: by skillful, independent diplomacy backed by the unchallengeable supremacy of the navy. War was averted and, with both Queen and Prime Minister sensitive to an adversary’s pride, the French Republic was permitted to avoid humiliation. The crisis centered on a crumbling African mud fort called Fashoda.
Lord Salisbury did not care for Africa. His diplomacy, like Bismarck’s, focussed on Europe, and the growing number of troubles emanating from Africa brought him only annoyance. “Africa was created2 to be the plague of foreign offices,” he sighed. At first—he told the House of Lords in 1890—it had not seemed that there would be difficulties in Africa: “Up to ten years ago,3 we remained masters of Africa, or the greater part of it, without being put to the inconvenience of protectorates or anything of that sort, by the simple fact that we were masters of the sea and that we have had considerable experience in dealing with the native races. So much was that the case that we left enormous stretches of the coast to the native rulers in the full confidence that they would gradually acquire their own proper civilization without any interference on our part.”
This hope was to fail. In 1869, the Suez Canal was opened and through the 1870s and 1880s an unseemly process known as the Scramble for Africa began. Great Britain, already positioned in South and West Africa, took more territory, and France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Portugal, and Spain each acquired large areas. By 1890, England had swallowed Egypt, Kenya, and Uganda, and Britons at home, along with Cecil Rhodes in Cape Town, dreamed of a railway running the length of the continent. Essential to this dream was British control of the four-thousand-mile valley of the Nile. Cairo and Egypt had been in British hands since 1882, but the Gladstone Cabinet had decided to withdraw British and Egyptian garrisons prematurely established in the Sudan. To supervise the withdrawal, General Charles Gordon established himself in Khartoum, the Sudanese capital. From this post, to the horror of the government in London, Gordon refused to depart, and in January 1885, after a nine-month siege, he was overwhelmed and beheaded, only two days before the arrival of a relieving army. National humiliation and the subsequent rage of the British electorate helped bring down the second Gladstone Cabinet and usher in Lord Salisbury’s first government.
Ten years later, a desire to avenge Gordon had blended with a desire to build the railway. In September 1896, after talks with Lord Salisbury, the Queen wrote in her journal: “The question of going forward4 to Khartoum is purely a question of money. There is no Egyptian money available. If it is to be done, it must be done with English money.” English money was made available. General Sir Horatio Herbert Kitchener, tall, broad-shouldered, with deep-set eyes and a flourishing luxurious mustache, was chosen by Salisburyfn1 and given the title of “Sirdar,” or Commander-in-Chief, of the Egyptian Army. For three years, Kitchener planned his Sudanese campaign. Gunboats designed for use on the Nile were built; a railway to transport and supply the army was constructed south into the desert toward Khartoum. On the morning of September 2, 1898, at Omdurman, Kitchener’s army of 26,000 Egyptian and British troops defeated 60,000 Dervishes led by the Khalifa Abdullah. Two days later, Kitchener entered Khartoum and raised British and Egyptian flags over Gordon’s ruined palace.
The Sirdar had no time to study the historic building. The day before, once the battle was won, he had opened sealed orders given to him in London to be read once Khartoum was secured. He was instructed to proceed immediately upriver to the old Egyptian fort at Fashoda to forestall a possible French annexation of the Upper Nile valley.
The trouble was that the French were already there.
France had never forgiven herself for the 1882 decision not to participate in the English occupation of Egypt. Through the 1880s, a primary goal of French foreign policy had been to force England’s withdrawal from Egypt. A French diplomat once confided to an English colleague that “the French Embassy in London6 possesses little attraction for me, as the French ambassador is expected to get the English out of Egypt and the thing cannot be done.” France, nevertheless, had wide possessions and great ambitions on the African continent. She held large territories in western North Africa, colonies at the mouth of the Congo and on the Niger, and settlements on the eastern coast at Djibouti in Somaliland. The French axis on the continent was east-west, the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic, as the British axis was north-south, Cape to Cairo. The two axes were competitive. Sooner or later, it was inevitable they would collide.
In 1894, French Foreign Minister Gabriel Hanotaux authorized a bold stroke of exploration and conquest. The Sudan and the Upper Nile had been unoccupied by a European power since Gordon’s death. For a decade, the British in Egypt and the Lower Nile had made no move to retake the Sudan. From the French base at Brazzaville on the Congo, an expedition traveling across the breadth of Africa could seize the Upper Nile; once France had annexed the region, the east–west axis would be in place. A whisper of M. Hanataux’s plan reached London. In March 1895, Sir Edward Grey, Parliamentary Under Secretary at the Foreign Office in Lord Rosebery’s government, told the House of Commons: “The advance of a French expedition...7 into a territory over which our claims have been known for so long, would not merely be an inconsistent and unexpected act, but it must be perfectly clear to the French Government that it would be an unfriendly act, and would be so viewed by England.” The enforcement of these British claims had provided an additional reason for sending Sir Herbert Kitchener8 into the Sudan. Equally, word of Kitchener’s advance hastened French preparations in Brazzaville. The race for Fashoda had begun.
In the summer of 1896, Captain Jean-Baptiste Marchand of the French marines set out with eleven French officers and 150 Senegalese soldiers to cross the continent. They walked for twenty-four months, covering 3,500 miles. No army of Dervishes stood in their way; instead they fought swamps, hippopotami, crocodiles, scorpions, mosquitoes, fleas, and fever. Nevertheless, on July 10, 1898, the French expedition arrived at the old fort of Fashoda, built by the Egyptians in 1870 to combat the slave trade. Marchand raised the tricolor and claimed the Upper Nile as in the name of France. Britain refused to recognize any French claim. While Marchand’s expedition was en route, Lord Salisbury warned the French government that Fashoda was indisputably part of the Sudan and therefore the property of the Khedive of Egypt.
Within a week of opening his sealed orders, Sir Herbert Kitchener (now Lord Kitchener by act of a grateful Queen) sailed upriver for Fashoda, accompanied by five gu
nboats pulling twelve barges in which were embarked one hundred Cameroon Highlanders, 2,500 Egyptian soldiers, and Maxim guns and field artillery. His officers included Lord Edward Cecil and—in command of one of the gunboats—Lieutenant David Beatty, who, eighteen years later, commanded the British Grand Fleet. The voyage up five hundred miles of river lasted a week. On September 19, Kitchener’s flagship, flying only the Egyptian flag, encountered a rowboat which carried a large French tricolor at the stern. A French sergeant handed Lord Kitchener a message from Marchand: “I note your intention9 to visit Fashoda where I shall be happy to welcome you in the name of France.” As it proceeded upstream, the British flotilla rounded a bend and beheld on the west bank a dilapidated fort surrounded by palm trees. In front of the fort, an honor guard of French African soldiers wearing red fezzes was drawn up on parade. In front of his men stood the small, bearded figure of Captain Marchand.
Herbert Kitchener was a Francophile who spoke French well. He admired Marchand’s achievement in crossing the continent. Marchand’s regard for Kitchener, who had defeated the Dervishes and in so doing eliminated a threat to his expedition, was equally great. They spoke in French.
“I have come to resume10 possession of the Khedive’s dominions,” Kitchener said.
“Mon Général, I, Marchand, am here by order of the French Government. I thank you for your offer of conveyance to Europe, but I must wait here for instructions.”
“Captain, I will place my boats at your disposal to return to Europe by the Nile.”
“Mon Général, I thank you, but I am awaiting orders from my Government.”
“I must hoist the Egyptian flag here,” Kitchener observed.
“Why, I myself will help you to hoist it—over the village.”
“Over the fort.”
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