by Jan Morris
It was a soldier’s formula, and the soldiers liked each other. They negotiated in French, but they talked the same professional language too, of flags and gunpowder, supplies and disciplines. After the talks the British mounted a parade, and the Egyptian flag was hoisted by a Sudanese detachment, to a twenty-one-gun salute from the artillery. Everybody saluted quiveringly, and did their best to be tactful. The warships flew Egyptian flags, most of the British officers wore Egyptian uniforms, and even the three cheers were in Arabic. The French, for their part, behaved with great courtesy: the officers wore fresh-laundered whites for the occasion, and their Senegalese soldiers, in red fezzes and jerseys, seemed even to the British to be commendably soldier-like.
Later Kitchener was entertained in Marchand’s mess, bending his gigantic frame almost double to enter it. The two sides toasted each other in sweet champagne, and exchanged fairly ornate pleasantries. A Senegalese guard was then inspected in the blazing heat, and as the Sirdar left the soil of Fashoda—Fort St Louis to the French—he was presented with a huge basket of vegetables and flowers from the garden: French flora from French soil, it was tacitly suggested as the last salutes were exchanged and the boats rowed out to the waiting gunboats.
Almost at once the flotilla sailed, leaving only a regiment of Sudanese and some guns in a bivouac on their mudflat, and soon the trail of black smoke was far away across the empty Sudd. Kitchener left behind him, nevertheless, a steely after-taste, for before he embarked he handed Marchand a formal letter of protest at the presence of the French in the Nile valley, and a list of stern restrictions on their movements. Not even private letters were to be sent down the river without British approval: in effect the French were to be imprisoned in their fort with their flowers, flags and vegetables. This was the iron within the glove. No pretence was made now that Kitchener was acting purely in Egyptian interests. The protest was made in the name of Great Britain, and Marchand and his Frenchmen were left in no doubt, as they watched the gunboats disappear, that the British Empire itself had passed that way.
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The British also sent the French, as a parting gift, a package of newspapers. It was a Parthian courtesy, for the papers contained the news of the Dreyfus Affair, the cancer in French public life which festered around the imprisonment on Devil’s Island, for alleged espionage, of the innocent Jewish Captain Alfred Dreyfus. ‘You have achieved something remarkable, very remarkable‚’ Kitchener had told Marchand in his mess hut, but he had added enigmatically, ‘but you know the French Government will not back you up.’ This was why. The Dreyfus scandal, which divided French society from top to bottom, also hamstrung French foreign policy, while the Russians had chosen the moment to tell their allies that they wanted no part of the Nile dispute. Marchand was all on his own, far away in the Sudd: France had her mind on closer predicaments.1
Sure enough, war never came. The British were united behind Kitchener—they realized, Churchill wrote, ‘that while they had been devoting themselves to great military operations, in broad daylight and in the eye of the world… other operations, covert and deceitful, had been in progress in the heart of the Dark Continent, designed solely for the mischievous and spiteful object of depriving them of the produce of their labours. And they firmly set their faces against such behaviour.’ The negotiations between London and Paris were protracted, but the British held all the cards, if only because they really were ready to go to war over Fashoda. ‘We’ve only got arguments,’ said Theophile Delcassé, the new and more conciliatory French Foreign Minister, ‘they’ve got troops.’ Admiral Sir John Fisher, the British naval commander on the North American Station, was standing by to fall upon Devil’s Island and snatch Dreyfus away to freedom, while at home the imperial propaganda machine worked at full blast. ‘What has France to look for?’ asked the Illustrated London News. ‘Of our ultimate triumph, and of the utter disaster that would befall her, there can be no question whatever.’ George Wyndham, one of the most promising of the younger Conservative imperialists, put the British attitude in a nutshell: ‘We don’t care whether the Nile is called English or Egyptian or what it is called, but we mean to have it and we don’t mean the French to have it…. It is not worthwhile drawing distinctions of right and wrong in the matter, it is a matter entirely of interest.’
Salisbury mischievously described poor Marchand as ‘an explorer in difficulties on the upper Nile’, and in fact the French presence at Fashoda, invested north and south by British power, did become more and more ridiculous. By the time Paris recognized realities, in November 1898, the six Frenchmen and seventy Senegalese left at Fashoda felt themselves cruelly betrayed and humiliated. They withdrew that December, after five months in the fort, and were played away to Djibouti (they refused an easier passage down the Nile to Egypt) by the strains of the ‘Marseillaise’ from the Sudanese band of the British garrison—‘sad yet proud’, as one of them recorded, ‘with moist eyes yet with our heads held high’.
‘Now’, wrote Churchill, ‘the British people may … tell some stonemason to bring his hammer and chisel and cut on the pedestal of Gordon’s statue in Trafalgar Square the significant, the sinister, yet the not unsatisfactory word, “Avenged”.’ In fact Gordon was doubly avenged, by the defeat of his murderers and by the final extension of British power to the headwaters of the Nile. In the end, too, the unhappy Fashoda episode had happier consequences, for it was the last dangerous clash between the British and the French Empires. Tempers cooled, as the two nations recoiled from the brink. The French recognized Britain’s supremacy on the Upper Nile, the British accepted French paramountcy in Morocco. Within a decade the Fashoda incident, with all its acrimonies, had been succeeded by the Entente Cordiale.
Marchand, a French hero in the classic mould, was made a Commander of the Legion of Honour and promoted to Lieutenant-Colonel.1 Kitchener was awarded the Grand Cross of the Bath, raised to the peerage as Lord Kitchener of Khartoum, voted a Parliamentary grant of £30,000 and appointed Governor-General of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. Fashoda itself disappeared from the maps. The dwindling remains of its fort remained there among the swamp, slowly disintegrating over the years, and for a while it was a relay station on the British telegraph line to Uganda: but in deference to French feelings the imperial surveyors changed the name of it, and it was known henceforth as Kodok, after the Shilluk settlement nearby—a fateful but forgotten spot, 9°51’N, 32°07’E, where a possible highway from Nigeria to Somaliland might cross a putative railway from Cairo to the Cape.1
1 But grumbling, for he was very economical, at the ammunition expended in shooting the wounded as they lay on the ground.
2 They were from the 21st Lancers, a regiment which had its baptism of fire at Omdurman, after so long a history of peaceful soldiering that its regimental motto was said to be ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’.
1 With live shot, there being no blank: the gunners aimed high over the river into the desert beyond, where nobody who mattered was likely to be.
1 Asked what were the ‘Sultan’s rights’ mentioned in one particularly obscure African treaty, the Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies replied that he wasn’t sure what they were, but whatever they were, they were reserved.
1 The captain of the Fateh, 128 tons, was Commander David Beatty, aged twenty-seven. Twenty years later he was to have under his direct command 41 battleships, 9 battle-cruisers, 54 cruisers, 4 aircraft carriers and nearly 200 destroyers.
1 Sir Ronald Wingate, whose father’s advice to Kitchener was crucial to the Fashoda settlement, points out to me the striking coincidence that almost exactly a century before, in August 1799, Admiral Sir Sidney Smith sent Napoleon, after his victory at Aboukir, a packet of newspapers giving him his first intimation of crisis in France: he abandoned his army in Egypt at once, and, sailing secretly for home, presently became First Consul and Emperor.
1 He died a general in 1934, after a life of mixed fame and obscurity. Hanotaux, the true instigator of Fashoda, became a somewhat dis
concerting delegate to the League of Nations, and survived until 1944.
1 Later it became a local administrative headquarters, but when in 1955 an RAF aircraft flew me over it (the Sudan was still Anglo-Egyptian then) it looked as forlorn and isolated as ever, and when I told the pilot that it was Fashoda, where Kitchener and Marchand met, he had never heard of the place.
The Khalifa, having escaped the slaughter at Omdurman, was caught and killed a year later, but the Mahdist movement never lost its appeal for the Sudanese, and until the last years of British rule the Mahdi’s own posthumous son, Abd ar-Rahman al-Mahdi, was a great man in the land, and also a Knight Commander of the British Empire.
CHAPTER THREE
Following the Flags
THE British at home were cock-a-hoop, glorying in Kitchener’s successes and half hoping for war with France. (‘It was a pity it could not have come off just now’, wrote Admiral Fisher, regretfully putting away his charts of Devil’s Island, ‘I think we should have made rather a good job of it.’) The bourgeoisie, in particular, revelled in their colonial wars, and a picture popular around the end of the century portrayed them doing it.
It was called Following the Flags. On the left sits Papa, wearing a frogged smoking-jacket and holding that morning’s Times. On the right are grouped his family: mother in lace jabot and speckled muslin, daughter with ribboned hair over her striped blouse, son in Eton collar and kilt. On the table between them lies a map of the current campaign, wherever it happens to be, stuck about with Union Jacks, and as the paterfamilias reads out the latest despatch from the front, his children eagerly move the flags and assess the tactical situation—for all the world as though they are indulging in some favourite nursery game, whose conquered territories are only imaginary, and whose dead are make-believe. The British were not merely interested in imperial affairs. At this climactic moment of the Empire’s history they were imperially brain-washed.
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There was hardly a moment of the day then, hardly a facet of daily living, in which the fact of Empire was not emphasized. From exhortatory editorials to matchbox lids, from children’s fashions to parlour games, from music-hall lyrics to parish-church sermons, the imperial theme was relentlessly drummed. Empire was the plot of novels, the dialogue of plays, the rhythm of ballads, the inspiration of oratorios. It was as though the whole nation was being deliberately disciplined into the imperial fervour.
That small kilted boy, for instance, when he returns to his preparatory school at the end of the holidays, will not often be allowed to forget that he is born to an imperial heritage. Every day’s curriculum reminds him. School prayers, for a start, will doubtless include a prayer for the Queen-Empress and her subjects across the world, may well include a sermon about imperial responsibilities or missionary needs, and is very likely to end with some devotional hymn of Empire. Refulgent upon the classroom wall will hang the map of the world, on Mercator’s projection preferably, for no other shows to such advantage the lavish slabs of red which mark the authority of the British—and perhaps a shipping chart, demonstrating by its distribution of boat-shaped blobs how overwhelming is the British maritime power—and possibly some inspiring steel engraving too, Caton Woodfield’s famous picture of the Khartoum memorial service, or one of Lady Butler’s celebrated reconstructions of British gallantry in the field.
Is it history this morning? No flabby internationalism in the 1890s. History was not only firmly Anglo-centric, it was also frankly designed to impress upon a pupil the superiority of all things British, and the privilege of being born to the Flag. Or is it Eng Lit? What better textbook than Arthur Stanley’s recent anthology of patriotic verse, with its introduction by the Lord Bishop of Calcutta, late headmaster of Harrow? ‘The song that nerves a nation’s heart’, as is very properly quoted from Tennyson on the title-page, ‘is itself a deed’, and within these pages art and action are certainly allied. Here is ‘The Song of the English Bowmen’, and ‘Private of the Buffs’—here Drake’s Drum sounds down the years, and here Wolfe dies once more on the Plains of Abraham—all to the glory of Britain and her Empire, for as the Bishop observes rather obscurely in his preface, an Empire lives not by bread alone.1
Luncheon nevertheless, in school hall, and perhaps there is some old boy at high table, home from the war, swaggering in red and gleaming brass, and reminiscing airily to the envious masters all about. To the cricket field next, nursery of England’s style, where Newbolt’s verses echo always, if not among the players, at least among the umpires—
There’s a breathless hush in the Close tonight—
Ten to make and the match to win—
A bumping pitch and a blinding light,
An hour to play and the last man in.
And it’s not for the sake of a ribboned coat,
Or the selfish hope of a season’s fame,
But his captain’s hand on his shoulder smote—
‘Play up! Play up! and play the game!’1
And when our little friend goes to bed after prep that night, to a good read under the blankets, there G. A. Henty awaits him no doubt, with his tales of healthy British adventure, or Rider Haggard’s vision of Africa, or perhaps just the Boy’s Own Paper, the B.O.P., in which the pluck of British youth is for ever matched, and for ever victorious, against wickedness, savagery and foreignness.
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There was no escaping it, breakfast to lights out, and to most people, in the full flush of Omdurman and Fashoda, it simply seemed inevitable. The Empire was as immemorial as the Palace of Westminster itself—which, though it had been built less than half a century before, was popularly assumed to be as old as anything.
This was partly because the long reign of Queen Victoria had given the British a sense of organic permanence. Foreign countries had coups or revolutions, invaded one another, replaced kings with Emperors. Britain progressed differently, quietly, steadily, as though the history of a nation was a direct paradigm of human life, and was simply part of the universal ageing process. So it surely was with the Empire. The idea that Kitchener had not really gone to the Sudan to avenge Gordon, but to forestall foreign competition in Africa, would strike most people as sophistry, if not actually sacrilege. Every Englishman was born, wrote George Bernard Shaw, with a miraculous power that made him master of the world. ‘When he wants a thing, he never tells himself he wants it. He waits patiently until there comes into his mind, no one knows how, a burning conviction that it is his moral and religious duty to conquer those who possess the thing he wants. Then he becomes irresistible.’
Even the rank and file of the imperial activists, the soldiers, the administrators, the merchants in the field, did not generally think of imperialism as power politics. The Empire was there, it was patently beneficial, they would do their best for it. The old idea of an imperial trusteeship had been transmuted by Kipling into the more readily comprehensible image of the White Man’s Burden—
Take up the White Man’s Burden,
In patience to abide
By open speech and simple, an hundred times made plain
To seek another’s profit,
And work another’s gain.
Most rank-and-file British imperialists, at the end of the nineteenth century, would probably admit to these sentiments as their own, especially as they were tinged with complaint—‘the blame of those ye better, the hate of those ye guard’. The Empire-builder often felt himself to be unappreciated. The ingratitude of subjects, the lack of material reward, the interference of politicians, the ignorance of intellectuals—all these figured often in letters home from Kodok or Kidderpore, and perhaps made the writers feel all the more noble. It was seldom, however, a grumble about the life itself. For many imperialists theirs was a true calling, often transmitted through generations in the imperial service.
For on this, the professional level of Empire, the idea of service really was paramount. The imperial classes, trained with such precision by the public schools and ancient universit
ies, were bred to it, and Joseph Conrad the Pole thought love of service, even more than love of adventure, to be the first characteristic of the Englishman in his Empire.
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And if to the public at home Empire was a craze, to the man in the field it was often a perennial fascination, for the imperial profession catered for every preference. The most esoteric speciality could be pursued somewhere under the Crown, and over the years the Empire had built up a vast corporate body of knowledge, scientific, anthropological, strategic, economic. Each extension of Empire widened this expertise. Hardly were the imperial soldiers on the Upper Nile than the imperial hydrologists were following them: after the gun came the butterfly net.
Only in the British Army, for instance, would there be supply officers ready to demonstrate that the number of camels needed to carry x loads y stages into Afghanistan might vary according to the formula 14x((15/32)y—1). Only a British diplomat, perhaps, told by a Persian Prince that the ink-stain on a new treaty was ‘a mole upon its face’, would be able instantly to reply with a quotation from Hafiz—‘I would give all Samarkand and Bokhara for the Indian-dark mole on the face of my lady-love.’ The handful of Englishmen who supervised the affairs of Sikkim in the 1890s produced a huge folio volume listing everything there was to know about the State, its flora and fauna, its history, its legal code, its folk-customs, its geology, its religion, down to Scorpion Charms against Injury by Demons and Jungle Fruits, &c, Eaten by Lepchas.1 The literary works of Elias Ney, British Agent at Meshed in 1896, included An Apocryphal Inscription in Khorassan, A Journey Through Western Mongolia, an introduction to the history of the Shans of Upper Burma, and a translation with learned notes of The Tarikh-i-Rashidi, by Miza Haidar of Kashgar. Flora Annie Steel’s Complete Indian Housekeeper, 1892, dedicated to ‘Those English Girls to whom Fate may assign the task of being Housemothers in our Eastern Empire’, told its readers how to build a camp-oven, how to make snipe pudding or mange ointment for dogs, how to treat cows with colic or husbands with prickly heat, the best means of keeping sparrows out of the house, the cost of hiring a bullock-drawn van in Ootacamund, the Tamil word for horse-barley, the right underwear to take to the Punjab, the proper way to load a camel and the only correct recipe for boot-dubbin (fish oil, mutton suet and resin).
