by Jan Morris
In 1905 the British decreed the partition of Bengal, the most intractable province of British India, whose population was rather larger than England’s. They proposed to divide it into two lesser provinces, one predominantly Hindu, one predominantly Muslim, and their intention was self-evident: divide and rule. They brushed aside Indian objections—‘if we are weak enough to yield to their clamour now,’ the Viceroy reported to London, ‘we shall not be able to dismember or reduce Bengal again; and you will be cementing and solidifying a force already formidable and certain to be of increasing trouble in the future.’
At first the leaders of Congress objected in constitutional terms. The British were unimpressed, being for the most part thoroughly contemptuous of Congress and all it represented, but as the day of partition approached they found themselves faced by a very different kind of protest. There were none of the habitual Indian riots, which were a nuisance indeed, but were easily enough suppressed by Indian policemen with their batons, or if necessary Indian sepoys with their bayonets. Instead, at Tilak’s inspiration, thousands of Bengalis protested passively, with a silent boycott of everything British. This was a new phenomenon. Shoppers would not buy British goods. Students would not do their examinations on British paper. Washerwomen would not wash British clothes. Cobblers would not mend British shoes. Children would not suck British sweets. Lancashire textiles were ceremonially burnt in the streets. As the weeks passed, boycott went further, and those who broke it were themselves boycotted. Relatives and neighbours refused to see them, tradesmen refused to serve them, even priests and physicians denied them solace.
This was the beginning of swadeshi, economic boycott, which was to become one of the chief weapons of Indian revolution, and even of a greater instrument still, passive resistance. The British realized its power very soon, and some of them recognized it as the first stirring of a decisive revolutionary process. So did some of the Indians. At the height of the anti-partition demonstrations 50,000 people assembled for the Bengali festival of Durga Puja, in the temple of Kali at Kalighat in south Calcutta. This was always one of the great days of the Bengali year, but now it had a special meaning, for the goddess Durga had acquired a new cult as the personification of Motherland. The Puja of 1905 was celebrated, for the first time, as a festival of Indianness.
It was an event of theatrical effect. The temple was brilliant with the lamps of the devotees, and crammed to its high railings with their bodies, pressing around the sacrificial block in the middle of its courtyard, crowding up the steps to the Natmadnir, the shrine beyond. The air was heavy with sickly smells, flowers, incences, perfumes, and loud with thousands of voices, and bells, and the rumble of the traffic in the street outside. The pilgrims entered the shrine in groups, and there before the Brahmin priests they made a solemn vow to Durga, ‘before thy holy presence and in this place of sanctity’, never to buy British goods, never to use British shops, never to employ Englishmen.
As the long ceremony proceeded a violent storm blew up, and the rain teemed furiously upon Calcutta, turning the temple courtyard into a quagmire and drenching the thin clothes of the devotees. The fury of the night, though, only gave the oath a deeper meaning, and through the storm the waiting crowd could hear, over and over again, the Sanskrit injunction of the priests, as they dismissed the pilgrims batch by batch: ‘Swear to serve your Motherland! Offer your lives to her service! Worship the Motherland before all other deities!’
5
Even more significantly, the world observed a first hesitation of British morale at home. A tremor, a fitful doubt, passed across the nation for all to see, in the aftermath of the Boer War.
Let us admit it fairly, as a business people should,
We have had no end of a lesson; it will do us no end of good.
Not on a single issue, or in one direction or twain,
But conclusively, comprehensively, and several times and again
Were all our most holy illusions knocked higher than Gilderoy’s kite.
We’ve had a jolly good lesson, and it serves us jolly well right!
This was the national mood, chastened and bewildered, expressed here by Rudyard Kipling himself. It was a deep and subtle disillusionment, and though it was overlaid still by pride, patriotism and the joy of victory, though it lay dormant or impotent for years to come, still it was a seed that grew with time, to change the nation, the Empire and the world.
On the surface Kipling was simply attacking military incompetence, and arguing for an end to the class-ridden structure of the old army, its officers so often courageous dunderheads, its men such unreasoning serfs. In this many soldiers agreed with him. They were all ‘ashamed for England’, reported the war correspondent G. W. Steevens after one humiliating skirmish—‘not of her, never that! but for her!’ ‘We are only sportsmen,’ one wounded officer was heard to say with a sigh, as he hauled himself crippled with fever, dysentry and loss of blood towards the chaos of a field hospital, ‘only sportsmen, after all….’
Before the Boer War the British, enjoying for the first and last time in their history a militaristic phase, had assumed their armies to be the best in the world, and watched their exploits with a robust pride, adequately expressed by the poet G. Flavell Hayward:
Hear the whizz of the shot as it flies,
Hear the rush of the shell in the skies,
Hear the bayonet’s clash, ringing bright,
See the flash of the steel as they fight,
Hear the conqueror’s shout
As the foe’s put to rout …!
Ah!
Glory or death, for true hearts and brave,
Honour in life, or rest in a grave.1
This vicarious swashbuckle was now extinguished. The British had never suffered such terrible casualties before, while the run of defeats in South Africa came as a terrible psychological shock, the first of a series which progressively whittled away the British taste for glory, and even perhaps for honour. ‘Please understand,’ the Queen had declared during Black Week, ‘there is no one depressed in this house’—but who could have imagined, five or ten years before, that she could ever make such a remark, of a war fought by the flower of her armies against 35,000 untrained bucolics?
On a deeper level, though, Kipling was reflecting a more general malaise, an unease which might not affect the Jingoist masses, but already troubled more sensitive citizens. He wrote of ‘obese, unchallenged old things that stifle and overlie us’. He wrote of ‘flannelled fools at the wicket, muddied oafs at the goals’. The conduct of the war had hinted at fundamental flaws in the imperial assumptions: flatulent old assumptions which, unchallenged in the euphoria of success, did lie deadweight upon the nation, and suggested themselves in failure. Britain was at the end of her aristocratic period. The public was still half-educated, half-enfranchised, and by and large the upper classes still dictated the course of events. The Labour movement was in its infancy; the new electorate was easily swayed, and inhibited too by traditional loyalties; most Members of Parliament still represented landed, agricultural interests. For the most part, in the Britain of the 1900s, what the gentry said, went.
Now this old hierarchy, which lay at the root of Empire too, was vaguely but significantly discredited. The British gentleman was not, it seemed, organically constructed to command, not entitled to success as a birthright. Calvinist dame schools of the dorps made better generals than Eton and Sandhurst. The British soldier’s traditional loyalty to his social betters was evidently no longer enough. The great regiments of the British Army, the Guards, the Highlanders, the cavalry of the line, were of all British institutions the most devoted to the old order: yet these proud brotherhoods had been seen running for their lives through the South African night, or pinned humiliatingly among the thorn-bushes with the sun blistering the backs of their kilted knees.
Before 1900, wrote the polemicist Arnold White in his exposé Efficiency and Empire,1 the ‘accepted creed of average Englishmen’ included the follow
ing clauses:
The British Empire is the greatest the world has ever seen, and being free from militarism is safe against decay.
The British Army, though small, can do anything and go anywhere.
One Englishman can beat two foreigners.
We are the most enlightened people on the face of the earth.
By the end of the war, as White commented, every one of those propositions was disputable, and some were obvious falsehoods. And if the system failed in war, how long would it succeed in peace? Could this archaic society keep pace with more modern rivals, better educated, fresher, less circumscribed by class and tradition? Or might it be that the nation was becoming effete? Curzon certainly thought the British were beginning to show ‘a craven fear of being great.’ The preposterously imperialist Poet Laureate, Alfred Austin, put the same thought into a different sort of verse, as he saw the audience for his bombast so disconcertingly diminished:
The sophist’s craft has grown a prosperous trade,
And womanish tribunes hush the manly drum;
The very fear of Empire strikes us numb,
Fumbling with pens who flourished once the blade.
6
There were also doubts of a yet more debilitating kind, about the morality of the war and so of the Empire itself. The British Empire had never been unanimous. There had been opposition always to the imperial idea, and several imperial wars of the past had been hotly criticized, in Press and in Parliament, as immoral or unworthy. Gladstone’s famous Midlothian election had been concerned immediately with the injustice of the Afghan campaign of 1879—‘Remember the rights of the savage! Remember that the happiness of his humble home, remember that the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan … is as inviolable in the eye of Almighty God as is your own!’ Britons of many kinds supported him. There were humanitarians who thought imperialism a sin, moralists who thought it a fraud, radical politicians who thought it an error, economists who thought it an unnecessary fiscal device and socialists who thought with Karl Marx that it was merely an undesirable extension of capitalism. ‘This has been a day of consolation’, the poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt wrote in his diary when he heard of the capture of Khartoum by the Mahdists and the death of General Gordon, ‘and I could not help singing all the way down in the train.’
The Boer War, however, revealed dissensions on an altogether different scale. There had been powerful opposition to it from the start. General Sir William Butler, the outspoken Commander-in-Chief in South Africa before the war, had resigned his office rather than be involved in it, and these are the headlines with which Reynold’s Newspaper announced its beginning:
MONARCHY v REPUBLIC
ENGLAND FORCES WAR
CAPITALISTS’ CAMPAIGN
£7,000,000 ALREADY SPENT
THE PRICE OF BREAD TO RISE
CHAMBERLAIN’S VICTIMS
70,000 BRITISH FIGHT 20,000 BOERS
WHAT ABOUT TOMMY ATKINS?
There was a revulsion against the ‘stock-jobbing imperialism’ which had, so many people thought, dragged Britain into the conflict. The mostly Jewish ‘Randlords’, the mining magnates of the Transvaal, became figures of contumely and derision, and there were hints of corruption and speculation nearer home—‘the more the Empire expands,’ suggested Punch disagreeably, ‘the more the Chamberlains contract.’
When the brave Lord Dundonald volunteered for the war, taking the Secret Plan with him, his aged mother did her best to dissuade him: ‘I do not like your going out to fight the Boers. It is an unrighteous war and Kruger is a religious good man and reads the Bible.’ Kipling’s aunt, Lady Burne-Jones, hung a black flag from her window at the news of the Boer capitulation, with the text: ‘We have Killed and Taken Possession.’ The popular writer H. H. Munro (‘Saki’) passionately opposed the war in the Westminster Gazette, and the Manchester Guardian was burnt on the Stock Exchange for its pro-Boer attitudes, surviving at all only because it was commercially indispensable to Lancashire.
Emily Hobhouse, the daughter of a distinguished Liberal family, furiously denounced to the world the dreadful conditions inside Kitchener’s internment camps. The general called her ‘that bloody woman’, but Campbell-Bannerman told the House of Commons that the camps were a ‘barbaric’ method of winning a war, while Field-Marshal Sir Neville Chamberlain said there had been nothing so shameful in the annals of the British Army.1 The war brought to fame, too, a British politician of an altogether new kind, David Lloyd George, the cobbler’s ward from Llanystumdwy in North Wales—a man not simply of the people, but of a fringe of the people, somebody totally alien to the English traditions of hierarchy and dominion, an iconoclast, a man who did not even believe English to be necessarily best, but surrounded himself with Welsh aides and secretaries, talked Welsh most of the time, and paid no attention to British conventions of reticence and decorum.
7
These were no more than omens. The mass of the British remained loyal to the imperial cause and the British way of things, and few people yet wondered whether it was actually wrong in principle for one nation forcibly to rule another. When Lloyd George presumed to express his heresies in Birmingham, he was so furiously attacked by a patriotic mob that he had to be whisked away in a police van, and when the Government went to the country in the Khaki Election of 1900, it was easily re-elected. The epitaphists of Empire could still write, as one did on a memorial at Wagon Hill, Ladysmith:
Tell England, ye who pass this monument,
We, who died serving her, rest here content.
But somehow it had lost its innocence. Take that celebrated imperial occasion, Mafeking Day, May 17, 1900. On the face of it this was a simple expression of joy and relief, but there was something hysterical to it, something at once self-conscious and self-delusory. It was only a little railway town that had been relieved, far away, of small importance to the course of the war: yet London in all its tremendous history had never known such scenes of celebration. It was a kind of madness. Every class of Londoner poured rambunctious and often drunken into the streets, and the capital gave itself over to three days and nights of carnival.
In retrospect it seems a very different festival, and we see it almost as a mourning dance. Just as in adult life a suggestion of nursery fire or bedtime story conjures from the past the comforts of childhood, so Mafeking seems to have satisfied a wistful yearning in the public mind, a yearning for lost years of certainty and fulfilment. The magic was leaving the British Empire. Six months later Queen Victoria died, and with her went the imperial virtue. She was like a great old oak, whose roots run deep into a parkland, whose branches shade half a meadow, and when she died some old instinct died too, the British lost some sense of favour, the world a sense of awe.1
1 Never repeated in the United States Navy, though British battleships were equipped with admirals’ walks for another twenty-five years.
1 It was coined, I learn from Colombo’s Canadian Quotations, by George Foster, MP for North Toronto, remembered too for another properly imperialist slogan: ‘No Truck Nor Trade with the Yankees!’
2 Prematurely, for he was shot dead a moment later, and the fort recaptured.
1 Set to music by Edward Elgar, Opus 5, No 1—fieramente.
1 Chiefly notable, by the way, for the saevo indignatio of its section headings: ‘Influence of Bad Smart Society’, ‘Idleness a Trade’, ‘Our Most Incapable Department’, or ‘Serious Effect on National Character of Dishonour or Untruthfulness in State-paid Ecclesiastical Teachers’.
1 In the First World War Emily Hobhouse became strongly pro-German: her ashes lie at the foot of the Women’s Memorial at Bloemfontein.
1 She is buried in the mausoleum she had herself built for the Prince Consort in 1862, in the grounds of Windsor Castle at Frogmore—a structure open to the public only on one day a year, but potentially among the great tourist spectacles of Europe. Romanesque outside, and built in a Grecian cross, inside it is a prodigy of Victorian Renaissance,
inlaid with many coloured marbles, elaborately decorated with paintings, statues and stained glass, and crowned by a ribbed gold-painted dome. The great Queen is buried with her husband beneath the largest single block of flawless granite ever quarried, and lies recumbent in white marble high on top of it, portable steps being available for visitors. There are three bronze wreaths near the tomb, all presented at the time of the Queen’s death: one by the Emperor Menelik of Ethiopia, one by the crew of a Brazilian cruiser visiting London at the time, and one by ‘Her Native Subjects of the District of Butterworth, Transkei’.
Sir Robert Mackworth-Young, the Royal Librarian, most kindly introduced me to this fascinating building.
CHAPTER SIX
Two Grandees
