Farewell the Trumpets

by Jan Morris

  On the face of things the Everesters (as they called themselves) seemed the very type of the Empire-builder: Englishmen of the upper middle classes, Furse men, who went to Everest in a spirit of uncomplicated bravado. All the Everest expeditions between 1921 and 1938 reached the mountain through Tibet, by permission of the now restored and compliant Dalai Lama, and so it happened that six times in the post-war years jolly groups of Englishmen crossed the Tibetan frontier by Younghusband’s route, up the Chumbi valley along his old telegraph wire, and made their way across the wide gravelly steppe that lay beyond the Himalaya. The Everesters became well known along this esoteric route. A whole generation of Tibetan villagers grew up knowing them, and the great monastery of Rongbuk, almost in the northern shadow of Everest, became in the climbing season almost a British club, where the sahibs unbent themselves in the congenial company of the monks, and wrote up their journals beneath the flapping prayer-flags.

  There they sprawl now in the statutory group photograph, 1921, 1922, 1924, 1933, 1936, 1938, among the tumbled scree of Base Camp or the shambled shrines of Rongbuk, dressed in a cheerful variety of climbing clothes, some casual, some exhibitionist, with school scarves, and old Army jerkins, and Tibetan boots, some in flapped astrakhan hats, some in caps bought long ago in Tyrol or Chamonix—bearded and dirty from the long march, but essentially clean-limbed, clean-living young Englishmen of the post-war generation, speaking a common language, sharing accepted values.

  They were not of course really as straightforward as that. That was the projection. Some in fact were unhappy men, working out their disappointments, some were running away from more complex challenges, some were very conceited, some fiercely ambitious to be famous. Some were neurotics, some poseurs. One disappointed his comrades by packing his bags and disappearing the moment their expedition seemed to have failed—not, they thought, the proper team spirit. One presently took to running nude through the lounges of respectable Swiss hotels. This is how George Leigh Mallory, who died on Everest in 1924, wrote home about the adventure: ‘I sometimes think of this expedition as a fraud from beginning to end invented by the wild enthusiasm of one man—Younghusband, puffed up by the would-be wisdom of certain pundits in the Alpine Club, and imposed upon the youthful ardour of your humble servant.’

  Mallory, the author of that sublime bathos ‘Because it’s there’, was variously described by his contemporaries and climbing colleagues as a ‘stout-hearted baby’, an ‘unimaginable English boy’, and ‘the magical spirit of youth personified’—‘George Mallory!’ quivered Lytton Strachey. ‘My hand trembles, my heart palpitates, my whole being swoons away at the words—oh heavens! heavens!’ Howard Somervell, who reached 28,000 feet on Everest in 1924, stayed in India for twenty-two years as a mission doctor in Travancore, abandoning his career as a London consultant, becoming an admirer of Gandhi and an advocate of Love as the ultimate political force. Hugh Boustead, who went in 1933, was the first man to be pardoned for deserting the Royal Navy, having jumped ship to join the army in search of action in the Great War. Three Everesters became university professors, three became generals, one became a Conservative MP and one Governor of the Gambia.

  So they were very varied men really, individualists, often of striking and unexpected talent. To the monks of Rongbuk, nevertheless, they doubtless looked all of a piece, and to the public at home too, which watched the successive Everest attempts with a less than hysterical interest, the Everesters seemed a homogeneous company. They were gentlemen-adventurers of the imperial frontiers. Their doings were reported in despatches exclusive to The Times. Their leaders were generals, or landed gentry. They talked Oxford English, and they liked to come down from the mountain, if possible, to champagne and chicken in aspic—or alternatively, to porridge and a cold bath. They were sahibs—a Party of Sahibs, as the Tibetans rightly said—and as such they were figures of Empire, a type becoming more remote, more misty, a little more risible as the decades drew on, but still recognizable as a category of Briton, lounging gregariously beneath the flag on meadow, scree or ice-flow.1

  5

  So long as the Raj lasted in India, they never succeeded in climbing Everest, but that was not the point.

  For when the One Great Scorer comes

  To write against your name,

  He marks—not that you won or lost—

  But that you played the game.

  More than ever now, perhaps, when success no longer seemed a national privilege, the British cherished their heroic failures. Of all the Great War battles, the all-but-victory of Gallipoli most bewitched the British imagination, and of all the imperial adventurers, none stirred the British memory like Captain Robert Falcon Scott, courageous always, gentlemanly to the last, devoted, diligent, second to the South Pole, and dead.2

  Perhaps it was the elegiac instinct: as though the British sensed that ahead of them lay one last great adventure of another kind, unwanted, unprofitable but magnificent, in which they would sacrifice not simply their lives, but their greatness too. In 1935 T. E. Lawrence, having withdrawn into pseudo-anonymity as an aircraftsman in the Royal Air Force, riding his motorcycle fast through Dorset, crashed and killed himself. A rumour ran through the country then, an Arthurian whisper, that he was not killed at all, but that, spirited away by Authority to secret duties, he would reappear when the moment came, when Drake’s Drum beat perhaps, to lead the British once more triumphantly against their enemies.1

  For if the spirit of Empire flickered dimly among the British now, the sense of destiny lay there still. This was a people bred to great things, after all, feeling itself a great nation still, equipped socially and historically for high enterprise. The Britain of the 1930s, timid and insular as it seems in retrospect, did not feel itself to be provincial. On the contrary, most Englishmen, of all classes, believed Piccadilly Circus to be the centre of the world, and assumed as a matter of course that in any new historical movement, any change in the world’s direction, the British would play a leading part. There was a part of the British instinct which hungered still for challenge: the collective unconscious, to use Carl Jung’s recently fashionable phrase, seemed to demand an element of trial or sacrifice, so that the people were at their best in times of hardship. The imperial adventurers of the post-war decades may have seemed anachronistic, compensating for the tremendous past in often unnecessary derring-do, but they were perhaps more representative than they seemed, and there were ordinary working men in England then who looked back to the miseries of the Somme itself as the richest period of their lives.

  The British were no longer an aggressive or even an expansionist people. The imperial urge was over, and they no longer felt it to be their duty, still less their privilege, to be the arbiters of the world. But they were still intensely patriotic, convinced that on the whole their ways were superior to foreign ways, and still, as a rule of thumb, dedicated to Fair Play as the British approximation of the Sermon on the Mount.

  If it was their weakness diplomatically, it was their truest moral strength: and so it led them in the end into the noblest of all their adventures, the most Pyrrhic of their victories, the last war of the British Empire.

  1 By Kingsley Fairbridge (1885–1924), a Rhodesian Rhodes Scholar whose Rhodes Emigration Society, founded when he was an undergraduate, aimed at the mass emigration of English slum children to the overseas Dominions. Its only success was a Farm School in Western Australia, where Fairbridge died, but there is now a Fairbridge Memorial College in Bulawayo, and he is counted among the heroes of early Rhodesia.

  1 By E. W. Hornung (1866–1921), the creator of that archetypal gentleman-cracksman, Raffles. I was sent the poem by Mr M. A. Nicholson of Eton, who wonders, from the evidence of such writing, if the stiff upper lip of the public schools was ever so stiff after all.

  1 Where they were governed by an all-male council of functionaries, including the Hog-Boss, the Geese-Boss and the Bee-Keeper.

  1 And paid off in the end, Calgary now being, with a pop
ulation approaching half a million, one of the most prosperous of the Canadian cities. Its shape is still recognizably the same, the Indians still live on their reservation, the Hutterites wander through, the Palliser and the Ranchmen’s Club prosper.

  1 The late Lord Cawdor, the 5th Earl, sent me this story—‘the only time on record when His Majesty’s mails were carried by an Incarnate God’. Cawdor was an Indian adventurer himself, an old friend of Bailey’s, and vividly recalled for me the reception such young bravos got from the Burra Memsahib of long ago, when they returned to the cantonment from jungle, frontier or indigo plantation. Where had they come from, she would ask, surveying them through, ‘or more probably over’, her lorgnettes, and then, speculatively, ‘You were staying at Government House?’

  1 Which ran in the family, WARN BAILEY MASSACRE SADIYA, said a laconic cable from his father, delivered to him one day by runner from Chengtu—an unsatisfactory message, as Bailey commented, ‘because it failed to say who had massacred whom, and why’.

  2 By the time I met Bailey in 1958, nine years before his death, it seemed to me that he had been physically Tibetanized by his experiences, for his cheekbones were high, his eyes were slightly slanted, his skin was like brown parchment, and he even moved, it seems to me in retrospect, in an indefinably remote or monkish way.

  1 Philby was imprisoned in England during the Second World War for his anti-British attitudes, and in the end he was banished from Saudi Arabia too. He died in Beirut in 1960, and is buried in the Muslim cemetery in the Basta quarter of the city. His son Kim, before defecting to Russia three years later, wrote a just epitaph for his tombstone—Greatest of Arabian explorers—but the fifteenth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica gives three times as much space to the son as it does to the father.

  1 Before that it was called, more romantically I think, Peak XV. Modernists nowadays, including the Russians, like to call it by its Tibetan name, Chomolungma, which means either Goddess Mother of the World, or Lady Cow.

  2 The son of the great South Wales coalowner Lord Aberdare, Bruce went on to lead, in his late fifties, the first two climbing expeditions to Everest. He died in 1939.

  3 Noel went back to Everest too—his cinema film of the 1922 expedition was the first high-altitude film ever made—and fifty years later was still lecturing about it from his home in Romney Marsh, Kent. In 1927 he advanced a plan for lowering a man on a rope from an aeroplane to the summit of the mountain, whence he would find his own way to the bottom: he would need, as Noel convincingly observed, ‘the stoutest pluck’.

  1 Some sixty Britons went to Everest with these expeditions. Four more flew over Everest in 1933, and one went to the mountain alone—Maurice Wilson, who believed that moral and physical asceticism could conquer everything, and perished all alone on Everest, thirty-seven years old and undeterred to the last, in 1934. Thirteen men died in all, four of them British.

  2 Since 1912, when the Norwegian Roald Amundsen beat him to the Pole by a month, and Scott with five companions failed to return to base. The most moving memorial to this epic, I think, is that erected by brother-officers to Lieutenant Henry Bowers, Royal Indian Marine, who died with Scott. It stands in St Thomas’s Cathedral in Bombay, and shows in white marble bas-relief his cairn and cross in Antarctica—while all around the Bombay traffic rumbles through the jalousies, birds shriek and chatter under the eaves, and the dust of India hangs heavy on the sun-shafts across the nave.

  1 It was not so, as far as I know. Lawrence certainly appears to lie buried in the village graveyard at Moreton, near the scene of the accident, where his gravestone describes him simply as ‘Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford’. I happened to go there on the anniversary of his death, in 1976, and the grave was covered with flowers.

  PART THREE

  Farewell the Trumpets 1939–1965

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The Last War

  HITLER went to war, wrote King George VI of England in his diary in September 1939, ‘with the knowledge that the whole might of the British Empire would be against him’. Fair Play was at stake, besides much else. As the good and simple monarch added, the British people were ‘resolved to fight until Liberty and Justice are once again safe in the World’. Political theorists would argue that the Second World War had economic causes, or sprang from the inequities of the Treaty of Versailles. To most Britons, though, as to their King, it was started by an evil man in pursuance of wicked ends, and the rightness of the cause was never in doubt. Hitler and his allies were Bad: in this context at least Britain and her Empire were Good.

  So the Last War assumed, for the British, a heroic quality. They alone fought the three great enemies—Germany, Japan and Italy—first to last. They alone held the breach in the dangerous months after the fall of France in 1940. Once again, and for the last time, their fleets and armies fought across the world, and the imperial strongholds from Bermuda to Hong Kong stood to their arms. The Empire did not always fight well. There were sorry defeats, timid failures, constant muddles and recriminations. Generals were all too often in the Great War mould.1 Still on the whole it was a grand performance in a noble purpose, a swan song of some splendour, and a worthy last display of the imperial scale and brotherhood. ‘Alone at last!’ ran the caption in a 1940 cartoon by David Low, and went on to answer itself, for there behind the resolute Tommy, steel-helmeted on the Dover cliffs, extended in endless line of march the soldiers of the overseas Empire, massed once more. A cherished cable from the Caribbean was received in Whitehall that same summer. ‘Carry on Britain!’ it said. ‘Barbados is behind you!’

  2

  This time it was unmistakably an imperial war. Hitler himself professed to have no quarrel with the British Empire, and would certainly have preferred the British as allies rather than as enemies. Like so many foreigners, he was seduced by history. He thought of the Empire as it had been, as history and legend made it still. He conceived of it as aristocratic, ubiquitous, imperturbable, immensely experienced. He admired the supposed consistency of British policy—‘foreign policy become a tradition’—and the latent brutality and toughness that was, he said, common both to the national leaders of England and to the mass of its peoples. ‘I do not wish the crown of the British Empire to lose any of its pearls, for that would be a catastrophe to mankind.’ Common-sense, he said, suggested a free hand for Germany in Europe, for Britain elsewhere. Otherwise a great Empire would be utterly destroyed, ‘an Empire which it was never my intention to harm’.

  But the British Empire, when once the die was cast, would have none of him. Mackenzie King, the Prime Minister of Canada, warned him that if he ever turned against England ‘there would be great numbers of Canadians anxious to swim the Atlantic’, and so it proved. ‘In that dark, terrific, and also glorious hour’, wrote Winston Churchill in retrospect of 1940, ‘we received from all parts of His Majesty’s Dominions, from the greatest to the smallest… the assurance that we would all go down or come through together.’ This was, besides being not absolutely true, by no means a foregone conclusion, for by 1939 the Empire was far more diffuse than it had been in 1914. Then the King had declared war, in a single proclamation, on behalf of all his peoples. Now he was several kings in one, and there was no formal alliance among his separate Dominions, no constitutional obligation to go to war at all.

  Ireland indeed never did, and was represented in Germany throughout the war by an Ambassador accredited in the name of King George. The Australians and New Zealanders declared war at once, soon sending almost all their trained soldiers to the other side of the world, but the South Africans decided only after bitter Parliamentary debates which side they wanted to be on, while the Canadians declared war on Germany after Great Britain, on Japan before Great Britain, and never declared war on Bulgaria at all. As for the 400 million people of India, they were committed to war by the sole word of their Viceroy, a Scottish nobleman, who consulted no Indians on the matter.

  Still, as the King said, ‘the whole might
of the Empire’ was presently mustered—even the Catholic Irish volunteered in their thousands for the British Army. The British had no expansionist war aims this time. They hoped the Empire and Commonwealth would survive the struggle intact, but no more. They coveted no new provinces. Their purposes were as altruistic as political purposes ever are, sharpened perhaps by a sense of shame about the indecisive years between the wars. If they did not go into battle in the sacramental spirit of 1914, they had apparently not inherited the disillusionment of 1918. Few of the old imperialist issues were at stake now—the British were no longer Thinking Imperially, as Joe Chamberlain had urged them to—but many of the imperial impulses found a fresh fulfilment. That old yearning for excitement came into its own once again, and helped the people through the ordeals of blitz, battle and separation. The aggressive instinct resurfaced, legitimized by war. Racy characters of the imperial legend reappeared from clubs or offices, to rediscover themselves in commando raids, parachute drops or weird prodigies of intelligence. The nation came to life again, as it had in the ebullient years of the New Imperialism, in a last flare of the commanding spirit.

  This time the very existence of the Empire was at stake. Germany might have no designs upon it, but Japan and Italy certainly did. The Japanese envisaged a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere embracing all the British eastern territories, India to Hong Kong, and perhaps Australia and New Zealand too. The Italians let it be known that they wanted Malta and Cyprus as Italian possessions, Egypt, Iraq and the Sudan as Italian protectorates, and Gibraltar as an international port.