Empire

by Jeremy Paxman

  Charles Gordon should never have been allowed anywhere near Khartoum. There was sufficient scuttlebutt to suggest that he might have had a drink problem. He was certainly impulsive, emotional, religiously obsessed (he compared himself during the siege to Uriah the Hittite, the soldier abandoned in battle by King David, in order that he could steal his wife, Bathsheba), bad-tempered, unreliable, obstinate and self-absorbed. When the Consul General in Cairo reflected on the hero of Khartoum, he concluded that ‘General Gordon does not appear to have possessed any of the qualities which would have fitted him to undertake the difficult task he had in hand.’ Nonetheless, he was forced to conclude that ‘no Christian martyr tied to the stake or thrown to the wild beasts of ancient Rome, ever faced death with more unconcern than General Gordon. His faith was sublime.’ The Mahdi did not live to enjoy his triumph of self-determination for very much longer, dying after a short, violent illness only six months later, mourned by his supposed seventy wives. A mighty tomb was raised, its shining dome visible far out into the desert.* His rule, with its slavery, hand-loppings and floggings to death, passed to the Khalifa Abdullah, who soon felt secure enough to send a letter to Queen Victoria, warning her that her only chance of survival lay in converting to Islam, otherwise ‘Thou shalt be crushed by the power of God and his might, or be afflicted by the death of many of thy people … by reason of thy Satanic presumption.’ The queen did not reply.

  In 1896 – the year before Victoria’s diamond jubilee – the newly elected Conservative government in London decided to settle the issue of Sudan once and for all. Ministers were now worried that if they did not take the region, then the French might, and with it the headwaters of the Nile. There was the usual – and in this case certainly fatuous – worry about a risk to the Suez Canal. And there was the death of Gordon to avenge. Command of the expedition was given to the man whose pediment moustache and imperious gaze would later make him the poster boy of the British Empire, General Horatio Herbert Kitchener. Ruthless, scheming, vain, arrogant, vulgar, vaultingly ambitious and glacial in manner, as a younger officer Kitchener had taken part in the failed attempt to rescue Gordon. This time, with no need to stage a rescue, progress was steady and utterly determined. Kitchener’s army advanced up the Nile laying railway tracks as it went. Up the railway line came more troops, guns and even armoured gunboats, which had been built in London, disassembled and then reassembled on the Nile under the eye of Gordon’s nephew, Major ‘Monkey’ Gordon of the Royal Engineers.* The newly founded Daily Mail called Kitchener ‘The Sudan Machine’, a well-chosen phrase, as his army closed on Khartoum like some steam-driven leviathan.

  By September 1898, Kitchener’s army had reached Omdurman, across the river from Khartoum. Through his binoculars a young Winston Churchill, a self-assured cavalry officer-cum-war reporter with the 21st Lancers, could see the pale dome of the Mahdi’s tomb rising above the mud walls of the town. In front of the walls was the astonishing sight of the waving banners of perhaps 50,000 men on horses and on foot, in a line about 4 miles across. Kitchener’s force was half as big. But it contained forty-four guns and the small flotilla of gunboats, which poured shells into the town. Soon after dawn on 2 September the Khalifa’s medievally equipped force advanced and was met by shells from Kitchener’s artillery. Still, in a display of astonishing bravery, the force came on, and at a distance of 2,000 yards the British infantry prepared to volley-fire into them. Again, the Arabs advanced, in their holy uniform of long, patched smocks. Next the Maxim guns (which could pour out 600 rounds a minute) opened up, and then, at 800 yards, the Martini-Henry rifles of the Egyptian and Sudanese troops in Kitchener’s column.

  Churchill claimed that Kitchener encouraged his men ‘to regard the enemy as vermin – unfit to live’, and the blood-letting was so one-sided that at one point the general was compelled to call out, ‘Cease fire! Cease fire! Oh what a dreadful waste of ammunition!’ Even so British cavalry, including Winston Churchill, made a superfluous mounted charge just for the hell of it. By 11.30 that morning Kitchener was able to comment that the enemy had been given ‘a good dusting’. There were almost 11,000 Sudanese dead on the ground, with an estimated 16,000 wounded. Out of a force of 26,000, the British had lost forty-eight officers and men, with 382 wounded. Kitchener rode into Khartoum as his troops looted the place. He ordered the Mahdi’s tomb destroyed, claiming it would otherwise become a focus for resistance to the occupying army. The Mahdi’s skull, the story went, he planned to keep for use as an inkstand or drinking cup. When the story later reached the ears of a disgusted Queen Victoria, she is said to have ordered its immediate return. It was dispatched inside a kerosene tin for burial. (Churchill was not convinced by the gesture: he thought the tin might have contained anything, maybe ‘even ham sandwiches’.)

  By then, Kitchener had long accomplished his purpose. On 4 September, four army chaplains conducted a service in front of the palace where Gordon had been hacked to death. A guard of British soldiers sang Gordon’s favourite hymn, ‘Abide with Me’, and three cheers were raised for the queen and another three for the Khedive of Egypt, the cipher whose name justified the adventure. Gordon’s death had been avenged and Kitchener returned to England the following year a hero. At the end of a parliamentary debate in which Lord Charles Beresford conceded that perhaps the ‘disentombment’ of the Mahdi ‘might have been done in a very much better manner’, Kitchener was voted a large gift of public money and all was right with the world once more.

  The British like to see their military history as a succession of scrapes – the Armada or the Battle of Britain, for example – in which they are outnumbered and outgunned and survive by guts and ingenuity. It seems to demonstrate a higher moral purpose. But much of the story of their empire is testament not to moral but to technological superiority. Omdurman avenged the death of their martyr. But the Dervishes had spears, while the British had rifles and machine guns. As Hilaire Belloc put it in The Modern Traveller, published that year:

  Whatever happens, we have got

  The Maxim Gun, and they have not.

  There was an imperial coda to this massacre. Five days after the Khalifa’s forces were wiped out at Omdurman, a boat came drifting down the Nile bearing unmistakable evidence of having been shot up. The crew described how they had been on a foraging mission upriver, near the town of Fashoda, when they had come under fire from the riverbank. Who their attackers were they knew not, just that they were black soldiers under the command of white officers. As Winston Churchill told the story, curious British officers then dug into the wooden hull and extracted nickel-covered bullets of the kind used only by European forces. This was firm evidence that some other European power was encroaching on to what Kitchener had now established was British territory. But which one? Could it be a Belgian expedition which had set off from the Congo? Italians advancing their country’s repeated claims to some of the spoils of Africa? Might they be French? The crew of the boat were asked what flag had been flying, but were unable to agree on the colours they had seen.

  Gathering a couple of battalions of Sudanese troops, two companies of Cameron Highlanders, an artillery battery and four Maxim guns, Kitchener set off upriver with five of his gunboats. As he approached Fashoda on 18 September 1898, the identity of the intruders was settled, for he was greeted by soldiers carrying a letter from a Major Jean-Baptiste Marchand. It had the impertinence to welcome him, in the name of France. The British Empire in Africa was hung on a north–south axis, along the lines of Cecil Rhodes’s dream of a railway line from the Cape to Cairo. French possessions in Africa were concentrated on the Atlantic coast of west Africa, although the French had recently taken control of the fly-blown but strategically important territory of Djibouti on the Horn of Africa. Paris dreamed of linking the two and Fashoda was the point where the British north–south line crossed the French east–west line. Marchand and his small group of officers had spent two years hacking their way across the continent on a march from west Africa. By com
parison with the British force, the Frenchmen were in a poor state, exhausted, short of ammunition for their rifles and with no artillery at all. Kitchener congratulated the major on his endurance. Marchand pointed to his men and replied that the achievement was all theirs. At this point, Kitchener decided, ‘I knew he was a gentleman.’ Blithely ignoring the French flag which was flying above the fort, he then ordered that the British and Egyptian flags be raised, the national anthems played and salutes fired from the gunboats. Then, leaving a colonel, troops, four artillery pieces and a couple of Maxim guns behind him, he continued his progress upriver.

  Kitchener sent news of the confrontation through to London by the telegraph which had been laid down the Nile from Khartoum to Cairo: this was an impasse which would have to be sorted by the British and French governments. For three months Marchand and his little band defiantly maintained a Gallic presence on a miserable island in the river. From their base on the other side of the island, the British appeared from time to time, offering newspapers brought upriver from Khartoum and beyond, which the French paid for in vegetables. From first-hand accounts, Churchill reported that ‘a feeling of mutual respect sprang up between Colonel Jackson and Major Marchand’.

  The restraint at Fashoda was not matched back in Britain and France, where mobs on either side of the Channel were infuriated by the outrageous ‘expansionism’ of the other country. A few perhaps agreed with Wilfrid Scawen Blunt’s acid observation that the confrontation resembled nothing so much as a ‘wrangle between two highwaymen over a captured purse’, but anger was the dominant emotion. At one stage, it even looked as if it might come to war between the countries. For months, the foreign ministries wrangled. The British were intransigent. The French weighed their dreams of an African empire against the need for an ally against the dangers from an increasingly menacing Germany. At Fashoda, the months passed in a sweaty stand-off until finally came the orders from Paris. The French government had blinked. The soldiers who had toiled their way across Africa were ordered to haul down the tricolour, and then, with elaborate courtesy and after a decent breakfast, the French went on their way. The only expression of passion came when, having watched his flag lowered, a junior French officer ran to the flagpole, tore it down, shook his fists and tore his hair. In Churchill’s words, it was ‘a bitterness and vexation from which it is impossible to withhold sympathy, in view of what these men had suffered uselessly’. Three months later, Britain and France formally agreed which were their respective spheres of influence, carving up most of the continent of Africa. Other European powers muttered and moaned, but had to put up with it. And Sudan, a million square miles of the continent, was now a weird entity, not technically a British colony, not Ottoman, but under notional joint Egyptian and British control. As Churchill put it, a diplomatic fourth dimension had been discovered. What the local people – whose future was being determined by largely indistinguishable groups of red-faced white men – made of it all we can only try to guess.

  What lessons can we draw from the story of Egypt and Sudan? First, that not all the empire was accumulated by design: there seems little reason to doubt Gladstone when he said that he had no great desire to acquire either place. The problem was that, as his cabinet colleague William Edward Forster remarked of the Sudan crisis, Gladstone could ‘persuade most people of most things, and above all he can persuade himself of almost anything’, a talent which has afflicted more recent moralists in Downing Street: the compulsion to ‘do something’ is a distinct imperial inheritance and is still felt not just by prime ministers but by the British population and its press. There was then, of course, a large element of racial prejudice in this self-appointed responsibility which found expression in pure rage that other races were getting out of hand. When riots broke out in Alexandria in the summer of 1882, killing several dozen Europeans, the Liberal Charles Dilke – a man who believed in the British as a sort of benevolent master race – noted in his diary that ‘Our side in the Commons is very jingo about Egypt. They badly want to kill somebody. They don’t know who.’ That leitmotif of so much late nineteenth-century imperial policy – a desperation to protect India – was another element, just as it had been the reason for Disraeli’s decision to buy shares in the new Suez Canal in the first place. Businessmen who believed their money was at risk roared on demands for military action. The jingoism Dilke had observed in parliament was shared by much of public opinion and was whipped up by the press, which presented Charles Gordon as a sort of Messiah. Succumbing to that pressure put the Sudan mission in the hands of a zealot, who, like many empire-builders, presented the task he had been given as a moral mission. That was Gordon’s particular madness, but the slow speed of communications meant that the success or failure of the imperial project was forever in the hands of individuals in distant lands, and the government of the home country just had to live with the consequences. On top of all of that was the need to make sure that the British kept other colonists out.

  Chapter Ten

  ‘Play up! Play up! And play the game!’

  Henry Newbolt, ‘Vitaï Lampada’, 1892

  What was to be done with a place like Sudan? Like everywhere else, once the conquest was finished there came the problem of administration. If you had any faith in the empire, this was a task which might stretch for centuries. And the bigger the empire became, the greater the number of people required to make it function. When the acquisition of territories was a by-product of free enterprise, it could be left to Jack the Lads of one variety or another. Better still, it could be done indirectly, through treaties with local chiefs and kings, who retained the dignities of power in exchange for surrendering the reality or paying a ransom. This was how it worked in much of India, where hundreds of rajahs and nawabs, maharajahs, nizams, walis and badshahs* were accorded the courtesies of apparent sovereignty – replete with artillery salutes – but whose strings were pulled by British residents or agents. A similar system was adopted once Africa had been colonized, a ‘dual mandate’, in which local chiefs continued to rule their tribes while the British ran the army, organized taxes, managed the colony’s foreign relations and plundered its natural resources. These arrangements had the obvious advantage for the British of requiring fewer officials while affording maximum profit and it is at least arguable that had some similar concessions been made in North America, then perhaps Britain might have hung on to its colonies there a little longer and said goodbye to them with more grace.

  By the late nineteenth century the possession, retention and running of an empire was Britain’s main international preoccupation, and it required a dedicated corps of individuals as its officers. At the grandest end of things – being the queen-empress’s personification in India, for example – the representatives of the Crown were expected to be imposing figures. Lord Curzon, Viceroy at the turn of the century, had been haunted since his Oxford days by a verse beginning:

  My name is George Nathaniel Curzon.

  I am a most superior person,

  which made him the right sort of chap for the job, and Viscount Mountbatten, the last Viceroy, was a genuine member of the British royal family. All were supplied with the robes and carriages, decorations and retainers, to give them an appropriately viceregal appearance. But the vast majority of officials were mere executives, untroubled by questions of how long one country might exercise authority over another, or indeed why it had been acquired in the first place. Their job was to make it function. The job could have a particular charm for younger siblings of smart families who would not inherit titles and estates. ‘Many there were’, writes the empire historian Ronald Hyam, ‘who discovered that pig-sticking in India or Kenya was more exciting than grouse-shooting in Scotland or Yorkshire, or that being a district officer responsible for millions was more satisfying than being a country magistrate in Berkshire.’ But by the time the empire reached maturity, the calls for manpower were too great and the needs too complicated for them to be filled merely by aristocrats, either
great or small. The growth of empire demanded a formal system of government, and an officer corps to make the queen’s writ run. They were a very special breed.

  They used to tell a story in the Sudan Political Service about Colonel Robert Savile (‘Savile Pasha’), who spent seventeen years governing great swathes of the country in the early twentieth century. He was returning for home leave on a P&O liner when he met a stranger in one of the bars on board. The man told him he was travelling from India, whereupon the colonel asked him whether he had by any chance ever come across his brother, who was serving out there. ‘What is he called?’ asked the stranger, and then, when he heard the answer, exclaimed, ‘By Jove, Savile, I am your brother!’ It sounds like something out of Monty Python. In fact the story was told – and loved – by members of the SPS, who were lampooning themselves long before the post-imperial generation thought of doing so. But few occupations have suffered a greater fall in esteem than that of the colonial officer. A year before independence he is out in the middle of nowhere building a school, driving through a road or opening a dispensary. The next he is not merely redundant, but comical, a pompous clown in over-sized shorts whose only interests in life are the propagation of groundnuts, the state of the cricket team and the next bridge night at the club. It matters not that many former British possessions have retained much the same system of administration (even twenty-first-century India still has ‘collectors’, and below them other, instantly recognizable colonial-style officials). But, with the end of empire, those who had made the system function became like the lamplighters of gaslit London when the streets were electrified. Colonial officials belonged on a page of history which the British imagined they had turned, and need never revisit.

  There is a scene in The Jewel in the Crown, Paul Scott’s novel set in the dying days of the Raj, when Duleep Kumar decides that to better himself he should travel to England to train as a lawyer. He has noticed that – even though his family are wealthy landowners – ‘the callowest white-skinnned boy doing his first year in the covenanted civil service could snub them by keeping them waiting on the verandah of the sacred little bungalow from whose punkah-cooled rooms was wafted an air of effortless superiority’. His father makes light of the supposed snub – what’s a few minutes hanging around? Better to stay in India and become an even richer man. The young British official is a fool to refuse gifts from Indians (because he has been taught that they are bribes), when ‘in forty years, he will be poor, living on his pension in his own cold climate’. Ah, the son replies, but during those forty years he will have wielded power. His father is incredulous. ‘What is this power?’ he asks. ‘He will have settled a few land disputes, seen to the maintenance of public works, extended a road, built a drain, collected revenues on behalf of Government, fined a few thousand men, whipped a score and sent a couple of hundred to jail. But you will be a comparatively rich man. Your power will be material, visible to your eyes when you look at the land you own.’