Empire

by Jeremy Paxman

  But in fact, for all the talk of a shared destiny, the First World War loosened many of the bonds thought to hold the empire together. Although they fought as part of an imperial army, the enormous price paid by Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand had given each a sense of their own distinctiveness. For the Canadians, immensely costly battles like the engagement at Vimy Ridge were a sacrifice that was both imperial and distinctively Canadian. The war memorial at Delville Wood commemorates equally intense fighting by the South African Brigade during the Somme campaign. The events bulked large in each nation’s growing sense that it was more than an overseas outpost. But the best-known example of the way the war encouraged nationalism is the 1915 Gallipoli campaign – as mismanaged and fatuous an operation as any ever perpetrated by British military planners. Like Allenby’s later campaign in the Holy Land, this had been born of a desperation to break the muddy stalemate on the Western Front. The plan enthusiastically advocated by the ambitious forty-year-old Winston Churchill – then First Lord of the Admiralty – was to sail British and French warships from the Mediterranean through the Dardanelles and to confront the Turks in Constantinople, opening the way for an attack on Germany through the ‘soft underbelly’ of eastern Europe. The assault turned into a disaster, as vessel after vessel struck mines or was shelled from well-placed Turkish artillery on shore. The subsequent decision to land soldiers to try to secure the passage proved even more misguided. Unclear about the precise objectives of the assault, provided with inadequate troops, the operation was a bloody shambles. Even Churchill was unable to justify the catastrophic and pointless loss of life and was forced to resign his post.

  In nationalistic myth, Australia and New Zealand were born in the courage and determination shown by ANZAC soldiers during the maelstrom to which chinless British generals had consigned them. Both nations mark the date of the landings, 25 April, with memorial rituals, in the spirit of the Australian bush poet ‘Banjo’ Paterson’s ‘We’re All Australians Now’, written in 1915:

  The mettle that a race can show

  Is proved with shot and steel,

  And now we know what nations know

  And feel what nations feel.

  The impression of big-boned country boys consigned to their fate by toffee-nosed English generals is one that turned out to be especially well suited to the developing sense of Australian nationhood: was it not to escape that sort of class prejudice that their ancestors had left the old country? It is a very partial version of the truth (the British suffered many more casualties in the operation). But it was enough. The empire that emerged from the war was a much less top-down association. It was soon time to send for the now septuagenarian Arthur Balfour, who chaired a committee which agreed that the white Dominions of the empire could in future be as independent as they chose.

  At the end of the war, the whole conceptual framework of empire looked shaky. Empire had become an official project and the awful loss of life had done nothing at all to enhance belief in the wisdom of government. (The great celebrant of empire, Rudyard Kipling, had lost his own son at the battle of Loos in September 1915: just turned eighteen when he was last seen staggering through the mud, half his face hanging off.) The emerging force in British politics, the Labour party, was more interested in improving living conditions at home than in the country’s possessions abroad. And internationally, US President Woodrow Wilson’s elaboration of the fourteen points on which the peace settlement would be based had included a specific promise that all colonial claims would be settled on an ‘absolutely impartial’ basis in which the needs of the colonized would have just as much weight as those of the imperial power.

  Increasingly, the language of British imperialism changed. Talk was no longer of some national destiny but of a duty of ‘trusteeship’, a responsibility owed by Britain to its colonies. If carried through effectively, this approach had the potential, as one distinguished historian put it, ‘to convert the anti-imperialists of one generation into the imperialists of the next’. The bible of this approach was a book with the very dull title of The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa, written by the former Governor General of Nigeria, Frederick Lugard.* A short, slightly haggard man with an enormous forehead, Lugard laid out a guiding principle that, instead of governing directly, Britain should rule its territories with and through local chiefs, promoting the interests of both indigenous people and colonial power. For a while, this new gloss on imperialism disarmed the growing number of sceptics, until they pointed out the chasm between theory and reality, and asked whether it might not be a better idea simply to concentrate upon helping local societies to develop, and giving them their freedom as soon as possible. But this was not a campaign which enjoyed mass popular support – just as the imperial movement began to succumb to indifference and self-absorption, so did anti-imperialism. As one British left-winger wryly pointed out, if you wanted to empty a political meeting hall, you talked of Indian independence.

  Promises of custodianship were no longer going to be enough for nationalists anywhere, and it was in India that the most pressing question arose, with a growing feeling that the subcontinent’s great contribution to the war effort deserved proper recognition by the Mother Country. It had been striking that some of the most nationalistically minded Indians had been among the fiercest advocates of military service. They had realized there could be political dividends to come, even if the British hadn’t quite grasped the point. ‘I venture to say that the war has put the clock of time fifty years forward,’ said the Hindu nationalist Madan Mohan Malaviya in 1917. He was right, for the war had shown Indians not only that there was nothing particularly special about a European culture which settled its differences by machine-gunning men as they floundered around in the mud, but had also revealed the extent of Britain’s dependence on India for the defence of its empire: by the closing stages of Allenby’s campaign in Palestine, one-third of his cavalry and two-thirds of his infantry were drawn from the Indian army. Indians held King’s Commissions in the army and had been told they were fighting for freedom against tyranny. Indian industries had grown to meet the war effort and Indians had filled jobs once performed by Europeans who had been sent to the front. The entire war had been presented as a valiant defence against the menacing power of the German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman alliance. Yet at its end Indians had had to watch as the victorious imperial powers blithely carved up the remnants of the enemy empires, while seeming to believe that India might remain a British possession for ever. (For diplomatic consumption, this approach was later dressed up by Lloyd George in the language of paternal protection: ‘if Britain withdrew her strong hand, nothing would ensue except division, strife, conflict and anarchy’.) Before the war, the Indian National Congress had been a cause for the Indian chattering classes. Soon it had a figurehead (in the intensely charismatic Mohandas Gandhi, who had returned to India from South Africa in 1915), an organization and an ideology. Indian labour was increasingly joining the first trades unions, and Islamic opposition looking for a focus for its disgruntlement. ‘The people are restless’, said a deputy commissioner in 1918, ‘and discontented and ripe for the revolution.’ The British attempted to buy off the discontent by ‘helping’ India towards the patently inadequate goal of ‘responsible government’ within the British Empire. It was never going to be enough.

  And then came Amritsar.

  In 1919, the city, near the border with present-day Pakistan (then part of British India), had a population of under 200,000 people – Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims. On 13 April it was more crowded than usual because it was Baisakhi, the Sikh New Year, and the city contained the sacred site of the Golden Temple. Three days before the festival, rampaging mobs had murdered five Englishmen, set buildings on fire and left a female missionary for dead. According to official reports, the local Commissioner requested the army to ‘send an officer who is not afraid to act’. This turned out to be Reginald Dyer, a grey-haired, blue-eyed general, whose brick-red
complexion testified to a lifetime military career in the subcontinent. Dyer took the train to Amritsar, where he issued a proclamation banning public meetings and imposing a curfew: anyone disobeying the rules risked being shot. In the days before efficient mass media, informing the population of their new conditions of life was an obvious problem. Dyer, meanwhile, worried that his forces in Amritsar were being steadily cut off from the world, as the railway line outside the town was sabotaged. So, on the morning of the 13th, he formed a column of soldiers and marched them about the city, stopping at nineteen public places and road junctions, where his proclamation was read out in various languages, with printed copies also being distributed. The order banned gatherings of more than four men in one place at one time and warned that anyone seen on the streets after eight in the evening was liable to be shot.

  But that afternoon news reached the general of a public meeting to be held at the Jallianwala Bagh, an enclosed patch of ground about 200 yards long, close to the Sikh Golden Temple. It was surrounded by low walls and the backs of houses, and the main entrance was only wide enough for people to enter two abreast. During the afternoon it steadily filled with men, women and children, although there are no indications they were in an aggressive or even especially agitated mood. Dyer’s loyal widow later explained that in the general’s eyes this ‘unexpected gift of fortune, this unhoped for defiance’ gave him ‘such an opportunity as he could not have devised’, for the gathering ‘separated the guilty from the innocent [and] placed them where he would have wished them to be – within reach of his sword’.

  Since the main entrance to the Jallianwala Bagh was too narrow to drive an armoured car through, General Dyer marched in twenty-five Gurkha and twenty-five Indian soldiers armed with rifles, along with another forty Gurkhas armed only with khukuris (the traditional curved steel knives); in addition he had five parties of fifty soldiers each placed outside the city walls. In his account of the event afterwards, Dyer said that he estimated the size of the crowd, which was being addressed by a man on a platform, at ‘about 5000’. He was worried, he said, that unless he acted immediately his smaller force could be overwhelmed. So, without any warning, he gave the order to open fire. There was immediate panic. In the pandemonium some people were picked off as they tried to climb the walls, others as they tried to shelter behind bodies on the ground. Yet more were trampled underfoot. The shooting lasted between ten and fifteen minutes, during which time the soldiers loosed off 1,650 rounds, and it stopped only when Dyer judged that they would soon not have enough ammunition left to protect themselves if they were to be attacked on the way back to barracks. By that time men, women and children lay dead and dying all over the place. (The official casualty estimate later was 379 killed and 1,200 wounded.) Then, without bothering to attend to the wounded, Dyer marched his men out.

  As news of the cold-blooded killing in Amritsar spread, the pressure to hold an inquiry became irresistible. A Scottish judge, Lord Hunter, was summoned, and his committee of inquiry, including both Indian and British members, heard evidence from witnesses including General Dyer, and then, predictably, split on racial lines. Dyer’s decisions fitted a pattern – as demonstrated perhaps most graphically by the behaviour of British authorities after the Indian Mutiny, in the Zulu wars and in Sudan – of using devastating force to impose their will. But in the Jallianwala Bagh Dyer had been facing defenceless civilians. In trying to justify his actions afterwards, the general used a particularly telling expression. He had not attempted to clear the Bagh peacefully because ‘then they would all come back and laugh at me, and I considered I would be making myself a fool’. This explanation from an unrepentant imperialist is curiously similar to George Orwell’s later reflection on his unhappy time as an empire policeman that ‘every white man’s life in the East was one long struggle not to be laughed at’. The true reason for the need to ‘give them a lesson’ and to produce ‘a sufficient moral effect’ was not strength but fear.

  The Committee produced its conclusions that Dyer had misread an unlawful assembly as a rebellion. The British government seemed shocked and censured the general for ‘acting out of a mistaken concept of duty’; he was denied promotion and then resigned from the army. The Daily Mail claimed that he had been sentenced without trial, the Morning Post ran a campaign which raised £26,000 from the public, while a letter to The Times from Belgravia pointed out that ‘When a handful of whites are faced by hundreds of thousands of fanatical natives, one cannot apply one’s John Stuart Mill.’ There were debates in the House of Commons in which much humbug was spoken by people who might have known better. Herbert Asquith maintained that there had never been anything like it ‘in the whole annals of Anglo-Indian history’. A retired brigadier talked of how the empire rested on prestige and ‘once you destroy that British prestige, then the empire will collapse like a house of cards’. A retired colonel asserted that the Amritsar massacre was the gravest blot on British history ‘since we burned Joan of Arc’. And Winston Churchill – veteran of the mass machine-gunning of Sudanese – declared that it was ‘an episode which appears to me to be without precedent or parallel in the modern history of the British Empire … an extraordinary event, a monstrous event, an event which stands in singular and sinister isolation … We have to make it absolutely clear, some way or another, that this is not the British way of doing business.’ That was nonsense. Amritsar had laid bare a brutal truth about empire and no amount of guff about Anglo-India could now save it on the subcontinent. As Gandhi put it, ‘We do not want to punish Dyer. We have no desire for revenge. We want to change the system that produced Dyer.’

  As it turned out, the system broke first in Ireland.

  How to contain or channel the persistent demands of nationalist opinion in Ireland had been a constant descant in British imperial politics for centuries. There had never been much the British wanted in Ireland – no great seams of gold, spices or expanses of prairie awaiting farmers – nothing but strategic security. Without being confident that Ireland would not provide a back door into Britain, it was impossible to plan expansion abroad. Yet throughout the centuries of British rule the Irish simply refused to abandon their campaigns to be free. It had been recognized in nineteenth-century debates over Home Rule that what was needed was some mechanism which would balance Irish demands for freedom with imperial demands for security. Perhaps – as was increasingly to be suggested for India – Ireland might be accommodated within the empire by being given dominion status, like Canada or Australia. But the critical difference with those places was that the people of Ireland had their own history, culture, mythology, religion and traditions long before the English, Scottish and Welsh soldiers had arrived to claim the place for the Crown. From an imperial point of view the other places were settlements. Ireland was a nation.

  Since 1800, Irish MPs had had seats at Westminster, so it was not, technically, a colony. Irish people emigrated across the empire in huge numbers. Irish soldiers fought in Britain’s colonial wars, in ranks from private to general. Ascendancy Irish, like Frederick Temple Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, picked up colonial baubles as readily as their English and Scottish counterparts: Blackwood became viceroy of India and a marquess. Yet the way Ireland was treated by the government in London indicated that it was anything but an integral part of the Kingdom, for it is inconceivable that politicians would have allowed a million people to perish in the Great Famine of the 1840s had they been living in industrial Yorkshire or rural East Anglia instead of Ireland. The depth of the political hypocrisy about Ireland was shown when Gladstone began to espouse the cause of Home Rule. Lord Randolph Churchill told him that the idea amounted to a plan to ‘plunge his knife into the heart of the British Empire’, which rather gave the game away. In Conservative circles, this was a widely held view, and when Gladstone died without achieving his ambition, the opportunity to find a peaceful settlement died with him. Of course, the vast military resources of the British Empire could (just about) keep a lid on things
by deploying the usual mechanisms of official inquiries and overwhelming force, as they demonstrated when the 1916 Easter Rising was put down within seven days and its leaders executed by firing squad. But the consequence was merely to radicalize a much larger section of the population.

  In 1919 Jan Smuts, who had served in the War Cabinet and was about to become prime minister of South Africa, claimed that ‘the Irish wound’ was spreading poison – if the country was not given its freedom (he favoured some sort of dominion status), the British Empire ‘must cease to exist’. Smuts had spotted the corrosive potential of the Irish question, even if his convictions prevented him from seeing how things would eventually turn out. (Two years later he drafted a speech on Ireland for the king to deliver which contained the marvellous blather, ‘My world-wide Empire is a system of human government which rests on certain principles and ideals of freedom and co-operation, which must find their application in Ireland no less than in the other parts.’) The difficult negotiations between Irish nationalists and the British government ended in independence for most of the island in 1922. When the Irish delegation arrived at Dublin Castle, to take power, a British lord lieutenant remarked that they were seven minutes late arriving, to which Michael Collins, President of the provisional government, replied that they could have the seven minutes: the British were 700 years late leaving.

  The fact that Ireland was geographically so close and had been an integral part of the British state for so long meant that not everyone appreciated how significant a split this was. But if a land proclaimed to be part of the very Mother Country could become independent, then what message was being sent to the rest of the empire? As one of the Irish nationalist leaders put it thirty years later, ‘if today India, and Burma, and Egypt are free Nations, they owe it primarily to our example and our softening effectiveness’.