After the Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  George V, unlike his father, did not feel at home in Europe. The Delhi Durbar, where a crowd of 100,000 had watched him being crowned, was a parable of how he, and so many of the governing class, saw his country as a great Asiatic Empire, having very little to do with his German cousins and their quarrels with the French. Flown with the success of the Durbar, George wanted to go the following year to South Africa, but this his Cabinet refused on rather devastating grounds. ‘We decided,’ wrote the financial secretary to the Treasury, Sir Charles Hobhouse, ‘he had much better stay at home, and not teach people how easily the machine worked without a King.’2 But George V had returned from Delhi with a new confidence, unseen in his character before, and a new idea of himself as king-emperor. His wife, Queen Mary, felt almost drunk with it – ‘I am still under the influence of the Imperialism it [the Durbar] inspired,’ she wrote.3

  Queen Mary was much more of a Continental European than her husband, and the First World War was a deep personal tragedy, separating her from her many relations. Her aunt, Augusta Caroline, Grand Duchess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, could send her poignant message to King George V just before she died in her pine-girt Schloss in 1916: ‘Tell the King it is a stout old English heart that is ceasing to beat!’4 But she was an amazing survival, a granddaughter of George III who was able to advise her niece May of Teck on etiquette remembered from the court of Queen Adelaide. Her stout old English heart had begun to beat in Hanover, her birthplace, and she lived on German soil for most of her life. When she became the Grand Duchess, the alliance between Britain and the German duchies, kingdoms and principalities seemed natural. Only a few years before her birth, all Britons had rejoiced at the prospect of a Prussian army racing through Belgium to help Wellington defeat the French at Waterloo. (About a third of Wellington’s own army were Germans, Hanoverians.) The Continental disruptions, leading eventually to war, were felt by no family so sharply as by the extended family of the king and queen. Perhaps this played its part in their choosing to concentrate so firmly on Britain’s imperial rather than her European role. But perhaps in his way the new king had more wisdom than his father, or than the politicians? Belgium, France, Holland, Germany, Italy, were European countries with colonies in different parts of the world. Britain actually was an Asiatic power. Yet this was a power which was destined not to last. Indian nationalism, and the tensions within Indian society, between different castes, religions and regions, were phenomena from which the king could blind himself while he entered Delhi on his charger. But only a week after the Durbar, when the viceroy, Lord Hardinge, made a state entry into the new capital, a bomb was thrown at his elephant, seriously wounding the viceroy himself and killing his attendant.5

  The Delhi Durbar ‘marked perhaps the peak of British authority in India’.6 It was also the occasion when three important administrative measures were introduced. The first was the raising of Bengal to the state of a province, with its own governor. The second was the undoing of the partition of Bengal. The third – ‘one of the few secrets successfully kept in modern India’7 – was the transfer of the capital from Calcutta to Delhi.

  The coming of the First World War was to change India radically and deeply. As many as one-third of all the British forces in France in autumn 1914 were from India – Indian army troops or British army personnel drawn from Indian garrisons. The force used to enter Basra in November 1915, in an attempt to absorb Mesopotamia into the Raj, was Indian.8 India provided a ‘barrack in the Eastern seas’. The Indian army became a reserve army which could be redeployed in theatres as various as East Africa, Egypt and Palestine, as well, of course, as the Western Front.9 Many of these troop movements were resisted by the Liberal viceroy, Lord Hardinge, whose own perceptions of Britain, India and their imperial relationships had been surprisingly expressed in November 1913, when he spoke up in a distinctly Gandhian voice for the beleaguered Indians in South Africa. He expressed ‘the sympathy of India, deep and burning, and not only of Indians, but of all lovers of India like myself, for their compatriots in South Africa in their resistance to invidious and unjust laws’.10

  Such words caused dismay in Britain, but they are a good example of the paradoxical quality of so much of the British attitude to India, where the desire to own and to dominate, violently apparent in some administrators and areas, was always balanced by a profound sympathy for India, its peoples and traditions. This was partly the sense, which breathes through all Kipling’s work, for example, that Indian culture and civilization was older and in some ways more beautiful than the combination of Benthamism and Protestantism which the Raj had brought to Asia. It was partly the more brutal politico-economic consciousness that Curzon had been right in his analysis: without India, Britain would cease to be a first-rate, and become instantaneously a third-rate world power. The Delhi Durbar marked the high point of the Raj’s strength. Within only three years, the Raj was confronted with the greatest drain on resources in its history. In the wake of economic hardship – India paid £146 million towards the war and suffered inflation and shortages in consequence – that strength waned. With the developing imperial recognition of the legitimacy of Indian political aspirations came the inevitable dissolution of the Raj, and with it the British Empire.11

  The First World War was, therefore, a disaster as far as it concerned the British Raj. But to view things from another angle, it was British anxiety for the strength and preservation of the Raj – and with it British status as the supreme world superpower – which led to Britain’s conduct of the war in the West, and in the Near East.

  If one remembers all the time, as no British statesman in 1914 could forget, the primal importance of India and the Eastern Empire in the story, then the strategic centrality of Turkey will become plain. Britain’s dominance of the East depended upon ease of access. She possessed Gibraltar and the Suez Canal, two conduits of the Mediterranean. So long as the Ottoman Empire remained, as it was known in the Victorian era, the ‘sick man of Europe’, the other powers could sniff around it hungrily hoping for economic, material, political advantages. As far as this great Islamic Empire was concerned, its history since the late seventeenth century had been one of shrinkage. In 1683 it had exercised dominion over all the territories from Budapest in the west to Baghdad in the east, from the River Dnieper in the north to the bulk of North Africa – Tunisia, Tripoli, Libya, Egypt. In the Crimean War, the Russians had made attempts to possess Constantinople, the old Byzantine patriarchate and centre of Eastern Christendom. They had been repulsed by an alliance of France and Britain. In later years of the nineteenth century, the Ottoman dominion over the Balkans shrank. It lost Bosnia-Hercegovina, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Romania, which had been, in effect, self-governing since the Crimean War. The Austro-Hungarian Empire, another sick man of Europe, with an emperor who had been on the throne since 1848, wanted to gain from Ottoman losses but had to face up to the phenomenon of modern nationalism, with Serbs, Albanians, Croats, Bulgarians and others all wishing to have independent nation-states rather than be satellites to an empire.

  In an atmosphere where small states can make a romantic appeal for nationhood, logic cannot deny the same dream to large states. And this really is the nub of the twentieth-century political tragedy. Poor little Serbia, poor little Ireland, poor little Palestine or would-be Judaea can win sympathy. Hindsight very often suggests their people enjoyed more peace and in practical day-to-day terms independence when they lived under the umbrella of an Imperium than when threatened by the rival nationalisms of big countries such as Germany or Turkey. For Turkey now becomes a word in international vocabulary. Hitherto, in post-classical vocabulary, a Turk had been a synonym for a lout – just as the abusive word ‘Arab’ had been used for Bedouins in the eastern provinces.12 Now, in the early years of the twentieth century, the word Turkish was used in newspapers, and Europeans referred to the Ottoman Empire as ‘Turkistan’ or ‘Turkey’.

  In 1908, a coup d’état gave power to the ‘Young Turks’. They allowed the
old Sultan, Abdulhamit II, to reign until his death in 1909, but from then on, this junta of modernizers and nationalists took control. In the major cities of Turkey happy mobs crowded into the streets,13 embracing and swearing eternal brotherhood – Jews, Arabs, Greeks, Serbs, Bulgars, Armenians, Turks. But if you have ceased to define your state merely in terms of imperial authority and territory controlled, how do you define a nation? Ethnicity and religious allegiance take on a significance which they lacked before.

  The Armenians were the first major victims of that distinctively twentieth-century phenomenon: genocide. From the late nineteenth century, they had been forbidden to carry arms, and they had been taxed at a higher rate than other Ottoman citizens. They were hated because many of them were successful merchants and financiers with contacts outside the empire. Many Armenians lived beyond Mount Ararat in the Russian Empire. In 1895, Armenian revolutionaries had seized a bank in Istanbul and the retaliations had been terrible. As many as 300,000 Armenians perished according to Armenian sources. Under the Young Turks, the Armenians fared even worse than under Sultan Abdulhamit, and in 1915, when they were suspected of siding with the enemy, a Final Solution was perpetrated. Able-bodied Armenian males were drafted into labour battalions, and having built roads or railways, bludgeoned to death or shot. Women and children were herded into ‘orphanages’ which turned out to be deep pits in which they were buried alive beneath heaps of stones. Rape was widespread; Armenian women were disembowelled, and had their breasts cut off. Thousands of Armenians fled over the border into Russia.

  Turkish historians still speak of these movements of peoples as necessary ‘evacuations’ into enemy territory. They concede that as many as 40,000 may have perished in their flight to Russia.14 The American ambassador to Turkey, Henry Morgenthau, provided refuge for Armenians in the United States where this was possible and supported the Armenian claim that the scale of slaughter had been much more extensive: namely, that one and a half million Armenians, out of a total of three million, were killed by the Turks.15

  This is Turkey, this is the ‘sick man’ with which the European powers wished to get involved. And this is the part of the story which so often gets tagged on to accounts of the Great War in Flanders and France. Having described the devastation of trench warfare, historians then turn their attentions to the Gallipoli campaign almost as an interlude in the main business of the war. A. J. P. Taylor could airily write: ‘It is a mystery why most people, then and since, assumed that the fall of Constantinople would lead to the defeat of Germany … Turkey might have been knocked out of the war, but this would have lessened the burden on Germany. An army would have had no light task to march from Constantinople to Central Europe …’16 and so on. This is to look at everything from a Western perspective, with its talk of marching from Constantinople to Europe. What had been painfully obvious at the time, and an absolutely key factor in Britain’s decision to fight a potentially suicidal war with Germany, was not the difficulty of marching from the Ottoman capital to Central Europe. It was the ease, after the completion of a German railway through the middle of Turkey in 1911, of travelling by steam-powered transport all the way from Berlin to the Persian Gulf.

  Britain, to recap what was said earlier, was secure in the possession of Gibraltar and the Suez Canal, the conduits of the Mediterranean which gave her access to her Indian Empire, her source and ground, as she saw it, for world power. Furthermore, access to the oilfields of Persia and Mesopotamia had now become essential. Churchill, in The World Crisis, wrote of the ‘formidable decision … to change the foundation of our Navy from British coal to foreign oil’, adding that as First Lord of the Admiralty, ‘during the whole of 1913 I was subjected to an ever-growing difficulty about the oil supply’.17 The new German railway put all that in jeopardy by short-circuting British command of the seas. ‘It was felt in England that if, as Napoleon is said to have remarked, Antwerp in the hands of a great continental power was a pistol levelled at the English coast, Bagdad and the Persian Gulf in the hands of Germany (or any other strong power) would be a 42-centimetre gun pointed at India.’18

  La Société Impériale Ottomane du Chemin de Fer de Bagdad, a German syndicate, launched its agreement with the Ottomans in 1903, merging with a slightly different syndicate, the Société du Chemin de Fer Ottoman d’Anatolie, the Anatolian Railway Company. It received concessions to build not only a railway but roads, and it then mysteriously changed its name once more to the Bagdad Railway Company.19 German engineers built and designed the roads and the railways. The two leading spirits of the project, Dr Siemens and Dr von Gwinner, actually offered English and French capitalists a share in the enterprise, but they were turned down on the illogical view that this threat to British trade and influence must not be pandered to. Better no cooperation than allowing a German toe in the door to India.

  When the Kaiser visited Damascus in 1898 he had declared himself ‘friend and protector of the three hundred millions of Mohammedans’. He had a vision glorious, extending his influence to the Holy Land – he entered Jerusalem helmeted and riding on a charger – and as far east as India. Although Dr von Gwinner and his syndicate of German businessmen in fact did all they could to ‘internationalize’ their railway,20 the politicians could not fail to see its importance. It began at Haidar-Pasha, adjacent to Scutari, where Florence Nightingale had nursed the sick of the Crimean War, and went down through Turkey to Konya, the Iconium of New Testament times, reaching Adana, Aleppo and Harran. This was where it stood by the outbreak of war, with a projected extension to Mosul in northern Iraq, Tikrit, later famed as the birthplace of Saddam Hussein, Baghdad, and right down to oil-rich Basra, a vitally important place to control, now that modern warfare depended on petrol-fuelled planes, armoured cars, ships, and eventually tanks. Once in the Persian Gulf, you would indeed be pointing the gun at India.

  When the railway had been started, in 1903, the Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour, had wondered ‘whether it is or is not desirable that what will be undoubtedly the shortest route to Indian should be entirely in the hands of French and German capitalists to the exclusion of British capitalists’.21 He had assured the House that the company was not owned by the German government, but for the next eleven years it was with German diplomats and the German Foreign Office that Britain was in constant negotiation about the railway.

  Five large boxes in the India Office Records contain the story of Britain realizing, and trying not to admit, that she was exposed to potential disaster. Hitherto, in spite of Ententes drawn up with gritted teeth, Russia had been seen as the enemy – in Turkey, in Persia, in Tibet. Germany was just as much of a threat. As the Germans received the franchise to extend the railway to Kuwait in July 1912 the viceroy of India sent a desperate memo to the Foreign Office in London:

  News just received of German attempted intrigue with Sheikh (vide my telegram of 11 July) emphasizes the necessity for carefully avoiding any concessions that may estrange Sheikh and drive him into German hands, or which Turkey may be able to transfer to Germany to our detriment.22

  If it did not grab the public imagination as a major threat, the railway obsessed the diplomats and politicians. They knew that access to the oilfields of Persia and to India were vital to their interests, and that this was no rumoured threat, such as the supposed Russian occupation of Tibet, which sent Younghusband on his fateful expedition to Lhasa. This was, as Perceval London wrote on 25 May 1912 in the Daily Telegraph, ‘no mere light railway … The Germans have decided to carry out the construction in a solid and businesslike way from the beginning.’23 In the very debate in the House of Commons after the assassination of the archduke and his wife in Sarajevo, Sir Edward Grey, the foreign secretary, having offered his personal sympathy, referred to a tragic loss, and spoken of the pleasure given by the visit to the king of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his consort, began almost immediately to speak of those things which most concerned British interests in a coming war. He said barely a word about France or Belgium.
He used the question of a backbencher to allow him to revert to oil concessions in Persia and whether two brigades would be enough to protect them. Aubrey Herbert rose to speak of the appalling conflicts in the Balkans, giving graphic descriptions of Christian and Muslim atrocities against one another. Once again, the foreign secretary chose not to dwell on that, but to speak of the railway and of the concessions – which at that late hour in 1914 must have seemed somewhat flimsy – obtained by Britain from Turkey and Germany that the railway would not go further than Bussora. He admitted that ‘this was a subject of great anxiety to this country’.24 This was what was on the mind of the Foreign Office on the very eve of war.