The Rise and Fall of the British Empire

by Lawrence, James

  These sportswomen could be excused their ignorance of the events of the past six weeks and their climax early in August because they had not directly involved the interests of Britain or the empire. The assassination of Archduke Franz-Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo by Serbian terrorists had provoked a confrontation between Germany’s ally, Austria-Hungary, and Serbia, which enjoyed Russian patronage. Germany was willing to back Austria-Hungary’s demands which, despite Serbia’s history of sponsorship of terrorism, appeared harsh. Russia, anxious to prove itself as the champion of all Slavs, backed its protégé in what was developing into a trial of strength with Austria. Everything hung on the attitudes of Germany and Russia. The Kaiser and his high command, frightened by the scale of recent Russian rearmament, had for some time been convinced that the sooner war came with Russia the better for Germany. Czar Nicholas II and his advisers were equally belligerent, and were driven by a deep-seated urge to prove that Russia was again a power to be reckoned with. The final week of July saw a rapid escalation of the dispute with the mobilisation of the Austro-Hungarian, Russian and German armies. With Russia beset by two assailants, France fulfilled its duty and ordered mobilisation.

  So far Britain was under no threat. Grey, pestered by France for help, could only promise that the fleet would prevent any German seaborne attack on the French coast. He was an interventionist but, like others of similar mind within the cabinet, he knew that a declaration of war against Germany would require the backing of public opinion. There was, especially on the left, much hostility towards Russia, the most oppressive tyranny in Europe, and it could reasonably be argued that Serbia had brought its misfortunes on itself. What was needed, as in 1899, was a moral cause to unite the public. It was provided on 29 July when the German government demanded free passage through Belgium for its armies. Britain was one of the signatories to the treaty which guaranteed Belgian neutrality, and by upholding it could appear as the honourable defender of international good faith against a power which believed that might was right.

  Belgium refused Germany’s demand and was invaded on 2 August, giving the British cabinet the just cause it had been seeking. When, on 3 August, Grey outlined to the cabinet the reasons for intervention, one listener was surprised to hear nothing about immediate national and imperial interests.27 Much could have been left unsaid: Germany’s occupation of the Belgian coastline; the defeat of France; and a Carthaginian peace which might involve the surrender of its fleet and colonies would all endanger Britain and the empire. So too would neutrality, for it would transform France and Russia into enemies who between them had an infinitely greater capacity than Germany to harm Britain’s overseas possessions. It was safer to have that mass of men and weaponry known as the Russian steamroller trundling towards Berlin rather than the Indian frontier.

  Once it was clear that Germany would trample on Belgian neutrality, Britain declared war. The order for mobilisation was given at ten to four on 4 August; army officers playing tennis or cricket that sunny afternoon were notified by the waving of white handkerchiefs. Within a fortnight, the advance guard of the British Expeditionary Force was disembarking at the ports of northern France. They were warmly welcomed.

  * * *

  The Balkan crisis had excited as little concern in the dominions as it had in Britain. As the situation deteriorated and Europe’s armies sprang to arms, the British government initiated the precautionary procedures agreed with its dominion partners and set down in the War Book. The governments of Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand recognised that the crisis had come of which Grey had spoken three years before, and that Germany was that nation whose ‘Napoleonic’ ambitions in Europe now imperilled British seapower. ‘If there is a war, you and I shall be in it,’ asserted the Australian Prime Minister, Joseph Cooke, for, ‘if the old country is at war, so are we.’28 News that Canada’s Prime Minister, Sir Robert Borden, had offered Britain his country’s backing and 30,000 fighting men, prompted Australia to equal this number on 3 August.

  The profoundly moving spirit of comradeship and carefree, jaunty patriotism which agitated the thousands of young men who rushed to recruiting stations in Britain during the late summer of 1914 was matched in the dominions. Many, perhaps the majority of young men welcomed the war as an adventure, but there was also a strong vein of patriotism running through the ranks of those who joined up. A nineteen-year-old Australian patriot wrote that he and his brothers-in-arms were preparing to uphold ‘the traditions of the British race’; he was killed in action at Gallipoli. Another soldier of the new Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) expressed the same spirit in verse:

  The banners of England unfurled across the sea,

  Floating out upon the wind, were beckoning to me.

  Storm-rent and battle-torn, smoked stained and grey:

  The banners of England – and how could I stay!29

  This sense of kinship and shared danger also inspired a Canadian soldier-poet:

  From Sydney to Esquimault, from the Lakes to Hudson Bay,

  Men who never saw you, Mother, those that left you yesterday,

  We have chucked the tools and ledgers, we have left the bench and mine,

  We are sailing east to Flanders to Join the khaki line.

  We are comng, wild and woolly,

  Hearts and hands are with you fully,

  Pledged to smash the Prussian bully,

  Five hundred thousand strong.30

  A black soldier of the empire from Nyasaland struck another common chord. ‘We joined the war because we were men,’ he recalled many years afterwards.31

  There was no choice for colonies such as Nyasaland and, for that matter, India which, as dependencies were bound to follow Britain into the war. The dominions fell into line in August 1914 because their leaders and people acknowledged a common peril and, bearing in mind what Grey had said three years before, realised that a German victory in Europe would be to Britain’s and their own disadvantage. The flood of offers of men from the dominion governments which reached London within a few days of the declaration of war were a reassuring demonstration of imperial solidarity. So too was the response of thousands of young men who poured into the recruiting offices throughout the empire, although they, like their rulers, expected a short war.

  PART FOUR

  THE AGE OF IMPERIALISM IS ENDED

  1914–45

  1

  E is for Empire for which We Would Die: 1914–18

  The resources of the empire made Britain the most formidable power engaged in the war. The empire covered a quarter of the earth’s land surface and had a population of 425 million of whom 366 million were coloured, and of these, 316 million lived in India. This manpower was ruthlessly exploited to provide both fighting men and the host of labourers and carriers which supported the imperial armies on every front.

  At the end of the war the total of imperial soldiers, sailors and airmen was 8.5 million. Of these, 5.7 million came from the United Kingdom (four-fifths from England), 1.4 million from India, 630,000 from Canada, 420,000 from Australia, 136,000 from South Africa, and 129,000 from New Zealand. This last figure was particularly impressive since it represented just over half the men eligible for service.1 The African colonies produced 57,000 soldiers and an astonishing 932,000 porters and labourers, most for service in the German East African campaign.2 There were a further 330,000 Egyptian labourers who worked in France and the Middle East, 43,000 black South Africans who undertook behind-the-lines chores in East Africa and northern France, and a specially recruited Chinese Labour Corps which was also employed in France. By 1918 there were nearly a third of a million Chinese, Africans and Egyptians in France alone. By undertaking the donkey work of total war, these men, like their counterparts on other fronts, released white men to replenish the firing line. The claim, based solely on a head count of servicemen, that Britain never fully utilised the empire’s manpower is absurd; Nyasaland yielded 15,000 askaris and 200,000 labourers between 1914 an
d 1918, two-thirds of its adult male population.3 The proportion of black soldiers could have been higher, but the Colonial Office was nervous about black men fighting white, and senior officers wrongly imagined that the negro lacked the steadiness and fortitude of the European.4

  The war revealed in the starkest possible way the undercurrents of racial prejudice and tension which had long swirled and eddied just below the surface throughout the empire. Sir James Willcocks, who commanded Indian forces in France between October 1914 and September 1915, publicly praised the Indian fighting man as ‘a first-class soldier and Nature’s gentleman’, but privately abhorred the thought of such men being tended by white nurses.5 Lord Lugard was horrified by the idea of his wife being treated by a black doctor and, in 1918, a Colonial Office official was appalled by the possibility that West Indian convalescents in a Liverpool hospital were being looked after by English nurses.6

  In March 1915, Maori troops in Egypt were ordered to undertake garrison duties in Malta rather than join their white colleagues in the attack on the Dardanelles, much to their disappointment.7 It was axiomatic among senior commanders that imperial prestige in the Middle East was best upheld by white troops. This was not entirely racial prejudice; the sudden influx of Indian and black units into this region in June 1918 and the transfer to France of white soldiers fuelled rumours among the Egyptians that Britain was on the verge of defeat, and that the new arrivals were expendable men who would soon be swept aside by the Turks and Germans.8 That the Egyptians should have thought along these lines says much about their experience of British racial attitudes.

  These were apparent elsewhere in the Middle East army, which included British, dominion, Indian and colonial troops. Men from two Royal Fusiliers battalions, recruited from London’s Jewish community, protested against being brigaded with the West Indians, who themselves were angry at being placed in hospital wards alongside Asian and African invalids ‘who were ignorant of the English language and western customs’.9 West Indians were further enraged by being ordered into foul railway carriages which Anzac soldiers had just refused to enter.10

  This incident in 1918 was also an example of the notorious cussedness of Australian soldiers, which had become a constant headache for senior officers, long accustomed to the docility of the British Tommy. The Australian fighting man was an independent-minded creature whose first and often only attachment was to his immediate unit. Australian officers, although for the most part from middle-class backgrounds, had to spend some time in the ranks, and relations between them and their men were free and easy. Extending the spirit of ‘mateship’, one Australian officer shared his bottle of whisky with some British NCOs and found himself reprimanded by a British court martial, which interpreted his gesture as one likely to undermine discipline. Such a view of discipline, indeed the whole concept of hierarchy it was intended to uphold, was utterly incomprehensible to the Australian soldier. At first, Australians had been puzzled by the servile obedience shown to their officers by English soldiers (the Scots seemed far less passive ), but their attitude later turned to one of contempt towards men who refused to stick up for themselves.11

  British generals, Haig in particular, were disturbed by the possibility that the insubordinate spirit of the Australians might contaminate British personnel. It did not; in fact, there was an understandable jealousy felt by many British servicemen towards the ‘fuckin’ five bobbers’, since Australians were paid five shillings (25p) a day as opposed to the one shilling allowed the British soldier.12 In Egypt, and afterwards France, this extra cash was usually spent on drink and prostitutes, and there were protests in the Australian press about the exposure of the country’s virtuous young manhood to the ‘depravity’ of the former country.13 A near epidemic of venereal diseases among Anzac troops early in 1915 led to a riot in Cairo in which brothels were sacked and burned. Subsequent manifestations of Australian recalcitrance included two mutinies in France in 1918, and the destruction of the Arab village of Surafend and the killing of several of its inhabitants as retaliation for the murder of a New Zealander.

  By contrast, the Indian professional soldier knew his duty and place in the scheme of things, or so his officers thought. The stress of war proved them wrong, for the fighting spirit of the two Indian divisions sent to France in the autumn of 1914 soon evaporated. Despite internal reforms of the past decade, the Indian army and its senior officers were physically and mentally unprepared to fight a modern, European war. A combination of cold, wet weather and extraordinarily heavy casualties (some units were reduced by half in a single action) suffered in battle led to a decay of morale which was reflected in a rash of self-inflicted wounds and malingering during the winter of 1914–15.14 In May 1915, the censors of Indian soldiers’ mail revealed that a large number were infected with ‘despair of survival’, and Haig feared that a mutiny was imminent.15 The Indian government, which had vainly attempted to keep knowledge of its soldiers’ discontent to itself, concurred, and in September the Indian contingent was pulled out of France for redeployment in Mesopotamia.

  Mobilisation of the empire’s manpower in 1914 had proceeded by slow stages, and according to no plan beyond the need to find dominion soldiers to replace imperial garrisons of British regulars, who were urgently needed in France. It was events there during the winter of 1914–15 which dictated the shape and direction of the empire’s war effort. By the turn of the year the conflict in France had evolved into what is best described as an extended siege. Two increasingly well-protected lines of fortification, each many miles deep, stretched from the Channel to the Alps. For the next three and a half years, the Anglo-French and German armies attempted to fracture and penetrate their adversary’s network of barbed wire, trenches and bunkers. At the same time, the opposing high commands endeavoured to discover a formula by which the innovations of modern warfare – machine-guns, high explosive shells, pinpoint bombardment, aircraft, poison gas, tanks, and wireless – could be brought together to deliver the knock-out blow. This task was made more difficult by simultaneous improvements in the techniques of defence.

  The process of finding a way to end the deadlock in the West was painfully slow and bloody. It was marked by a sequence of mass offensives between 1915 and 1918 which consumed men by the hundred thousand and yielded relatively minor tactical gains. Haig, who took command of the British Expeditionary Force in December 1915, justified this strategy in terms of wearing down the German army to a point of moral and physical exhaustion. This was arguable. What was not was that the Allies would need a continual flow of fighting men to make good the losses which were the inevitable result of a war of attrition. To start with, and in the belief that the contest would be soon over, Britain and the dominions had relied on volunteers.

  Conscription had long been regarded as inimical to those cherished notions of individual freedom which obtained in Britain and the dominions. Principles of this sort were luxuries in time of war, and as the flow of volunteers slackened the British government was forced to introduce conscription at the beginning of 1916. New Zealand followed suit in May, but in Australia, where the enlistment rate was falling, there was widespread resistance to compulsory service. The matter was twice put to the public in referendums in October 1916 and December 1917, and each time the vote was decisively against conscription. On each occasion there had been considerable opposition from Australians of Irish descent whose ancestral dislike for Britain had been sharpened by the condign measures employed after the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin, and the British government’s reluctance to allow Home Rule. Conscription also opened up racial divisions in Canada where French Canadians objected to conscription legislation passed in August 1917. Its enforcement during the winter and spring of 1917–18 provoked riots in Quebec. Fears of a similar rift between those of British ancestry who were wholeheartedly behind the war and the Afrikaners, of whom a minority were pro-German, inhibited the South African government from even considering conscription. The reactions to conscription of A
ustralian Irish, Canadiens and Boers were a reminder that within the white dominions were communities whose collective historic memory made it impossible for them to have any natural affinity with Britain, or any emotional attachment to the idea of empire.

  While the dominions had the final word as to whether or not conscription was adopted, overall control of the imperial war effort and allocation of imperial resources was the responsibility of the British war cabinet and high command. Both worked in harness if not harmony with their French counterparts, and were constrained by having to take into account their ally’s needs. Domestic political intrigue and debate had not been suspended at the outbreak of war, rather they became more intense and bitter as it became clear that successive governments were failing to deliver victories. Asquith’s Liberal war cabinet, to which the imperial hero Kitchener had been co-opted as Minister for War, was replaced by a coalition in April 1915. Asquith survived until December 1916, when he was unseated by a cabal of newspaper owners and politicians who believed that he lacked the energy and willpower needed to win the war. Lloyd George possessed both qualities, as well as charisma. He succeeded Asquith, heading a coalition which remained in power, often uncomfortably, for the next two years.

  The entries and exits of ministries, ministers and for that matter generals and admirals, were the outward evidence of discord and divisions among those responsible for deciding strategy. By the beginning of 1915, two distinct views were emerging as to the nature of the war and how it might be won. On one hand there were the ‘Westerners’ who, with French backing, wanted a concentration of resources in France on the grounds that victory could only be achieved by the defeat of the German army there. On the other, there were the ‘Easterners’ who argued that the war in France had become a stalemate and, as the casualty lists were daily proving, attempts to gain a breakthrough just squandered lives. Instead, an attack should be made on Germany’s allies, weaker vessels which would shatter easily, and whose destruction would undermine Germany.