Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (13 page)

Curzon responded voluptuously to the far horizons and the scented coasts. He was easily moved, to tears and to laughter, and if he distinctly lacked the common touch, he responded to style and sensitivity in men of all races—racial pride, he thought, was a lower-class attribute. Certainly he was less at home with the British bourgeoisie than he was with a delicate Maharajah, an entertaining Kurd or the wild frontier chieftains of the north-west—‘gigantic’, as he approvingly described them, ‘bearded, instinct with loyalty, often stained with crime’.

Curzon’s first love of travel had been Persia, but he responded too to the more complex fascination of India, and grew to relish its tangled history. Surveying the disturbances and fomentations of the 1900s, he wrote: ‘I have observed the growing temper of the native. The new wine is beginning to ferment in him, and he is awaking to a consciousness of equality and freedom.’ The movement was inevitable, he believed, and if it was not to end in violent rebellion the arrogance of the British must be held in check. He considered that arrogance vulgar, the prejudice of uneducated men, and in trying to control it he made many enemies among Anglo-Indians.
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Once again he was consciously enacting a lofty imperial role, the role of trustee, and never more consciously than in his famous quarrel with the 9th Queen’s Royal Lancers.

The 9th, who figure prominently in half the military adventures of the Victorian age, were a fashionable cavalry regiment, rich in
titles as they were in battle-honours, Anglo-Welsh in origin but long since transmuted into a kind of smart socio-military club.
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Intensely snobbish towards inferior regiments, they were clannishly bound together themselves, officers and men alike, by a fierce regimental loyalty, making them all in all, with their rich and influential officers, their illustrious record,
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and this tight spirit of membership, a formidable organism. In 1902 some troopers of the 9th Lancers, it was alleged, brutally attacked an Indian, leaving him dying outside their camp. Who the culprits were, nobody knew. Several courts of inquiry failed to discover, and though the regiment itself offered a reward for information, nobody came forward.

Curzon was much distressed by the affair. During the previous twenty years there had been eighty-four recorded cases in which Europeans had killed Indians, yet since 1857 only two Europeans had been hanged. ‘You can hardly credit’, he wrote, ‘the sympathy with wrong-doing that there is here—even among the highest—provided that the malefactor is an Englishman.’ He was convinced that the 9th Lancers had deliberately withheld evidence, probably with the complicity of the Army command, and he ordered that, since no individual could be punished, the whole regiment must be instead. All leave was cancelled for nine months, and as an outward mark of disapprobation, throughout that period a sentry from another regiment was placed outside each of the regimental barrack blocks.

The regiment was infuriated by this despotism, and was angrily supported by most Anglo-Indians. The case became a
cause
célèbre.
The Indian newspapers were full of it, society at home gossiped about it. Even the King protested at Curzon’s action. Six months later, at the Delhi Durbar for his Coronation, the 9th were detailed
to provide the escort for the Duke of Connaught, who was representing the Royal family. A proud escort they provided, the horses sleek and powerful, the soldiers wearing the medals of the South African campaign, with the pennants flying from their lance-heads and their spiked helmets gleaming white. When this splendid equipage rode by the saluting base, where Lord Curzon was taking the review, Anglo-India made its feeling known: for as the 9th passed a loud and pointed cheer went up from the assembled Europeans, unmistakable in its meaning and apparently unanimous—even the Viceroy’s personal guests, so Curzon noted wryly, could not forbear to cheer.

This was another sort of imperialism, something much nearer the earth than Curzon’s alabaster kind. He was upset by the demonstration, implying as it did that the vast majority even of educated Europeans in India regarded the Indians as less than fully human, but was intensely conscious too of his own patrician response. ‘As I sat alone and unmoved on my horse, conscious of the implication of the cheers … I felt a certain gloomy pride in having dared to do the right.’

He dared, too, to approach the civilization of India with a respect rare among the pig-stickers and the box-wallahs, and tried to convince the Indians themselves that they should not simply wish to be brown Britons. At the Durbar—‘the Curzonation’—he insisted that every detail of the decoration should be Indian, so that the whole huge camp became a display of woodworks, enamels, carpets, potteries and lovely silks. He devoted himself to Indian archaeology, neglected then by Indians and Britons alike. He it was who restored the Taj Mahal to its original perfection, cherished the half-buried glories of Fatehpur Sikri and the exquisite Pearl Mosque in the fort at Lahore, and by reviving the moribund Department of Antiquities, gave to the British Raj in India, just in time, a scholarly distinction that would remain among the more honourable imperial legacies.

Out of his time—in some ways too soon, in others too late. It was Kitchener, now Commander-in-Chief in India, who baulked Curzon
of his Indian mission. In a historic quarrel—‘The Lord of the Realm
versus
the Lord of War’—they clashed over the degree to which the civil government should control the Indian Army. Kitchener won, obliging Curzon to resign in 1905, and never afterward did a Viceroy of such difficult originality grace the administration of India.

He left behind mixed feelings: gratitude for much of what he had done, contumely for his partitioning of Bengal, widespread resentment at his high-handedness and delusions of grandeur. He had mixed feelings himself. On the one hand he was a frank imperialist, working always ‘to rivet the British rule more firmly on to India and to postpone the longed-for day of emancipation’. On the other he was a man of civilized sympathies, and hoped that he had helped India towards ‘the position which is bound one day to be hers—namely that of the greatest partner in the Empire’.

His disdain was remembered by many, his fun by only a few. Though he later became Foreign Secretary, he never did get to 10 Downing Street, and he looked back on his years in India, for the rest of his life, with a nostalgic pride. Out of it all he distilled as memorable a philosophy of Empire, by his own proud standards, as was ever expressed: ‘Let it be your ideal’, he told his countrymen in India, ‘to remember that the Almighty has placed your hand on the greatest of his ploughs, in whose furrow the nations of the future are germinating and taking shape, to drive the blade a little forward in your time, and to feel that somewhere among these millions you have left a little justice or happiness or prosperity, a sense of manliness or moral dignity, a spring of patriotism, a dawn of intellectual enlightenment, or a stirring of duty where it did not exist before—that is enough. That is the Englishman’s justification in India.’

Our second grandee of Empire stands, beside Curzon, like a searching torchlight beside a wind-flickered flare. If Curzon was quintessentially English, rooted for eight centuries in the same plot of Derbyshire countryside, Alfred Milner was hardly English at all. His philosophies owed nothing to the easy amateurism of the
English tradition, his means of expression would not have found favour with the Souls, he lacked romance and he had little humour. He was an imperialist of a very different kind: much less flamboyant than Curzon, but much more implacable, dedicated less to ideals than to systems. He was a genuine imperial technocrat, a class of statesmen of which history had time to produce, fortunately for the allure of Empire, only one or two.

Milner was born in Germany, and had a German grandmother. His father, though British, had been born and brought up in Germany too, and Milner’s boyhood years there, his schooling at the gymnasium at Tübingen, marked his mind for life, and made him vulnerable always to English sneers and innuendoes. In 1870, during a walking tour in France, he saw the German Army in action during the Franco-Prussian War, and it is said that this experience further disposed him towards order, efficiency and political cohesion—not in those days the preoccupations of English gentlemen. At Oxford, where he was at Balliol a few years before Curzon, he won practically everything. He got a double first, of course. He won four of the great University scholarships. He was President of the Union. He was elected to a New College fellowship. He was a leading figure in a very different set from Curzon’s dashing and irreverent circle of Etonians. Milner’s group was earnest, socially-conscious, dutiful and exceedingly clever, and the friends he made in it lastingly influenced his view of public life and private duty. He was a formidable young man, and became a formidable old one.

He came to Empire obliquely, via journalism and politics, and his imperial career started as Under-Secretary to the Ministry of Finance in Egypt, under the grandiose pro-consulship of Lord Cromer. The task of imposing fiscal order upon that anthology of disorders, Egypt, was just Milner’s style. ‘In Egypt,’ he wrote, surveying the state of the toiling fellahin around him, ‘economic causes produce their theoretically correct results with a swiftness and exactitude not easily visible in other lands’: and this measurable distance between cause and effect, this self-evident translation of theory into practice, suited his sober gifts—‘in Egypt,’ he said, ‘there is no argument but “you must”.’

Milner was a black and white man, a man of figures, a prophet of ‘discipline, order, method, precision, punctuality’. ‘If Milner does not agree with you,’ Clemenceau was to write, ‘he closes his eyes like a lizard and you can do nothing with him.’ Intellectually, among the servants of the Empire in the early years of the new century, he stood almost alone: it was puzzling to some of his contemporaries that one of the cleverest men in England should devote his life to that essentially irrational enthusiasm, the Empire.

But Milner was the born public servant—or alternatively, the born dictator. He was a bachelor until late in life, believing that he had to choose between public good and private happiness (‘What he needs’, Beatrice Webb the Socialist once remarked, ‘is God and a wife’). He lacked the
hwyl
to lead simple people or the artistry to inspire them, but he had a vocation to serve the State, and at the start of the twentieth century he believed that the most satisfying field of public service lay within the Empire. He was not much interested in the black African and Asian possessions, except as a source of wealth, but he was a consistent believer in white imperial unity—Greater Britain, a political amalgam of Britain and the self-governing Dominions. He recognized earlier than most of his contemporaries that Britain herself would presently be outclassed by the greater new Powers of Russia, Germany and the United States. Union with the Dominions, he thought, was the only way to maintain her status in the world—‘the British State’ (a word he was fond of, by the way) ‘must follow the race, must comprehend it….’

Look at his face, in the oval-framed photograph in
Men
of
Empire,
1902! His mouth is set in a downward curve, not unkindly, not even unattractively, but implacably. His moustache, while not ostentatious, is emphatic and symmetrical. His eyes have a faintly bemused expression, as though he is forever astonished at the wayward nature of mankind. His forehead is high and fine, his ears are rather prominent, he sits in a posture half slouch, half admonition, like a schoolmaster lecturing a boy who, though undeniably a trouble-maker, does have recognizable talent. Only his tie, by a
lifelong quirk, is slightly skew-whiff, and shows his collar-stud beneath.

Few women might be intoxicated by this severe cerebral figure.
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It is easy to see, however, why Joseph Chamberlain, himself a forceful mixture of the impulsive and the hard-headed, surveying the growing confusion of South Africa immediately before the Boer War, invited Milner to go as High Commissioner to Cape Town. Milner called himself ‘a synoptic man’, a man who could make sense of things, and he hoped to fuse the two white races of South Africa into a harmonious whole under the Crown. He went there with a reasonably open mind, he learnt Afrikaans, he conscientiously met all the Boer leaders, but the synopsis did not work. After a year of hassle and impasse, logic convinced him that the only solution to the South African dilemma was war against the Boers. British and Boer independence, like the British and the Boer mentalities, were incompatible.

Milner never did cultivate the art of the possible. Another of his self-epithets was ‘a man for emergencies’, and he was bad at the slow slog or the compromise. Lloyd George, who should know, said he had ‘no political nostril’. He despised English constitutional methods—‘that mob at Westminster’, he called Parliament—resented the shifts and delays of democracy, and said, as he analysed the chances for peace and war in Africa, that he didn’t care twopence for the opinion of people 6,000 miles away in England.

In May, 1899, Milner declared his views in a much-quoted summary: ‘South Africa can prosper under two, three or six governments, though the fewer the better, but not under two absolutely conflicting social and political systems.’ It was not a judgement of values, only of expediencies. Relentlessly he pressed it upon President Kruger, and the successive interviews between the two men are among the most suggestive in the Empire’s history: the Briton so cold, so implacable, so Balliol, the Boer so embedded in lore and faith, inherited emotions and tribal certainties—the one high-browed and formal in his winged collar and check cravat, the other whiskered and hideous with age, slumped in his drab frock-coat across the table. The talks were doomed: after a last harangue of Kruger which reduced the old patriarch to tears, Milner broke them off, and war was inevitable. It was all Milner’s fault, Lord Salisbury thought.‘We have to act upon a moral field prepared for us by him and his Jingo supporters … and all for people whom we despise, and for territory which will bring no power and no profit to England.’