Gandhi & Churchill (36 page)

To top it all, for unrelated reasons white railway workers were threatening labor action of their own. In December 1913 South Africa was teetering on economic chaos. Gandhi, however, refused to take advantage of Smuts’s dilemma and formally halted the Natal workers’ strike, a chivalrous gesture that won Smuts’s gratitude and respect.

But Smuts had a strong hand as well. The truth was that the strike was collapsing even before Gandhi called it off. His Natal Indian Association had been too worried about further violence to press ahead and pleaded with workers to remain on their plantations. The strike organizers, and the strikers, were destitute.
⁵³
Gandhi at first resisted the appointment of a commission to hear their grievances because two members were notoriously anti-Indian, but he had no leverage left. As Smuts told him, a renewal of satyagraha and the strike would only bring a “gratuitous infliction of grave suffering on the innocent” and put the onus of any further violence on Gandhi himself.
⁵⁴

So with options and time running out, Gandhi signed an agreement to suspend all passive resistance, pending the outcome of the government commission. Smuts, in turn, promised to introduce legislation to address the Indians’ concerns, without promising that it would be passed.

In April 1914 the commission recommended that the £3 tax be abolished and that the marriage rights of Muslims and Hindus be recognized. Both measures passed into law. Nothing, however, was said about interprovince emigration, let alone the hated registration law—the infamous Black Act that had launched Gandhi’s original passive resistance campaign seven years earlier. The truth, which most biographers prefer to pass over, was that Gandhi had given up on both points in his negotiations with Smuts in January.
⁵⁵
Natal and Transvaal activists, including his old ally Haji Ojer Ali, subjected Gandhi to a barrage of criticism, complaining about the yawning gap between what he had promised his followers and what he had delivered. It was criticism he would hear again in India, even from his closest followers.

But the deed was done, and Gandhi’s days in South Africa were drawing to a close. Thambai Naidu, Henry Polak, Sonja Schlesin, Joseph Doke, and Gandhi’s son Harilal would all remain at Phoenix Farm. He said goodbye to them all. After spending more than twenty years in South Africa, Gandhi would never return. To his mind, he had won the victory he wanted. He had proved that passive resistance worked, at least in forcing a reluctant government to the bargaining table. He had shown that satyagraha could unite Indians into a mass movement, although what happened afterward, including the spread of violence, was outside his control. Finally, he had turned the plight of South Africa’s Indians into a major cause in India. But Indians in Natal and the Transvaal knew only too well that Gandhi’s campaign had done little to change their situation, even that of the indentured underclass that had so unexpectedly come to his rescue.

For a few days he toured South Africa, welcomed by crowds and speaking of their “victory” (which successive white supremacist governments would steadily whittle away until almost nothing was left). As for Smuts, Gandhi asked Sonja Schlesin and Henry Polak to give the general a pair of sandals he had made in prison, as a gift. Smuts was touched by the gesture. He wore them every year at his farm until 1939, when he returned them to their maker as a tribute on Gandhi’s seventieth birthday.

“It was my fate to be the protagonist of a man for whom even then I had the highest respect,” Smuts would write many years later.
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In Smuts’s long career, only one other politician would win his admiration more: Winston Churchill. But as Gandhi’s ship disappeared over the horizon on July 18, 1914, the general’s feelings were less sentimental. “The saint has left our shores,” he wrote, “I sincerely hope forever.”

Ten days later Austria declared war on Serbia, in retaliation for the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The terrible world war that Churchill had predicted and dreaded was about to begin. It would burn away the last certainties of the old post-Victorian order and thrust both Gandhi and Churchill into the political inferno.

Chapter Eleven

A BRIDGEHEAD TOO FAR

1914–1915

Winston was often right, but when he was wrong, well, my God.

F. E. SMITH

G
ANDHI REACHED
E
NGLAND ON
A
UGUST
4, 1914. The last time he was there, the London papers had been full of news of India and assassinations. Now they were full of war. That same day Britain declared war on Germany. Germany had done the same to France the day before, and to Russia before that. Vast national armies were being mobilized, and tens of millions of men were on the move, from the Pyrenees to Bombay. “The wars of peoples will be more terrible than the wars of kings,” Churchill had predicted back in 1901. History was about to prove him correct.
¹

Gandhi, now forty-five years old, was no longer the sleek and prosperous Indian lawyer. A photograph shows him looking drawn after the years of inner and outer struggle in South Africa. He had regrown his mustache, but the suit, white collar, and tie that he had once again donned were a concession to the English weather, not emblems of his ambition, as they had been when he first arrived as a student in 1888.

The rough cut of his clothes and the stick in his hand (he suffered from bad pleurisy during his stay) gave him a countrified air, like a farmer on a visit to town. And it was as a farmer that he now saw himself. His Confession of Faith had stated that “the simple peasant life” was the life of true happiness, and that “the rude plough” of his ancestors would cut humanity’s path to salvation.
²
His visit to London was supposed to be a brief stopover on the way to India, where he was planning to unleash his program of “soul force” and back-to-the-land moral and spiritual uplift—even though in South Africa it had been only a half-success.

The news of war, however, once again galvanized him into action. Certainly no pacifist ever enjoyed preparing for war more than Gandhi. “London in these days was a sight worth seeing,” he remembered ten years later. “There was no panic, but all were busy helping to the best of their ability.” English sons, brothers, and husbands were enlisting to fight and training for combat; wives and mothers “employed themselves in cutting and making clothes and dressings for the wounded.”
³

Gandhi asked himself a typical Kiplingesque question: “What is my duty?” His conclusion was that he and other Indians must still serve King and Country. “Am I, doing nothing, to continue enjoying myself, eating my food?” was his refrain to friends and family. For Gandhi, the basis of all community, past and future, was sacrifice, including sacrifice in war. He had written in
Hind Swaraj,
“That nation is great which rests its head upon death as a pillow.”
⁴
Now it was time for Indians to rise to the occasion in true warrior spirit.

Gandhi threw himself into organizing another Indian ambulance corps. Lord Crewe, now secretary of state for India, warmly thanked him for his offer of service. The Indian nationalists at India House, however, were scandalized: how could Gandhi possibly advocate helping their British oppressors?

But Gandhi, as usual, weighed his judgment in moral not political terms. “I felt then that it was more the fault of individual British officials,” he wrote later, “than of the British system” that Indians were unhappy within the empire.
^*47
He conceded that “we were slaves and they were masters.” But was it not “the duty of the slave, seeking to be free, to make his master’s need his opportunity” by standing beside him in time of peril? “When thousands have come forward to lay down their lives only because they thought it their duty to do so, how could I sit still?” he told his cousin Maganlal. “A rifle in this hand will never fire. And so there only remained nursing the wounded and I took it up.”
⁵

The first recruits, fifty or so in number, arrived at Eastcote outside London on October 2, 1914. Gandhi served them fruit and nut meals, and they met their commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Richard Baker, formerly of the Indian Army Medical Service. Already 28,500 Indian Army troops from the Lahore and Meerut divisions, including the Secunderabad Cavalry Brigade, had arrived at Marseilles, headed for the Western front. Gandhi and Baker needed to get the volunteers ready to join them. Some tension arose between Baker and Gandhi over the appointment of noncommissioned officers. Finally Lord Crewe had to remind Gandhi that he was in the army now and thus subject to military discipline.
⁶

At the end of October Indian troops were involved in fierce fighting near La Bassée in France, then at Ypres. One of their number, a soldier from the Duke of Connaught’s regiment, had already won India’s first posthumous Victoria Cross. “What an army!” the American correspondent from the
New York World
enthused, noting that these troops represented “a civilization that was old when Germany was a forest and early Britons stained their naked bodies blue.”
⁷
Gandhi’s ambulance men were shipped off to help. The Prince Aga Khan appeared to see the volunteers off. The prince said he envied them and would try to join them later as an interpreter. Gandhi offered to have the entire senior class from his Phoenix Farm School in South Africa come to London to lead the next batch.
^*48

Gandhi wanted to stay longer in London, raising recruits and exhorting Indians to join the cause, but the cold, damp weather had brought on his pleurisy. It must have made Kasturbai miserable as well. Finally a friend from the India Office advised him to go to India to recover. Gandhi embarked on November 18, 1914, after a warm farewell reception at the Westminster Palace Hotel, attended by Indian and English friends. He was in poor health but still full of fire for the “war for civilization,” as some would soon term the cataclysm to come. Leaving seemed anti-climactic. On board the SS
Arabia
he plaintively asked a friend: “Having reached [India] what shall I do with myself?”
⁸

When he reached India he would continue his war work, in spite of other distractions. It was those distractions, however, that would sweep him to the top of the Indian nationalist movement.

The coming of war had given Winston Churchill the same boost of excitement. The day war was declared, David Lloyd George remembered the First Lord of the Admiralty coming into a cabinet meeting. “Winston dashed into the room radiant,” he said, “his face bright, his manner keen…You could see he was really a happy man.” As Winston confessed to Clementine, “Is it not horrible to be built like this?”
⁹

The apologetic tone was a pretense. In fact, this was the moment he had dreamed of all his life, to lead a great fighting force into battle. Replacing the toy soldiers spread out on the floor of his nursery were the battleships of the Royal Navy, the most sophisticated machines of war ever built, which he watched lined up “squadron by squadron,” as they left Portland for Scapa Flow in Scotland just days before war began. “Scores of gigantic castles of steel,” he wrote, “wending their way across the misty, shining sea, like giants bowed in anxious thought.”
¹⁰

Actually the ships were headed away from battle and away from Europe. Almost from the day he arrived at the Admiralty, Churchill had realized that the navy could not win a war with Germany, only prevent defeat. Everyone assumed the decisive clash would come on land, and in August 1914 Churchill assumed, like everyone else, that that meant in France. The Germans assumed the same thing. At war’s outbreak their so-called Schlieffen Plan sent German armies on a massive swing through neutral Belgium, followed by a great wheeling movement south to encircle Paris and entrap the French army. The plan nearly worked. French troops were sent reeling back toward the capital before a single British soldier set foot on French soil. For a crucial week or two it seemed that the British Expeditionary Force might arrive too late to halt German victory, just as the German generals had planned.

But then the German attack ran out of steam. Churchill had predicted this might happen in a memorandum written three years earlier.
¹¹
The French were able to rally at the first Battle of the Marne on September 5. Soldiers from the British Expeditionary Force, which had begun disembarking on French soil on August 15, moved in to fill the gap between the two retreating French armies. The Germans fell back, and on September 14 they halted at the Aisne River, to dig trenches and set up machine guns. A few miles to the west the Allies did the same. The First World War of stationary trenches, barbed wire, and massive bombardments was about to begin.