Pax Britannica (47 page)

There were sweet English flowers everywhere (phlox, sweet peas, antirrhinums), but the buildings had been left in their shattered ruins, and the visiting parties, holding their long skirts above the dust, and shaded by pink parasols, could walk from one scene of heroism to the next—imagine the murderous line of fire from beyond the Baillie Gate, see just where Captain Fulton set up his eighteen-pounders at the Redan, thrill to the memory of Lieutenant Macabe, sallying out beyond Sago’s garrison to spike two enemy guns, or shudder in the cellar where the women and children had huddled through nearly three months of bombardment— 

On the highest point of the compound stood the Residency itself, half-destroyed but still imposing, with the remains of a tower and an air of proud authority—fine and fearless in the sunshine, rubble all around. A few guns still stood sentinel over the lawn: and night and day down the years, as it had throughout the siege, from the broken battlements of the Queen’s House the banner of England flew.
1

No other imperial war had left memories so hallowed, and sometimes the British public scarcely noticed that some hard-fought campaign was being fought at all—so remote were the battlefields, so uncertain was the average Englishman’s command of imperial geography, and so common an occurrence was what the Army called a ‘subaltern’s war’. Dimly out of the past, though, they might see the victors of Empire parading: Roberts riding through Afghanistan, in an astrakhan hat on Vonolel; Wolseley and his soldiers paddling canoes up the Red River to put down Riel’s rebellion in the Canadian West; Napier with his scholars and elephants labouring along the mountain tracks of Ethiopia; 12,000 British soldiers dashing up the Irrawaddy in flotillas of river boats; the White Rajah at the head of his private army, helter-skelter in pursuit of Dyaks; the eighty undefeated stalwarts of Rorke’s Drift, who earned ten Victoria Crosses in a single night.

Possibly they also remembered Gordon’s forlorn bugle-signals to his outposts across the river—‘Come to us, Come to us’; or Dr Jameson and his policemen, humiliated on the veldt at Krugersdorp; or the Boer War of 1881, the only British war against white men since the Crimea, when General Colley’s troops were driven panic-stricken from Majuba Hill; or Colonel William Hicks and his 10,000 Egyptian soldiers, obliterated by the Mahdi in 1883; or the terrible first war against the Afghans, in 1838, when the solitary Dr Brydon, the only man to escape the slaughter of the British in Kabul, rode exhausted into Jellalabad upon his pony.

But for most people, one supposes, all these triumphs and reverses were confused in the historical memory, stirred up with flags and patriotic colours, and blended into a general impression of glory.
1

Between them the two armies of the British Empire could muster, in peacetime, perhaps 400,000 men (the Roman Empire at the time of Trajan was said to have had armies of 300,000 men). It was a small force for its duties, and fortunately it had never been tested in open war. This was not because the British disregarded war as an instrument of policy. They had cool nerves, and in fact they repeatedly gambled with the possibility of a great war, and juggled dexterously with
casus
belli
in the pursuit of their imperial ends. Salisbury was generally conciliatory towards the Germans, wary of the Russians, smoothly diplomatic to the French, but there were times when war against any of them seemed quite likely. It was only against the Americans that the British were, at root, unwilling to contemplate war at all, fiercely though the two nations sometimes confronted one another. Whenever it came to the point, in a conflict with Washington, the British gracefully withdrew, for it was already becoming apparent to them that one day the survival of the Empire might depend upon a special relationship with the United States: besides, one potent strain of the New Imperialism was the idea of Anglo-Saxon supremacy—a joint destiny, as Rhodes hazily conceived it, towards the mastery of the earth.

Generally the British peacefully won their case, and that string of imperial campaigns bore little resemblance to the kind of wars Great Powers conceived for diplomatic purposes. Colonial wars
demanded special techniques—the War Office published a book called
Small
Wars:
Their
Principles
and
Practice
—and the swift transfer of troops and supplies from continent to continent became a speciality of British military men. They may not have frightened the Germans and Russians much, but they were adept at semi-irregular warfare in difficult country, and at confronting adverse primitive odds with disciplined calm—holding their fire, keeping their nerve, against the frenzies of painted
impis
or subtle Afridi sniping. Many British troopers with experience of war in India and in South Africa joined the United States Army for service in the Indian wars. The Americans indeed assiduously studied British methods of colonial war, and at one time considered forming irregular regiments of friendly Sioux, as the British enlisted the warrior peoples of India. For the British armies fought their little wars with a calculated ferocity inconceivable to most patriots at home. During the Afghan frontier campaigns of 1897 no holds were barred: all prisoners were killed (on both sides), many villages were burnt to the ground, nobody who resisted the Raj could expect mercy. ‘There is no doubt that we are a very cruel people’, Churchill wrote home from the frontier.

The Roman Empire was never at peace, from the beginning of its history to the rule of Augustus, and as Victoria foresaw, war became part of the everyday British experience, too; war of a small and distant kind, it is true, but none the less real for that—none the less noble for those who saw it as an instrument of greater ends, none the less exhilarating for those who loved the smell of the gunsmoke, nor the less tragic for those, friend or foe, who had not yet learnt to ask the reason why.

T
O every right-thinking Englishman the Army was only a second shield. The Pax was primarily a peace of the sea, and the little land wars of the Empire were only picturesque asides. As Lord St Vincent had observed, long before his descendant had taken to riding camels up the Nile, ‘I only say they cannot come by sea.’ The Royal Navy was the very heart and pride of the Empire. Upon it, as everybody knew, the security of the realm rested, and around it there flew, like a cloud of reassuring signals, an accretion of legends and victorious memories, mellowed by age, gunsmoke, rum and saltspray. In the nineties the Nelson touch was more than just a romatic tradition: it was, at least in theory, a professional outlook.

The Navy had never seemed more magnificent than it did in 1897. Its 92,000 sailors manned a fleet of 330 ships, with 53 modern ironclads, 80 cruisers, 96 destroyers and torpedo boats, splendidly dubbed with the names that Kipling loved—
Cyclop
and
Hecate,
Badger
,
Bouncer
and
Bustard
,
Pickle
and
Snap
,
Rattlesnake
,
Ajax
,
Colossus,
Basilisk
and
Cockatrice,
Jupiter,
Hamibal
and
Mars,
Thunderer
and
Devastation,
the torpedo gunboats
Boomerang
and
Gossamer
, the destroyers
Dasher,
Lynx,
Wizard
and
Boxer.
This was beyond cavil the supreme Navy of the world.
Jane
’
s
that year reported that the French Navy was numerically its nearest rival, with 95 ships, followed by Russia (86), Germany (68), the United States (56) and Italy (53). The fleets of lesser Powers candidly copied the uniforms, the style, and the equipment of the Royal Navy—thirteen foreign navies used British guns. At home its name was almost as sacred as the Crown itself, and just as popular. Sailor costume was the fashionable dress for boys and girls alike, with the name of the latest British battleship proudly on the cap-ribbon, and it was with something approaching reverence that the
Daily
Mail
’
s
reporter watched the
naval contingent swinging up Ludgate Hill on Jubilee day—they marched, he said, with ‘the steadfast calm of men who have been left alone with God’s wonders at sea’. Naval questions could be guaranteed to spark heated debates at Westminster, and the progress of the Navy, its construction plans, its relative size, was followed with a kind of sporting interest by the public—every year the Government published a White Paper listing the naval strengths of all the Powers, like a form book. Everybody knew about the Two-Power Standard, the practice of maintaining the fleet on a scale ‘at least equal to the naval strength of any other two countries’, which had been official policy since 1889. ‘There are two factors in the celebrations’,
The
Times
wrote of the Jubilee, ‘which transcend all others in their significance as symbols of the Imperial unity. One is the revered personality of the
Queen
, the other the superb condition of
Her
Majesty
’
s
Fleet.
’ The true bond of Empire, the paper said, was naval supremacy: without a dominant Navy the Empire would be ‘merely a loose aggregate of States which derive some commercial advantage from each other’.

So the Jubilee review of the fleet at Spithead was really the most significant function of the whole celebration. It was arranged as a spectacular propaganda display, demonstrating to the Powers the Navy’s ability to assemble vast numbers of modern ships at any one place at any one time. It was claimed to be the largest assembly of warships ever gathered at one anchorage—173 ships, including more than fifty battleships, in lines seven miles long—and most of them had been designed, laid down and completed within the past eight years: yet no ships, it was repeatedly emphasized, had been withdrawn from foreign stations for the review. The Admiralty presented this lesson with style, and down the long lines of anchored warships the visiting grandees sailed in an elegant little convoy of inspecting vessels. The Prince of Wales led the way, in the royal yacht
Victoria
and
Albert
—a paddle-steamer, with two gracefully slanting funnels and a gold-enscrolled prow. The yacht
Enchantress
followed, carrying the Lords of Admiralty, the
Wildfire
with the colonial Premiers, the
Eldorado
full of foreign Ambassadors, the
Danube
loaded deep with the House of Lords, and finally the mighty
Campania,
largest and fastest of Cunarders, carrying both the House
of Commons and the gentlemen of the Press—provision having been made on board, so
The
Times
correspondent elaborately reported, ‘for those comforts which the enervating influences of civilization and the internal economy of the human frame have taught us to desire’.

The fleet itself, supplemented by a respectful line of foreign warships, was dressed overall, and looked superb. It was that ornate period of naval architecture in which the influence of sail was still apparent in the design of warships, and the battleships of the Royal Navy were not yet painted in grey, but flaunted a rich combination of black and yellow. Rank upon rank they lay there, with funnels side by side or huge yellow airvents, catwalks at the stern, canopied look-outs on spindly masts, their hulls complicated with the booms of torpedo nets, their boats swung out on high davits—decks scrubbed to the raw grain of the wood, brasswork polished thin, the wheelhouse glass miraculously crystal, the sailors impeccably paraded at the rail and at the stern, high on a perpendicular staff, the huge White Ensign gracefully fluttering. There was nothing like a British battleship, for a show of pride, pomp and seamanlike skill. Multiplied by fifty on a single afternoon, the effect must have been dazzling: and as the royal yacht led its companions down the line, suddenly there shot out of nowhere, in a mad dash of Nelsonic impertinence, the fastest vessel in the world, Charles Parsons’s
Turbinia,
2,000 horsepower driving nine screws, demonstrating with dramatic and altogether unofficial effrontery the superiority of British marine engineers. ‘Her speed was’, reported
The
Times
man, a little unsteadily by now, ‘simply astonishing, but its manifestation was accompanied by a mighty rushing sound and by a stream of flame from her funnel at least as long as the funnel itself.’
1

The Royal Navy did not lack self-esteem. It loved to show off its brilliance and its seamanship. There was nothing on the seas to equal the panache of a British warship, when she sailed into a foreign port all flags and fresh paint, the Marine band playing on the forecastle and the captain indescribably grand upon his bridge. This was a genial sort of conceit. The officers of the Navy did not think much about war and its horrors. ‘We looked on the Navy more as a World Police Force than as a warlike institution’, wrote one officer in retrospect. ‘We considered that our job was to safeguard law and order throughout the world—safeguard civilization, put out fires onshore, and act as guide, philosopher and friend to the merchant ships of all nations.’ The Navy’s discipline was strict, but there was to its spirit much of the breezy
bonhomie
of sail. Its sailors were recognizably the Jolly Jack Tars of the wooden walls, trained in all-round seamanship like sailing-ship men; padding around the decks in bare feet, moving generally at the run, often bearded and bronzed through service on tropical stations. Its executive officers were frequently men of private means—these were still the days of ‘half-pay’, on which an officer might be placed without notice at the end of a ship’s commission—and prided themselves on their self-reliance. Nothing in Nelson’s life appealed more to the British than his loyal disregard of orders, and in the 1890s the Royal Navy was rich in highly individual commanders. Algernon Charles Fiesché Heneage, ‘Pompo’ to the Navy, habitually carried a stock of twenty dozen
piqué
shirts in his ship, was alleged to break two eggs every morning to dress his hair, and took off his uniform coat when he said his prayers, because for a uniformed British officer to fall on his knees would be unthinkable. ‘Prothero the Bad’, Reginald Charles Prothero, was one of the most alarming persons ever to command a warship, with a black beard down to his waist, flaming eyes, huge shoulders, an enormous hook nose and a habit of addressing everyone as ‘boy’, even sometimes his eminent superiors. Arthur Wilson, ‘Old ’Ard ’Art’, when he commanded the Channel Squadron, used to ride out of Portsmouth Dockyard on a rattly old
bicycle, gravely saluted by the sentries, and on June 6, 1884, laconically entered in his diary: ‘Docked ship. Received the V.C.’ Gerard Noel, greeted with a cheery good morning on the bridge of his ship in the small hours, turned with a snarl and replied: ‘This is no time for frivolous compliments.’ Robert Arbuthnot was so absolute a martinet that when, soon after he had handed over a ship to his successor, a seagull defecated with a plop upon the quarter- deck, the Chief Bosun’s Mate remarked without a smile: ‘That could never ’ave ’appened in Sir Robert’s day.’ ‘Tell these ugly bastards,’ William Packenham instructed his Turkish interpreter, when sent ashore to quell a rising in Asia Minor, and surrounded on all sides by angry brigands, ‘tell these ugly bastards that I am not going to tolerate any more of their bestial habits’: when an elderly lady at a civic luncheon asked him if he was married, he replied courteously: ‘No, madam, no. I keep a loose woman in Edinburgh.’
1

These were the extravagances of a lost age, and the Navy still lived half in its glorious past. Earlier in the century it had probably been the most complex and advanced organization in Britain, but technology had overtaken it. It had no war plans, because for fifty years there had been no serious challenge to its supremacy. Its officers had little tactical or strategic training, but relied largely on seamanship and the Nelson touch, or on a rigid acceptance of inherited methods. Bold they might be in their private lives, but their professional drive was blunted by protocol and tradition. For all their fun and charm they were often fearfully ignorant of the world, and interested only in their beloved Navy: in those days naval officers began their careers at 12 or 13, when they joined the training ship
Britannia,
and spent their whole life insulated within the service. The ships of the Royal Navy were scattered across the world in
ones and twos, a battleship here, an armoured cruiser there, with squadrons in the East Indies, the West Indies, the Pacific, the south Atlantic, with cruisers in Australian waters and battleships off China—a habit of dispersion inherited from the days of sail, when it took at least three months to sail to India. Sometimes ships went off on goodwill cruises for months at a time, with no prearranged course or instructions—‘Well, boys,’ the captain would say to his wardroom in the morning, ‘where shall we go today?’

In
materiel,
too, the Royal Navy was deficient in some important respects—notably guns. An Admiral’s annual report on his squadron made no mention of gunnery, and this was almost the last Navy in the world to be equipped with muzzle-loading guns.
1
Until the apparition of the
Turbinia
at Spithead, the Admiralty had persistently ignored Charles Parsons’s revolutionary inventions, and many of the Navy’s ships on distant stations were obsolete, ‘too weak to fight, too slow to run away’. It was true that numerically the Navy was overwhelming, but each ship’s company, or at least each squadron, tended to think of itself as a self-contained unit, trained to perfection in its own chosen specialities, but with no conception of how to combine in a fleet action, and only the haziest idea of what to do if war broke out. The Admiralty thought more in terms of land than of sea—of particular stations, rather than the grand whole of the oceans, with the result that the Navy had forfeited its mobility, and was tied to fuelling bases, repair yards or traditional trouble-spots. Appearances counted most of all. The success of a commander was judged chiefly by the appearance of his ship, how white its paintwork, how burnished its brass, how smart its time-honoured drills. Swords were worn at sea, and officers sometimes spent their own money on extra brasswork or paint for their ships. On the battleship
Duke
of
Edinburgh
in the late eighties the nuts of all the bolts on the aft deck were gilded, the magazine keys were electro-plated, and statues of Mercury embellished the revolver racks. The guns were fired as seldom as possible, because the blast blistered the paintwork (ammunition was occasionally thrown overboard, to save shooting it off).