Pax Britannica (26 page)

And behind these ageing marshals stood the third of the imperial soldiers, and the most formidable: Herbert Kitchener. He was yet another Anglo-Irishman, another soldier’s son, but in no other way did he resemble his peers. Set beside Wolseley’s languid elegance, or the neat genial precision of Bobs, Kitchener looks a kind of ogre. He was only 48 in 1897, but around him a mystique had long arisen, a glamour which set him apart from other soldiers, and made him one of the figureheads of the New Imperialism. He was huge in stature—six feet two inches in his socks—and terrible of visage, and his life was powered by an overriding and ceaseless ambition. He was aloof to women. He did not care whether his colleagues, his subordinates or his common soldiers loved or loathed him. He had made his early reputation by a series of romantically mysterious adventures among the Arabs—first in Palestine, then in the Sudan, in which he improbably posed as an Arab himself, and undertook various dashing intelligence missions. He had fought under Wolseley in the unsuccessful campaign to relieve Gordon; he had become Sirdar of the Egyptian Army; he was now, with heavy-footed thoroughness, slowly moving up the Nile, month by month, cataract by cataract, towards the capture of Khartoum.

Kitchener was not, like Wolseley and Roberts, a familiar figure in England. His allure was remote and enigmatic. He fascinated some women by his cold detachment; he maddened many colleagues by his ruthless determination to succeed. He was a great organizer but a plodding and sometimes irresolute general, and seen over the perspective of the years he seems, far more than the two Field-Marshals, to have been emblematic of his times. He was too large for life. He was like a great idea somehow overplayed, so that it has lost its edge. He had never in his life fought against white men, and there was to the ferocity of his eye, the splendour of his famous moustache, his immense bemedalled figure and his utterly humourless brand of imperialism—there was to Kitchener, though
one might hardly dare say it to his face, something faintly absurd.
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Alone among the admirals of the imperial Navy stood Sir John Fisher, ‘Jacky’, Third Sea Lord and Controller, but about to raise his flag in the battleship
Renown
as Commander-in-Chief of the North America and West Indies Station. Fisher was the most brilliant, the most disliked, the most beloved and the most extraordinary of the many remarkable officers of the late Victorian Navy. He was a raging individualist in a service full of eccentrics. He was also one of the few British naval officers to approach the problems of his profession intellectually, to interest himself in the higher strategy as in the new technology, in the social structure of the service and its part in the
real-politik
of the times. Fisher was at once a reformer of violent enthusiasm and a sentimental traditionalist. His personal saint was Nelson, one of his many slogans was
Think
in
Oceans,
Sink
at
Sight
‚
and it was he who, asked one evening at the dinner table by Queen Victoria what all the laughter was about at the other end, replied instantly without a blush: ‘I was telling Lady Ely, Ma’am, that I had enough flannel round my tummy to go all round this room.’

Fisher’s life had been inextricably imperial. He was born in Ceylon, where his father, having retired from the Ceylonese police, had a small coffee estate: and his yellowish complexion and mandarin features seemed to give substance to the legend that his mother was a Sinhalese princess (she was in fact the granddaughter of a Lord Mayor of London). His godmother was the Governor’s wife—that
Lady Horton whom Byron had apostrophized. His godfather was commander of the garrison. Two of his brothers entered the Ceylon Civil Service and two more became naval officers. Before he was 40 Fisher had served in the Mediterranean, the West Indies and the Channel Squadron, had helped to attack the Taku forts on the Peiho River in China, and had commanded the battleship
Inflexible
, the greatest of her day, in the bombardment of Alexandria. But though the Empire had made him, and he was fast becoming one of the most powerful men in the kingdom, he was hardly a New Imperialist. His ebullience was tauter than the rather rambling enthusiasms of the Greater Britain school. He thought of Britain essentially as a European Power, faced always by potential enemies across the Channel, as she had been in Nelson’s day. The imperial duties of policing the seas, showing the flag and overawing petty potentates did not excite him, for he knew that when the Pax Britannica was finally challenged it would survive only by the most modern naval expertise. He wanted to concentrate the Navy’s scattered strength in three or four massive fleets. He gave the destroyer its name. He was concerned always with gunpower, speed, new kinds of boiler and fuel, with the menace of the submarine and the aircraft. He had blatant favourites and
bêtes
noires,
devoted disciples and unforgiving enemies. He made shameless use of the Press. Wherever he went, whatever command he assumed, he turned things topsy-turvy, and shook officers out of their comfortable lethargy. When he commanded the cruiser
Northampton,
so his second-in-command complained, ‘we had 150 runs with Whitehead torpedoes in the last 10 days, and the whole Navy only had 200 last year’.

Yet in his person this marvellous man, so obsessed with the severe techniques of his profession, represented almost better than anyone the style of the British Empire, its pungent mixture of quirk, arrogance and good nature. Fisher was a man of tremendous personal charm. He had a passion for dancing: if no women were present he would dance with a brother officer, whistling his own music. He loved sermons, and was often to be seen in garrison churches hunched formidably in the front pew, eye to eye with the quailing preacher. He gloried in show: the flurry of foam at the stern of the Admiral’s barge, as it reversed with a flourish to the
gang-plank, the splendour of British battleships sliding into Malta at daybreak, the boyish pleasure of things biggest, fastest, newest. ‘The Royal Navy always travels first class,’ he liked to say: it was the best navy in the world, serving the best of countries, and Fisher was never ashamed to show it.

And so transparent was this patriotism, so bluff its expression and so fascinating Fisher’s personality that to foreigners he seldom gave offence. He was an Admiral of the Royal Navy, and that was that. More still, by the expression on his face, the effortlessly peremptory pose of his body and the irresistible twinkle in his eye, he seemed to exemplify in his person all that the Navy meant to the world. The Sultan of Morocco, once paying a visit to Fisher’s flagship, was asked afterwards what had most impressed him, and replied without hesitation: ‘The Admiral’s face.’ To anyone meeting Fisher for the first time the British Empire must have seemed perfectly impregnable. There he sits in his chair, a thick-set man holding his sword hilt, with his cocked hat across his knee, a cluster of medals on his chest and a belt-buckle embossed with the Admiralty crest. He is twisted a little in his seat, looking over the visitor’s right shoulder, and his face is an indescribable mixture of sneer, defiance and humorous bravado. His thick-lipped mouth turns down at the corners. His hair is carefully brushed in a cowlick across his forehead. His nostrils appear to be dilated, like a bull’s, and the diagonal creases running down from his nose make him look as though he is finding life perpetually distasteful. Yet if you place your hand over the lower half of the face, you will find that the upper half is alive with laughter: there are laugh lines all around the eyes, the big clear forehead looks sunny and carefree, and there is something about the expression that makes you feel even now, across the gulf of so many years, that if Fisher’s aboard, all’s well.
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Of the proconsuls in the field of Empire that summer, two in particular would be remembered: Cromer of Egypt, in his prime, Lugard of East Africa, awaiting bigger things—the one a Baring of the banking Barings, the other the son of a chaplain on the Madras establishment.

Frederick Lugard was 39 in 1897, and already famous. Born inside Fort St George in Madras, he had failed the Indian Civil Service examination, and helped by his uncle, Edward, Permanent Under-Secretary at the War Office, joined the Army instead. But he was not cut out for soldiering. A small, wiry, nervous man, he was adventurous in a solitary kind, a fine shot and an irrepressible big-game hunter, and the first ten years of his adult life were unsatisfying. He served under Roberts in Afghanistan, but was ill, and saw little fighting. He fought with Wolseley in the Sudan, and in Burma in the campaign to unseat Thebaw, the last of the Burmese kings. He tried unsuccessfully to join the Italian forces preparing, in 1887, to fight the Abyssinians for the possession of Massawa. He was short of money, and in poor health, when in 1888 he was invited to join a force raised by the African Lakes Company to protect its interests on Lake Nyasa against the raids of Arab and Swahili slave-traders.

At a stroke Lugard became a convinced and dedicated imperialist. He never went back to the Army. Instead he joined the Imperial British East Africa Company, and at 32 became virtually the father of British Uganda. He defeated the slavers, established a series of stations from the coast to the Nile, ended the wars between Muslims and Christians, made treaties with the local chiefs and finally persuaded the British Government to assume responsibility for the whole country. He became the trouble-shooter of British Africa. In Nigeria he forestalled the French in the occupation of a place called Kikku, beating them to it in a lightning march, and securing the British position in western Nigeria. In Bechuanaland he made a fearful journey across the Kalahari Desert, 700 miles through country devastated everywhere by the rinderpest, to explore a mineral concession. But through all this derring-do he was evolving
a new theory of imperial government, a concept of indirect rule which would enable the natives to maintain their own social and political forms, refined rather than destroyed by the imperial authority. Under his inspiration indirect rule was carried in Nigeria to a pitch of subtlety and complexity never equalled elsewhere. Lugard began as a mercenary of Empire: but he was already acquiring the habits of an apostle, a dedicated champion of imperial trusteeship, of a paternal imperialism which would allow the native peoples to develop, not in their own time, but at least according to their own cultures—while ensuring that the resources of their territories were developed for the benefit of the world as a whole. He was a kind and lonely man, bad at sharing responsibility, excellent at shouldering it. He was one of the very few British theorists of Empire to apply his ideas in the field—the very antithesis of the proper, unobtrusive bureaucrat the Indian Civil Service might have made of him.
1

What a world away was Cromer, whose power we have already glimpsed in Cairo, and who was now, at 56, in his fourteenth year as para-Pharaoh! Cromer was born to authority, the son of an M.P., the grandson of an Admiral, and a member of one of London’s most distinguished banking families—German, probably Jewish, by origin. He was a ruddy-faced man, with short white hair and trimmed moustache, wearing gold-rimmed spectacles and rather nattily dressed. He looked like a surgeon, or perhaps a reliable family solicitor, a serious, calm and balanced man. The wild vagaries of Egyptian life only threw his composure into greater relief. It was Cromer who, fairly and without excitement, had been at the receiving end of Gordon’s feverish hates and enthusiasms, telegraphed downriver from the Palace at Khartoum; Cromer who stood halfway between Gladstone and Lord Wolseley, during the tragic campaign of 1884; Cromer to whom the great Kitchener had sent an urgent cable, only a month or two before the Jubilee, asking what he ought to do next, when faced with a tricky military situation up the Nile.

Cromer had started life as a soldier himself, serving first in the Ionian Islands in the days when they were a British protectorate, then in Malta and in Jamaica. He went out to India as private secretary to the Viceroy, his cousin Lord Northbrook, and spent a few years in Egypt, before the British occupation, as British member of the Caisse de la Dette. Then, in 1883, he followed Wolseley into Cairo and began his life’s work—the reformation and reconstruction of Egypt. He was very grand indeed. In India they had called him Overbaring. In Cairo they nicknamed him ‘Le Grand Ours’. Wilfrid Blunt,
1
then resident in Cairo, said his reports were written in a ‘first chapter of Genesis style’. He moved with an air of ineffable superiority, and disapproved, as D. G. Hogarth
2
wrote, of ‘fantasy, rhapsody and all kinds of unstable exuberance’.

It was his fate to live in a country where every kind of exuberant instability was part of the very climate—a country described by Alfred Milner, Cromer’s Director-General of Accounts, as ‘unalterably, eternally abnormal’. The longer he stayed in Egypt, the loftier Cromer became. ‘The Egyptians’, he wrote, ‘should be permitted to govern themselves after the fashion in which Europeans think they ought to be governed’—and when he spoke of Europeans he unquestionably thought first of himself. His mandate of power was indeterminate. His use of it was masterly. He was in practice the absolute ruler of Egypt, in whose presence nationalist aspirations repeatedly withered—giving office to any leading nationalist, Cromer thought, would be ‘only a little less absurd than the nomination of some savage Red Indian chief to be Governor-General of Canada’. Cromer knew what was best for the country, and to the intense irritation of many of his contemporaries, generally seemed
to be right. Under his command Egypt escaped from bankruptcy and actually produced a surplus. Great irrigation projects were launched. The Aswan Dam was begun.
1
The Egyptian courts were reformed, forced labour was abolished, the railways were rebuilt, the Army was disciplined. It was paradoxical that in Egypt, the most tenuously indirect of British possessions, British imperialism should have come closest to the classic form of the ancient conquerors: a personal despotism, that is, characterized by the imposition of a new order upon a demoralized people, and the building of great engineering works. Almost alone Cromer left this mark upon Egypt, like an off-stage Alexander—for from first to last his official rank was that of Consul-General of Great Britain, and his modest palace was only the British Consulate. The Egyptian Princess Nazli Fazil was once visiting her cousin the Khedive of Egypt when they heard a policeman’s shout far down the street, and the rattle of wheels. The Khedive paled. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I hear the cry of the runner in front of Baring’s carriage.
Who knows
what
be
is
coming
to
tell
me?
’
2