Churchill saw Versailles as “grimly polished and trellised with live wires” over which the British prime minister repeatedly tripped. He tried, but failed, to dilute Clemenceau’s draconian demands upon the Germans. Lloyd George’s support of President Wilson’s proposal for a League of Nations was—to Churchill’s deep disappointment—uncharacteristically tepid. The fact is that George was jealous of Wilson. The austere President was upstaging him. A weary Europe found the American’s earnest idealism fresh and stirring. The center of Sir William Orpen’s painting of the signing ceremony features Lloyd George, surrounded by an Australian, a Canadian, an Afrikaner, a turbaned Indian, Balfour, Curzon, and Milner. “But somehow the eye strays,” wrote James Morris, to “the stiff ascetic person of President Wilson: for he is looking directly, deliberately, at the artist, with an almost accusatory expression, as though he is staring hard into the future, and willing it his way.” Lloyd George distrusted the President, and with good reason, for the Wilsonian doctrine of self-determination—the right of a people to decide their own political status—was a threat to the very survival of imperialism. Indeed, the Empire delegations, led by Australia’s mercurial Prime Minister W. M. Hughes, narrowly defeated a clause in the League Covenant, proposed by Japan, which would have declared that all races were inherently equal. Hughes, a fellow Welshman, was Lloyd George’s natural ally. Besides, Australia had its eye on German archipelagoes in the Pacific. Wilson, offended, asked Hughes if he really meant to defy world opinion by a naked grab for colonies. The feisty Australian replied: “That’s about the size of it, Mr. President.” Thus the emergence of the Third World debuted on the international stage as a moral issue. It would be crowded into the wings again and again, only to reappear cast in ever larger roles, to the exasperation and dismay of, among others, Winston Churchill.9
Almost unnoticed among the miles of Union Jacks in the Firth of Forth on the day of von Reuter’s surrender had been a little squadron of six warships flying the Stars and Stripes. When the Admiralty signaled Beatty that morning, affirming that the enemy’s capitulation “will remain for all time the example of the wonderful silence and sureness with which sea power attains its end,” it meant British sea power.10 The Royal Navy’s treatment of its American cousins had been patronizing and at times even rude, but one of the first signs that England’s belle époque was ending appeared in a naval agreement, reached in Washington after the Versailles signing, which would have been unthinkable before the war. At the turn of the century England had been spending almost twice as much on its navy as any other country. Its policy, followed by both parties, had kept its fleet strength at a level greater than that of any other two nations combined. Now England consented to observe the ratio of 5 (Great Britain), 5 (United States), 3 (Japan), 1.75 (France), and 1.75 (Italy). Imperial warship designs were discarded; the agreement stipulated the size and type of every vessel. There would never be another Queen Elizabeth. After the pact, the Royal Navy was required to scrap 657 ships, including dreadnoughts, battleships, and cruisers—much of the Grand Fleet’s backbone. The Admiralty pledged itself never to build a naval base at Hong Kong. England’s absolute command of the seas, so vital to the Empire, was over. Britannia no longer ruled the waves, not because world opinion objected, but because, having spent £5,000,000 a day during the war, it simply couldn’t afford to.
It is impossible to pinpoint the beginning of imperial decline. In a sense eventual freedom became inevitable the moment a British possession was conquered, because Britain selectively extended its institutions into its colonies with the establishment of legislative councils, later to become parliaments. In the beginning this happened only in colonies dominated by white settlers. Canada became a self-governing federation in 1867 and imposed a tariff on British imports the following year. Gladstone’s cabinet was outraged, but the GOM pointed out that if you grant people rights, you must expect them to flex their new muscles, however disagreeable the consequences. Self-government then came to Australia in 1901, to New Zealand in 1907, and, in 1910, to South Africa.
As early as the 1880s, farsighted members of England’s ruling class, seeing where all this would lead, expressed alarm that Free Trade and self-government would end in the “dismemberment” of the Empire. To stop it, they founded the Imperial Federation League in 1884. Rhodes, Milner, Rosebery, and Joseph Chamberlain gave the league their heartiest support. Chamberlain, who had admired Bismarck’s skill in uniting the former German states for commercial and military ends without sacrificing the autonomy of the Second Reich, proposed a British imperial defense league, patterned on the Reich’s Kriegsverein, and a customs union along the lines of Bismarck’s Zollverein. However, the Empire’s self-governing colonies—now coming to be called Dominions—were not interested. They came to London for imperial conferences and loyally knelt before the throne, but when they declared war on the Central Powers in 1914, each of their prime ministers was careful to point out that his government was making its own decision, not following London’s instructions, whatever constitutional theorists might say. After the war, thoughtful men in Whitehall realized that the United States and the USSR would eventually dominate Weltpolitik. They tried to press the cause of imperial federation, in the hope that all countries flying the Union Jack might combine to form a third superpower.
Gradually, however, they realized that they were playing upon a losing wicket. The Washington treaty was but one of several omens. India having supported the war effort, India’s politicians now demanded a quid pro quo. Their leaders, some of them educated in English public schools, infuriated the British establishment by quoting Burke and Macaulay in support of the demands for immediate parliamentary self-government. They didn’t get it, but their contribution of a million men and £500,000,000 to the war effort could not go unrecognized. A resolution introduced by Lloyd George in 1917, and then passed by Parliament in 1919, proved to be the first step toward Indian independence. Before 1914 both the resolution and the Washington naval treaty would have meant the fall of the government. Now press and public seemed indifferent. H. G. Wells estimated that 95 percent of England’s population was as ignorant of the Empire as of the Italian Renaissance. Both the Colonial Office and the Indian Civil Service marked a sharp drop in the number and quality of their applicants. In large measure this was a consequence of the recent slaughter. The war had left 160,000 young English widows and 300,000 fatherless children. The flower of England’s youth, its university students and recent graduates, had joined Kitchener’s armies and crossed to France, most of them as infantry lieutenants. The number of those who fell is incalculable, but some figures are suggestive. In his mindless Passchendaele offensive, Haig lost 22,316 junior officers, compared to only 6,913 Germans of similar rank. We shall never know how many potential prime ministers, cabinet ministers, poets, scientists, physicians, lawyers, professors, and distinguished civil servants perished in the mud of France and Belgium, but the conclusion is inescapable: an entire generation had lost most of its ablest men. Those who survived, like Anthony Eden, of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, gassed on the Somme, and thrice-wounded Harold Macmillan of the Grenadier Guards, who had studied Horace by candlelight in his dugout, emerged with a weltanschauung which was incomprehensible to their fathers.
Part of the loss of brio may be attributed to the lack of heroes. Chivalric myth required heroic leaders. The reading public now had to settle for the thin fictional gruel of Bulldog Drummond and Richard Hanney. The war had produced no Marlboroughs, Wellingtons, Nelsons, or Gordons. Kitchener was a tarnished legend. Only the young archaeologist T. E. Lawrence, whose achievements as a colonel in the Middle East were genuine, had a postwar following. Victory had eluded Jellicoe at Jutland, the war’s only major naval engagement, because, out of excessive caution, he had evaded three crucial decisions. All the British generals had been discredited, with consequences which reached far beyond the British Isles. Before the war, the Empire’s overseas subjects had regarded England with affectio
n and respect. Young Mahatma Gandhi, who had struggled up Spion Kop as a stretcher-bearer that night when Churchill was frantically rushing from colonel to colonel, trying to save the hill from the Boers—Gandhi had been decorated for his bravery afterward—later wrote of his anglophilia then: “Hardly ever have I known anyone to cherish such loyalty as I did to the British Constitution…. I vied with Englishmen in loyalty to the throne.” In 1914, James Morris wrote, “the white colonials had gone to war trustingly, innocently almost, satisfied for the most part to be loyal assistants to the Mother Country. They had been inexperienced still, as soldiers and as statesmen, and they were as indoctrinated as the British at home in their ingenuous respect for British traditions and achievements. Though they often made fun of the British, their toffs, their drawls and their domesticity, they still looked up to the Old Country, and believed as the British did themselves in the value of its systems and the skill of its leaders.”11
At the time of the Somme, when the fate of civilization seemed to hang in the balance, Australian boys at Melbourne’s Scotch College wept when they sang the stanzas of “Bugles of England.” The legend of Saint George was as revered in Durban and Ottawa as in London. Proud of their membership in the Empire, the colonials assumed that the graduates of Sandhurst were the finest officers in the world. In the trenches they learned otherwise. The Australians learned to despise both Major General Alexander Godley, who at Gallipoli had led them ashore, not to a beach, but to the base of a cliff, and Ian Hamilton, who, when they asked to be evacuated, had replied: “You have got through the difficult business, now you have only to dig, dig, dig, until you are safe.” In self-mockery the survivors called themselves “diggers” and made ribald jokes about British redtabs. Godley, they said, “couldn’t find the balls on a bull.” Some of the wittiest wartime scatology ever written was inspired by Louisa Godley, the general’s wife, who visited wounded New Zealanders in an Egyptian hospital and complained that they had insulted her by not lying at attention.12
The Canadians were also disillusioned. On Easter Sunday, 1917, on Vimy Ridge, they had won the reputation of being the finest soldiers on the western front. Haig wasted them, of course; his lethal hand struck down everything it touched. But he also slighted them. He described a delegation of visiting Canadians, including their minister of war, as a “well-meaning but second-rate sort of people.” Indeed, he let it be known that in his judgment all “colonial generals” were “ignorant and conceited.” Australians and New Zealanders, he said, were likely to desert at the first opportunity. He made it a point to keep them separated from British divisions, explaining to his staff that they would exert “a bad influence.” It was probably impossible to deepen the contempt of Irish Catholics for the British, but Kitchener had a try at it, issuing orders that under no circumstances would Catholics be permitted to fight under their own officers.13
By Armistice Day the image of the Mother Country in its greatest possessions had been irretrievably altered, although there was little understanding of this in London. Someone in the royal household—it is impossible to trace the source—thought it a splendid idea for the King’s four sons to reign over the four Dominions. The question was raised in Ottawa, Canberra, Wellington, and Cape Town; then quietly shelved. The Empire’s five additional votes at Versailles had been misunderstood. They were a sign, not of imperial unity, but of the Dominions’ independence. As early as 1917 their four prime ministers, meeting in London, had resolved that when the fighting ended they must have an “adequate voice in [imperial] foreign policy and in foreign relations.” Jan Christiaan Smuts, South Africa’s next premier, even called them “autonomous nations.” British omniscience had been exposed as a fraud. They were less willing to accept decisions made in Whitehall and Westminster, though the tug was still strong; when the first summons came, they wavered, awed by the momentous decision to defy parental authority. The test came shortly over an incident in Turkey, and here, as so often in the making of British history during his life, Churchill, then at the Colonial Office, was right in the middle of it. He sent an “inquiry” to the Dominions, asking whether they were prepared, if the need arose, to send troops to the troubled area. The Times was offended. This, said its editorial, was a typical example of Winston’s lack of good judgment; imperial possessions weren’t asked, they were told. “Although the Dominions may speak with many voices for themselves as individuals,” its leader declared, “they speak as one when the time comes to speak for the Empire.” But they didn’t. They spoke as many. Only New Zealand and Newfoundland meekly complied. The Australians agreed under protest. The South Africans refused. “Very important questions of policy would be involved as far as the Union is concerned,” Smuts cabled, “by any decision of the Union Government to take part in military operations in Eastern Europe and it is felt by the Union Government that such a step should not be taken without calling Parliament together.” The Canadian prime minister, Mackenzie King, took the same stand. King fully understood the implications of his response, but in his diary he wrote: “If membership in the British Empire means participation by the Dominions in any and every war in which Great Britain becomes involved, I can see no hope for an enduring relationship.”14
As it turned out, the men weren’t needed, but the precedent had been set. The King’s statesmen brooded. Most of his British subjects, however, gave the issue neither first nor second thought. Imperialism, so thrilling a creed only a few years earlier, had lost its charisma. They simply didn’t care. The young in particular were more concerned with finding a home and a steady job. Labour, now the most exciting of the parties, was either indifferent toward the Empire or downright hostile. Newspapers found that events in England’s far-flung possessions bored their readers. “Back to 1914”? They wanted no part of it. The chairman of the Empire Day Committee acknowledged that Britons were simply incurious about the “many dark corners where the rays of our Empire sun have not been able to penetrate.” Philip Guedalla discovered that in the early 1920s the doctrine of Imperialism attracted merely “a dim interest [among] research students.”15 Intellectuals jeered at values fin de siècle Britain had held sacred. Lytton Strachey’s sardonic, sniggering Eminent Victorians was an immediate success when it appeared in 1918. His next book, Queen Victoria, which presented its subject as a trivial, quirky woman, became required reading in universities between the wars. And the generals, who had seemed mighty only yesterday, were left to the merciless pens of cartoonists.
Sometimes a social event, wholly divorced from political considerations and affairs of state, can illumine the mood of a time. In this sense, the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley is immensely instructive about the temper of postwar England. Assembled at the terminus of the London underground railway at a cost of £4,000,000, it dwarfed Britain’s last great fair, the Crystal Palace. Pavilions celebrated the genius of the imperial peoples, the fair managers enlisted Kipling to acclaim imperial glory, and Edward Elgar provided the music, which largely comprised various renditions of his “Land of Hope and Glory.” Tibetan trumpeters blew bugle calls. The tomb of Tutankhamen was reconstructed, he being, as W. S. Gilbert would have put it, a sort of British ancestor by purchase. Visitors traveling on the exhibition’s Never-Stop Railway passed beneath thousands of massed Union Jacks, and Lord Milner expressed the conviction that Wembley would prove a “powerful bulwark” against subversives who would undermine the Empire. The King himself went on the radio to hawk its attractions. (“This great achievement reveals to us the whole Empire in little….”) The exhibition, solemnly conceived, should have reaffirmed Britain’s confidence in its imperial destiny.16
It didn’t. It became a joke. The most popular feature had been lifted from an American carnival. “I’ve brought you here to see the wonders of the Empire,” a Noel Coward character told his children, “and all you want to do is go to the Dodgems.” P. G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster drawled: “I mean to say, millions of people, no doubt, are so constituted that they scream with j
oy and excitement at the spectacle of a stuffed porcupine fish or a glass jar of seeds from Western Australia—but not Bertram…. By the time we had tottered out of the Gold Coast Village and were looking towards the Palace of Machinery, everything pointed to my shortly executing a quiet sneak in the direction of that rather jolly Planters’ Bar in the West Indies section.” The intellectuals of Bloomsbury and Hampstead, solidly anti-imperialist, organized a group called the WGTW, the Won’t Go To Wembleys. Mayfair’s Bright Young Things, soon to find their minstrel in Evelyn Waugh, treated it, James Morris wrote, “as a spree.” They performed naughty acts in the Nigerian Handicrafts Exhibition—“Did you Wemble?” they slyly asked one another, and if you nodded it meant you had performed a lewd act under the eyes of the wogs—after which the bobbies usually released them, because the boys bore patrician names and so many of the naked girls turned out to be widows of the Glorious Dead. “A great empire and little minds,” Edmund Burke had said in 1775, “go ill together.” Now T. S. Eliot wrote: “I had not thought death had undone so many.”17
Churchill watched all this and grieved. In the notes for a speech to his constituents he wrote: “What a disappointment the twentieth century has been. How terrible & how melancholy is the long series of disastrous events wh have darkened its first 20 years. We have seen in ev country a dissolution, a weakening of those bonds, a challenge to those principles, a decay of faith, an abridgement of hope on wh structure & ultimate existence of civilized society depends…. Can you doubt, my faithful friends, as you survey this sombre panorama, that mankind is passing through a period marked not only by an enormous destruction & abridgement of human species, not only by a vast impoverishment & reduction in means of existence but also that destructive tendencies have not yet run their course?”18