Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (52 page)

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Authors: Niall Ferguson

BOOK: Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power
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It was the Germans who first spoke of the war as ‘
der Weltkrieg
’, the world war; the British preferred the ‘European War’ or, later, the ‘Great War’. Conscious of their own vulnerability in the war on two fronts in Europe, the Germans sought to globalize the conflict – and divert British resources away from Europe – by undermining their rule in India. The true fulcrum of this new imperial war was supposed to be not Flanders but the gateway to India, the Middle East.
John Buchan’s wartime thriller
Greenmantle
is an apparently far-fetched yarn about a German plot to subvert the British Empire by stirring up an Islamic holy war. At first glance, the story is one of Buchan’s most fanciful:
‘There is a dry wind blowing through the East, and the parched grasses await the spark. And that wind is blowing towards the Indian border. Whence comes that wind, think you? ... Have you an explanation, Hannay?’
... ‘It looks as if Islam had a bigger hand in the thing than we thought,’ I said.
‘You are right ... There is a Jehad [
sic
] preparing. The question is, How?’
‘I’m hanged if I know,’ I said; ‘but I’ll bet it won’t be done by a pack of stout German officers in pickelhaubes ...’
‘Agreed ... But supposing they had got some tremendous sacred sanction – some holy thing ... which will madden the remotest Moslem peasant with dreams of Paradise? What then, my friend?’
‘Then there will be hell let loose in those parts pretty soon.’
‘Hell which may spread. Beyond Persia, remember, lies India.’
 
As Hannay’s comrade Sandy Arbuthnot discovers, ‘Germany could gobble up the French and the Russians whenever they cared, but she was aiming at getting all the Middle East in her hands first, so that she could come out conqueror with the practical control of half the world’. It all sounds perfectly absurd; and the later appearance of two ludicrously caricatured German villains, the sadist von Stumm and the
femme fatale
von Einem, only serves to heighten the comic effect. Yet Buchan was basing his plot on genuine intelligence reports, to which he had privileged access.
94
Subsequent research has confirmed that the Germans did indeed aim to sponsor an Islamic
jihad
against British imperialism.
Turkey was central to the Germans’ global strategy, not least because its capital Istanbul – then known as Constantinople – straddles the Bosphorus, the narrow channel that separates the Mediterranean from the Black Sea and Europe from Asia. In the age of naval power this was one of the world’s strategic bottlenecks, not least because it was through the Black Sea Straits that much of Russia’s trade was conducted. In time of war, a hostile Turkey could menace not only the flow of supplies to Russia but also Britain’s imperial lines of communication to India. For these reasons, the Germans had worked hard to secure Turkey as an ally in the years before 1914. Kaiser Wilhelm II had visited Constantinople twice, in 1889 and 1898. Since 1888 the Deutsche Bank had played a leading role in the financing of the so-called Berlin-Baghdad Railway.
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The Germans also offered their military expertise. Between 1883 and 1896 the German general Colmar von der Goltz was employed by the Sultan to overhaul the Ottoman army. Another German, Otto Liman von Sanders, was appointed the army’s Inspector General in 1913.
On 30 July 1914, even before the Turks had finally committed themselves to fight alongside Germany, the Kaiser was already planning the next move in characteristically intemperate terms:
Our consuls in Turkey, in India, agents ... must fire the whole Mohammedan world to fierce rebellion against this hated, lying, conscienceless nation of shopkeepers, for if we are to bleed to death, England shall at least lose India.
 
In November 1914 the Turkish Sultan, the spiritual head of all Sunni Muslims, duly responded to German prompting by declaring a holy war on Britain and her allies. Given that just under half of the world’s 270 million Muslims were under British, French or Russian rule, this could have been a masterstroke of German strategy. Just as the Germans hoped, the British responded to the Turkish threat by diverting men and materiel away from the Western Front to Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq) and the Dardanelles.
The German General Staff had gone to war without giving much thought to Britain. By comparison with their vast army, the British Expeditionary Force sent to France was indeed, as the Kaiser said, ‘contemptibly’ small. Henry Wilson, the Director of Military Operations from 1910, candidly admitted that six divisions were ‘fifty too few’. However, Germany was fighting not just the British Army but the ‘Greater Britain’ that ruled over a quarter of the world. The British response to the German declaration of world war was to mobilize her imperial forces on an unprecedented scale.
Symbolically, the first shots fired on land by British troops, on 12 August 1914, were aimed at the German wireless station at Kamina in Togoland. Soon the fighting spread to all Germany’s African colonies (Togoland, the Cameroons, South-West Africa and East Africa). Though it is often forgotten, the First World War was as ‘total’ in Africa as resources permitted it to be. In the absence of extensive railways and reliable beasts of burden, there was only one solution to the problem of logistics: men. Over 2 million Africans served in the First World War, nearly all as carriers of supplies, weapons and wounded, and although they were far from the fields of Flanders, these forgotten auxiliaries had as hellish a time as the most exposed front-line troops in Europe. Not only were they underfed and overworked; once removed from their usual locales they were every bit as susceptible to disease as their white masters. Roughly a fifth of all Africans employed as carriers died, many of them the victims of the dysentery that ravaged all colonial armies in the tropics. In East Africa 3,156 whites in British service died in the line of duty; of these less than a third were victims of enemy action. But if black troops and carriers are included, total losses were over 100,000.
The familiar rationale of white rule in Africa was that it conferred the benefits of civilization. The war made a mockery of that claim. ‘Behind us we leave destroyed fields, ransacked magazines and, for the immediate future, starvation’, wrote Ludwig Deppe, a doctor in the German East African Army. ‘We are no longer the agents of culture; our track is marked by death, plundering and evacuated villages, just like the progress of our own and enemy armies in the Thirty Years War’.
The key to British world power was supposed to be the Royal Navy. Its performance in the war was disappointing. It proved unable to destroy the German navy in the North Sea: the one full-scale encounter between the surface fleets, at Jutland, was one of military history’s great draws. Partly this was because of technical backwardness: although Churchill had converted the navy from coal to oil before the war began, the British lagged behind the Germans in the accuracy of their gunnery, not least because the Admiralty had refused to adopt the range-adjusting system known as the Argo clock, which compensated for a ship’s rolling. The Germans also enjoyed superiority in wireless communications, though they tended to broadcast ‘in clear’ or in easily crackable codes. The Royal Navy, by contrast, stuck to Nelson-era semaphore signals, impossible for the enemy to read at a distance but not much easier for the intended recipient to decipher.
However, the Navy did succeed in inflicting immense disruption on German sea-borne commerce outside the Baltic. Not only was the German merchant marine ruthlessly mopped up within a matter of months of the war’s outbreak; under the Orders in Council of March 1915, even the ships of neutrals suspected of carrying supplies to Germany were liable to be boarded, searched and, if contraband was found, ransacked. Although these tactics caused irritation abroad, the German response of unrestricted submarine warfare caused much more, especially when the British liner
Lusitania
was sunk without warning with more than 100 American passengers on board. Admittedly, for a time in the spring of 1917 it seemed as if unrestricted submarine attacks would fatally impede British imports of food – in the month of April, one in four vessels leaving British ports was sunk. But the rediscovery of the convoy system, familiar to the Admiralty in Nelson’s day, swung the sea war back in Britain’s favour.
Much more impressive was the British Empire’s military capability on land. Fully a third of the troops Britain raised during the First World War were colonial. The most celebrated contributions came from the furthest flung colonies of all. New Zealand sent 100,000 men and women (as nurses) overseas, a tenth of the entire population. At the very outbreak of the war, Andrew Fisher, the Scottish-born leader of the Australian Labour Party, pledged ‘our last man and last shilling in defence of the mother country’. The steady flow of volunteers meant that conscription there was never necessary, though it is significant that a very high proportion of Australian volunteers had been born in Britain (the same was true of Canadian volunteers). J. D. Burns of Melbourne captured the mood of effulgent loyalty that swept through these first-generation immigrants:
The bugles of England are blowing o’er the sea,
Calling out across the years, calling now to me.
They woke me from dreaming, in the dawning of the day,
The bugles of England: and how could I stay?
 
Though at first the British commanders were reluctant to rely on colonial troops, they soon came to appreciate their quality. The Australians in particular ranked alongside the Scottish Highland regiments when it came to ferocity in battle: the ‘Diggers’ were as much feared by the other side as the ‘devils in skirts’.
Perhaps the supreme symbol of the imperial war effort was the Imperial Camel Corps, formed in 1916. Although Australians and New Zealanders accounted for around three-quarters of its entire strength, there were also troops from Hong Kong and Singapore, volunteers from the Rhodesian Mounted Police, a South African mining prospector who had fought against the British in the Boer War, a fruit grower from the Canadian Rockies and a pearl fisherman from Queensland.
Yet it would be a mistake to think that the imperial contribution to the war effort came primarily from the white Dominions. At the outbreak of war, the man who would become India’s most famous political and spiritual leader told his fellow countrymen: ‘We are, above all, British citizens of the Great British Empire. Fighting as the British are at present in a righteous cause for the good and glory of human dignity and civilisation ... our duty is clear: to do our best to support the British, to fight with our life and property’. Many thousands of Indians shared Gandhi’s sentiments. In the autumn of 1914, around a third of British forces in France were from India; by the end of the war more than a million Indians had served overseas, almost as many as came from the four white Dominions put together. ‘The fighting is strange’, wrote Signaller Kartar Singh to his brother from the Western Front. ‘On the ground, under the ground, in the sky and in the sea, everywhere. This is rightly called the war of kings. It is the work of men of great intelligence’. As that suggests, the Indians were not reluctant conscripts; they were in fact all volunteers, and enthusiastic volunteers at that. As Kartar Singh explained:
We shall never get another chance to exalt the name of race, country, ancestors, parents, village and brothers, and to prove our loyalty to the government ... There will never be such a fierce fight ... Food and clothing, all is of the best; there is no shortage. Motors convey the rations right up to the trenches ... We go singing as we march and care nothing that we are going to die.
 
It was not just public schoolboys raised on Horace and Moore who believed ‘
dulce et decorum est pro patria mori
’. True, there were three mutinies by Muslim soldiers in Iraq who refused to fight their co-religionists (further evidence that the plot of
Greenmantle
had substance to it). But these were the exception to a rule of loyalty and conspicuous valour.
96
Only when they were ill treated did colonial troops question the legitimacy of the demands the Empire made on them. The men of the British West Indies Regiment, for example, resented the fact that they were used primarily for the hazardous but inglorious task of ammunition carrying. Plainly, little respect was paid to them by British officers; as a Trinidadian sergeant complained in 1918: ‘We are treated neither as Christians nor British Citizens, but as West Indian “Niggers”, without anybody to be interested in or look after us. Instead of being drawn closer to Church and Empire we are driven away from it’. Yet not dissimilar grumbles could have been heard in nearly every part of the British Expeditionary Force
97
– a thoroughly multinational enterprise which, unlike its Habsburg and Russian counterparts, somehow endured despite profound ethnic divisions and frequently lamentable leadership.

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