Ghosts of Empire (27 page)

The debate on Burma was actually about whether the government of India, under the Viceroy, should pay for the campaign. As Gladstone had realized, it was difficult for Parliament to undo what had been executed under the royal prerogative. For Parliament to do this would undermine the Crown. Yet despite this constraint, Richard denounced what had happened in what would in the ensuing decades become a standard liberal critique of imperial wars. He baldly stated that ‘the summary annexation' of Burma ‘was an act of high-handed violence for which there is no adequate justification'. It was unjust but it was also ‘an act of flagrant folly'. ‘By suddenly overthrowing the existing government,' he went on, ‘it looks as though we had consigned the country to . . . a prolonged anarchy.' The Liberal government, in Richard's opinion, should have ‘reversed the policy as they did in Afghanistan and the Transvaal' (a reference to the second Afghan War and the Anglo-Zulu War, fought in the late 1870s). He dismissed the idea that it was Thibaw's misconduct that had caused the war. The truth was simply that ‘we coveted his possessions and were determined to have them at any cost'.

Winding up his powerful speech, Henry Richard made the point which anti-imperialists have frequently made–that the costs of invading and occupying a country always exceed, often by a considerable margin, initial expectations. ‘We are told it would only be £300,000. But we always begin our wars with very modest demands.' Richard pointed out that when ‘we entered upon the Abyssinian War [of 1868] we were assured that the expenditure would not amount to more than £2,000,000 or £3,000,000
whereas it had not been much less than £9,000,000'. When it came to Afghanistan, Richard remembered, the same wildly over-optimistic assessment of the costs of war had been made. ‘The Government said the Afghan war would cost £1,250,000 but that had swollen to £18,000,000 or £20,000,000.' What security was there ‘that the Burmese War might not lead to such a sum'?
⁹

The general principle of annexation worried some Liberal MPs. Although he was Scottish by birth, Lewis McIver was one of the few Liberals representing an English constituency to speak against the annexation of Burma. McIver showed some insight into the relationship the people of Burma had with their king when he observed that in ‘the Burmese mind, no social scheme was conceivable without a King'. The King, in McIver's understanding of Burmese culture, was a ‘semi-Divine' figure. Britain had respected these sentiments in the past. Upper Burma was, the MP observed, relatively settled. ‘Nothing was to be gained by annexation which could not have been equally well secured by a strong Protectorate.' Gladstone felt he had to redirect the debate; the question before the House was about who would pay for the fait accompli, not about policy. Dr G. B. Clark, the Liberal MP for Caithness, another Scottish constituency, agreed with the honourable members ‘who felt very strongly at the injustice of the war'.
¹⁰
Clark had a ‘strong opinion that the war was altogether unjustifiable. It was a kind of freebooting expedition undertaken against Burmah.'
¹¹
Perhaps, in his heart, Gladstone agreed, but he was reluctant to reverse the decisive action Lord Randolph had taken. The Liberals quietly acquiesced in a policy which had not been sanctioned by Parliament and which ran counter to the stated British policy of non-intervention in native states. This had all been due to Churchill's dramatic intervention. Churchill, like modern politicians in the war against Saddam Hussein, assumed that only the best results would ensue. He believed that, once Thibaw was gone, an administration would remain in place that would be stable and that would be amenable to British interests. He thought that it would be a ‘cheap war', but the best results did not happen.
¹²

Back in Burma, it was the officials on the ground who had to deal with the consequences of Churchill's bold stroke of policy. One of the first problems was what to do with the palace in Mandalay. What would it be used for, once
Thibaw and his wife had been exiled? The palace also contained many valuable objects–gorgeous jewels, finely lacquered furniture and the like. Already in February 1886, only three months after Thibaw's overthrow, tourists were rushing to see it and the various monasteries in Mandalay and the surrounding area. Many of these tourists would have taken trinkets and souvenirs from the precincts of Thibaw's palace, which had already been ransacked by soldiers in the wake of the fall of Mandalay. In 1964, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London returned 154 of these items.
¹³
Dufferin, as viceroy, gave strict instructions at the end of February 1886 about what should be done with the royal possessions: ‘The goods in the palace at Mandalay . . . which it may be desired to dispose of, should be sold to the best advantage either at Mandalay itself, or at Calcutta, or elsewhere.' On the other hand, the high-quality pieces or, in the Viceroy's convoluted words, ‘the jewellery that is not manifestly of a comparatively unimportant character' should be ‘collected together and sent to England'. The goods dispatched to England also included objects whose value was not yet determined. The British government had been warned by Professor Nevil Maskelyne, the Professor of Mineralogy at Oxford, that there would be ‘many priceless articles' found in the palace. The government had made a serious mistake when Ranjit Singh, the Sikh ruler, had been deposed in 1849, as many of Ranjit's treasures had been ‘sold through ignorance as to their character much below their value'. This waste should not be allowed to occur again.

Professor Maskelyne believed that the Burmese palace would contain ruby, sapphire and jade specimens of great value, which would be worth retaining. The Viceroy was less sanguine but nevertheless suggested that ‘the suggestions of the Professor should be carefully attended to'.
¹⁴
Dufferin, as a loyal subject of the Crown, had set aside certain jewels for ‘Her Majesty the Queen' and two carved ivory tusks for the ‘Prince of Wales'. He was also eager to obtain ‘a good bell', if one could be procured ‘without in any way offending either the feelings or the religious sentiments of the Natives'. The palace of Mandalay itself ‘should be carefully preserved as a Public Building', although it might be ‘desirable to transfer to England one or two of the small detached houses which, while they form no essential part of the building, are very fine representations of Burmese wooden architecture'.
¹⁵

Alongside the difficult question of deciding which objets d'art should be sold and which taken back to England was the even more advanced problem of maintaining some semblance of internal order in the country. At the start of the occupation there was the scandal about the abuse of Burmese prisoners. When Parliament opened at the end of January 1886, MPs were already complaining of the actions of Colonel Willoughy Wallace Hooper, the Provost Marshal, a police officer in Burma who was obsessed with photography. The British authorities were then shooting prisoners in order to suppress incipient rebellion in Burma, which had been fomented by bands of young men, dacoits as they were known, still unreconciled to the British annexation of their country. The Provost Marshal wanted to capture the precise moment when the bullet actually entered a prisoner being shot. The story broke in
The Times
on 21 January. The next day, in the House of Lords, Lord Ripon, the former Viceroy and ultra-Liberal, denounced the incident as ‘very outrageous'. Lord Randolph Churchill, in the Commons, adopted a pompous tone of outrage. He could not ‘bring himself' to believe ‘that any officer wearing the Queen's uniform would have allowed himself to perpetrate actions which really would have disgraced the officers of Thibaw'.
¹⁶
Dufferin, the current Viceroy, in February could only express his ‘deep regret at the unfortunate incident which accompanied certain capital executions which were carried out at Mandalay'. Hooper's behaviour was indeed outrageous. ‘The photographing by the Provost Marshal of prisoners in the act of being shot was a most lamentable occurrence.'

Dufferin countered the argument that the act of photographing people who were in the ‘act of being shot' didn't actually add to their suffering. As he put it, in the dignified, rather stiff style so often used in these official documents, it is ‘no good alleging that the fate of the unfortunate themselves was not aggravated, inasmuch as they were ignorant of what was happening'.
¹⁷
The problem, however, was with the policy of executions. After getting rid of Thibaw at the end of 1885, it was clear that the British had immediately adopted a policy of repression. The whole fabric of Burmese administration fell apart; the Burmese army was ‘disarmed and disbanded'; the police force was ‘dispersed' and there existed ‘no centre of administration'.
¹⁸
There emerged, as a consequence, a movement against the British which was expressed in general lawlessness and sporadic
violence. This was a guerrilla war waged against the British occupation by dacoits. The movement itself became known to the British as dacoity, an Anglicized version of the Hindi word
dakaiti
, meaning roughly ‘armed robber'. To the Burmese it was a movement of resistance; to the British it was mere lawlessness. Rudyard Kipling's idealized soldiers in his
Plain Tales from the Hills
were campaigning against dacoits in Burma.

Terence Mulvaney, an Irishman, is the hero of the story ‘The Taking of Lungtungpen'. Kipling's tale is interesting in the light it casts on the tough, fighting side of the empire. Mulvaney is an outstanding soldier, whose promotions are denied him because he likes ‘one big drink a month'. He and his comrades get hold of a Burmese suspect whom Mulvaney, accompanied by an interpreter, beats with a cleaning rod. By this act of brutality, the soldiers find out that there is a town called Lungtungpen, nine miles away, where the insurgents are based. Mulvaney then persuades his officer not to await reinforcements, but to pay a ‘visit' to Lungtungpen that night. Mulvaney and his comrades then cross a wide river (‘that stream was miles wide'). When they reach the other side, it is dark. The soldiers find they have landed on the river wall of Lungtungpen. A fierce fight with Burmese insurgents follows, from which the British emerge unscathed. Still naked from swimming the river, Mulvaney and the other British soldiers charge with bayonets and the butts of their rifles and kill seventy-five Burmese men. They hold ‘the most indecent parade', with only eight men wearing any clothing. The rest were ‘as naked as Venus'.
¹⁹

This may have been a fictional account, but the reality of the violence was scarcely different on the ground in Burma itself where, in the first few weeks after the occupation of Mandalay, the British, according to Grattan Geary, the editor of the
Bombay Gazette
, acted with ‘a very high hand indeed, and with complete disregard of Burmese susceptibilities'. So-called dacoits, whom the Burmese would have called patriots, were ‘shot out of hand' when captured. This was seen as the best option, as there were few prison places and the ‘care of prisoners' was ‘irksome to the soldiers'. The guerrilla attacks increased in January 1886, as the ‘shootings and floggings' seem to have inflamed the Burmese population. The policy of repression was conspicuously unsuccessful. Grattan Geary, a journalist and traveller, concluded that harsh measures were ineffectual against people who could
use the natural landscape in which to hide and regroup. Geary's words have resonance for the course of international history in the twentieth century. ‘One grows sceptical about the tranquillizing effect of military executions on the general population. Experience seems to show that where there is a refuge at hand–mountains as in Afghanistan, deserts as in Egypt and the Soudan–an excited population will be exasperated rather than intimidated by such executions.'
²⁰
Repression was not the answer. Geary, misquoting Shakespeare's
Henry V
, observed that ‘cruelty and lenity never played for a kingdom but that the gentler gamester proved the winner'.
²¹
The Burmese were not going to accept the invasion of their country and the deposition of their King.

Burmese institutions were in the process of being dismantled. The issue of what to do with the Hlutdaw, or council, which advised King Thibaw, had been smouldering ever since the palace itself had been captured in November 1885. Edward Sladen, the tennis-playing army officer who was fluent in Burmese, thought that the council should remain to help the British rule Burma. Charles Bernard, the normally liberal Chief Commissioner in Rangoon, disagreed. The important feature of Bernard's liberalism was that he believed in the British mission as a civilizing one. He trusted in British ideas of law and order and sought to impose them on Upper Burma. At the end of 1885, Sladen was writing urgently to Bernard on the issue of allowing the Burmese council to take responsibility for Mandalay and the surrounding country. The council, in Sladen's view, would be part of the provisional government and would help the British in hunting down ‘dacoits and dangerous characters'. Sladen and Bernard met to discuss the deteriorating situation on 20 December 1885. Bernard later gave an order which debarred the ‘Hlutdaw [from] all control over the City and the suburbs'. This order, in Sladen's opinion, could not ‘remain in its present form'.
²²
Sladen was now quite firm. He wanted ‘respectfully [to] point out that this is not a time for limiting the influence and authority of the council'. His simple argument was that it made no sense to disband the one institution in Upper Burma with any authority when the country was sliding into anarchy. Bernard, in the courteous, formal language of the late Victorian bureaucrat, was equally determined. On the same day he fired back a letter to Sladen in which he said, ‘I cannot
change my views'; while there were so many British troops employed and ‘quartered in the City and while trade and general quiet are still so much disturbed, I must retain the control of the city in the hands of European officers ...
under your orders
and not under the Hlutdaw [emphasis in original]'.