Ghosts of Empire (28 page)

The next day, Sladen wrote back. He knew how important the council's influence was. ‘Knowing as I do, how much this influence depends on the outer formalities of office–on the voice of the people–and on long established custom, I cannot help acknowledging the serious difficulties which must ensue' when the ministers were stripped of power and were ‘irresponsible for the criminal state of the capital, in which they reside'.
²³
This dispute raged between the two men during January 1886, at the very time when the dacoits were marauding through the countryside. Sladen was now relaying the deliberations of the Burmese council to Bernard, his superior, in Rangoon. The present Hlutdaw desired a ‘King and a constitution based on the English monarchical form of Government'. This, the ministers felt, would enable them to restore order and allow ‘trade to flourish'. It would also allow the Buddhist religion to thrive. ‘Burma has for centuries been under the rule of Burmese sovereigns–it follows therefore that the people can only recognize the existence of a Hlutdaw in connection with Royalty.' The ministers believed that ‘if Burma is allowed a Hlutdaw under constitutional restraints, the people will settle down, and the country be easily pacified'. This may have been special pleading, as the Burmese ministers were essentially asking to keep their jobs and status. The British, under Bernard's authority, were unwilling to satisfy the wishes of Thibaw's old ministers. The Chief Commissioner, for all his liberalism, was highly sceptical about the Burmese council's ability to keep order in Burma. In a telegram to the Indian government, he drew a contrast between the districts controlled by English officers and those managed by the Hlutdaw. In the areas controlled by the Burmese, ‘the work of pacification has made no progress . . . No police have been organized.'

Bernard's telegram to the government of India on 10 January painted a gloomy picture of the situation in Upper Burma. The Hlutdaw was not to be trusted. To the south-east of Mandalay, in the Shan hills, there was a ‘Prince with about 3,000 Shan and Burmese adherents'. To the north-east,
there were ‘bands of dacoits or rebels'. ‘More cavalry' was needed, more mountain guns, more animal transport. English civil officers were needed in every important district, with soldiers, ‘to direct, control and support Burman officials'. The Hlutdaw would not ‘do the work properly'.
²⁴
Bernard got his way; the Burmese council, the Hlutdaw, was abolished. At the end of February, Lord Dufferin visited Mandalay with his wife, and while he was there he ‘took the opportunity of informing the Hlutdaw that the administration of Burma would at once pass under the control of British officers'. The Viceroy loftily thought it ‘desirable that the Chief Commissioner should take measures for at once disabusing the whole Burmese population of the idea that there is any chance of the re-establishment of a Native Prince'. In other words, the Burmese were not going to be allowed their own king. ‘They should be told that the Queen Empress is now their sovereign.'
²⁵
In his address to the council itself, Dufferin curtly announced, ‘Upper Burmah has now been permanently incorporated with the British Empire and you yourselves have definitely become the subjects of the Queen Empress and of the British Crown.'
²⁶

Sladen had not been successful. In some rather melancholy jottings that February, he drafted a letter in which he declared, ‘I have no wish to remain–my position is untenable–my views are so opposed to those of all others.'
²⁷
He was effectively cashiered, although, as he was aged fifty-five, the authorities suggested that he had retired voluntarily. Dufferin dismissed him as a ‘foolish, vain man'.
²⁸
The next task was simply to press on and bring the country to order. Throughout the rest of 1886, Upper Burma continued to languish in an unsettled state. Sir Charles Crosthwaite, the man who would succeed Bernard as chief commissioner in 1887, described the situation in this way: in the autumn of 1886 ‘the country was far from being under our control'. By July it had become obvious that a ‘considerable minority of the population, to say the least, did not want us, and that until we proved our strength it was idle to expect active help even from our friends'.
²⁹

Crosthwaite was chosen as the strongman to replace Bernard, a liberal who had been regarded as rather weak. An arch-Conservative, who would later denounce Liberal governments, Crosthwaite was the type of robust, intellectual reactionary who belied the image of stupid army colonels
running the empire. In his seventies, he was to denounce Lloyd George's budget of 1909, which first introduced old-age pensions, as ‘rank socialism'. The budget would, in Crosthwaite's apocalyptic imagination, be ‘the beginning of a social revolution in this country which will destroy all that is refined and beautiful in the country. The reign of cads it will be and predatory cads' too.
³⁰
Yet for all his Colonel Blimpish bluster, Sir Charles had a keen and efficient mind. Born in 1835, he had gained a first in Classical Moderations at Oxford before entering the Indian Civil Service in 1857. His memoir of the Burma campaign, though grisly and matter of fact, is clearly written. He had literary tastes, formed by his early education in the Classics, and the Roman poet Virgil was a favourite author.

Crosthwaite understood that the invasion and annexation of Burma had been the easy part of the mission to bring Burma under the aegis of the British Empire. As we have noted, there had been only about 10,000 soldiers involved in General Prendergast's initial expedition against Thibaw. ‘The work hardly occupied a month,' Crosthwaite observed in his memoir.
³¹
Yet, in his precise, perfunctory style, he claimed that in ‘the following year the subjugation of the people by the destruction of all formidable armed resistance was effected'. This was inaccurate, if the word ‘subjugation' implies the termination of all resistance. The year 1886 proved to be a difficult one, during which the need for more troops became more obvious, while it appeared that the capture of Mandalay meant nothing in itself. Burma was ‘loosely organized', with the Burmese themselves being ‘still free to resist and fight'.
³²
The difficulty of the terrain, the wild jungles and swamps round the Irrawaddy river, made Burma an ideal place to wage a guerrilla war. Bands of young, disaffected men, ‘egged on by the priests, took advantage of the rainy season, when the jungles were thick and paths impassable', to cause disruption and mischief.
³³
There was a feeling that social causes underlay the revolt. In January 1886, some 700 of the dacoits had surrendered to the British on condition of a ‘full pardon'. They also demanded work. Dr Marks, Thibaw's old headmaster, even suggested that the government should ‘undertake some kind of gigantic measure', like building roads, to suppress the resistance movement by actually giving the young men jobs to do.
³⁴

Against this background of dissent and resistance, the British did what invading powers often do when faced with such opposition. They carried out a ‘surge'; thousands more troops were poured into Burma. In July 1886,
The Times
of London reported that ‘we have now some 30,000 troops and military police in Upper Burma', which was twice the ‘highest number made before the war'. The
Times
reporter, E. K. Moylan, who generally opposed the government line in Burma, noticed that ‘despite the great increase' in the number of troops, British authority did not extend ‘beyond rifle-range from our fortified posts'. By the end of the year, there were 40,000 British Empire troops, both from Britain itself and from India, stationed in Burma.
³⁵
The British showed a will and determination in the Burma campaign which would be a source of pride in the veterans, who believed that the rigours they had undergone had shown the soundness of the British soldier, proof of Britian's greatness. In no other campaign was the imperial mission so highly praised as in the Burmese annexation. To some contemporaries, the task of annexing and pacifying was a ‘stupendous' one, but it was ‘perhaps, the most interesting that can ever fall to a man's lot in life'. The British ‘had to make a new country', so they thought, in Burma and, by acquiring this new country, there now arose an opportunity of ‘employing large numbers of educated Englishmen–the best men on earth–who would probably be idle'. This, of course, was all for the benefit of the Burmans, and for the ‘material good and prosperity of mankind'. ‘We must go forward' or else ‘we must fall back'. The author of these high imperialistic words, Major Edmond Browne, ended his exhortation to Britain's imperial manhood in fine if overblown rhetoric: ‘Let us advance then, with unfaltering steps, facing manfully our mighty responsibilities, and thus fulfill our destiny upon the earth.' Prose being not quite sufficient to capture his sentiments, he then quoted Tennyson's poem, now less well known, ‘Hands all round', which had been composed for Queen Victoria's sixty-third birthday in 1882:

Despite the high confidence and bombast, the reality of the fighting in Burma was very tough indeed. Contemporary accounts dwell on the difficult terrain, the mosquito-ridden jungles and swamps which covered the country. Major General Sir George White VC, who replaced Prendergast as commander of the Upper Burma Field Force, drily remarked that the ‘climatic and physical conditions in Burma during the hot weather and rains are extremely adverse to active operations in the field'. White complained of the ‘extensive swamps, the dense jungle, the heavy rainfall and the consequent prevalence of malarial fever' which not only hampered the movement of troops during the campaign but also made them unable to continue their careers ‘if subjected to prolonged exposure'.
³⁷
In their diaries officials and soldiers described long marches in heavy rain through paddy fields, where mosquitoes lurked ‘of a size and virulence not to be paralleled'.
³⁸
Through the months of May to October 1886, between 100 and 150 men a month were dying just from disease. In a force of 30,000 in July, not all of whom were out in the field on campaign, this was a high mortality rate. The soldiers had to contend with the ‘ravages of cholera, malaria, dysentery and heat apoplexy'. The British soldier's life in Burma was, in the words of one historian, one of ‘stifling heat, roads feet deep in water, flooded rice-fields and swollen rivers'. The soldier's favourite refrain, during this period, was ‘one more river to cross'.
³⁹

Much has been made of the appalling conditions which soldiers faced in the First World War, and these horrors have rightly lived on in the popular mind. This is partly because the Great War affected a great many people, as almost the whole population, especially after the introduction of conscription in 1916, was mobilized. The gruelling conditions of many of the colonial wars in the nineteenth century have been largely forgotten. Fighting a guerrilla campaign in malarial swamps without any form of radio or electronic communication is hard to conceive and there is no doubt that the British professional soldier of those days was exceptionally tough. This toughness is reflected in some of Kipling's poems, which evince a brutality and bloody-mindedness in the attitudes of the soldiers which often surprises modern readers.

The Burmese fought bravely, their leaders rallying the people in the name of national resistance. Contrary to what British officials believed, the
‘armed robbers' felt that they were launching a campaign of national independence. They would have called themselves nationalists if the term had then been current. In October 1887, one of the more notorious dacoit leaders, Bo Swe, was killed in a minor skirmish. His death had a big psychological impact on the resistance movement. Papers were found on his body, some of which outlined various general principles relating to the rebellion. Many of the injunctions were general military-type orders: ‘Every man shall obey his superior as a cow obeys a cowherd'; every man shall ‘be of one mind with his superior, whether in love or in hate'. Yet in addition to these military orders there were other instructions which unambiguously show the nationalist nature of the insurrection: ‘Anyone found to have abandoned his religion, and his national traditions', and to be ‘serving the rebel Kalas [the British] by acting as guide, informer, etc., shall be executed or otherwise punished by order of one in authority'.
⁴⁰
The British were the ‘rebels' in a sense, because they had subverted the traditional order in Burma by invading and trying to annex the country.

The natural leaders of the revolt were the princes, of whom there were still many, despite Thibaw's efforts, and the
pongyis
or Buddhist priests. U Oktama, a Buddhist priest, was another leader of the revolt: ‘From February 1886 until his capture in July 1889, Oktama continued to be one of the most formidable opponents of the British Government in Upper Burma.' In the eyes of the British, he was a nuisance because of his ‘systematic method of pillage'. He and his robbers for long enjoyed ‘comparative immunity owing to the impassable nature of the wild forest country and the deadly malaria of the climate'. Oktama ruled a large tract of country ‘without check'. In his fiefdom, he assumed the title of
mingyi
, or great minister of state. When he was finally captured, he was hanged.

In Mandalay itself, there were constant rumours of plots to overthrow the British. At the beginning of January 1887, a young prince of the royal family was brought to Mandalay and entrusted to the care of a senior Buddhist priest, the Sadaw (abbot) of the Modi Monastery. On the day the young Prince arrived a fire started in the monastery. The fire consumed about 200 houses in the southern quarter of Mandalay. This fire was interpreted by the monks as a sign of the Prince's supernatural powers. The next week messages were sent out to the Prince's supporters, who were invited
to attend a meeting at the monastery, in a building untouched by the fire. The meeting was to take place on 16 January, but was postponed for two days because not everyone could make the earlier appointment. At nine in the morning of the 18th, the meeting started. One monk held a book which contained a list of the conspirators. A charmed image, said to be bullet-proof, and a horoscope were handed round.