The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma (3 page)

Years of British machinations had also produced a lively exiled opposition, and more than one of Thibaw’s brothers were plotting to overthrow him from beyond the kingdom’s borders. That Burma was a potentially rich country no one seemed to doubt, certainly not the increasingly vocal Scottish merchants in Rangoon, eager for unfettered access to the teak forests, oil wells, and ruby mines of the interior. What seemed even more tempting was the prospect of a back door to China’s limitless markets. Perhaps Burma was the answer to Birmingham’s problems.

*

Randolph Churchill could not simply propose war against an independent country, even a fairly inconsequential non-European one like Burma. Commercial gain could not be the only reason. There had to be a strategic interest involved, and luckily there was, supplied by the budding relationship between Paris and Mandalay. France in the mid-1880s was still smarting from its humiliating defeat at the hands of Otto von Bismarck’s Prussian Empire and eager to prove its prowess abroad. Jules Ferry was premier of the Third Republic. Under his imperialist policies Paris began to expand its presence in what was to become French Indochina. Saigon was already in French hands. In June 1884, following a somewhat ignominious military campaign that featured more than one embarrassing setback, the Treaty of Hué formally established a protectorate over Annam and Tonkin and sealed French rule over all of what is today Vietnam. To those who wished direct access
between British India and the imagined markets of China, this sudden outburst of French activity in Southeast Asia could not have been welcome. A line had to be drawn somewhere. From Vietnam, the French were pushing westward into Cambodia and the Lao principalities along the Mekong. Upper Burma would be next. French rule in Indochina was bad enough; French interference in Thibaw’s kingdom could not be allowed.  

It was not really the French who approached the Burmese but rather the Burmese who were keen to embrace the French. The holy grail of Burmese diplomacy was recognition by the European powers as an independent and sovereign state. Attempts to gain direct ties with Britain had failed as the Court of Ava was told time and again that Anglo-Burmese relations would be handled by the India government at Calcutta and not (in the manner of a truly sovereign state) by the Foreign Office in London. What the Burmese hoped was that by becoming friends with the French, they could at least raise the diplomatic cost to Britain of any future expansion at Mandalay’s expense.

At the beginning of 1884 a new treaty was agreed between the Quay d’Orsay and a Burmese mission to Paris led by the
myoza,
or lord, of Myothit. There was to be no official alliance or military agreement, nor would a French political agent be stationed at Mandalay. There was nothing in this essentially commercial agreement about which London could really complain. But this did not stop the Calcutta press or the restless trading houses of Rangoon from spreading stories of secret French clauses. As the Burmese and the French were involved, surely there was more than met the eye.

*

Many years later a story made the rounds that laid much of the blame for the fall of the kingdom on an unrequited love, between an up-and-coming Burmese scholar-official and a beautiful Eurasian maid of honor to the queen. The maid of honor was Mattie Calogreedy, later Mrs. Mattie Calogreedy Antram, born in Mandalay to a Greek father and Burmese mother and one of the many young women of the Western Palace.
⁷
As a teenager she had fallen deeply in love with a Frenchman, an engineer in the employ of the king. The affair was well known, and Mattie Calogreedy hoped they would soon be engaged. But when this man, Pierre Bonvilain, returned from a sojourn in Paris with
new French wife, she was humiliated and enraged. Not only that: she sought revenge, not just on her ex-lover but on the entire French nation.

Conveniently for her, there was someone she knew she could use, a Burmese official who had unsuccessfully tried, perhaps a few times, to seduce her. His name was Naymyo Theiddi Kyawtin. He had been a state scholar in England and had accompanied the royal embassy to Queen Victoria in 1872. Fluent in English and French and with a taste for expensive whiskey, he was in 1885 a junior secretary to the Council of State with access to privileged papers. Mattie Calogreedy agreed to sleep with him, and he agreed to share with her a secret document. And this secret document, so the story goes, quickly fell into the nimble hands of the Italian spy Giovanni Andreino.

Giovanni Andreino was a former village blacksmith and onetime organ grinder from Naples who had come to Burma at the invitation of his brother, the Roman Catholic bishop. Ambitious and unscrupulous, within a few years he had made himself the center of much palace gossip, and his seeming familiarity with the ways of the Oriental court had led to three of the biggest British firms—Finlay Flemming, the Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation, and the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company—appointing him their representative. Rome made him the Italian consul. And the British recruited him as their man in Mandalay.

The truth of the matter may never be known, but Andreino claimed to have a copy of a secret letter from Jules Ferry to the Burmese foreign minister, one that promised French arms, to be smuggled across the Mekong from Tonkin, in return for French monopolies over the king’s fabled jade mines in the northern hills and much else besides. News of this “secret agreement” set off a whirlwind of Anglo-Saxon indignation. Lord Churchill had his rationale. So too did his friends on the editorial staff of the London
Times
who wrote, in September 1885, that the argument for an invasion of Burma was now “unimpeachable.”

But Churchill had to be careful. The last thing he (or anyone else in the British government) wanted was a war with Burma that would lead unwittingly to a war with France. The threat of French expansion would provide the pretext for an invasion, but the British had to be sure that the French would not
actually
rally to Thibaw’s defense. At this point, if the French had stood firm and said there was no secret deal or if they had intimated in any way that they sympathized with Burma’s
plight (and might lend Thibaw a hand), Churchill would likely have retreated. Instead, the French neither denied scheming nor suggested that they would lift a finger to save Burmese independence. The road to Mandalay was clear. Only the final piece remained: a proper casus belli.

*

As if on cue, the Burmese provided a timely provocation. On 12 August the Burmese Council of State imposed a large fine of over a hundred thousand rupees on the Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation. A provincial governor had charged that the Scottish company, based in Rangoon, had been illegally exporting timber from Upper Burma without paying the proper royalties. The governor had imposed a fine, the company had appealed, and Mandalay had now upheld the provincial decision. The company offered to open its books. The British commissioner in Rangoon suggested impartial arbitration. But the Court of Ava would not be moved, and the London Chamber of Commerce petitioned Lord Churchill either to annex Upper Burma or at least to establish a protectorate over the irksome kingdom. Whoever was in the right (and corrupt Burmese officials were likely to blame), the timing could not have been better for Lord Churchill.

On 22 October an ultimatum was sent by steamship to the Court of Ava, setting a deadline of 10 November with the following demands: (1) The fine should go to arbitration; (2) a British Resident should be received at Mandalay with “a proper guard of honour and a steamer” and should have full access to the king without having to submit “to any humiliating ceremony” (meaning, primarily, that he should not have to take off his shoes indoors, as was the Burmese custom); and (3) the Burmese would in the future exercise their external relations only in accordance with the advice of the government of India “as is now done by the Amir of Afghanistan.” The last was effectively a demand that the country relinquish its sovereignty. For good measure, the ultimatum also called on the Burmese to open up a trade route with China for British firms.

*

The king and his ministers knew they had no good choices. Most knew their defenses were in a sorry state. The underwater explosives would
not be laid in time. And the preparations to sink the king’s steamers and create a blockade along the middle Irrawaddy were not yet complete. There were several European trainers and advisers, but they were a mixed lot, adventurers like Joseph Henri de Facieu, the son of a colonel in Napoleon’s Cuirassier Regiment, who had served for an Indian prince, then for the British, before finding a home in Thibaw’s army. But staring at the ultimatum, they couldn’t bring themselves to surrender Burma’s independence. They drafted a reply that accepted all the British demands except that one. Instead, apparently hoping for a compromise formula, they proposed that Britain, France, and Germany jointly decide Burma’s status.

They understood that war was coming but canceled any moves toward a general mobilization. No one had any illusions about the outcome. They would do their best with what they had, and the rest was left to fate. Command of the kingdom’s defenses was entrusted to the lord of Salay. Three columns were mustered: the Lower Irrawaddy Column, under the cavalry general Mingyi Thiri Maha Zeyya Kyawdin, recently returned from campaigning along the Chinese border; the Great Valley Column, under a colonel of the Cachar Horse Regiment, Mingyi Minkaung Mindin Raza; and the Toungoo Column, under the colonel of the Shwaylan Infantry Regiment, Mingyi Maha Minkaung Nawrata.

But this would be no grand army like the armies of the king’s ancestors that had waged their own wars of aggression against Siam and Assam or had defended the country against China many decades ago. Too many battalions were far away in the Shan hills fighting to reclaim lost principalities or putting down rebellions in the border towns upriver. At best, Salay would be able to muster fifteen thousand regular soldiers to meet the English invasion.

On the road to Mandalay,

Where the old Flotilla lay,

With our sick beneath the awnings when we went to Mandalay!

In the days before the war began, ordinary townspeople from nearby Thayetmyo used to come around to the riverfront to see for themselves the impressive steamships and khaki-clad soldiers of Sir Harry Prendergast’s
Burma Expeditionary Force. Thayetmyo (the name means “mango-town”) was a small district capital of around ten thousand people and the home of a growing and profitable silverworks industry. Its citizens had lived for over thirty years under British rule, and the sight of uniformed Europeans, Sikhs, and Punjabi Muslims was nothing particularly new. But what caused considerable excitement was a sight no one expected: a Burmese prince, in full court costume, sitting in a large chair on the prow of one of the steamers. All around were attendants in the white silk jackets of the royal palace, some kneeling before him. Some thought it was the
mintha,
or prince, of Myingun, an older brother of Thibaw’s who had led an abortive rebellion many years before and was rumored to be in Bangkok. Others were sure it was the prince of Nyaungyan, another exiled prince, thought to be in Calcutta. And so the speculation gained ground, and people were calmed. The British would only place a new king on the throne. Yes, Thibaw would be overthrown, but the kingdom and the monarchy would be safe. Perhaps it was all for the better.

It was that week that Maung Pein, a student at the Government School in Rangoon, was home on holiday. He was descended from a line of local chiefs, and several of his ancestors had served at the Court of Ava. Hearing about the prince, Maung Pein and his father decided to go down to the river and see what they could. They were joined in their evening stroll by a Burmese official, Naymyo Thiri Kyawtin Nawrata, who had received orders the night before not to resist the British advance.

Curious, and fluent in English, the young schoolboy talked his way past the various sentries and sauntered up to the steamship, only to find himself face-to-face not with a prince of Ava but with Maung Ba Than, a former student at his school and now a junior clerk at the chief commissioner’s office in Rangoon. It was a ruse! He ran back to tell his father and the Burmese official about the impostor. They tried to send a telegraph to Mandalay, but the telegraph line had been cut. And so all along the invasion route, ordinary people would be convinced that a new prince of the blood would soon be on the throne.
⁸

When the first British steamships, the
Irrawaddy
and
Kathleen,
crossed the frontier at first sunlight on 14 November, there were no massed Burmese positions to meet them, only invisible rifle fire from the low hills overlooking the river. General Prendergast understood
Lord Churchill’s desire to see Mandalay occupied by the beginning of polls on 25 November, but he wanted to be careful and also remembered his instructions to avoid bloody conflict. Many of his men were already lying ill from dysentery and fever even before any actual fighting had begun.

*

The first and only real battle of the war was at its very start, just after the flotilla had set sail and a few miles north of the frontier.
⁹
The Burmese garrison was under the command of the son-in-law of Thibaw’s war minister, the
myoza
of Taingdar. The British were led by Brigadier George White, later to achieve considerable fame at the defense of Ladysmith during the Boer War. The first fort was overrun almost effortlessly, but the second, on the opposite bank, was taken only after fierce fighting. At least a hundred Burmese soldiers died in the battle. On the British side, the casualties were much lighter: three Indian soldiers and a young English officer, Lieutenant Dury, a promising former schoolmate of Rudyard Kipling’s whom the poet later remembered: “The Crammer’s boast, the Squadron’s pride, Shot like a rabbit in a ride!”