Читать книгу Empires of the Dead: How One Man’s Vision Led to the Creation of WWI’s War Graves - David Crane - Страница 9

‘Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,’

RUPERT BROOKE

On the afternoon of Saturday 19 September 1914, a spare, dark-haired man in his mid-forties arrived at Lille in northern France to take command of the motley collection of vehicles and drivers that made up the British Red Cross’s ‘flying unit’. For the past four years he had been largely out of the public eye, but if there were few in the unit who would have recognised the face, they would undoubtedly have known the name of the man who for five turbulent years had been the erratically brilliant, ‘warmongering’ editor of the right-wing, imperialist Morning Post.

If they imagined that this was all that was to be said about him they would not have been entirely wrong – he did not idolise Napoleon for nothing – but it was by no means the most interesting thing about him. There were certainly men at the Morning Post who had only ever seen the bully in him, but Fabian Ware was a dreamer as much as a doer, as much a scholar and visionary as a bruising newspaperman. Which side of ‘this Rupert of the pen and sword’ had brought him to France would be hard to say.

It is very possible that he did not know himself, but if ever a man was made for France and what lay ahead, it was Fabian Ware. There are natural warriors who only come fully alive in battle, and then there is another, more alarming kind of man altogether: the romantic idealist and patriot who can glimpse among the horrors of war spiritual absolutes that the shabbier and greyer realities of peace deny; who can find in the call to sacrifice and suffering, in the democracy of death and the comradeship of war, not just a realisation of nationhood, but a healing balm for all the divisions, inequalities, subterfuges, and selfishness of ordinary political life.

For the best part of a decade Ware had been warning the country against the German menace, but then his whole adult life had been lived under the shadow of Britain’s decline. The generation before his that had grown up in the rich afterglow of Waterloo could reasonably expect to live and die in undisturbed possession of the world. It was Ware’s luck to take his place in public life at a moment when an era of expansive confidence and optimism gave way to that endlessly contradictory, paranoid, self-assertive and self-questioning Edwardian age, which would only finally come to an end with Jutland and the Somme.

It was an age of political paralysis at home and the naval race abroad, of gross inequalities and bitter industrial unrest, of national shame in South Africa and looming civil war in Ireland. But if these were the crises that shaped Ware’s politics something else is needed to explain the man. This is the history of an idea and not the biography of an individual, and yet when that idea so clearly bears the stamp of one man’s personality and moral convictions, we need at least some sense of what it was that would enable a middle-aged man to transform the random command of a small, volunteer ambulance force into an empire that would change the way a whole country would see and commemorate itself.

Fabian Arthur Goulstone Ware was born at Glendower House in Clifton, Bristol, on 17 June 1869, the third son of the second marriage of a prosperous member of Bristol’s Plymouth Brethren community and his schoolteacher wife. There is as little known of these early Clifton years as there is of his own married life, but if one was looking for a single clue to Ware’s character and development, one influence that, above all, made him the zealot and idealist he was, it probably lies in a childhood steeped in the Millenarian visions and theological rancour of Victorian England’s most combative, divisive and embattled Calvinist sect. It would be many years before Ware escaped the intellectual straitjacket of this world – years before he even ‘dared question what he had been taught to regard as the only conceivable premise for all thoughts and all actions’ – and in critical ways he remained the child of the Brethren he had always been. In adult life he seems to have achieved an amused and tolerant detachment from his Bethesda roots and yet, like many another Victorian apostate, his whole life remained a constant search for a faith or dream – Culture, Bloomsbury, Socialism, Industry, Philanthropy, Empire, Sex, Crusading Journalism, Women’s Rights, the alternatives were endless – that would provide a secular substitute for the religious certitudes and deep seriousness of the faith he had intellectually abandoned.

It was a powerful and energising legacy, and if the passion for battle, the conviction of righteousness, the love of autocracy also left their mark, these were only the reverse of that spirit of independence that is the great birthright of all Protestant dissent. In the most obvious sense, Ware’s whole life became a violent rejection of a sect that had turned its back against the world, but even when his work took him to the heart of the British establishment, he never sold out, never lost that critical power of detachment or sense of distance that, in the struggles ahead, would prove the most creative and important inheritance of his Brethren upbringing.

Even if Ware had wanted to ‘belong’ to that establishment world, his formative years and education inevitably reinforced a sense of apartness. In the late nineteenth century, the public schools and universities offered a well-trodden path to public service, but while his contemporaries were filling the reformed civil service and dying on Majuba Hill, soldiering with Stalky on the North West Frontier, or running the Empire, Ware was trudging down an obscure road that took him from a private tutor at home in Clifton to a struggling career as an indigent and ill-qualified schoolteacher. ‘My academic qualifications are not worth counting,’ he confessed in 1911, forced by the abortive hope of a post at Sheffield University to rehearse the long and dusty route that had brought him, at the age of forty-three, to the life of an unemployed ex-newspaperman working in Paris on a book no one was ever likely to read:

First class tutors up to eighteen (my people were Plymouth Brethren & took me away from a Preparatory School when I was twelve because I had been made captain of a cricket XI. I was never allowed to go back to school); then my father died & I had to earn my own living by teaching in private schools – I could only afford to work for a London degree – after having passed two of the three examinations I chucked it as I was getting no teaching, & saved up to come to Paris & took my Baccalaureate in science … Returning from Paris I was for several years assistant master in the Bradford Grammar School, then I reported to Sadler on foreign educational systems (Germany), was British Educational Representative at the Paris exhibition in 1900 and, when I came out … in 1901, was inspecting secondary schools for the Board of Education and was to be made a permanent inspector as soon as the inspectorate was established … All this counts for nothing among English academic people who smile at it all as they would smile at my Paris pinkish-mauve hood & cap of the same colour which is a cross between a coster’s headdress & a biretta!!

For an ambitious, sensitive and highly gifted idealist, there must have been endless frustrations, although in the long run this education opened up a richer and more varied experience than a conventional and insular English public school could ever have done. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the life of a secondary schoolmaster was as miserable as it has ever been, but it crucially gave Ware the experience and right – a right he would claim in the pages of the Morning Post and again in France – to speak for that other Britain which, in the years ahead, would make up the Pals’ battalions and fight and die in their anonymous thousands in the mud of Flanders and the Somme.

If it was the years of educational drudgery and poverty that made an egalitarian and social reformer of Ware, it was the next phase of his career that hardened ‘pity and indignation’ into the kind of vision and ideal that was so crucial to a lapsed child of the Brethren. In 1900 he had published the first of two books on educational reform, and on the back of a growing reputation he went out to South Africa the following year to oversee the post-war reconstruction of education in the Transvaal alongside that famous ‘Kindergarten’ of talented and devoted young imperialists that the High Commissioner, Lord Milner, had gathered around him.

The figure of Viscount Milner has receded so far into the background of history that it is hard now to remember how large he once loomed over the Edwardian political landscape. Alfred Milner was born in Giessen, Hesse in 1854 of Anglo-German stock and received his early education at a Gymnasium in Tübingen. On the death of his mother in 1869, the fifteen-year-old Milner returned to England, and in 1872 won a scholarship to Benjamin Jowett’s Balliol, where a brilliant undergraduate career and a fistful of university prizes was rounded off with a First in Classics and a fellowship to New College.

This was the Oxford of Ruskinian high-mindedness and social intervention, of Arnold Toynbee and H. H. Asquith, of the Canadian imperialist George Parkin, and Cecil Rhodes – and it was the dominant influence on Milner’s life. ‘As an undergraduate at Oxford,’ he later wrote,

I was first stirred by a new vision of the British Empire. In that vision it appeared no longer as a number of infant or dependent communities revolving around this ancient kingdom but as a world encircling group of related nations, some of them destined to outgrow the mother country, united in a bond of equality and partnership, and united … by moral and spiritual bonds.

At the heart of Milner’s ‘New Imperialism’ was a quasi-religious belief in the innate superiority of the English ‘race’ and an unshakeable conviction of its civilising destiny, and one of the great tragedies of British history is that he found himself in a position to implement it. On leaving Oxford he had gained a formidable reputation as an administrator and public servant, and after a formative colonial apprenticeship in Egypt under Lord Cromer, he went with the blessings of all parties to ‘Southern Africa’ as High Commissioner and Governor of the Cape Colony at a time when the Jameson Raid and President Kruger’s treatment of British Uitlanders in the Transvaal had forced South Africa to the front of the political agenda.

It was a disastrous appointment – a crisis that called for cool pragmatism and the government had sent an imperial visionary, negotiations that demanded compromise and tact and they had sent the one man in England as obdurate as Kruger – and Britain reaped what it had sown. It is very possible that nobody could have dealt with Kruger and his dismal combination of ‘hatred’ and ‘invincible ignorance’, but Milner had never any intention of trying to find a peaceful answer to the problems of the Transvaal. When negotiations finally broke down in the summer of 1899 he had the war with the Afrikaner republics that he had wanted.

The Second Boer War was known as ‘Milner’s War’ for good reason. Milner was not a man to shy away from the personal or public opprobrium brought about by a brutal and ugly conflict. In the spring of 1901 he had returned to England to face down a storm of Liberal criticism from his old allies, but within the year he was back again with a peerage and the support of a Conservative government to tighten the final terms of the Boer surrender and begin the vast post-war task of reconstructing a united, reformed and anglicised South Africa along the imperial lines he had always dreamt of.

It was as part of this work of political, legal, economic and educational reconstruction that Fabian Ware went out to join the Kindergarten of zealous young administrators: men like Geoffrey Dawson, the future editor of The Times; Philip Kerr, Britain’s Ambassador to the United States at the outbreak of the Second World War; the novelist and future Governor General of Canada, John Buchan; the future Governor General of South Africa, Patrick Gordon; Lionel Curtis, the driving force of the ‘Round Table’, who shared Milner’s vision and would carry the Milner torch deep into the twentieth century.

For the first time in his adult career, Ware had the man and the faith he needed, and the substitution of the religio Milneriana for his father’s Millenarianism marks the great ‘conversion experience’ of his life. Under the influence of Milner’s ‘race patriotism’ he learned his sense of Britain’s global destiny, under Milner he honed his doctrine in the subordination of the individual to the collective, under Milner he gave political shape to his social conscience, and under Milner – cold, austere and ‘Germanic’ in public, generous and warm in private – he learned the virtue of public service that would be his own lodestar. ‘For you your job was your mistress, and was no step-mother to those who worked under you,’ Ware addressed him on the eve of the First World War in an open letter that is as close to a personal manifesto as he ever came,

You taught them to regard their own success as dependent on and inseparably associated with the success of their job. They rose, as it were, on the work which they built up, you, the supreme architect, from your lofty outlook warning off those evil fellows … who would have taken advantage of their absorption in their daily task to climb up, unnoticed on the growing structures and supplant them.

It was under Milner too that Ware got his first chance to show his own remarkable abilities as an administrator. The early months in South Africa produced a series of frictions that provide an interesting ‘taster’ of the battles ahead, but from the day he established his independence he was in his element, doubling within four years the number of children in education in the Transvaal, addressing the technical mining and agricultural needs of the newly annexed state, breathing in the heady fumes of imperialism, and battling – and no one loved a battle like Ware – with a Boer clergy so bigoted and intransigently hostile to reform or reason that even the Brethren could have learned a lesson from them.

‘I was working late last night,’ he would write to his old ‘chief’ from Paris in 1911, the memories of the Transvaal and their imperial venture as fresh and intoxicating after six years as if it had all been only yesterday,

& watched the sunrise – behind the Pantheon & the Bibliothèque Ste Genevieve – and whenever I see it, it reminds me of S. Africa & takes one by the throat as the French say … What a time it was & how we worked – & always when we were conscious of having done rather more than our hardest hoping that it would please you: I suppose I was a fool not to stay on doing your work. But as you say, it is no good regretting.

Ware might have been a fool not to have stayed, but as an ambitious man in his mid-thirties he would have been a bigger fool not to have left when, in 1905, he was offered the editorship of the Morning Post. The offer must have come as much of a surprise to him as it did to everyone else in journalism, but as the newspaper world soon found out, he was a born editor, the ideal man to take a hopelessly moribund Tory newspaper like the Morning Post and kick and bully and charm it into becoming the most influential and combative paper of its day.

The paper had no library or reference support for its journalists, no salaried leader-writers, no proper offices at this time, even, nothing but temporary wooden sheds near the Aldwych, and ‘a regular mythology of minor deities created by the old traditions’. ‘It is magnificent but it is not business,’ Ware wrote to the paper’s owner, Lord Glenesk, as he began the Augean task of modernisation,

I will take an example. The Art Critic is, I believe, actually bedridden. At any rate I have never seen him. He draws his salary and farms out the work. He does this with discrimination … But he breaks the first condition which should attach to such service and that is regular attendance at the office.

There was something else that he had learned under Milner that stood him in good stead in these early days at the Morning Post, and that was how to make use of that informal network of connections that held the British establishment together. The group of young zealots who had made up Milner’s Kindergarten had nearly all been Oxford men, and one of Ware’s first acts as editor was to write off to the Master of Balliol – Milner’s old college – to scout for talent. When the answer came back in the shape of ‘an ugly mannered but honest, self devoted young reformer of the practical kind called William Beveridge’, Ware took it and him in his stride. He asked me ‘to come on the staff completely to undertake all the articles and leaders on social questions!’ an astonished Beveridge – the future architect of the modern Welfare State – later wrote of their interview,

I told him of course that in party politics I was certainly not a Conservative and that in speculative politics I was a bit of a Socialist. He rather liked that than the reverse. I told him I wasn’t a journalist; he said there was no such thing as a journalist, that it was all practice. It was a flattering approach. I went about feeling like a beggar-boy who had just been proposed to by a Queen.

The change of regime was seldom as smooth or happy a transformation as this suggests, however. Although Lord Glenesk knew what he wanted when he appointed Ware, it is less certain that he knew what he had got. He had brought in an outsider to put an ailing business back on its feet, and over the next five ‘erratic but brilliant’ years he found that he had not so much bought himself a ‘new broom’ as a high-jacker, an unruly Milnerian cuckoo in the comfortable old Tory nest, an imperial zealot, Tariff Reformer, and universal conscript-monger, hell-bent on readying Britain and the Empire for a war with Germany that he half feared and half wanted. ‘At the time of the Delcassé incident’ – the first ‘Moroccan Crisis’ of 1905 – he later told Spenser Wilkinson, his influential military correspondent,

we threw the whole weight of the Morning Post against war with Germany. I am ashamed that I did not understand what we were doing at the time. I now believe that England ought to have fought them then – at any rate she is every month becoming less prepared relatively to Germany to fight her than she was then … It [the Morning Post] should boldly point to the German danger and use the lesson of present events to rub in the immediate necessity of universal military service and the reorganizing of naval matters.

Ware was perfectly genuine in his campaigning hatred of social injustice and sweated labour – it was all part of the Milnerian imperial package to improve the ‘race’ – but as international crisis followed crisis it was the German threat and thought of an opportunity lost for ‘urging compulsory service’ that left him awake and ‘miserable’ at night. Wilkinson ‘has been wanting to write saying that there are no causes for misunderstanding between England and Germany at the present’, he complained to Lady Bathurst, Glenesk’s daughter and successor as proprietor, as the gap between Ware and his military correspondent widened to open warfare, ‘but I won’t let him: to allay fears of Germany is to throw away our only chance of getting the people to bestir themselves’.

There were genuine strategic differences at stake: Wilkinson thought Ware’s obsessions with imperial defence and conscription woefully inadequate to the real nature of Britain’s military and naval deficiencies, but it was essentially a battle of wills between two men equally determined to get their way. Ware had already shown what a generous and imaginative boss he could be with a young man like Beveridge, but line him up against a leader-writer who had been publishing on defence issues while Ware was still a Bradford schoolteacher and the iron entered his soul. He could not bear to share authority. The Morning Post must speak with one voice and that voice was his. He had fought with Glenesk, he had battled his manager, and he was not going to give in to Wilkinson. What he wanted, when it came to issues of Empire and defence, was not an independent thinker of stature but a ‘party hack’.

‘I am to take the views that he thinks right,’ Wilkinson complained to Lady Bathurst, ‘and he even explained to me what my views, which he thinks he knows better than I do, really are.’ It was a dangerous omniscience to insist on. This time he won his battle (Wilkinson could not even bring himself to mention Ware’s name when he wrote his memoirs) but Ware’s own days at the Morning Post were numbered. In the bitter infighting within the Conservative Party over Tariff Reform he had alienated some powerful interests, and when in 1910 a fundraising appeal, sponsored by the Morning Post, to buy the nation an airship to counter the ‘Zeppelin menace’ ended in chaos, farce and serious financial embarrassment for Lady Bathurst, Ware was forced to go.

It was a grubby end to a brilliant, maverick, error-strewn age for the Morning Post and left Ware in a limbo that was both new and familiar to him. The terms of his severance gave him a measure of financial independence for the immediate future, but for a man who had been at the heart of the country’s political life for a decade – a man, moreover, with not just a wife, Anna, now but two small children and no more obvious prospects than he had when living in student poverty almost twenty years before – dismissal was a psychological blow from which it would take a war to help him recover.

In his open ‘letter’ to Milner, written in France as a preface in 1912 to his last book, The Worker and His Country, Ware bravely trumpeted the blessing of his new-found ‘freedom’, but it was the Cassandra cry of a prophet without honour in his own country. ‘The existence of the United Kingdom to-day as a first-class Power is indissolubly bound up in the integrity of the British Empire,’ Ware warned from his ‘old student quarters’ in Paris, as he contemplated a France on the brink of civil war, a Britain torn apart by strikes, political atrophy and civil unrest, Ireland on the edge of disintegration and international relations stumbling from crisis to crisis,

The gravity of the responsibilities thus incurred needs no emphasising; they will be accepted calmly by a race which has brought so large a portion of the earth within its rule … So long as patriotism is the controlling force, dominating all classes, the supreme instinct in the hour of crisis, no renunciation and no sacrifice will be too great in the cause of unity.

It was only too horribly prophetic. For Ware, though, even if he could never have admitted it, the imminent prospect of war carried its own dark consolations. Spenser Wilkinson had once accused him of being a warmonger and he was only half wrong. If it seemed to Ware, in his gloomier moments, a mere toss-up whether civil strife or a European conflagration would come first, at least part of him saw the latter as the solution to the former. If the country could not heal its divisions in peace, perhaps it could in war. If ‘Milnerism’, the dream of a united, federated, white empire spanning the globe, was already unravelling in Ireland and South Africa then perhaps war – the great purging, unifying engine of change – might redeem it.

He had dreamed and preached of the individual absorbed in the family, the family in the nation and the nation in that ‘highest attainment of human collectivity that the world has yet seen, the British Empire’, and just when it seemed that history had left that dream behind, war had come to give sacrificial patriotism a last, bloody chance. In the final summer of peace, the headmaster of Uppingham School had told his departing sixth form that unless they could serve their country they would be better dead, and for a heady moment in that autumn of 1914 it was as if the whole country had been listening – not just that headmaster’s ‘country’, not the country of Wykehamists and Etonians desperate to get to France before it was all over, but the 300,000 men who volunteered in August, the 450,000 in September, the 137,000 in October, forerunners of the five million who, in one way or another, would find themselves in uniform before the war’s end to bear out Kipling’s prophecy that it would be the ‘third-class carriages’ that would save the country.

It was the same too on the broader scale, where all those dreams of imperial preference and closer union had seemed the vision of a departing age. The First World War would only hasten the centrifugal forces at work within the Empire, but before it did that it would prove a macabre theatre for the realisation of Ware’s dream. The parliaments of the Empire had no more say in the declaration of war than did the Imperial Parliament at Westminster, but as the Viceroy in India and each governor general issued the King’s proclamation, the same enthusiasm that had fired Britain brought the Dominion troops in their tens of thousands to sacrifice their lives – 65,000 Canadians, 60,000 Australians, 18,000 New Zealanders, more than 9,000 South Africans – in a war that only sentiment, historical ties and a shared linguistic and cultural heritage, can remotely have suggested was theirs.

As Fabian Ware made his way across to France to take up his new post as commander of the Mobile Ambulance Unit, he at least knew what he wanted out of this war. Milner had found him a consultancy with Rio Tinto, but that was now forgotten. In October 1914 he had no idea, of course, where his Red Cross work would ultimately take him, but no one could have been better equipped to recognise and fill the need when it came. He had arrived with all the qualifications for the task – ambition, connections, intelligence, energy, diplomatic skills, charm, iron will, fluent French – but at the core of everything he would do was a belief in the rightness of the cause: belief in the Empire, belief in France, and a belief in a patriotic sacrifice. Fifteen years earlier he had written that the purpose of education was to produce the citizen ‘ready to perform, to the utmost of his ability, those duties which his country demands of him’, and war had only changed the nature of that call. ‘So long as … patriotism is the controlling force … no sacrifice will be thought too great in the cause of unity,’ he had concluded his political credo, and he was not going to shy away from the consequences now. Only at the moment of birth and death, he had written just two years earlier, can men be truly equal. Desperate and shameful poverty in England might have given the lie to the first part of that proposition, but, from now on, his life’s work would be to make sure that the second half of it, at least, would come true.