THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

6

The prevailing force in my undergraduate days was not Socialism but

Kiplingism. Our set was quite exceptional in its socialistic

professions. And we were all, you must understand, very distinctly

Imperialists also, and professed a vivid sense of the "White Man's

Burden."

It is a little difficult now to get back to the feelings of that

period; Kipling has since been so mercilessly and exhaustively

mocked, criticised and torn to shreds;-never was a man so violently

exalted and then, himself assisting, so relentlessly called down.

But in the middle nineties this spectacled and moustached little

figure with its heavy chin and its general effect of vehement

gesticulation, its wild shouts of boyish enthusiasm for effective

force, its lyric delight in the sounds and colours, in the very

odours of empire, its wonderful discovery of machinery and cotton

waste and the under officer and the engineer, and "shop" as a poetic

dialect, became almost a national symbol. He got hold of us

wonderfully, he filled us with tinkling and haunting quotations, he

stirred Britten and myself to futile imitations, he coloured the

very idiom of our conversation. He rose to his climax with his

"Recessional," while I was still an undergraduate.

What did he give me exactly?

He helped to broaden my geographical sense immensely, and he

provided phrases for just that desire for discipline and devotion

and organised effort the Socialism of our time failed to express,

that the current socialist movement still fails, I think, to

express. The sort of thing that follows, for example, tore

something out of my inmost nature and gave it a shape, and I took it

back from him shaped and let much of the rest of him, the tumult and

the bullying, the hysteria and the impatience, the incoherence and

inconsistency, go uncriticised for the sake of it:-

"Keep ye the Law-be swift in all obedience-

Clear the land of evil, drive the road and bridge the ford,

Make ye sure to each his own

That he reap where he hath sown;

By the peace among Our peoples let men know we serve the Lord!"

And then again, and for all our later criticism, this sticks in my

mind, sticks there now as quintessential wisdom:

The 'eathen in 'is blindness bows down to wood an' stone;

'E don't obey no orders unless they is 'is own;

'E keeps 'is side-arms awful: 'e leaves 'em all about

An' then comes up the regiment an' pokes the 'eathen out.

All along o' dirtiness, all along o' mess,

All along o' doin' things rather-more-or-less,

All along of abby-nay, kul, an' hazar-ho,

Mind you keep your rifle an' yourself jus' so!"

It is after all a secondary matter that Kipling, not having been

born and brought up in Bromstead and Penge, and the war in South

Africa being yet in the womb of time, could quite honestly entertain

the now remarkable delusion that England had her side-arms at that

time kept anything but "awful." He learnt better, and we all learnt

with him in the dark years of exasperating and humiliating struggle

that followed, and I do not see that we fellow learners are

justified in turning resentfully upon him for a common ignorance and

assumption…

South Africa seems always painted on the back cloth of my Cambridge

memories. How immense those disasters seemed at the time, disasters

our facile English world has long since contrived in any edifying or

profitable sense to forget! How we thrilled to the shouting

newspaper sellers as the first false flush of victory gave place to

the realisation of defeat. Far away there our army showed itself

human, mortal and human in the sight of all the world, the pleasant

officers we had imagined would change to wonderful heroes at the

first crackling of rifles, remained the pleasant, rather incompetent

men they had always been, failing to imagine, failing to plan and

co-operate, failing to grip. And the common soldiers, too, they

were just what our streets and country-side had made them, no sudden

magic came out of the war bugles for them. Neither splendid nor

disgraceful were they,-just ill-trained and fairly plucky and

wonderfully good-tempered men-paying for it. And how it lowered

our vitality all that first winter to hear of Nicholson's Nek, and

then presently close upon one another, to realise the bloody waste

of Magersfontein, the shattering retreat from Stormberg, Colenso-

Colenso, that blundering battle, with White, as it seemed, in

Ladysmith near the point of surrender! and so through the long

unfolding catalogue of bleak disillusionments, of aching,

unconcealed anxiety lest worse should follow. To advance upon your

enemy singing about his lack of cleanliness and method went out of

fashion altogether! The dirty retrogressive Boer vanished from our

scheme of illusion.

All through my middle Cambridge period, the guns boomed and the

rifles crackled away there on the veldt, and the horsemen rode and

the tale of accidents and blundering went on. Men, mules, horses,

stores and money poured into South Africa, and the convalescent

wounded streamed home. I see it in my memory as if I had looked at

it through a window instead of through the pages of the illustrated

papers; I recall as if I had been there the wide open spaces, the

ragged hillsides, the open order attacks of helmeted men in khaki,

the scarce visible smoke of the guns, the wrecked trains in great

lonely places, the burnt isolated farms, and at last the blockhouses

and the fences of barbed wire uncoiling and spreading for endless

miles across the desert, netting the elusive enemy until at last,

though he broke the meshes again and again, we had him in the toils.

If one's attention strayed in the lecture-room it wandered to those

battle-fields.

And that imagined panorama of war unfolds to an accompaniment of

yelling newsboys in the narrow old Cambridge streets, of the flicker

of papers hastily bought and torn open in the twilight, of the

doubtful reception of doubtful victories, and the insensate

rejoicings at last that seemed to some of us more shameful than

defeats…