Free Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat by Jan Morris

weary Titan—
                      with deaf
    Ears, and labour-dimmed eyes,
    Regarding neither to right
    Nor left, goes passively by,
    Staggering on to her goal;
    Bearing on shoulders immense,
    Atlantean, the load ,
    Well-nigh not to be borne,
    Of the too vast orb of her fate.
    This prophetic picture would have been unrecognizable only five years before, but in 1902 the world, thoughtfully watching, saw its outline dimly delineated in the aftermath of war.
2
    The scale of the Empire, which so sustained the confidence of the British themselves, had bemused other nations no less. The Empire was so inescapable, seemed so old, bore itself so majestically, that it had become a universal fact of life, something natural to the world.
    It spilt far beyond its own frontiers, too, for its power was tacitly present everywhere, wherever a merchantman docked, a banker checked an exchange rate, or a statesman contemplated a course of action. It was protean in its forms. To Americans the Empire was Canada, or the Caribbean, or Pacific power, or sea-blockade, or hard cash from the City. To the Russians it was India, the Mediterranean and the Eastern Question. To France it was Africa. To Germany it was the Royal Navy. To the Japanese it was an instructive model. To the Chinese it was a cultural humiliation—‘I began to wonder’, wrote the young revolutionary Sun Yat Sen, ‘how it was that … Englishmen could do such things as they have done with the barren rock of Hong Kong within 70 or 80 years, while in 4,000 years China had achieved nothing like it….’
    Sea-captains of every nationality knew the Empire as a chain of harbours and coaling-stations, and the most ubiquitous of maritime aids. Financiers saw it as the power of the pound sterling, the king of currencies. To Argentinian commuters it was the Buenos Aires Tramways Company, British owned and operated. To Italian railwaymen it was the familiar Adriatic specials, the trains which, speeding from Calais to the waiting India liners at Brindisi, sent the Anglo-Indians back to their labours in the east. To the pleasure cities of Europe it was bronzed but skinny tourists with money to spend, talking to each other in inexplicable jargon, and frequently meeting colleagues in the public gardens—‘Dammit, Hodgson, Helen, good to see you! Well I never! Care for a spot of tiffin? Found yourselves somewhere decent to stay? Damme, what a long way from Jacobabad, ain’t it?’
    The ampleness of it all impressed foreigners despite themselves. It was sometimes hard not to be obliged by its noblesse, and some of the Empire’s most vicious foreign critics were relieved, nevertheless, to cross a distant frontier and see before them, billowing on fort or hilltop, the Union Jack that promised them order, security and a cup of thick sweet tea. The Royal Navy especially, that supreme emblem of Empire, found loyalties everywhere. When the Americans began to build a new Navy of their own, in the 1890s, they adhered so closely to the British manner that the first of their new armoured ships, the New York, even had an admiral’s walk at the stern, a direct and quite unfunctional tribute to the Nelsonic tradition. 1 As for Admiral von Tirpitz, the creator of the new German Navy, he carried his respect to still further extremes, and sent his daughter to be educated at Cheltenham Ladies’ College.
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    The spectacle of the Boer War tempered all these emotions, and presented the British Empire in less flattering lights. It was clear to everybody now, as it had been clear to the Tsar, that a single colonial war, against an enemy with a population half that of Birmingham, had tried the Empire to its limits. The British admitted as much. Arthur Balfour, who succeeded Lord Salisbury as Prime Minister, said publicly that its drain upon the imperial resources had reduced Britain in effect to a third-rate Power. The Viceroy of India had been warned, at the height of the war, that the last division