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By Root 1289 0

was said to have been made out with the help of a line drawn in the sand by the cloche-hatted archaeologist: the great explorer and Arabist H. St John Philby called her ‘the maker of Iraq’. Further south in the Gulf, British officials pulled the strings of ‘protected’ states or took tribal chiefs and made them potentates. And in Palestine, largely occupied by Arabs but promised to Jews, Britain accepted the authority of a ‘mandate’ on behalf of the League of Nations, which it felt no other nation on earth could take on. Near Nazareth, Jewish settlers had established an agricultural co-operative. They named it Balfouria, to honour the British Foreign Secretary who had endorsed Zionism.

High on a hill overlooking Jerusalem, within an octagonal ochre stone wall, the British built a headquarters for their High Commissioner. It was close enough for the Muslim calls to prayer and the tolling bells of the Christian churches inside the Old City to waft across in the dry air. From the elegant formal garden the High Commissioner could look at the gold dome of the mosque – built at the point from which Muhammad was said to have ascended to heaven – and wonder whether a force of policemen in sand-coloured shorts would be enough to keep a lid on things.* The site chosen for his headquarters was called the Hill of Evil Counsel.

The spoils of war may have broadened the empire. But the effects of war weakened it. It was true that the acquisition of most of what had been German East Africa almost made possible Cecil Rhodes’s dream of a railway line from the Cape to Cairo on British territory, should anyone ever get around to building it. Lord Curzon, who had served in Lloyd George’s War Cabinet, sighed that ‘The British flag never flew over more powerful or united an empire than now.’ Figures like Curzon expected that the experience of shared hardship might have deepened the unity of empire. Had not the government of India given £100 million towards the war effort and sent so many thousands of soldiers? Canada had supplied wheat and vast quantities of munitions. Why, even the people of Marakei Atoll in the Gilbert Islands had offered coconuts for the troops.

But in fact, for all the talk of a shared destiny, the First World War loosened many of the bonds thought to hold the empire together. Although they fought as part of an imperial army, the enormous price paid by Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand had given each a sense of their own distinctiveness. For the Canadians, immensely costly battles like the engagement at Vimy Ridge were a sacrifice that was both imperial and distinctively Canadian. The war memorial at Delville Wood commemorates equally intense fighting by the South African Brigade during the Somme campaign. The events bulked large in each nation’s growing sense that it was more than an overseas outpost. But the best-known example of the way the war encouraged nationalism is the 1915 Gallipoli campaign – as mismanaged and fatuous an operation as any ever perpetrated by British military planners. Like Allenby’s later campaign in the Holy Land, this had been born of a desperation to break the muddy stalemate on the Western Front. The plan enthusiastically advocated by the ambitious forty-year-old Winston Churchill – then First Lord of the Admiralty – was to sail British and French warships from the Mediterranean through the Dardanelles and to confront the Turks in Constantinople, opening the way for an attack on Germany through the ‘soft underbelly’ of eastern Europe. The assault turned into a disaster, as vessel after vessel struck mines or was shelled from well-placed Turkish artillery on shore. The subsequent decision to land soldiers to try to secure the passage proved even more misguided. Unclear about the precise objectives of the assault, provided with inadequate troops, the operation was a bloody shambles. Even Churchill was unable to justify the catastrophic and pointless loss of life and was forced to resign his post.

In nationalistic myth, Australia and New Zealand were born in the courage and determination