Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [97]
Kitchener sent news of the confrontation through to London by the telegraph which had been laid down the Nile from Khartoum to Cairo: this was an impasse which would have to be sorted by the British and French governments. For three months Marchand and his little band defiantly maintained a Gallic presence on a miserable island in the river. From their base on the other side of the island, the British appeared from time to time, offering newspapers brought upriver from Khartoum and beyond, which the French paid for in vegetables. From first-hand accounts, Churchill reported that ‘a feeling of mutual respect sprang up between Colonel Jackson and Major Marchand’.
The restraint at Fashoda was not matched back in Britain and France, where mobs on either side of the Channel were infuriated by the outrageous ‘expansionism’ of the other country. A few perhaps agreed with Wilfrid Scawen Blunt’s acid observation that the confrontation resembled nothing so much as a ‘wrangle between two highwaymen over a captured purse’, but anger was the dominant emotion. At one stage, it even looked as if it might come to war between the countries. For months, the foreign ministries wrangled. The British were intransigent. The French weighed their dreams of an African empire against the need for an ally against the dangers from an increasingly menacing Germany. At Fashoda, the months passed in a sweaty stand-off until finally came the orders from Paris. The French government had blinked. The soldiers who had toiled their way across Africa were ordered to haul down the tricolour, and then, with elaborate courtesy and after a decent breakfast, the French went on their way. The only expression of passion came when, having watched his flag lowered, a junior French officer ran to the flagpole, tore it down, shook his fists and tore his hair. In Churchill’s words, it was ‘a bitterness and vexation from which it is impossible to withhold sympathy, in view of what these men had suffered uselessly’. Three months later, Britain and France formally agreed which were their respective spheres of influence, carving up most of the continent of Africa. Other European powers muttered and moaned, but had to put up with it. And Sudan, a million square miles of the continent, was now a weird entity, not technically a British colony, not Ottoman, but under notional joint Egyptian and British control. As Churchill put it, a diplomatic fourth dimension had been discovered. What the local people – whose future was being determined by largely indistinguishable groups of red-faced white men – made of it all we can only try to guess.
What lessons can we draw from the story of Egypt and Sudan? First, that not all the empire was accumulated by design: there seems little reason to doubt Gladstone when he said that he had no great desire to acquire either place. The problem was that, as his cabinet colleague William Edward Forster remarked of the Sudan crisis, Gladstone could ‘persuade most people of most things, and above all he can persuade himself of almost anything’, a talent which has afflicted more recent moralists in Downing Street: the compulsion to ‘do something’ is a distinct imperial inheritance and is still felt not just by prime ministers but by the British population and its press. There was then, of course, a large element of racial prejudice in this self-appointed responsibility which found expression in pure rage that