Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (34 page)

Significantly, of all the Cambridge Apostles of that generation, the one wholly vital and exuberantly creative figure, Bertrand Russell, was never really part of the Bloomsbury Group. Though he shared its pacifism, atheism, anti-imperialism and general progressive notions, he despised its torpid dampness; it, in turn, rejected him. He thought Strachey had perverted Moore’s
Principia
to condone homosexuality. In any case he felt it was an inferior essay. ‘You don’t like me, do you Moore?’ he asked. Moore replied, after long and conscientious thought: ‘No’.
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It was notable that Russell, unlike Strachey, actually fought for pacifism in the Great War and went to jail for it. He read
Eminent Victorians
in Brixton prison and laughed ‘so loud that the officer came to my cell, saying I must remember that prison is a place of punishment’. But his considered verdict was that the book was superficial, ‘imbued with the sentimentality of a stuffy girls’ school’.
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With his four marriages, his insatiable womanizing, his fifty-six books, over one of the widest selection of topics ever covered by a single writer, his incurable zest for active experience, Russell was of sterner stuff than Bloomsbury. Nor did he share its weakness for totalitarianism. On Armistice night, Bloomsbury had joined forces with the new firmament of the Sitwells and what Wyndham Lewis termed their ‘Gilded Bolshevism’. They were celebrating not so much the victory of the Allies as Lenin’s wisdom in signing a separate peace to ‘create and fashion a new God’, as Osbert Sitwell put it. At the Adelphi, Strachey was to be seen actually dancing, ‘jigging with the amiable debility of someone waking from a trance’ – under the ferocious scowl of D.H.Lawrence.
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Russell would have none of it. He went to Russia himself in 1920, saw Lenin, and pronounced his regime ‘a close tyrannical bureaucracy, with a spy system more elaborate and terrible than the Tsar’s and an aristocracy as insolent and unfeeling’.
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A year later he was in China. Surveying the total administrative and political chaos there, he wrote to a friend: imagine … Lytton sent to govern the Empire & you will have some idea how China has been governed for 2000 years.’
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Curiously enough, it was Russell’s activities and supposedly
subversive remarks which the Foreign Office found alarming. No one in authority thought to take an interest in the Apostles, which was already producing such extremists as E.M.Forster’s mentor, Nathaniel Wedd, Fellow of King’s, described by Lionel Trilling as ‘a cynical, aggressive, Mephistophelian character who affected red ties and blasphemy’.
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During the Thirties the Apostles were to produce at least three Soviet agents: Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and Leo Long. In the innocence of the time, however, it was Russell’s public antinomianism – worthy of Oxford in its openness – which fascinated Whitehall. Even his conversations on board ship were monitored, and at one time it was considered whether to invoke the War Powers Order-in-Council (not yet repealed) to get him arrested and deported from Shanghai.
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These symptoms of paranoia in the Foreign Office reflected a quite genuine concern, among those who knew the facts and thought seriously about Britain’s future security. There was an awful lot of empire to defend, and very little with which to defend it. That was one reason why the Foreign Office hated the League, with its further universal commitments. Successive Tory Foreign Secretaries denied Robert Cecil, Minister for League Affairs, a room in the Foreign Office, and when this was conceded by the Labour government of 1924, officials prevented him from seeing important cables.
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Senior British policy-makers were uneasily conscious that keeping the Empire together as a formidable entity was, at bottom, bluff and demanded skilful juggling. They believed they could do it – they were not yet defeatist – but greatly resented any ‘sabotage’ by ‘our side’. Hence their resentment at people like Russell and Cecil, who came from old governing families (the first the grandson, the second the son, of Prime Ministers) and therefore ought to know better.
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What particularly worried British planners was the rapid absolute, and still more relative, decline in the strength of the Royal Navy from its position of overwhelming might at the end of 1918. Britain had always skimped her army. But from the days of Queen Anne she had maintained the world’s largest navy, whatever the cost, as a prerequisite to keeping her empire. For most of the nineteenth century she had insisted on a ‘two-power standard’, that is, a navy equal or superior to those of any two other powers combined. In the end that had proved beyond her means, but she had endeavoured to mitigate any declension from the two-power standard by diplomatic arrangements. Hence, in 1902, she had finally abandoned her ‘splendid isolation’ by signing a treaty of alliance with Japan, the chief object of which was to allow her to concentrate more of her naval forces in European waters. The Japanese navy had been largely created with British help and advice. For Britain, with her immense Asian
possessions and interests, and limited means to protect them, Japan was a very important ally. During the war, her large navy had escorted the Australian and New Zealand forces to the war-zone: indeed, the Australian Prime Minister, W.M.Hughes, thought that if Japan had ‘elected to fight on the side of Germany, we should most certainly have been defeated’.
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America’s entry into the war, however, introduced a fearful complication. America and Japan viewed each other with increasing hostility. California operated race-laws aimed at Japanese immigrants and from 1906–8 the mass-migration from Japan had been halted. So the Japanese turned to China and sought in 1915 to turn it into a protectorate. The Americans endeavoured to halt that too: they regarded themselves as the true protectors of China. At Versailles, Wilson angered the Japanese by refusing to write a condemnation of racism into the Covenant of the League.
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Thereafter America tended to give the Pacific priority in her naval policy. As a result, she put the sharp question to Britain: whom do you want as your friends, us or the Japanese?

For Britain the dilemma was acute. America was an uncertain ally. Indeed, strictly speaking she was not an ally at all. Of course there were ties of blood. But even by 1900 the proportion of white Americans of Anglo-Saxon stock had fallen to a third: the German-Americans, with 18,400,000 out of 67 million, were almost as numerous.
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America’s original decision to build a big ocean navy appeared to have been aimed at Britain more than any other power. As late as 1931, in fact, the United States had a war plan aimed at the British Empire, ‘Navy Basic Plan Red (
WPL
-22), dated 15 February 1931’.
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On the other hand, there was a whole network of institutions on both sides of the Atlantic binding the two nations together, and an identity of views and interests which constituted the fundamental fact in the foreign policies of both.

The Anglo—Japanese Treaty came up for renewal in 1922. The Americans wanted it scrapped. The British cabinet was divided. Curzon thought Japan a ‘restless and aggressive power … like the Germans in mentality’; ‘not at all an altruistic power’. Lloyd George thought the Japanese had ‘no conscience’. Yet both men were clear the alliance should be renewed; so were the Foreign Office and the Chiefs of Staff. So were the Dutch and the French, thinking of their own colonies. At the 1921 Commonwealth Conference, the Australians and the New Zealanders came out strongly in favour of renewal. In short, all the powers involved in the area – except America – and all those involved in British foreign and military policy formation, were adamant that the Anglo-Japanese alliance was a stabilizing, a ‘taming’ factor, and ought to be maintained.
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But Smuts of South Africa was against, for racial reasons. So was Mackenzie King of Canada, a Liberal who depended on the anti-British vote in Quebec and who was advised by the Anglophobe O.D.Skelton, permanent head of the Canadian Ministry of External Affairs.
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This seems to have tipped the balance. Instead of renewing the Treaty, an American proposal to call a conference in Washington to limit navies was adopted. Hughes of Australia was outraged: ‘You propose to substitute for the Anglo—Japanese alliance and the overwhelming power of the British navy a Washington conference?’ It was worse than that. At the Conference itself in 1922 the Americans proposed a naval ‘holiday’, massive scrappings, no capital ships over 35,000 tons (which meant the end of Britain’s superships) and a 5:5:3 capital ship ratio for Britain, the USA and Japan. When Admiral Beatty, the First Sea Lord, first heard the details, an eyewitness said he lurched forward in his chair ‘like a bulldog, sleeping on a sunny doorstep, who has been poked in the stomach by the impudent foot of an itinerant soap-canvasser’.
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The Japanese hated the proposals too, which they regarded as an Anglo-Saxon ganging up against them. Yet the scheme went through. The pressure for disarmament at almost any cost and the related fear of driving America still further from Europe proved too strong. Japan, in turn, demanded and got concessions which made matters worse. She insisted that Britain and America agree to build no main fleet bases north of Singapore or west of Hawaii. This made it impossible, in effect, for America’s fleet to come to the rapid support of the British, French or Dutch possessions if they were attacked. But even more important, the fact that Japan felt she had to demand such concessions symbolized, so far as Britain was concerned, her transition from active friend into potential enemy.

This was not grasped at the time. One of those who failed to do so was Winston Churchill: indeed, though alert to danger in India, he was always blind to perils further east. In August 1919, as War Secretary, he had been instrumental in drawing up the ‘Ten Year Rule’, under which defence planning was conducted on the assumption there would be no major war for at least ten years. In the Twenties this was made a ‘rolling’ guideline, and it was not in fact scrapped till 1932. As Chancellor of the Exchequer he put on the pressure to curb naval spending, and especially to extend the 5:5:3 ratio to cruisers, the basic naval life-support system of the empire: ‘We cannot have a lot of silly little cruisers’, he told the Assistant Cabinet Secretary, Tom Jones, ‘which would be of no use anyway.’
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In fact at the 1927 naval conference the Admiralty fought off this attack. But in 1930, with Labour in power again, the point was conceded – indeed, extended to destroyers and submarines
too. By the early 1930s, Britain was a weaker naval power, in relative terms, than at any time since the darkest days of Charles II. Nor could she look to her empire. India was a source not of strength but of weakness, absorbing a regular 60,000 men from Britain’s tiny army. The rich dominions were even more parsimonious than Britain under the stern stewardship of Churchill. Their forces were tiny and hopelessly ill-equipped. The 1925–6 Defence White Paper showed that while Britain spent annually only 51s.
per capita
on her armed forces, Australia spent only half as much, 25s, New Zealand 12s 11d and Canada a mere 5s 10d. By the early 1930s, these three ‘have’ powers, with so much to defend against men with lean and hungry looks, had carried out a programme of virtually total unilateral disarmament. Australia had only three cruisers and three destroyers, and an air force of seventy planes. New Zealand had two cruisers and virtually no air force. Canada had four destroyers and an army of 3,600. It had only one military aircraft – on loan from the
raf.
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Britain was not much more provident so far as the Far East was concerned. The building of a modern naval base in Singapore had been postponed, at Churchill’s urging, for five years.

History shows us the truly amazing extent to which intelligent, well-informed and resolute men, in the pursuit of economy or in an altruistic passion for disarmament, will delude themselves about realities. On 15 December 1924 Churchill wrote a remarkable letter to the Prime Minister, scouting any possibility of menace from Japan. For page after page it went on, using every device of statistics and rhetoric, to convince Baldwin – already sufficiently pacific and complacent by nature – of the utter impossibility of war with Japan: ‘I do not believe there is the slightest chance of it in our lifetime. The Japanese are our allies. The Pacific is dominated by the Washington Agreement …. Japan is at the other end of the world. She cannot menace our vital security in any way. She has no reason whatever to come into collision with us.’ Invade Australia? ‘That I am certain will never happen in any period, even the most remote which we or our children need foresee … war with Japan is not a possibility which any reasonable government need take into account.’
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FIVE
An Infernal Theocracy, a Celestial Chaos