There was something, however, about the response to Scott’s death that differentiates it sharply from the mourning over the grave of the Unknown Soldier. There can be no doubting the reality of people’s grief when the news reached England, but it was a grief shot through with a sense of gratitude to the men who had restored to them their emotional birthright as Englishmen. ‘The keynote of this wonderful “In Memoriam”,’ the Daily Sketch proudly wrote, ‘was at once its simplicity and its quiet exultation.’ ‘To mourn!’ it demanded, the day after the memorial service. ‘Yes, we had come to mourn – yet not with wailing and lamenting, but rather with a song of thankfulness for that these sons of our common country had died as they had lived, in the spirit which is the noblest heritage of Englishmen … Could Nelson, sleeping in the crypt below, hear those mighty trumps of a nation’s requiem, he would know that though the years roll on, yet, as long as England expects, there are heroes of her blood and race to answer truly to the call.’
The real value of their deaths, The Times insisted, ‘is moral and spiritual, and therefore in the truest sense national. It is a proof that in an age of depressing materialism men can still be found to face known hardship, heavy risk, and even death, in pursuit of an idea, and that the unconquerable will can carry them through, loyal to the last to the charge they have undertaken. That is the temper of men who build empires, and while it lives among us we shall be capable of maintaining the Empire that our fathers builded … So we owe honour and gratitude to Captain Scott and his companions for showing that the solid stuff of national character is still among us, and that men are still willing to be “killed in action” for an idea.’
The news of Scott’s death would have struck a chord at any time, but what is easily ignored in all this is that it came at a moment when Britain was in urgent need of the kind of reassurance it seemed to offer. The horrors of the First World War have cast so seductive a glow over the age that immediately preceded it that it is easy to forget what it was really like, seeing it instead as a last Golden Age, a final swansong of patrician ease and self-confidence before the watershed of the Somme and Jutland destroyed its certainties for ever.
There is something about the iconography of the period, too – something about its ripeness of institutional expression, its imperial gravity, its command of ritual – that no amount of historical deconstruction can shake. This has nothing in any crude sense to do with the mere exercise of power, but from the rent rolls of its statesmen to the flickering cinematographic dumb-show of the old Queen’s Jubilee parade, the age before the Great War still projects an illusion of ceremonial and functional harmony that seems to paralyse dissent.
It was, after all, little more than a decade since a cabinet that boasted a marquess for Prime Minister, another at the War Office, a duke for Lord President, the son of a duke as Secretary of India, an earl, a viscount, three barons and a brace of baronets, seemed to hold out to Englishmen a promise of social and historic permanence. In the United States – the power of the future – and France – the historic enemy of the past – politics and social status had long parted company, but faced with a government that seemed to reconcile privilege and responsibility, heredity and power as effortlessly as Salisbury’s did, it is hard not to succumb to the illusion.
Yet if images of the King presiding at Cowes, of Balfour golfing at North Berwick, or Sir Edward Grey fly-fishing on the Itchen, seem to extend the shelf-life of the ‘Splendid’ in Splendid Isolation long beyond its doctrinal usefulness, it certainly did not seem a Golden Age at the time. The Poet Laureate, Alfred Austin’s, idea of heaven might be to sit in an English garden and receive telegrams alternately announcing British victories by land and sea, but after the humiliations of the Boer War at the hands of a nation no bigger than ‘Flintshire and Denbighshire combined’, it was not just Kipling who could see the writing on the walls of Tyre.
There are certain moments in modern British history that have a psychological impact out of all proportion to their practical consequences, and the war in South Africa is one of these. In the past even such defeats as Majuba Hill could be transmuted into allegories of British heroism, but as Europe howled in moral outrage at British concentration camps, and British troops came invalided home in their thousands, the jubilant vision of Herbert Bismarck, the anglophobe son of the ‘Iron Chancellor’, of a country ‘smothered in its own fat’ seemed something more than Prussian wishful thinking.
It was as if Britain, as it began the long retreat from empire and abandoned its historic isolation for the entanglements of European alliances, had collectively glimpsed the possibility that the whole fabric of its power was nothing but a show. From the moment that naval architects had created the Dreadnought the navy that had reigned supreme at the Queen’s Jubilee was so much scrap. But what if the whole edifice of power was a charade? What if the obsessions with espionage and invasion in the popular fiction of the day were justified? What if the paranoid hatred of decadence and homosexuality and ‘foreign influence’ was no more than a last, dying protest of a stricken empire? What if the very texture of national life, the physical and imaginative landscape of its identity, its historical sense of self, were all equally flawed? What if ‘The great house, the church, the village, and the labourers and their servants in their stations and degrees,’ as Wells wrote, had ‘even now passed away’? ‘The great houses stand in the parks still, the cottages cluster respectfully on their borders, touching their eaves with their creepers, the English country-side … persists obstinately in looking what it was. It is like an early day in a fine October. The hand of change rests on it all, unfelt, unseen; resting for a while, as it were half reluctantly, before it grips and ends the thing forever. One frost and the whole face of things will be bare, links snap, patience end, our fine foliage of pretences lie glowing in the mire … ’
In such a climate of doubt and self-questioning, the outpouring of national pride over Scott was no demonstration of imperialist triumphalism but its reverse, its militancy the militancy of weakness, its stridency the stridency of a country desperate for assurance that the moral qualities that once made it great were still intact. ‘Children,’ Arthur Machen – the great mythologiser of ‘The Angel of Mons’ – began the story read to hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren across the country as Scott’s memorial service at St Paul’s opened, ‘you are about to hear the true story of five of the bravest and best men who have ever lived on the earth since the world began. You are English boys and girls, and you must often have heard England spoken of as the greatest country in the world, or perhaps you have been told that the British Empire … is the greatest Empire that the world has ever seen … when we say that England is great we are not thinking of the size of the country or of the number of people who live in it. We are thinking of much more important things, and if you listen to the story that is to be read to you, you will find out what greatness really does mean.’
‘Oh! England! oh! England! What men have done for thee,’ responded one eleven-year-old girl, Mary Steel, and her sob of relieved gratitude found an echo across the country. ‘Amundsen says he won the Cup,’ began one extraordinary poem sent to Scott’s bereaved family by an E. Clacy – a poem that in its grotesque fusion of sporting and religious symbolism brings into single focus every outdated fantasy of Arthurian chivalry and gamesplaying, dog-loving, xenophobic English pre-eminence that ever floated an empire.
Amundsen says he won the Cup
Then why do our men guard it?
Two lie prone, but