Lesbia Newman (1889)/Chapter 26
CHAPTER XXVI.
Complications and Conflagration.
Our heroine’s prognostication was verified—a military dictatorship succeeded to power during the unlooked-for interregnum in Russia, and cast in its lot with the most aggressive section of the Panslavonic party. The old quarrel with Turkey was revived, on a pretext about arrears of an indemnity due from ’77, and the upshot was that eighty thousand Russians, under General Polishoff, passed Kars, and marched upon Erzeroum. The terrified Sultan called upon Allah and his friends—that is, Turkish bondholders—all over Europe, to come to his aid in this extremity, and the Bungling Coalition, under pressure of influential capitalists, was weak enough to be drawn into an entanglement involving such national discredit that the sober judgment of the country succumbed for the time to the Jingo element, and an auxiliary expedition for the defence of Asia Minor was resolved upon.
The medley army of the Sultan had already scrambled together at the first alarm, and had been sent forward to the interior of Asia Minor, under Rhumbegar Pasha, chosen for the command simply because he was a palace favourite. He sustained a crushing defeat by the Russians, to the south-east of Erzeroum, and, hardly escaping with a few thousand men, retreated to Scutari, where he met the English force of fifteen thousand men, under Brigadier-General Burnfingal, hurrying to his support. On learning of Rhumbegar’s defeat, however, the English commander did not think it prudent to risk an engagement with so small a force, and applied for reinforcements to the home Government. The country now awoke to the fact that a struggle as big as the Crimean War had begun, and the Opposition made the most of the discontent this discovery was likely to evoke. But this time the weight of public opinion leant to the side of the Bungling Coalition, and not only did the Ministry remain in power, but the supplies for a great war were voted, and an additional force of thirty thousand men, raising the force in Asia Minor to a total of forty-five thousand, was sent out, under the distinguished and popular commander General Lord Gurth Redhill, to supersede Burnfingal. Meanwhile, however, the latter had been venturing on a little glory on his own account. He pushed forward on the line of the beaten Turk’s retreat, met the enemy, nearly three times his own strength, in a mountainous and unexplored district, and after a smart engagement of about two hours, was repulsed with a loss of four hundred and eleven men, three field pieces, and an ammunition waggon. This little reverse caused much irritation at home, and the general public looked with impatience for Lord Redhill to avenge it. But the Russians knew their advantages, and were not to be tempted into a pitched battle. By feints and stratagems of various kinds they gradually drew the British army on from point to point, until it was close to the great fortified position at Erzeroum, to which large Russian reinforcements were already on their way. To advance against such a force and such a fortress as the place had now been made, was out of the question; and had it not been for the rallying of Rhumbegar’s demoralised troops, and their advance to the support of their English allies, the situation would have been very critical. As it was, all that Lord Gurth Redhill could hope to do at present was to hold his own; and even this he could not have done, had not a temporary diversion been effected by the fleet at Trebizonde, which made it necessary for the Russians to be prudent about leaving their right flank exposed to the advance of fresh troops landed at that port. Thus the expedition which was to be so glorious for our Jingoes, was at a deadlock.
The political grievances of Ireland not having been removed, but rather intensified by the stupid obstinacy of the Bungling Coalition, this troubling of the waters in the East was welcomed by the Nationalist party, now the vast majority of the Irish people. They saw in the thickening difficulties of the British Ministry a chance to extort the independence they could not hope to win by patience and persuasion, and the whole energy of the Irish Americans was thrown into getting up a quarrel, on some pretext or other, between the Governments of the United States and of England. Nor were the men of action in little Ireland itself behindhand with their special industry. Arson—a very difficult thing either to prevent or to prove—and, when practicable, dynamite, were the order of the day, or rather of the night; and those methods of procedure were by no means confined to the congenial climate of the distressful country. There moonlighting, boycotting, and plans of campaign, which had ducked their heads to Coercion Acts for a time, raised them again, and were as rampant as ever, the office having been given from over the ocean by those who wanted to carp at any possible error of the Bungling Coalition. They found this not so difficult as it might have been in another and, for with all their esteem for the old country, and their commercial reasons for keeping on terms, the Yankees could not forget that each 4th of July they celebrated an independence wrung by physical force from this same power from whom the Irish—or at least four-fifths of them—were now seeking in vain a friendly and partial separation.
The crisis schemed for came about; the dynamite scare in the British Islands increased and spread over town and country. The fact was that nitro-glycerine had of late been very largely used at Woolwich to try the new long pneumatic guns throwing dynamite shells, which the Americans, by whom they were invented, had some time since adopted for their navy, but which short-sighted trade interests had opposed in England, so that the Admiralty was only now in the stage of experiment with them. However, the explosive for these performances was kept in large quantities, a considerable fraction of which was secretly but regularly sold to the other patriots by Government officials who loved their country so long as it paid them well, but naturally did not allow flighty music-hall sentiments to interfere with the solid realities of personal profit. No doubt a large percentage of those who manipulated this business were Irish Americans, certainly those who conducted the explosions were so, that class generally being endued with more nerve than their congeners in the little island, many of whom were apt to be somewhat squeamish about scattering destruction in a mixed crowd of harmless people.
But anyhow, these gentlemen took their pleasure in their own way, and were not in any sense or manner the emissaries of the American Government or nation. But the party in power, owing perhaps to its fiasco in Asia Minor, was in a quarrelsome mood, and communications, in an overbearing tone, were addressed to Washington on the subject. The Washington Government replied shortly that it had nothing to do with the matter, and could not undertake duties which belonged to the police in England. Here the dispute should have ended, only that to drop it would not have suited the purpose of the agitators. The wire-pullers strained their resources to improve the occasion, and before long there was a brisk interchange of unfriendly despatches between the two countries, the sinister spell of the Irish question working upon each of them in its different way. And just when temper was at its highest on both sides, a fresh dispute about the Canadian Fisheries served to precipitate matters; Congress was hastily summoned, the action of the Foreign Minister was endorsed, and diplomatic relations with England were broken off with a suddenness and completeness implying a state of war. Our unfortunate Ministry would probably have stopped short of this madness, had they not reckoned without their host upon the allegiance and alliance of Canada. But here too they had been giving umbrage by their want of tact, and the upshot of their proceedings was that the Canadians engaged to observe neutrality, and left the Bunglers of England to face alone the struggle which they alone had provoked.
The costly and melancholy Soudan expedition, some dozen or fifteen years before, had pretty well disgusted the British public with their part in North African affairs. Since Egypt was not to be theirs out and out, taxpayers began to grumble at having to pose as head-nurse there, bolstering up the Khedive, tying on the Khedive’s bib, applying the Khedive’s pap-bottle, blowing the Khedive’s nose, wiping the Khedive’s tears, and so forth. The road now lay open, so far as the English public cared, to a renewal of French ascendancy in Egypt; but France, too, was no longer jealous or keen about it, and certainly the entente cordiale between the two neighbours would not have been disturbed on that account. But the same morbid condition of feeling which had already broken the peace in the East and in the West, gave rise to needless complications about matters in which British interests were even less concerned than in Egyptian affairs. For instance, the Bungling Coalition thought proper to interfere about a project which the French press had taken up with great enthusiasm,—that of converting a portion of African desert into a navigable salt lake, by letting in the ocean at a certain point where it had been ascertained that the sand lay considerably below the sea level, thus giving new scope to the commercial relations of the rest of the world with that continent. The scientific pros and cons having been thoroughly thrashed out by competent explorers, the objections made by the British Government were frivolous and vexatious. Perhaps that was the very reason why they were made, harmonious relations with the Republic having become more and more impaired ever since the accession to office of the Bungling Coalition. Any stick will do to beat a dog, and, given the disposition to quarrel, a pretext is not hard to find. With all their national defects—what nation is without?—the French of the day were, on the whole, struggling honestly through difficulties toward a higher standard of civilisation; they were weighted with some anarchy, some crime, much violent partisanship, yet, taken altogether, the people wished and strove to press forward rather than to lapse backwards or stagnate; while, on this side of the Channel, stagnation, rooted in the social, and evinced in the political sphere, had set in, and showed no signs of giving way under any milder stimulants than those which were now ready in the hand of Fate.
The unfriendliness of—we do not say England, but the dominant English party—thus showing itself in minor matters, provoked the French Chamber to re-open the question of an extended protectorate over the southern coast of the Mediterranean. The pulse of Italy was felt in regard to a French advance over her African possessions; and it was soon clear that she would not go to war about that territory merely, so long as her commercial and other interests were guaranteed. The views of the Russian Provisional Government were also ascertained, and found to be favourable, in fact, Russia and France would now become allies by the force of circumstances. The upshot was that Tripoli was annexed, in the face of impotent scolding on the part of the time-serving section of the London press. Impotent, at least, it was against France; but it incited and assisted the crowning of that structure of political folly which the Bungling Coalition had been unremittingly building. They managed to obtain the consent of their obsequious—though, in this instance, narrow—majority in Parliament to the sending out of an expedition of fifteen thousand men to Alexandria, an act which at once strained their treaty rights, was a direct slap in the face to France, and weakened the home force, which could not very safely be spared at all, and which, if it were spared, should have been sent to Asia Minor, where it was sorely needed, Redhill and Burnfingal having their work cut out for them to maintain their feeble grasps upon the alarming and daily-increasing number of Tartars they had caught. The French Government, in a most conciliatory message, requested some explanation of the step; although exasperated, the French were fully alive to the serious and lamentable character of a rupture with their old friend and ally, and they were resolved to put up with a good deal rather than allow it to happen. But a reply was returned, carefully worded for the purpose by Fitzgorin of the Foreign Office, and carelessly signed by the Chief Secretary, which amounted to an open defiance and challenge. It was hopeless to go any further in conciliation of an opponent who seemed to quarrel for quarrelling’s sake, and to demand more the more was conceded. The sensible and just minority of the English people took alarm and protested loudly; but motions of censure and sparely-attended indignation meetings were of no avail; the Opposition in Parliament had become a metaphysical expression; the besotted men in power had got the bit in their teeth, and rushed madly to their doom, dragging their aiders and abettors with them. Before long, a collision, provoked by the British troops on the Tripoli frontier, put an end to the French Ministry’s earnest attempt to keep a peace which our constituted authorities had now broken with three of the great Powers of the world, under some infatuation, the source of which was not on the surface of politics, unless that be the place of those deep-seated internal dissensions which, where they have been left uncured, take the backbone out of a nation.
The outlook for England was now very formidable, and a flurried appeal was made by the Cabinet to Berlin and Vienna to throw their great weight into restoring the peace of the world. But the German Powers replied in a joint Note that the quarrel was none of theirs; that it was now their turn to reserve liberty of action, as England did, and had a right to do, in 1866 and 1870; that they had taken their full share of hard knocks at the dates referred to, and needed rest; and that they did not see the logic of keeping peace by plunging into a general war. They accordingly stood in firm neutrality, back to back, and drew a cordon round their frontiers.