Part 2 — CHAPTER XI (continued 2)

“1st Feb.—George Wyndham, writes from London, envying me my happy life away from politics, but why does he grind on? He wants me to come up and stay with him at Belgrave Square. It is stated in the ‘National Zeitung’ that an agreement had been come to between England and Turkey that Egypt should be given autonomy under English protection. The fall of Kiamil must have put an end to this plan.

“7th Feb.—The war has been renewed by the Balkan States and is being well responded to by Mahmud Shefket and Enver Bey who are giving it a frankly religious character. The Mullahs are preaching in the Mosques at Constantinople.

“9th Feb. (Sunday).—A violent attack by the Bulgarians is reported at Gallipoli, and a bombardment of Adrianople. If Gallipoli were taken by the Allies it would end the war, for Constantinople would then be at the mercy of any fleet that might choose to threaten a bombardment, but the thing is not done yet.

“14th Feb.—A letter from Beauclerk dated 31st January. In it he says ‘Bouchier has been this morning with Sir Edward Grey and Benckendorf and he thinks that war will begin on Monday evening. . . . The Great Powers want the Allies to exhaust themselves before stepping in. Germany is sincere in her desire to avert a war and has her eye on Asia Minor. We will remain on in Egypt and attempt to annex it. . . . The Turks have been getting in guns and money recently from Germany.’

“18th Feb.—A letter from George Wyndham, four sheets long, telling of his son Percy’s engagement to Ribblesdale’s daughter, Diana Lister. He is much excited about it.

“21st Feb.—A black melancholy is on me caused by a sense of my failure every where in life. My poetry, my Eastern politics, my Arab horse breeding, were strings to my bow and they have one after another snapped, and to-day looking through my memoirs I perceive how slackly they are written and how unworthy they are of survival. Yet the diaries are full of things too important for me to destroy and they overwhelm me with despair.

“22nd Feb.—Syud Mahmud writes from Benares telling me that the whole Moslem community in India has now adopted my views in connection with the Turco-Bulgarian War and the complicity of our Government in the intrigue with Russia against Islam, and I see in the Reuter’s telegrams of to-day that the ferment is beginning to alarm the Government of India. Syud Mahmud ends thus, ‘Your most kind and pathetic letter has touched me very much and I actually wept. Your sentence “my long advocacy of Islam has been a complete failure,” is most touching as coming from one who has spent the best years of his life in fighting for Moslems and then this is the conclusion he arrives at. . . . You say your advocacy has ceased to exercise any influence even on Mohammedans. I say it has just begun. They now realize the true meaning of what you told them years ago, because they are shaking off a bit of their slavishness, developed since the mutiny of 1857. Your articles in ‘Egypt’ are widely read here. They are translated and reproduced in the vernacular papers. If possible, please write a long article, a sort of appeal to the Mussulmans, telling them what they should do in the future. It will greatly influence them.’ This is an unexpected encouragement.

“23rd Feb.—Belloc’s friend, Cecil Chesterton, is to be prosecuted for criminal libel in the ‘Eye Witness’ by the Samuel family, and Belloc is a bit uneasy for himself too. He declares that there will be war this year between France and Germany, in consequence of Germany’s increasing armaments which force the French to call out one man in three as compared to the German one man in four, and the French will not stand being conscripted to that amount, they prefer fighting.

“1st March.—Gertrude, Lady Kenmare, is dead, once a considerable figure in my life, being one of the coterie of ladies, friends of my sister Alice who were my friends for her sake. I can remember her being married fifty-two years ago, a beautiful girl, daughter of Lord Charles Thynne, in 1858. She must have been exactly my own age and had been at the Roehampton Convent School with Alice. Then, as Lady Castlerosse, she became one of the beauties of the day, the very first Englishwoman to dress herself well, indeed extravagantly, at Paris, and there is much about her in my diaries, then and later, as Lady Kenmare, but it is many years since I last saw her.

“13th Mar.—Peace seems likely now to be made between Turkey and her enemies, leaving her Constantinople with a fairly defensible position for the future, a frontier drawn from the Black Sea to the Ægean, the whole Marmora coast remaining to Turkey. This is what I have been contending for. Adrianople itself is of less consequence and will probably be dismantled as a fortress while ceded to Bulgaria. If these comparatively good terms have been obtained it has been due to German intervention, and the restoration of German influence with Shefket Pasha’s return to power at Constantinople. Grey is now on his knees to Berlin and there are signs that the triple Entente is breaking up. Our Government has probably made up its mind that it will not, because it cannot, help France in a war with Germany. This will put off, for a while at least, the Anglo-Russian plan of partitioning the Ottoman Empire in Asia and annexing Egypt, which may God forbid!

“19th March.—King George of Greece has been assassinated at Salonika, fortunately not by a Turk but by one of his own subjects.

“26th March.—Lady Dorothy Neville is dead, a worthy old dame, at the age of eighty-six, also Lady Cowper and Lord Wolseley. Lady Dorothy I knew pretty well thirty years ago, a sprightly little lady with much pleasant Primrose League talk and knowledge of our local Sussex things; Lady Cowper, less well, though she was one of the early ‘Soul’ group and a friend of all my friends. Lady Dorothy kept her social flag flying to the last.

“27th March.—Adrianople has at last surrendered to the Bulgarians, after a five months’ siege. The city could not have been kept, but its resistance has probably saved Constantinople to the Sultan. The Turks have little to boast of in this campaign.

“2nd April.—Ryan has come down to make up a final number of ‘Egypt’ to end the series, after which if we get sufficient support we may continue it as ‘The Voice of Islam.’ After tea we drove to Belloc’s and found him in high spirits over the cross-examination of Rufus Isaacs and Lloyd George before the Marconi Committee which has disclosed the irregularities and equivocations of these two members of the Government, laid bare mainly by Belloc and Chesterton. They had gone in for a Stock Exchange gamble a year ago and denied it flatly last summer in the House of Commons and now it turns out to be true.”

“3rd April.—The terms of peace are at last come to between Turks and Bulgarians with the Enos Midia line of frontier, this saves the situation for the Sultan as it keeps the enemy out of the Sea of Marmora, an essential condition.

“Poor Ryan was taken ill last night, and we had to send for a Horsham doctor, who pronounced it a case of appendicitis and talks of an operation.”

I omit my diary of the next days which were wholly occupied for us in the tragedy of poor Ryan’s illness, operation, and death, which took place the morning of 7th April, at 8 o’clock. I was with him to the last and he was buried in the Crawley Monastery churchyard on the 9th. On that day I write:

“9th April.—All is over. The funeral left our door at half-past one. . . . One thing is certain, it is useless continuing our paper in any form without Ryan, so I have written to Syud Mahmud begging him to stop all subscriptions for the paper, we cannot attempt it.

“The following is a sonnet acrostic I have written to one of the purest of Irish patriotic souls:

‘TO FREDERICK RYAN

‘Fabric of clay, poor, impotent child’s face,

Ransomed from thought, its load of life laid down!

Earth of all earth, disrobed and passionless,

Dead mask of a man’s brow, which once could frown,

Eyes which could smile, lips which could hold their own

Relentless against wrong in eloquent stress

Indignant at our English ill crop sown,

Curse of the World, its tares of bitterness!

—Kind Irish soul, free labourer in a field

Rich with rebellion’s mint from age to age,

Young ever in revolt, and child-like still!

Are these thy wages then of sword and shield,

Naked to lie and never take thy fill

Of human pleasure, to the end thus sage?’

“20th April (Sunday).—Rothstein is here for the week end and a Frenchman, Maurice Bourgeois, who holds a travelling fellowship at the Sorbonne, and is getting up as a subject the Irish literary movement, an intelligent young man of the serious University kind, very academical, somewhat priggish, but a good fellow. He and Rothstein have got on very well together, talking Socialism and Continental politics. Belloc came to dinner, and we had a most pleasant evening.

“A woodcock’s nest, the first for many years at Newbuildings, was found to-day in Marlpost Wood, the young just flown.

“30th April.—George Wyndham was here to-day. Talking of Winston’s recent outburst on the Marconi business, he thinks he (Winston) will be Prime Minister one of these days. Grey, however, will have a first claim before him, being by birth a traditional Whig, though very inferior to Winston in ability. We had much talk, too, on family affairs.

“12th May.—Winston writes from the train while on his way to join the Admiralty yacht, the Enchantress, with his wife and Margot and Asquith and Eddy Marsh at Venice. They are all to cruise together in the Mediterranean during the Whitsuntide holidays.

“18th May (Sunday).—Farid Bey has written from Geneva asking me to join his society, Le Progrès de l’Islam, and I have taken advantage of it to write a final letter to be read at the Egyptian Congress about to be held there. I think we, with our paper ‘Egypt,’ may claim to have converted Grey, or at any rate Asquith’s Cabinet, from its active hostility to Islam by encouraging the Islam Moslems to show their teeth on the subject. Certain it is that the Foreign Office policy has undergone a change in the last two months. Grey is now working with the German Government for the re-establishment of the Sultan’s Asiatic Empire—the project of annexing or proclaiming a Protectorate over Egypt is abandoned, and every attempt is being made to pacify Mohammedan feeling. As a clear sign of this new policy, Sir Gerald Lowther has been recalled from Constantinople, where he had intrigued for the past three years against the Young Turks. I have embodied this in writing to the Society.

“I have been reading Lady Gregory’s new Irish comedies. They are altogether excellent. The dialogue has qualities which remind me of ‘The Assemblies of Hariri.’

“23rd May.—The news from European Turkey is all of quarrels between Bulgarians and Greeks and Servians over a division of the spoils, but in this I take small interest, or in the fate of Albania, where the Moslems have earned their misfortunes. Theirs is a lost cause. At Constantinople an understanding has been come to between Germany and our Government to keep Russia out of the Bosphorus and the Sultan in authority there under a kind of joint control. Anything is better than Grey’s policy of the Entente with Russia. It means another twenty or thirty years’ life for the Ottoman Empire. In consideration of this Grey has been allowed a Protectorate of the Persian Gulf, and the last news is that Ibn Saoud has occupied El Katíf, and that the Turkish garrison there has been shipped back to Busrah.”

This last piece of my Constantinople news, though it unfortunately proved to be less than true, indicates, I believe, ideas then current at the Foreign Office connected with an undoubted attempt being made at that time to smooth down things with the Berlin Government. It seems to have failed through the opposition of the Russian Government to the recognition by England of the full German claim of extending their interest in the Bagdad railway to the Persian Gulf.

“31st May.—Both Farid Bey and Abdul Ghaffar write from Cairo in gratitude for my services to Egypt.

“2nd June.—A good letter from Syud Mahmud at Benares. I have been drafting a letter of advice according to his request to the Indian Moslems, which will also be a farewell message to my Mohammedan friends everywhere. I am glad to see that Kiamil Pasha has been refused permission to remain at Constantinople. It is a great slap in the face for Grey, whose special protégé he was, and for Cromer and Kitchener, and all the Cairo gang.

“4th June.—There is news from Constantinople that a treaty has been concluded between England and the Porte guaranteeing the integrity of the Sultan’s remaining dominions for forty years. That is till 1953. It sounds improbable, but there is certainly a great effort being made just now at the Foreign Office to regain the friendship of the Moslem world.”

All this, alas! proved untrue news, though it doubtless represents a phase in Grey’s diplomacy when a better thought for a while prevailed with him, as here suggested, of regaining the friendship of the Moslem world, and at the same time of Germany. But his unfortunate Ententes with France and Russia always prevented an honest understanding. Egypt especially stood in the path of a settlement, and Russia’s unwillingness that her partner in Persia should agree to any extension of German influence in Mesopotamia. The peace of the world was practically sacrificed by Grey at this time through his obstinate weakness about Egypt and his bondage at Bagdad to the Czar.

A more terrible tragedy than poor Ryan’s death and one which, even more absolutely than that determined me on my retirement from all active work in the great world, was the sudden and entirely unlooked-for death of my dear cousin, George Wyndham, so long the link which bound me closest to it. It was a blow which struck me to the inmost fibres of my heart, bewildering in its unexpectedness, and touching me on every side of my existence.

His last letter, written a few weeks before, had given no hint of any failure of health or of anything but his usual delight in life and his especial joy in his son Percy’s marriage. It had been written in acknowledgment of a trifling wedding present I had sent, chosen expressly because I knew that it would be appreciated by George rather than for any other reason. It was a fine old edition of “Ronsard,” a folio of 1609, a thing of all others I knew that George would delight in. It is thus he had written: “Your wedding present to Percy is, in fact, a most priceless gift to me. I know and love that ‘Ronsard.’ Percy has been soldiering with his General all over the south-west of England, so we only met to-day on the eve of his marriage. He had, as I had not, opened the parcel, and will thank you. He proposes to put the ‘Ronsard’ in my library. . . . These days have been tense. Rosebery, I don’t know why, asked me to dinner yesterday week, the 8th April. He felt then that unless the Emperor of Russia could squash the King of Montenegro there might be a mobilization here before Percy’s wedding. But those clouds are dispersed, so we have enjoyed the preliminaries of Percy’s nuptials. We had a display of gifts at Ribblesdale’s house this afternoon, and a dinner of both families at Grosvenor House this evening. We all feel that politics are a bore, and should be quitted by honest men, and that soldiers are menaced. So, as you won’t come to Clouds, we (by which I mean Percy, Diana, and myself) hope in the interval of peace to invade you at Newbuildings in the course of the summer. I would like you to see Percy and Diana in the prime of their mating. It is just possible that they have hit off an alliance of heroic love, combined with matrimony. If this should prove to be so they are lucky. In any case they are happy to exorbitance for the moment. For the moment they are lovers, and they ought to visit your shrine and lay a wreath at the feet of Proteus. As a rule, people do not know how to love; as an exception, they love now here, now there; as a rarity, almighty lovers find each other after both are married. It is extravagant to suppose that Percy and Diana are going to be lovers and also husband and wife, but it is pleasant to contemplate the hypothesis. In any case I ought to take them in their youth and delight to see you. Your affectionate, G. W.”

It is impossible for me to tell here all that George was to me and what I lost by his death. He was my nearest male relation, and very much my nearest friend. I had looked upon him as the inheritor after me of our family traditions, and in some measure of my family possessions as trustee and knowing all. No thought had ever crossed my mind that I could have the misfortune to survive him. Although on politics we were a whole world apart, on all things else we were in perfect unison of thought and taste and literary sympathy. I find this in my diary:

“10th June.—I have thought of nothing else to-day but George. Only yesterday, before I knew of his death, I had taken down from its shelf his little book on Ronsard, and had begun reading it again. The preface is one of the most brilliant pieces of writing I know and the translations in verse are admirable. His poetry belonged to his hidden life, of which I knew more than the rest of his friends. In nearly his last letter to me, when writing to announce his son Percy’s marriage, he says: ‘I write at once to you because you and one other are near to me in all that really touches my life. I am determined to be your guest with luck when the birds are in chorus, and in any case when the wild roses bloom. You are fortunate. To select and print poetry seems to me—after influenza in a dark drizzle damned to the hell of politics—an inconceivable extravagance of joy. Now if this world was made for joy (if it was not made our revolt should be for joy), you are accomplishing the design of the great artificer; or else (if he never was) helping to fill the gap of his non-existence; but I, good lack! am a member of Parliament! I mean, however, to escape and to get you to London to see pictures and plays, or to go to you to hear the birds and see the blossoms.’ And here is June and he is dead!”