Freedom at Midnight: Inspiration for the major motion picture Viceroy’s House. Dominique Lapierre

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СКАЧАТЬ in which George VI’s hopes might be realized. It could become a multi-racial assembly of independent nations with Britain, prima inter pares, at its core. Bound by common traditions, a common past, common symbolic ties to his crown, the Commonwealth could exercise great influence in world affairs. Britain, at the hub of such a body, would still speak in the councils of the world with an echo of that imperial voice that had once been hers. London might still be London; cultural, spiritual, financial and mercantile centre for much of the world. The imperial substance would have disappeared, but a shadow would remain to differentiate George VI’s island kingdom from those other nations across the English Channel.

      If that ideal was to be realized, it was essential India remain within the Commonwealth. If India refused to join, the Afro-Asian nations which in their turn would accede to independence in the years to come would almost certainly follow her example. That would condemn the Commonwealth to become just a grouping of the Empire’s white dominions.

      Influenced by a long anti-imperial tradition however, George VI’s Prime Minister and the Labour Party did not share the King’s inspiration. Attlee had not even told Mountbatten he was to make an effort to keep India in the Commonwealth.

      George VI, as a constitutional monarch, could do virtually nothing to further his hopes. His cousin, however, could and Louis Mountbatten ardently shared the King’s aspirations. No member of the royal family had travelled as extensively in the old Empire as he had. His intellect had understood and accepted its imminent demise; his heart ached at the thought.

      Sitting there in the Buckingham Palace sitting-room, Victoria’s two great-grandsons reached a private decision. Louis Mountbatten would become the agent of their common aspiration for the Commonwealth’s future.

      In a few days, Mountbatten would insist that Attlee include in his terms of reference a specific injunction to maintain an independent India, united or divided, inside the Commonwealth if at all possible. In the weeks ahead, there could be no task to which India’s new Viceroy would devote more thought, more persuasiveness, more cunning than that of maintaining a link between India and his cousin’s crown.

      In a sense, no one might seem more naturally destined to occupy the majestic office of Viceroy of India than Louis Mountbatten. His first public gesture had occurred during his christening when, with a wave of his infant fist, he had knocked the spectacles from the bridge of his great-grandmother’s imperial nose.

      His family’s lineage, with one passage through the female line, went back to the Emperor Charlemagne. He was, or had been, related by blood or marriage to Kaiser Wilhelm II, Tsar Nicholas II, Alfonso XIII of Spain, Ferdinand I of Rumania, Gustav VI of Sweden, Constantine I of Greece, Haakon VII of Norway and Alexander I of Yugoslavia. For Louis Mountbatten, the crises of Europe had been family problems.

      Thrones, however, had been in increasingly short supply by the time Mountbatten was eighteen at the end of the First World War. The fourth child of Victoria’s favourite granddaughter, Princess Victoria of Hesse, and Prince Louis of Battenberg, her cousin, had had to savour the royal existence at second hand, playing out the summers of his youth in the palaces of his more favoured cousins. The memories of those idyllic summers remained deeply etched in his memory: tea parties on the lawns of Windsor Castle at which every guest might have worn a crown; cruises on the yacht of the Tsar; rides through the forests around Saint Petersburg with his haemophiliac cousin, the Tsarevitch, and the Tsarevitch’s sister, the Grand Duchess Marie, with whom he fell in love.

      With that background, Mountbatten could have enjoyed a modest income, token service under the crown; the pleasant existence of a handsome embellishment to the ceremonials of a declining caste. He had chosen quite a different course, however, and he stood this winter morning at the pinnacle of a remarkable career.

      Mountbatten had just become 43 when, in the autumn of 1943, Winston Churchill, searching for ‘a young and vigorous mind’, had appointed him Supreme Allied Commander Southeast Asia. The authority and responsibility that command placed on his youthful shoulders had only one counterpart, the Supreme Allied Command of Dwight Eisenhower. One hundred and twenty-eight million people across a vast sweep of Asia fell under his charge. It was a command which at the time it was formed, he would later recall, had had ‘no victories and no priorities, only terrible morale, a terrible climate, a terrible foe and terrible defeats’.

      Many of his subordinates were twenty years and three or four ranks his senior. Some tended to look on him as a playboy who used his royal connection to slip out of his dinner jacket into a naval uniform and temporarily abandon the dance floor of the Café de Paris for the battlefield.

      He restored his men’s morale with personal tours to the front; asserted his authority over his generals by forcing them to fight through Burma’s terrible monsoon rains; cajoled, bullied and charmed every ounce of supplies he could get from his superiors in London and Washington.

      By 1945, his once disorganized and demoralized command had won the greatest land victory ever wrought over a Japanese Army. Only the dropping of the atomic bomb prevented him from carrying out his grand design, Operation Zipper’, the landing of 250,000 men from ports 2000 miles away on the Malay Peninsula, an amphibious operation surpassed in size only by the Normandy landing.

      As a boy, Mountbatten had chosen a naval officer’s career to emulate his father who had left his native Germany at fourteen and risen to the post of First Sea Lord of the Royal Navy. Mountbatten had barely begun his studies as a cadet, however, when tragedy shattered his adored father’s career. He was forced to resign by the wave of anti-German hysteria which swept Britain after the outbreak of World War I. His heartbroken father changed his family name from Battenberg to Mountbatten at King George V’s request and was created Marquess of Milford Haven. The First Sea Lord’s equally affected son vowed to fill one day the post from which an unjust outcry had driven his father.

      During the long years between the wars, however, his career had followed the slow, unspectacular path of a peacetime officer. It was in other, less martial fields that the young Mountbatten had made his impression on the public. With his charm, his remarkable good looks, his infectious gaiety, he was one of the darlings of Britain’s penny press, catering to a world desperate for glamour after the horrors of war. His marriage to Edwina Ashley, a beautiful and wealthy heiress, with the Prince of Wales as his best man, was the social event of 1922.

      Rare were the Sunday papers over the next years that did not contain a photograph or some mention of Louis and Edwina Mountbatten, the Mountbattens at the theatre with Noël Coward, the Mountbattens at the Royal Enclosure at Ascot, dashing young Lord Louis water-skiing in the Mediterranean or receiving a trophy won playing polo.

      They constituted an image Mountbatten never denied; he revelled in every dance, party and polo match. But beneath that public image there was another figure of which the public was unaware. It emerged when the dancing was over.

      The glamorous young man had not forgotten his boyhood vow. Mountbatten was an intensely serious, ambitious, and dedicated naval officer. He possessed an awesome capacity for work, a trait which would leave his subordinates gasping all his life. Convinced that future warfare would be patterned by the dictates of science and won by superior communications, Mountbatten eschewed the more social career of a deck officer to study signals.

      He came out top of the Navy Higher Wireless Course in 1927, then sat down to write the first comprehensive manual for all the wireless sets used by the Navy. He was fascinated by the fast-expanding horizons of technology and plunged himself into the study of physics, electricity and communications in every form. New techniques, new ideas, were his passions and his playthings.

      He obtained for the Royal Navy the works of a brilliant French rocketry expert, Robert Esnault Pelterie. Their pages gave Britain an eerily accurate forecast of the V-bomb, guided missiles and even СКАЧАТЬ