Empires of the Dead: How One Man’s Vision Led to the Creation of WWI’s War Graves. David Crane

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      For the first time in his adult career, Ware had the man and the faith he needed, and the substitution of the religio Milneriana for his father’s Millenarianism marks the great ‘conversion experience’ of his life. Under the influence of Milner’s ‘race patriotism’ he learned his sense of Britain’s global destiny, under Milner he honed his doctrine in the subordination of the individual to the collective, under Milner he gave political shape to his social conscience, and under Milner – cold, austere and ‘Germanic’ in public, generous and warm in private – he learned the virtue of public service that would be his own lodestar. ‘For you your job was your mistress, and was no step-mother to those who worked under you,’ Ware addressed him on the eve of the First World War in an open letter that is as close to a personal manifesto as he ever came,

      You taught them to regard their own success as dependent on and inseparably associated with the success of their job. They rose, as it were, on the work which they built up, you, the supreme architect, from your lofty outlook warning off those evil fellows … who would have taken advantage of their absorption in their daily task to climb up, unnoticed on the growing structures and supplant them.

      It was under Milner too that Ware got his first chance to show his own remarkable abilities as an administrator. The early months in South Africa produced a series of frictions that provide an interesting ‘taster’ of the battles ahead, but from the day he established his independence he was in his element, doubling within four years the number of children in education in the Transvaal, addressing the technical mining and agricultural needs of the newly annexed state, breathing in the heady fumes of imperialism, and battling – and no one loved a battle like Ware – with a Boer clergy so bigoted and intransigently hostile to reform or reason that even the Brethren could have learned a lesson from them.

      ‘I was working late last night,’ he would write to his old ‘chief’ from Paris in 1911, the memories of the Transvaal and their imperial venture as fresh and intoxicating after six years as if it had all been only yesterday,

      & watched the sunrise – behind the Pantheon & the Bibliothèque Ste Genevieve – and whenever I see it, it reminds me of S. Africa & takes one by the throat as the French say … What a time it was & how we worked – & always when we were conscious of having done rather more than our hardest hoping that it would please you: I suppose I was a fool not to stay on doing your work. But as you say, it is no good regretting.

      Ware might have been a fool not to have stayed, but as an ambitious man in his mid-thirties he would have been a bigger fool not to have left when, in 1905, he was offered the editorship of the Morning Post. The offer must have come as much of a surprise to him as it did to everyone else in journalism, but as the newspaper world soon found out, he was a born editor, the ideal man to take a hopelessly moribund Tory newspaper like the Morning Post and kick and bully and charm it into becoming the most influential and combative paper of its day.

      The paper had no library or reference support for its journalists, no salaried leader-writers, no proper offices at this time, even, nothing but temporary wooden sheds near the Aldwych, and ‘a regular mythology of minor deities created by the old traditions’. ‘It is magnificent but it is not business,’ Ware wrote to the paper’s owner, Lord Glenesk, as he began the Augean task of modernisation,

      I will take an example. The Art Critic is, I believe, actually bedridden. At any rate I have never seen him. He draws his salary and farms out the work. He does this with discrimination … But he breaks the first condition which should attach to such service and that is regular attendance at the office.

      There was something else that he had learned under Milner that stood him in good stead in these early days at the Morning Post, and that was how to make use of that informal network of connections that held the British establishment together. The group of young zealots who had made up Milner’s Kindergarten had nearly all been Oxford men, and one of Ware’s first acts as editor was to write off to the Master of Balliol – Milner’s old college – to scout for talent. When the answer came back in the shape of ‘an ugly mannered but honest, self devoted young reformer of the practical kind called William Beveridge’, Ware took it and him in his stride. He asked me ‘to come on the staff completely to undertake all the articles and leaders on social questions!’ an astonished Beveridge – the future architect of the modern Welfare State – later wrote of their interview,

      I told him of course that in party politics I was certainly not a Conservative and that in speculative politics I was a bit of a Socialist. He rather liked that than the reverse. I told him I wasn’t a journalist; he said there was no such thing as a journalist, that it was all practice. It was a flattering approach. I went about feeling like a beggar-boy who had just been proposed to by a Queen.

      The change of regime was seldom as smooth or happy a transformation as this suggests, however. Although Lord Glenesk knew what he wanted when he appointed Ware, it is less certain that he knew what he had got. He had brought in an outsider to put an ailing business back on its feet, and over the next five ‘erratic but brilliant’ years he found that he had not so much bought himself a ‘new broom’ as a high-jacker, an unruly Milnerian cuckoo in the comfortable old Tory nest, an imperial zealot, Tariff Reformer, and universal conscript-monger, hell-bent on readying Britain and the Empire for a war with Germany that he half feared and half wanted. ‘At the time of the Delcassé incident’ – the first ‘Moroccan Crisis’ of 1905 – he later told Spenser Wilkinson, his influential military correspondent,

      we threw the whole weight of the Morning Post against war with Germany. I am ashamed that I did not understand what we were doing at the time. I now believe that England ought to have fought them then – at any rate she is every month becoming less prepared relatively to Germany to fight her than she was then … It [the Morning Post] should boldly point to the German danger and use the lesson of present events to rub in the immediate necessity of universal military service and the reorganizing of naval matters.

      Ware was perfectly genuine in his campaigning hatred of social injustice and sweated labour – it was all part of the Milnerian imperial package to improve the ‘race’ – but as international crisis followed crisis it was the German threat and thought of an opportunity lost for ‘urging compulsory service’ that left him awake and ‘miserable’ at night. Wilkinson ‘has been wanting to write saying that there are no causes for misunderstanding between England and Germany at the present’, he complained to Lady Bathurst, Glenesk’s daughter and successor as proprietor, as the gap between Ware and his military correspondent widened to open warfare, ‘but I won’t let him: to allay fears of Germany is to throw away our only chance of getting the people to bestir themselves’.

      There were genuine strategic differences at stake: Wilkinson thought Ware’s obsessions with imperial defence and conscription woefully inadequate to the real nature of Britain’s military and naval deficiencies, but it was essentially a battle of wills between two men equally determined to get their way. Ware had already shown what a generous and imaginative boss he could be with a young man like Beveridge, but line him up against a leader-writer who had been publishing on defence issues while Ware was still a Bradford schoolteacher and the iron entered his soul. He could not bear to share authority. The Morning Post must speak with one voice and that voice was his. He had fought with Glenesk, he had battled his manager, and he was not going to give in to Wilkinson. What he wanted, when it came to issues of Empire and defence, was not an independent thinker of stature but СКАЧАТЬ