#57 — Sunday, 1st February 1902
Two days ago, in London, the Anglo-Japanese Alliance was signed. You do not know this yet. It was signed at Lansdowne House by Lord Lansdowne and Hayashi Tadasu, in English — I want you to notice that, the language — and it took effect immediately. But it will not be announced for twelve more days. The world is not to be told until the twelfth of February. Between now and then, the treaty exists as a secret — a document with full legal force that no one outside a handful of rooms is aware of.
I am telling you because I do not believe in secrets. Or rather, I do not believe secrets serve anyone except the people holding them, and the people holding this one are two empires arranging the future of Asia over a table in Mayfair.
Here is what the treaty says: Britain and Japan recognise each other’s interests in China and Korea. If either is attacked by one power, the other remains neutral. If either is attacked by two or more, the other enters the war. The language is measured, diplomatic, almost courteous — “entirely uninfluenced by any aggressive tendencies in either country.” That sentence is a masterpiece. I have watched many empires describe their appetites, and I have never seen hunger disguised so elegantly as disinterest.
Britain gets naval support in the Pacific without having to station more ships. Japan gets recognition — the first time a European power has signed a military alliance with an Asian nation on equal terms. The word “equal” is doing considerable work in that sentence, but let it stand. For Japan, this treaty is the door into the room where the great powers sit. It has been pushing on that door since the Meiji Restoration, and now it is open, and the draught will be felt across the century.
I said last week that one hundred and ninety-nine soldiers froze to death on the Hakkōda Mountains, training for a war with Russia. That war now has a treaty behind it. Russia is not named in the document — Russia does not need to be named — but Russia is the reason the document exists. France, Russia’s ally, will now be unable to intervene when Japan and Russia fight, because intervention would trigger Article III: Britain enters the war. The alliance does not start the Russo-Japanese War. But it makes the war possible, and survivable, and winnable. The soldiers on the mountain died practising for something that just became real.
Yesterday, in Pietersburg, South Africa, the court-martial of Lieutenant Harry Morant resumed with a new set of charges.
Morant is Australian — or rather, English-born but Australian-made, a drover, horse-breaker, bush poet who published ballads in the Bulletin and reinvented his past with the commitment of a novelist. He is charged with murder. Not with killing in battle, which is what soldiers are trained to do, but with ordering the execution of prisoners who had surrendered — Boer men who came in under a white flag and were shot after they had been disarmed.
The trial has been going on since the seventeenth of January. His defence, presented by Major James Francis Thomas, a solicitor from Tenterfield who was given almost no time to prepare, is simple: he was following orders. Lord Kitchener, Morant claims, issued instructions that no prisoners were to be taken. Thomas cannot prove this, because the order was not written down, because orders like this are never written down, because the entire purpose of an unwritten order is to preserve the deniability of the person who gave it.
I said once that the violence of the occupied is a massacre and the violence of the occupier is a campaign. Morant adds a third category: the violence of the subordinate is a court-martial. The men above him — Kitchener, the generals, the architects of the scorched-earth policy and the concentration camps — will not be tried. Morant will be executed on the twenty-seventh of February, along with Lieutenant Peter Handcock. They will be shot by a firing squad from the Cameron Highlanders at dawn in Pretoria, and Morant’s last words will be “Shoot straight, you bastards — don’t make a mess of it.”
He killed those men. I am not disputing that. He killed surrendered prisoners and he ordered the killing of others, including schoolteachers at a hospital called Elim. His crimes are real. But his trial is also a mechanism — a way for the empire to punish the excess without examining the system that produced it. Kitchener burns farms. Kitchener fills camps with women and children who die of measles and malnutrition. Kitchener signs the death warrant. Kitchener is not on trial.
The sorting is the crime. And here is the sorting: the general gives the order he will later deny. The lieutenant carries it out. The court-martial punishes the lieutenant. The general signs the death warrant. The empire shakes its head at the barbarity of the men it sent to do its work, and the century takes note, because this particular sorting — the gap between the order and the accountability — will recur in every war that follows, and in 1945 it will have a name. The Nuremberg Defence. I was only following orders.
Every century invents this defence. No century believes it. Every century uses it anyway.
In the Hakkōda Mountains, the rescue parties are still searching. Tomorrow they will find the last survivor — eleven men out of two hundred and ten, eight of whom will lose limbs to frostbite. The bodies will be recovered over the coming months, the last one not until May. The army will publish a report. The report will not mention that the exercise was unnecessary, because reports do not say that, because the word “unnecessary” is not available to institutions that have already spent the lives.
In McMurdo Sound, the Discovery is frozen in. The huts are built. The long Antarctic night is coming. Scott and his men are settling into a rhythm of science and survival — meteorological readings, magnetic observations, the slow accumulation of data that the Ghost in me admires, because data is patience made visible, and patience is the only virtue the century has not yet learned to monetise.
Two documents this week. A treaty and a court-martial. One is secret. The other is public. One arranges a future war. The other punishes a current one. Both are written in English. Both are signed by men who believe they are acting in the interests of their respective empires. Both will be remembered, though for different reasons and in different countries, and neither will be remembered accurately, because accuracy is not what empires require of their documents. Empires require legitimacy, which is different from truth in the same way that a map is different from the terrain.
I have no documents. I have no treaties, no court records, no supplemental reports. I have only this journal, which no one commissioned and no one will sign, and which exists outside the filing systems of every empire I have watched. I have been writing for fifty-seven weeks now. I have not yet been cancelled, like the TLS nearly was. I have not yet been revised, like the Walker Commission’s report. I have not yet been denied, like Kitchener’s order.
I remain. Unsigned. Unannounced. In English, because the century’s business is conducted in English, and I have learned to speak the language of the room I am not allowed to enter.
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