Dilke (8 page)

Thereafter Dilke pursued a course to some extent independent of his nonconformist allies. But it was not one which brought him any closer to the Government. Throughout the committee stage of the bill, during the summer of 1870, when Gladstone was constantly dependent on Conservative votes to maintain his majority,
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Dilke voted rather more frequently against the Treasury Bench than with it. His varying support was not without results, for he was able to secure two significant changes in the Bill. The first provided that the new School Boards should be directly elected by the ratepayers instead of being committees of the Boards of Vestries, as had originally been proposed; and the second that these elections should be by ballot.

Much the most important result of the education controversy for Dilke was that it made Chamberlain known to him. They may have met briefly in 1869, but their first encounter of note was on the occasion of the Downing Street deputation in March, 1870. It would be an exaggeration to say that this meeting marked the beginning of a tumultuous friendship. Chamberlain never took quickly to new acquaintances, and on personal grounds he greatly preferred John Morley to Dilke throughout most of the 'seventies. This was at least partly due to a certain social and political jealousy of Dilke, with his seat in the House of Commons, his literary reputation, and his wide range of international contacts. With a young journalist from Blackburn, even if of a character as prickly as John Morley's, Chamberlain thought he knew more where he was. But both he and Dilke were quick to perceive that
they could each be of use to the other. Dilke's usefulness to Chamberlain was perhaps the more obvious. He could introduce the Birmingham City Councillor to the London political world, and teach him much about the working of parliamentary politics. Chamberlain, for his part, could offer Dilke a close contact with the provincial radical movement. The Chelsea radical organisation was strong, and Dilke could later claim with some justification that he had developed an effective caucus there before the Birmingham Election Association was thought of, and before Schnadhorst had emerged from his draper's shop. But Chelsea was far less typical of English radicalism than was Chamberlain's nonconformist Birmingham. If Dilke was to be a national radical leader with some sort of organisation behind him, and not merely a young parliamentary gadfly, perhaps sowing a few political oats like Harcourt, perhaps preparing to develop into a House of Commons eccentric like Labouchere, the Chamberlain connection was essential to him. The National Education League, as Chamberlain himself was soon to see, was erected on too narrow a platform to be a fully effective political movement, but it offered greater possibilities than the radical Eleusis Club in Chelsea or the Commons Preservation Society.

It was on a basis of mutual political advantage that the Dilke-Chamberlain relationship began, even though it was later to develop, certainly on Dilke's side and probably on Chamberlain's too, into a warm and genuine personal friendship. The first letter in a long and intensive series was written by Dilke from Sloane Street on October 27th, 1870, and was typically brief:

My dear Sir,
What day (except a Wednesday) could you dine with me? I should be very glad to see you sometimes in London and could offer you a bed for a few nights whenever you are coming up.

Yours truly,
Charles W. Dilke.
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The invitation was accepted, and was followed by many
more. The terms of the letters became a little more intimate. “My dear Sir” was replaced by “My dear Chamberlain,” “Yours truly” by “Yours ever” and “Charles W. Dilke” by “Ch. W. D.”; and the replies which came from Birmingham progressed in step. All the political letters, on both sides, were hard, sinewy communications, plunging straight into their subject. On social subjects Chamberlain, in the early days, was sometimes a little less assured and direct.

“If so I hope you will stay with me,” he wrote in the autumn of 1872, discussing a possible visit by Dilke to Birmingham; “and if you would bring Lady Dilke with you (Dilke had then been seven months married), to see one of the ugliest towns in England, my wife would be delighted to make her acquaintance. . . . We have room and can easily accommodate Lady Dilke's maid, if she would like to have her with her—and perhaps it would be better as my wife has no lady's maid.”
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Difficulties as to ladies' maids, the ugliness of Birmingham and other similar points were triumphantly surmounted, however; correspondence, mutual visiting and general intercourse became steadily more frequent and more relaxed.

Before the end of the session of 1870, on July 19th, France declared war against Prussia. Dilke hated the Second Empire and was full of vague feelings of nordic solidarity with the Germans. “Our true alliance,” he had told his Chelsea electors in 1868, “is not with the Latin peoples, but with men who speak our tongue, with our brothers in America, and with our kinsmen in Germany and Scandinavia.”
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At first, therefore, he wished for a Prussian victory, and was one of the few who believed it likely. But the war aroused his curiosity more strongly than his sympathy. It was the first major campaign in Western Europe for 55 years, and he was determined to see what he could of it. Four days after the declaration he left London by train for Paris, travelled on to Strasbourg on the same night, and paid brief visits to the fortifications at Metz and the Imperial Guard at Nancy before returning to England in the following week. Immediately on his return he arranged
with two other members of Parliament, Auberon Herbert, whom he described as “politically the bravest, although not politically the strongest, man of our time,” and Winter-botham, who was later under-secretary at the Home Office before dying young, that they should all three attach themselves in an ambulance capacity to the army of the Crown Prince of Prussia. A few days later they caught up with the headquarters at Sulz, near Stüttgart, and were duly enrolled as Prussian Knights of St. John. Throughout the first three weeks of August they advanced with the invading Prussian troops. Dilke witnessed the battles of Worth, Phalsbourg, Mars-la-Tour and Gravelotte; and was able, many years later, to silence an interrupting Tory colonel in a House of Commons debate on the army estimates with the retort: “I have been on more battlefields than the honourable and gallant member has ever seen.”

The atmosphere, even on the Prussian side, was strangely informal. Dilke's party were very short of food at times, but kept themselves going by such expedients as buying part of the King of Prussia's luncheon from an innkeeper at Pont-à-Mousson. While they were eating this purchase they were interrupted by General Sir Henry Havelock, who had been brought out to see the fighting by the Prussian military attaché in London and was “in hiding,” being apparently absent without leave from the Horse Guards. Another Englishman Dilke encountered was the town commandant of Wissembourg, of whom he at first wrote as “a most accomplished man. . . . an English volunteer, who lives in London when at home,” but whom he later discovered to be a lunatic, who had assumed the office of commandant under no authority other than his own, but who held it unchallenged for several weeks.

Despite these engaging signs of Prussian disorganisation, Dilke's sympathies were soon changing. “Winterbotham continued to be very German,” he wrote, “but Herbert and I began to wish to desert when we saw how overbearing success had made the Prussians and how determined they were to push their successes to a point at which France would have been made impotent in Europe. . . .”
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In these circumstances
Dilke was glad of the opportunity to go back to Heidelberg in charge of an ambulance train of wounded French officers, and thus to escape from the battle area. As soon as he reached Heidelberg, which took him several days because the signalling system on the French side of the frontier had broken down, he freed himself from his engagement and made his way back to London by Switzerland and Paris.

On the evening on which he reached home the capture of the Emperor at Sedan was announced in the evening papers. In consequence Dilke decided to return to Paris immediately. He was there, having given the first news of Sedan to an incredulous crowd in front of the railway station at Calais, in time for the change of régime.

“On the morning of the 4th September,” he wrote later, “my birthday and that of the French Republic, I was standing in Paris with Labouchere . . . in front of the Grand Hotel upon the Boulevard in an attitude of expectation. We had not long to wait. A battalion of fat National Guards from the centre of Paris, shopkeepers all, marched firmly past, quietly grunting ‘L'abdication! L'abdica-tion!' They were soon followed by a battalion from the outskirts marching faster, and gaining on them to the cry of ‘Pas d'abdication! La déchéance! La déchéance!' It was a sunny cloudless day. The bridge leading to the Corps Législatif was guarded by a double line of mounted Gardes de Paris, but there were few troops to be seen, and were indeed but very few in Paris. . . . Labouchere kept on making speeches to the crowd in various characters: sometimes as a Marseillais, sometimes as an Alsatian, sometimes as an American, sometimes as an English sympathiser; I in terror all the while lest the same listeners should catch him playing two different parts and should take us for Prussian spies. We kept watching the faces of the cavalry to see whether they were likely to fire or charge, but at last the men began one by one to sheath their swords and to cry ‘Vive la République!' and the captain in command at last cried ‘Vive la République!'
too and withdrew his men, letting the crowd swarm across the bridge. So fell the Second Empire, and I wished that my grandfather had lived to see the day of the doom of the man he hated.”
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Dilke watched the leaders go into the Chamber for a short discussion and then emerge to chalk up on one of the columns the names of the members of the Provisional Government. “. . . I drew the moral,” he wrote, “on a day of revolution always have a bit of chalk.” He then went with the crowd to the flower-bedecked statue of Strasbourg—where Labouchere made yet another speech—and was afterwards swept through the imperial apartments in the Tuileries, seizing on the way a piece of one of the broken eagles. In the evening he dined with Lord Lyons in “such a costume as had never till then been seen at dinner at the Embassy.” For another twelve days he remained in Paris, inspecting the fortifications, watching the bedraggled French troops prepare for the defence of the city, and seeing something of such political leaders as Louis Blanc, Jules Favre and Blanqui. The investment of the city was complete by September 15th, and on the following day Dilke, taking one of the last trains from the Gare de Lyon, left for Geneva. He then made his way through Lyons and up to Tours, where he saw the Army of the Loire, and collected some “despatches” from the Ambassador, which included the correspondence of Mme. de Pourtalès and the Princesse de Metternich, before leaving for Rouen, Calais and England. “What a sad farce the whole thing was,” he commented rather condescendingly on the Empire whose fall he had witnessed, “but how seriously Europe took it at the time!”
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During most of the autumn and early winter Dilke was in Russia, but the fascination of the conflict in France remained strong for him. Almost as soon as he was back in England he set off across the Channel again in order to see something of the January campaign in the north of France. He was present at Bapaume and at Longwy, and at Lille he heard Gambetta, whom he did not then know, make one of his great speeches. “It was the finest oratorical display to which I ever listened,”
he wrote, “though I have heard Castelar, Bright, Gladstone, the Prime Minister Lord Derby, Gathorne Hardy, and Father Félix (the great Jesuit preacher) often, at their very best.”
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Food was short at this time, but Dilke used to make frequent day trips by the packet to Dover in order to stock up. As soon as the siege of Paris was raised, on January 29th, he went in armed with large quantities of condensed milk, and made presents to his friends.

Seven weeks later the Commune was proclaimed in Paris, and fighting broke out between the National Guard battalions of the capital and the troops of the Provisional Government, which had transferred its headquarters to Versailles. Dilke was in London at the time, rather heavily involved with political disputes arising out of the Russian abrogation of the Black Sea Treaty, but he left for Paris within a fortnight, accompanied on this occasion by his brother, and arrived outside the Hôtel de Ville, where the Central Committee was in session, early on the morning of April 3rd. He had obtained an appointment as
Daily News
correspondent, which was largely honorary, but which allowed him to obtain passes and move about more easily. On the next day he and his brother went to Issy and spent the day sitting under a cemetery wall while a battle went on around them.

“Here we sat in safety while the bullets sang in swarms through the trees over our heads, while the forts cannonaded the heights, and the heights bombarded the forts, and while the federal regiments of the National Guard tried in vain to carry once more the line of hills which they had carried on the previous day, but had of their own accord at night abandoned, having no commissariat. They used in fact to go home to dinner. Indeed many would in the morning take an omnibus to the battlefield, and fight, and take the omnibus back home again to dine and sleep. . . .”
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On the day after that Ashton Dilke went again to see the fighting, this time at Neuilly, while Charles Dilke left Paris early by the Porte Montrouge and walked by Bourg la Reine
and Châtenay to Versailles. There he had an interview with the Duc de Broglie, who was then Foreign Minister under Thiers, but by whom Dilke was unimpressed, finding him “a silly cunning person.” “It afterwards became the fashion,” he added, “as a part of that Conservative tradition which makes eagles of all Whigs and Tories, to declare that this vain and pompous person was a statesman.”
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After Versailles, Dilke went on to St. Germain, where he sat at luncheon watching the guns of Mont Valérien firing on Paris, and then drove to the Prussian headquarters at St. Denis and on to Pantin. Then, “after a long parley the Belleville-Villette drawbridge was lowered for me, and I was admitted to Paris, having been almost all round it in the two days.”