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From Malta – An Account and an Appreciation by Sir Harry Luke (Lieut. Governor of Malta 1930-38)
[Published by George H Harrap & Co Ltd, first published 1949, revised edition 1960]
Napoleon, we know, assessed so highly Malta's importance to a naval European Power with Imperial commitments as to declare that he would prefer to see the British in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. And this declaration was no bluff, for he backed his opinion in practice by resuming-primarily on account of Malta – a war that ended only with his downfall at Waterloo. His principal British naval opponent took at first a different view of the island's value to Great Britain, despite the results of his victory at the Nile. But after his appointment in 1803 as naval Commander-in-Chief in the Mediterranean, Nelson modified his original opinion to the extent of writing to Addington, the Prime Minister:
Having said this, I now declare that I consider Malta as a most important outwork to India, that it will give us great influence in the Levant and indeed all the southern parts of Italy. In this view I hope that we shall never give it up.
Nor was this view ever abandoned despite temporary changes in the disposition of ships to meet specific circumstances. The British Mediterranean Fleet based on Malta between the two wars of the twentieth century was the greatest single naval force then in existence.
Voltaire once remarked, as we have seen, that "nothing is better known than the siege of Malta," and what the Patriarch of Ferney said of the First Siege has almost become true of the Second. It is only meet and right that Malta's second ordeal of that nature and its happy issue from its afflictions should have been commemorated in a number of volumes dealing with the various aspects of those arduous and hazardous years. Titles such as Malta at Bay, Tattered Battlements, Grace under Malta, later ones such as The Epic of Malta, Malta Magnificent and The Unconquered Isle, tell their own tale. But as this book is not a history but an appreciation of Malta, so is this chapter not intended to be an account of the episodes of the Second Siege. The many excellent war books on the island's part in those events deal fully with all phases of those great but grim days, whether from the point of view of the Fighting Services or the activities of the civil population. In one respect, that on this occasion Malta was invested from a new element, the sky, the Second Stage was to some extent the converse of the First, but on both occasions one of the gravest problems defenders and besieged had to face was that of food. And as there is neither soil nor room for more than a very few trees (apart from the orange groves for which Malta is famous), another grave problem was that of fuel. Those who think of Mediterranean islands as bathed in perennial sunshine may find it difficult to realize how bitter are the Maltese winters and how great the hardships of a dense and fuel-less population were.
But the Maltese people-sturdy, abstemious, laborious and inured to sieges-coped with danger and hardship as their forbears had done on previous occasions. Nor was their demeanour the cause for any surprise to those who had witnessed and admired their calm resolve during that dress rehearsal of the Second Siege, the Abyssinian crisis of 1935-36, when Malta lay for many consecutive months under the threat of sudden and undeclared assault and its shield and buckler, the Fleet, had of necessity to be based elsewhere.
In some respects, no doubt, the Maltese were favoured by nature. Malta is a rock, its stone is easily worked, and in sufficient thickness is proof against direct hits. The fact that Malta's houses are built of stone and are flat-roofed was a real protection against incendiary bombs. Moreover, the Knights of S. John had hollowed many tunnels and underground chambers and galleries out of this stone, and to those conveniently existing and secure places of refuge the Government added so many new ones that every inhabitant was provided with a habitable bomb-proof shelter. Some villagers living near the rocky cliffs in the south preferred the ancient troglodyte dwellings of their remote ancestors.
But even with these advantages the people, cooped up in their small, overcrowded island, had to stand fast and endure for a period whose end they could not foresee. It was all very well for Mussolini to pretend to King Victor Emmanuel, as Count Ciano recorded in his Diary on the 22nd April 1940, that "Italy to-day is in fact a British Colony, and certain Italians would be disposed to make this a legal fact that is, they would make of her a Malta multiplied by a million." The Maltese saw perfectly clearly that there was no prospect of respite from their non-stop ordeal as long as Italy remained a belligerent. No wonder that they received the news of tl1e capture of Tripoli in January 1943 with relief and jubilation, for it meant that the end of their trials was in sight. They must have heard the 'ancestral voices' of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, their erstwhile Public Secretary, prophesying not war but victory, for they had not forgotten that the failure of the Knights to hold Tripoli in 1551 had been the prelude to the Siege of 1565. That is what it means to be an ancient people with a long memory.
History has a curious way of repeating itsel£ We have seen how not quite four centuries before the Second Great Siege the outcome of the First was watched by all Europe with the deepest anxiety; how Queen Elizabeth I voiced that universal concern with her characteristic clearness of vision; how Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury, ordered the use for six weeks of a special service entitled "A Short Form of Thanksgiving to God for the Delivery of the Isle of Malta from the Invasions and Long Siege thereof, both by Sea and Land."
No less intently were the fortunes of Malta followed by the peoples of Europe during the Second World War, if not with quite the same unanimity of outlook regarding the result. "The eyes of all Britain," said Sir Winston Churchill in a message addressed to Malta in 1941, "and, indeed, of the whole British Empire, are watching Malta in her struggle day by day, and we are sure that success as well as glory will reward your efforts." And the eyes not only of the British Empire: President Franklin Roosevelt brought personally to Malta a message conveying the sentiments of the people of the United States, a message now recorded on a plaque which flanks on the outer wall of the Palace a similar one recording the award to Malta of the George Cross by King George VI. The King's plaque is inscribed as follows:
BUCKINGHAM PALACE
THE GOVERNOR
MALTA
To Honour her brave People I award the George
Cross to the Island Fortress of Malta to bear witness
to a Heroism and Devotion that will long be famous
in History.
George R.I.
April 15th, 1942
As for the peoples of the Axis, they were as fully convinced as those of the United Nations of the paramount effect of Malta's fate on the fortunes of war in the Mediterranean and beyond that sea. Mussolini had known what he was about in his long-range policy for the absorption of Malta into the "Third Roman Empire." In November 1942 that great Commonwealth leader, Field-Marshal Smuts, called the opening of the Allied campaign in North Africa "the most amazing transformation of the war. Who knows," he went on to ask, "whether another Carthage will not yet avenge herself against a recreant Rome?"
Never had the inspired South African soldier, scholar and statesman spoken in more prophetic vein. Not only did Carthage avenge herself at long last against recreant Rome; Carthage's fairer daughter Malta,
matre pulchra filia pulchrior,
settled her score, too, with the pinchbeck Caesar. Gabriele d'Annunzio-poet and novelist of genius in more languages and dialects than his own Italian and Abruzzese; master of words and connoisseur of beauty as few have been; ugly, gooseberry-eyed amorist with an amazing fascination for women, but caddish egoist in his human relationships and totally devoid of a sense of humour; the once pomaded fop of Florentine salons (as the writer remembers him well in the early days of the century) who in his sixth decade became a fearless and dashing fighter in war; Fascist of a fanaticism that in its last phase degenerated into frenzy-that strange, contradictory, portentous being once fulminated in chauvinistic fury: "Malta is no longer an island, but an infection to be cured."
Well, things turned out contrary to the hopes of the exalté Prince of Monte Nevoso. When on the 11th September 1943 Admiral of the Fleet Sir Andrew Cunningham, later Knight of the Thistle and a Viscount, signalled with the time-honoured terseness of British naval phraseology, "Be pleased to inform Their Lordships that the Italian battle fleet now lies at anchor under the guns of the fortress of Malta," d'Annunzio's patient had become the doctor. History repeats itself, we know. But seldom does it take so dramatic a revenge.
Well might the King address to the Admiral a personal message conveying his "heartfelt congratulations on this triumphant result of three years of war in the Mediterranean"; well might His Majesty create a new precedent in British history by making of Malta the first community in the Empire and Commonwealth to be honoured collectively by the bestowal of a British decoration. (His father had conferred the Military Cross on Ypres in the First W odd War.) "The Bulwark of the Faith" had become the bulwark of freedom in the Middle Sea. Justly had it merited its latest title of "Malta, George Cross."
The tenacity of the Maltese during their long ordeal recalls to me the epitaph written by Tymnes, a Greek poet of the second century B.C., on a Maltese dog:
He came from Malta; and Eumelus says
He had no better dog in all his days.
We called him Bull.
Such might have been Great Britain's tribute after the second Siege of Malta to her watchdog-island in the Mediterranean. |
