Gandhi & Churchill (19 page)

It was the main theater of operations for the Indian Army and classic Kipling country, the setting for poems like “Gunga Din” and stories like “The Man Who Would Be King.” British and Indian troops had skirmished with Afridi and Pathan tribesmen along this rugged range of mountains for decades. The Malakand Pass itself was a deep cleft in a jagged bowl of mountainous ridges, guarded by a typical British garrison of Sikhs, Punjabis, and Bengal Lancers under the command of white officers. Some of those officers had been playing polo in a nearby town when locals warned them of an imminent uprising led by a local Muslim holy man or fakir, whom Churchill in his colorful dispatches to the
Daily Telegraph
dubbed the Mad Mullah.

The mullah was “a wild enthusiast,” as Winston described him, “convinced of his divine mission,” while “crafty politicians, hitherto powerless,” seized the opportunity of the call for war on the unbeliever to strike a blow against the British.
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Forty-eight hours later the telegraph wires had been cut and the Malakand garrison surrounded. Calcutta ordered General Blood to organize a relief column of 6,800 infantry and 700 cavalry to break them out.

It was, as Churchill noted, a typical frontier tiff. Inevitably, the British would march to the garrison’s rescue. Inevitably, British and Indian soldiers would be killed and wounded, and many more Pathans. And inevitably, the Pathans would withdraw to fight another day. Certainly “the fate of empires does not hang on the result.” Yet Winston’s dispatches for the
Pioneer
newspaper and the
Daily Telegraph,
and the book he composed out of them called
The Story of the Malakand Field Force,
gave this brief but violent encounter a more powerful significance, especially in light of the Diamond Jubilee and his reading of Gibbon.
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Churchill turned the battle into a classic confrontation between superior civilization and primitive barbarism.
The Malakand Field Force
is an epic of vigorous British law and order prevailing over the Mad Mullah and his hordes of screaming Ghazis, although Churchill noted that when the native Guides cavalry overran one of the Pathans’ strongholds, “no quarter was asked or given, and every tribesman caught was speared or cut down at once.” The dead bodies were “thickly strewed about the fields, spotting with black and white patches, the bright green of the rice crop.”
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Strategically the Malakand campaign was meaningless. But to young Winston, it was a conflict in which “the spectator may observe and accurately appreciate all grades of human courage.” He saw the courage of native Indian soldiers, who up to this time had entered his consciousness only as servants or opponents at polo. The garrison’s Sikhs and Punjabis fought and stood guard with cool steadiness for ninety-six hours without a break. Sepoy Prem Singh dodged sniper fire day after day while he sent semaphore signals from the garrison’s tower—“an action as brave as any which my pages record,” Churchill told his readers.
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He saw an army doctor stoically hold between his thumb and forefinger the ruptured artery of a wounded man so he did not bleed to death. General Blood had to shoot down a knife-wielding fanatic who treacherously attacked him under a flag of truce: the general coolly dropped his would-be assassin with a single bullet. “It is easy to imagine how delighted everyone in the Field Force, down to the most untouchable sweeper, was at such an event,” Churchill wrote.
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Last but not least on the scale of courage was Winston himself. In the second week of September, after securing the Malakand garrison, the brigade was sent to suppress rebels in the neighboring Mamund Valley. Churchill had not yet fired a shot, or had a shot fired at him in anger, despite the “rather grim” experience of dividing up the revolver, blanket, boots, and shirts of a dead fellow officer. But when General Jeffreys’s column was ordered up the valley to burn out the disobedient Pathans’ fields and villages, General Blood told Winston: “If you want to see a fight, you may ride back and join Jeffreys.”

“All night long the bullets flew across the camp,” Winston remembered years later, “but everyone now had good holes to lie in.”
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At dawn the brigade swung up the valley and fanned out. Winston had attached himself to a party of Sikhs led by a British officer. As they approached a seemingly deserted village, the entire mountainside sprang to life with volleys of rifle fire and sword-waving Pathans dodging from rock to rock.

The Sikhs scrambled for cover, even as “a shrill crying arose from many points.” Winston grabbed a rifle and began picking off the blue and white figures as they descended and clustered behind boulders one hundred yards from the tiny party. “We had certainly found the adventure for which we had been looking,” he laconically wrote later. The Sikh whose rifle Winston had borrowed got ready to leave, as did the rest of the group. As they turned to retreat, “there was a ragged volley from the rocks: shouts, exclamations, and a scream.” Two Sikh soldiers had been killed, and three wounded. “The British officer was spinning around just behind me, his face a mass of blood, his right eye cut out.”
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Together with another subaltern, the regimental adjutant, and a Sikh
havildar
or sergeant, Winston and his men managed to half-carry, half-drag the wounded down the slope. Pathan bullets continued to whiz around them. One struck the Sikh soldier at Winston’s side. “He shouted with pain,” Winston later recalled, “his turban fell off; and his long black hair streamed over his shoulders—a tragic golliwog.”
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Then the adjutant was hit and went down, and a party of Pathans sprang forward to finish the job. The other bearers fled. Only Winston stood between the wounded man and the lead tribesman, who slashed away at the prone figure with his sword. “I forgot everything else at this moment,” Churchill remembered, “except a desire to kill this man.”

He fired once, twice, three times with his pistol: but with the confusion and pumping adrenaline, he could not be sure he had actually hit his target. Nor could he be sure, after joining the Sikhs at the bottom of the hill, that any of the thirty or forty dodging Pathans he fired at were dead or had even been hit. But when relief came in the form of the Ross-shire Buffs and Bengal cavalry, a single exhilarating thought crossed his mind. He had fought his fight and survived. Whatever else anyone could say about him, Winston Churchill had served in action—although technically only as a newspaper correspondent.
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A couple of weeks later Winston would again serve under fire. By then General Blood had appointed him as his orderly, writing to the Fourth Hussars’ Brabazon that “if he gets the chance [he] will have the VC or DSO.”
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Winston wrote jubilantly to his mother, “I am still alive and well after another exciting week.”

But he was not scoring points with his fellow officers. They felt that his behavior during the campaign had been unseemly; they whispered that he was a medal hunter, a self-advertiser, and an unscrupulous “thruster”—precisely the words antagonists would whisper about him for the rest of his career. The adjutant general in Simla turned down his appointment as Blood’s orderly. His mother’s urgent letters to her husband’s old friend, General Roberts, failed to induce the a.g. to reverse his decision, while the publication of the self-advertising
Malakand Field Force
made him more enemies in the Indian Army than friends.

Yet in his own mind Winston was taking his leave of those antagonists. The losses among white officers in the Malakand and Mamund fighting gave him a temporary posting with the Thirty-first Punjab Infantry. Churchill did not speak a word of Hindi or Urdu. He saw no reason to learn, noting, as he told his brother Jack, that every Indian he met in Bangalore spoke perfect English.
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However, command forced him to learn at last two words:
maro
(kill) and
chalo
(hurry up). Otherwise, “if you grinned, they grinned. So I grinned industriously.” But since the Thirty-first Punjabis were largely out of the fighting, he was getting bored. He had got what he wanted out of India. He had had experience as a cavalry officer, the pleasure of being literally part of a “master race,” and the thrill of combat, plus an unanticipated benefit: a self-taught education with the greatest books in the English language. He was already looking around for fresh opportunities.

During the Malakand campaign he had proclaimed to the
Daily Telegraph
’s readers: “Civilization is face to face with militant Mohammedanism.” At the close of 1897, however, the storm center of that confrontation was not in India but in Africa, in the Sudan. In January 1885 the armies of the radical Islamic prophet the Mahdi had overrun Khartoum, killing the Egyptian pasha’s governor, General Charles George Gordon, and massacring the inhabitants. Twelve years later London was organizing a punitive expedition of 25,000 British and Egyptian troops, to be led by General Herbert Kitchener. Winston decided he wanted to be part of it.

He knew and admired Kitchener as one of the British Army’s most dedicated and bravest officers; he also knew Kitchener was, like General Blood, an admirer of his mother.
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The problem was that Kitchener did not admire him. A stern professional, Kitchener considered the publication of
Malakand Field Force,
with its sometimes caustic comments about Winston’s senior officers, bad form and self-serving. The last person he wanted around him was a bumptious, cocksure young busybody who was sure to pass everything he saw on to the newspapers.

So Kitchener remained deaf to Jennie Churchill’s pleadings and refused point-blank to take Winston on his staff. However, “No young man should ever take no for an answer,” Winston would say later,
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for the book that had so offended Kitchener and the rest of the army now came to his rescue. The prime minister and his father’s old colleague, Lord Salisbury, asked to see him. Salisbury had read
Malakand Field Force
and been deeply impressed by it. “I myself have been able to form a truer picture of the kind of fighting that has been going on in these frontier valleys,” he told Winston, “from your writings than from any other documents which it has been my duty to read.” In mid-July they met for half an hour at Number 10. When Winston left, Salisbury told him if he ever needed anything to let him know.
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It was a heaven-sent opportunity, and Winston seized it. As it happened, Kitchener had absolute authority over all appointments in the Egyptian army, and not even a prime minister’s entreaty was going to move him. But Kitchener’s British regiments were designated as part of a joint expeditionary force and were thus under the authority of the War Office.
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So less than a week later Winston received a telegram appointing him “supernumerary lieutenant” to the Twenty-first Lancers and ordering him to show up at regimental headquarters in Cairo. Six days later he was reporting for duty, with another newspaper contract, this time for the
Morning Post,
jammed in his tunic.

As a participant in the expedition against the Mahdi, Churchill took part in the last major confrontation between a British and a native army in Africa, at Omdurman on September 4, 1898. He also took part in the last great cavalry charge in British history, when Kitchener sent in the Twenty-first Lancers to complete the Dervishes’ rout. Winston’s chronic shoulder injury kept him from wielding either a lance or a sword, “like a knight in days of old.” Instead, he had to make do with a very large and very unchivalric Mauser pistol. But “everyone expected that we were going to make a charge,” he wrote years later. “In those days, before the Boer War, the British cavalry did little else.”
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And so they did. Winston was the first to see what they were charging at: “a long row of blue-black objects, two or three yards apart” advancing on their flank, which turned out to be “men—enemy men—squatting on the ground.” At that moment the regimental trumpeter sounded “Trot.” In an instant “the whole long column of cavalry began to jingle and clatter across the front of those crouching figures.”
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For Churchill, the charge was the climax of his military career and his ultimate reward for all those hours on the polo field. He left a long description in his dispatches for the
Morning Post,
which he also turned into a book. Thirty years later he wrote another account for his autobiography. But the most vivid version appears in a letter to one of his senior officers, Sir Ian Hamilton, right after the battle.

“The fire was too hot to allow of second lines,” he told Hamilton. “The only order given was Right Wheel into Line, Gallop and Charge were understood.” As they flew along, Churchill and the other Lancers assumed that the tribesmen wildly firing at them would break or scatter as the riders plunged into their line, where they were standing or kneeling four deep. But they did not. As the horses reared and plunged, the Dervishes “all fell knocked arse over tip and we passed through without any sort of shock.”
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Everything was flying confusion and dissolved into one-on-one combat. “I heard none of their bullets,” he told Hamilton, “which went Heaven knows where.” Winston kept firing his pistol until he ran out of ammunition, “killing several—3 for certain—2 doubtful—one very doubtful.” (Later he boasted to his mother that he had killed five for certain.) Then he saw he was alone and that the rest of the squadron had dropped back to regroup. He managed to join them “without a hair of my horse or a stitch of my clothing being touched. Very few,” he added, “can say the same.”
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