The sand of the desert is sodden red, -
Red with the wreck of a square that broke; -
The Gatling’s jammed and the colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.
The river of death has brimmed his banks,
And England’s far, and Honour a name,
But the voice of schoolboy rallies the ranks,
“Play up! play up! and play the game!”
Red with the wreck of a square that broke; -
The Gatling’s jammed and the colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.
The river of death has brimmed his banks,
And England’s far, and Honour a name,
But the voice of schoolboy rallies the ranks,
“Play up! play up! and play the game!”
“Horrible
and revolting” – that’s how 22-year-old British cavalry officer turned war
correspondent for The Daily Telegraph and Pioneer newspapers,
Winston Churchill, described in a dispatch what he saw when entering the ruins
of the village of Desemdullah in the Mohmand Valley in British India’s
Northwest Frontier (today’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province in northwestern
Pakistan) on the morning of September 22, 1897.
Pashtun
tribesmen had unearthed the 36 bodies of fallen British and Indian soldiers,
hastily buried a few days earlier in unmarked graves, and mutilated them beyond
recognition. “The tribesmen are among the most miserable and brutal creatures
on earth. Their intelligence only enables them to be more cruel, more
dangerous, more destructible than the wild beasts. (…) I find it impossible to
come to any other conclusion than that, in proportion that these valleys are
purged form the pernicious vermin that infest them, so will the happiness of
humanity be increased, and the progress of mankind accelerated,” a shaken and
sulfurous Churchill jotted down in his notebook that day.
The
Pashtun tribesmen, the forebears to today’s Pashtun insurgents in Afghanistan
and Pakistan, had risen against the British in 1897 due to the division of
their tribal territory by the Durand line in 1893, as well as the gradual
British occupation of Pashtun lands. They rallied under the leadership of the
Pashtun fakir Saidullah, nicknamed “Mad Mullah,” by the British, who declared a
“jihad” against British India and rallied more than 10,000 warriors to his
cause.
Pashtun
warriors under Saidullah attacked forts and camps guarding the Malakand Pass
and by doing so threatened British control of the entire Northwest
Frontier. ”The British held the summit of the Malakand Pass and thus had
maintained the road from the Swat Valley and across the Swat River by many
other valleys to Chitral,” Winston Churchill summarized the strategic
importance of the pass in his autobiography My Early Life.
The
British reacted quickly and assembled a punitive expedition, the
so-called Malakand Field Force, to pacify the Pashtun tribes along the
Afghan-Indian (today’s Afghanistan-Pakistan) border. The force included young
Churchill, who for around $420 (in today’s value) per piece, wrote a number of
dispatches under the heading of “The War in the Indian Highlands,” which were
signed—much to Churchill’s consternation, since he wanted to become famous
through his writing—“By a Young Officer.”
Yet,
finding the mutilated corpses on that September morning put a slight
temper on the “medal hunter” as he was sometimes dismissively called. Some of
the desecrated dead he found in Desemdullah were young British soldiers of his
age, perhaps bringing home for the first time the realities of war to
Churchill, who joined hoping “like most young fools” that “something exciting
would happen” while he was with the troops.
Churchill
would later on sardonically boast in My Early Life that
luckily for those, like himself, who were fond of war “there were still savages
and barbarous peoples. There were Zulus and Afghans, also the Dervishes of the
Soudan. Some of them might, if they were well-disposed, ‘put up a show’
someday.”
And a
show the Pashtun tribesmen in the ten-mile long Mohmand Valley, located in the
mountains to the northwest of Peshawar, did put up. In fact, they had beaten
back the British-Indian force sent against them, under British
Brigadier-General P.D. Jeffreys, which sustained 149 casualties. Churchill saw
some of the British wounded himself with “their faces drawn by pain and
anxiety, looked ghastly in the pale light of the early morning.” Even the
general had received a head wound and wore a uniform covered in his own blood.
“It was not apparently all a gay adventure,” Churchill would later write.
The
battle was a setback, but the British—“the dominant race” in Churchill’s
words—would wreak terrible retribution on the “the savages” and step up their
even campaign of burning villages and killing everyone in their path who
resisted. “After today we begin to burn villages. Every one. And all who resist
will be killed without quarter,” Churchill wrote to a friend that September.
“The Mohmands need a lesson, and there is no doubt we are a very cruel people.”
In his autobiography he matter-of-factly noted how the British went about their
business:
We
proceeded systematically, village by village, and we destroyed the houses,
filled up the wells, blew down the towers, cut down the great shady trees,
burned the crops and broke the reservoirs in punitive devastation.
He goes
on to note that whenever the Pashtun tribesmen would put up resistance the
British would lose two to three officers and 15 to 20 Indian soldiers.
However, “no quarter was asked or given,” Churchill noted, “and every
tribesman caught was speared or cut down at once.”
Time and
again he praised the endurance of the British soldier in his dispatches and
compared them—true to his imperialist credo-favorably to their Indian
comrades-in-arms. “The soldiers of India naturally feel the effects of the
climate less than those from cooler lands. This, of course, the British
infantryman will not admit. The dominant race resent the slightest suggestion
of inferiority. (…) This is the material for empire‑building.”
The young
war correspondent was also apparently not a fan of what today would be called a
“hearts and mind approach” in dealing with insurgents, at least so he claims in
My Early Life. He dismissively talks about political officers, who
“parleyed all the time with the chiefs, the priests and other local notables,”
which made them very unpopular among fellow army officers.
He
singled out one particular efficient British envoy who always “just when we
were looking forward to having a splendid fight and all the guns were loaded
and everyone keyed up, this Major Deane and why was he a Major anyhow? so we
said being in truth nothing better than an ordinary politician would come along
and put a stop to it all,” by seeking some sort of diplomatic accommodation
between a tribe and the British.
True to
his bellicose nature, Churchill conversely rather believed in the power of the
dumdum bullet, a soft-point bullet that expands upon impact, and the well-aimed
volleys of British and Indian soldiers, who, when they caught them in in the
open, killed thousands of Pashtuns, and proved the British poet Hilaire Beloc’s
truism right that “whatever happens, we have got The Maxim gun [a type of
machine gun], and they have not,” when reminiscing about the uneven clashes
between imperialists and natives in the late 19th century.
Indeed,
the campaign against the Mohmand tribe would come to a rather swift end in
early October 1897, with the tribesmen agreeing to hand over their rifles and
promising to live peacefully (at least for a while). Churchill rejoined his
regiment, the 4th Hussars, stationed at that time in Bangalore. The
punitive expedition had cost the British Raj 282 men killed or wounded out of a
force of roughly 1,200. Pashtun casualties are unknown but some estimates are
as as high as 10,000. In January 1898, the Malakand Field Force was officially
disbanded and the soldiers returned to their garrisons.
While
embedded with the troops Churchill saw “more fighting than I expected, and very
hard fighting too,” the overall commander of the Malakand Field Force,
Major-General Sir Bindon Blood later recalled. More than once, Churchill saw
people around him killed (“The British officer was spinning just behind me, his
face a mass of blood, his right eye cut out,” as he recounted in one
instance.), endured the sight of massacres, the agonizing cries of the wounded,
and the psychological toll of fighting, what in Victorian eyes, must have been
a merciless enemy encapsulated in Kipling’s The Young British Soldier:
“When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains, And the women come out
to cut up what remains, Just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains…”
Churchill
does recount on a few occasions in letters what today (and back then) without a
doubt would be considered war crimes on the British side. For example, he saw
how Sikh soldiers of the British-Indian Army torture and slowly kill a wounded
Pashtun tribesman by shoving him little by little into an incinerator that
slowly melted the skin off the poor man’s bones amidst his agonizing
cries. The other side was not much better. “The tribesman,” Churchill
wrote in a letter, “torture the wounded & mutilate the dead. The troops
never spare a man who falls into their hands – whether he be wounded or not . .
. The picture is a terrible one.”
While
admitting to acts of barbarism on both sides during the campaign, he never
condemned it, although he felt the need to assure his mother in a letter that
he himself, during his six week stint as a war-correspondent, did not commit
any heinous acts. “I have not soiled my hands with any dirty work,” he
wrote to her.
Dismissing
the entire region and its inhabitants as uncivilized —“savages impelled by
fanaticism”—he did not expect his side or the enemy to follow the rules of
gentlemanly (European) warfare he had been taught at the Royal Military Academy
at Sandhurst. As a result, it must have been easier for him to shed the horror
of war, dismissing it as an abnormality in the conduct of warfare and something
that would not occur during the clash of “civilized nations.” For him, a
child of the Victorian period, war remained a game, best exemplified by Sir
Henry Newbolt’s poem Vitai Lampada,
coincidentally first published in 1897, the same year that Churchill was
fighting on the Northwest Frontier:
The sand of the desert is sodden red, -
Red with the wreck of a square that broke; -
The Gatling’s jammed and the colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.
The river of death has brimmed his banks,
And England’s far, and Honour a name,
But the voice of schoolboy rallies the ranks,
“Play up! play up! and play the game!”
Red with the wreck of a square that broke; -
The Gatling’s jammed and the colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.
The river of death has brimmed his banks,
And England’s far, and Honour a name,
But the voice of schoolboy rallies the ranks,
“Play up! play up! and play the game!”
That war
will be like a game of cricket, of course, turned out to be a fatal
miscalculation; one that Churchill was not alone in making around the turn of
the last century. By Franz-Stefan Gady
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