Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made (11 page)

III

Churchill’s enforced return to his regiment after Malakand irritated him. He was eager to see more action and, even before he had completed his book, he was agitating for a place on another expedition. The tribesmen of the mountainous Tirah region – between the Khanki Valley and the Khyber Pass – had exploited the opportunity created by the Malakand rising to stage a rebellion of their own. General Sir William Lockhart was given command of an expeditionary force of 40,000 men to suppress what was the most serious anti-British outbreak since the 1857 mutiny. Lord George Hamilton, the Secretary of State for India, talked boldly of transforming the ‘wild tribesmen’ into loyal subjects, just as the Scottish rebels of the eighteenth century had been transformed into the Highland regiments now fighting them.
⁶⁷
Those soldiers were incredibly brave, but nonetheless incurred heavy losses, provoking Liberal criticism of the sacrifice of men and money.
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Having made substantial advances, the troops retired for the winter; but as one commander later admitted, what was ‘politely called an evacuation [. . .] was really a “get away” of the worst type’.
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In January 1898 – although still hankering to see the fighting himself – Churchill told Lady Randolph that the whole expedition had been a mistake. Regular troops, which made an ideal target for guerrilla fighters, could not ‘catch or kill an impalpable cloud of skirmishers’. Lacking the means to subdue the tribesmen, it was wrong to make the attempt.
⁷⁰
Yet if these remarks appeared to signal a change in his thinking about the frontier question, that change was to be short lived.

In March 1898 Churchill’s efforts to get to the front – which had included a fruitless visit to Calcutta to lobby the authorities – paid off at last. Colonel Ian Hamilton, who had befriended him on his journey to England the previous year, made efforts to smooth his way. Clever, courageous and charming – ‘brilliant and chivalrous’, as Churchill put it – Hamilton had repeatedly showed his fearlessness in battle in Afghanistan and elsewhere. He was severely wounded during the first Boer War (1881) and was afterwards left with a withered hand. In 1891 became the youngest colonel in the British army.
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In Churchill he clearly recognized a kindred spirit, someone who would go out and look for action rather than sit and wait for instructions. Churchill, while at a polo tournament in Meerut (only one and a half days’ rail journey from the front), now begged Hamilton by telegram to arrange an interview for him with General Lockhart. Accounts conflict as to whether Hamilton actually succeeded in fixing this, but he at any rate advised Churchill to take the risk of going to see the general in Peshawar. Churchill did so, even though, unless his application for a position on the force was accepted, he would not be able to get back to Bangalore before his leave expired.
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At this point, another man came into the picture. This was Captain Aylmer Haldane, Lockhart’s aide-de-camp, who, like Hamilton, was to play a significant role in Churchill’s future career.

Haldane was a dozen years older than Churchill and, prior to his service with the Tirah field force, had seen action in Waziristan and with the Chitral relief force. On 5 March he was at the bungalow headquarters of William Nicholson, the field force’s Chief of Staff, when Churchill arrived, and was delegated to find out what he wanted. Haldane had already heard of Churchill, and was immediately impressed by him. ‘He struck me almost at first sight as cut out on a vastly different pattern from any officer of his years I had so far met’, he recalled.
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He persuaded Nicholson to accept him onto the staff. Churchill wrote: ‘I have never met this man before and I am at a loss to know why he should have espoused my cause – with so strange an earnestness.’ His first impression was that Haldane was intelligent, brave, ambitious and conscientious, and with extraordinary influence over Nicholson, albeit he was very unpopular.
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Although he soon decided that his new friend was not quite as clever as he first thought – and at times found him over-bearing and irritating – the two got on ‘capitally’. Haldane confessed to Churchill that he was unhappily married.
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Churchill, for his part, told Haldane that he aimed to go into politics, and talked to him of books (including H. G. Wells, Winwood Reade and Gibbon). ‘As we trudged along the dusty roads near Peshawar he would quote snatches from Rudyard Kipling’, Haldane remembered.
⁷⁶

By this time the field force’s activities were more or less at an end. Churchill did see some fighting – Ian Hamilton, another latecomer to the expedition, recalled seeing him ‘enjoying himself amongst the bullets’ in the Bara Valley.
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His chief service, though, was as a propagandist. As Hamilton acknowledged in his memoirs, under the terms of the peace deal that Nicholson patched up, the tribesmen ‘surrendered some thousands of their rifles, most of them captured or stolen from us, and were [. . .] given umpteen heavy bags of silver to induce them to go on pretending they had been defeated’.
⁷⁸
Churchill, though, was to drop his previous private criticisms and to describe the outcome much more optimistically. Haldane’s influence may have been important here. ‘So far as I could I took care to ensure that he [Churchill] should meet those whose views on frontier policy I had imbibed from my seniors and which seemed to be sound’, the older man recalled; ‘and he several times discussed with Colonel Warbuton [one of the force’s political officers] the recent troubles on the border and their bearing on future problems’.
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As Churchill put it later, Haldane’s inside descriptions of the operations ‘showed me that much went on of which I and the general public were unconscious’.
⁸⁰
Or to put it another way, he was given the army’s ‘spin’.

Churchill showed his usefulness when Haldane revealed to him that Nicholson had been incensed by an article in the
Fortnightly Review
criticizing the conduct of the campaign.
⁸¹
The general had been so stung, in fact, that he had written a reply, signed it ‘Chief of the Staff’, and sent it to the
Fortnightly
. Churchill realized that this was undignified, if not improper, and successfully urged that Nicholson should withdraw the piece from publication.
⁸²
Probably as a direct result of this incident, Churchill wrote his own article. Styled as a private letter to a Conservative MP – an artifice which can have fooled few – it was published in
The Times
. He did not make any effort to rebut criticisms of the campaign in detail, but instead dismissed them as gossip generated by ‘stragglers’ who had rushed home early. He denied that the results had been disappointing: ‘The business has been finished and yet while the army receives the humble submission of the most ferocious savages in Asia, we are assailed by the taunts and reproaches of our countrymen at home.’ At one point, though, he seemed to give the game away. He told the touching story of Private James Clow, who was accidentally shot by one of his fellow-soldiers with a dum-dum bullet and had to have his leg amputated. Invalided home, Clow and others of the wounded were visited by the Queen, and he told her he thought he had been hit by a Martini bullet (which might have been fired by a tribesman). Churchill saluted Clow’s well-meaning disingenuity: ‘This poor man – penniless & a cripple, because he thought the truth might “give away” the regiment to which he belonged, had concocted this fiction’ in order to save its honour.
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But as the Liberal
Westminster Gazette
pointed out, Churchill clearly believed that if Clow was entitled to deceive the Queen to spare his regiment, then he, Churchill, was also entitled to deceive the public so as to shield the army. ‘We are not criticising this ingenious “concocter of fiction”, James Clow, but the eulogy he gets is a sufficient revelation of what Mr Churchill’s “accepted creed” in these matters is. Mr Churchill may not be deceiving us – but how can we be in the least sure that he is not a second Clow?’
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IV

After the Tirah campaign, Churchill determined to make his way to the Sudan, where the British reconquest was entering its climactic phase. After the death of General Gordon at Khartoum in 1885, British and Egyptian forces had withdrawn from the country. The Mahdi died just a few months after his victory. Under his nominated successor, the Khalifa ‘Abdallahi, the Mahdist state established its writ with a fair degree of success. It had a tolerable postal service, a taxation system that aspired towards fairness, and its own currency. In Omdurman, the new capital, the Khalifa made some efforts at slum clearance.
⁸⁵
All this belied the idea that the Mahdists – usually referred to by the British as ‘Dervishes’ – were merely savages. A similar point struck Churchill when he at last found his way into the Khalifa’s abandoned house, with its bathroom served by hot and cold water. Its owner, he thought, ‘must have possessed civilised qualities’, as he was clearly a man who understood life’s decencies.
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Nonetheless, the state was a tyranny, and suffered from corruption. Confiscation was used as a weapon against internal enemies, but the more it was deployed the more those enemies multiplied. The Khalifa’s power base weakened. Jihad, the state’s guiding force and motivational principle, generated diminishing returns as the population wearied of war. There was, moreover, the type of legislation that is familiar in Islamist states today. Women were to be veiled outside the home, and those who disobeyed were beaten; those who ventured into the market place could be punished with one hundred lashes.
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The escaped European captives who acted as anti-Mahdist propagandists may have exaggerated the horrors of the regime – as Churchill for one appreciated – but they had plenty of material with which to work.
⁸⁸

Neither dislike for the regime nor the desire for revenge for Gordon’s death was enough in itself to provoke the British into action. But in 1896 the Italian army was heavily defeated by the Abyssinians at the Battle of Adowa. The Cabinet agreed to help the Italians by relieving Mahdist pressure on their garrison at Kassala. The resulting British–Egyptian advance was to turn into an unstoppable juggernaut of reconquest. This satisfied several impulses at once: Lord Salisbury’s hatred of the ‘false religion’ of Islam, the public’s desire to avenge Gordon, the government’s wish to frustrate other great powers in the region, and its urge to control the upper reaches of the Nile in the interests of Egypt’s economy and in turn its bondholders.
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It should not be assumed, however, that support for the reconquest was unanimous. Some Liberals felt that it had not been properly thought through, and warned that Britain risked overtaxing her strength.
⁹⁰

The man in charge was H. H. Kitchener, the Commander-in-Chief (or ‘Sirdar’) of the Egyptian army. He spoke Arabic and he knew the ground, having served in Sudan as an intelligence officer with the doomed Gordon Relief Expedition. His most remarkable achievement of the campaign was his construction of a railway across the desert, cutting journey times to a fraction of what had been possible by steamer or camel and ending the seasonal dependence on the level of the Nile. Churchill observed in a masterly chapter of
The River War
that mere flesh and blood could scarcely hope to prevail against this magnificent combination of planning and machinery. ‘Fighting the Dervish was primarily a matter of transport’, he wrote. ‘The Khalifa was conquered on the railway.’
⁹¹
Kitchener gained a reputation as ‘the man who has cut out his human heart and made himself a machine to retake Khartum’.
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He was also autocratic, highly secretive and did not, as a rule, care much for correspondents.

After the British victory at Atbara in April 1898, the fall of the Mahdist regime was all but assured. The question for Churchill was whether he could get to the Sudan in time to see the endgame. After Tirah he headed to England on leave, which was when he had the meeting with Salisbury mentioned above. He prevailed upon the Prime Minister, and as many others as he could (including the Prince of Wales), to persuade Kitchener to accept his attachment. He was, in fact, only one of a long list of supplicants; the Queen’s grandson Prince Christian Victor of Schleswig-Holstein, for instance, was another.
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Yet in this instance the Sirdar would not bend. He was probably suspicious of Churchill’s intention to write about the campaign. Only a last-minute vacancy in the 21st Lancers – which was not part of the Egyptian army and therefore came under the authority of the War Office rather than the Sirdar – enabled Churchill to join in time for the final phase. His bitterness against Kitchener was considerable.

Churchill again contracted to write for the press – this time for the
Morning Post
. He was, in fact, one of a whole pack of journalists; Kitchener had earlier tried and failed to limit coverage to that of Reuters.
⁹⁴
One of the correspondents was G. W. Steevens of the
Daily Mail
, described by H. L. Mencken as ‘the greatest newspaper reporter who ever lived’;
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by Churchill as ‘the most brilliant man in journalism I have ever met’;
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and by Kitchener (who plagiarized his reports for his own despatches) as a ‘genius’.
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Pale and thin but also witty and cheerful, he held strong Social Darwinist views and was a brilliant propagandist of Empire; Churchill was especially impressed by his article ‘From the New Gibbon’, a pastiche which warned against the decadence that might lead to the downfall of the British Empire.
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Steevens was soon to boost Churchill’s career with an article that dubbed him ‘the youngest man in Europe’. He shrewdly observed that his new friend had qualities that could make him ‘almost at will, a great popular leader, a great journalist, or the founder of a great advertising business’.
⁹⁹
He and Churchill were often compared to one another, although the latter was undoubtedly the superior writer.
¹⁰⁰
After Steevens’s death of fever during the Boer War, Churchill repaid his compliments: ‘Modest yet proud, wise as well as witty, cynical but above all things sincere, he combined the characters of a charming companion and a good comrade.’
¹⁰¹
Another colleague in the Sudan was Hubert Howard of
The Times
, who was to survive the Battle of Omdurman only to be hit by ‘a friendly shell’ later the same day. It struck Churchill as strange that the experienced Howard should be killed and he himself escape unscathed; but, as he vaingloriously remarked to his mother, who could say that that result should not be better for the Empire?
¹⁰²