Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill (3 page)

It was, in fact, the Pashtun’s unmatched ferocity in battle that drew Churchill to India, and to the Pashtun heartland known as Malakand. In October 1896, Churchill had arrived in India with his regiment, the Fourth Queen’s Own Hussars. He had come hoping to find himself quickly at the center of action. Instead, he had spent month after frustrating month in Bangalore, which he irritably described to his mother as a “
3rd rate watering place.”

The incredible luxury in which he lived had made little difference. Left to find their own lodgings, Churchill and two fellow officers had chosen what Churchill described to his mother as “
a magnificent pink and white stucco palace in the middle of a large and beautiful garden.” They paid for this lavish abode by combining their salaries, given to them in silver rupees poured into a string net bag “
as big as a prize turnip,” with any allowance they managed to pry from dwindling family fortunes.

Like some of his fellow officers, Churchill came from a family that was rich in titles and grand estates, but little else. The Churchill family palace, Blenheim, was, like most great houses in England at the end of the nineteenth century, hovering on the brink of collapse.
The 5th and 6th Dukes of Marlborough had lived lives of such extravagance that when Churchill’s grandfather inherited the title and the palace, he had been forced to sell not just land but
some of the treasures that the family held most dear. In 1875, when Churchill was not yet a year old, the 7th Duke sold the Marlborough Gems, a stunning assortment of more than 730 carved gemstones, for more than £36,000. A few years later, despite the protestations of his family, he sold the Sunderland Library, a vast and historically significant collection.

The most effective means the Churchills had found of keeping the palace from going under, however, had been to marry the successive dukes off to “dollar princesses,” enormously wealthy heiresses whose families longed for an old British title to burnish their new American money. Soon after becoming the 8th Duke, Churchill’s uncle George Spencer-Churchill, whose first wife divorced him in the wake of an affair, married a wealthy New York widow named Lillian Warren Hamersley. His son, now the 9th Duke, dutifully followed in his footsteps, marrying a dollar princess of his own, the American railroad heiress Consuelo Vanderbilt, in 1895.

Despite his family’s financial failings, Churchill was accustomed to a lavish lifestyle, and he hired a veritable army of servants while in India. “
We each have a ‘Butler’ whose duties are to wait at table—to manage the household and to supervise the stables: A First Dressing Boy or valet who is assisted by a second DB: and a sais [syce] to every horse or pony,” Churchill had coolly explained to his mother. “Besides this we share the services of 2 gardeners—3 Bhistis or water carriers—4 Dhobies or washermen & 1 watchman. Such is our ménage.”

When a Pashtun revolt began in the mountains of Malakand the next year, Churchill, bored and restless, had been on leave in London, at the world-famous Goodwood Racecourse.
It was a perfect day, the racecourse was so beautiful that the Prince of Wales referred to it as a “garden party with racing tacked on,” and Churchill was “winning my money.” As soon as he learned of the revolt, however, Churchill knew that this was the opportunity he had been waiting for, and he was not about to waste a moment or wait for an invitation.

Quickly scouring the newspapers, Churchill had learned that the military had formed a field force of three brigades to send to
the front, and as luck would have it, its commander was a friend of his mother: the Dickensian-named Sir Bindon Blood. Having anticipated just such a turn of events, Churchill had, a year earlier, cultivated a friendship with Blood himself and had extracted from the major general a promise to take him along if he were ever in command of a regiment on the Indian frontier.

Churchill had never had any qualms about pulling every string he had. “
I am certainly not one of those who need to be prodded,” he would admit years later in a speech to the House of Commons. “In fact, if anything, I am a prod.” Over the years, he would often turn to his American mother, a renowned beauty who had many admirers in high-ranking positions, to help him get appointments. “
In my interest she left no wire unpulled,” Churchill wrote, “no stone unturned, no cutlet uncooked.”

Racing to the nearest telegraph, Churchill had sent Blood a telegram, reminding him of his promise, and then, without waiting to hear back, set sail for India. “
Having realized, that if a British cavalry officer waits till he is ordered on active service, he is likely to wait a considerable time,” he later wrote, “I obtained six weeks’ leave of absence from my regiment…in the hope of being sooner or later attached to the force in a military capacity.”

Churchill had not heard back from Blood until he reached Bombay, where he found waiting for him a less than encouraging telegram. “
Very difficult; no vacancies,” Blood had written hastily. “Come up as a correspondent; will try to fit you in.” Churchill, however, did not need encouragement. He only needed a chance. After swiftly securing assignments as a journalist with the
Pioneer
newspaper and the
Daily Telegraph
, he had made his way by rail across the two thousand miles that stretched between Bangalore and Malakand in just five days.

On September 15, 1897, as the mountain sky darkened and the cold night fell, Churchill lowered himself into a makeshift trench
he had dug in the rocky soil of Malakand. The trench was a critical defense against enemy snipers in the surrounding mountainsides, but as the dry gray dust sifted onto Churchill’s khaki uniform, leather boots and pale hands, it seemed as though he were not settling in for the night but fitting himself for his own shallow grave. The fact that he was wrapped in a dead man’s blanket—bought just weeks earlier from the possessions of a British soldier killed in these same mountains—only seemed to complete the ominous tableau.

Everywhere Churchill looked, death, or the imminent threat of it, pressed in on him from the frigid, dark peaks of the Hindu Kush. Malakand, he would later write, was like an enormous cup, with his camp, Inayat Kila, at the bottom and a jagged rim of rocks looming above. The giant black walls of the mountains closed around him, glittering with the menacing campfires of hundreds of enemy Pashtun tribesmen—the “
hell fiends” he had come to fight.

Crouching silently in their twisted turbans and pale, loose shirts, with heavy bandoliers of ammunition across their shoulders, the Pashtun themselves were invisible in the dark. The largest and most feared tribal group in Afghanistan, they had for centuries dominated not just Malakand but the entire Hindu Kush, a massive, five-hundred-mile-long mountain system that separated central and south Asia. They knew every jagged, rain-carved crevice, every barren hillock, every bullet-pocked boulder. This was their land, and ever since it had been divided by the separation of Afghanistan and British India four years earlier, they had held a particular hatred for the British Empire and its soldiers. As a Pashtun proverb put it, “You should always kill an Englishman.”

Now, in the midst of their rebellion, the Pashtun warriors prepared to do just that, gripping their long, elaborately decorated rifles, training their sights on anyone brave or foolish enough to light a match or lift his head above the sanctuary of a trench. Even before the percussion of the Pashtun weapons reached them across the thin night air, the British could hear the bullets striking around them, ringing against rocks, kicking up geysers of dust and, too often, drawing a shriek of agony.
The night before, the Pashtun had killed
forty men in a nearby camp with astonishing accuracy, shooting one man through the heart and another through the head, dropping him like a stone as the bullet shattered his skull.

Even more frightening than the Pashtun’s long-range marksmanship was the ferocity with which they fought hand to hand, face-to-face. To British soldiers, who were themselves renowned for their courage, the Pashtun seemed terrifyingly heedless of their own safety, or even survival. They fought when they had no chance of winning, when they were alone on the battlefield, when they had been shot and speared and bayoneted. “Careless of what injury they may receive,” Churchill observed in awe, “they devote themselves to the destruction of their opponent.”

Unflinching in the face of their own suffering, the Pashtun were merciless when it came to the enemy’s. They did not just kill but slaughtered, slicing men’s bodies to ribbons with their long, curved swords. “
Death by inches and hideous mutilation,” Churchill wrote, “are the invariable measure meted out to all who fall in battle into the hands of the Pathan tribesmen.” Just a few days later, he would watch, shocked and sickened, as the body of one of his friends was carried away after it had been “
literally cut to pieces” by the Pashtun.

Long after night had descended completely, obscuring everything before him but watch fires and the occasional dull gleam of a bayonet, Churchill, unable to sleep, peered intently at the stars overhead. As he listened to nearby soldiers tensely coughing and shifting in their trenches, yearning for the night to end, he contemplated “
those impartial stars, which shine as calmly on Piccadilly Circus as on Inayat Kila.” Bindon Blood had ordered the men to march into the mountains the next morning, burning homes and crops and destroying water reservoirs. Reveille would sound at 5:30, and the Pashtun, they knew, would be waiting.

When the soldiers and officers of Blood’s brigade climbed out of their trenches on the morning of September 16, not one of them
could be sure he would live to nightfall. Whatever unspoken thoughts they might have harbored of home or even the relative safety of their trenches, however, they had little choice but to face the Pashtun. Among them, only Churchill could have turned around and left at any moment, and he had no intention of going anywhere but into battle.

Buttoning a padded cloth onto the back of his uniform to protect his spine, straightening the chain-mail epaulets on his jacket, meant to shield him against the slash of a sword, and adjusting his khaki-covered cork pith helmet, Churchill knew that many of the young men surrounding him would perform acts of striking heroism on the battlefield that day. He also knew that very few of them would be seen or, if seen, remembered. Where his own future was at stake, he was determined to even the odds.

As Blood divided his thousand men into three columns, Churchill quickly attached himself to the center column, a squadron of Bengal Lancers that was headed deep into the valley on a mission of destruction guaranteed to provoke the Pashtun, and to give Churchill plenty of opportunity for conspicuous bravery. The squadron, however, also appealed to him for another reason: It was part of a cavalry regiment, which allowed him to do something that, although it stunned every man in the brigade, would guarantee that he, at least, would not be forgotten. Gripping the side of his saddle, he swung a leg, wrapped in leather from his riding breeches to his boot, over the back of a gray pony.

Churchill had acquired the pony on his way to Malakand, at the same auction in which he had bought his blanket from the effects of a young soldier killed in battle. His plan, he would later tell his brother, was to ride “
about trying to attract attention when things looked a little dangerous,” hoping that his “good grey pony” would catch someone’s eye. Although it was much more likely to catch the eye of a Pashtun tribesman who would kill him before anyone had an opportunity to admire his courage, Churchill was willing to take that chance. “
The boy seemed to look out for danger,” an article in
Harper’s
magazine would later marvel. “He rode on a white pony, the
most conspicuous of all marks, and all the prayers of his friends could not make him give it up for a safer beast.”

Churchill understood that he could very easily be killed in the battle that lay before him, but he did not for a moment believe that he would be. “
I have faith in my star,” he had written to his mother just days earlier. “That I am intended to do something in the world.”
In fact, soon after arriving in India, he had told a fellow officer that not only did he plan to leave the military soon for a seat in Parliament but he expected to be prime minister one day.