The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (47 page)

Churchill was standing on the lawn at the Goodwood races, enjoying balmy weather and winning money, when the report of this decision buzzed through the crowd. He was electrified. On meeting Sir Bindon at Deepdene the year before he had extracted a promise that, should the general take the field again, Winston would join him. Churchill had three weeks of leave left, but he instantly wired Blood, reminding him of his pledge, and caught the next boat to India, the S.S.
Rome,
leaving behind, in his haste, a batch of new books, his polo sticks, his pet dog Peas, a Primrose League badge old Mr. Skrine had lent him in Bath, and, of course, a sheaf of bills. At each port of call he looked, in vain, for a reply from Blood. This P & O voyage was even worse than the last, particularly on the Red Sea: “The temperature is something like over 100° and as it is damp heat—it is equal to a great deal more…. It is like being in a vapour bath. The whole sea is steamy and there is not a breath of air—by night or day.” Finally, at Bombay, a telegram from Upper Swat awaited him: “Very difficult. No vacancies. Come as correspondent. Will try to fit you in. B.B.”
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A four-day detour to Bangalore was necessary; he needed his colonel’s permission to join Blood. Newspaper credentials came next. Jennie tried
The Times,
without success, but the
Daily Telegraph
contracted to pay Winston five pounds a column, and in India the Allahabad
Pioneer,
which had published much of Kipling’s early work, agreed to run a three-hundred-word telegram from him every day and pay accordingly. At the Bangalore train station he pushed a small sack of rupees across the counter and asked, out of curiosity, how far north his journey would take him. The ticket babu checked a timetable and told him 2,028 miles—a five-day trip through the worst of the summer heat. But there were compensations. He had bought a bag of books, and the first-class, leather-lined, heavily shuttered railway compartment carried a circular wheel of wet straw which the passenger could turn from time to time. Thus, he proceeded, as he put it, “in a dark padded moving cell, reading mostly by lamplight or by some jealously admitted ray of glare.”
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He broke his trip at Rawalpindi to visit a friend in the Fourth Dragoon Guards. The dragoons were preparing to be sent to the front; officers expected the order to grind their swords any day. That evening he joined a sing-along in the sergeants’ mess. Long afterward he would remember roaring out:

And:

A photograph of Churchill taken at the time shows him faultlessly turned out in the romantic uniform of that period: spurred cavalry boots, whipcord jodhpurs, and military tunic with choker collar, Sam Browne belt, and the swooping khaki topee which will forever be identified with Victorian colonial wars. Wearing it, with a Wolseley valise for paper and pencils slung over his shoulder, he stood on the platform at Nowshera, the railhead of Blood’s Malakand Field Force, and arranged for transportation for the last leg of his journey: forty miles across a scorching plain and then up the steep, winding ascent to Malakand Pass, the general’s headquarters. Upon arrival Winston learned that Blood himself was off with a flying column, putting down a local mutiny by the Bunerwal tribe. Yellow with dust, Churchill was provided with a tent, a place in the staff mess, and a tumbler of whiskey. He took this last only to be polite. He had long enjoyed the taste of wine and brandy, but until this moment the smoky taste of whiskey had turned his stomach. Here, however, he faced a choice of tepid water, tepid water with lime juice, and tepid water with whiskey. As he put it, he “grasped the larger hope.” In the five days Blood was away he conquered his aversion. “Nor was this a momentary acquirement,” he later wrote. “Once one got the knack of it, the very repulsion of the flavour developed an attraction of its own…. I have never shrunk when occasion warranted it from the main basic refreshment of the white officer in the East.” Thus fortified, he contemplated his immediate future. He cherished few illusions about warfare; he had, after all, come under fire in Cuba. Aboard the train to Nowshera he had warned his mother that danger lay ahead for him. Nevertheless, “I view every possibility with composure. It might not have been worth my while, who am really no soldier, to risk so many fair chances on a war which can only help me directly in a profession I mean to discard.” That, at least, was settled. “But I have considered everything and I feel that the fact of having seen service with British troops while still a young man must give me more weight politically—must add to my claims to be listened to and may perhaps improve my prospects of gaining popularity with the country.” Now he wrote her again, more somberly: “By the time this reaches you everything will be over so that I do not mind writing about it. I have faith in my star—that is that I am intended to do something in the world. If I am mistaken—what does it matter? My life has been a pleasant one and though I should regret to leave it—it would be a regret that perhaps I should never know.”
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General Blood returned, magnificently erect on his charger, mustache bristling, snorting with triumph. The Bunerwalis were vanquished. Moreover, during his absence the Eleventh Bengal Lancers and the Guides Cavalry had driven the Swatis from Chakdara and chased the tribesmen up and down the valley. Everyone was ready for more action. Several officers had been killed in local skirmishes, and their effects, in accordance with Anglo-Indian campaigning custom, had been auctioned off. Winston had bought two horses, hired a groom, and acquired a kit. He was now fully equipped. In the morning Blood welcomed him, motioned him to his side, and then led an expedition of twelve thousand men and four thousand animals over the bridge, into the valleys where lurking tribesmen, armed with long rifles, lay in wait. In describing the enemy’s practice of hiding in the hills and firing down at the moving British column, Churchill introduced his readers to a new word. Such a rifleman, he wrote, was “a ‘sniper,’ as they are called in the Anglo-Indian army.”
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Lieutenant Winston Churchill in India

While pursuing tribesmen, the Malakand Field Force also carried out punitive missions: destroying crops, driving off cattle, putting huts to the torch. The Pathans were a pitiless foe, but the British perpetrated atrocities, too. Winston wrote Reggie Barnes in Bangalore: “After today we begin to burn villages. Every one. And all who resist will be killed without quarter. The [tribesmen] need a lesson—and there is no doubt we are a very cruel people. At Malakand the Sikhs put a wounded man into the cinerator & burnt him alive. This was hushed up. However I will tell you more stories—some queer ones I have heard too—when we meet.” He wrote his mother: “The danger & difficulty of attacking these active—fierce hill men is extreme. They can get up the hills twice as fast as we can—and shoot wonderfully well…. It is a war without quarter. They kill and mutilate everyone they catch and we do not hesitate to finish their wounded off. I have seen several things wh. have not been very pretty since I have been up here—but as you will believe I have not soiled my hands with any dirty work—though I recognise the necessity of some things.” Long afterward he recalled that “it was all very exciting and, for those who did not get killed or hurt, very jolly.” His newspaper dispatches do not reflect this. Even less so do his letters. He was ill. It cannot have been pleasant to remain on the line at Inayat Kila with a 103-degree fever. “Here I am,” he wrote miserably, “lying in a hole—dug two feet deep in the ground—to protect me against the night firing—on a mackintosh with an awful headache—and the tent & my temperature getting hotter every moment as the sun climbs higher and higher.”
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Most war correspondents hover around headquarters, writing dispatches based on communiqués; in World War II they reported the fighting on the island of Okinawa, in the Pacific, while sitting at typewriters on Guam, fourteen hundred miles away. Churchill went into the field. Indeed, as Sir Bindon’s officers fell, he found himself leading troops. At one point he commanded a company of the Thirty-first Punjab Infantry, sepoys whose language he didn’t even speak. (He learned two words,
maro
[“kill”] and
chalo
[“get on”], and introduced them to an English one, “Tallyho!”) There can be no doubt that he was remarkably brave, at times even rash. After closing within forty yards of the enemy he wrote, “I felt no excitement and very little fear.” Like Nelson, he freely admitted that he was chiefly driven, not by patriotism, but by ambition. He wrote Jennie: “I rode on my grey pony all along the skirmish line where everyone else was lying down in cover. Foolish perhaps but I play for high stakes and given an audience there is no act too daring or too noble. Without the gallery things are different.” This, he was convinced, was advancing him another step toward the House of Commons. “I shall get a medal and perhaps a couple of clasps,” he wrote at one point, and, at another, “I should like to come back and wear my medals at some big dinner or some other function.” The awful thought crossed his mind that no medal might be struck for this expedition. He told Jennie, “Here out of one brigade we have lost in a fortnight 245 killed and wounded and nearly 25 officers,” suggested a comparison with “actions like Firket in Egypt—wh are cracked up as great battles and wh are commemorated by clasps & medals etc etc,” and concluded, “I hope you will talk about this to the Prince and others.” But apart from its political value, physical courage had an intrinsic value in his eyes, and the lack of it was shameful. To his “intense mortification” he saw men of the Royal West Kents “run and leave their officer on the ground.” He added: “I know the Buffs wd never have done this.” Despite the heavy casualties, when he thought of “what the Empire might have lost I am relieved.”
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He wrote Reggie: “It is bloody hot.” You could “lift the heat with your hands, it sat on your shoulders like a knapsack, it rested on your head like a nightmare.” The worst scorcher was Thursday, September 16. It also saw the heaviest fighting—“16th was biggest thing in India since Afgan [sic] war,” he wrote his mother. Judging from his letters and dispatches, it was a harrowing day for him. On its eve Sir Bindon ordered Brigadier Patrick Jeffreys, commanding his Second Brigade, to enter the Mamund Valley, a cul-de-sac, and clear it out. Swinging around in his saddle, the general told Churchill, “If you want to see a fight, you may ride back and join Jeffreys.” A troop of Bengal Lancers was headed that way, so Winston mounted and accompanied them as they gingerly picked their way through the ten miles of broken ground between the general’s camp and the brigadier’s. They reached Jeffreys at dusk. “All night long the bullets flew across the camp; but everyone now had good holes to lie in, and the horses and mules were protected to a large extent.”
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At the instant of dawn the entire brigade, preceded by a squadron of lancers, moved in warlike formation into the valley, Lee-Enfields at the ready. The Mamund basin widened as they entered it, and when they fanned out in three separate detachments, Churchill chose to ride with the center column. As they advanced not an enemy shot was fired. The slopes above were silent, watchful. But the natives were there. Approaching the far end of the valley, Churchill raised his field glasses and saw “a numerous force of tribesmen on the terraced hillsides… they appeared seated in long lines, each with his weapon upright beside him…. The sun threw back at intervals bright flashes of steel as the tribesmen waved their swords.” At 7:30
A.M.
the lancers, trotting a hundred yards forward, opened fire with their carbines. Martini-Henrys immediately replied. Churchill wrote: “From behind rocks and slopes of ground, on spurs, and from stone houses, little puffs of smoke darted. A brisk skirmish began.” He accompanied about fifteen men around him who rode up, dismounted, and opened fire at seven hundred yards. They, too, came under fire. Then the British infantry, the bulk of Jeffreys’s brigade, toiled up and reached them. The Thirty-fifth Sikhs split into small parties and attacked various hills, hummocks, and a village. Churchill picked the one heading for the village. Enemy fire died away; they reached their objective without incident. But once there, he looked back and saw no brigade. He searched the valley with his glasses. Jeffreys’s force had simply disappeared. Although he did not realize it then, they were in fact enveloped in folds of the vast terrain. He and his people were equally invisible to the brigade; geography was the Pathans’ great ally. It occurred to Winston that his was a very small troop: five officers, including him, and eighty-five Sikhs. He recalled Sandhurst warnings about “dispersion of forces,” and was grateful when the company commander relayed word from a lieutenant colonel down below to withdraw because “we are rather up in the air here.” Churchill noted on his pad that this was “a sound observation.” Then the officer said: “You stay here and cover our retirement till we take up a fresh position on that knoll below the village.”
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