The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (48 page)

Winston’s small rear guard waited uneasily for ten minutes. They were about to depart when the mountain above them sprang to life. Sabers flashed, gun muzzles erupted, bright flags appeared, and figures dressed in white and blue began dropping down from ledges hundreds of feet overhead, shrieking, “Yi! Yi! Yi!” A group of Pathans began to assemble in a clump of rocks about a hundred yards from Churchill, and as they fired, Winston, borrowing the rifle of a Sikh, squeezed off answering shots while the Sikh handed him cartridges. This continued for five minutes; then the battalion adjutant scrambled up and panted: “Come on back now. There is no time to lose. We can cover you from the knoll.” Churchill pocketed his ammunition—it was a standing order to let no bullets fall into the hands of the tribesmen—and was about to leave when an enemy fusillade killed the man beside him and hit five others, one of whom “was spinning around just behind me, his face a mass of blood, his right eye cut out.” Recovering wounded was a point of honor; torture was the lot of those who fell into the hands of the Pathans. Carrying their casualties, they were halfway down the slope when a force of thirty tribesmen charged them. Chaos followed. More Sikhs fell. The adjutant was hit; Churchill stayed behind to rescue him, but a Pathan swordsman, getting there first, butchered the dying officer. At this point Winston remembered that he had won the public-school fencing championship. He drew his cavalry saber. “I resolved on personal combat
à l’arme blanche
.” But he was all alone, and other clansmen were hurrying up. These were not public-school boys. “I changed my mind about cold steel.” Instead, “I fired nine shots from my revolver” and leapt down the hill, gratefully finding refuge with the Sikhs on the knoll nearest the plain.
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But they were being outflanked. And they were demoralized. As Winston wrote his “Uncle Bill,” Lord William Beresford, a winner of the Victoria Cross, “The men were completely out of hand. The wounded were left to be cut up. We could do nothing…. Of course I had no legal status but the urgency was such that I felt bound to see the affair out…. Martini rifles at 80 yards make excellent practice and there were lots of bullets. At last we got to the bottom in great disorder, dragging some wounded with us, and the men loosing off wildly in all directions—utterly out of hand with a crowd of Ghazis at our heels.” During the descent, he himself got off thirty or forty shots (“I am sure I never fired without taking aim”) before they joined the battalion. There the lieutenant colonel drew them up two deep, shoulder to shoulder, while hundreds of firing Pathans, “frenzied with excitement,” streamed around their flanks. In that formation the Sikhs presented a tremendous target, but anything was preferable to scattering. British officers shouted above the din: “Volley firing. Ready. Present. Fire!” Tribesmen were toppling, but their numbers were overwhelming. The lieutenant colonel told Churchill: “The Buffs are not more than half a mile away. Go and tell them to hurry or we shall all be wiped out.” Winston was turning away when he had a vision of himself as the sole, fleeing survivor of a massacre. That was
not
the way to Parliament. He turned back and said, “I must have the order in writing, sir.” Startled, the commander fumbled in his tunic and began to write. Then they heard the distant notes of a bugler sounding the Charge. “Everyone shouted. The crisis was over, and here, Praise be to God, were the leading files of the Buffs.”
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His ranks swollen, the lieutenant colonel ordered a counterattack to recover the wounded, the adjutant’s body, and his own prestige. They retook the knoll (all the wounded had been slain and mutilated) but not till 5:00
P.M.
Then they fell back. In the confusion Winston had lost his mount, “but I borrowed a mule—I was too blown to walk and rode up again. We were attacked coming down but the Buffs were steady as rocks and hence lost very little.” Meanwhile, another company of Sikhs, on their right, had been driven to the plain with even heavier casualties. “Well then we found the [brigadier Jeffreys] had split up his force and that odd companies were cut off and being cut up etc and it got pitch dark and poured with rain.” It had been a calamitous day, and it wasn’t over. Winston had been in action for thirteen hours, but before he could fall asleep he heard the boom of a fieldpiece three miles away, followed by twenty more booms, followed by silence. It had to be Jeffreys; he had the only battery in the valley. But why should his cannon be fired at night? There was only one explanation—he, his staff, his sappers, and miscellaneous headquarters personnel must be fighting at very close quarters. The battalion officers, including Churchill, conferred. Sending a rescue party in the dark would be an invitation to disaster. The brigadier and those with him must fight it out where they were with what they had. At daybreak a squadron of lancers galloped across the open pan of the valley and found them dug in around the battery. They had taken heavy casualties in hand-to-hand fighting. Jeffreys himself had been wounded in the head, though not seriously; he reported by heliograph to Sir Bindon Blood. Sir Bindon and the brigade with him had also been heavily engaged. Blood ordered that the valley be laid waste. “So long as the villages were in the plain, this was quite easy,” Winston wrote. “The tribesmen sat on the mountains and sullenly watched the destruction of their homes and means of livelihood. When however we had to attack the villages on the sides of the mountains they resisted fiercely, and we lost for every village two or three British officers and fifteen or twenty native soldiers.” He commented dryly: “Whether it was worth it, I cannot tell. At any rate, at the end of a fortnight the valley was a desert, and honour was satisfied.”
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H
e saw action again with Jeffreys’s brigade at Domodoloh, with the Buffs at Zagia, with the Mohmands in a minor engagement, and, after Sir Bindon had succeeded in getting his leave from the Fourth Hussars extended for two more weeks, at Agrah and then with the Thirty-first Punjab Infantry. Twice more he rode his gray pony along skirmish lines. Jeffreys mentioned him in dispatches, praising “the courage and resolution of Lieutenant W. L. S. Churchill, 4th Hussars, the correspondent of the
Pioneer
newspaper with the force who made himself useful at a critical moment,” and Sir Bindon wrote Brabazon predicting that Winston “if he gets a chance will have the VC or a DSO.” He received neither, partly because his reports were creating considerable discomfort at the highest levels of the Indian army in Simla. In a cable from Nowshera he had commented that “the power of the Lee-Metford rifle with the new dum-dum bullet—as it is called, though officially, the ‘ek dum’ bullet—is tremendous,” a fact Simla would have preferred not to see in print. And he grew increasingly free with his criticisms of the British military establishment, condemning the manner in which sympathetic civilians were put in jeopardy, the failure to cover retreating soldiers with continuous fire, the “short service” system of recruitment, and the lack of proper rations for soldiers on long marches. Defiant of the wrath he knew this would arouse, he wrote: “There will not be wanting those who will remind me that in this matter my opinion finds no support in age or experience. To such I shall reply that if what is written is false or foolish, neither age nor experience should fortify it; and if it is true, it needs no such support.”
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On October 12 he wrote his mother “one line to let you know that I am across the frontier and rejoining my regiment,” and nine days later he followed this with news that “once again I write to you from my old table and my own room here in Bangalore.” His first impression, when he leafed through back copies of the
Daily Telegraph,
was that his vivid reporting had been wasted in England. His stories had carried the anonymous by-line, “From a Young Officer.” A letter from Jennie explained that the editor had “begged me not to sign yr name. He said it was very unusual & might get you into trouble.” Winston indignantly replied: “I will not conceal my disappointment at their not being signed. I had written them with the design, a design which took form as the correspondence advanced, of bringing my personality before the electorate.” He believed that “if I am to do anything in the world, you will have to make up your mind to publicity and also to my doing unusual things. Of course a certain number of people will be offended. I am afraid some people like Brab will disapprove…. But I recognise the fact that certain elements must always be hostile and I am determined not to allow them to interfere with my actions. I regard an excellent opportunity of bringing my name before the country in a correct and attractive light—by means of graphic & forcible letters, as lost.”
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It was not lost. Jennie was more experienced in these matters than her son, and she had seen that everyone who mattered, from the Prince of Wales down, learned the identity of the Young Officer writing in the distant passes and gorges of the North-West Frontier. They even knew at Harrow. Welldon wrote her: “I have been much interested in seeing Winston’s articles. I think he possesses in a high degree the special correspondent’s art of seizing the picturesque and interesting features of a campaign. Really he is very clever, and must make a mark in the world.” Voyages to India took over three weeks, and it was November before Churchill realized how deep an impression he had made. “I am very gratified to hear that my follies have not been altogether unnoticed,” he wrote. His flair for the language was responsible, but he persisted in his belief that his valor, implicit in the pieces, would count far more among the Tory elders. He told his brother: “Being in many ways a coward—particularly at school—there is no ambition I cherish so keenly as to gain a reputation of personal courage.”
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63

Despite his daring and acclaim, Winston’s standing in the army was not enhanced by all this. Generals were not alone in their disapproval. In the Fourth Hussars his brother officers were civil but cool. There was a vague feeling that what he had done was, by Victorian standards, “ungentlemanly.” Regimental messes elsewhere put him down as a “medal-hunter,” “self-advertiser,” and “thruster.” One officer would note in his memoirs that Churchill “was widely regarded in the Army as super-precocious, indeed by some as insufferably bumptious.” Why, it was asked, should a subaltern praise or deprecate his seniors? Why should he write for newspapers while wearing the uniform? How did he get so much leave? Who was indulging him? The resentment was real, and became an obstacle to his plans. Sir Bindon asked that he be made his orderly officer. The adjutant general in Simla refused. Surely, Churchill thought, Lord Roberts could clear this up. The omnipotent Roberts, now in Ireland, had been a friend of his father’s, and now Jennie, at his urging, wrote the field marshal, reminding him of past favors. But the old man declined to intervene. Churchill wrote bitterly: “I don’t understand Lord Roberts’ refusal. A good instance of ingratitude in a fortunate and much overrated man.” Spurred by his mother, the
Daily Telegraph
appointed him a permanent correspondent, but the high command continued to deny him access to all battlefields. He complained to her: “The Simla authorities have been very disagreeable to me. They did all they could to get me sent down to my regiment…. I… invite you to consider what a contemptible position it is for high military officers to assume—to devote so much time and energy to harrying an insignificant subaltern. It is indeed a vivid object lesson in the petty social intrigue that makes or prevents appointments in this country.” He added: “Talk to the prince about it.” She did. Ian Hamilton also got busy, and finally, the morning after a polo match in Meerut, Churchill was gazetted to the staff of Sir William Lockhart. Sir William was organizing a punitive expedition into the Tirah, where the Afridi and Orzkzai tribes had risen. “Red tabs sprouted on the lapels of my coat,” Winston wrote. For once, “I behaved and was treated as befitted my youth and subordinate station. I sat silent at meals or only rarely asked a tactful question.” It was all for nothing. The tribesmen begged for peace; the expedition was abandoned; he boarded a train for the long ride back to Bangalore.
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Calling him a “publicity hound”—another epithet heard in the messes—seemed cruel. It was not, however, inaccurate. His correspondence admits of no other explanation. He had no interest in a military career, and meant to use the service to advance his prospects in public life. Peace having broken out on the frontier, he returned to his pen. He had several projects in mind: finishing his novel, writing a biography of Garibaldi, a “short & dramatic” history of the American Civil War, and a volume of short stories to be called, obscurely, “The Correspondent of the
New York Examiner.
” He wanted recognition, but he also expected to be paid. The
Telegraph
had sent him five pounds an article, and he felt that wasn’t enough. “The pinch of the whole matter is we are damned poor,” he wrote his mother. He sent her a short story “wh I want you to sell, signed, to one of the magazines. I think the
Pall Mall
wd like it & would pay my price. You should not get less than £20 for it, as it is a very good story—in my opinion. So don’t sell it without a good offer.” Financial relief was on its way, however. His first major effort to reach the British public was, in fact, ready: an account of his frontier adventures with Sir Bindon Blood, largely a paste-up of his frontier dispatches. This has become a common journalistic practice today, but he became one of its pioneers with
The Story of the Malakand Field Force.
Working five hours a day, he had dashed off a draft in two months before his posting to Sir William in Peshawar, where, he confessed, it had occupied his thoughts “more than… anything else.” He had “affected the style of Macaulay and Gibbon, the staccato antitheses of the former and the rolling sentences and genitival endings of the latter; and I stuck in a bit of my own from time to time.” Later he would say that writing a book “is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.” This monster was almost ready to be flung on December 22, 1897, when he wrote his mother: “I hope you will like it. I am pleased with it chiefly because I have discovered a great power of application which I did not think I possessed.” Nine days later he mailed her the manuscript—“Herewith the book”—accompanied by maps and, for the frontispiece, a photograph of Sir Bindon Blood.
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