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.”53
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.”54
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.”55
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.”56
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.”57
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 clum
p 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.58
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.”59
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.”60
He 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.”61
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.”62
It was not lost. Jennie was more experienc
ed 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.”*63