by Richard Toye
In the spring of 1897 Churchill returned home on leave. It was while he was there that he made his speech to the Bath Primrose League on the ‘splendour’ of the Empire. (Naturally, he did not share with his audience the fact that he found the particular part of the Empire to which he had been sent tedious rather than splendid.) His early imperial education was not yet finished. Not only was the formative experience of his military campaigning across the Empire still to come, but he was keenly aware that his knowledge even of India was woefully incomplete. As he complained to his mother, he had no access, as a mere subaltern, to people of influence and expertise; and he had no time for the ‘despicable’ Indian press (from which he could perhaps have learnt more than he chose to).150 Nevertheless, it is clear that he had learnt to think imperially – not merely in the sense of having a sentimental attachment to the Empire, but in having developed his own rationale for it. His world view, as articulated to the Tories of Bath, was pretty orthodox; Winwood Reade had convinced him that Christianity might be false, but not that it was ‘wise or expedient to say so’.151 One might say, then, that he had reached an apparently conventional viewpoint by a somewhat unconventional route. Primed by his Harrow education and the imperial culture of the time, his encounter with heterodoxy led him to view international relations as an evolutionary battle, but never to question the idea that Britain, because of its inherent superiority, would be able to win that struggle. Ultimately, he thought, such a victory would be for the good of the world as a whole, but in practical (and electioneering) terms the welfare of the rest of the world was low on his list of priorities. The notion that thinking imperially meant thinking always of ‘something higher and more vast than one’s own national interests’ was one that at this stage remained alien to him.
IV
Churchill freely conceded that he was a ‘child of the Victorian era’.152 In the interwar period and beyond, though, the term ‘Victorian’ had become practically a term of abuse, the equivalent, when the Empire was discussed, of ‘reactionary’. The surprising thing is that his Victorian background was used against him not just by political progressives, but by imperialists within the Conservative Party who were themselves of a similar vintage to Churchill. In 1929, when Baldwin (b. 1867) pondered making Churchill Secretary of State for India, the Viceroy, Lord Irwin (b. 1881), advised him not. Irwin suggested that Churchill held antediluvian opinions, writing that he ‘has always been a much more vigorous Imperialist in the 1890–1900 sense of the word than you and me’.153 A later Viceroy, Lord Wavell (b. 1883), remarked that Churchill ‘has still at heart his cavalry subaltern’s idea of India; just as his military tactics are inclined to date from the Boer War’.154 Leo Amery (b. 1873) believed, for his part, that ‘the key to Winston is to realise that he is a Mid Victorian, steeped in the politics of his father’s period, and unable ever to get the modern point of view’.155 Even Churchill’s doctor, Lord Moran (b. 1882), had a view. He wrote of Churchill’s attitude to the Chinese: ‘Winston thinks only of the colour of their skin; it is when he talks of India or China that you remember he is a Victorian.’156
Describing Churchill’s attitudes as ‘Victorian’ may in part have been a convenient way for those who opposed him to stress the contrasting ‘modernity’ of their own imperial views. Or perhaps Churchill did to some extent suffer a genuine case of arrested development. Either way, we can see the limitations of the suggestion that Churchill’s later opinions were the inevitable product of a Victorian upbringing per se. And, whether or not it is right to criticize his views on issues such as race, it can scarcely be considered anachronistic to do so, when his own contemporaries did not hold back themselves. By the time he had reached the threshold of his public career, he had absorbed a particular version of imperialism, but not one that was universally held. No homogeneous view of Empire existed in late-Victorian Britain; there was in fact vibrant debate, not about the Empire’s inherent validity, but about how its interests could best be pursued. Churchill’s first real military excursion, on the Indian frontier in 1897, led to his wholehearted launch into this field of controversy.
2
JOLLY LITTLE WARS AGAINST BARBAROUS PEOPLES, 1897–1899
In 1929 Churchill took up the honorific position of Chancellor of Bristol University. In a speech to the students he reflected on his own lack of a university education and remembered how his military training had led him instead to a period of adventure. He recalled how at that time Britain had fought ‘a lot of jolly little wars against barbarous peoples’ and how he himself had gone ‘scurrying about the world from one exciting scene to another’.1 If this sounds like a parody of Victorian imperial adventurism, it is more than possible that Churchill was intentionally sending himself up. He was certainly capable of humour at his own expense; the persistently ironical tone of My Early Life, for example, is part of what gives the book its charm. But if it would be unfair to dismiss that book as merely a sequence of thrilling scenes – a charge more easily levelled against treatments such the 1972 film Young Winston – it is nonetheless true that the picture it paints of the Empire is romantic and depoliticized. Churchill’s failure to give his readers a full sense of his role in fin-de-siècle imperial debates may have been a wise commercial decision in the gloomy circumstances of 1930; yet without an understanding of that context, his ‘scurrying’ phase is reduced to not much more than the ‘jolly little wars’ of his own caricature. Churchill may have been courageous as a soldier, but when he combined that role with that of journalist, he was by no means always the candid scourge of authority that legend depicts.
I
On the very day in 1897 that Churchill made his first political speech at Bath, there was a rising of Pathan tribesmen in the Swat Valley on the North-West Frontier of India. The news was reported in Britain two days later. After two years of quiet, the garrison at Malakand had suddenly been attacked at the behest of a local religious leader called Sadullah, dubbed the ‘Mad Mullah’ by the British, who was intent on raising jihad. The attack was repulsed, but it quickly transpired that the whole valley was up in arms. In the view of The Times the episode was simply an example of what was to be expected in the early years of occupation of new territories. ‘It is absolutely necessary to show the tribesmen without delay that we can bring an overwhelming force to act against them even in the fastnesses of their own mountains, and to teach them that treachery and insurrection will be sharply and swiftly punished’, the paper claimed. ‘That is a lesson which we have been obliged to teach savage peoples very often in many parts of the world’. If this was done then in due course the ‘wild and fanatic’ tribesmen would ‘subside into loyal soldiers, peaceful husbandmen, and industrious traders’.2
That view, however, was far from unanimously held. Colonel H.B. Hanna, a veteran of the 1857 mutiny and author of several books on Indian questions, wrote to The Times to express his scepticism about the so-called ‘forward policy’. That policy involved trying to bring independent tribal territories on the frontier under British control. It was not based merely on an altruistic desire to civilize the tribesmen; rather, it was aimed at countering the influence of Russia and the potential threat she posed to India. Hanna argued, though, that that threat was not nearly as severe as the policy’s proponents claimed, and that the policy itself was provoking the tribesmen.3 Plenty of other correspondents criticized his views, but Hanna was no lone voice. Liberal politicians denounced the government’s folly, which, they suggested, was putting the Indian Empire at risk.4 Even the arch-imperialist Daily Mail was to describe the idea of turning the tribesmen into British subjects as a dangerous and expensive fallacy. ‘As long as they are friendly, the caterans of the hills form a frontier garrison very formidable to the invader. [. . .] Interference exasperates them and changes them from virtual allies into uncompromising foes.’5 The proudly independent Afghans naturally wanted to repel the British from their borders – which remained ill-defined – and to stave off a repeat of earlier invasions.
In his published writings at the time, Churchill – like many of his contemporaries6 – blamed the rising on Islamic fanaticism. In this view, the ignorant and credulous tribespeople were seduced by the wave of religious emotion for which Sadullah was the conduit and which had been fomented with help from Kabul.7 Because fanatics were not amenable to common sense, and because their actions threatened the safety of the Empire, they had to be crushed.8 Interestingly, when he wrote about the episode in My Early Life, he dismissed the religious explanation, and suggested that the outbreak could be explained ‘on quite ordinary grounds’.9 The chief of these was the presence of British troops in lands the local people considered their own. Indeed, even at the time Churchill conceded in private that the cause of the war was the forward policy itself and that it would never have taken place had the British not retained the outpost of Chitral after a previous uprising in 1895.10
As soon as he learnt of the rising, Churchill cut short his leave and headed back to India. A year earlier, in England, he had met Major-General Sir Bindon Blood, the man now appointed to lead the Malakand Field Force to put down the trouble. He had extracted from Blood – who had led the Chitral relief expedition – the promise that, should he ever again command a force on the frontier, he would allow Churchill to be a part of it. Churchill cabled the general to remind him of this, but to his great frustration received no reply until he was actually back in India. Blood then told Churchill that he had no places on his personal staff, but ‘I should advise your coming to me as a press correspondent, and when you are here I shall put you on the strength at the first opportunity.’11 Churchill headed for the front straight away. In line with Blood’s plan, he got himself accredited to the London Daily Telegraph and to the Pioneer, an Allahabad paper on which Rudyard Kipling had cut his teeth as a young journalist.
On the face it, the idea that a serving soldier might alternate his regular job with that of journalist, at the direct instigation of the top brass, might seem a little odd. (Churchill carried on writing for the papers even after Blood made him his orderly officer.) But he was not receiving a unique favour. The same thing had already been done for Viscount Fincastle, who acted as correspondent for The Times and then joined the Guides Cavalry after another officer was killed. Fincastle went on to win the Victoria Cross for his conspicuous bravery in action. Churchill felt some rivalry with him and rushed out his own book on the conflict in order that Fincastle would not beat him to it. Both men were, in fact, ‘embedded correspondents’, for whom the pen and sword (or revolver) were interchangeable. It was through the work of such journalists – who were subject to strict military control even if they were civilians – that tales of war were communicated to the public at home. The army’s approach to them was ambivalent. Many commanders regarded correspondents as a nuisance with the potential to report inconvenient facts; many of the frustrations of Churchill’s early career are a testament to this. Others, however – and Blood was a case in point – recognized their possible utility as a means of communicating the army’s point of view to the British people. As Lord Wolseley, the army’s commander-in-chief, once explained, generals could make use of correspondents’ thirst for information ‘by spreading fake news among the gentlemen of the Press’ as a means to deceive the enemy.12 There is no evidence that what Churchill wrote was subject to direct manipulation, but he was certainly induced to see things from the perspective of the commanders. (By contrast he did not hold back from criticism of the Viceroy’s government based at Simla.) Although he was disquieted by some of the horrors he saw during the campaign, he appreciated that the unspoken terms of Blood’s offer required discretion. He wrote to his grandmother, for example, of the appalling effects that the expanding ‘dum-dum’ bullets used by the British had on the human body: ‘The picture is a terrible one, and naturally it has a side to which one does not allude in print,’13 although he later defended their use as being no more likely to cause suffering than ordinary bullets.14 (Later still, when the Boers used them against the British in South Africa, it was a different story again.)15 Well might an article in the Fortnightly Review ask, ‘Can We Rely on Our War News?’16
Churchill’s journey to the frontier began with a rail trip from Bangalore. Told by the ticket clerk that the distance was 2,027 miles, he gleefully contemplated the revulsion he thought Little Englanders would feel at this vastness of British territory.17 He broke his travel at Rawalpindi and, after dinner, paid a visit to the sergeants’ mess, where a sing-song was in progress. The best song, in Churchill’s view, ran:
Great White Mother, far across the sea,
Ruler of the Empire may she ever be.
Long may she reign, glorious and free,
In the Great White Motherland.18
Suitably inspired by these lofty sentiments he continued on his way to Nowshera, the Malakand Field Force’s base of operations. From then on, in the extreme heat, he had to travel an uncomfortable fifty miles in a horse-drawn tonga to the Malakand Pass. He had to wait several days in the British camp before seeing any action, but when it came it was dramatic.
On 16 September he took part in a punitive raid in the Mamund Valley. As the British forces moved into the valley they saw many tribesmen seated in lines on the terraced hillsides, their rifles upright beside them. As the British got nearer, bullets started to fly, but the skirmish did neither side much harm. Sikh infantrymen moved upwards to occupy a village (Indians formed the bulk of the British armed forces in India). The enemy seemed to have disappeared; but when the British began to retire homewards the tribesmen suddenly attacked. Churchill’s newspaper account of the action was somewhat veiled, but he admitted to his mother that the retreat had been ‘an awful rout’ in which the wounded had been horribly mutilated by ‘these wild beasts’ of tribesmen. He himself fired forty rifle rounds and hit, he thought, four men. He also – with some thought of being noticed for his bravery – helped drag away a wounded Indian soldier, although the process hurt the man so much that the sepoy decided he preferred to stagger down unaided.19 More than one in ten of those on the British side were killed or wounded in the encounter.20
In the wake of this humiliating battle, Blood ordered that the valley be laid waste. Churchill recalled: ‘We proceeded systematically, village by village, and we destroyed the houses, filled up the wells, blew down the towers, cut down the shady trees, burned the crops and broke the reservoirs in punitive devastation.’21 Privately he was shocked at the kind of warfare that was taking place – not only at the brutality of the tribesmen but also at the British refusal to take prisoners, wounded or otherwise.22 On one occasion he saw Sikh troops burn a wounded man alive.23 Publicly, though, he defended the destruction: ‘Of course, it is cruel and barbarous, as is everything else in war, but it is only an unphilosophic mind that will hold it legitimate to take a man’s life, and illegitimate to destroy his property.’ (This was a false distinction: destroying crops and villages inevitably meant that many tribespeople would die of cold or starvation.) He argued that domestic critics of the policy, who worried about the effects on non-combatants, were deluded to think that any such people existed. In fact, he suggested, all the (male) inhabitants were combatants from childhood onwards, and all the houses were fortified, so that meaningful discrimination was impossible. The good sense of the British people would, he felt, lead them to agree with these sound and pragmatic conclusions as soon as the necessary information was put in front of them.24 ‘I have not soiled my hands with any dirty work’, he told his mother, ‘though I recognise the necessity of some things.’25
Churchill’s attitude to the men he was fighting was predictably negative. In his despatches he described the rebellious Pathans as ‘vermin’, although he did also concede that they were brave and warlike.26 After operations had ended he had the chance to write about them in a more reflective way, and in doing so he granted that there were occasional moments when lovers of the picturesque might feel some sympathy with their hopes and fears
. Nevertheless, he believed that the Pathans were disposed to treachery and violence by virtue of their ‘strong aboriginal propensity to kill’. That propensity was compounded by their religion, which in Churchill’s eyes was responsible for stimulating ‘a wild and merciless fanaticism’. The tribes were dirty, ignorant, superstitious and degraded, he claimed. They loved plunder and had an incomprehensible code of honour. Their state of mental development, he suggested, was such that civilized people would not know whether to laugh or cry. He did not believe, though, that they were condemned to degradation purely by virtue of their ethnicity. After all, those tribesmen who had earlier come over to the British side proved themselves highly useful. To him, the Afridi and Pathan companies of the Guides Infantry were like ‘a well-trained pack of hounds. Their cries, their movements, and their natures are similar.’ Although he viewed these soldiers as dirty, lazy spendthrifts (in contrast to the hygienic, thrifty Sikhs), he defended them against charges of untrustworthiness.27 Churchill’s opinions may strike the modern reader as patronizing and Islamophobic, but it is important not to romanticize the tribesmen, or to suggest that Churchill’s views were completely antediluvian. His strictures on the tribes’ treatment of women, for example, were by no means unfounded. However, his bald assertion ‘Civilisation is face to face with militant Mohammedanism’ greatly exaggerated the threat that the Empire faced.28