5
Never at Peace:
India’s Frontiers and
Armies
I
The people who lived in the desolate hills and valleys of India’s northwestern marches called their homeland ‘Yaghestan’, which translates as ‘the land of rebellion’. Fighting was in their blood and they were proud of their independence and pugnacity. Two of their proverbs ran:
Of course we are brave warriors
Have not we sucked the milk of Pukhtun mothers?
and,
The Pukhtun is never at peace
Except when he is at war.
Their most persistent adversary, the British Raj, which, in theory more often than practice, was also their overlord, collectively called them Pathans. Seen from the parapet of a frontier fort, they were a troublesome, untameable miscellany of tribes and invariably at odds with each other; or, when united by a fierce Islamic faith, with the British. On the battlefield, the Pathan commanded respect and fear in equal parts. His legendary cruelty was redeemed to some extent by his manliness and sense of personal honour, which made him, in the eyes of romantics at least, one of nature’s gentlemen.
The Pathan’s warrior code had chivalric undertones which appear in Kipling’s splendid narrative poem ‘The Ballad of East and West’. It is the story of Kamal, a Pathan chieftain, who steals a mare belonging to a colonel of the Guides, a crack frontier cavalry regiment. The colonel’s son, a subaltern, sets out in hot pursuit, but his horse collapses from exhaustion. He becomes Kamal’s prisoner and learns that his captor’s followers have had him in their sights from the start of the race:
There was not a rock for twenty mile, there was not a clump of tree,
But covered a man of my own men with his rifle cocked on his knee.
The young officer is defiant, warning the chieftain that his demise would be avenged by ‘a thousand swords’ who would bring death and destruction to his kinsfolk, their crops and homes. But there will be no retribution in the customary frontier manner. In an assay of stamina and nerve, each man has recognised his own virtues in the other. A shared pride, sense of honour, recklessness and indifference to death are the bonds of a freemasonry of warriors to which each belongs.
‘Give me my father’s mare again, and I’ll fight my own way back!’
Kamal has gripped him by the hand and set him upon his feet.
‘No talk shall be of dogs,’ said he, ‘when wolf and grey wolf meet.
May I eat dirt if thou has hurt of me in deed or breath;
What dame of lances brought thee forth to jest at the dawn with Death?’
Lightly answered the Colonel’s son; ‘I hold by the blood of my clan:
Take up the mare for my father’s gift – by God, she has carried a man!’
The red mare ran to the Colonel’s son, and nuzzled against his breast;
‘We be two strong men,’ said Kamal then, ‘but she loveth the younger best.’
He hands the subaltern his jewelled saddlery and by return is given his second pistol: ‘“Ye have taken the one from foe,” said he. “Will ye take the mate from a friend?”’ The ritual exchange of gifts ends when Kamal presents his son who, in the manner of a mediaeval squire, will learn his father’s soldierly code from a mentor whom he must also protect:
‘Now here is thy master,’ Kamal said, ‘who leads a troop of the Guides,
And thou must ride at his left side as shield on the shoulder rides.
Till Death or I cut loose the tie, at camp and board and bed,
Thy life is his – thy fate it is to guard him with thy head.
So, thou must eat the White Queen’s meat, and all her foes are thine,
And thou must harry thy father’s hold for the peace of the Border-line.
And thou must make a trooper tough and hack thy way to power –
Belike they will raise thee to Ressaldar when I am hanged at Peshawur!’
The young man then passed from one world to another in which the Queen’s peace is supreme, overruling the customs of his race. He learns this as he enters the fort:
And when they drew near to the Quarter-Guard, full twenty swords flew clear –
There was not a man but carried his feud with the blood of the mountaineer.
‘Ha’ done! ha’ done!’ said the Colonel’s son. ‘Put up the steel at your sides!
Last night ye had struck at a Border thief – tonight ’tis a man of the Guides!’
Kipling concludes the ballad with lines which make the encounter between two fighting men into a metaphor of empire:
Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgement Seat;
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth!
The young subaltern represents an imperial ideal: his character and courage win respect, even affection, from an enemy with whom he has an inner kinship. Sure displays of moral and physical strength had, according to the soldier’s lore, won India for Britain and would tame the frontier tribes.
As so often, Kipling was using his genius to elaborate the commonplaces of British India. The theme of ‘The Ballad of East and West’ was expressed prosaically by officers of the Indian army who, like George Younghusband, believed themselves born leaders with a mystique which enabled them to capture the hearts of ‘alien troops’. Such natural leaders instilled self-confidence into their men, showed them how to fight and the results were ‘brilliant and dashing exploits’ on the frontier, a theatre of war where individual leadership counted for everything.1
Kipling’s poem of frontier adventure appeared in 1889 and would be followed by many more, real and imaginary in verse and prose. The North-West Frontier was about to enter the public consciousness as an increasing number of punitive expeditions criss-crossed its mountains and valleys. Each campaign was marked by a crop of ‘brilliant deeds and dashing exploits’ by young officers out to make a name for themselves, and there were war correspondents on hand to see that their daring was publicly recognised. Entry into a new battleground coincided with a period during which imperialists at home were deliberately fostering among the young that cult of the noble warrior that lay at the heart of ‘The Ballad of East and West’. In this and his short stories, Kipling set the tone for future writers, endowing the region and its conflicts with a romance that it never lost and which, in time, would be taken up by film-makers in Britain and Hollywood.
Fact and fiction were constantly being blended, as they were by Sir Henry Newbolt in his poem ‘He Fell Among Thieves’. The subject, George Hayward, was a young officer who was murdered by robbers during an expedition in the Pamirs at the end of 1870.2 It was said that he had asked his killers to allow him a night’s rest, after which he would meet his death facing the sun as it rose over the mountains. In Newbolt’s poem he dreams of the country house which had been his home, the church where he had prayed as a boy, the races he had run at school and his days at university among ‘faces merry and keen’. He confronts death with serenity:
Light on the Laspur hills was broadening fast,
The blood-red snow peaks chilled to a dazzling white:
He turned, and saw the golden circle at last,
Cut by the Eastern height.
‘O glorious Life, Who dwellest in the earth and sun,
I have lived, I praise and adore Thee.’
A sword swept.
Over the pass the voices one by one
Faded, and the hill slept.
This tribute to self-sacrifice, the highest imperial virtue, was, like much else from Newbolt’s muse, directed towards the young. For boys who grew to manhood in the 1890s and 1900s the North-West Frontier and its wars were a source of thrilling yarns, written to entertain and inspire. In ‘Cut off by Afridis’, which appeared in Chums towards the end of the extended frontie
r campaigns of 1897–98, the hero, Lieutenant Vassall of the ‘Diehards’, rallies a party of English, Scottish, Irish and Indian soldiers for a desperate last-ditch stand against Afridis, whose ‘foaming host plunged right among the dripping bayonets’. The pace is fast, and the style breezy. An Irish private rallies his mates with:
‘I say, bhoys, we’re cut off,’ yelled Pat O’Mahary. ‘Niver moind! On to blood and glory, ye murthering, spalpeens an’ the saints ’av mercy on yer!’
A fighting Irishman was more than a match for a fighting Pathan and, after some dicey moments, the band are saved and the young officer wins the Victoria Cross.3 As ever, it was a simple them-and-us contest in which the ‘them’ deserved whatever they got. In another short story, ‘When Afghan Bullets were Flying’, readers heard how if an Afghan mutilated an Englishman he secured the key to Paradise. The Pathan marksman caught by a resourceful young Tommy in ‘Stalking a Midnight Sniper’ is afterwards hanged – ‘the example was enough to deter the tribesmen’.4 Each yarn was accompanied by an animated pen-and-ink drawing illustrating a tense moment in the plot.
Frontier derring-do and instruction as to why it was required mingle in G. A. Henty’s Through Three Campaigns, which covers the relief of Chitral in 1895 and the Malakand expedition of 1897. It is a picaresque tale in which Lisle Bullen, the sixteen-year-old son of a captain in the 32nd Pioneers, masquerades as a sepoy in order to get to grips with the Pathans who are blocking the passes along the road to Chitral. An old Indian soldier reassures him and Henty’s readers that the Indian army is in good shape thanks to men like Bullen’s father: ‘They are good men the white officers . . . they are like fathers to us, and we will follow them anywhere.’5 Bullen’s steadiness under fire, his accurate shooting and willingness to take command in a tight spot after his havildar is wounded earn him the nickname ‘young sahib’. True breeding cannot be hidden on the frontier; far from it, and Bullen’s identity is soon unveiled. Commissioned on the spot, he proceeds to another regiment and further adventures, including a spell as the prisoner of a chieftain from whom he escapes intact.
Reminiscences delivered to the mess by Bullen’s brother officers give Henty the opportunity to retell the tales of other frontier campaigns. It’s tough work, and one says he would rather fight the Russians than the Pathans, reminding readers that there are other threats to the peace of India.
There were opportunities for beating the political drum of empire in Henty’s A Soldier’s Daughter (1906), set on the contemporary North-West Frontier. The heroine, Nita Ackworth, is the daughter of Major Ackworth who tells her that her:
. . . accomplishments are not strictly feminine in their character. You are a good shot as there is in the regiment both with rifle and revolver, you can fence very fairly, and you have a good idea of cricket, but you know nothing of music.
If these skills were not enough to qualify her as an honorary male in the true Henty mould, she has been having boxing lessons. It falls to her to inject some ginger into Charlie Carter, a subaltern to whom the fort is entrusted after Ackworth and most of his men have been lured away by Pathans. In between beating off attacks, he advises her to keep the last bullet for herself and offers some general instruction on the nature of command on the frontier. ‘All savage races love fighting and certainly our own people do,’ which explains why British officers enjoy such a rapport with Sikhs, Punjabis and Gurkhas. And it is this martial spirit which makes Indian troops led by British officers a match for the Pathans.6 It does not, however, prevent the fort from falling and Nita and Charlie being captured by a chief who enslaves them. They escape and, in due time, marry, and one feels she will prove a very stalwart memsahib.
At one penny a week, Chums was well within the reach of all middle-class boys and many from the more prosperous working classes. Henty’s ‘lads’, as he called his readers, were from all classes, for his yarns were regularly given as prizes for achievement in Board and Sunday schools – many found in second-hand bookshops today still contain the inscription plates. Together with the poems of Kipling and Newbolt, these juvenile stories gave the North-West Frontier a special place in the popular imagination. Among the last compositions of that robust patriot William McGonagall, Dundee’s weaver-turned-balladeer, was ‘The Storming of the Dargai Heights’. It described, as only he could, a famous incident during the 1897–98 Tirah campaign:
In that famous charge it was a most beautiful sight
To see the regimental pipers playing with all their might;
But, alas! one of them was shot through both ankles, and fell to the ground,
But still he played away while bullets fell on every side around.
II
McGonagall derived his version of the engagement from newspaper reports. Frontier wars were a staple of the late-Victorian press. Editors rightly believed that readers of all classes relished accounts of distant wars in which imperial armies subdued savage but recklessly brave adversaries. Reporters and war artists concentrated on thrilling incidents and, where comment intruded, the wars were presented as affirmations of national superiority and imperial destiny.
The issues behind Indian frontier campaigns were given relatively few column inches compared to the space allocated for accounts of fighting, on-the-spot photographs and sketches, and imaginary scenes of action drawn by staff artists at home. On 31 August 1897 the Daily Graphic, a tabloid with a predominantly lower-middle and working-class readership, summed up the purpose of current operations on the North-West Frontier in one sentence: ‘The power which is not seen, is, for the Oriental, nonexistent.’ This message was repeated later in a letter from a serving officer: ‘Never do anything by halves with Orientals. They don’t understand it.’ The wider implications of the campaign were conveyed in an interview with the explorer, Captain Francis Younghusband, who explained that it was foolhardy for the government to permit the continued existence of native states in an area where the frontiers of the British, Russian and Chinese empires met.7
The Times gave prominence to a speech by General Sir George White, the commander-in-chief in India, who insisted that civilisation and barbarism could no longer co-exist on India’s frontier. As it was pushed back, civilisation advanced. It was militarily unthinkable that the Indian government could tolerate on its borders 200,000 ‘of the most turbulent and finest fighting material in the world, unrestrained by civilised government and fired by fanaticism’.8 The theme of civilisation pressing ahead, which was also being applied to the contemporary campaign in the Sudan, was taken up in the Graphic, an illustrated weekly. A sketch of a native tailor using a sewing machine was captioned: ‘The Advance of Civilisation in the Tochi valley’. Another drawing which spoke for itself showed doctors testing the eyes of frontier tribesmen at a dispensary in Bannu.9
By far the greater part of press coverage of frontier operations concerned the progress of the armies. New printing techniques enabled photographs to be reproduced, giving a new verisimilitude to campaign reports, with portraits of generals, men decorated for gallantry or killed in action. The camera also revealed the landscape which was being fought over, and off-duty troops and their equipment. The Illustrated London News reproduced a posed photograph of a Maxim machine-gun detachment during the Chitral campaign. The everyday realities of frontier warfare appear on a photograph taken by an officer which shows sepoys digging a drinking-water channel. In the foreground is a sign in Hindi, Nepalese and English with the order: ‘Pakkal Mules not to stand in water’.10
Officers’ eyewitness sketches, either reproduced direct or re-drawn to give additional dramatic effect, remained the standard illustrations in weeklies and dailies. They were supplemented by the first-hand material sent home by professional war artists. The experienced Melton Prior, who accompanied the Tirah punitive column on behalf of the Illustrated London News, knew what his audience liked most and provided vivid scenes of hand-to-hand combat. In one, a line of Sikh infantrymen withstand an Afridi charge while, just behind the mêlée, a do
ctor gives first aid to a man wounded in the arm, and nearby a soldier, his face in agony, collapses with a chest wound.11
Most popular of all were representations of extraordinary acts of courage. The storming of the Dargai ridge on 20 October 1897 provided the raw material for artists to show their patriotic mettle and give the public what it wanted. After five hours of inconclusive fighting on the lower slopes, the 3rd Sikhs and the Gordon Highlanders were ordered to advance. They surged uphill to the sound of ‘The Cock o’ the North’ and Piper Findlater, although shot in both legs, played on until the position was taken. He won the Victoria Cross for his part in what the Daily Graphic called ‘a splendid piece of pluck’.12 Specially commissioned pictures soon appeared in the papers which showed kilted Highlanders bounding up the hillside past the wounded Findlater; one in full colour was given away free to readers of Chums.13 Newbolt commemorated the battle in ‘The Gay Gordons’:
There are bullets by the hundred buzzing in the air;
There are bonny lads lying on the hillside bare;
But the Gordons know what the Gordons dare
When they hear the pipers playing!
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