Frontier derring-do was also celebrated in the Music Halls with the stirring song, ‘Bravo, Gordon Highlanders’:
A deafening cheer – a rush of men – a glint of deadly steel,
On dash the Gordons, though the bullets rain.14
Public eulogy for the Highlanders left a sour taste in the mouths of some English soldiers on the frontier, who complained that their achievements never drew such applause.15 There was some truth in this; but adulation of the Highlanders owed as much to romantic Victorian images of them and their homeland as to their wild prowess on the battlefield. It was somehow appropriate that these kilted clansmen, natural soldiers from a rugged land, should overcome Afridis who, like them, were men of the mountains bred to war. This may have been why Findlater caught the public imagination. After receiving his VC from the Queen Empress, he was discharged from the army and offered a job by a Music Hall proprietor, who wanted him to play his pipes in a spectacular stage re-creation of the battle. The War Office considered this attempt at theatrical authenticity vulgar, and disapproved strongly.16
Every fictional version of the wars on India’s frontiers drew heavily on the reports sent by war correspondents. They were either professional journalists or army officers with literary talent and a need for extra income, like George Younghusband, who was briefly The Times’s correspondent during the Chitral campaign. After the storming of the Malakand Pass, he came across a soldier setting up a telegraph line some way back from the front and had the presence of mind to wire his story. The telegram reached London within twenty-four hours and provided his employers with a scoop.17 Winston Churchill, then a 23-year-old Hussar subaltern, used personal influence to get himself attached as the Daily Telegraph’s correspondent to General Sir Bindon Blood’s force during the 1897 Malakand campaign.
As he admitted to his mother, he was hungry for glory and delighted to be placed temporarily in charge of a company of Punjabis. ‘It means the medal and also that the next time I go into action I shall command a hundred men – and possibly I may bring off some “coup”.’18 There was something distinctly Hentyesque about this enthusiasm for a scrap on the frontier, and today it may strike a jarring note. But Henty wrote and Churchill went to war in the twilight of that age when the field of battle was still regarded as the field of honour, rather than the killing ground of mass, technological warfare which it became in the next century. Moreover, there were many actual soldiers who corresponded closely with Henty’s stereotypes. Consider this contemporary description of Surgeon-Lieutenant James ‘Jimmy’ Hugo of the 31st Punjabis, who won the DSO during frontier operations in 1897. He was: ‘Captain of school, and also of the Hammersmith Rugby Football Club; a thick-set, red-headed and very popular fellow; as strong as a bull, a good athlete, and a steady worker at “Barts”.’19
Churchill’s chance for fame came not on the battlefield, although he distinguished himself in some scrimmages, but from his account of the campaign, The Malakand Field Force, which appeared in 1898. It contained a vivid evocation of what made this kind of warfare so appealing to the keen young officers with a sense of adventure and a name to make:
. . . on the frontier, in the clear light of morning, when the mountain side is dotted with smoke puffs, and every ridge sparkles with bright sword blades, the spectator may observe and accurately appreciate all grades of human courage. He may remark occasions of devotion and self-sacrifice, of cool cynicism and stern resolve. He may participate in moments of wild enthusiasm, or savage anger or dismay.20
III
Behind the adventure and glamour of the frontier wars which so captivated the public were hard political realities. The land where Kipling’s brave men met and fought each other was also witnessing a far greater collision, between two societies and cultures which were irreconcilable. The romantic image of the frontier masked one of the greatest headaches which faced the Indian government. At the conclusion of their account of the 1897 Malakand campaign, two of Churchill’s brother officers remarked that the recent victories over the Pathans had achieved little beyond demonstrating the muscle of the Raj: ‘The frontier remains a source of perpetual joy to the soldier, but to the politician a problem yet to be solved.’21 Even the unprecedented show of military might ultimately proved of limited benefit; between 1899 and 1906 local intelligence catalogued 602 raids and disturbances in the frontier districts.22
The political problem of the North-West Frontier was part geographical and part human. It was a mountainous and, even at the turn of century, largely uncharted region which stretched from the Pamirs in the north to Baluchistan in the south. It included all the major passes which connected Afghanistan with India. Of these the most important were the Khyber Pass, the country of the Mohmands, and to the south, the Kurram Valley, home to the Afridis. Far to the north and close to the borders with Russia and China were the passes which led into Chitral and northern Kashmir. All, even the most inaccessible, were considered as potential ‘gateways’ to India by disciples of Forward frontier policies and therefore of immense strategic significance. The physical features of the area are best appreciated from a high-flying modern airliner, from which it appears like the wrinkled skin of elephant. From below and the perspective of the soldiers who periodically entered it, the frontier was a succession of physical obstacles. ‘Valley walls rise steeply five or six thousand feet on every side,’ recalled Churchill. ‘The columns crawl through a maze of giant corridors down which the snow-fed torrents foam under skies of brass.’23 The breath-taking vistas and sudden changes of light and weather were intoxicating, and gave an added zest to frontier warfare.
No one knew for certain how many people lived within the frontier districts. In 1898 the army estimated that there were at least 200,000 fighting men there, of whom a quarter were Afridis and Orakzais.24 They were well armed; according to intelligence calculations there were 48,000 rifles distributed among the tribesmen, including 7,700 breech-loaders. Ownership of a modern weapon gave a tribesman status among his own people and the capacity to fight as a guerrilla in a countryside he knew infinitely better than his enemies. He moved deftly and was a master of all the arts of ambush. During the 1894–95 expedition into Waziristan, Mahsuds armed with swords and led by a mullah on a white horse made a night attack on a camp, swept through the pickets and slaughtered servants and pack animals.25
The wild tribal charge, so beloved of war artists, was becoming a thing of the past as the Pathans took steps to procure modern rifles. More and more were being smuggled across the Afghan and Persian borders; between 1900 and 1907 at least 94,000 Martini-Henry breech-loaders reached the tribesmen from sources in Arabia and the Persian Gulf. The profits of this clandestine trade were enormous, with a Lee Metfold magazine rifle of the sort becoming redundant in the British army costing £6 in Muscat and being sold for £80 on the frontier.26 New firepower meant new mayhem as outposts built when a tribesman’s gun carried no more than 400 yards were enfiladed from hillsides a thousand or more yards away.27 In 1909 a belated attempt was made to stem the flow of modern weapons when the Royal Navy mounted a blockade of the Persian Gulf, intercepting ships and searching their holds for guns.
The possession of good weapons and the ability to use them were vital for every tribesman who lived by the ancestral code of puhktunwali, which demanded that he took vengeance for any injury or slight to his own or his clan’s honour. The obligations of the blood feud passed from generation to generation and were pursued relentlessly by warriors who had no other occupation. ‘Our women make bread and children,’ the Pathan would boast. ‘They need do no more. They are like cows.’28 This one-sided division of labour left men free to fight for profit, honour or the defence of Islam and their land. They did so with a courage and ferocity that astonished British officers. During an engagement in the Sandul valley in August 1895, a large body advanced into the combined fire of the new magazine rifles and Maxim machine-guns and were wiped out to a man.29 The onlookers did not say whether these men were Ghazis,
holy warriors dedicated to killing all enemies of Islam, whom the British called ‘Hindustani Fanatics’. Over 180 Ghazis joined the tribesmen who opposed the 1888 Black Mountain expedition and eighty-eight were counted among the dead after one futile headlong charge.30 They were identified by a red cord tied round the right arm.
Islam was the only force which ever united the Pathans. In its frontier mutation it taught the tribesmen that their land was in purdah, like their women: hidden from the view of unbelievers and sacrosanct. If purdah was violated, then the victim’s menfolk were obliged to kill the perpetrator. By this token, gradual British penetration of the frontier appeared as a sort of blasphemy, and demanded retribution. This was among the messages preached by various charismatic clerics who, from time to time, drew tribes and clans together in a jihad. In British official papers they were near-anonymous creatures to whom the adjective ‘mad’ was frequently attached. Those who followed them respected them as men of outstanding piety, often with supernatural powers. Saddullah, known to the British as the ‘Mad Mullah’ or the ‘Mullah of Mastan’, had a revelation that angels would destroy Malakand fort and owned a miraculous pot which contained an inexhaustible supply of ghi and rice. Active in the lower Swat valley during the summer of 1897, he raised 20,000 men within a few days and led them in attacks on the Malakand and Chakdara forts, taking the British by surprise.31 The resonance of events around Malakand was quickly felt elsewhere and contributed to a wave of anti-British jihads in Afridi and Mohmand territories. All owed their origins and fervour to messianic holy men, about whom the authorities could discover little.32 Thereafter, military intelligence endeavoured to keep track of all mendicant mullahs and find out what they were preaching.33
Spiritual merit was offered to all who joined the jihads; in the case of those who stormed the Malakand fort, equal in value to a pilgrimage to Mecca. Such inducements were valuable, but the real source of Pathan resistance lay in fears that incursions into their country were the forerunners of permanent British military occupation. The warning signs were more or less the same: the construction of telegraph lines, police and military posts, road building and the appearance of political agents attached to the courts of local rulers. The passage through the Swat valley of the sizeable force sent to rescue the resident in Chitral in 1895, followed by the establishment of the base at Malakand, made it easy for Sadullah to convince the tribesmen that their independence and religion were imperilled. Religious passion had also been aroused by reports to the effect that Britain was no longer the protector of the Turkish sultan and was in the process of invading the Islamic state of the Sudan. Both stories were true, but this did not prevent some officers from detecting the malign influence of the nationalist press behind the upsurge in restlessness in the 1890s: ‘The unemployed loafer, who twenty years ago might have listened to the seditious preaching of a stump orator now hears the latest news . . . being read out from the papers, framed with the embellishments of a disloyal editor.’34
Pathan resistance to British encroachments posed a dilemma for the government. Two options offered themselves, each fraught with danger. There was the deliberate extension of direct control to the Afghan frontier, which most Pathans did not acknowledge, or the adoption of a live-and-let-live approach. This involved reaching an accommodation with the representatives of secular authority, hereditary rulers, maliks (village headmen) and jirgas (councils of elders), by which they agreed to co-operate with permanent British agents and residents in return for subsidies. Regional security would depend upon locally-recruited police and militia under British officers. It was hoped that such arrangements would, in time, eradicate disorder and finally lead to the area’s integration with more settled regions. It was a classic imperial policy which was summed up and gently mocked by the contemporary Muslim poet, Akbar Illahabad:
We of the East break our opponents’ heads
They of the West change their opponents’ nature . . .35
Remoulding the Pathan’s character was the task of political officers. Their job required perseverance, courage and, above all, immense reserves of patience. Most were former soldiers with a knowledge of local languages and a willingness to see things through the eyes of the Pathans, which made ‘politicals’ unpopular with regular officers. The distinctive white tabs on the political officer’s uniform were resented by soldiers on campaign, for whom the only policy worth following was that of hammering the tribesmen rather than coming to terms with them.36 This was understandable, but when the armies had finished their chastisement of the tribesmen, the political officers remained behind to continue the work of conciliation.
This was never easy among a people whose upbringing and religion made them inherently suspicious of all outsiders. Overcoming this distrust ultimately depended on the character of the individual officer. It was achieved with remarkable success by Sir Robert Warburton, who was assistant commissioner in Peshawar between 1879 and 1896. His mother was an Afghan and his father Anglo-Irish, which must have helped considerably in that he was less high-handed and more aware of tribal sensibilities than men from conventional military or civil service backgrounds. He believed that courtesy was the vital ingredient in winning confidence, for, if one was ‘kind in words’ to an Afridi, ‘he will repay you by great devotion, and he will put up with any punishment you like to give except abuse’. It was an approach which paid dividends:
It took me years to get through this thick crust of mistrust, but what was the after-result? For upwards of fifteen years I went about unarmed amongst these people. My camp, wherever it happened to be pitched, was always guarded and protected by them. The deadliest enemies of the Khyber Range, with a long record of blood-feuds, dropped these feuds for the time when they were in my camp.
He left the region at the onset of a large-scale war of the sort he had endeavoured to prevent. Before his departure, tearful old warriors expressed the hope that he would come to no harm in the fighting. This show of affection was all the more touching because they knew that in a few weeks punitive columns would be burning their villages, slaughtering their livestock and carrying off their stores of grain.37
Looking back on his life’s work, Warburton believed that he had brought a degree of stability into the Tirah and gained a deep understanding of its inhabitants. Progress would continue if they remained in contact with upright British officers who passed freely among them, dispensing ‘rough and ready’ justice. Instinctively querulous people appreciated dispassionate mediation from a figure from beyond their world of mutually jealous extended families and vendettas. Warburton maintained his reputation for impartiality by warmly accepting baksheesh from a native and then handing it back with the polite request to keep it for his use at some later date. This was the tack adopted by Sir Michael O’Dwyer whenever he was presented with ‘a fat-tailed sheep’ by a friendly malik, telling him to keep it and fatten it up for his next visit. A degree of open-mindedness was also invaluable, but it was often hard to sustain. George Robertson, successively agent in Gilgit and Chitral, was enchanted by the ‘Arabian nights’ entertainments he was offered, which included performances by ‘beautiful but unspeakable dancing boys’. His hosts’ moral universe repelled him:
Sensuality of the grossest kind, and murder, abominable cruelty, treachery or violent death, are never long absent from the thoughts of a people than whom no more in the world are more delightful companions, or of simpler, gentler appearance.38
Turning a blind eye to Pathan vices was essential if men like Robertson were to cultivate allies from among their men of influence. Political accommodations with rulers like the akhund (messenger of God) of Swat, the mehtar of Chitral and maliks were the foundation of British authority in the region. There were also lesser collaborators, the tribesmen who enlisted in Indian regiments or joined the tribal police forces and militias which formed the first and sometimes unreliable resort whenever trouble got out of hand. They could show exceptional courage in the service of their new masters, but when,
as in 1897, they had to choose between their faith and their officers, they tended to plump for the former. Many could never completely cut themselves off from the life they had left; at least one Pathan soldier in France in 1915 was keeping in touch with the progress of local blood-feuds by post.39 Some were willing to play the spy, like two-men from the Guides who were detached from the Chitral relief force to make charts of valleys in the Swat region where Europeans would have been attacked. One was given 100 rupees for his work.40 Espionage did not trouble the Pathan conscience, for in 1927 one army intelligence officer discovered that his Mahsud ‘stool pigeons’ were boasting to their villages that they were now government employees.41
As in earlier phases of Indian history, cultivation of high-ranking collaborators drew the Raj into serpentine family rivalries. The death in 1892 of Aman-ul-Mulk, the co-operative if amoral mehtar of Chitral, was followed by a bloody family power struggle which ended with the accession of Sher Afuz at the beginning of 1895. From Calcutta’s standpoint he was an unsuitable candidate who owed his throne to Afghan intrigue and the intervention of Umrah Khan, the anti-British, self-made ruler of neighbouring Dir. George Robertson, the resident, refused to recognise Sher Afuz and withdrew into the residency with his 400-strong bodyguard, two-thirds of them Kashmiri levies. The siege lasted seven weeks and, after the arrival of a relieving force, a more tractable mehtar was found, Shuja-ul-Mulk, whom the British Tommies called ‘sugar and milk’. A garrison with two machine-guns was left behind to ensure his safety and Chitral’s tranquillity. Its communications with the south were defended by new forts in the Swat valley.
This heavily-armed penetration of this region directly triggered widespread uprisings of 1897–98 and the heaviest fighting the region had yet seen. When it was over the total bill was £4.5 million. In an unlikely alliance, the Indian nationalist press and the new Viceroy, Curzon, condemned the campaigns as wasteful; there were no indications whatsoever that the tribesmen were cowed or ready to mend their ways. Indeed, as the stepping up of arms purchases indicate, they were preparing for a return match.
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