This formed a well-conceived prelude to the gaieties of the London season.
Chapter X
The Malakand Field Force
I WAS on the lawns of Goodwood in lovely weather and winning my money, when the revolt of the Pathan tribesmen on the Indian frontier began. I read in the newspapers that a Field Force of three brigades had been formed, and that at the head of it stood Sir Bindon Blood. Forthwith I telegraphed reminding him of his promise, and took the train for Brindisi to catch the Indian Mail. I impressed Lord William Beresford into my cause. He reinforced my appeals to the General. He entertained me at the Marlborough Club before my train left Victoria. These Beresfords had a great air. They made one feel that the world and everyone in it were of fine consequence. I remember the manner in which he announced my purpose to a circle of club friends many years my seniors. ‘He goes to the East tonight – to the seat of war.’ ‘To the East’ – the expression struck me. Most people would have said ‘He is going out to India’; but to that generation the East meant the gateway to the adventures and conquests of England. ‘To the Front?’ they asked. Alas, I could only say I hoped so. However, they were all most friendly and even enthusiastic. I felt very important, but naturally observed a marked discretion upon Sir Bindon Blood’s plan of campaign.
I only just caught the train; but I caught it in the best of spirits.
One voyage to India is enough; the others are merely repletion. It was the hottest season of the year, and the Red Sea was stifling. The hand-pulled punkahs, for in those days there were no electric fans, flapped vigorously to and fro in the crowded dining-saloon and agitated the hot food-smelling air. But these physical discomforts were nothing beside my mental anxieties. I was giving up a whole fortnight’s leave. At Brindisi no answer had come from Sir Bindon Blood. It was sure to come at Aden. There I danced about from one foot to the other till the steward had distributed the last of the telegrams and left me forlorn. However, at Bombay was good news. The General’s message was ‘Very difficult; no vacancies; come up as a correspondent; will try to fit you in. B.B.’
I had first of all to obtain leave from my regiment at Bangalore. This meant a two days’ journey by railway in the opposite direction to that in which my hopes were directed. The regiment was surprised to see me back before my time, but an extra subaltern for duty was always welcome. Meanwhile I had been commissioned as war-correspondent by the Pioneer newspaper, and my mother had also arranged in England that my letters should be simultaneously published in the Daily Telegraph, for which that journal was willing to pay £5 a column. This was not much, considering that I had to pay all my own expenses. I carried these journalistic credentials when I presented in much anxiety Sir Bindon Blood’s telegram to my commanding officer. But the Colonel was indulgent, and the fates were kind. Although the telegram was quite informal and unofficial, I was told that I could go and try my luck. That night therefore with my dressing-boy and campaigning-kit I sped to the Bangalore railway station and bought a ticket for Nowshera. The Indian clerk, having collected from me a small sack of rupees, pushed an ordinary ticket through a pigeon-hole. I had the curiosity to ask how far it was. The polite Indian consulted a railway timetable and impassively answered, 2,028 miles. Quite a big place, India! This meant a five days’ journey in the worst of the heat. I was alone; but with plenty of books, the time passed not unpleasantly. Those large leather-lined Indian railway carriages, deeply shuttered and blinded from the blistering sun and kept fairly cool by a circular wheel of wet straw which one turned from time to time, were well adapted to the local conditions. I spent five days in a dark padded moving cell, reading mostly by lamplight or by some jealously admitted ray of glare.
I broke my journey for a night and a day at Rawalpindi where I had a subaltern friend in the Fourth Dragoon Guards. There was a certain stir in Rawalpindi, although it was some hundreds of miles away from the front. The whole garrison was hoping to be sent north. All leave was stopped and the Dragoon Guards were expecting to be ordered any day to grind their swords. After dinner we repaired to the Sergeants’ Mess, where a spirited sing-song was in progress. Nothing recalls the past so potently as a smell. In default of a smell the next best mnemonic is a tune. I have got tunes in my head for every war I have been to, and indeed for every critical or exciting phase in my life. Some day when my ship comes home, I am going to have them all collected in gramophone records, and then I will sit in a chair and smoke my cigar, while pictures and faces, moods and sensations long vanished return; and pale but true there gleams the light of other days. I remember well the songs the soldiers sang on this occasion. There was a song called ‘The New Photographee’ about some shocking invention which had just been made enabling photographs to be taken through a screen or other opaque obstruction. This was the first I had heard of it. It appeared that there might soon be an end to all privacy. In the words of the song
The | in | side | of | ev | er | y | thing | you | see, |
A ter | ri | ble | thing, | an | ’or | ri | ble | thing, | is | the | new pho | tog | ra | phee. |
Of course we treated it all as a joke, but afterwards I read in the newspapers that they might some day even be able to see the very bones in your body! Then there was the song, the chorus of which was:
And England asks the question,
When danger’s nigh,
Will the sons of India do or die?
and naturally a reassuring answer was forthcoming. But the best of all was
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.
I felt much uplifted by these noble sentiments, especially after having been spaciously entertained at the regimental mess. I comported myself, however, with purposed discretion, because there was at this time some ill-feeling between this distinguished regiment and my own. An officer of the Fourth Dragoon Guards had telegraphed to one of our Captains in the ordinary routine of the service, saying ‘Please state your lowest terms for an exchange into the Fourth Dragoon Guards.’ To which our Captain had gaily replied ‘£10,000, a Peerage and a free kit.’ The Dragoon Guards had taken umbrage at this and thought it was a reflection upon the standing of their regiment. This ruffling of plumes added zest to the competitions we were later on to have with this fine regiment in the polo championships of 1898 and 1899.
I must not allow the reader to forget that I am on my way posthaste to the front, and early on the sixth morning after I had left Bangalore I stood on the platform of Nowshera, the railhead of the Malakand Field Force. It was forty miles across the plains in really amazing heat, before the tonga – a kind of little cart drawn by relays of galloping ponies – began to climb the steep winding ascent to the Malakand Pass. This defile had been forced by Sir Bindon Blood three years before, and the headquarters for the new campaign, together with a brigade of all arms, were encamped upon its summit. Yellow with dust I presented myself at the Staff Office. The General was away. He had gone with a flying column to deal with the Bunerwals, a most formidable tribe with a valley of their own in which they had maintained themselves for centuries against all comers. In 1863 the Imperial Government had sent an expedition to Bunēr resulting in what is known in Anglo-Indian annals as the Umbeyla campaign. The Bunerwals had resisted with extraordinary spirit and the skeletons of several hundred British soldiers and sepoys mouldered round the once notorious Crag Picquet, stormed and retaken again and again. No one knew how long Sir Bindon Blood would be occupied in dealing with these famous and ferocious bandits. In the meanwhile I was made a member of the Staff Mess and told I might unroll my Wolseley valise in one of the tents. I decided in great docility to be always on my best behaviour for fear that anything should happen to get me a bad name in this new world into which I had climbed.
The General took only five days to coax and quell the Bunerwals, but it seemed a very long time to me. I endeavoured to t
urn it to the best advantage. I acquired an entirely new faculty. Until this time I had never been able to drink whisky. I disliked the flavour intensely. I could not understand how so many of my brother officers were so often calling for a whisky and soda. I liked wine, both red and white, and especially champagne; and on very special occasions I could even drink a small glass of brandy. But this smoky-tasting whisky I had never been able to face. I now found myself in heat which, though I stood it personally fairly well, was terrific, for five whole days and with absolutely nothing to drink, apart from tea, except either tepid water or tepid water with lime-juice or tepid water with whisky. Faced with these alternatives I ‘grasped the larger hope’. I was sustained in these affairs by my high morale. Wishing to fit myself for active-service conditions I overcame the ordinary weaknesses of the flesh. By the end of those five days I had completely overcome my repugnance to the taste of whisky. Nor was this a momentary acquirement. On the contrary the ground I gained in those days I have firmly entrenched and held throughout my whole life. Once one got the knack of it, the very repulsion from the flavour developed an attraction of its own; and to this day, although I have always practised true temperance, I have never shrunk when occasion warranted it from the main basic standing refreshment of the white officer in the East.
Of course all this whisky business was quite a new departure in fashionable England. My father for instance could never have drunk whisky except when shooting on a moor or in some very dull chilly place. He lived in the age of the ‘brandy and soda’, for which indeed there was much respectable warrant. However, surveying the proposition from an impartial standpoint after adequate experiment and reflection, I am clear that for ordinary daily use whisky in a diluted form is the more serviceable of these twin genii.
Now that I have been drawn into this subject while perched upon the Malakand Pass, let me say that I and other young officers had been brought up quite differently from the University boys of those times. The undergraduates of Oxford and Cambridge used to drink like fishes, and they even had clubs and formal dinners where it was an obligation for everyone to consume more liquor than he could carry. At Sandhurst, on the other hand, and in the Army, drunkenness was a disgraceful offence punishable not only by social reprobation often physically manifested, but if it ever got into the official sphere, by the sack. I had been brought up and trained to have the utmost contempt for people who got drunk – except on very exceptional occasions and a few anniversaries – and I would have liked to have the boozing scholars of the Universities wheeled into line and properly chastised for their squalid misuse of what I must ever regard as a good gift of the gods. In those days I was very much against drunkards, prohibitionists and other weaklings of excess: but now I can measure more charitably the frailties of nature from which their extravagances originate. Subalterns in those days were an intolerant tribe; they used to think that if a man got drunk or would not allow other people to have a drink, he ought to be kicked. Of course we all know much better now, having been civilised and ennobled by the Great War.
I had also in these five days to fit myself out in all respects for the approaching movement of our force. I had to buy two good horses, engage a military syce (groom), and complete my martial wardrobe in many particulars. Unluckily for them, but very conveniently for me, several officers had been killed in the preceding week, and their effects, including what they had stood up in, were, in accordance with Anglo-Indian campaigning custom, sold by auction as soon as the funeral (if any) was over. In this way I soon acquired a complete outfit. It struck me as rather grim to see the intimate belongings of one’s comrade of the day before – his coat, his shirt, his boots, his water-bottle, his revolver, his blanket, his cooking-pot – thus unceremoniously distributed among strangers. But after all it was quite logical and in accordance with the highest principles of economics. Here was much the best market. All transport charges were already defrayed. The dead man disposed of his assets on what were virtually monopoly terms. The camp auctioneer realised far better prices than any widow or mother could have done for the worldly effects of Lieut. A.B. or Capt. X.Y. And as it was with the officers, so also was it much more frequently with the private soldier. Still I must admit that I felt a pang when a few weeks later I first slung round my shoulder the lanyard of a gallant friend I had seen killed the day before.
The time has come when I must put the reader into a more general comprehension of the campaign.6 For three years the British had held the summit of the Malakand Pass and thus had maintained the road from the Swat Valley and across the Swat River by many other valleys to Chitral. Chitral was then supposed to be of great military importance. It has always seemed to get along quite happily since, but no doubt it was very important then. The tribesmen of the Swat Valley, irritated by the presence of the troops in what they had for generations regarded as their own country, had suddenly burst out in a fury, attributed by the Government to religion, but easily explainable on quite ordinary grounds. They had attacked the garrisons holding the Malakand Pass and the little fort of Chakdara which, peeked up on a rock like a miniature Gibraltar, defended the long swinging bridge across the Swat River. The misguided tribesmen had killed quite a lot of people, including a number of women and children belonging to the friendly and pacified inhabitants. There had been a moment of crisis in the defence of the Malakand Pass from a sudden and surprise attack. However, the onslaught had been repulsed, and in the morning light the Guides Cavalry and the 11th Bengal Lancers had chased these turbulent and froward natives from one end of the Swat Valley to the other, claiming that they had speared and otherwise slain considerable numbers of them. The fort of Chakdara, the Lilliputian Gibraltar, had just survived its siege and saved its soul (and skin) alive. The swinging wire-rope bridge was intact, and by this bridge the punitive expedition of, say, 12,000 men and 4,000 animals was now about to march into the mountains, through the valleys of Dir and Bajaur, past the Mamund country, finally rejoining civilisation in the plains of India after subduing the Mohmands, another tribe who had also been extremely contumacious in the neighbourhood of Peshawar.
Sir Bindon Blood returned in due course from the subjugation of the Bunerwals. He was a very experienced Anglo-Indian officer, and he had reduced the Bunerwals to reason almost without killing anybody. He liked these wild tribesmen and understood the way to talk to them. The Pathans are strange people. They have all sorts of horrible customs and frightful revenges. They understand bargaining perfectly, and provided they are satisfied first of all that you are strong enough to talk to them on even terms, one can often come to an arrangement across the floor of the House, or rather ‘behind the Chair’. Now, Sir Bindon Blood had cleared it all up quite happily with the Bunerwals. There had only been one fight and that a small one, in which his aide-de-camp Lord Fincastle and another officer had gained the VC by rescuing, in circumstances of peculiar valour, a wounded comrade, about to be finished off. Back then comes my old friend of Deepdene days, a General and Commander-in-Chief with his staff and escort around him and his young heroes in his train.
Sir Bindon Blood was a striking figure in these savage mountains and among these wild rifle-armed clansmen. He looked very much more formidable in his uniform, mounted, with his standard-bearer and cavalcade, than he had done when I had seen him in safe and comfortable England. He had seen a great deal of the British and Indian armies in war and peace, and he had no illusions on any point. He was very proud to be the direct descendant of the notorious Colonel Blood, who in the reign of King Charles II had attempted to steal by armed force the Crown Jewels from the Tower of London. The episode is in the history books. The Colonel was arrested as he quitted the Tower gates with important parts of the regalia in his hands. Brought to trial for high treason and several other capital offences, he was acquitted and immediately appointed to command the King’s bodyguard. This strange sequence of events gave rise to scurrilous suggestions that his attempt to abstract the Crown Jewels from the Tower had the conn
ivance of the Sovereign himself. It is certainly true that the King was very short of money in those hard times, and that the predecessors of Mr Attenborough were already in existence in various parts of Europe. However this may be, Sir Bindon Blood regarded the attempted stealing of the Crown Jewels by his ancestor as the most glorious event in his family history, and in consequence he had warm sympathy with the Pathan tribes on the Indian frontier, all of whom would have completely understood the incident in all its bearings, and would have bestowed unstinted and discriminating applause upon all parties. If the General could have got them all together and told them the story at length by broadcast, it would never have been necessary for three brigades with endless tails of mule and camel transport to toil through the mountains and sparsely populated highlands in which my next few weeks were to be passed.
The General, then already a veteran, is alive and hale today. He had one personal ordeal in this campaign. A fanatic approaching in a deputation (called a jirga) whipped out a knife, and rushed upon him from about eight yards. Sir Bindon Blood, mounted upon his horse, drew his revolver, which most of us thought on a General of Division was merely a token weapon, and shot his assailant dead at two yards. It is easy to imagine how delighted everyone in the Field Force, down to the most untouchable sweeper, was at such an event.
My Early Life Page 13