by Richard Toye
II
Throughout the fighting Churchill did his best to impress his superiors through conspicuous bravery (or recklessness). When the firing started he carried on riding his pony while others dived for cover – but only, as he told Lady Randolph, when there was a chance that someone might notice.29 He did not get the medal he longed for, and had to be content with a mention in despatches for having ‘made himself useful at a critical moment’ during the action of 16 September.30 When the fighting in the Mamund Valley came to an end he was obliged to return to his regiment and the old routine. By late October, barely seven weeks after he had left, he was back in Bangalore. He was already bent on writing The Story of the Malakand Field Force, which would bring his name before a wider public and help get him into politics. (He had been annoyed that his Daily Telegraph letters had been published anonymously.) His manuscript was completed by the end of the year, with the assistance David Konar, a clerk of around his own age, who recalled him as quiet but hard working.31 On the part of the original manuscript that survives there is a telling amendment made by Churchill: ‘the prestige of the dominant race enables them to keep up appearances before maintain their superiority over the native troops’.32 In his rush to beat Fincastle into print, Churchill sacrificed the chance to check the proofs himself and entrusted them to his uncle, Moreton Frewen, known as ‘The Mortal Ruin’ because of the permanently catastrophic state of his finances. The result was an embarrassing series of errors that detracted from the book’s genuine literary virtues. The Athenaeum said it resembled ‘a volume by Disraeli revised by a mad printer’s reader’.33 It remains one of Churchill’s most misunderstood works, but when read in conjunction with his original despatches and his private letters it yields important insights into his early imperial thought.
Many scholars have suggested that the book revealed Churchill as an outspoken critic of the government’s frontier policy.34 ‘Winston was not timid about criticizing British policy’, we are told. ‘What was the point of extending the British presence into the inaccessible North-West Frontier?’ he asked. ‘The tribesmen were best left alone.’35 He is said to have viewed the forward policy ‘with great scepticism’.36 Another writer argues, ‘Churchill opposed the extension of the imperial frontier on both financial and moral grounds.’37 Others show signs of confusion. For example, the official biographer claims that Churchill thought the whole Malakand expedition was a mistake while simultaneously suggesting that he favoured annexation of the borderlands.38 Yet another writer argues that Churchill favoured an expansionary policy, albeit ‘not without regrets’.39
So what was Churchill really arguing? In the preface to the book, he disclaimed any intention to write a party pamphlet on an imperial issue. He had no case to make, he claimed, against any policy or person; he had merely recorded the facts.40 This was disingenuous. As the United Service Gazette observed, there was an obvious disparity between Churchill’s promise of neutrality and his actual performance.41 In spite of his protestations, he had a clear policy agenda in favour of the forward policy. We can see this by tracing in detail the way in which his thinking about the frontier had evolved.
He first addressed the question even while the fighting was still going on, in a despatch of 21 September 1897. Using a line of reasoning that he was to deploy consistently, he suggested that although it was not hard to find arguments against the forward policy, it was doubtful that it had ever been possible to avoid that policy. The forward movement was now, he said, ‘beyond recall’. Retreat was impossible, and ‘the more rapid the advance the sooner will the troubles of a transition stage be over’. He argued for the (very ambitious) frontier Gilgit–Chitral–Jellabad–Kandahar.42 At first his mother declined to forward this despatch to the Daily Telegraph; she appears to have thought it would get her son into difficulties with his superiors.43 Churchill assured her that it was not the case: ‘Far from getting me into trouble it expresses what is essentially the military view.’ He pointed out that his views were in line with those of Sir George White, the Commander-in-Chief in India.44 Churchill was absolutely right about this. White’s term was about to end, and at his farewell dinner he argued that ‘civilization and barbarism’ could not coexist peaceably. ‘We hear a great deal of abuse of the “forward” policy, but look back on the history of the world and you will see that, by fate’s inexorable decree, civilization must advance and savagery recede.’45 In the light of this it is unsurprising that Churchill’s article, when published, did not cause him any problems with the army hierarchy. In the final letter of the series, written on 16 October, Churchill argued that the gains from trade in the newly pacified valleys would never repay the cost of the military expenditure, but that it was impossible to retreat. He also remarked that ‘morally, it is unfortunate for the tribesmen that our spheres of influence clash with their spheres of existence’.46 When he reproduced this observation in his book, the United Service Gazette commented that it was not a bad epigram, ‘though to our duller comprehension it would seem as if the moral misfortune did not attach to the tribesmen’.47
In private, Churchill was more ambivalent. Back in Bangalore in October, he wrote to his mother that although the initiators of the forward policy bore responsibility for the war, they may in fact have found it impossible to act otherwise.
At any rate now we are started we can’t go back and must go on. And the sooner the better. Financially it is ruinous. Morally it is wicked. Militarily it is an open question, and politically it is a blunder. But we can’t pull up now. Annexation is the word which the B.P. [British Public] will have ultimately to swallow, and the sooner they do it, the sooner things will begin to mend.
He added that Britain would eventually have to absorb territory right up to the frontier with Russia.48
Several days later he sent Lady Randolph a tribeswoman’s amulet, and commented sarcastically that although it was neither valuable nor pretty it was at least ‘a tangible result of the “Forward Policy” ’. He had found it in a village which had cost the British seventy casualties to take, and he thus found it ‘a bitter comment on the wild and wasteful course upon which we are now embarked’.49 He told another relative that the forward policy was ‘an awful business’.50 However, he appears to have objected not to expansion and annexation per se but rather to the methods by which it was being pursued. And even his dislike of those methods does not appear to have dented his belief that, having been started, the policy should be continued. That was to be the keynote of his argument in the final chapter of The Story of the Malakand Field Force, which he called ‘The Riddle of the Frontier’.
Churchill, it is true, made some efforts to hedge his bets. He emphasized that he was proceeding in a spirit of cautious inquiry, and that his conclusions were only a guess. He acknowledged that there were plenty of plausible arguments against the forward policy. As in his original despatches, he made no attempt to deny one of the strongest of these – that it cost more money than it could possibly generate in return. However, he believed that, as he put it elsewhere in the book, ‘Imperialism and economics clash as often as honesty and self-interest’; that is to say, the policy should not be rejected on grounds of expense alone.51 And he suggested that it was fruitless to argue over whether it had been right to begin it. ‘We have crossed the Rubicon’, he claimed. It was necessary to find a defensible frontier: ‘The old line has been left, and between that line and an advanced line continuous with Afghan territory, and south of which all shall be reduced to law and order, there does not appear to be any prospect of a peaceful and permanent settlement.’ This did not mean that he favoured a policy of ‘full steam ahead’, as he put it. He ridiculed the idea of a field force operating non-stop in the frontier valleys until they had been rendered as pacific as Hyde Park, an exercise for which Britain lacked both the money and the troops. He preferred instead the system in force prior to the uprising – that is one ‘of gradual advance, of political intrigue among the tribes, of subsidies and small expedi
tions’. This, it should be noted, was an argument about means and not about ends. Churchill did criticize both the government of India and that of Britain, not for their advocacy of the forward policy, but rather for their failure to advocate it openly. ‘They know they cannot turn back. They fully intend to go on. Yet they fear to admit the situation, to frankly lay their case before the country, and trust to the good sense and courage of an ancient democracy.’52 The authorities were thus reproached not with excessive ardour but with unnecessary timidity – a criticism which, although it cannot have been entirely welcome, was hardly deeply wounding in the circumstances.
Contemporaries were quite able to recognize the drift of his argument. Although some reviewers took his claim not to be offering a political tract at face value,53 many others saw through it. In fact, he makes it abundantly clear that he is a strong partisan of the most forward “Forward Policy” ’, observed the United Service Gazette.54 The Pall Mall Gazette likewise noted that ‘he plunges for the Forward Policy’.55 The Review of Reviews found that Churchill’s political views were ‘not new, being simply a repetition of the stock arguments of the advocates of the Forward School’.56 Some reviewers expressed approval of Churchill’s stance; others were scornful of his extensive territorial ambitions. The Liberal Daily News suggested that Churchill was in favour of Britain occupying the whole of Afghanistan, as far as its border with Russia. It sneered, ‘If the Forwards mean to annex Jellalabad and Candahar, why they may just as well finish the job by annexing the city of Cabul and all Afghanistan up to and beyond Herat, and shake hands (or exchange shots) with the Russian outposts.’57 Of the British papers, only the Scotsman’s reviewer seemed in any doubt about what the book was arguing, and even he succeeded in puzzling through the policy implications in the end: ‘he [Churchill] seems, if we understand him aright [. . .] to criticise unfavourably the Forward Policy. But then he is still more severe upon the alternative policy, of standing still, and upon its advocates; and he holds that having committed ourselves to the course of garrisoning the passes and defending Afghanistan against aggression, we are bound on all accounts to go through with it.’58 One can almost hear the mental cogs turning. The Times of India, for its part, offered general applause for Churchill’s views on the frontier issue as well as for his defence of village-burning. It ventured that although such practices might invite condemnation if employed in the course of ‘ordinary international warfare’, civilized standards sometimes required ‘considerable qualification’ in the special conditions of the North-West Frontier.59 Churchill visited the paper’s editor and thanked him with a smile: ‘That’s the very first time any newspaper has ever published a leading article about me, but it won’t be the last! ’60
Almost as if he desired to erase any remaining ambiguity, Churchill followed up his book with an article on ‘The Ethics of Frontier Policy’. In it, he repeated the now-familiar argument that it was impossible either to turn back or to stand still, and revealed the ultimate scope of his ambitions for expansion. ‘The weary march of civilization lies onward’, he wrote portentously. ‘We must follow it till the Afghan border is reached and thence beyond, until ultimately India is divided from Russia only by a line of painted signposts’. (The Daily News was proved right.) He also said explicitly that his own ideas did not differ fundamentally from the forward policy, and that the government’s attitude was to be applauded.61 In sending a copy of the piece to a friend, he noted that he had adopted a ‘circuitous insidious but none the less effective method of defending the Forward Policy’.62 His defence of it was not really all that subtle; he may have convinced himself he was carrying an argumentative rapier, but somewhere along the line he had exchanged it for a blunderbuss. His admission that he had tried to be ‘insidious’, though, is compelling evidence that we should take the reservations in his arguments for the forward policy – which appear to have misled many historians – with a generous pinch of salt.
Given Churchill’s views on the frontier question, it is hardly surprising that The Story of the Malakand Field Force found favour with Lord Salisbury, who asked to see Churchill when the latter returned to England briefly in the summer of 1898. According to Churchill’s later recollection, the Prime Minister praised both the book’s subject matter and its style.63 Doubtless, Salisbury would not have shown such interest if it had been unreadable, but neither would he have done so had he perceived it as an attack on his own policy. Indeed, not long before the book came out, he had made a speech in the House of Lords in which he used a very similar argument to that deployed by Churchill. He opposed, he said, ‘a military forward policy’ and yet he argued that a forward policy, secured by other means, was ‘inevitable’. The march of civilization could not be stopped.64 (As a matter of fact the incoming Viceroy, Lord Curzon, successfully abandoned the forward policy, which proves that it was not inevitable at all.) Churchill, then, was no Young Turk daringly challenging received orthodoxy; rather, he was defending Establishment wisdom against the attacks of the heretics. In 1888, Salisbury had described small imperial wars as ‘merely the surf that marks the edge of the advancing wave of civilisation’.65 Churchill had chosen this remark as an epigraph – which was a useful method of currying favour and signifying the book’s ideological agenda at the same time.66
III
Churchill’s enforced return to his regiment after Malakand irritated him. He was eager to see more action and, even before he had completed his book, he was agitating for a place on another expedition. The tribesmen of the mountainous Tirah region – between the Khanki Valley and the Khyber Pass – had exploited the opportunity created by the Malakand rising to stage a rebellion of their own. General Sir William Lockhart was given command of an expeditionary force of 40,000 men to suppress what was the most serious anti-British outbreak since the 1857 mutiny. Lord George Hamilton, the Secretary of State for India, talked boldly of transforming the ‘wild tribesmen’ into loyal subjects, just as the Scottish rebels of the eighteenth century had been transformed into the Highland regiments now fighting them.67 Those soldiers were incredibly brave, but nonetheless incurred heavy losses, provoking Liberal criticism of the sacrifice of men and money.68 Having made substantial advances, the troops retired for the winter; but as one commander later admitted, what was ‘politely called an evacuation [. . .] was really a “get away” of the worst type’.69 In January 1898 – although still hankering to see the fighting himself – Churchill told Lady Randolph that the whole expedition had been a mistake. Regular troops, which made an ideal target for guerrilla fighters, could not ‘catch or kill an impalpable cloud of skirmishers’. Lacking the means to subdue the tribesmen, it was wrong to make the attempt.70 Yet if these remarks appeared to signal a change in his thinking about the frontier question, that change was to be short lived.
In March 1898 Churchill’s efforts to get to the front – which had included a fruitless visit to Calcutta to lobby the authorities – paid off at last. Colonel Ian Hamilton, who had befriended him on his journey to England the previous year, made efforts to smooth his way. Clever, courageous and charming – ‘brilliant and chivalrous’, as Churchill put it – Hamilton had repeatedly showed his fearlessness in battle in Afghanistan and elsewhere. He was severely wounded during the first Boer War (1881) and was afterwards left with a withered hand. In 1891 became the youngest colonel in the British army.71 In Churchill he clearly recognized a kindred spirit, someone who would go out and look for action rather than sit and wait for instructions. Churchill, while at a polo tournament in Meerut (only one and a half days’ rail journey from the front), now begged Hamilton by telegram to arrange an interview for him with General Lockhart. Accounts conflict as to whether Hamilton actually succeeded in fixing this, but he at any rate advised Churchill to take the risk of going to see the general in Peshawar. Churchill did so, even though, unless his application for a position on the force was accepted, he would not be able to get back to Bangalore before his leave expired.72 At this point, another ma
n came into the picture. This was Captain Aylmer Haldane, Lockhart’s aide-de-camp, who, like Hamilton, was to play a significant role in Churchill’s future career.
Haldane was a dozen years older than Churchill and, prior to his service with the Tirah field force, had seen action in Waziristan and with the Chitral relief force. On 5 March he was at the bungalow headquarters of William Nicholson, the field force’s Chief of Staff, when Churchill arrived, and was delegated to find out what he wanted. Haldane had already heard of Churchill, and was immediately impressed by him. ‘He struck me almost at first sight as cut out on a vastly different pattern from any officer of his years I had so far met’, he recalled.73 He persuaded Nicholson to accept him onto the staff. Churchill wrote: ‘I have never met this man before and I am at a loss to know why he should have espoused my cause – with so strange an earnestness.’ His first impression was that Haldane was intelligent, brave, ambitious and conscientious, and with extraordinary influence over Nicholson, albeit he was very unpopular.74 Although he soon decided that his new friend was not quite as clever as he first thought – and at times found him over-bearing and irritating – the two got on ‘capitally’. Haldane confessed to Churchill that he was unhappily married.75 Churchill, for his part, told Haldane that he aimed to go into politics, and talked to him of books (including H. G. Wells, Winwood Reade and Gibbon). ‘As we trudged along the dusty roads near Peshawar he would quote snatches from Rudyard Kipling’, Haldane remembered.76
