Churchill the Young Warrior, page 7
They all ran down towards the plain, followed by their pursuers trying to cut them off and firing on both flanks. When they finally got away they left one officer dead and a dozen wounded men to be cut to pieces by the pursuing Pathans.
Winston was in action twice more that week, at Domadola and at Zagai. He felt lucky, which was a good sign in a soldier. All the time, of course, the heat was unrelentingly harsh. And he had begun to understand why whisky was such a popular tipple with India hands.
Sixty more men were killed or wounded on September 30, when the 31st Punjabi Regiment was in action at Agrah. “I cried,” he wrote to Jennie, “when I met the Royal Wests and saw the men really unsteady under fire and tired of the game, and that poor young Browne-Clayton, literally cut in pieces on a stretcher …” He was only a year older than Winston. It may have been the first time he wept with emotion and sentiment, but it would not be the last. (Forty years later, he would weep to see working-class women lining up to buy birdseed for their pet budgerigars during the shortages with German bombing raids on London). Despite his tears at the deaths of boys so young, there was no doubt that Winston loved every minute of the adventure and the danger.
“The tribesmen torture the wounded and mutilate the dead,” Winston wrote to his grandmother. As a consequence, the British and Sikh troops never spared a single man of the enemy who falls into their hands. “Nature sets little store by life.”
Jennie chided him for boasting. And he replied that he only did so to close friends who already knew how conceited he was; and having an audience was half the fun. Anyway, he joked, being under fire was good experience for a political life. He had been under fire now on fifteen occasions since his first encounter on the frontier, and was satisfied with his coolness in dangerous situations.
In fact, his exuberance at the sight of gruesome deaths and deadly dangers to come was probably a need to talk about the shock of new experiences that could turn one’s life upside-down and linger in the mind forever, rather than being boasting. Far better to talk than bottle up all the images for future recall, as any psychiatrist would advise. (It was not until 1917 that bottling up grim memories for repeated recall later on would be named shell-shock.) The experience of lethal danger and death and grief required an outlet. What was important was that he had found himself cool and ruthless under fire and also a way to assuage any irrational feelings of guilt that frontline soldiers frequently suffer from. For others who become mentally blocked and can’t communicate their shock or grief, there is only crippling pain. Winston had tested himself under fire and passed the test. He was now a hardened soldier.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE CAVALRY CHARGE
WINSTON WISHED HE COULD COME TO the conclusion that the barbarity and losses, and the expenditure, resulted in a permanent settlement of the frontier, but he doubted it: “I do not think however that anything has been done that could not have to be done again.” He gave his opinion in the Daily Telegraph that it was folly to allow the tribesmen to be in control of the buffer zone between British India and Afghanistan. That opinion made him set aside writing a novel in favor of a true account of the Malakand field force.
He sent his manuscript to Jennie in England. He preferred histories that conjured up the past, since many traditional ones did not bring it alive. He’d previously mentioned his book to Balfour and now Balfour recommended his own literary agent, who found a publisher for it within a week. Winston still wished to leave for Egypt, but his mind had hardened to the challenge of winning an election and being esteemed in the House of Commons, as his father had been. He was now twenty-three.
In response to Jennie’s remarks about persisting with the army to demonstrate that he could, in effect, hold down a job, he wrote to remind her it was a pushy age and we must shove with the rest of them. After Egypt, he would turn from war to politics. The link between the two vocations was the switch from showing his mettle under attack on the frontier, to showing it under fire from the opposition in Parliament. He stayed with Lord Elgin the viceroy in Calcutta in 1898. It was an influential move into circles that could facilitate his career either way—eight years hence he would work for Lord Elgin at the Colonial Office. He had already discovered that promotion was based not on what one does but on what he is; not a matter of brains so much as character and originality. Introductions only admit a person onto the scales where everyone has to be weighed.
Meanwhile, he was short of cash again. He grew annoyed at what he considered Jennie’s extravagance with her fashionable clothes, her travelling and entertaining: she had spent a quarter of their fortune in the three years since Lord Randolph’s death. Fortunately, he received an advance from his book on Malakand, and good sales resulted in a reprint.
Jennie and her influential friends now thought he was wasted in the army—that was a turn of events!—and could do much better at his writing. The Prince of Wales confirmed her remark about his writing, but perhaps he had written to Winston more to caution him about being tactless in what he wrote, which—as he said—“would be resented by the authorities.”
On the other hand, it seemed that everyone was looking for someone to blame for the failure to suppress the attacks of the tribes on the frontier. But Winston had noted before that there are no great victories or magnificent successes, and no surrenders; soldiering was just a persistently grim and grueling job of work, and very repetitive. And if ever there are successes, “we are assailed by the taunts and reproaches of our countrymen at home.” He wrote about the ethics of policy on the frontier, and then a couple of feature articles, and a short story, then pressed on again with his novel. He felt he was on a roll, and his income grew.
Nevertheless, he still wanted to be elected in Bradford and travelled to London on July 2, to speak to an audience there. He found they listened to what he said and liked it, and applauded him several times. That was encouraging. Lord Salisbury read his book about Malakand, and invited him to the Foreign Office for a meeting soon afterwards. Winston was greeted with old-world courtesy by the Prime Minister, who went on to tell him that his book had provided him with more information than any other report of the affair, and offered to help Winston—who was the son of his old colleague—in any way he could.
Winston felt encouraged to send a telegram to General Kitchener asking to be considered for the expeditionary force. The General thought otherwise. Even so, Winston seldom took no for an answer and had an informal message sent to him through Jennie, mentioning the Prime Minister’s interest in him. It took only forty-eight hours for instructions to arrive for him to leave for the 21st Lancers in Egypt. He contacted the Morning Post successfully before leaving. He was in Marseilles three days later. He took ship to Egypt from there, where he met old friends from Harrow.
He’d longed for a political career when in England, but now he was close to the front again, he found he was excited with another adventure in view. He became focused on battle and now thought only of arms and ammunition and the Dervish army.
The Lancers were sixty miles from Omdurman by August 24. He wrote to Jennie not to be anxious, since he didn’t think he’d be killed, but that she should rather be consoled by the thought that all human beings are insignificant. Perhaps his mind was on The Martyrdom of Man again, or Darwin’s The Origin of Species. Or perhaps it was because of writing objectively and philosophically—as if viewing the event from a huge historic distance. Because of his reading and writing histories, he could view most incidents with detachment, as if they were happening to someone else. He was like an artist painting a huge panoramic picture with a few tiny dots on a seashore to represent the insignificance of mankind.
As he closed in on Omdurman two days later, General Kitchener’s forces of 25,000 men also drew closer to the chosen battlefield beside the waters of the Nile.
Omdurman
He soon learned on arrival that Kitchener had been reluctant to take him because he knew that Winston was only in the army for his own temporary convenience, so Kitchener didn’t want to meet him.
The Dervishes chose to attack Kitchener’s forces at Omdurman, across the river from Khartoum. It appeared that their army would clash with British troops before dark. Winston was instructed by the cavalry commander to move in order to find a clearer view and judge the enemy’s size and movements, and report to Kitchener. He climbed a hill to get a better look. Once there, he saw the Dervish army was enormous, but dwarfed even so by the immense desert landscape. Glancing to the east, he saw the British and Egyptian troops, but neither of them could see the Dervishes for the hill between them. The enemy forces were broadly spread out and deeper than the Allies, and were slowly advancing.
Winston hastened back down to his gray pony and saw Kitchener together with the Sirdar and a dozen staff officers riding towards him. The imposing, upright general, and the insignificant junior officer advanced towards each other, the hooves of their mounts crunching gently on the firm sand and somebody’s horse gently whinnying.
Kitchener asked him to describe what he’d seen and listened thoughtfully to what Winston had to say, while they rode beside each other. “How long d’you think I’ve got?” Kitchener asked him.
“At least half an hour,” Winston informed him. “Probably an hour and a half,” he added.
“They may as well come today as tomorrow,” was the offhand retort.
The goal was to liberate large regions from the tyranny of the Dervishes in the Sudan. Kitchener had already destroyed the army of Mahmoud, who was the captain of the Khalifa. His final action would be against the capital city.
The Dervishes came to a halt on one side of Surgham Hill, with the British and the Sirdar’s Egyptian army on the other side. Winston would recall many years later, in a more technical and mechanical age, that these battles were not real battles, but only actions. “In those lighthearted days, in Britain’s little colonial wars, death in action then, was a splendid game with a sporting element. It was,” he wrote, “very different in the First World War, where death was expected, and severe wounds were counted as lucky escapes.”
A unit of the Egyptian cavalry climbed on to Surgham Hill for the night, while cavalry patrols rode out to have a look at the enemy forces for themselves. Winston joined one of them. He was awed by the sight of 40,000 men laid out ahead of them. Their lines were five miles long and broken up by squares. They were shouting war songs. The immensity of their size made the little British patrol feel lonely and vulnerable, so that they shivered in the dark.
He scrawled a message in pencil for Kitchener. There were no Dervishes within three miles of the British camp. But as the sky grew lighter, he could see the mass of figures was still advancing. Winston reported their movements. Then he waited. Soon, a force of 2,000 men drew within 400 yards of them. Until then, Winston had thought they were spearmen, but now he saw that the force also included riflemen. Although they saw Winston’s cavalry before them, they ignored them as if they were not there.
“Foolishly,” he said later on, “I fired and shot down four of them,” Then he squeezed a whole magazine into the crowd. The Dervishes sent twenty riflemen forward, who took target practice on the British army. Winston’s cavalry galloped off as the enemy bullets whined towards them. But no one was hit. He sent seven of his lancers behind the hill and climbed to the top on his pony, where he dismounted.
The Khalifa’s entire army of almost 60,000 Dervishes advanced in disciplined order towards them, wrote Winston; rising up on the rolling land between them and the British troops, then gradually descending on the gentle slope towards the battlefield, with the Nile beside them, as the British infantry stood shoulder to shoulder to bar their way. When the Dervish army came close enough for rifle fire, Kitchener ordered the infantry forward and left the cavalry at the camp. Winston was startlingly aware of gazing at the zealous fanaticism of a past age, faced with British state-of-the-arts weaponry. The enemy also possessed about 20,000 rifles as well as spearmen. But the British Army of two and a half trained infantry divisions, standing waiting in two lines, were supported by more than seventy guns on the river bank and in gunboats on the Nile, all of them firing with calm discipline. The Dervish attack was stopped in its tracks as six or seven thousand of the enemy fell where they stood.
When their spearmen could advance no further, their riflemen lay down on the desert floor and aimed a fusillade in Winston’s direction, causing about two hundred British and Egyptian casualties.
Kitchener now wheeled his troops into his customary echelon formation and proceeded to march south to the city with his left flank alongside the river. His intention was to separate the Dervish army from the capital city and bar them from food, water, and sanctuary. But the enemy reserves of about 15,000 were untouched and began their advance on the British forces, which continued to march across the desert. British military precision and guns increased the numbers of dead Dervishes, which were now in excess of 20,000 men who lay in scattered heaps as the mass of their army disintegrated into bits and pieces of flesh that merged with the low-lying layer of a shimmering mirage like a wave of sea across the desert floor.
As Winston told it later, the next hour was filled with the noise of 20,000 rifles firing, with sixty guns and twelve Maxims—although they saw little from their camp, where the cavalry fed and watered their horses. But when the attack slowed, they came out to take positions on the left flank of the British line and rode forward slowly toward the massed Dervish reserves. It was Winston’s first cavalry charge, and he was prepared to use his lance to spear the enemy.
Meanwhile, a line of a hundred and fifty men stood between them and the mass of Dervishes behind them. They allowed the British cavalry to move forward to about 250 yards from them. The cavalry rode across the front of the Dervish line, scanning them for a point of entry to wheel and spear them. But Winston soon discovered they were riflemen who kneeled and opened fire at them close up.
A trumpet call marked the advance, and each cavalry officer took his chance whether to wheel away left and gallop off, or right-wheel to charge the enemy. Winston spurred his horse into a cavalry charge against riflemen who had no intention of yielding. When he next looked to his front and drew his Mauser pistol, instead of a thin line of riflemen, the unyielding line of men was now twelve deep in some places, where reserves of Dervish soldiers had climbed out of concealment from a trench, which he now saw was a ravine with steps carved in it where they had climbed up out of hiding.
The British cavalry, 310 officers and men, galloped through them with surprisingly few casualties, although he saw one soldier cut up. Winston had already emptied his pistol into the enemy. The charge had lasted only two minutes. An officer and twenty men had been killed.
He said at the time that it was probably the most dangerous two minutes he’d live to see. Then he noticed some of the British infantry were scattered and in individual combat with the enemy. He spurred his horse into a trot and rode up, firing his reloaded pistol into the enemy’s faces, and killed some of them—three for certain, he said; two doubtful, and one very doubtful.
But when he looked round him, he saw the Dervishes reforming and regrouping only twenty yards away. He glanced at them without comprehension for a moment, and saw the men kneel and take aim with their rifles. Then he realized the danger he was in for the first time. He wheeled his horse away and galloped back to his troop as the riflemen fired at him. He reined into a canter to rejoin his men, when he saw a Dervish suddenly rise up in the middle of the troop. They turned their lances at him. Although wounded in several places, he ran towards Winston with spear raised, and Winston shot him at less than a yard away. He dropped and lay dead.
Winston recalled his troop of fifteen men in case they had to make another charge, asking a sergeant if he’d enjoyed himself. “Well, I don’t exactly say I enjoyed it, Sir, but I think I’ll get more used to it next time.”
Meanwhile, the Dervishes were retreating. “I never saw soldiers more willing,” he wrote to Jennie a few weeks later. But before they left the field, he saw the carnage of horses and men returning from the charge, some with fish-hook spears protruding from them, and faces and limbs cut to pieces. He no longer felt so heroic. He had been about to suggest another charge, but the gasping vision and the expiring victims discouraged it.
“We all get a little cold an hour afterwards,” he admitted.
An officer who was a friend of Jennie’s telegraphed her to say, “Big fight. Fine sight. Winston well.” More than 10,000 Dervishes had been slain, and 15,000 wounded.
Winston’s criticisms of some of the vengeful barbarity of officers and troops earned him enemies in the army, but his cheerful demeanor was liked by others.
Even so, he was in a unique position whereby, as a war correspondent, he could write about whatever he saw with impunity. But he was only a junior officer, and his superior officers would be bound to object to a subaltern criticizing them in the newspapers. One of them was General Kitchener, whom he considered was a barbarian for preserving the Mahdi’s head in kerosene as a souvenir of the battle. It was, perhaps, a metaphor for the time when Britain had progressed as a civilized world power with recognition of human rights and the abolishment of slavery, whereas not everyone was rising with the tide of nineteenth-century culture. Many were still dragging their feet, since civilization never advances in a clear straight line, and can fall back to barbarism very fast, to take us all back to the primitive slime from which life was born.
