1. Winston Churchill: The Making of an Imperial Strategist In September 1897, twenty-two-year-old Winston Churchill first set eyes on the Himalayas. He was entranced, and a little horrified. Raised in the tidy countryside of southern England, he found the topography of north-west India all out of proportion. High slopes were intersected by deep valleys, fertile and green, watered by fish-filled rivers and dotted with prosperous villages swarmed by late-summer butterflies. On the slopes above, the change was stark. The vegetation became stumpy and sparse, eventually thinning out entirely. Constant wash had eroded the soil, exposing black "primeval" rock. Near the tops of the mountains the ground was completely barren, crowned by masses of jagged rock. It was a difference that would soon be a matter of life and death. For the first time in his young life, Winston Churchill was going to war. He was joining a campaign of pacification, waged to force the local population to accept British rule. This was the border area of India, Britain's imperial jewel in the crown, and Afghanistan. These valleys were the homeland of numerous Pathan peoples. For years the British had mostly let the Pathans alone, but now, under their "Forward Policy," they had recently moved military forces as far north as possible. It was typical imperialist politics; the British wanted to secure the territory before the Russians, who were pushing southwards from central Asia, got too close. To impose British authority, a series of military outposts were constructed throughout Pathan country. One of these small fortresses controlled the traffic through the Malakand valley, a key route into Afghanistan. On July 26, 1897, local Pathans launched a surprise attack against the Malakand camp, lighting a fuse that spread quickly to other valleys. More and more Pathans joined the attempt to drive the occupiers away, and by early August more than 150 British officers and soldiers had been killed or wounded in the fighting. When Churchill first heard about the attacks, he was on leave in England. A cavalry lieutenant with the 4th Queen's Own Hussars, then stationed in the south of India, he was desperate to see action and craved notoriety. He quickly pulled every string available in his socially rich shadow box and was taken on board by Sir Bindon Blood, the commander of the expedition sent to break the Pathans. The journey from England to the front was over 10,000 miles by train, boat and then train again, and even though Churchill set off immediately, it took well over a month. He was in such a rush that he left without all the necessary equipment and had to buy important items from the possessions of fellow officers who had just been killed in the fighting. Churchill's first brush with combat took place on September 16, when he was attached to a force of about a thousand soldiers whose job it was to "chastise" the inhabitants of the Mamund valley. This valley was a cul-de-sac-approximately ten miles wide, pan-shaped and framed by rocky ridges. The Pathans of the Mamund, a particularly warlike bunch in British eyes, were to pay the price for joining the fray after the Malakand attacks. British troops were ordered to lay waste to the valley, executing any tribespeople who stood up to them. For Churchill it was "lion-taming," needed to teach the Pathans about the inherent "superiority" of the British race. The British troops that entered the valley-the majority of whom were Indians themselves, from regiments including the 35th Sikhs, 38th Dogras and 11th Bengal Lancers-believed that one day would be more than enough to inflict this devastation. Many expected that the Pathans, faced with an organized army, would simply run away; and during the first few hours of the day they would have felt rather smug. Starting just before sunrise, the troops advanced methodically along the valley floor. The Pathan fighters, who could see their enemy approach, kept their distance, occasionally waving swords that flashed in the early morning light. They waited until the troops got close, and then slowly, almost insolently, retreated up the valley slopes. To try to force a fight, the British shot at them as they retreated, but the Pathans would not take the bait. They continued upwards, disappearing into the grey-black moonscape. By mid-morning, with hardly a casualty suffered and no enemy in sight, the British commanders decided to move into the hills. Churchill was attached to a unit of fewer than a hundred men aiming for the village of Shahi-Tangi, which stood at the end of a spur road high up along a ridge, at the end of the valley. As they approached their objective, everything changed. Human shapes started dropping from much higher up, and five British soldiers were shot in an instant. The Pathans could move more quickly up and down the ridges than the British troops, and had decided to make a stand. Churchill, exhilarated that he could finally shoot another human being, grabbed a rifle from one of the Sikh soldiers under his command and started to pump round after round into the advancing enemy. Unconcerned with his own safety, he viewed the actions of others pitilessly. Perhaps that was all he could do, because the fighting in the Mamund quickly revealed the brutality of war. British soldiers executed prisoners who came into their hands and blamed the Pathans for butchering their comrades. Churchill claimed to have seen British bodies, including one of his friends, savagely hacked to pieces. He considered the shooting of Pathan prisoners an understandable response. But if the Pathans seemed barbaric to the British, the feeling was more than mutual. For the first time in large-scale combat, British soldiers were armed with soft-nosed dum-dum bullets. During the nineteenth century, as firearms had become more advanced, with stronger metals, industrially made fittings and more powerful mixtures of gunpowder, they were able to fire rounds with a far greater muzzle velocity. This could make them ineffective. By the 1890s, modern rifles fired hardened metal bullets with such force that if they did not hit a bone or vital organ, they could pass smoothly through a human being, making only small, non-lethal entry and exit wounds. The dum-dums corrected this "problem" by using a soft lead tip that would split and tumble in different directions when it hit flesh, gouging out swathes of the innards. Churchill told his grandmother that previously dum-dums had been used only on wild game such as tigers, but they had now decided to use them on the Pathans. They caused the most gruesome injuries, with "shattering effects . . . which are simply appalling." Nevertheless, in articles and books he wrote after the event, Churchill went to great lengths to defend their use. He described the dum-dums as having the "wonderful" impact of a "beautiful machine." The purpose of a bullet was to kill, he pointed out, in which case the dum-dums did their job admirably. Dum-dum-type bullets were declared inhumane and illegal by the Hague Convention in 1899, but the British government refused to accept the decision. They would do so, belatedly, in 1907. Having access to dum-dums allowed Churchill and the others to stem the first Pathan attack. Armed with a mishmash of firearms-some smuggled, some stolen, some taken from British dead-the Pathans could not produce the sustained firepower of their enemy. Yet, no matter how many Pathans were shot, more and more dropped down from above and it became clear that the British position was in danger of being overrun. Spread out in small detachments throughout the far end of the valley, their entire force was engaged, with no reinforcements available for hard-pressed units such as Churchill's. The decision was made, however humiliating, to retreat. The way back down the hill was perilous. Struggling to take the wounded and dead with them, the British had to crawl back slowly, with small groups holding off the Pathans while others carried the bodies. If the Pathans shot a carrier, the whole unit had to stop under fire and arrange another group to carry the newly wounded man. Eventually the number of dead and wounded proved too much, and one officer and twelve men were left behind on the hillside to "be cut to pieces." It was not until noon that Churchill's force was back at the beginning of the spur road and in touch with other British forces. Despite being exhausted and now broiling in the midday sun, the officers determined to return and destroy the village and recover the body of the white officer. A much larger force, six companies, was mustered and ordered up the road. Faced with such force, the Pathans gave way. The British reached Shahi-Tingi by mid-afternoon and wiped the village from the map. Retreat was once again ordered, and by the following morning, exhausted British forces were outside the valley. The cost was sobering. Of the thousand men who had marched into the Mamund, nine British officers, four Indian officers and 136 soldiers had been killed or wounded. Churchill claimed this was the highest casualty rate that the British had suffered for many years. Instead of admitting that the operation was a fiasco, however, he tried to argue that it was a success. After all, Shahi-Tingi had been destroyed and more than 200 Pathan fighters killed. It was a feeble effort on his part. Blood, understanding that the Mamund Pathans now had to be broken beyond redemption, sent an entire brigade into the valley on September 29. He told his men to "lay it waste with fire and sword in vengeance." They did their job. All day the Mamund echoed with the booms of exploding buildings-so regular they sounded like an artillery barrage. In the end the soldiers levelled fourteen villages and forty different forts, and filled all the wells, broke all the reservoirs, cut down all the trees, and burned all the food and crops they could find. The Pathans, unable to resist such might, sat high up on the hillsides watching their lives below being obliterated. Churchill supported the use of such terror tactics, telling his mother that the great slaughter of the Pathans had cowed them into submission. These battles in the Mamund valley were but one small part of a larger and more expensive conflict that went on for months. In private Churchill voiced some doubts about the Forward Policy, which had pushed the British into a position where they had to spend so much treasure defending this distant frontier. This has led some to argue that Churchill was opposed to the whole plan. That is wrong. Winston Churchill in 1897 believed in only two things with conviction: his own destiny, and that of the British Empire. While he might have been sceptical of some of the finer details of imperial policy, he never wavered in his determination that the British Empire should be as powerful as it could be, and that he was the right person to lead it. Such self-confidence was no accident. Churchill was raised to be a servant of the empire and, in return, to view the empire as a servant of his greatness. He was born in the only non-royal house in England to be deemed a palace-Blenheim, the Oxfordshire seat of his grandfather, the 7th Duke of Marlborough. The creation of the architect Sir John Vanbrugh, Blenheim was gifted to the 1st Duke of Marlborough by the English government for that most important of acts, beating the French in battle. Three-sided, with soaring heavy towers and grand baroque architecture not offset with the slightest hint of whimsy, its immensity can only really be appreciated at a distance. Up close, its vastness overwhelms. Churchill's father, Randolph, was the third son of the duke. An ambitious, up-and-coming politician in the Conservative Party, from relatively early in his career Randolph was seen as a possible prime minister. Churchill's mother, Jennie, was American, though she much preferred life in refined and sophisticated Europe. Vivacious and alluring, she was the daughter of an alternately successful and bankrupt New York financier, Leonard Jerome. Randolph and Jennie met during a summer holiday in 1873 when he was twenty-four and she nineteen. They were engaged after three days, married after eight months, and Winston was born a little more than seven months after that, on November 30, 1874. Randolph and Jennie were extremely well suited, both being emotionally stunted. Preferring their pleasures-including horse racing and love affairs-over all else, they spent as little time as possible with their new son. Winston was deposited with nannies, then tutors, and finally at boarding schools (most famously Harrow, which he entered and loathed in 1888). The young boy was desperate for parental affection and wrote them letters begging for visits or even just signs of attention. He was usually disappointed. At one point his mother cut off contact when she became irritated with his pleading, admonishing him that his tone "does not please me." His father was known to schedule meetings practically next door to where Winston was living, without ever informing his son. Churchill was not born into a meritocracy, or else he would have achieved little. As a young man he demonstrated at best modest talents and was prone to laziness. Uninspired by his upbringing, he hated school and studied erratically, receiving marks near the bottom of his class. The only thing that excited him was war. The first surviving letter he wrote to his mother was to thank her for sending him toy soldiers, flags and castles. As soon as he entered Harrow, he joined the school's Rifle Corps, revelling in the smoke and confusion of the mock battles they fought. He learned to shoot and fence, believing that they would be useful if he joined the army. During vacations, Churchill spent days playing soldier with his younger brother, Jack, and their friends. He was known to drill the young boys in proper military technique-building little fortresses on the estate grounds and then planning attacks. He threw himself into these games with a recklessness that he would later show on real battlefields. Once, when playing a game where he was on the run, trying to elude capture by his brother and a cousin, Churchill found himself trapped in the middle of a rickety old bridge with a pursuer at each end. Mortified at the prospect of surrender, he decided to leap twenty-nine feet to the ground below, hoping that the slender branches of the fir trees beneath him would break his fall. He ruptured a kidney and was unconscious for three days. It would take harder lessons than this before his childish idea of war matured. Considering his fascination with war, it is not surprising that Churchill decided to join the army, yet even doing this proved to be a challenge. To be accepted he had to pass the admission test for the Royal Military College at Sandhurst. Even with the help of tutors, he failed at his first two attempts (his mother took advantage of this to argue that because he needed to study, she couldn't see him at Christmas). Only in June 1893, on his third try, did he make the grade, just scraping by. With marks too low to gain admission into the infantry, his only option was to join the cavalry. If he expected praise from his father, he was quickly disabused of this notion. Randolph, irritated that he had to bear the extra cost of supporting his son in the cavalry, sent Winston a stinging rebuke. He complained that, despite being given every advantage, Winston continued his pattern of "slovenly" work. Excerpted from The Strategists: Churchill, Stalin, Roosevelt, Mussolini, and Hitler--How War Made Them and How They Made War by Phillips Payson O'Brien All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. 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