Chapter 3
The Vale of Tirah
Our fault is that our province is the gateway of India. We were born
in the frontier Province. This is why we were doomed.
J“IN THE SMALL HOURS” of July 27thm a frontier war correspondent
wrote to his London readers, “the officers of the 11th Bengal
Lancers at Nowshera were aroused by a frantic telegraph operator who
was astounded by the news his machine was clicking out. This man in
his shirt sleeves, with a wild eye, and holding an unloaded revolver
by the muzzle, ran round waking everyone. The whole country was up.
The Malakand garrison was being overwhelmed by thousands of
tribesmen. All the troops were to march at once.”
Winston Churchill was twenty-three and a First Lieutenant of the
Fourth Hussars in India at the time he wrote this account of the
beginning of the Frontier War of 1897. He had joined the Malakand
Field Force under General Sir Bandon Blood as a war correspondent
when it was ordered in to the field to exact “massive retaliation”
against the rebellious tribes. “Like most young fools,” he wrote, “I
was looking for trouble.”
Churchill’s dispatches give a stirring, if transparent, account of
imperial warfare at the turn of the century. While tattered swarms
of tribesmen flug themselves against the cannon fire of the Queen’s
armies, the young lieutenant wrote to the London Daily Telegraph
readership of daring and adventure:
The tale I have to tell is one of frontier war. The fate of empires
does not hang on the result. Yet the narrative may not be without
interest, or material for reflection.
The rumors of coming war grew stronger and stronger. The bazaars of
India, like the London coffee-houses of the last century, are always
full of marvelous tales-the invention of fertile brains. A single
unimportant fact is exaggerated, and distorted, till it becomes
unrecognizable. From it, a thousand wild, illogical, and fantastic
conclusions are drawn. These again are circulated as facts. So the
game goes on.
But amid all this falsehood and idle report, there often lies
important information. As July [1897] advanced, the bazaar at the
Malakand became full of tales of the Mad Fakir. His miracles passed
from mouth to mouth with suitable additions.
A great day for Islam was at hand. A mighty man had arisen to led
them. The English would be swept away. By the time of the new moon,
not would remain. The Great Fakir had mighty armies concealed among
the mountains. When the moment came these would sally forth-horse,
foot and artillery-and destroy the infidel.
It was understandable, nevertheless, that the young telegraph
operator at the Nowshera garrison should have been “astounded” at
the news. Since the Chitral uprising in 1895, the Pathan had been
noticeably quiet. And only a month a go, he had read from the same
wire a cordial message from Imperial Highness, the Queen, in whose
Diamond jubilee ceremonies at Chakdarra, Malakand, and Peshawar many
Pathans had joined.
A more informed party, however, would not have been surprised at the
outburst of Pathan violence that just such an attack for two
decades. Ironically, these sere policies aimed not at Pathans, but
at an enemy whose armies had never set foot in the province and
never would.
Ever since 1807, when Napoleon met Czar Alexander I of Russia on a
raft in the Tilsit River and proposed a combined Russian French
assault on India, the Russian had been making the British nervous.
Their steady expansion eastward across the Central Asian plain made
many in the British Foreign Office fear that Russia’s ultimate
destination was India. In 1865 the czar’s armies annexed Tashkent,
then Samarqand, and in 1868 they turned Bokhara into a Russia
Satellite. The “Great Game” of imperial intrigue between Russia and
Great Britain had begun in earnest.
Since the disastrous retreat from Kabul in 1842, the British had
been keeping a respectful distance from the Pathan tribes of the
Afghan Empire. The “Close Border School” in the foreign Office had
argued for decades – successfully – that the best way t deal with
the Afghan tribes was to leave them alone. The high Afghan plain,
awash in intrigue, was all the buffer the British needed between
their Indian Empire and Russian menace.
The “Forward School,” the hawks of the Foreign Office, thought
otherwise. They argued for an assertive policy that would keep
Afghan under the British thumb and free of Russian intrigue. The
risk of stirring up a little violence among the Pathan tribes of the
Frontier was a small price to pay for the security of India.
When the conservatives took office in 1847 under Disraeli, the
Forward School was made official British policy. A new viceroy was
appointed, Lord Lytton, who immediately began an aggressive
expansionist program to extend the Indian frontier into Afghan
territory up to the slopes of the Hindu Kush. Lytton ordered thirty
thousand troops to march on Kabul, forcing the Afghan amir to cede
the administration of the Khyber Pass and other strategic areas to
Britain. He also placed a British envoy in Kabul to direct Afghan
forting policy. Despite fears of a repetition of the 1842 debacle,
Sir Louis Cavagnari was stationed in Kabul in July 1879 with a guard
of eighty-one troops. On September 3 the British residency was
stormed and all its occupants kill. A second British force occupied
Kabul in October, and this time a pro-British amir was placed on the
throne. Afghanistan became, in eddect, and appendage of the Empire.
But this was not enough to placate the fears of the Forward School.
The borders between Afghanistan and India were ill defined and no t
easily defended. When Russian troops clashed with the Afghanistan in
1895, the conservatives insisted it was Britain’s “bounden duty” to
build a permanent buffer zone between British India and Imperial
Russia along a secure border. The obvious location for the border
was the range of mountains between Afghanistan and British India.
High and rugged, their narrow passes were easily defended. The only
problem was that this placed the buffer garrisons squarely within
the homelands of the Pathans. Not even Forward School hawks were
eager to arouse Pathan ire. But the protectors of the Empire felt
they had no choice: India, Britain’s prize possession, must be
defended at all costs.
In the autumn of 1893 Lieutenant Henry Durand was sent to Kabul to
negotiate a border between Afghanistan and British India that would
effectively hand over to the British most of the Pathan homelands,
historically part of the Afghan Empire. The proposed border – the
“Durand Line”- cut through the heart of the Pathan nation, leaving a
third of all Pathans in Afghanistan.
The Afghan amir warned the British that they had more to lose from
the settlement than he did. “If you should cut the Pathan tribes
away from my domain,” he wrote the viceroy in desperation,
They will not be of any use either to you or to me. You will always
be engaged in fighting them or be involved in some other trouble
with them, and they will always go on plundering.
The British forced the issue. On November 12, 1893, they got the
amir,s signature to a treaty that brought under their dominion all
the territory from the Hindu Kush to the westernmost limits of
Baluchistan – and made inevitable a conflict with the Pathans that
would last to the Empire’s final day.
The British set out to forge a buffer zone that would permanently
seal British India off from external threats. Pathans were divided
into “settled” tribes of the lower valley and “free” tribes of the
hills. More forts were built and additional troops brought in to
make certain their presence was left. For the independent spirited
Pathans, the girdling of their hills with forts and garrisons and
the insufferable imperial rule that followed simply could not be
borne for long.
British expeditions had already been sent against the Akazais in the
Black Mountains in 1891; in 1894 they went into Waziristan. In
January 1895, Chitral exploded in the north and fifteen thousand to
be sent to restore order. Forts were built at Malakand and Chakdara
in swat to prevent further outbreaks. But the area was British in
name only. Independent tribesmen saw the new forts as portents of a
permanent occupation.
For two years they simmered. Then, in the early summer months of
1897, Mullah Mastun began touring the villages of the north. He
reminded the tribesmen of their humiliation and roused them to
religious hysteria by proclaiming that the prophet himself had given
the word: the time had come for jihad, a holy war that would drive
the British out of the province and reclaim the Delhi throne, after
a lapse of three centuries, for Islam. He had found the thirteen
years old heir to the Mogul dynasty and would place him on the
throne himself. Within a month, Mullah Mastun – Churchill’s “mad
fakir” – had raised an army of ten thousand seething Pathans.
The explosion came at ten o’clock on a moonless July night.
Descending simultaneously on the forts at Malakand and Chakdara, the
Pathans stormed the outer garrisons with their swords, knives, and
ancient rifles. Caught off guard – but only momentarily – British
and Sikh troops fought back with land mines, cannon, and devastating
fire from their breech loading rifles. Throughout the night, wave
after wave of tribesmen were repulsed – by massive firepower,
discipline, and sheer pluck. If the Queen’s troops could hold out,
reinforcements could reach the forts from Nowshera and Mardan by
noon.
To the Pathans who threw themselves into the teeth of the cannon and
rifle fore, setbacks meant little. Time was with them – as was
Allah. They knew they outnumbered the British. Hundred of them died
in the avalanche of bullets and the bursts of cannon and land mines.
But what was death? Only a promise of paradise.
Morning came, and the forts still held. Bodies littered the rocky
ground around the forts, but the Pathans kept up the attack. Their
cause was invincible.
Then an astounding thing happened. From the bare hills of the pass
came a great body of the Raj,s soldiers and cavalry, with their
breechloaders firing and their lances ready. The tribesmen simply
started, unbelieving.
“It is no exaggeration,” Churchill writes,
To say that perhaps half the tribesmen who attacked the Malakand had
thought that the soldiers there were the only troops that the Sirkar
[the government] possessed.
“Kill these,” they had said, “and all is done.”
What did they know of the distantregiments which the telegraph wires
were drawing from far down in the south of India?
Little did they realize they had set the world humming; that
military officers were hurrying seven thousand miles by sea and land
from England, to the camp among the mountains; that long trains were
carrying ammunition, material and supplies from distant depots to
the front…..
These ignorant tribesmen had no conception of the sensitiveness of
modern civilization, which thrills and quivers in every part of its
vast and complex system at the slightest touch.
They saw only the forts and camp on the Malakand Pass and the
swinging bridge across the river.
The miscalculation was typical of these impulsive tribesmen and
fatal. Churchill continues:
Sir Bindon Blood had with his staff ascended the Castle Rock, to
superintend the operations generally. From this position the whole
field was visible. On every side, and from every rock, the white
figures of the enemy could be seen in full flight. The way was open.
The passage was forced. Chakdara was saved. A great and brilliant
success had been obtained. A thrill of exultation convulsed
everyone.
The 11th Bengal Lancers, forming line across the plain, began a
merciless pursuit up the valley. All among the rice fields and the
rocks, the strong horsemen hunted the flying enemy. No quarter was
asked or given, and every horseman caught was speared or cut down at
once. Their bodies lay thickly strewn about the fields, spotting
with black and white patches the bright green of the rice crop. It
was a terrible lesson ad one which the inhabitants of Swat and
Bajaur will never forget.
The victory was thorough, but- as usually the case on the
Frontier-inclusively. By the time the Malakand Field Force had
blasted its way through the higher region of Swat, the Afridis had
entered the Khyber. Further south, Orakzais were sending assault
parties into the Kurram Valley. By the end of August the Frontier
was up in massive revolt, and the Khyber Pass itself-gateway to
India-fill from British hands.
A force of thirty five thousand men, including sixty field cannon, a
machine gun detachment, and thirty thousand pack animals, took the
field in response. It was aimed at the heart of the Afridi homeland,
the Tirah, which no foreign army had ever penetrated. By mid
October, the Tirah Expeditionary Force had fought its way through
the protective ring of the Samana range and entered the Valley of
Tirah Maidan.
There, in the midst of barren, blistered peaks, the British found a
paradise. The passes opened onto wide cultivated fans, terraced
orchards of apricot and plum, apple, fig, and orange trees. The
harvest was in; the storage sheds behind the farmhouses were brimful
with corn and barley, beans, potatoes, onions, and walnuts. In the
crisp October air, the valley looked as serene as an English
landscape. “The autumn tints upon the trees are beautiful,” wrote a
British correspondent accompanying the expedition, “and carry one
back to the mother country at once. One can well imagine that when
the spring crops are in and the valley is green from end to end,
this is the beautiful spot which has so inspired the Pathan poets.”
But the point of a punitive campaign is to punish – to render the
landscape so incapable of supporting life that its inhabitants will
be forced to surrender. And the Afridis had made the job easier than
anyone expected. They were gone-fled with their families and flacks
to the bare ridges above the valley. From there they watched, silent
and helpless, as the khaki-colored troops spread out across the
valley.
They started with the stocks. Wagonfuls of beans and potatoes and
nuts were carted out of the storehouses and the orchards were
stripped, and the trees then felled with axes or ringed to die
slowly. Standing crops were burned.
As they reached a village, soldiers would hurry to sack the houses
of the khans. Carpets and silks, copperware, furniture, and
ornaments were piled into long wagons and carted back to the camps.
What was not worth carrying back-utensils, farm equipments,
household items-was heaped into a pile in the centre of the village
and burned. Wagonfuls of granite boulders were drawn alongside the
wells and heaved in to poison the water.
Sometimes soldiers ventured too close to the valley walls and fell
victims to ambush. At night, a lighted cigarette might draw rifle
fire from a nearby crag. There were casualties, but by and large
soldiers moved about unimpeded. Once a village had been cleared,
demolition units laid dynamite charges along the walls and towers.
By mid November the Tirah valley was close to being a desert, while
high on the ridges, the tribal children began succumbing to the
cold. Khans trickled into Expeditionary force headquarters to accept
the term of peace: three hundred rifles and a fine of thirty
thousand rupees.
In December, the British began a quick withdrawal and just managed
to get through the Samanas before a howling winter storm slammed the
passes shut. The Afridi families were less fortunate. With little
shelter and virtually no food stocks, many of the youngest and
oldest died.
The punitive campaign had met its objective. The Frontier tribes had
been back and the war ended. But the price was high. The empire had
collected a few thousand rusting rifles and enough in fines to cover
the expenses of a marching column for perhaps a week. In the process
it had guaranteed the enmity of the Frontier Pathans for the next
fifty years.
Before a decade had passed, the British would have to face new
uprising of Waziris and Orakzais-and once again have to enter the
Tirah. If Churchill’s plucky prose stirred the British back home to
feel the glamour and romance of the Frontier wars, other Englishmen
came to assess the net effect of Frontier policy in more sobering
terms. Some of them – like Annie Besant, an English-woman in India
already agitating for Indian “home rule”- came close to matching
Churchill’s fire.
We loudly proclaimed that we had not quarrel with the Pathan nation,
yet we burnt their villages, destroyed their crops, stole their
cattle, looted their homes, hanged their men as “rebels” if they
resisted, while we drove out their women and children to perish in
the snow.
From out of the darkness, moans of suffering reach us, and we shrink
in horror from the work which is being done in our names. These
starved babes wail out our condemnation. These frozen women cry
aloud against us. These stiffened corpses, these fire blackened
districts, these snow covered, blood stained plains appear to
humanity to curse us.
Englishmen, with wives nestled warm in your bosoms, remember these
Pathan husbands, maddened by their wrongs. Englishwomen, with babes
smiling on your breasts, think of these sister-women, bereft of
their little ones. The Pathans loves wife and children as you do. He
also is husband and father. To him also the home is happy, the
hearth is sacred. To you he cries from his desolate fireside and
from his ravaged land. In your hands is his cause.
But the British were helpless to change course. The Forward policy
had overextended them into territories they could not fully
subjugate; permanent occupation of the Pathan hills would have been
far too costly an enterprise. But neither could they ignore the
tribes; the Pathans themselves would see to that. Thus they were
reduced to vindictive campaigns whose excesses only inflamed the
Pathans while offending liberal sensibilities at home. In a sense,
the British had become prisoners of their own imperial designs.
Thus, within a few months of Victoria’s Diamond jubilee and its
celebration of the “new imperialism,” at least some British were
beginning to have second thoughts. The glittering image of the
Empire had a dark side which the resolute Pathan resistance had
begun to unmask. Within two years the atrocities of the Boer War in
South Africa would confirm the darker aspects of empire. One more
year and Victoria herself would die, mercifully spared the spectacle
of her “best and bravest” dying by the hundreds of thousands on the
fields of Flanders and Verdun. The benign face of Pax Britannica, so
shimmering during the Jubilee summer, would never smile as brightly
again. |
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