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 differen.