TWO

STREAM

1895–1901

 

QUEEN Victoria’s army, which would leave a lasting impression upon Churchill, was an eccentric, insular institution that had changed little since Waterloo, a battle some men still alive could remember clearly. The troops were led by patricians: Wellington had decreed that English gentlemen made “the best officers in the world, and to compose the officers from a lower class would cause the Army to deteriorate.” Military leaders, it was held, should be men with “a stake in the country.” Only WASPs need apply; there were few Disraelis or Rothschilds wearing epaulets. Apart from that, public-school boys were accepted if they were “sound,” were “of the right sort,” and came from “good families.” (You could quickly identify those with classical educations; they swore “By Jove,” an oath never heard in Other Ranks.) In endorsing an application, one colonel scrawled across it, “The son of a good soldier, his mother is a lady.” It was common to note on reports as a recommendation: “A good man to hounds.” Lord Roberts always checked the bloodlines of a man applying for an appointment, and according to the career officer Ian Hamilton, if Roberts thought the candidate “owned a good grandmother he would give him a trial.”¹ Gentlemen were expected to guard zealously their regiment’s “tone,” a Victorian word freighted with class consciousness. The army counted on them to live by the gentleman’s code, and if they didn’t know what that was, they weren’t commissioned in the first place. In some ways the code was peculiar. Gambling debts were always settled promptly, but those to tradesmen weren’t. Six years after joining the Fourth Hussars, Churchill still hadn’t paid the tailor who made his first uniforms. But once you were in, you could stay in forever. Some officers who had reached their eighties retained their commands. Nor were crippling wounds disqualifying. Two generals, Roberts and Wolseley, were one-eyed. Hamilton’s wrist had been shattered at Majuba.^* Lord Raglan had been one-armed. So was Samuel Browne, who invented the Sam Browne belt so he could draw his sword swiftly with his remaining hand.

By continental standards, the number of men in uniform was tiny. Asked what he would do if the British army landed in Prussia, Bismarck replied: “Send a policeman and have it arrested.” There were no corps, no divisions, nor even brigades. Everything was built around the regiment. An infantry regiment might have a single battalion of seven hundred men divided into five or six companies. An entire cavalry regiment like Winston’s—hussars, dragoons, or lancers—numbered from three hundred to five hundred men, led by its colonel, four majors, eight captains, and fourteen or fifteen subalterns. There were just thirty-one cavalry regiments in the whole of the British Empire. Seniority—which determined which outfit was stationed on the right in an attack—was jealously guarded in both the cavalry and the infantry. The Coldstream Guards went back to 1661, the Grenadier Guards to 1656, the Scots Guards to 1633, the Buffs to 1572, and the Honourable Artillery Company, which was neither a company nor confined to ordnance, to 1537. Each of them cherished drums and flags captured in battles, some long forgotten, and each dressed officers and ranks in absurd uniforms. The Times had reported on the regalia of the Eleventh Hussars: “The brevity of their jackets, the irrationality of their headgear, the incredible tightness of their cherry-colored pants altogether defy description.” The man responsible was George IV, who had never been near a battlefield but who, as Prince Regent, had designed uniforms so tight that men could hardly get into them. In his opinion, “A wrinkle is unpardonable.”²

These zany costumes had become preposterous with the invention of smokeless gunpowder in 1886, but the British didn’t like smokeless powder, and wouldn’t accept it until their enemies had shown them how effective it could be. It was new; therefore, it was suspect. So were the breech-loading fieldpieces Krupp had introduced; Britain was the last European power to abandon muzzle-loading cannon. So were carbines; those issued to one cavalry regiment were dumped on the stable manure pile. The Duke of Cambridge protested that he wasn’t against change. He favored it, he said, when there was no alternative. But encroachments on tradition, if avoidable, were fiercely resisted. Enlisted men were called Tommy Atkins because that was the name of the private Wellington had picked for a specimen signature on an army identity card. Officers drank wine, brandy, and whiskey, and Other Ranks drank gin and beer, because it had always been that way. Regulation bugle calls, though difficult for some buglers, were defended on the ground that they were quintessentially British, though in fact they had been composed by Franz Joseph Haydn.

The citadel of custom, charmingly described in Byron Farwell’s Mr. Kipling’s Army, was the regimental mess. This, thought Captain R. W. Campbell, was “the school for courage, honour, and truth”; there, Hamilton wrote, one understood the “Chivalry of Arms”; there, in the opinion of Major General George Younghusband, “The prig ceases to be priggish: it isn’t good enough. The real ‘bad hat,’ or ‘untamable bounder’ quietly disappears.”³ Meals were rituals. You wore a proper mess jacket, which varied from one regiment to another. New subalterns did not speak until spoken to, never expressed opinions, and, in at least one regiment, did not stand on the hearthrug in front of the fire until they had completed three years’ service. The first toast of the evening was to the Queen. Thereafter the port was passed from right to left, and no one smoked until the decanter had circulated twice, or, as they put it, “when the cloth was removed.” Those who broke the rules were fined, and the rules were so numerous, and so divorced from reality, that one wonders when they had time to ponder the profession of arms. Not at mess; shoptalk was forbidden there. So were discussions of politics, religion, and women. Therefore, they rambled on about sport and horses, particularly hunting, where they shot hares, plover, quail, stags, grouse, partridges, ducks, snipes, woodcocks, pigeons, and, occasionally, through error, one another.

What did their countrymen think of them? It is difficult to say. “Victorian England,” Brian Bond writes, “was simultaneously jingoistic and anti-militarist.” A visiting foreigner observed: “How this blind glorification and worship of the Army continues to co-exist with the contemptuous dislike felt towards the members of it, must remain a problem of the national psychology.” They were paid almost nothing. Regimental rates, established in 1806, varied from £95 for a subaltern to £365 for a lieutenant colonel—less than half the wages of War Office clerks—and they would remain unchanged until 1914. No man could afford a commission unless he possessed a private income of at least £150 a year for an infantry office and as much as £700 in the cavalry. Enlisted men received eleven shillings and fourpence per week, twopence less than the most exploited rural laborer in England. Edward Spiers quotes a recruiting sergeant: “It was only in the haunts of dissipation or inebriation, and among the very lowest dregs of society, that I met with anything like success.”⁴

Yet these men had conquered an Empire. Under Victoria one regiment or another had been in action every year, somewhere on five continents, fighting from Aden and Afghanistan to Zululand and the Zhor Valley. They were almost always victorious. One reason was their sublime, unfathomable courage. Braver officers never led men into battle. They marched at the head of their columns, disdaining weapons for themselves, brandishing only cigars or swagger sticks. At the battle of Isandhlwana every officer had a horse and could have escaped with his life. Not one did; all remained and died with their men. Under fire, they refused to “bob”—to duck bullets and shells. An astonishing number actually enjoyed courting death. Of his first wound Wolseley wrote: “What a supremely delightful moment that was!” A captain in the First Royal Dragoons wrote his mother: “I adore war. It is like a big picnic. I have never been so well or happy.” Chinese Gordon, seeing combat for the first time in the Crimea, found it “indescribably exciting.”⁵ If officers found themselves in peaceful billets, they looked for war elsewhere, took leave to get there, and paid their own expenses. The colonel commanding the Fourth Dragoon Guards enlisted as a private in the King’s Own Scottish Borderers so he could join the storming of the Malakand Pass. The commander of the Tenth Hussars fought under the Turkish and Egyptian flags. Younghusband, having vanished from his post, was next seen standing rapturously in the middle of a Philippine bloodletting. And in November 1895 Second Lieutenant Winston Churchill went to embattled Cuba via the United States.

His motives were mixed. He wanted to see a real war. He was curious about New York, his mother’s home. And he was bored. Anticipating its move to India, the Fourth Hussars had been giving its officers ten weeks’ leave. They were expected to spend it yachting, racing, steeplechasing, and riding to hounds. The War Office assumed that, as gentlemen, they all had independent incomes and could afford such diversions. Being broke was bad form. The Manchester Regiment had the lowest status in the army because it was said that its officers could live on their pay. But a young cavalry subaltern needed a charger, two hunters, and three polo ponies. Buying them had exhausted Churchill’s funds and his mother’s patience. Therefore, as he put it, he “searched the world for some scene of adventure or excitement.”⁶ Spain was making its last attempt to quell the insurrection led by José Martí and Máximo Gómez, and 200,000 Spanish troops were tied down in Cuba. Both sides were murdering civilians and putting towns to the torch. That, and its proximity to America, appealed to Churchill. Moreover, he could manage some of the expenses. The Daily Graphic, which had published Randolph’s letters from Africa in 1891, agreed to pay Winston five guineas for every dispatch from the front. He persuaded one of his regiment’s senior subalterns, Reginald Barnes, to accompany him.

At that time there were no restrictions on officers’ writing for the press. Brabazon had no objections to the trip. Neither had Jennie. She sent ninety pounds and wrote: “I understand all right—& of course darling it is natural that you shd want to travel & I won’t throw cold water on yr little plans.” Next Winston wrote Lord Randolph’s old friend Sir Henry Wolff, now the British ambassador in Madrid, applying for permission from the Spanish military authorities to visit the war zone. It was granted instantly, almost eagerly. The fighting in Cuba had given Spain a terrible image. The press in both England and the United States ardently supported the rebels. This briefly became an issue. Churchill needed one more endorsement, from the War Office. He called on the commander in chief, Wolseley, who seemed embarrassed by the request and hinted that it would be better if Winston went without asking him; newspapermen might misinterpret his sanction of two British officers marching with the Spanish troops. But he couldn’t deny a Churchill. He sighed, nodded, and, Winston wrote, added that “if I worked at the military profession he would help me in every way he could & that I was always to come and ask when I wanted anything.” Then Wolseley sent Winston to his director of military intelligence. This officer, unlike his commander, saw no need for discretion. He provided Churchill with maps and a full briefing. In addition, Winston wrote, he and Barnes were “requested to collect information and statistics on various points and particularly as to the effect of the new bullet—its penetration and striking power. This invests our mission with almost an official character & cannot fail to help one in the future.”⁷

On November 2 they sailed aboard the Cunard Royal Mail Steamship Etruria. The voyage was “tedious and uncomfortable… & I shall always look upon journeys by sea as necessary evils.” But in New York they forgot their grievances. Originally they had scheduled three days in the city, and, aboard ship, had considered cutting this in half. Actually, they were there a week. The man responsible for this revision in plans was Bourke Cockran, a wealthy Irish-American lawyer, congressman, and power in the Tammany wigwam. Cockran was one of Jennie’s men—at one time he had been her favorite—and like the rest he cut a remarkable figure, towering, leonine, with deep-set eyes and a massive forehead. His mobile features gave a contemporary the impression of “something Spanish, Celtiberian as well as Celtic.”⁸ His oratory was remarkable. Twice, in 1884 and 1892, his deep, resonant brogue had held Democratic national conventions spellbound. Churchill was to be one of his early conquests. Among the last was Adlai Stevenson, who modeled his rhetoric on Cockran’s. In the early 1950s Churchill would astound Stevenson by quoting long passages from Cockran speeches.

Jennie and two of her lovers (Count Kinsky on left)

Churchill and Barnes were Cockran’s guests in his sprawling apartment at 763 Fifth Avenue, on the corner of Fifty-eighth Street. Jennie had written him that they would be calling, and he made wonderful things happen. Her son wrote her that he had “engagements for the next few days about three deep. It is very pleasant staying here as the rooms are beautifully furnished and fitted with every convenience & also as Mr Cockran is one of the most charming hosts and interesting men I have met.” Twelve judges, including a Supreme Court justice, came to dine with them the first evening. The two young English officers dined out at the Waldorf, were entertained at Koster and Bial’s, toured the harbor in a tugboat, attended the annual horse show, were shown around the ironclad cruiser New York, attended five fires with the fire commissioner, were received by the Cornelius Vanderbilts—whose niece would be the next Duchess of Marlborough—and visited West Point. Winston wrote: “We are members of all the Clubs and one person seems to vie with another in trying to make our time pleasant.”⁹

He was not an uncritical tourist. To Jack he wrote that West Point discipline was so strict as to be “positively disgraceful.” He wrote his aunt Leonie that he had paid his fare across the eleven-year-old Brooklyn Bridge “with a paper dollar,” which he thought “abominable currency.” It seemed to him that “the essence of American journalism is vulgarity divested of truth.” Considering the character of Pulitzer’s World and Hearst’s new Journal, this was not unjust. Besides, he qualified it: “I think mind you that vulgarity is a sign of strength. A great, crude, strong, young people are the Americans—like a boisterous healthy boy among enervated but well bred ladies and gentlemen.” And New Yorkers, by their treatment of him, won his heart. “What an extraordinary people the Americans are! Their hospitality is a revelation to me and they make you feel at home and at ease in a way that I have never before experienced.” He adored America’s most popular song that year:¹⁰

When you hear dem a bells go ding, ling ling,

All join ’round and sweetly you must sing,

And when the verse am through, in the chorus all join in,

There’ll be a hot time in the old town tonight!

But there is no doubt about which New Yorker impressed him most. He wrote: “I have great discussions with Mr Cockran on every conceivable subject from Economics to yacht racing. He is a clever man and one from whose conversation much is to be learned.” Night after night, long after Barnes had retired, they sat in the flat’s large library, sipping brandy, smoking cigars—Churchill’s first—and talking, talking, talking. Jennie’s intimate admirer introduced her son to the works of Edmund Burke. He told him: “Burke mastered the English language as a man masters the horse. He was simple, direct, eloquent, yet there is a splendor in his phrases that even in cold type reveals how forcibly he must have enthralled his visitors.” Churchill was enthralled by his host’s fire, vision, vigor, and, most of all, by his own mastery of English. In speaking, Cockran advised him, one should avoid scurrility, affectations, and cant. He said: “What people really want to hear is the truth—it is the exciting thing—speak the simple truth.” All his life Winston would remember, and frequently quote, some of the phrases he heard by the fire in that Fifth Avenue apartment. Cockran said: “The earth is a generous mother. She will provide in plentiful abundance food for all her children, if they will but cultivate her soil in justice and peace.” He also said: “In a society where there is democratic tolerance and freedom under the law, many kinds of evils will crop up, but give them a little time and they usually breed their own cure.” Thirty-seven years later Churchill would write of Cockran: “I have never seen his like or, in some respects, his equal. His conversation, in point, in pith, in rotundity, in antithesis and in comprehension, exceeded anything I have ever heard.”¹¹ By then Winston knew scores of great men. But even in 1895 he had met Rosebery, Salisbury, and Balfour. The difference was that they had all regarded him as his father’s misfit son. In New York, for the first time, he found himself in the company of a distinguished man who treated him as a peer. Today Bourke Cockran’s papers gather dust in the New York Public Library. He is forgotten in his own city. Yet a man who aroused young Churchill, and inspired Stevenson’s gallant campaign in 1952, deserves remembrance.

Cockran seemed omnipotent in New York. At a word from him, the two English lieutenants had a private compartment for the thirty-six-hour train trip through Philadelphia, Washington, Savannah, Tampa Bay, and Key West, where they boarded the steamer Olivette. In the early hours of Wednesday, November 20, they sighted Havana and the rugged coast outlined against the deep blue horizon. Winston felt “delicious yet tremulous… I felt as if I sailed with Long John Silver and first gazed on Treasure Island. Here was a place where anything might happen. Here was a place where something would certainly happen. Here I might leave my bones.” In his first dispatch as a war correspondent he wrote:

High up on the cliffs, as the ship enters the narrows, one sees the fortress of El Moro, formerly a place of great strength, and commanding the channel to the port. It is now only used as a prison for political and military offenders, and an occasional place for execution. Here it was that the sentence of death on Lieutenant Gallegos was carried out in May last. This officer had the charge of a small post with some fifty soldiers, and was unfortunate enough to be breakfasting in a café when the insurgents happened to pass.¹²

A carriage carried them to the Gran Hotel Inglaterra and then to the office of Alexander Gollan, the British consul general. Everything had been arranged. In the morning they would leave the capital for a twelve-hour train trip to Santa Clara, the headquarters of Captain General Arsenio Martínez de Campos. Unfortunately, they could not be guaranteed a safe passage. Rebels frequently used passing trains for target practice. Sometimes they set them afire, or blew up the tracks. Winston was excited. He told readers of the Graphic that the train preceding theirs, carrying a Spanish general, “had been thrown off the line a few miles beyond Santo Domingo, and… fifteen of its occupants had been severely injured.” Their train, however, completed the trip without incident. “Marshal Campos, to whose headquarters we went, received us very kindly, and readily gave us the necessary passes and letters.”¹³

Campos turned them over to Lieutenant Juan O’Donnell, son of the Duke of Tetuán. The lieutenant was fluent in English. Unfortunately, he had a sad tale to tell. Churchill was introduced to the most exasperating problem of correspondents covering a guerrilla war—finding the front. A Spanish mobile column was camped twenty miles away, pursuing a force of four thousand insurgents, but the jungle between here and there was “infested by the enemy.” To get there, Churchill and Barnes must take another train to Cienfuegos, proceed by steamer to Tuna, and then travel, again by train, to Sancti Spiritu. “Though this route forms two sides of a triangle, it is—Euclid notwithstanding—shorter than the other, and we shall catch the column there.”¹⁴

Altogether he filed five “Letters from the Front” for the Graphic, each of which ran under the head “The Insurrection in Cuba,” was by-lined “From Our Own Correspondent,” and concluded with the initials “WSC.” They show a keen eye for detail, a gift for clarity, and a sure grasp of tactics. The fourth was the best. By November 30—his twenty-first birthday—he had joined troops commanded by General Juarez Valdez in the fortified village of Arroyo Blanco. At 5:00 A.M., wearing his British uniform, he accompanied two battalions, seventeen hundred men, who were feeling their way toward a band of rebels led by Gómez. “No sooner had we got clear of the town than we heard the sound of firing.” To deceive Gómez’s scouts, the Spaniards retraced their steps and approached from a different direction, “through swampy meadows of coarse grass traversed by frequent water-courses.” At 10:00 A.M., to his astonishment, they halted and everyone except sentries slept for four hours. This was his introduction to the siesta, a custom which he would appropriate and use during both world wars to turn one working day into two. Rising, they advanced and came upon a rebel encampment; the enemy’s line of march could be traced “by broken branches and trampled grass, and this line the column followed.” At 5:00 P.M. the Spaniards found rebel campfires “still smouldering, and signs of a hasty departure were to be seen on every side.” Here they dug in for the night, with four companies of infantry posted as sentinels. “The whole scene, bathed in brilliant moonlight—in strong contrast to which the tall palm trees and the surrounding woods showed in deepest black”—was compared with “the numerous watch fires, against whose glaze the figures of the soldiers were silhouetted.”¹⁵

At 5:15 A.M. they were off again. “The sun had not yet risen, and a mist hung over all the low-lying ground.” The path ahead “lay through the thickest and most impenetrable forest.” Until now Valdez’s plan had been to throw one battalion ahead, with two extended companies guarding each flank, but here the flank guards had to be abandoned; the dense jungle confined them to a narrow path. “Daylight slowly broadened, and the long Spanish column insinuated itself like a snake into the endless forests and undulations of a vast, lustrous landscape dripping with moisture and sparkling with sunshine.” Their siesta was interrupted by rebel sharpshooters. Back on the trail Winston lit a Cuban cigar—he had the habit now—and noted that the bush here “gave place to a forest of extraordinary palm trees of all possible sizes and most peculiar shapes.” The column forded a river and camped at a place called Las Grullas, where he persuaded two officers to join him in a swim. As they were dressing, “suddenly we heard a shot fired. Another and another followed; then came a volley. The bullets whistled over our heads.” Like Chinese Gordon and George Washington, he found it thrilling to be under fire: “There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at without result.” He coolly observed that while Valdez’s men carried Mausers, the enemy used Remingtons, “and the deep note of their pieces contrasted strangely with the shrill rattle of the magazine rifles of the Spaniards.”¹⁶

That night a bullet passed through the thatched hut in which he was sleeping and another wounded an orderly just outside. Battle—the battle of La Reforma—was joined in the morning. The Spanish column debouched into open country, and the general, scanning the field through his field glasses, saw the enemy’s main position. He ordered an attack. His infantry advanced three hundred yards in silence; then “from the distant crest line came a lot of little puffs of smoke, followed immediately by the report of the insurgent rifles.” The Spaniards’ rifles replied as the infantrymen continued their advance. “The firing on both sides became heavy.” There was “a sound in the air sometimes like a sigh, sometimes like a whistle, and at others like the buzz of an offended hornet.” Valdez, “in his white uniform and gold lace, mounted on a grey horse, was a mark for every sharpshooter,” yet he rode up to within fifty yards of the firing line, urging his men on while bullets felled staff officers riding on either side of him. “Presently the sound of the Mauser volleys began to predominate and the rebel fire to slacken, till finally it ceased altogether.” Churchill saw “figures scurrying to the shelter of the woods,” then silence. Spanish troops occupied the enemy’s position. They had but one day’s rations left, however, and pursuit of the insurgents “was impossible owing to the impenetrable nature of the woods.” Valdez, triumphant but foiled, returned to his base in Cienfuegos.¹⁷

Campos—who was about to be relieved by Veleriano Weyler, whose suppression of rebellious Cuban civilians helped precipitate the Spanish-American War—awarded Churchill and Barnes the Red Cross, a Spanish decoration for officers. In London the War Office announced that they wouldn’t be permitted to wear it, however; sympathy for the insurrection was still strong on both sides of the Atlantic. New York newspapers reported that Winston had fought under the Spanish colors. In Tampa he hotly denied it: “I have not even fired a revolver. I am a member of General Valdez’s staff by courtesy only.” But in England the Newcastle Leader, ignoring British army precedents, observed that “spending a holiday in fighting other people’s battles is rather an extraordinary proceeding even for a Churchill,” and the Eastern Morning News predicted that “difficulties are certain to arise and Lord Wolseley will probably order him to return at once and report himself.” Wolseley did no such thing; if he reprimanded officers for serving in foreign armies, he would lose his best men. American editors were more cutting; the two subalterns were described as “emissaries of the British Government sent to teach Campos how to whip the secessionists” and proof that England was “throwing more bricks at the Monroe doctrine.”¹⁸

Back in Cockran’s flat, Churchill, stung, held his first press conference. Some of his remarks were foolish. If Campos took two Cuban strongholds before spring, he said, “he will, in my judgment, break the back of the revolution.” The rebels might then “carry on the war for a year or two longer, but ultimately they will be forced to accept virtually dictated terms.” Campos was, “in my judgment, one of the most distinguished men that Spain has ever produced,” a leader of “rare judgment and great humanity.” The rebels were “not good soldiers, but as runners would be hard to beat.” That inspired derisive headlines across the United States. He was described as a “pleasant faced young officer” wholly lacking in judgment. Yet he had qualified his predictions. If the Cubans held their present gains, he said, they would “be in a position to demand more favorable terms in the event of any attempt at settlement or arbitration.” The Spaniards were valiant and energetic, “but the nature of the country is against them, and, furthermore, there is too little combination in the movements of their various columns.” This could turn the tide. Indeed, “If the insurgents hold out until the spring rains set in, they may yet win.”¹⁹

He and Barnes sailed home on the Etruria, but the Cuban dilemma still weighed heavily upon him. He dashed off a piece for the Saturday Review denouncing rebel cruelty and adding, “They neither fight bravely nor do they use their weapons effectively.” Bad as the Spanish administration was, “a Cuban Government would be worse, equally corrupt, more capricious, and far less stable. Under such a Government revolutions would be periodic, property insecure, equity unknown.” The best solution, he wrote Cockran, would be an American takeover of the island: “I hope the United States will not force Spain to give up Cuba—unless you are prepared to accept responsibility.” If the rebels won, the government would be dominated by “the negro element among the insurgents,” who would “create renewed and even more bitter conflict of a racial kind.”²⁰

Cuba had been the first test of his courage and his sagacity. He had handled himself well under fire, inviting death near the firing line when, as a nonbelligerent, he might honorably have sought safety in the rear. His reportorial skills were already remarkable. On the other hand, he had failed to grasp the essential nature of guerrilla warfare, so important to an understanding of the century ahead. He had been, and in some respects always would be, a defender of the established order. Imperialism would never be a pejorative for him. Of the infamous Jameson Raid, which took place a week after his return from New York, he later wrote, “I was all for Dr. Jameson and his men. I understood fairly well the causes of the dispute on both sides. I longed for the day on which we should ‘avenge Majuba.’ I was shocked to see our Conservative Government act so timidly in this crisis. I was ashamed to see them truckling to a misguided Liberal Opposition and even punishing these brave raiders, many of whom I knew so well.” His forecasts of Cuba’s immediate future would soon be discredited. But in the long run his pessimism about the island would be vindicated. He had just reached his majority. He had been growing in acumen since his father’s death, and was continually revising his judgments. Little more than a year after his return from embattled Cuba, he expressed misgivings over his first interpretation of the revolution there. “I reproach myself somewhat,” he wrote, “for having written a little uncandidly and for having perhaps done injustice to the insurgents. I rather tried to make out, and in some measure succeeded in making out, a case for Spain. It was politic and did not expose me to the charge of being ungrateful to my hosts, but I am not quite clear whether it was right…. I am aware that what I wrote did not shake thrones or upheave empires—but the importance of principles do not [sic] depend on the importance of what involves them.” One principle was clear. It was inconceivable to him that a colony could survive as a sovereign state. After the Maine blew up, he told a reporter that “America can give the Cubans peace, and perhaps prosperity will then return. American annexation is what we must all urge, but possibly we shall not have to urge long.” To him the very thought of Cuban independence was as absurd as, say, an independent India.²¹

India now loomed. The Fourth Hussars marched from Aldershot to Hounslow, paraded past the retiring Brabazon for the last time, and began packing leisurely for the long voyage eastward in the autumn. Churchill later recalled: “I now passed a most agreeable six months; in fact they formed almost the only idle spell I have ever had.” It was the year of Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee; fashionable London celebrated with balls, receptions, recitals, and dinner parties. Jennie was back after nine months of dalliance on the Continent, including a marathon romp with Bourke Cockran in a Champs-Elysées apartment, and vexed only by pursuing, jealous little notes from the Prince of Wales, who typically speculated on “where your next loved victim is…?” Winston had also missed her. “My darling Mamma,” he had written her from Aldershot, “I am longing for the day when you will be able to have a little house of your own and when I can really feel that there is such a place as home.” Now she had taken, not a little house, but a seven-story Georgian mansion at 35A Great Cumberland Place, near Hyde Park and within sight of Marble Arch, and using London’s six-year-old “electric deep-level” subway, the precursor of the modern tube, he commuted between there and Waterloo, taking the train on to his barracks. Once Duchess Lily invited him to join a weekend party at Deepdene given for the prince. Colonel Brabazon would also be present. Churchill realized, he wrote, that “I must be upon my best behaviour: punctual, subdued, reserved, in short display all the qualities with which I am least endowed.” Unforgivably, he missed the six o’clock train to Dorking. That delayed him by an hour and a quarter. In his railway compartment, he frantically changed to full dress—to the dismay of the man who shared it—and a servant, meeting him at the station with a brougham, lashed the horses into a gallop. Nevertheless, he was late. He hoped to slip into the dining room unnoticed and apologize afterward. Instead, he found the entire company assembled in the drawing room. Without him there were only thirteen in the party, and the royal family was superstitious about that. As Winston bowed, HRH said shirtily with his German accent: “Don’t they teach you to be punctual in your regiment, Winston?” He glared at Brabazon, who glared at Winston, who was, for once, mute.²²

It didn’t last. Before the meal ended he was chatting amiably with the prince. Duchess Lily reproachfully called him incorrigible; he cheerfully acknowledged it. Among the other guests he had met Sir Bindon Blood, an influential veteran of colonial wars, so he counted the weekend a triumph. In his letters of those months one has the feeling that skies were always blue. He danced, he hunted, he devised clever masquerades for fancy-dress balls, and he evaded creditors. His means during this period are in fact mysterious. Messrs E. Tautz, breeches and trousers makers, were dunning him for nearly forty guineas. He now had “five quite good ponies” and owed payment for them. Wine bills, book bills, saddler’s bills—they accumulated, were stuffed away and ignored. His attitude toward them was insouciant. He left a note for his mother: “Our finance is indeed involved! If I had not been so foolish as to pay a lot of bills I should have the money now.”²³

She wrote him tautly: “I assure you unless something extraordinary turns up I see ruin staring me in the face.” Jennie was as improvident as Winston—she would spend £200 on a ball dress—but after he left she would be in London to face the consequences of his extravagance, and her alarm mounted. She borrowed from friends. She borrowed £17,000 from a bank, using her life insurance as collateral. She raised money on her jewels and juggled balances. Still the drain continued. She wrote: “My darling boy, you can’t think how all this worries me. I have so many money problems of my own I feel I cannot take on any others”; and, “What an extraordinary boy you are as regards yr business affairs.” Her annual income had fallen to £900, out of which she had to provide allowances for both her sons. She explained this to Winston, and he replied: “The situation as described by your letter is appalling. As you say it is of course impossible for you to live in London on such a pittance.” Then he hinted unscrupulously: “I hate the idea of your marrying—but that of course would be a solution.” It was indeed the eventual solution. Meanwhile, she made ends meet by taking over houses, redecorating them, and selling them for a profit. Winston remained indifferent to her struggle. Once one of his checks actually bounced. She told him: “I marvel at their allowing you to overdraw as you do. Neither the Westminster or the National Bank will let me overdraw £5 without telling me at once.” She sounded envious.²⁴

He remitted thirty pounds of the forty-five she had paid on his account and vaguely assured her he would send the rest “when my ship comes home.” He did not mean the ship to India. He had decided that he wanted to miss that one. The Fourth Hussars would be there nine years, and the more he thought about that, the less he liked it. The fact was that he wasn’t really cut out to be a professional officer. His father’s impression that he was, fragilely based on a boyhood infatuation with toy soldiers, had been whimsical. Winston was brave, and would distinguish himself in battle, but the long droughts of peacetime service could only frustrate him. He wanted to get on. Barracks life in the East would be dull, confining, dispiriting—Harrow all over again. England was the place to be; here he could find a constituency and run for office. Money would be necessary, of course, but he was an experienced journalist now; surely some newspaper would pay for his by-line. Crete was going through one of its periodic upheavals. He approached the Daily Chronicle with the suggestion that the paper send him there as its correspondent. The editor replied that they would pay him “at the rate of ten guineas a letter” if he got there on his own. He couldn’t afford it. In Fleet Street he floated other proposals. He offered to cover the Nile expedition Kitchener was organizing, or Sir Frederick Carrington’s expedition in Matabeleland, or the Ninth Lancers’ adventures in Rhodesia. There were no takers. He urged relatives and powerful friends to intercede on his behalf. They failed, and Lord Lansdowne, the secretary of state for war, wrote Jennie that Winston’s importuning was causing talk. His duty, Lansdowne said, lay with his regiment. There were rumors that he was trying to dodge it. “There are plenty of ill natured people about,” Lansdowne wrote, “and it is just conceivable that an attempt might be made to misrepresent his action.”²⁵

Churchill was unchastened. By now it was August, and they would be sailing for Bombay in a month. He leaned on his mother. He leaned hard. Perhaps he sensed that she, ashamed of her early neglect of him, was vulnerable to pressure. Surely, he felt, one of her many contacts could solve his problem. Writing from Hounslow he begged her to find “places where I could gain experience and derive advantage—rather than to [sic] the tedious land of India.” If he went he would be losing a “golden opportunity” and “guilty of an indolent folly that I shall regret all my life. A few months in South Africa would earn me the S.A. medal and in all probability the company’s star. Thence hot foot to Egypt—to return with two more decorations in a year or two—and beat my sword into an iron despatch box.” He turned the screw: “I cannot believe that with all the influential friends you possess and all those who would do something for me for my father’s sake” something could not be done. It was “useless to preach the gospel of patience to me. Others as young are making the running now and what chance have I of ever catching up. I put it down here—definitely on paper—that you really ought to leave no stone unturned to help me at such a period.” He begged her: “Three months leave is what I want & you could get it for me.”²⁶

She couldn’t, or at any rate didn’t; no reply from her survives. The army had been lenient with him, and what he was asking of her was probably impossible. Later she would move mountains for him, but he could not avoid India now. On September 11, 1896, he and a hundred other officers sailed from Southampton aboard the S.S. Britannia. Twelve days later, at Balmoral, Queen Victoria celebrated the sixtieth year of her reign. Churchill, who would do more to preserve and protect the Victorian legacy than any of her other subjects, was on the Red Sea, at midpoint in the twenty-three-day voyage. He played chess with a fellow officer that afternoon and listened to a string band that evening. His spirits were low. He wrote home: “The weather is beginning to get hot and the troop decks are awful.” His only good news was that he had reached the semifinal of a shipboard chess tournament: “I have improved greatly since the voyage began, and I think I shall try to get really good while I am in India.” But that was the limit of his expectations there. He had no inkling that India, far from dooming his future, would be the first crucial experience of his youth.²⁷

In 1896 the British Raj had reached flood tide. It lay halfway between the Mutiny forty years earlier, which had seen the transfer of power from the Honourable East India Company to the Crown, and the great days of that improbable, bespectacled nationalist who wore only a homespun dhoti and was known as Mahatma Gandhi. In the interval English dominance over the subcontinent flourished. The Indian Empire was a jigsaw of 602 states, ranging in size from Kashmir and Hyderabad to tiny holdings of a few acres. All were ruled from London under the principle of “paramountcy.” This was paternalism at best, and at worst, dictatorship, but the British argued, not unreasonably, that India had never been democratic, had never even been a country, and had always been governed by rajas, whose rights were respected by the Queen’s viceroy. As Englishmen saw it, they had rescued the people from pagans and savagery and introduced them to a better way of life. This was not entirely hypocritical. At the time of the Mutiny they had founded three Indian universities. Qualified natives, though few in number, had been admitted to the Indian Civil Service since 1864. Irrigation, railroads, newspapers, and the concept of Western justice and its quaint trimmings had been introduced and accepted. Solicitors wore white collar-tabs, like lawyers in Lincoln’s Inn; barristers wore wigs; judges wore imperial ermine. Hospitals, physicians, and public-health officials treated black and white patients alike.

Nevertheless, the Union Jack flew over all public buildings. Englishmen could, with impunity, strike natives who offended them. The pukka sahib and the burra sahib were masters to be respected and feared. By no means did all of them abuse their privileges. Those who came to love India, and they were many, treated its people with respect and civility. To them the Raj was a gigantic humming chromoscope providing endless, delightful, exotic sights and sounds: the sullen red glow growing in the bazaars and the little compounds crayoned with light at dawn, and equestrian statues of British generals staring blankly at the alien sunshine; the rhinestone eyes of plodding bullocks, and chuprassies fussing busily about in their gold-frogged chamras, and red tikkas on the foreheads of Brahmin women; dholl banyas beating their gongs and chewing blood-red pan supari; the fierce dadu wind blowing down the Himalayas and the contrasting hot puff of a sultry loo breeze; the fabrics of Mysore silk and Travancore coir and khuskhus screening from Bombay; the strumming of sitars, the quiet green maidans, the pye-dogs, the ita’at festivals of holy sadhus, the did-you-do-it did-you-do-it of lapwings perched on the branches of gigantic haldu trees, and the choruses of doves weeping piteously in scented foliage overhead, throbbing like a fever in the night. Britons who had found a home here (“Ah India, my country, my country,” Kipling had scribbled in the middle of an essay) rejoiced in the land’s eccentricities: the sacred elephants with their embroidered howdahs, the big fruit bats which flapped home at daybreak and hung upside down in trees by day; the fields of steaming white where dhobis’ sheets lay drying; the native railway engineers who rode around seated beneath umbrellas on their little inspection trolleys; the paddle-wheelers of the Ganges; the “kala memsahibs,” or black ladies, who could be just as arrogant as the most insensitive English mems; and the obscene carvings on the Nepalese temple of Benares, of which Murray’s Handbook chastely observed, “visitors need not see them if the attendant is discouraged from pointing them out.” Visits to rajas’ palaces could be stunning; one might see strutting peacocks, figures of four-armed goddesses in marble courtyards, gardens of brilliant melon-flowers, displays of star rubies, Kashmir sapphires, and emeralds like eggs—visions of the ancient, merciless India of priceless jewels and slave girls. Performing scorpions were to be found in the streets. So were snake-charmers, and fakirs, and freak shows, and the indescribable scent of communal India, a complex compound of kerosene, burned ghee, rose, dung, and dahlia. Excitement could be found in just sitting on your veranda at teatime, sipping whiskey in the heat, your legs propped up on the long arms of your wicker chair, awaiting the first mango showers and watching the fading of daylight, so unlike the long blue twilights of England, when the sun plunged behind the Arabian Sea with dramatic swiftness, and darkness fell on the vast Hindustan plain before you could grope your way inside.

This was the India Kipling loved, but it was known to too few of the new arrivals of the 1890s. A majority of them ignored the magic of India, eschewed curry, tried to recreate English suburbs in their cantonments, and watched regimental cricket matches while bands played Gilbert and Sullivan airs. Among themselves they laughed heartily, slapped one another on the back, and called each other “old chap” while completely ignoring the Indians, or, as they called them, the “wogs.”^* They traveled like lords. Short distances were covered in horse-drawn tongas, in coolie-drawn rickshas, or in sedan chairs, where you sat on a dholi, a small stool suspended from poles carried on the shoulders of two natives. Long trips were by train, in coaches reserved for the English; at stations there were rest rooms for First Class Gents, even special ones for Officers. On Saturday evenings subalterns got drunk, played rugger for regimental trophies, and sobered up in the morning over mulligatawny soup—all without leaving the post to explore the mysteries beyond the gate. It was assumed that the greatest possible achievement of an Indian youth would be to be accepted by a British public school. Natives believed it, too. Jawaharlal Nehru, Gandhi’s greatest protégé, became, and remained, a loyal Harrovian.

That did not, however, entitle him to enter a Raj club. It was said that the only difference between the Bengal Club and the Bombay Club was that one excluded Indians and dogs while the other admitted dogs. These were sahib bastions. A member sat at a little table, rang a silver bell with the reproduction of a cobra as a handle, and ordered a chota peg, a small whiskey, secure in the knowledge that no one of inferior blood could approach. Reading matter was all from home: Punch, Country Life, the Book of the Horse, The Times, Blackwood’s Magazine, and, of course, the Queen’s Regulations, Hart’s Army List, and, later, Jane’s Fighting Ships. In the clubs, members of the ascendant race planned war memorials, fountains, and statues honoring great Anglo-Indians. Memsahibs concentrated on converting hill stations—cooler because of their altitude, and therefore summer refuges—into a bit of the Mother Country. Naini Tal, Mussoorie, Ootacamund, and Darjeeling were popular hill stations, but the greatest was Simla, to which the viceroy and his court repaired when thermometers began to soar. Simla’s English parks and its half-timbered cluttered homes, shrines of Victorian materialism, testified to the insularity of the Raj. There one could sit by evening fires, breathe deeply of moist, cool air, ride bridle paths, and pretend that the real India did not exist.

Architecture reflected the confusion of disparate cultures, no more so than in Bombay, the destination of the Fourth Hussars before they moved south to permanent quarters outside Bangalore in the Madras Presidency. Here, where Kipling was born nine years before Churchill, you could find Moslem and Hindu and Occidental architectural principles warring with one another in the Municipality, erected in 1893, and in the Victoria Terminus, the central train station, which Nicholas Wollaston called “pure imported ingenuity, a fantasy of spikes and pillars full of grime and purple gloom.”²⁸ The Mint was Ionic. The Town Hall was Doric outside and Corinthian inside. The Old Secretariat was Venetian Gothic. The university library and clock tower, fourteenth-century Gothic, were the work of Sir Gilbert Scott, who had built the Albert Memorial. You couldn’t miss the similarity; it was awesome. University Hall, fifteenth-century French Decorative, was named, appropriately, after Sir Cowasjee Jehangir Readymoney, an Indian who had met the standards of success recognized in the Victorian Midlands. The telegraph office was Romanesque; the High Court, Early English. Various monuments, in indescribable styles, saluted the military virtues, commerce, and equity. The identity of the designer of Bombay’s Sassoon Dock has not survived, luckily for his reputation. It is a triumph of incompetence, so ill-suited to disembarkation that impatient immigrants often chose to come ashore in skiffs, a risky procedure which could cripple a man before he set foot on Indian soil.

It happened to Churchill. Let him tell it: “We came alongside of a great stone wall with dripping steps and iron rings for hand-holds. The boat rose and fell four or five feet with the surges. I put out my hand and grasped at a ring; but before I could get my feet on the steps the boat swung away, giving my right shoulder a sharp and peculiar wrench. I scrambled up all right, making a few remarks of a general character, mostly beginning with the earlier letters of the alphabet, hugged my shoulder and soon thought no more about it.” He was reminded of it in Poona, where the regiment spent the night under double-fly tents and then tried out the polo ponies of the Poona Light Horse. On his mount he found he could not swing a polo stick unless his right arm was strapped to his side. He procured a leather harness. That would come and go, but tennis was out forever. Indeed, his injury was to plague him in various maddening ways all his life. His shoulder would go out at unexpected moments, while he was taking a book from a shelf, swimming, sleeping with his arm under a pillow, or slipping on a stairway. Once the capsule that held the joint together nearly tore loose during an expansive gesture in Parliament, and he thought “how astonished the members would have been to see the speaker to whom they were listening, suddenly for no reason throw himself upon the floor in an instinctive effort to take the strain and leverage off the displaced arm bone.”²⁹

But he reflected little then on what seemed a temporary disability. He was too caught up in the new life that lay before him. India, “that famous appanage of the Bwitish Cwown,” as Brabazon had called it, overwhelmed him. He thought he might have landed on “a different planet.” That first morning he acquired his staff, or, as he came to call it, his “Cabinet.” All salaamed and presented recommendations from the homeward-bound regiment the Fourth Hussars was replacing. For a few pice he hired a dressing boy, who would be responsible for his uniform and clothing; a butler, who would manage his money; a syce, or groom, who would handle his ponies; various bearers; a wet sweeper; and, to be shared with two officers, two gardeners, three water carriers, four dhobis, and a watchman. “Princes,” he wrote, “could live no better than we.” That noon, after he had completed his only official task of the day—reprimanding troopers who weren’t wearing their cork helmets in the beating heat—he and another subaltern were approached by a messenger in a red-and-gold frock coat carrying an envelope with a puissant crest. It was an invitation to dine with William Mansfield, Baron Sandhurst, governor of Bombay.^* At the table Winston, cocky as ever, over-rode his host and dominated the conversation. Afterward he put it charmingly: “There were indeed moments when he seemed willing to impart his own views; but I thought it would be ungracious to put him to so much trouble. He kindly sent his aide-de-camp with us to make sure we found our way back to camp all right. On the whole, after forty-eight hours of intensive study, I formed a highly favourable opinion about India.” Hugo Baring, the young officer who had accompanied him, told the tale to the regimental mess. Their comrades were amused but unsurprised. They had grown accustomed to the strutting, slim, freckle-faced, irrepressible youth so quick to resent a slight, but quicker to offer the hand of friendship. Their favorite word for him was, and would continue to be, bumptious. Repeatedly, and unsuccessfully, they had tried to put him in his place. Once, aboard the Britannia, they had shoved him, struggling, under a huge couch, and then piled themselves upon it, but while they were still sorting themselves out he crept from beneath, rumpled but crowing: “You can’t keep me down like that!”³⁰

Darkness still lay over Poona the following morning when the bugles sounded reveille, rousing them in time to catch the 5:10 for a thirty-six-hour, twenty-mile-per-hour trip aboard a typical troop train “where the ’eat,” as Kipling wrote, “would make your bloomin’ eyebrows crawl.” But Bangalore, on the great triangular plateau of southern India, was worth the discomfort. It was a coveted station, three thousand feet above sea level. Days were fierce, but nights, except in the months preceding the annual monsoon flowering, were fresh and cool. The cantonment lay six miles from the city. Troops were housed in spacious, colonnaded barracks. Officers were paid a lodging allowance and left to find their own quarters. Churchill, Barnes, and Baring rented an enormous bungalow, a pink-and-white structure with a heavy tile roof supported by white plaster columns and broad verandas, the whole enlaced with purple bougainvillea and surrounded by two acres of gardens. He wrote his mother: “My writing table at which I now am—is covered with photographs and memories of those in England. The house is full of you—in every conceivable costume and style. My cigarette box that you brought me from Japan—my books—and the other Lares and Penates lie around and I quite feel at home—though 6,000 miles away.”³¹

Days began just before dawn, when, he wrote, one was “awakened by a dusky figure with a clammy hand adroitly lifting one’s chin and applying a gleaming razor to a lathered and defenceless throat.”³² Morning parade formed at 6:00 A.M. Mounted, they drilled and maneuvered for an hour and a half. Baths followed, and then breakfast. After that they were free until 5:00 P.M., the hour of polo. Despite his shoulder, he rode in every chukker, or playing period, he could find. As shadows crossed the field they broke up, bathed again, and dined at 8:30 P.M. to the strains of the regimental band. Subalterns fortunate enough to avoid being drafted for after-dinner whiskey by garrulous senior officers smoked and talked until 11:00 P.M. and lights out.

Every reveille found him ready for the new day. He was a keen soldier. His troop sergeant later recalled in the regimental history that “after a field day Mr Churchill would arrive at stables with rolls of foolscap and lots of lead pencils of all colours, and tackle me on the movements we had done at the exercise.” Both sergeant and subaltern were detailed to attend a course on musketry; Churchill passed out first in the class. He was happy, at least in the beginning, to be ignorant of political crises and social gossip. Long afterward he would say: “If you liked to be waited on and relieved of home worries, India thirty years ago was perfection.” He seldom gave money a thought. In addition to his lodging allowance, he was paid fourteen shillings a day, and three pounds a month to keep two horses. This, with his allowance from Jennie, constituted his income. Each month the paymaster handed him a string bag about the size of a turnip, filled with silver rupees. He immediately turned it over to his butler and forgot about it. This lofty disdain was irresponsible; his mother, her sister Clara, and several friends had just been defrauded of over £4,000 by an American confidence man. Jennie wrote, begging him to practice thrift. Instead, he lived beyond his means, borrowing from native moneylenders. He would recall: “Every officer was warned against these gentlemen. I found them most agreeable; very fat, very urbane, quite honest and mercilessly rapacious. All you had to do was to sign little bits of paper, and produce a polo pony as if by magic. The smiling financier rose to his feet, covered his face with his hands, replaced his slippers, and trotted off contentedly till that day three months.”³³ Somehow Jennie managed to cover their debts. Her admirers were still many, and rich.

Romance first reared its violin-shaped head in Winston’s life on November 3, 1896. He wrote home from Trimulgherry that he had just been introduced “to Miss Pamela Plowden—who lives here. I must say that she is the most beautiful girl I have ever seen—‘Bar none’ as the Duchess Lily says. We are going to try and do the City of Hyderabad together—on an elephant.” Pamela would be in and out of his life for years. Other girls did not attract him. Returning from a racecourse he reported that he had seen “a lot of horrid Anglo-Indian women” there, and that “nice people in India are few & far between. They are like oases in the desert…. I have lived the life of a recluse out here. The vulgar Anglo-Indians have commented on my not ‘calling’ as is the absurd custom of the country…. I know perhaps three people who are agreeable and I have no ambitions to extend my acquaintance.” But there were other diversions. For a time he collected butterflies in the gardens around his bungalow—swallowtails, white admirals, purple emperors, and rare species. He sent home for nets, collecting boxes, pins, boards, and a killing tin. Barnes and Baring protested that he was turning the house into a taxidermist’s shop. Then disaster struck. “My butterfly collection,” he mournfully wrote Jack, “which included upwards of 65 different sorts, has been destroyed by the malevolence of a rat who crawled into the cabinet and devoured all the specimens.” Undaunted, he cultivated roses: Maréchal Niel, La France, Gloire de Dijon—“over 50 different kinds of roses,” he wrote his mother, adding, “if it would not worry you I would like you very much to send a few English seeds—Wallflowers, Stocks, Tulips etc.”³⁴

Winston’s one great passion in those first months continued to be polo. His fellow officers shared it, and they concocted a plan. Never in the history of the Raj had a cavalry regiment from southern India won the Indian Empire’s Regimental Cup. But the officers of the Fourth Hussars, pooling their resources, helped to break this precedent. Their scheme was to approach the Poona Light Horse. Because this regiment was permanently stationed in the country, the Poona sepoys, largely officered by Britons, had a clear advantage in securing the Arabian ponies so prized by polo players. Specifically, they had first choice of mounts arriving at the Byculla stables in Bombay, where Arab steeds were imported. During the Fourth Hussars’ pause in Maharashtra, Churchill and his comrades had admired these animals. Now they bought an entire stud of twenty-five ponies from the Poona Light Horse. Ordinarily two or three years’ practice was believed essential before a regiment could field a passable team, but six weeks after their landing they challenged the Nineteenth Hussars for the Golconda Cup in Hyderabad. Although the match was considered a joke—and the laughter grew when the crowd saw that one subaltern from Bangalore had to ride one-armed—it was preceded by customary ceremonies. The native army of the nizam of Hyderabad paraded in full dress. The British troops followed. Elephants hauling cannon raised their trunks in salute as they passed the reviewing stand. After tiffin the game began, and the lithe, darting Nineteenth Hussars, as expected, quickly scored three goals. They were held to that, however, while the Fourth Hussars, with the one-armed officer leading them, scored nine times, thus establishing a record, never broken, of a regiment’s winning a major tournament within fifty days of landing in India. One of Churchill’s contemporaries, Patrick Thompson, believed that if you wanted to understand him, you had to see him play polo. “He rides in the game,” Thompson said, “like heavy cavalry getting into position for the assault. He trots about, keenly watchful, biding his time, a master of tactics and strategy. Abruptly he sees his chance, and he gathers his pony and charges in, neither deft nor graceful, but full of tearing physical energy—and skillful with it, too. He bears down opposition by the weight of his dash and strikes the ball. Did I say ‘strikes’? He slashes the ball.”³⁵

Apart from polo, he had acquired a taste for horse racing, with himself as jockey. Duchess Lily had promised him a pony, and he had expected to find it waiting for him in Bombay. It wasn’t there. He wrote Jennie of his disappointment. She was unsympathetic: “It may be dead for all I know, but if it is not I want you to promise me to sell it.” She and the Prince of Wales had discussed it, “& he begged me to tell you that you ought not to race… it is next to impossible to race in India & keep clean hands.” Winston bridled: “I do not at all want to sell it—and I cannot see that it is unwise of me to keep it…. Everyone out here possesses an animal of one sort or another which they race in the numerous local meetings…. Now I cannot believe that all who race—on this small scale—must necessarily soil their hands.” He scoffed at HRH: “He always loves ‘glittering generalities’ and it is so easy to say, ‘They are all cheats in India.’ Such a statement is of course nonsense and I am sure you will not believe it.” His mother shot back, “They all tell me that the racing in India is a very shifty unsatisfactory thing.” He boldly retorted: “You should tell His Royal Highness, if he says anything further about racing in India, that I intend to be just as much an example to the Indian turf as he is to the English as far as fair play goes.”³⁶ Anticlimax followed. The pony, which arrived in November, was a lemon. Riding it, he came in third three times, and, of course, even second place would have been unacceptable to him. But in London his second cousin, the Marquess of Londonderry, put him up for the Turf Club; Brabazon seconded the nomination, and he was in. Loyally he registered his father’s old racing colors, chocolate and pink.

Comradeship, ease, butterflies, roses, horses—obviously his new life was enchanting. But a new hunger was growing within him. That appetite, and the means he took to satisfy it, marks the end of his youth and the incipient signs of his emergence as an exceptional man. The transformation began with early pangs of intellectual curiosity. He found that he had “a liking for words and for the feel of words fitting and falling into their places like pennies in the slot. I caught myself using a good many words the meaning of which I could not define precisely. I admired these words, but was afraid to use them for fear of being absurd.” On the day his troopship left Southampton a friend had told him, “Christ’s gospel was the last word in ethics.” Churchill had been puzzled. What, he wondered, were ethics? Judging from the context, he assumed they meant the Public School Spirit, Playing the Game, honorable behavior, or patriotism. Then someone else remarked to him that ethics dealt, not merely with what you ought to do, but with why it ought to be done, and that there was a vast literature on the subject. He knew tactics, he had some grasp of politics, but “here in Bangalore there was no one to tell me about Ethics for love or money.” Next he remembered his father’s gibe about the Grand Remonstrance during the reign of Charles I. It occurred to him that his knowledge of history was limited and something ought to be done about it. He overheard a man using the phrase “the Socratic method.” Churchill wondered who Socrates was, or had been. He made inquiries. They were unsatisfactory. He was told that Socrates was a contentious Greek, hounded by a nagging wife, who became so troublesome that he was forced to take his own life. But Winston knew there must have been more to it than that. More than twenty-three hundred years had passed since the Greek’s death, and people were still arguing about it. “Such antagonisms,” Churchill reasoned, “do not spring from petty issues. Evidently Socrates had called something into being long ago which was very explosive. Intellectual dynamite! A moral bomb! But there was nothing about it in The Queen’s Regulations.”³⁷

In the winter of 1896, as he approached his twenty-second birthday, he “resolved to read history, philosophy, economics, and things like that; and I wrote to my mother asking for such books as I had heard of on these topics.” He began with Gibbon’s eight-volume Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. At Harrow his history text had been The Student’s Hume, and he had found it dull. Now, “all through the glistening middle hours of the Indian day, from when we quitted stables till the evening shadows proclaimed the hour of Polo, I devoured Gibbon. I rode triumphantly through it… and enjoyed it all. I scribbled all my opinions on the margins of the pages.” On January 14, 1897, we find him writing Jennie, “The eighth volume of Gibbon is still unread as I have been lured from its completion by [Winwood Reade’s] The Martyrdom of Man & a fine translation of the Republic of Plato: both of which are fascinating.” Then, remembering Woom’s brother-in-law by the fire at Ventnor, he tackled twelve volumes of Macaulay. On March 17 he wrote, “I have completed Macaulay’s History and very nearly finished his Essays.” He thought that Macaulay “is easier reading than Gibbon and in quite a different style. Macaulay crisp and forcible, Gibbon stately and impressive. Both are fascinating and show what a fine language English is since it can be pleasing in styles so different.” He was covering “fifty pages of Macaulay and twenty-five of Gibbon every day. There are only 100 of the latter’s 4,000 odd left now.”³⁸

The scope of his explorations was broadening—“I read three or four books at a time to avoid tedium”—and he was poring over Schopenhauer, Malthus, Darwin, Aristotle (on politics only), Henry Fawcett’s Political Economy, William Lecky’s European Morals and Rise and Influence of Rationalism, Pascal’s Provincial Letters, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, Liang’s Modern Science and Modern Thought, Victor-Henri Rochefort’s Memoirs, the memoirs of the Duc de Saint Simon, and Henry Hallam’s Constitutional History. Incredibly, he asked his mother to send him all one hundred volumes of the Annual Register, the record of British public events founded by Burke. He explained that he wanted to know “the detailed Parliamentary history (Debates, Divisions, Parties, cliques & caves)^* of the last 100 years.” Jennie balked at the expense—fourteen shillings a volume—but she did send twenty-seven. In using them, he first set down his opinion of an issue, then studied the debates. By this practice he hoped “to build up a scaffolding of logical and consistent views which will perhaps tend to the creation of a logical and consistent mind. Of course the Annual Register is valuable only for its facts. A good knowledge of these would arm me with a sharp sword. Macaulay, Gibbon, Plato etc must train the muscles to wield that sword to the greatest effect.”³⁹

He was scrawling letters to Jennie, Jack, Welldon, and Cockran, rekindling issues which had fired Parliaments of the past but were now resolved or at least dormant. Disraeli’s support for the popular election of Scottish clergymen won his approval; Gladstone’s opposition to parliamentary reform, his disapproval. He thought Lord Northbrook right in banning the export of Indian grain during the famine of 1873–1874. He favored the Irish Coercion Laws, advocated the establishment of a criminal appeals court in England, came down hard on the side of slum clearance, death duties, compulsory vaccination, and capital punishment in public (“Justice in every form should not shrink from publicity”), and rejected the charge that newspapers fanned the flames of war—a curious inference from one who knew the role of Pulitzer’s World and Hearst’s Journal in Cuba. What sort of education, he asked rhetorically, could a pupil anticipate in a tax-supported school? “Reading and writing, the knowledge of sufficient arithmetic to enable the individual to keep his accounts; the singing of patriotic songs and a gymnastic course is all that he may expect.” Woman suffrage was ridiculous, “contrary to natural law and the practice of civilized states.” Wives were “adequately represented by their husbands.” Spinsters would back religious intolerance and “every kind of hysterical fad.” Admit females to the polls and “all power passes to their hands.” Indeed, “if you give women votes you must ultimately allow women to sit as members of Parliament.” It was, he darkly prophesied, “only the thin end of the wedge.”⁴⁰

His autodidacticism precipitated a religious crisis. At Harrow he had attended daily prayers and Sunday services; in the army he participated in church parades. Until now he had never doubted their value. The anticipation of a hereafter, he had assumed, justifiably disciplined the lower classes and served as an incentive for middle-class morality. Indian sects were similarly useful, provided they did not degenerate into fanaticism. But the books he was now reading challenged the underpinning of everything he had learned since childhood. Gibbon, Reade, and Lecky convinced him that he had been gulled, and as a consequence he “passed through a violent and aggressive anti-religious phase which, had it lasted, might have made me a nuisance.” This, of course, is a common experience among the self-educated. But Churchill’s resolution of it was unusual. In moments of danger in Cuba and later, he instinctively recited prayers he had learned at Woom’s knee. He survived. He asked for lesser gifts, “and nearly always in these years, and indeed throughout my life, I got what I wanted. This practice seemed perfectly natural, and just as real as the reasoning process which contradicted it so sharply.” In a book of quotations he had read: “Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point.” Why, he asked himself, should he discard the reasons of the heart for those of the head? Why not enjoy both? He therefore adopted “quite early in life a system of believing whatever I wanted to believe, while at the same time leaving reason to pursue unfettered whatever paths she was capable of treading.”⁴¹

“I have hardly looked at a novel,” he wrote on March 31, 1897. He was sticking to tough reading and writing letters meshed with abstruse allusions. His brother officers wondered how he did it. The climate was punishing. This was the Raj in its heroic period, without air conditioning, refrigerators, or even electric fans. One thinks of Kipling in the Punjab only a few years earlier, sweating and scribbling under the same sun through long afternoons in his darkened bungalow, struggling to immortalize the age. Churchill was writing, too, but his was a genius of a different order, and he had not found his medium. He was writing his first book, and only novel, Savrola, though he had not yet settled on that title. Once it had begun to take shape he wrote Jennie: “I think you will be surprised when you get the MS. It is far and away the best thing that I have ever done. I have only written 80 MS pages—but I find a fertility of ideas that surprises me…. It is called ‘Affairs of State,’ a political romance. Scene Plot a hypothetical Republic…. I am quite enthusiastic about it. All my philosophy is put into the mouth of the hero. But you must see for yourself. It is full of adventure.”⁴²

He added a postscript: “Do try to get me up to the war if you can possibly.” He meant the imminent clashes along India’s North-West Frontier, but it is clear from his correspondence that year that the prospect of fighting anywhere would have been welcome. The first flush of his enthusiasm for Bangalore had faded. He had become restless; his temperament cried for action. India had become “an abominable country to live long in. Comfort you get—company you miss…. There is every temptation to relapse into a purely animal state of existence.” He and Baring had spent Christmas in Bengal, but he had concluded that “Calcutta is full of supremely uninteresting people endeavouring to assume an air of heartiness”; he was glad to have seen it only because “it will be unnecessary ever to see it again.” Yearning for a stimulating environment, he wrote that if he could “only get hold of the right people my stay here might be of value. If I had come to India as an MP—however young & foolish, I could have had access to all who know and can convey. As a soldier… I vegetate.” Without his books, he felt, he would stagnate. “The Indian press is despicable—being chiefly advertisements.” All sorts of complaints crowded his letters now. “My face is blistered by the sun so badly that I have had to see a doctor,” he wrote after one field exercise, and when he was appointed acting adjutant he had to write “so many memos etc that to touch a pen is an effort.”⁴³

His first chance to break free from this oppression came in the spring of 1897. The Greeks had sent a small expeditionary force to fight rebellious Turks on Crete. The British Mediterranean fleet, joining those of five other nations, was blockading the island to prevent the landing of Greek reinforcements. Churchill was indignant: “What an atrocious crime the Government have committed in Crete! That British warships should lead the way in protecting the blood bespattered Turkish soldiery from the struggles of their victims is horrible to contemplate.” His mother disagreed: “The Concert of Europe were obliged to act as they did altho’ they certainly were slow in making up their minds.” He was unconvinced: “We are doing a very wicked thing in firing on the Cretan insurgents… so that she [Greece] cannot succour them.” He saw the whole thing as a devious Salisbury plot to strengthen the Turks and thereby deny Constantinople to the Russians. He was right there, but wrong in an aside which, in the light of subsequent events, has a haunting ring: Salisbury’s policy was “foolish because, as surely as night follows day—the Russians are bound to get Constantinople. We could never stop them even if we wished. Nor ought we to wish for anything that could impede the expulsion from Europe of the filthy Oriental.”⁴⁴

All this laid the groundwork for his letter to Jennie of April 21. “I am afraid you will regard this letter somewhat in the aspect of a bombshell,” he began. He proposed to cover the Cretan fighting as a war correspondent, and he didn’t care which side accepted his credentials. “Of course all my sympathies are entirely with the Greeks, but on the other hand the Turks are bound to win—are in enormous strength & will be on the offensive the whole time.” It didn’t matter, really; “if you can get me good letters to the Turks—to the Turks I will go. If to the Greeks—to the Greeks.” He thought her close friend Sir Edgar Vincent “could probably do everything for me in Constantinople & could get me attached to some general’s staff etc as in Cuba. On the other hand you know the King of Greece and could of course arrange matters in that quarter.” Jennie, he was confident, could also find a newspaper which would hire him. He expected to be paid ten or fifteen pounds for each piece but would meet his own expenses, and he asked her to manage a loan—“Lord Rothschild would be the person to arrange this for me as he knows every one.” His mother, he felt certain, would “not stand in my way in this matter but will facilitate my going just as you did in the case of Cuba.” He misjudged her. In London she described his design to friends as “a wild scheme” and told Jack that the men she knew in the Foreign Office thought the war would end soon anyhow. This being true, his plan, far from being a bombshell, would end rather “like a damp firework,” which is precisely what happened.⁴⁵

He had been checked. But not mated. Considering the powerful men who had been enticed by his mother’s beauty—the Prince of Wales, the Duke of Cambridge, Salisbury, Vincent, Sir Evelyn Wood, Kitchener, Lord Cromer, Sir Bindon Blood—Winston concluded that she could surely exploit at least one of her relationships to his advantage. He had no compunctions about twisting her arm, thereby persuading her to twist theirs. But he could not do it from six thousand miles away. Luckily he would soon be at her side. As the hot season of 1897 approached, the officers of the Fourth Hussars were offered what was called “three months’ accumulated privilege leave” in England. Most declined on the ground that they had just settled in, but “I,” Churchill would recall, “thought it was a pity that such good things should go a-begging, and I therefore volunteered to fill the gap.” On May 8 he sailed from Bombay aboard the Ganges. The trip was an ordeal: “sweltering heat, rough weather and fearful seasickness.” At Aden he was greeted by bitter news. The Greeks had sued for peace. His disappointment was shared by a fellow passenger, Colonel Ian Hamilton, a romantic who dreamed of Greece’s past glories and would later encounter Churchill again and yet again, but Winston, unconsoled, left the ship when it reached Naples, dawdled in Pompeii, Rome, and Paris, and reached home only just in time to attend society’s annual fancy-dress ball at Devonshire House in Piccadilly. Jennie went as Theodora. Of Winston we know only that he wore a sword. He had, he said, returned to enjoy “the gaieties of the London Season,” but he had other matters on his mind.⁴⁶ War, any war, was one. Politics was another. After the ball he dropped into the St. Stephen’s Chambers office of Fitzroy Stewart, secretary of the Conservative Central Office and a distant cousin, and told him he wanted to stand for Parliament as a Conservative.

No seats were vacant, Stewart explained, but he wrote Henry Skrine, the party’s agent in Bath, asking: “Will you allow the late Lord Randolph Churchill’s son, Mr Winston S. Churchill… to speak at your gathering on the 26th? He is very keen about politics and about the Primrose League and has told us he would like to address a few political meetings before rejoining his regiment…. He is a clever young man and his presence would no doubt be of some interest to the Bath Conservatives.” Thus it was that Churchill delivered his first political address at Claverton Manor, now England’s American Museum, in a park near Bath, in the high summer of 1897. Newspapers then devoted roughly the same space to politics that they give to sports today, and both the Bath Daily Chronicle and London’s Morning Post ran full accounts of his performance. The speech was enthusiastically received—he was interrupted by cheers forty-one times—but that may have arisen in part from sympathy for his inexperience; he began by telling his audience that the timeworn “unaccustomed as I am to public speaking” should be pardoned in this instance, because this was, in fact, his maiden effort.⁴⁷

Not much was happening in politics just now, he said, which was dull for the politicians but probably a relief to the people. Then he launched into a spirited defense of the Conservative party and an attack on its critics. Liberals were “always liberal with other people’s money.” Radicals—“the dried-up drain-pipe of Radicalism”—reminded him of “the man who, on being told that ventilation was an excellent thing, went and smashed every window in his house, and died of rheumatic fever.” Conservative policy, on the other hand, was “a look-before-you-leap policy… a policy of don’t leap at all if there is a ladder.” He praised the Tories’ bill to compensate workers injured in industrial accidents, regretted a recent strike, and took the position, always popular with politicians courting the average voter, of damning both labor and capital. Ultimately, he believed, “the labourer will become, as it were, a shareholder in the business in which he works,” though he hastily added that this solution would become practical only “in the distant future.” The greatest achievement of the Conservatives, he said, had been teaching “the people of Great Britain the splendour of their Empire, the nature of their Constitution, and the importance of their fleet.” This was the heart of his message, a paean to imperialism, and his peroration, throbbing with the rhythms of Gibbon, is both a tribute to his imperial faith and a demonstration of his beginning struggle toward eloquence:

There are not wanting those who say that in this Jubilee year our Empire has reached the height of its glory and power, and that we now should begin to decline, as Babylon, Carthage, and Rome declined. Do not believe these croakers, but give the lie to their dismal croaking by showing by our actions that the vigour and vitality of our race is unimpaired and that our determination is to uphold the Empire that we have inherited from our fathers as Englishmen, that our flag shall fly high upon the sea, our voice be heard in the councils of Europe, our Sovereign supported by the love of her subjects, then shall we continue to pursue that course marked out for us by an all-wise hand and carry out our mission of bearing peace, civilisation, and good government to the uttermost ends of the earth.⁴⁸

On the day that Churchill spoke in Bath, news reached England of a Pathan uprising in the Swat Valley, on India’s North-West Frontier. This had been smoldering for some time, and was a direct consequence of Whitehall’s policy in that harsh, craggy corner of Asia. The British, having conquered the plains of India, had paused at the foothills of the Himalayas and turned back to develop the lands they had taken. The mountains formed a natural barrier as definite, and as unbridgeable, as the English Channel. But in the northwest the peaks trailed off. There, in 1893, an Anglo-Afghan frontier had been demarcated; Britain intended to build Afghanistan up as a buffer between the Raj and the Russians, Asia’s other great power. Meanwhile, they went about enrolling the tribesmen on their side of the frontier as subjects of the Queen. And there lay the rub. These clansmen—Pathans, Swatis, Waziris, Mahsuds, Afridis, Bunerwalis, Chitralis, and Gilgitis—had lived in remote independence since the dawn of time. Now bands of pale aliens were moving among them, building roads, putting up signs, establishing outposts and blockhouses. They were bewildered, then angry. They knew almost nothing of what was happening in the rest of the world, but now they were being informed, and misinformed, by a Moslem rabble-rouser whom the British called the Mad Fakir and Churchill later described as “a priest of great age and of peculiar holiness.”⁴⁹ This mullah told the tribesmen of victories by their fellow Moslems—the Turks on Crete and the Mahdi in the Sudan—and spread wild tales. Turks had captured the Suez Canal, he said, explaining what it was, and he assured them that the British bullets could not harm men faithful to Mohammed, displaying as proof a small bruise on his leg which, he said, was the only consequence of a direct hit by an English cannonball. The viceregal staff in Calcutta was not unaware of this agitation. Word of it came to them through networks of—readers of Kim will have guessed—informers. Punitive expeditions were organized; reinforcements of Tommies were on their way from other parts of the Empire. London was particularly worried by the isolation of the Raj’s key frontier fort, Chitral, far to the north, a miniature Gibraltar situated on an eminence commanding the great passes into Afghanistan. A Swati revolt threatened the British garrison holding the Malakand Pass and, specifically, a long wire-rope jhula, or swinging bridge, needed to provision Chitral. Whitehall reacted by announcing that a field force of three brigades would put down the uprising. It would be led by General Sir Bindon Blood.

Churchill was standing on the lawn at the Goodwood races, enjoying balmy weather and winning money, when the report of this decision buzzed through the crowd. He was electrified. On meeting Sir Bindon at Deepdene the year before he had extracted a promise that, should the general take the field again, Winston would join him. Churchill had three weeks of leave left, but he instantly wired Blood, reminding him of his pledge, and caught the next boat to India, the S.S. Rome, leaving behind, in his haste, a batch of new books, his polo sticks, his pet dog Peas, a Primrose League badge old Mr. Skrine had lent him in Bath, and, of course, a sheaf of bills. At each port of call he looked, in vain, for a reply from Blood. This P & O voyage was even worse than the last, particularly on the Red Sea: “The temperature is something like over 100° and as it is damp heat—it is equal to a great deal more…. It is like being in a vapour bath. The whole sea is steamy and there is not a breath of air—by night or day.” Finally, at Bombay, a telegram from Upper Swat awaited him: “Very difficult. No vacancies. Come as correspondent. Will try to fit you in. B.B.”⁵⁰

A four-day detour to Bangalore was necessary; he needed his colonel’s permission to join Blood. Newspaper credentials came next. Jennie tried The Times, without success, but the Daily Telegraph contracted to pay Winston five pounds a column, and in India the Allahabad Pioneer, which had published much of Kipling’s early work, agreed to run a three-hundred-word telegram from him every day and pay accordingly. At the Bangalore train station he pushed a small sack of rupees across the counter and asked, out of curiosity, how far north his journey would take him. The ticket babu checked a timetable and told him 2,028 miles—a five-day trip through the worst of the summer heat. But there were compensations. He had bought a bag of books, and the first-class, leather-lined, heavily shuttered railway compartment carried a circular wheel of wet straw which the passenger could turn from time to time. Thus, he proceeded, as he put it, “in a dark padded moving cell, reading mostly by lamplight or by some jealously admitted ray of glare.”⁵¹ He broke his trip at Rawalpindi to visit a friend in the Fourth Dragoon Guards. The dragoons were preparing to be sent to the front; officers expected the order to grind their swords any day. That evening he joined a sing-along in the sergeants’ mess. Long afterward he would remember roaring out:

And England asks the question

When danger’s nigh

Will the sons of India do or die?

And:

Great White Mother, far across the sea,

Ruler of the Empire may she ever be.

Long may she reign, glorious and free,

In the Great White Motherland!

A photograph of Churchill taken at the time shows him faultlessly turned out in the romantic uniform of that period: spurred cavalry boots, whipcord jodhpurs, and military tunic with choker collar, Sam Browne belt, and the swooping khaki topee which will forever be identified with Victorian colonial wars. Wearing it, with a Wolseley valise for paper and pencils slung over his shoulder, he stood on the platform at Nowshera, the railhead of Blood’s Malakand Field Force, and arranged for transportation for the last leg of his journey: forty miles across a scorching plain and then up the steep, winding ascent to Malakand Pass, the general’s headquarters. Upon arrival Winston learned that Blood himself was off with a flying column, putting down a local mutiny by the Bunerwal tribe. Yellow with dust, Churchill was provided with a tent, a place in the staff mess, and a tumbler of whiskey. He took this last only to be polite. He had long enjoyed the taste of wine and brandy, but until this moment the smoky taste of whiskey had turned his stomach. Here, however, he faced a choice of tepid water, tepid water with lime juice, and tepid water with whiskey. As he put it, he “grasped the larger hope.” In the five days Blood was away he conquered his aversion. “Nor was this a momentary acquirement,” he later wrote. “Once one got the knack of it, the very repulsion of the flavour developed an attraction of its own…. I have never shrunk when occasion warranted it from the main basic refreshment of the white officer in the East.” Thus fortified, he contemplated his immediate future. He cherished few illusions about warfare; he had, after all, come under fire in Cuba. Aboard the train to Nowshera he had warned his mother that danger lay ahead for him. Nevertheless, “I view every possibility with composure. It might not have been worth my while, who am really no soldier, to risk so many fair chances on a war which can only help me directly in a profession I mean to discard.” That, at least, was settled. “But I have considered everything and I feel that the fact of having seen service with British troops while still a young man must give me more weight politically—must add to my claims to be listened to and may perhaps improve my prospects of gaining popularity with the country.” Now he wrote her again, more somberly: “By the time this reaches you everything will be over so that I do not mind writing about it. I have faith in my star—that is that I am intended to do something in the world. If I am mistaken—what does it matter? My life has been a pleasant one and though I should regret to leave it—it would be a regret that perhaps I should never know.”⁵²

General Blood returned, magnificently erect on his charger, mustache bristling, snorting with triumph. The Bunerwalis were vanquished. Moreover, during his absence the Eleventh Bengal Lancers and the Guides Cavalry had driven the Swatis from Chakdara and chased the tribesmen up and down the valley. Everyone was ready for more action. Several officers had been killed in local skirmishes, and their effects, in accordance with Anglo-Indian campaigning custom, had been auctioned off. Winston had bought two horses, hired a groom, and acquired a kit. He was now fully equipped. In the morning Blood welcomed him, motioned him to his side, and then led an expedition of twelve thousand men and four thousand animals over the bridge, into the valleys where lurking tribesmen, armed with long rifles, lay in wait. In describing the enemy’s practice of hiding in the hills and firing down at the moving British column, Churchill introduced his readers to a new word. Such a rifleman, he wrote, was “a ‘sniper,’ as they are called in the Anglo-Indian army.”⁵³

Lieutenant Winston Churchill in India

While pursuing tribesmen, the Malakand Field Force also carried out punitive missions: destroying crops, driving off cattle, putting huts to the torch. The Pathans were a pitiless foe, but the British perpetrated atrocities, too. Winston wrote Reggie Barnes in Bangalore: “After today we begin to burn villages. Every one. And all who resist will be killed without quarter. The [tribesmen] need a lesson—and there is no doubt we are a very cruel people. At Malakand the Sikhs put a wounded man into the cinerator & burnt him alive. This was hushed up. However I will tell you more stories—some queer ones I have heard too—when we meet.” He wrote his mother: “The danger & difficulty of attacking these active—fierce hill men is extreme. They can get up the hills twice as fast as we can—and shoot wonderfully well…. It is a war without quarter. They kill and mutilate everyone they catch and we do not hesitate to finish their wounded off. I have seen several things wh. have not been very pretty since I have been up here—but as you will believe I have not soiled my hands with any dirty work—though I recognise the necessity of some things.” Long afterward he recalled that “it was all very exciting and, for those who did not get killed or hurt, very jolly.” His newspaper dispatches do not reflect this. Even less so do his letters. He was ill. It cannot have been pleasant to remain on the line at Inayat Kila with a 103-degree fever. “Here I am,” he wrote miserably, “lying in a hole—dug two feet deep in the ground—to protect me against the night firing—on a mackintosh with an awful headache—and the tent & my temperature getting hotter every moment as the sun climbs higher and higher.”⁵⁴

Most war correspondents hover around headquarters, writing dispatches based on communiqués; in World War II they reported the fighting on the island of Okinawa, in the Pacific, while sitting at typewriters on Guam, fourteen hundred miles away. Churchill went into the field. Indeed, as Sir Bindon’s officers fell, he found himself leading troops. At one point he commanded a company of the Thirty-first Punjab Infantry, sepoys whose language he didn’t even speak. (He learned two words, maro [“kill”] and chalo [“get on”], and introduced them to an English one, “Tallyho!”) There can be no doubt that he was remarkably brave, at times even rash. After closing within forty yards of the enemy he wrote, “I felt no excitement and very little fear.” Like Nelson, he freely admitted that he was chiefly driven, not by patriotism, but by ambition. He wrote Jennie: “I rode on my grey pony all along the skirmish line where everyone else was lying down in cover. Foolish perhaps but I play for high stakes and given an audience there is no act too daring or too noble. Without the gallery things are different.” This, he was convinced, was advancing him another step toward the House of Commons. “I shall get a medal and perhaps a couple of clasps,” he wrote at one point, and, at another, “I should like to come back and wear my medals at some big dinner or some other function.” The awful thought crossed his mind that no medal might be struck for this expedition. He told Jennie, “Here out of one brigade we have lost in a fortnight 245 killed and wounded and nearly 25 officers,” suggested a comparison with “actions like Firket in Egypt—wh are cracked up as great battles and wh are commemorated by clasps & medals etc etc,” and concluded, “I hope you will talk about this to the Prince and others.” But apart from its political value, physical courage had an intrinsic value in his eyes, and the lack of it was shameful. To his “intense mortification” he saw men of the Royal West Kents “run and leave their officer on the ground.” He added: “I know the Buffs wd never have done this.” Despite the heavy casualties, when he thought of “what the Empire might have lost I am relieved.”⁵⁵

He wrote Reggie: “It is bloody hot.” You could “lift the heat with your hands, it sat on your shoulders like a knapsack, it rested on your head like a nightmare.” The worst scorcher was Thursday, September 16. It also saw the heaviest fighting—“16th was biggest thing in India since Afgan [sic] war,” he wrote his mother. Judging from his letters and dispatches, it was a harrowing day for him. On its eve Sir Bindon ordered Brigadier Patrick Jeffreys, commanding his Second Brigade, to enter the Mamund Valley, a cul-de-sac, and clear it out. Swinging around in his saddle, the general told Churchill, “If you want to see a fight, you may ride back and join Jeffreys.” A troop of Bengal Lancers was headed that way, so Winston mounted and accompanied them as they gingerly picked their way through the ten miles of broken ground between the general’s camp and the brigadier’s. They reached Jeffreys at dusk. “All night long the bullets flew across the camp; but everyone now had good holes to lie in, and the horses and mules were protected to a large extent.”⁵⁶

At the instant of dawn the entire brigade, preceded by a squadron of lancers, moved in warlike formation into the valley, Lee-Enfields at the ready. The Mamund basin widened as they entered it, and when they fanned out in three separate detachments, Churchill chose to ride with the center column. As they advanced not an enemy shot was fired. The slopes above were silent, watchful. But the natives were there. Approaching the far end of the valley, Churchill raised his field glasses and saw “a numerous force of tribesmen on the terraced hillsides… they appeared seated in long lines, each with his weapon upright beside him…. The sun threw back at intervals bright flashes of steel as the tribesmen waved their swords.” At 7:30 A.M. the lancers, trotting a hundred yards forward, opened fire with their carbines. Martini-Henrys immediately replied. Churchill wrote: “From behind rocks and slopes of ground, on spurs, and from stone houses, little puffs of smoke darted. A brisk skirmish began.” He accompanied about fifteen men around him who rode up, dismounted, and opened fire at seven hundred yards. They, too, came under fire. Then the British infantry, the bulk of Jeffreys’s brigade, toiled up and reached them. The Thirty-fifth Sikhs split into small parties and attacked various hills, hummocks, and a village. Churchill picked the one heading for the village. Enemy fire died away; they reached their objective without incident. But once there, he looked back and saw no brigade. He searched the valley with his glasses. Jeffreys’s force had simply disappeared. Although he did not realize it then, they were in fact enveloped in folds of the vast terrain. He and his people were equally invisible to the brigade; geography was the Pathans’ great ally. It occurred to Winston that his was a very small troop: five officers, including him, and eighty-five Sikhs. He recalled Sandhurst warnings about “dispersion of forces,” and was grateful when the company commander relayed word from a lieutenant colonel down below to withdraw because “we are rather up in the air here.” Churchill noted on his pad that this was “a sound observation.” Then the officer said: “You stay here and cover our retirement till we take up a fresh position on that knoll below the village.”⁵⁷

Winston’s small rear guard waited uneasily for ten minutes. They were about to depart when the mountain above them sprang to life. Sabers flashed, gun muzzles erupted, bright flags appeared, and figures dressed in white and blue began dropping down from ledges hundreds of feet overhead, shrieking, “Yi! Yi! Yi!” A group of Pathans began to assemble in a clump of rocks about a hundred yards from Churchill, and as they fired, Winston, borrowing the rifle of a Sikh, squeezed off answering shots while the Sikh handed him cartridges. This continued for five minutes; then the battalion adjutant scrambled up and panted: “Come on back now. There is no time to lose. We can cover you from the knoll.” Churchill pocketed his ammunition—it was a standing order to let no bullets fall into the hands of the tribesmen—and was about to leave when an enemy fusillade killed the man beside him and hit five others, one of whom “was spinning around just behind me, his face a mass of blood, his right eye cut out.” Recovering wounded was a point of honor; torture was the lot of those who fell into the hands of the Pathans. Carrying their casualties, they were halfway down the slope when a force of thirty tribesmen charged them. Chaos followed. More Sikhs fell. The adjutant was hit; Churchill stayed behind to rescue him, but a Pathan swordsman, getting there first, butchered the dying officer. At this point Winston remembered that he had won the public-school fencing championship. He drew his cavalry saber. “I resolved on personal combat à l’arme blanche.” But he was all alone, and other clansmen were hurrying up. These were not public-school boys. “I changed my mind about cold steel.” Instead, “I fired nine shots from my revolver” and leapt down the hill, gratefully finding refuge with the Sikhs on the knoll nearest the plain.⁵⁸

But they were being outflanked. And they were demoralized. As Winston wrote his “Uncle Bill,” Lord William Beresford, a winner of the Victoria Cross, “The men were completely out of hand. The wounded were left to be cut up. We could do nothing…. Of course I had no legal status but the urgency was such that I felt bound to see the affair out…. Martini rifles at 80 yards make excellent practice and there were lots of bullets. At last we got to the bottom in great disorder, dragging some wounded with us, and the men loosing off wildly in all directions—utterly out of hand with a crowd of Ghazis at our heels.” During the descent, he himself got off thirty or forty shots (“I am sure I never fired without taking aim”) before they joined the battalion. There the lieutenant colonel drew them up two deep, shoulder to shoulder, while hundreds of firing Pathans, “frenzied with excitement,” streamed around their flanks. In that formation the Sikhs presented a tremendous target, but anything was preferable to scattering. British officers shouted above the din: “Volley firing. Ready. Present. Fire!” Tribesmen were toppling, but their numbers were overwhelming. The lieutenant colonel told Churchill: “The Buffs are not more than half a mile away. Go and tell them to hurry or we shall all be wiped out.” Winston was turning away when he had a vision of himself as the sole, fleeing survivor of a massacre. That was not the way to Parliament. He turned back and said, “I must have the order in writing, sir.” Startled, the commander fumbled in his tunic and began to write. Then they heard the distant notes of a bugler sounding the Charge. “Everyone shouted. The crisis was over, and here, Praise be to God, were the leading files of the Buffs.”⁵⁹

His ranks swollen, the lieutenant colonel ordered a counterattack to recover the wounded, the adjutant’s body, and his own prestige. They retook the knoll (all the wounded had been slain and mutilated) but not till 5:00 P.M. Then they fell back. In the confusion Winston had lost his mount, “but I borrowed a mule—I was too blown to walk and rode up again. We were attacked coming down but the Buffs were steady as rocks and hence lost very little.” Meanwhile, another company of Sikhs, on their right, had been driven to the plain with even heavier casualties. “Well then we found the [brigadier Jeffreys] had split up his force and that odd companies were cut off and being cut up etc and it got pitch dark and poured with rain.” It had been a calamitous day, and it wasn’t over. Winston had been in action for thirteen hours, but before he could fall asleep he heard the boom of a fieldpiece three miles away, followed by twenty more booms, followed by silence. It had to be Jeffreys; he had the only battery in the valley. But why should his cannon be fired at night? There was only one explanation—he, his staff, his sappers, and miscellaneous headquarters personnel must be fighting at very close quarters. The battalion officers, including Churchill, conferred. Sending a rescue party in the dark would be an invitation to disaster. The brigadier and those with him must fight it out where they were with what they had. At daybreak a squadron of lancers galloped across the open pan of the valley and found them dug in around the battery. They had taken heavy casualties in hand-to-hand fighting. Jeffreys himself had been wounded in the head, though not seriously; he reported by heliograph to Sir Bindon Blood. Sir Bindon and the brigade with him had also been heavily engaged. Blood ordered that the valley be laid waste. “So long as the villages were in the plain, this was quite easy,” Winston wrote. “The tribesmen sat on the mountains and sullenly watched the destruction of their homes and means of livelihood. When however we had to attack the villages on the sides of the mountains they resisted fiercely, and we lost for every village two or three British officers and fifteen or twenty native soldiers.” He commented dryly: “Whether it was worth it, I cannot tell. At any rate, at the end of a fortnight the valley was a desert, and honour was satisfied.”⁶⁰

He saw action again with Jeffreys’s brigade at Domodoloh, with the Buffs at Zagia, with the Mohmands in a minor engagement, and, after Sir Bindon had succeeded in getting his leave from the Fourth Hussars extended for two more weeks, at Agrah and then with the Thirty-first Punjab Infantry. Twice more he rode his gray pony along skirmish lines. Jeffreys mentioned him in dispatches, praising “the courage and resolution of Lieutenant W. L. S. Churchill, 4th Hussars, the correspondent of the Pioneer newspaper with the force who made himself useful at a critical moment,” and Sir Bindon wrote Brabazon predicting that Winston “if he gets a chance will have the VC or a DSO.” He received neither, partly because his reports were creating considerable discomfort at the highest levels of the Indian army in Simla. In a cable from Nowshera he had commented that “the power of the Lee-Metford rifle with the new dum-dum bullet—as it is called, though officially, the ‘ek dum’ bullet—is tremendous,” a fact Simla would have preferred not to see in print. And he grew increasingly free with his criticisms of the British military establishment, condemning the manner in which sympathetic civilians were put in jeopardy, the failure to cover retreating soldiers with continuous fire, the “short service” system of recruitment, and the lack of proper rations for soldiers on long marches. Defiant of the wrath he knew this would arouse, he wrote: “There will not be wanting those who will remind me that in this matter my opinion finds no support in age or experience. To such I shall reply that if what is written is false or foolish, neither age nor experience should fortify it; and if it is true, it needs no such support.”⁶¹

On October 12 he wrote his mother “one line to let you know that I am across the frontier and rejoining my regiment,” and nine days later he followed this with news that “once again I write to you from my old table and my own room here in Bangalore.” His first impression, when he leafed through back copies of the Daily Telegraph, was that his vivid reporting had been wasted in England. His stories had carried the anonymous by-line, “From a Young Officer.” A letter from Jennie explained that the editor had “begged me not to sign yr name. He said it was very unusual & might get you into trouble.” Winston indignantly replied: “I will not conceal my disappointment at their not being signed. I had written them with the design, a design which took form as the correspondence advanced, of bringing my personality before the electorate.” He believed that “if I am to do anything in the world, you will have to make up your mind to publicity and also to my doing unusual things. Of course a certain number of people will be offended. I am afraid some people like Brab will disapprove…. But I recognise the fact that certain elements must always be hostile and I am determined not to allow them to interfere with my actions. I regard an excellent opportunity of bringing my name before the country in a correct and attractive light—by means of graphic & forcible letters, as lost.”⁶²

It was not lost. Jennie was more experienced in these matters than her son, and she had seen that everyone who mattered, from the Prince of Wales down, learned the identity of the Young Officer writing in the distant passes and gorges of the North-West Frontier. They even knew at Harrow. Welldon wrote her: “I have been much interested in seeing Winston’s articles. I think he possesses in a high degree the special correspondent’s art of seizing the picturesque and interesting features of a campaign. Really he is very clever, and must make a mark in the world.” Voyages to India took over three weeks, and it was November before Churchill realized how deep an impression he had made. “I am very gratified to hear that my follies have not been altogether unnoticed,” he wrote. His flair for the language was responsible, but he persisted in his belief that his valor, implicit in the pieces, would count far more among the Tory elders. He told his brother: “Being in many ways a coward—particularly at school—there is no ambition I cherish so keenly as to gain a reputation of personal courage.”^*63

Despite his daring and acclaim, Winston’s standing in the army was not enhanced by all this. Generals were not alone in their disapproval. In the Fourth Hussars his brother officers were civil but cool. There was a vague feeling that what he had done was, by Victorian standards, “ungentlemanly.” Regimental messes elsewhere put him down as a “medal-hunter,” “self-advertiser,” and “thruster.” One officer would note in his memoirs that Churchill “was widely regarded in the Army as super-precocious, indeed by some as insufferably bumptious.” Why, it was asked, should a subaltern praise or deprecate his seniors? Why should he write for newspapers while wearing the uniform? How did he get so much leave? Who was indulging him? The resentment was real, and became an obstacle to his plans. Sir Bindon asked that he be made his orderly officer. The adjutant general in Simla refused. Surely, Churchill thought, Lord Roberts could clear this up. The omnipotent Roberts, now in Ireland, had been a friend of his father’s, and now Jennie, at his urging, wrote the field marshal, reminding him of past favors. But the old man declined to intervene. Churchill wrote bitterly: “I don’t understand Lord Roberts’ refusal. A good instance of ingratitude in a fortunate and much overrated man.” Spurred by his mother, the Daily Telegraph appointed him a permanent correspondent, but the high command continued to deny him access to all battlefields. He complained to her: “The Simla authorities have been very disagreeable to me. They did all they could to get me sent down to my regiment…. I… invite you to consider what a contemptible position it is for high military officers to assume—to devote so much time and energy to harrying an insignificant subaltern. It is indeed a vivid object lesson in the petty social intrigue that makes or prevents appointments in this country.” He added: “Talk to the prince about it.” She did. Ian Hamilton also got busy, and finally, the morning after a polo match in Meerut, Churchill was gazetted to the staff of Sir William Lockhart. Sir William was organizing a punitive expedition into the Tirah, where the Afridi and Orzkzai tribes had risen. “Red tabs sprouted on the lapels of my coat,” Winston wrote. For once, “I behaved and was treated as befitted my youth and subordinate station. I sat silent at meals or only rarely asked a tactful question.” It was all for nothing. The tribesmen begged for peace; the expedition was abandoned; he boarded a train for the long ride back to Bangalore.⁶⁴

Calling him a “publicity hound”—another epithet heard in the messes—seemed cruel. It was not, however, inaccurate. His correspondence admits of no other explanation. He had no interest in a military career, and meant to use the service to advance his prospects in public life. Peace having broken out on the frontier, he returned to his pen. He had several projects in mind: finishing his novel, writing a biography of Garibaldi, a “short & dramatic” history of the American Civil War, and a volume of short stories to be called, obscurely, “The Correspondent of the New York Examiner.” He wanted recognition, but he also expected to be paid. The Telegraph had sent him five pounds an article, and he felt that wasn’t enough. “The pinch of the whole matter is we are damned poor,” he wrote his mother. He sent her a short story “wh I want you to sell, signed, to one of the magazines. I think the Pall Mall wd like it & would pay my price. You should not get less than £20 for it, as it is a very good story—in my opinion. So don’t sell it without a good offer.” Financial relief was on its way, however. His first major effort to reach the British public was, in fact, ready: an account of his frontier adventures with Sir Bindon Blood, largely a paste-up of his frontier dispatches. This has become a common journalistic practice today, but he became one of its pioneers with The Story of the Malakand Field Force. Working five hours a day, he had dashed off a draft in two months before his posting to Sir William in Peshawar, where, he confessed, it had occupied his thoughts “more than… anything else.” He had “affected the style of Macaulay and Gibbon, the staccato antitheses of the former and the rolling sentences and genitival endings of the latter; and I stuck in a bit of my own from time to time.” Later he would say that writing a book “is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.” This monster was almost ready to be flung on December 22, 1897, when he wrote his mother: “I hope you will like it. I am pleased with it chiefly because I have discovered a great power of application which I did not think I possessed.” Nine days later he mailed her the manuscript—“Herewith the book”—accompanied by maps and, for the frontispiece, a photograph of Sir Bindon Blood.⁶⁵

There were details, as there always are, to be cleared up before publication. Quotations had to be verified; some sentences were awkward; here and there he had repeated himself. But “I don’t want anything modified or toned down in any way. I will stand or fall by what I have written.” Revisions and proofreading, he decided, would be entrusted to his uncle Moreton, who, on the frail strength of a monograph on bimetallism, was the only member of the family with literary pretensions. Churchill told his mother that he thought he ought to get at least £300 for the first edition, with royalties, “but if the book hits the mark I might get much more.” There was one problem. Another author was writing a book on the same subject. That called for haste: “Do not I beg you lose one single day in taking the MS to some publisher. [Lord] Fincastle’s book may for all I know be ready now.” On reflection he decided to “recommend Moreton’s treating with the publishers, it is so much easier for a man.” Here he misjudged both uncle and mother. The first edition, to Winston’s horror, would contain some two hundred misprints. “A mad printer’s reader,” one reviewer would write, and Winston would add sadly, “As far as Moreton is concerned, I now understand why his life has been a failure in the city and elsewhere.” Jennie, on the other hand, had very sensibly gone to Arthur Balfour, who had referred her to A. P. Watt, the literary agent. Watt negotiated the terms with Longmans. Malakand, appearing in March 1898, sold eighty-five hundred copies in nine months. It was priced at six shillings; the royalty was 15 percent. Winston had earned more in a few weeks (£382) than he could in four years as a subaltern.⁶⁶

But far more welcome was the book’s enthusiastic reception. Moreton’s disgraceful performance did not pass unnoticed: the Athenaeum observed that “one word is printed for another, words are defaced by shameful blunders, and sentence after sentence ruined by the punctuation of an idiot or of a school-boy in the lowest form.” But the same reviewer predicted that the author might become as great a soldier as the first Marlborough and “a straighter politician.” The Pioneer found “a wisdom and comprehension far beyond his years.” The Spectator agreed. It was hailed as a minor classic, the debut of an exciting new talent, and, in the Times of India, the Madras Mail, and Delhi’s Morning Post, a penetrating study of Raj policy. Churchill’s response to all this is curiously moving. He was “filled with pride and pleasure…. I had never been praised before. The only comments which had ever been made upon my work at school had been ‘Indifferent,’ ‘Slovenly,’ ‘Bad,’ ‘Very bad,’ etc. Now here was the great world with its leading literary newspapers and vigilant erudite critics, writing whole columns of praise!”⁶⁷

The Prince of Wales read Malakand, sent a copy to his sister, the Empress Dowager Victoria of Germany, and wrote “My dear Winston” on April 22: “I cannot resist writing a few lines to congratulate you on the success of your book! I have read it with the greatest possible interest and I think the descriptions and the language generally excellent. Everybody is reading it, and I only hear it spoken of with praise.” HRH thought Churchill probably wanted to see more combat, and he approved: “You have plenty of time before you, and should certainly stick to the Army before adding MP to your name.” He had, of course, misread the author. Winston wanted to be where the fighting was thickest, but as a correspondent, not as a junior officer. He had vowed to “free myself from all discipline and authority, and set up in perfect independence in England with nobody to give me orders or arouse me by bell or trumpet.” Besides, the struggle on the Indian frontier was over. Everyone knew that the next excitement would be in Africa. Sir Herbert Kitchener’s campaign to reconquer the Sudan had begun two years earlier; he had been moving slowly, building a railroad as he went, but now in April 1898 his major victory over sixteen thousand dervishes on the Atbara River signaled the beginning of the end. Churchill longed to be at his side. Once more he implored his mother to yank strings. “You must work Egypt for me,” he told her. “You have so many lines of attack…. Now I beg you—have no scruples but worry right and left and take no refusal.” He wanted her to “stimulate the Prince into writing to Kitchener.” Two months later he wrote: “Oh how I wish I could work you up over Egypt! I know you could do it with all your influence—and all the people you know. It is a pushing age and we must shove with the best.”⁶⁸

Unfortunately Kitchener, at that time, detested Churchill. He had been outraged by his book; it was bad for discipline, he believed, for subalterns to chide their superiors. In any event, he felt that Winston already had had a good run for his money in India; the Nile was out of bounds for him. “It was,” Churchill later said, “a case of dislike before first sight.” Jennie and her influential friend Mary, Lady Jeune, were wining and cajoling everyone in the War Office—Winston later said that they “left no wire unpulled, no stone unturned, no cutlet uncooked”—but while guests were susceptible to petticoat diplomacy, Kitchener, as Egyptian commander in chief, or Sirdar, had the final say, and in Winston’s case he said it over and over. It was no. Lady Jeune wired him: “Hope you will take Churchill. Guarantee he wont write.” She couldn’t guarantee it, and the Sirdar knew it. Sir Evelyn Wood, the adjutant general and an admirer of Lady Jeune’s, was recruited to the Churchill cause. Lady Jeune and Jennie lunched with Wood and the Prince of Wales, and Wood then cabled the Sirdar: “Personage asked me personally desires you take Churchill.” Kitchener was adamant: “Do not want Churchill as no room.” Jennie knew Kitchener, of course; she knew everyone. Winston asked her to write him directly: “Strike while the iron is hot and the ink wet.” She did, and he replied with elaborate courtesy. He had too many officers as it was, he was overwhelmed with applications from men more qualified than her son, but if at some future time an opportunity arose he would be pleased, et cetera, et cetera. Really challenged now, she decided to go to Egypt herself. Winston wrote: “I hope you may be successful. I feel almost certain you will. Your wit & tact & beauty—should overcome all obstacles.” They didn’t. Setting up headquarters in Cairo’s Continental Hotel with her current lover, Major Caryl John Ramsden, she bombarded the Sirdar with letters. The best reply she got was: “I have noted your son’s name and I hope I may be able to employ him later in the Sudan.” All Jennie had to show for her pains was humiliation, from Kitchener and then, unexpectedly, from Major Ramsden, who jilted her; returning to her hotel room on an impulse after she had left it for Port Said, she found Ramsden in bed with Lady Robert Maxwell, the wife of another army officer. HRH sent her a teasing note: “You had better have stuck to your old friends than gone on your Expedition to the Nile! Old friends are the best!”⁶⁹