The Dark Defile by Diana Preston Page B

white linen pounced on him with a sword. It was a horrible sight.”
    Churchill also described the problems of campaigning in the heat: “ September in these valleys is as hot as it is easy to imagine … Slowly the hours pass away. The heat is intense. The air glitters over the scorched plain, as over the funnel of an engine the wind blows with a fierce warmth, and instead of bringing relief raises only whirling dust devils, which scatter the shelters and half-choke their occupants. The water is tepid and fails to quench the thirst. At last the shadows begin to lengthen as the sun sinks towards the western mountains. Everyone revives.”
    The campaigns were conducted with no quarter given on either side to prisoners. Rudyard Kipling described the leveling effect of guerrilla warfare such as this.
ARITHMETIC ON THE FRONTIER
A great and glorious thing it is
To learn, for seven years or so,
The Lord knows what of that and this,
Ere reckoned fit to face the foe—
The flying bullet down the Pass,
That whistles clear: “All flesh is grass.”
Three hundred pounds per annum spent
On making brain and body meeter
For all the murderous intent
Comprised in “villanous saltpetre!”
And after—ask the Yusufzaies
What comes of all our ’ologies.
A scrimmage in a Border Station—
A canter down some dark defile—
Two thousand pounds of education
Drops to a ten-rupee jezail—
The Crammer’s boast, the Squadron’s pride,
Shot like a rabbit in a ride!
No proposition Euclid wrote,
No formulae the text-books know,
Will turn the bullet from your coat,
Or ward the tulwar’s downward blow
Strike hard who cares—shoot straight who can—
The odds are on the cheaper man.
    Kipling also gave chilling advice to British soldiers in another poem:
When you’re wounded on Afghanistan’s plains
And the women come out to cut up what remains
Just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.
    Part of the British policy was, in Churchill’s words, to make the tribesmen’s villages “hostages for their good behaviour.” When they rebelled the British punished them by destroying their crops, wells and fortifications. Churchill told how, as his column left the area, “not a tower, not a fort was to be seen, the villages were destroyed. The crops had been trampled down. They had lost heavily in killed and wounded and the winter was at hand.”
    Even though Churchill approved of the campaign, he wrote home to his family, “ There is no doubt we are a very cruel people.” Lord Roberts, the successful general of the Second Afghan War, wrote, “ Burning houses and destroying crops unless followed up by some sort of authority and jurisdiction, mean … for us a rich harvest of hatred and revenge. ” 33
    These risings had begun to take on a more overtly religious dimension. Not least responsible was Abdur-ur-Rahman, the emir in Kabul, who covertly encouraged the frontier tribes. He ensured the wide circulation of a book he had written, which emphasized that jihad was the highest duty of all Muslims and which extolled those dying in the fight who would be “ placed in the throat of green-winged birds who circle in the air and make their nests in the branches of the most blessed tree in Paradise. ” 34
    At the end of the campaign Churchill, who was nearly killed when a bullet went through his hat, praised the benefits the new roads driven into the mountains would bring in terms of trade: “ As the sun of civilisation rose above the hills, the fair flowers of commerce unfolded and the streams of supply and demand, hitherto congealed by the frost of barbarism, were thawed. ” But when the main British force left the frontier mountains behind them, together with their roads, their garrisons and a trail of destruction, they were also leaving a legacy of hatred and resentment among subdued but still defiant tribespeople.
    ABDUR-UR-RAHMAN DIED IN 1901 and was succeeded by his short, obese, eldest son Habibullah. On