ApatheticLiberalDepressingPostModernEvangelicalRedNeckTechnoApocalypse

In the summer of 1999, my family took a week's vacation and traveled the Swat Valley for a second time. East of Afghanistan lies the corduroy succession of the Chitral, Swat, Indus, Kaghan, Jhelum, and Kashmir valleys, a series of barely habitable slopes between the recurrent pleats of north-south mountain ridges. The mountains rise at most 15,000 feet, which in Himalayan terms is an after-thought; but throughout recorded history, they have sufficed to keep their valleys from functioning as all but the most temporary of frontiers.

Two days from Rawalpindi brought us to Kalam, the head of the valley, where the Swat River forks, or forms, depending on your preference for current. One branch heads northwest to God knows where, and the other is followed northeast by a road, which dusty track traverses innumerable switchbacks, the occasional forward glacier, lakes where the trout fishing is reputedly divine and emerges eventually and doubtless exhausted in the backwaters of the Gilgit Valley. If you want to go back the way you came, Kalam is as far as you get.

The town is constructed in the classical wild west style. Ramshackle wooden buildings and a few stunted trees attempt a civilized counterpoint against abundant mud, in which they are not aided by the daily rain. The world around seems primarily composed of humidity, but still, or for that reason, deserves the epithets 'alpine' and 'picturesque'. But such words are flaccid descriptors of the struggle, here, between water and light. With crafty jubilance one mimics the form of the other, so that morning brings a beam of mist pouring over massifs. Dawn comes late if at all, delayed by the arduous climb up the tall backs of the mountains, fills the slit of sky with a passing cloud of light. Then the world returns, again, to illumination of water, the pink beacon of setting sun on snow. In the twilight, this haphazard, elemental landscape of trees, rocks, and river manifests a brazen elegance. Impudent, the raw mountains loom above the river, thousand-foot cliffs of rock broken by dark clusters of trees, or, unexpectedly, the green glow of unreachable meadows.

It was a typical episodic vacation. We hiked up a rocky side valley behind our hotel and reached a summer pasture. Here we found a fantastic variety of wildflowers, and what seemed at first a whole and intact meadow was clothed with a mesh of rivulets, whose ubiquity the thin air permitted. We had spoken with a man who warned us with some concern not to climb further up that valley, and the next day a small group of men marched through town with a banner announcing a jihad recruitment drive. Strangely enough, in a town where any man old enough to shave owned a rifle, these men paraded in maroon uniforms with shovels held to their shoulders. But their fervor, and their hostile, or dismayed, expressions set them apart from dutiful employees of the Department of Roads and Public Works.

And there were interludes passed in local handicraft shops, sources of tablecloths appliqued with the famous five-legged Swati elephants (the fifth leg having presumably evolved, with help of artistic license, from a unnaturally thick tail), as well as a brief foray up that northeast valley where we were offered the chance to fire a full Kalashnikov clip at whatever targets presented themselves across the river ("probably no one on that side"), and where progress towards the fabled lakes of trout were ultimately repulsed by a glacier in the process of crossing the road.

We put our Alpine fantasies aside and drove south. The towns grew less tenuous, the buildings more concrete. We had patience only to make one more excursion. It came at the valley's southernmost extreme, where the river broadens, allowing rice fields, orchards, and other tools of agriculture to take hold of the earth. Here we crossed the Swat river to visit Churchill's Picket. It was mid-morning and already hot.

An oblong ridge ran parallel to the river. Atop its southern end sat a square, two-story, whitewashed stone tower. It was not yet a ruin. The squat post looked sturdy enough to outlast its desiccate surroundings, if rectitude ensures persistence. At the end of the bridge, the road bent to squeeze through a gap in the ridge; from a small hollow, a dusty track zigzagged across the ridge and gradually ascended to the tower. This was where, the guidebook claimed, Winston Churchill had been posted during one of the Frontier Wars which occupied the government of India during the latter half of the nineteenth century.

It took five minutes' climb to reach Churchill's Picket. There was a low outer wall, which gave the impression that we were walking through a courtyard. But it was a most austere monument. Worn stone steps led up to the shoulder-high door. The building was open. Inside the only signs of habitation were narrow gun-slit windows and blackened stones. The wooden stairs to the roof were still in place. We climbed to the top, clasped the parapets, looked to the earth for signs of battle.

The tower, and we, stood on a pinnacle above the riverbank with clear views across the plain. Trucks trundled along the far main road. The river, the merest collection of rocky shallows, shrank to an easily forded stream. But with your back to the valley, you felt smaller and insecure. Succeeding ridges rose higher; the road we had climbed from wound once and disappeared into their twisting labyrinth. The effect was as if we were standing on the battlements of civilization's last outpost; or on the edge of reason.

Part the Second

It is fitting then, how that rooftop-conjured vision should comprise the heart of Churchill's first book, The Story of the Malakand Field Force. The book concisely chronicles events in the summer of 1897, as the British army was first besieged and then unleashed against a shapeless mass of "religious fanatics". Churchill portrayed it as a clash between reason and religion; that tired theme of Rome versus the barbarians played out once again, if only on a different stage.

And it is fitting, in a more troublesome way, that the small outpost of Churchill's Picket should now be associated with a man who was not present at its siege, whose mark on it at most was to narrate its successful defense in a secondhand report. Assigned to a cavalry unit stationed thousands of miles across India in Madras, the young Churchill was stirred by news of a "native uprising" which threatened, and very nearly overran, the troops garrisoned at the Malakand Pass (the southern entrance to the Swat Valley). Anxiously seeking any excuse which would allow him to journey north to the "wild" frontier region, Churchill obtained temporary positions as a war correspondent for minor Indian and British papers, and accepted a personal offer to accompany General Bindon-Blood, the commanding officer, on the retributive expedition. It would be a short, bloody campaign.

The war proceeded according to plan. British forces pushed the insurgent tribesmen back up the Swat Valley, inflicting high casualties, until those tribes sued for peace. At this point, the force crossed the Swat River and marched through the mountainous country to the west to exact punishment from those tribes, and to clear the way to Chitral. At that time the most strategic British outpost between India, Afghanistan, and the nebulous Russian threat, Chitral had itself been the scene of a dramatic siege and rescue several years before, but was now ruled by a puppet chief whose loyalty was ensured by a generous stipend.

It should not be forgotten that Churchill was writing for a British readership; compared against the patriotic bluster of the time, his account may take a more measured tone. Nonetheless, British officers, and their native units, are to a man clear-headed, decent, heroic. In the entire book there is but one episode where misjudgment and overeagerness lead to preventable death. As a soldier must, I suppose, he expresses no qualms about the killing of his enemy in battle; they have presented themselves to be killed. But when it comes to portraying the character of that enemy, the "native", the "fanatic tribesman", offers little praise. He deplores the gun-ruled, vendetta-honoring society that causes every house to be built a fortress: thick-walled compounds with towers, granaries, and sight-holes for rifles. He notes their to flee when opposed with superior, and better-trained, might. When Churchill descends to praise the hardiness of enemy snipers, holed up to a week in a small rock-built shelter with ammunition, water, few scraps of bread, who fire on the camp day and night. But the insignificance of such a life most strikes him; how could a man desire to end his life fighting in such a pitiful, cowardly, militarily inefficient manner? The one action that Churchill's sensibilities cannot abide above all is the tribes' predisposition for killing of the wounded, and mutilation of the dead. Civilized armies do not behave in this manner.

If he could, in the main, present this two month minor war as the vindication of the pax Britannia against the folly of superstitious, war-mongering tribes, it was not without irony, if only briefly. Churchill came away from Swat with mixture of awe and sympathy for his enemy:

"One man was found the next morning, whose head had been half blown off by a discharge of case shot from one of the mountain guns. He lay within a yard of the muzzle, the muzzle he had believed would be stopped, a victim to that blind credulity and fanaticism now happily passing away from the earth, under the combined influences of Rationalism and machine guns."

I confess that it is hard for me to separate Churchill the youth from that bulldog visage vowing Britain shall not fail; perhaps I read into his words on this occasion an irony which was not intended, or which only reached fruition as the man descended through longer, bloodier wars. But perhaps they represent an opinion which has never changed. "Credulity and fanaticism", "Rationalism and machine guns", have joined battle in so many conflicts of the past hundred years.

The conflicted sentiments Churchill witnessed on this occasion would be repeated in much the same manner by the 1905 British "Tibetan Expeditionary Force". The central battle of that campaign began when the Tibetan general, who had walked up to British lines and bizarrely remained there, crying, drunk, or tranced, for nearly one hour, drew his pistol. He meant either to attack or surrender. The British fired, and in fifteen minutes slaughtered the army of Tibetan warrior-monks, opening the way to Lhasa. Fervently assured that faith and amulets would render them immune to bullets, the Tibetans were psychologically stunned. Men turned their heads and slowly left the battlefield, too shamed to take cover. "I hope I shall never again have to shoot at the backs of retreating men", wrote one British soldier afterwards, unable separate victory from moral devastation.

In such moments as these, the British in India were beginning to ask questions which an entire century would fail, time and again, to answer. Is victory merely the result of technological superiority? Are the machine guns the guarantors of peace? Churchill does find time take that longer view; to imply that the British Empire itself, as all empires, was a temporary ascendant:

"Even in these busy, practical, matter-of-fact, modern times, where nothing is desirable unless economically sound, it is not unprofitable for a moment to raise the veil of the past, and take a glimpse of the world as it was in other days. The fifth century of the Christian era was one of the most gloomy and dismal periods in the history of mankind. The Great Roman Empire was collapsing before the strokes of such as Alaric the Goth, Attila the Hun, and Genseric the Vandal. The art and valour of a classical age had sunk in that deluge of barbarism which submerged Europe. The Church was convulsed by the Arian controversy. That pure religion, which it should have guarded, was defiled with the blood of persecution and degraded by the fears of superstition. Yet while all these things afflicted the nations of the West and seemed to foreshadow the decline or destruction of the human species, the wild mountains of Northern India, now over-run by savages more fierce than those who sacked Rome, were occupied by a placid people, thriving, industrious, and intelligent, devoting their lives to the attainment of that serene annihilation which the word nirvana expresses. When we reflect on the revolutions which time effects, and observe how the home of learning and progress changes as the years pass by, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion, perhaps a mournful one, that the sun of civilization can never shine all over the world at once."

Grant, for this moment, that there exists passage from barbarism, ignorance, superstition to civilization, rationality, order. What causes a people to turn from one to the other? Is there an innate human preference for civilization? Are empires a chance conglomeration, over which time hangs on a thread? His answer is strange; civilization is mounted, like the coming apocalypse, on horseback.

Part the Third

"Polo has been the common ground on which English and Indian gentlemen have met on equal terms, and it is to that meeting that much mutual esteem and respect is due."
--Winston Churchill, The Malakand Field Force

E.M. Forster fictionalized this very sentiment in his novel A Passage to India, where Dr. Aziz, riding a borrowed horse, and an unnamed British ensign engage on the maidan, at dusk, in a brief, respectful chukker. After few minutes of wordless encounter, both leave, without speaking, filled with admiration for the other's unexpected nobleness. In the scheme of the novel, it is an encounter tinged with irony. We later hear the same ensign's praise for his anonymous competitor, a thought of the "they aren't all bad" variety; but that same barracks conversation heaps damnation upon Aziz in particular. Only an unknown opponent, Forster says, can be respected. Once his name gets out, when he starts to be known, he'll be cursed.

[In fairness to Forster, I should point out a counterpoint to this polo scene which comes at the end of his novel, when Aziz, realizing what hurt he has caused due to his own misunderstanding, befriends the unattractive adolescent son of his deceased friend, Mrs. Moore. The two embark for a night jaunt in a rowboat, ending in seeming disaster with two boats upturned and a Hindu festival interrupted; but all without offense. Sincerity and friendship persist despite.]

So Churchill, and even Forster's winking echo, praises the sport of polo for its social cohesion. It provides a way to attain military precision and to embody the art of war without the loss and burden of combat. Polo, the combination of man and animal, contests grace and skill without the shedding of blood. Think, Churchill urges, the Mongol terror and Hun rapacity aside, what our civilization owes to the virtues of horses. You can hear in his praise of polo the precursor to what E.M Forster's said of of Virginia Woolf: "pushed the light of the English language a little further against darkness". It is a pleasant thought, but without much hope.

For so far as it can be said to represent the contest between a moral military and the militantly religious, Churchill's Picket stands on the border between plains and the mountains. The frontier between civilization and the barbarians is inexorably geographic. Polo, for all its sweating glory, cannot cross that line; that stately game belongs to the flats, on tamed and tempered ground. In pitting Churchill against the tribesmen, we have stumbled into that geographic apportioning of destiny described by W H Auden as the choice of landscape made by incipient Caesars and expectant Saints:

In this moment, then, Churchill was of the Fascist camp.

What process of reason dares take account how the earth itself is shaper of our thoughts? That the mind's contours should prejudice our choice is neither a blessing nor shame. When accidents of thought drive reason to reshape the wilderness, where can it construct but on local ground. Where is that universal landscape? Or where supremely fertile truth?

Strange how landscape and belief should be so easily and so often conflated. Fanaticism, so we say, proceeds through narrow defiles, breeds in the sickly backwater towns. Meanwhile, on the open plains, the strong light of reason and temperance purifies; ignorance can find no shadows; the slow work of civilization proceeds. Do the shallow, fanciful creeds of superstitious religion only appear more wretched in their contrast, daily, without mercy, to the high mountains?

what I wrote

churchill's picket

Part the First

Part the Second

Part the Third