G.W. Steevens, the Daily Mail's brilliant correspondent,
visited India in the winter of 1898-9. He reported
that, 'When you speak of "the war", in India now, you
can only mean one war - the Tirah-Mohmund-Swat-
Bajaur-Buner campaign of '97 and '98. There is a great
deal of disappointment and a little bitterness in India
about "the war" ... soldiers feel that perhaps the most
difficult campaign in history, and deeds certainly never
surpassed for endurance and valour, have been scantily
recognised at home, where popular applause and
official reward have been reserved for the luckier
heroes of easier enterprises'. Now, over a century
later, the story of the greatest Indian frontier war
fought by the British Raj - using a force larger than the
entire British regular army today - has been retold by Michael
Barthorp, whose family regiment served in that war.
The Frontier Ablaze: The North-West Frontier Rising 1897-
98 is an attractively-produced, large-format book in the same series as Ian Knight's Zulu:
Isandlwana and Rorke's Drift. It is well illustrated with
contemporary photographs and drawings, maps, and
specially-commissioned colour plates by Douglas N.
Anderson. Researched from a range of contemporary
publications, and from letters and diaries in the
National Army Museum, regimental museums and
elsewhere, it puts the war into its historical context,
describes the forces involved — including their
weapons and uniforms and vividly narrates the
campaigns and their outcome.
Steevens - who like Kipling is very quotable - wrote
that 'to find the real British army you must go to India'.
Major Barthorp shows what you would have found. He
shows the difficulties of the war: cruel, cunning and
weU-armed enemies; harsh terrain and climate, and the
killer diseases dysentery and cholera. He shows the
courage, endurance and military skills with which
British, Gurkha and Indian troops responded to the
test, and the heavy price paid by some British units
which, though brave, were inexperienced and
unskilled in frontier warfare. Among the episodes
described is the famous, much-portrayed storming of
the Dargai heights. To read of such endurance and
courage is a humbling experience for the stay-at-home
armchair reader.
Good books stimulate as well as answer questions.
One question stimulated by Major Barthorp's book is
why the army failed to learn from frontier warfare
certain specific lessons which now with hindsight seem
obvious. During the Malakand campaign a squadron of
Bengal Lancers had to be rescued by Guides infantry
because the lancers' carbines were outranged by the
Mahmunds' rifles. Yet in 1899 British cavalry were sent
with short-range carbines against Boer riflemen. In hot
weather British infantry exhausted their water-bottles,
yet for years after they each continued to carry only one
water-bottle. Also during the Frontier War, officers,
conspicuous as such, were deliberately targeted by the
enemy - one old soldier warned a friend, 'Don't go near
no officers nor white stones' - and suffered disproportionate
casualties. Yet the lesson was unlearned until
during the Boer War and then, amazingly, forgotten by
1914. Nineteenth-century British governments, unlike
their twentieth-century successors, were lucky in the
timing of the challenges to British imperial defence
over-stretch. What would have happened if the Mutiny
had coincided with the Crimea, or the Frontier War
with the Boer War?
Regular readers of this journal will not be surprised
that Major Barthorp, in emphasising the scale and
importance of the Frontier War, compares it to the Zulu
War of 1879. He states the Tirah campaign alone
involved nearly three times as many infantry as the
entire Zulu War, and claims the heroic defence of
Chakdara should rank with that of Rorke's Drift, but
was much less publicised and rewarded.
Indian Army veterans and enthusiasts, collectors,
and all interested in the heyday of the Raj, would do
well to purchase The Frontier Ablaze.
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