Notes from a war zone

When Winston Churchill, as a young cavalry officer, found himself fighting the fierce tribesmen who inhabited the imposing mountainous terrain that defined the Indian empire’s northern border, he provided a graphic account of the brutality of the enemy the British force encountered.

When Winston Churchill, as a young cavalry officer, found himself fighting the fierce tribesmen who inhabited the imposing mountainous terrain that defined the Indian empire’s northern border, he provided a graphic account of the brutality of the enemy the British force encountered.

‘At a thousand yards the traveller falls wounded by the well-aimed bullet of a breech-loading rifle,’ Churchill wrote in his account of the 1897 campaign, The Story of the Malakand Field Force. ‘His assailant, approaching, hacks him to death with the ferocity of a South-Sea Islander. The weapons of the 19th century are in the hands of the savages of the Stone Age.’

Visiting this same inhospitable area more than a century later, I find that very little has changed.