Robert Fisk - The Great War for Civilisation - The Conquest of the Middle East

So we stopped the Toyota and climbed out to watch the fireball as it blazed through the darkness above us, the al-Qaeda men and the Englishman, all filled with awe at this spectacular, wondrous apparition of cosmic energy, unseen for more than 4,000 years. ‘Mr Robert, do you know what they say when a comet like this is seen?’ It was the Algerian, standing next to me now, both of us craning our necks up towards the sky. ‘It means that there is going to be a great war.’ And so we watched the fire blaze through the pageant of stars and illuminate the firmament above us.

When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,

And the women come out to cut up what remains,

Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains

An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.

RUDYARD KIPLING, ‘The Young British Soldier’

Less than six months before the outbreak of the First World War, my grandmother, Margaret Fisk, gave my father William a 360-page bookof imperial adventure, Tom Graham, V.C., A Tale of the Afghan War . ‘Presented to Willie By his Mother’ is written in thick pencil inside the front cover. ‘Date Sat. 24th January 1914, for another’. ‘Willie’ would have been almost fifteen years old. Only after my father’s death in 1992 did I inherit this book, with its handsome, engraved hardboard cover embossed with a British Victoria Cross – ‘For Valour’, it says on the medal – and, on the spine, a soldier in red coat and peaked white tropical hat with a rifle in his hands. I never found out the meaning of the cryptic reference ‘for another’. But years later, I read the book. An adventure by William Johnston and published in 1900 by Thomas Nelson and Sons, it tells the story of the son of a mine-owner who grows up in the northern English port of Seaton and, forced to leave school and become an apprentice clerk because of his father’s sudden impoverishment, joins the British army under-age. Tom Graham is posted to a British unit at Buttevant in County Cork in the south-west of Ireland – he even kisses the Blarney Stone, conferring upon himself the supposed powers of persuasive eloquence contained in that much blessed rock – and then travels to India and to the Second Afghan War, where he is gazetted a 2nd Lieutenant in a Highland regiment. As he stands at his late father’s grave in the local churchyard before leaving for the army, Tom vows that he will lead ‘a pure, clean, and upright life’.

The story is typical of my father’s generation, a rip-roaring, racist story of British heroism and Muslim savagery. But reading it, I was struck by some remarkable parallels. My own father, Bill Fisk – the ‘Willie’ of the dedication almost a century ago – was also taken from school in a northern English port because his father Edward was no longer able to support him. He too became an apprentice clerk, in Birkenhead. In the few notes he wrote before his death, Bill recalled that he had tried to join the British army under-age; he travelled to Fulwood Barracks in Preston to join the Royal Field Artillery on 15 August 1914, eleven days after the start of the First World War and almost exactly six months after his mother Margaret gave him Tom Graham . Successful in enlisting two years later, Bill Fisk, too, was sent to a battalion of the Cheshire Regiment in Cork in Ireland, not long after the 1916 Easter Rising. There is even a pale photograph of my father in my archives, kissing the Blarney Stone. Two years later, in France, my father was gazetted a 2nd Lieutenant in the King’s Liverpool Regiment. Was he consciously following the life of the fictional Tom Graham?

The rest of the novel is a disturbing tale of colour prejudice, xenophobia and outright anti-Muslim hatred during the Second Afghan War. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Anglo-Russian rivalry and suspicion had naturally focused upon Afghanistan, whose unmarked frontiers had become the indistinct front lines between imperial Russia and the British Indian Raj. The principal victims of the ‘Great Game’, as British diplomats injudiciously referred to the successive conflicts in Afghanistan – there was indeed something characteristically childish about the jealousy between Russia and Britain – were, of course, the Afghans. Their landlocked box of deserts and soaring mountains and dark green valleys had for centuries been both a cultural meeting point – between the Middle East, Central Asia and the Far East – and a battlefield. *A decision by the Afghan king Shir Ali Khan, the third son of Afghanistan’s first king, Dost Mohamed, to receive a Russian mission in Kabul after his re-accession in 1868 led directly to what the British were to call the Second Afghan War. The First Afghan War had led to the annihilation of the British army in the Kabul Gorge in 1842, in the same dark crevasse through which I drove at night on my visit to Osama bin Laden in 1997. At the Treaty of Gandamak in 1879, Shir Ali’s son Yaqub Khan agreed to allow a permanent British embassy to be established in Kabul, but within four months the British envoy and his staff were murdered in their diplomatic compound. The British army was sent back to Afghanistan.

In Bill Fisk’s novel, Tom Graham goes with them. In the bazaar in Peshawar – now in Pakistan, then in India – Graham encounters Pathan tribesmen, ‘a villainous lot … most of the fanatics wore the close-fitting skull-cap which gives such a diabolical aspect to its wearer’. Within days, Graham is fighting the same tribesmen at Peiwar Kotal, driving his bayonet ‘up to the nozzle’ into the chest of an Afghan, a ‘swarthy giant, his eyes glaring with hate’. In the Kurrum Valley, Graham and his ‘chums’ – a word my father used about his comrades in the First World War – fight off ‘infuriated tribesmen, drunk with the lust of plunder’. When General Sir Frederick Roberts – later Lord Roberts of Kandahar – agrees to meet a local tribal leader, the man arrives with ‘as wild a looking band of rascals as could be imagined’. The author notes that whenever British troops fell into Afghan hands, ‘their bodies were dreadfully mutilated and dishonoured by these fiends in human form’. When the leader of the Afghans deemed responsible for the murder of the British envoy is brought for execution, ‘a thrill of satisfaction’ goes through the ranks of Graham’s comrades as the condemned man faces the gallows.

Afghans are thus a ‘villainous lot’, ‘fanatics’, ‘rascals’, ‘fiends in human form’, meat for British bayonets – or ‘toasting forks’ as the narrative cheerfully calls them. It gets worse. A British artillery officer urges his men to fire at close-packed Afghan tribesmen with the words ‘that will scatter the flies’. The text becomes not only racist but anti-Islamic. ‘Boy readers,’ the author pontificates, ‘may not know that it was the sole object of every Afghan engaged in the war of 1878–80 to cut to pieces every heretic he could come across. The more pieces cut out of the unfortunate Britisher the higher his summit of bliss in Paradise.’ After Tom Graham is wounded in Kabul, the Afghans – in the words of his Irish-born army doctor – have become ‘murtherin villains, the black niggers’.

When the British suffer defeat at the battle of Maiwand, on a grey desert west of Kandahar, an officer orders his men to ‘have your bayonets ready, and wait for the niggers’. There is no reference in the book to the young Afghan woman, Malalei, who – seeing the Afghans briefly retreating – tore her veil from her head and led a charge against her enemies, only to be cut down by British bullets. That, of course, is part of Afghan – not British – history. When victory is finally claimed by the British at Kandahar, Tom Graham wins his Victoria Cross.