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 second lieutenant in the Kingâs 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 âGreat Game,â as British diplomats injudiciously referred to the successive conflicts in Afghanistanâthere was indeed something characteristically childish about the jealousy between Russia and Britainâwere, of course, the Afghans. Their landlocked box of deserts and soaring mountains and dark green valleys had for centuries been both a cultural meeting pointâbetween the Middle East, Central Asia and the Far Eastâand a battlefield. 3 A decision by the Afghan king Shir Ali Khan, the third son of Afghanistanâs 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 Aliâs 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 Fiskâs novel, Tom Graham goes with them. In the bazaar in Peshawarâ now in Pakistan, then in IndiaâGraham encounters Pathan tribesmen, âa villainous lot . . . most of the fanatics wore the close-fitting skull-cap which gives such a diabolical aspect to its wearer.â Within days, Graham is fighting the same tribesmen at Peiwar Kotal, driving his bayonet âup to the nozzleâ into the chest of an Afghan, a âswarthy giant, his eyes glaring with hate.â In the Kurram Valley, Graham and his âchumsââa word my father used about his comrades in the First World Warâfight off âinfuriated tribesmen, drunk with the lust of plunder.â When General Sir Frederick Robertsâlater Lord Roberts of Kandaharâagrees to meet a local tribal leader, the man arrives with âas wild a looking band of rascals as could be imagined.â The author notes that whenever British troops fell into Afghan hands, âtheir bodies were dreadfully mutilated and dishonoured by these fiends in human form.â When the leader of the Afghans deemed responsible for the murder of the British envoy is brought for execution, âa thrill of satisfactionâ goes through the ranks of Grahamâs comrades as the condemned man faces the gallows.
Afghans are thus a âvillainous lot,â âfanatics,â ârascals,â âfiends in human form,â meat for British bayonetsâor âtoasting forksâ 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 âthat will scatter the flies.â The text becomes not only racist but anti-Islamic. âBoy readers,â the author pontificates, âmay not know that it was the sole object of every Afghan engaged in the war of 1878â80 to cut to pieces every heretic he could come across. The more pieces cut out
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