Francis P. Sempa, writing in The Diplomat, discusses young Winston Churchill’s time in India as a military officer and journalist. The two occupations famously combined when Churchill accompanied a military expedition to deal with tribal upheaval on the North-West frontier (present day Pakistan-Afghanistan). As a result, Churchill was mentioned in dispatches – and wrote a series of newspaper articles that were published as his first book, The Story of the Malakand Field Force (1898).
We reflect a bit elsewhere on CSD on that minor classic (we call it minor because of Churchill’s later towering literary achievements, but read as one might read Xenophon’s Anabasis or Kipling’s Kim, it is a great adventure story, yet without pretense about the small and large effects of conflict).