Spandex
A crazy bulbous punchbag of sound
It's years since I read Churchill: My Early Life. I always mix it up with the Flashman books; they're both about a wasteral that joins the army, goes to fight in colonial wars and makes their name with self aggrandising accounts.although his writings certainly bloodthirsty i'm not sure he actually did anything beyond being there. i would of course be interested in anything you've got connecting him to what we'd call war crimes, him actually committing them in afghanistan
I reckon Orang Utan was thinking of the Malakand Field Force, which fought in the Northwest Frontier, in what is now Pakistan. The uprising was caused by upset at the Durand Line, which divided Pashtun tribal lands between India and Afghanistan.
The force probably didn't commit genocide by modern standards, but certainly would've commit war crimes if they were a thing at the time. As Churchill put it:
We proceeded systematically, village by village, and we destroyed the houses, filled up the wells, blew down the towers, cut down the great shady trees, burned the crops and broke the reservoirs in punitive devastation.
Churchill himself was just a 2nd Lieutenant in the cavalry in the Field Force (earning some spare cash writing reports for the Telegraph and Pioneer newspapers), so it wasn't his job to personally take part in this. In his The Story of the Malakand Field Force he mentions the sappers going of to destroy stuff in villages. He was just part of the army that committed these atrocities. The person in charge was the aptly named General Blood.