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THE INDIAN ARMY AND CHASING PANCHO VILLA

The oldest of nine children, Frederick Morgan didn’t come from a family with a military background. There were none of the evocative scenes of the ancestral country estate filled with generations of military glory as portrayed in films like the Korda brothers’ 1939 version of The Four Feathers. Morgan’s father came from a succession of timber merchants—importers of soft woods from Russia and North America. As a result of World War I and the Russian Revolution, the business disappeared—leaving his father to “the management of the dwindling family estate … [which] in turn also became a casualty of the First World War. Whereafter the family migrated to Chichester.”¹ Consequently, Morgan, who relied on his military pay to live, was keenly aware of the ebb and flow of his finances.

He was not a graduate of Sandhurst, as was Churchill, but of Woolwich, where Royal Engineers and Royal Artillery officers are trained. While he did not gain a placement that would have led to service with the engineers, he did well enough to enter the “real gentlemen’s life in the Royal Field Artillery.” Morgan quoted the Duke of Wellington in this regard. “The Horse Artillery would be the finest cavalry in the world if it weren’t for their bloody guns.”² In July of 1913 nineteen-year-old Second Lieutenant Morgan joined his first unit, stationed at Aldershot, on Salisbury Plain. He had barely settled in when he was sent out for more training in the emerging art of firing artillery accurately at targets beyond visual range—which seemed “pretty far-fetched” at the time. While on the course at the Royal Garrison Artillery installation at Shoeburyness, Morgan encountered gin for the first time. One day, after a particularly gin-flavored lunch, there came a call for volunteers for service in India. “Put me down for India said the gin, speaking through my lips. And so began … an experience that lasted over twenty years.”³

On the sea voyage to the subcontinent he met a woman also on her way to India. Her father, from an Anglo-Irish family, was a doctor in the Army Medical Service and had spent his career in India. Just over three years later Morgan and Marjorie Whaite were married. They had two daughters and then a son.

The unit he joined in early 1914 was one of those old-school batteries of field artillery, “living in a constant state of readiness for whatever may befall.” The young lieutenant felt quite incapable and at a loss as to what to do. “It was, as ever, the soldiers who made it possible. They were typically kind to this young whipper-snapper … with some six months of not very helpful service behind him.”⁴ He had only a few months to settle in. With the start of what became known as the Great War of 1914–18, his unit and much of the Indian Army was sent to fight in France, leaving India in mid-October and arriving at Marseilles a month later.

Morgan admitted that this first, brief experience of India did not expose him to any profound observations or deeper understanding of India or the Indian people. He was focused on mastering the details of the center section of 84th Battery, Royal Field Artillery. He was happy to later unlearn “most of what I had learnt about India and Indians … for in some odd way, in spite of it all … somewhere inside the East registered its call.”⁵ He was a product of his time and saw India as part of the empire, but he was observant and thoughtful enough to recognize that the presence of the British was possibly a mixed blessing for those whose country it was.

Morgan’s unit joined the Lahore Division in France, and he spent the war on the Western Front. He participated in most of the major battles, including the Somme and Passchendaele, and was mentioned in dispatches twice. He had the full experience of being a junior officer in that great industrial conflict.⁶ It was at the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915 that he had his first experience in international military relations, being picked by his commanding officer to contact the French troops on their flank, upon whom the British would have to rely if the Germans renewed their attack. He stayed with the French unit for a few days. Once the danger had passed, he returned to his battery and was almost immediately wounded and concussed by a German shell. Upon his return from the hospital, Morgan had the good fortune to be made aide-de-camp to the commander of Divisional Artillery, Brig. Gen. Edward Spencer Hoare Nairne. For the rest of the war he served as a staff officer, ending the war as brigade major of Divisional Artillery, in which position he was the principal staff officer at the Divisional Artillery’s headquarters.⁷

When the Indian Divisions were deployed from France to the Middle East in December 1915, the artillery of the Lahore Division remained behind and was attached in turn to various infantry divisions as they formed up, giving the inexperienced divisions the advantage of having veteran artillery, without which they would not have been ready to enter that desperate struggle on the Western Front. They served with the 2nd and 3rd Canadian Divisions, the 4th Australian Division, then the 4th Canadian Division for the capture of Vimy Ridge (along with Alan Brooke, who was a senior artillery officer in the Canadian Corps), and finally the 42nd East Lancashire Division.⁸ It was with the last unit that Morgan experienced firsthand the kind of inspirational leadership that had a direct impact on him. There were other fine officers that Morgan encountered, but Micky Walshe, the 42nd’s general of Divisional Artillery, was in a class by himself for Morgan.

Walshe, “the archetype of fighting Irishman,” would today be called a true warrior. If he had a weakness, it was, “from the point of view of his staff, that he would not go and be recklessly foolhardy by himself. We were honoured in rotation with invitations to accompany him on his expeditions which rarely bore any relation to the operation of his artillery.”⁹ Morgan later claimed that it was only Walshe’s inspired and passionate leadership that gave him the impetus to overcome his hesitancy and the lack of self-confidence he had felt all too often for most of his service life up to then.

Now twenty-four, Morgan ended the war by surviving the Spanish flu epidemic. While recovering near Charleroi, Belgium, and watching the division slowly disband after the Treaty of Versailles was signed, he was not certain what he should do. He was unconvinced that a military career was the right direction for him but knew nothing of the civilian business world. He had married the year before, when in England on seven days leave after Ypres, with Marjorie having gone home to family in the United Kingdom with the advent of war.

At first he thought going back to England was the solution. “Then, out of a dark and dismal winter sky, came the brilliant solution to all my troubles. The call came for volunteers for service in India…. Anyone who would volunteer for a normal tour of six years in India would be eligible for two months leave in England…. No price was too high to pay for such a boon after all that had gone before.”¹⁰

He served in India until 1935, with just a brief period back in what he called “the Home Establishment” in Great Britain. It was in India that Morgan encountered the experiences and remarkable personalities that shaped his approach to his profession. He returned to India after the Amritsar massacre but served in the same area, albeit nearer what is now Islamabad, about 280 kilometers farther north.¹¹

This next phase of his career began with assignment to a brigade of field artillery in England that was reforming from a cadre left over from the war into a full-strength unit to be stationed in what was then northern India. Now a captain, he served as the adjutant for three years. Here he experienced firsthand what it took to take a mob of unwilling soldiers and turn them into a fully equipped, well-trained, motivated, combat-ready unit. He credited his commanding officer, who was “never ruffled, never hustled, always with something in reserve,” and who had the ability to reduce complex problems to simple terms so that a solution could be found. It was through his leadership that Morgan and the others were able to “rekindle the sacred flame of disciplined endeavour that has carried the British Army undefeated through centuries of mismanagement and disaster.”¹²

From there he moved to a base at what was then Campbellpore (now Attock, Pakistan, about seventy-eight kilometers from Peshawar), where he was placed in command of Indian troops. There, in addition to learning how to lead men from a different culture and often in a different language, he began to have what he later described as a nagging doubt as to “the infallibility of the British overlords, the ‘heaven-borne’ who ruled India.”¹³ In that area, hard by the North-West Frontier Province, keeping order was more akin to the small wars of peace on a daily basis than anything else.

In 1924 he was transferred to the staff of the 1st Indian Division, whose commander was also in command of the Rawalpindi District, in the Punjab, through which ran the main road to the Khyber Pass. The commander, Maj. Gen. Sir Herbert Uniacke, was another major influence on Morgan. Uniacke, a field artillery officer considered a progressive and modernizer, spent four years on the Western Front in World War I and was senior artillery officer for the British 5th Army for two of those years, developing innovative methods of employing artillery.¹⁴