Warfare, he believed, purified and strengthened the nation and its representatives. "There are few things on earth, if any, to come up to the joy of starting on a campaign when head and heart are young," he wrote. "Behind lies civilisation and its trammels; before is freedom and excitement, and the hope of seeing great deeds, with the chance of distinction." Of course, the casualties inflicted against Britain's enemies in such engagements tended to be higher than those endured by the Empire. But "I don't think I feel very strongly about men being killed," says Russell at the climax of the book. "They must die, and it makes little difference whether they die a few years sooner or later. Nations have to go through with it, and I believe war is necessary to maintain a nation's character...Englishmen are the best fighting race in the world, the only civilised race that really loves a fight. I look forward to the time when all the empty places of the earth will be filled with Englishmen, banded together for good against the world. I wish there were more room for the race to spread. There is no other to compare with it." On other lips, at other times, ideas like these would have baleful consequences, albeit that the master race in question then would speak German, not English.

But when it came to the Afghan border, neither Durand nor those to whom he answered in Calcutta and London were motivated by a lust for more living space. Their true concern was more negative: fear. On the surface, this concerned the Russians. Drawing the Durand Line was one of the final acts in the Great Game, the long campaign to stop the Tsars' southward expansion, a phenomenon that also explains Britain's earlier entanglements in Afghanistan — the disastrous wars of 1839-42 and 1878-80. With a firmly delineated border, and Afghanistan a buffer state, policy-makers believed that India would finally be safe from the bear. 

However, the need to counter Russia spoke to deeper insecurities. The 1890s marked the very zenith of Britain's global power, but many of its exponents were seized with foreboding about its coming eclipse — a mood expressed by Kipling in his 1898 elegy, Recessional: "Far-called, our navies melt away;/On dune and headland sinks the fire:/ Lo, all our pomp of yesterday/Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!" Among Anglo-Indians — especially one who had lost his mother in 1857 — such anxieties had a specific focus: a terror of a second Indian rebellion, still bloodier than the first.

Durand told Madge in his letters the overriding reason for why the proposed new frontier must finally quash any prospect of Russian influence in Afghanistan: if Britain were to allow it, this would be taken as a sign of weakness by the Empire's subjects in India, and so "fire the mine" of British rule. Mutiny would be the inevitable consequence. "Remember the Mutiny, when your churches were full of black-robed sorrowing women," he wrote in his novel, "and realise in time that you cannot with impunity allow India to get out of control." 

Hence, the personal and strategic impulses that drove Durand on his mission to the Afghan Amir had virtually nothing to do with the people principally affected by it — the Pashtuns. His mission took place in an era of rampant nationalism in Europe. But when it came to drawing a frontier in Asia that happened to divide the Pashtun nation, it simply did not occur to Durand that the Pashtuns might object — a policy which, in hindsight, seems almost calculated to trigger violence.