M I G H T Y  P E N  A N D  S W O R D

Historically this pass was a popular invasion route into India, and England wanted to maintain its control over it.

Edward Bulwer-Earl of Lytton, besides writing long poems, the novel, The Last Days of Pompeii, and a play, Richelieu, was also Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Governor-general of India in the late 1800s. As Governor-general, Edward wanted the Afghans in Kabul to align themselves with England, and break off relations with another interested party, the Russians. Even in the 1800s, Russia was trying to gain influence in Afghanistan, and when one of its generals visited Kabul in 1878, and Lytton's envoy was turned back at the border by Afghan troops, he eagerly reacted--British troops invaded through the Khyber Pass, capturing it, and Kabul. Lytton then arranged for a more acceptable government to rule this area.

The Second Afghan War (1878-1880) was part of a long-standing conflict dating back to the beginning of the 1800's, and whether or not you believe military action was appropriate in this case is now quite beside the point. The interesting thing is what Edward Bulwer-Lytton wrote forty years prior to his taking action in Afganistan. In a play called "Richelieu," Lytton depicts Cardinal Richelieu, a 17th Century French Cardinal, as a power to be reckoned with, and a force held in check by enemies who would turn against him and seize control of his authority by treason or murder. Lytton fancied himself a creative writer and, in ways he could not have recognized at the time, he was.5 In the play, Richelieu is presented as wise, just, moral, and even vulnerable. His enemies do not succeed in destroying him, but mid-point in the story, Lytton's Richelieu makes the following statement: "Beneath the rule of men entirely great, the pen is mightier than the sword--Take away the sword--States can be saved without it!"

In his own life, Edward Bulwer-Lytton chose the sword over the pen, and paradoxically created a metaphor for peace that lives to this day. Lytton, however, could have had no idea what a fitting metaphor, "the pen, and the sword," could make for our post industrial era. The pen and the sword are now both the aggressor in a new form of combat involving humans vs. our industrial machines. The pen (software), and the sword (hardware), are continuing to merge in various forms of information machines, embedded media, and nanotechnology.

5. In a biography written by Lytton's grandson in 1913, the picture you get of Edward is that of a man with a broken marriage, and frustrated in his professional life. "The fact is, that when he took his pen in hand Lytton always conjured up before himself an image of the man he wished and believed himself to be; for materials he drew upon all the finer qualities of his nature, and with an artist's hand he fashioned them into the figure of a tragic hero, maligned, misunderstood, but ever ready to forgive. In his letters, in his private memoranda, and doubtless in his own thoughts, this image perpetually recurs. But to his wife it had too little of the substance of reality; and he would have succeeded better if in these appeals he could have revealed a little more of the erring human being who, though struggling always, had become humbled by many failures." The Life of Edward Bulwer, First Lord Lytton, By His Grandson, The Earl of Lytton, Macmillan and Co., 1913.