Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill (11 page)

The men aboard the
Dunottar Castle
seemed to Churchill to be almost blasé about the war that lay before them. Their only concern as they lazily watched a shoal of flying fish race the ship, or debated the merits of throwing a fancy dress ball—some arguing that it would be “
healthy and amusing,” while others growled that it would be “tiresome”—was that they might miss their chance to fight. “
Some of our best officers were on board,” Churchill wrote, “and they simply could not conceive how ‘irregular amateur’ forces like the Boers could make any impression against disciplined professional soldiers.”
So certain were they that Buller would flatten the Boers they had nicknamed him the Steamroller.
Even now, their enemy faced an entire infantry brigade, a cavalry regiment and two batteries of artillery in one region alone, not to mention the man in charge in Buller’s absence: Brigadier General William Penn Symons, one of the most decorated and experienced officers in the British army.

Churchill was torn between fear that he would miss the war, which represented his best hope of regaining his political footing, and concern that the Boers might be more prepared, and far more capable, than the British gave them credit for. “
Evidently the General expects that nothing of importance will happen until he gets there,” he wrote to his mother from the ship. “But I rather think events will have taken the bit between their teeth.”

While the rest of the passengers of the
Dunottar Castle
lounged in deck chairs or competed in athletic contests, racing “
violently to and fro,” Churchill often seemed to be urging the ship to go faster through sheer force of will. He was either pacing the deck in frustration, “
plunging…‘with neck out-thrust,’ as Browning fancied Napoleon,” John Black Atkins, a fellow journalist who was working for the
Manchester Guardian
, noted with amusement, or sitting
completely still, as if meditating. Only his hands moved, “folding and unfolding,” Atkins wrote, “not nervously but as though he were helping himself to untie mental knots.”

Whatever Churchill might have believed about the commander in chief, however, Buller was under no illusions when it came to the Boers. Although he hoped that he would arrive before the fighting began, he was certain that when it did begin in earnest, England would find itself in a war unlike anything it had ever seen. Buller knew South Africa, and, more than any other general in the British army, he knew the Boers. In fact, when the members of the War Office’s Intelligence Branch had rushed to gather everything they had on the Boer republics, bind it into two volumes and send it to him, he had dismissively sent it back, attaching a note wearily reminding them that he already “
knew everything about South Africa.”

Twenty years earlier, during the Anglo-Zulu War, Buller had fought with the Boers rather than against them. He had won his Victoria Cross, the highest award given by the British military, for his gallant conduct during that war, and he knew that he owed much of his success to the Boers who had ridden next to him time and again, untiring and unafraid. As the British secretary of state for war, Henry Lansdowne, had disdainfully remarked, Buller “
talked Boer,” and, in stark contrast to nearly any other man in the British military, he openly admired their courage and skill.

Buller, however, like Churchill, was trapped on the sea, while other men were running the war. Worse, those in charge, Penn Symons and General George White, were quite possibly the last men who should have been chosen for the job. White, who had won his Victoria Cross in Afghanistan, had never before fought in South Africa. “
The Army at large was quite as much astonished as the civilian world at the appointment of Sir George White to the command in Natal,” a reporter for the
Daily Telegraph
wrote. “In the clubs and messes it had been taken for granted that the head of the force sent to the Cape would be men having experience of South African warfare.” Penn Symons knew South Africa, but had no respect for or interest in the Boers. “
Whatever the estimate formed of the fighting quality of
the Boers,” Leo Amery, a journalist for the London
Times
, wrote, “no one rated it lower than Sir W. Penn Symons.”

Although Penn Symons and White had only twelve thousand men between them, and were surrounded by more than four times that number of fighting Boers, they did not for a moment worry that they would have any difficulty holding the enemy at bay until Buller arrived. “Personally,” White had nonchalantly told a friend the day before he set sail from Southampton, “
I don’t believe there will be fighting of a serious kind.”

CHAPTER 6

“WE HAVE NOW GONE FAR ENOUGH”

W
hatever waves of panic the British army might have imagined rippling through the Transvaal as news of war spread to its farthest reaches, the reality was starkly different. In the days leading up to the ultimatum, the Boers were not frantically preparing for war, rushing to gather maps and men, supplies and ammunition. They didn’t have to. There had never been a time, either in their own lives or in those of their forebears, when they had not been ready to fight. For the great majority of Boers, as soon as war seemed imminent, there was little to do but leave for the front.

In isolated farms across hundreds of miles of southern Africa, from the Drakensberg Mountains to the vast plateaus of the Highveld, every Boer man and boy between the ages of sixteen and sixty, and many much older or younger than that, set out for war. There was no need to enlist in the army because there was no standing army, and there was no need to find a uniform because there were no uniforms. Uniforms were something soldiers wore, and Boers were fiercely adamant that they were not soldiers, a term they found deeply offensive. They referred to themselves only as burghers, or citizens.

When he left for war, a Boer pulled on the same clothes he wore every day—homemade shoes, a pair of stiffmoleskin trousers and a
wide-brimmed hat to keep the sun and rain out of his eyes, all of it in the same drab grays and browns. The only flourishes he might allow himself were affixed to his hat, either a small flag of the Transvaal sewn into the fabric or, as a nod to the customs of the past, a meerkat tail, dark tipped and slightly bushy, tied to the upturned brim.

As he walked out the door, his wife or mother handed him a linen sack filled with enough food to allow him to survive on his own for several weeks. He was accustomed to living on just a handful of staples—coffee, brown bread and biltong, a dried meat made of anything from beef to zebra or giraffe and cured with a mixture of vinegar and spices. His native servant hooked a roll with a rough blanket and a raincoat onto the front of his saddle and a kettle to the back. Likely wearing a wide bandolier over his shoulder, and with a Bible tucked into his pocket, he climbed onto his horse and rode off with little more than a backward glance.

By early October, thousands of Boers had already flooded into Pretoria, the Transvaal capital. The town, which had been built in a warm, fertile valley north of Johannesburg, about three hundred and fifty miles from the eastern coast, seemed far less a bustling center of political power than a sleepy frontier outpost. Although the wide streets had large government buildings clustered at each end, most of them were made of dirt, with small streams running beside them.
The home of the president, Paul Kruger, had two imposing stone lions standing guard at its entrance, a lavish gift from the British mining magnate Barney Barnato, but Kruger’s wife, the First Lady of the Transvaal, could often be seen out front, milking their cow.

With the onset of war, the usually quiet town had been rapidly transformed. Trains arrived every day crowded with burghers from all corners of the republic; hundreds of heavily bearded men, clearly unused to, and uncomfortable with, being anywhere but their own farms, wandered the town; and a crush of horses kicked up the dirt streets until everything and everyone was coated with a fine red dust. On the day before the deadline for the ultimatum, which also happened to be Kruger’s birthday, the town even did something very un-Boer-like: It had a military parade.

As their commandant general, Piet Joubert, the man who had led them to victory against the British twenty years earlier, stood in silent and awkward appraisal, his men rode past him one by one in their own makeshift version of a military review. Even Deneys Reitz, the seventeen-year-old son of Francis William Reitz, the Transvaal’s secretary of state and the man who had written the ultimatum, could tell that there was a striking lack of uniformity among the men, or even any apparent plan to the military exercise. Although “
it was magnificent to see commando after commando file past,” he wrote, “each man brandish[ed] hat or rifle according to his individual idea of a military salute.”

Had they been able to witness the scene, the British military would have mocked it as unworthy of any military tradition. The rifles the Boers were holding, however, would have gotten their attention, and stolen the smiles from their faces. Accustomed to fighting colonial wars against enemies who had little more than a few antiquated shotguns, the British War Office assumed that, at best, the Boers would be carrying the outdated Martini-Henry carbines they had used during the First Boer War. They could not have been more wrong.

For years, the Boers had been making one critical concession to war preparedness. They had been stockpiling weapons. Since the Jameson Raid, Cecil Rhodes’s disastrously failed attempt to take over the Transvaal nearly four years earlier, Kruger had been sending men to Europe to buy the most effective and modern weapons available anywhere in the world.
In particular, the Boers had been amassing German Mausers, a magazine rifle that was not only lighter but faster loading than the Lee-Enfield, the rifle the British army had been using since 1888.
In 1895 alone, the Boers bought ten thousand rifles and roughly twelve million rounds of ammunition, which they stored in a fort in Pretoria.
The following year, the secretary of state for war, Louis de Souza, had gone back to buy more.

As good as the guns were, the men using them were even better. Even the British had to begrudgingly admit that when it came to marksmanship, it was impossible to compete with the Boers.
Whether they were hunting lions, which raided their herds of cattle and flocks of sheep and posed a threat to their families, or fighting the native Africans whose land they now occupied, their lives depended every day on the speed and accuracy of their shooting. They were “
the finest mass of rifle-armed horsemen ever seen,” Churchill wrote, “and the most capable mounted warriors since the Mongols.”

They were also determined to win. They felt that they had no other choice. Although southern Africa had been populated for millions of years before the Boers arrived, they believed that this land was their birthright, no less than a gift from God. They were certain that if they lost, the resulting tragedy would not only devastate them, it would, in Kruger’s words, “
stagger humanity.”

As the burghers filed past Joubert that day, brandishing their Mausers in a self-styled salute, one man stood out among the long gray beards and rough, heavily lined faces of the members of the Volksraad, the Transvaal parliament. Louis Botha, nearly six feet tall, broad-shouldered and sinewy with dark hair, a closely trimmed goatee and violet-blue eyes, looked as though he could have been carved out of the heavy clay soil of Natal, where he had been born. Although he was only thirty-seven years old, among a people who revered age, he was already a respected member of the Volksraad, a position he was about to abandon so that he could go to war.

No man in the crowd that surrounded him was more thoroughly Boer than Louis Botha, and the story of his ancestry was the story of Boer creation.
He could trace his family back to some of the earliest days of European settlement in southern Africa, to the hundreds of Huguenots who left France for South Africa in 1685 after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, which had made their religion, and any but Catholicism, illegal. On one of the ships sailing out of France was a man named Botés, or it might have been Bottes, or perhaps Bodes. No one knows with any certainty because he changed his
name to Botha soon after reaching the Cape of Good Hope.
So infuriated were the Huguenots at being cast out of France that when they arrived in Africa, they refused to speak the French language, a ban that extended even to their own names.

Botha and his fellow Huguenots quickly joined forces with the Dutch, and together they seized control of the region. Spreading from Table Bay to the foot of Table Mountain, they raised cattle and sheep and grew everything from grain to wine grapes in the fertile soil. Armed with guns and horses, neither of which the Cape’s inhabitants—the San and KhoiKhoi peoples—had ever before seen, and bringing with them devastating European diseases, they quickly decimated the native population.

By the time the British began making their own claims on the Cape at the end of the century, the Dutch and the Huguenots, along with an infusion of German immigrants, had already transformed themselves from rogue splinter groups into an entirely new ethnic group—neither European nor African, but Boer. “
In their manner of life, their habits…even in their character,” a journalist for
The Times
would write, “they had undergone a profound change.” The Boers even developed their own language, Afrikaans, which mixes Dutch with everything from French and Portuguese to KhoiKhoi. The word
boer
itself, which means “farmer,” is Dutch, but the Boers quickly developed new words as they needed them, from
kopje
(hill) and
veld
(grassland) to
Voortrekker.