Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill (14 page)

The crowd in Cape Town watched in excitement as Buller’s own Irish chargers—Biffin, a six-year-old, white-faced chestnut, and Ironmonger, a dark bay with a white star on his forehead—were lifted off the
Dunottar Castle
one at a time, secured in wide leather harnesses, and lowered down into a scene of complete chaos. Buller himself, leaving in his wake a staggering amount of work to accomplish, was whisked away in an open carriage, chased by cheering crowds, to an urgent meeting with Sir Alfred Milner, the governor of Cape Colony.

In sharp contrast to the unadorned practicality of Pretoria, Cape Town shimmered with modern life. As Buller’s carriage rattled down broad brick roads flanked by ornate, many-storied buildings,
he was surrounded by the hum of electric cars and the sharp gongs of rattling trolleys. To George Warrington Steevens, the journalist for the
Daily Mail
who had arrived there a few weeks earlier, Cape Town was less African or even British than a mix of continents and cultures. “
It seemed half Western American with a faint smell of India,” he wrote. “Denver with a dash of Delhi.”

When Buller reached Milner’s residence, however, the sheen of imperial calm in the face of war quickly evaporated. Shocked to life by the recent, stunning battlefield losses, Government House, a Georgian-style mansion with a brand-new ballroom, had become a center of tense, frantic action. Harried government workers scurried up and down the elaborate central staircase, their arms full of papers, tight frowns on their tired faces.

One night soon after arriving in Cape Town, Churchill, on the strength of Joseph Chamberlain’s letter of introduction, was invited to dine at Government House. Confidently elbowing his way into a conversation between Milner and Buller, he critiqued the governor’s colonial policy and then, turning his attention to the commander in chief, began to give him advice on how he should conduct his campaign. Buller, characteristically blunt, told Churchill “
not to be a young ass.”

Milner, however, was desperate, and willing to listen to just about anyone. He had done more than perhaps any man to bring about this war, arguing long and loudly that the Boers could easily be defeated. Now, sickened by the news coming out of Natal, he was terrified that Cape Colony would be next to fall to the Boers. “
Sir Alfred Milner told me that the whole of Cape Colony was ‘trembling on the verge of Rebellion,’ ” Churchill would write to his mother just days later. Milner himself took refuge in his diary, miserably confiding that “matters look extremely black…the blackest of all days.”

Although he was urgently needed in Natal, Buller would have to wait until the ships that were now on the high seas, carrying additional
men and supplies, caught up with him. Churchill, however, had no intention of cooling his heels in Cape Town. He had another plan.

Slipping into the city with Atkins, the correspondent for the
Manchester Guardian
, he learned that there was a rail line to East London, a harbor town on the east coast of Cape Colony, from where he could take a British mail boat into Natal, on the Indian Ocean coast. The journey by train alone would be seven hundred miles, all of it undefended and much of it bordering Boer territory. Once in the besieged colony, it would be a breakneck race to make it to Ladysmith before the Boers had surrounded it completely.

When the other journalists learned of this desperate and dangerous plan, they were determined to find their own way out of the Cape. Churchill and Atkins’s train, however, would be the last to get through. Churchill was determined to travel faster and farther than any of them, and he would succeed. His carefully orchestrated life, however, was about to veer wildly off course.

CHAPTER 8

LAND OF STONE AND SCRUB

W
hile Churchill slept, his train moved quickly eastward, slipping over smooth tracks as it carried him out of the Cape and toward a land that was starkly different from the incredibly green and diverse terrain he had first seen from the deck of the
Dunottar Castle
. He was leaving behind not just Table Mountain, which looms, broad-shouldered and flat-topped, behind Cape Town, but also the Cape Fold Belt, a series of low sandstone and shale mountain ranges that stretches along the sea like a curving fortress wall.

The jutting chin of southern Africa is rimmed with a low, narrow coastline. Not even a hundred miles inland, however, a jagged belt of mountain ranges rises up in dramatic peaks that in some areas reach more than ten thousand feet. Most of these ranges belong to the Great Escarpment, which was formed about 200 million years ago when Gondwanaland, the supercontinent that included South America, Africa, Madagascar, Arabia, India, Australia and Antarctica, was torn apart. The Cape Fold Belt, however, was created even earlier than that, 100 million years earlier.

Inside this framework of mountains lies a sprawling tableland that includes a vast semi-desert known as the Great Karoo. Much like the Andes mountain range in South America, which divides one
of the richest, wettest regions on earth—the Amazon basin—from the driest—the Atacama Desert—the mountains of the Cape Fold Belt not only separate the sparkling Cape from the Great Karoo but are themselves the cause of their extreme contrast. When cold air coming off the Atlantic Ocean collides with the mountains, it is forced thousands of feet above sea level, where it meets the warm air of the Indian Ocean. This collision, which creates the famous “Table Cloth,” the cottony cloud that often appears to be draped over the top of Table Mountain, sends the vast majority of the rainfall to the southern face, leaving very little precipitation for the northern side.

When Churchill awoke and peered out his train car window, the rising sun revealed mile after mile of seemingly endless, changeless desert. George Warrington Steevens, who had passed through the Great Karoo only a few weeks earlier, defended the brown and largely barren region in his dispatch for the
Daily Mail
. “
It is only to the eye that cannot do without green that the Karroo is unbeautiful,” he argued. “Every other colour meets others in harmony—tawny sand, silver-grey scrub, crimson-tufted flowers like heather, black ribs of rock, puce shoots of screes, violet mountains in the middle distance, blue fairy battlements guarding the horizon.” The subtle colors and pleasures of the Karoo, however, were completely lost on Churchill. “
The scenery would depress the most buoyant spirits,” he scrawled in a dispatch from his train car. “Wherefore was this miserable land of stone and scrub created?”

Although he was relieved when, the next day, he finally escaped the Great Karoo, reaching East London and the mail boat that would take him northward to Natal, Churchill was not looking forward to another sea journey. He was right to worry. His ship, only 150 tons, was no match for the Indian Ocean, especially during the rainy season. In what Churchill would later describe as a “
horrible Antarctic gale,” the ocean churned and the little mail boat “bounded and reeled, and kicked and pitched, and fell and turned almost over and righted itself again…hour after hour through an endless afternoon, a still longer evening and an eternal night.”

When morning finally came, and Churchill had somewhat recovered
from the “
most appalling paroxysms of sea-sickness which it has ever been my lot to survive,” he gingerly ventured onto the deck to watch the coastline slide by. What he saw on the region’s Indian Ocean coast brought on a surge of imperialistic fervor that was extreme even for Churchill, the kinds of emotions that a place like the Great Karoo could never have stirred within his British breast. “
Here are wide tracts of fertile soil watered by abundant rains,” he wrote in a gushing tribute to the rich, eastern coast of southern Africa. “The temperate sun warms the life within the soil. The cooling breeze refreshes the inhabitant. The delicious climate stimulates the vigour of the European….All Nature smiles, and here at last is a land where white men may rule and prosper.”

Although the white men Churchill had in mind for ruling and prospering in South Africa were certainly not the Boers, the Dutch descendants had had the same rush of desire and deep sense of entitlement when they first laid eyes on Natal. Since the earliest days of the war, both the Boers and the British had held an unshakable belief in the righteousness of their cause and the unworthiness of their enemy. Neither group, however, had given a moment’s thought, or would have cared if they had, to the fact that the land over which they were fighting did not belong to either one of them.

When the first Dutch ships landed on the Cape of Good Hope in the mid-seventeenth century, southern Africa had not been a forgotten land, any more than North America had been free for the taking when the Pilgrims had settled Plymouth just thirty years earlier. Unlike North America, however, Africa had already been inhabited not for thousands of years but for millions.

The first modern humans in southern Africa were the San, who lived there for tens of thousands of years before the KhoiKhoi arrived. After the KhoiKhoi, tens of thousands of years more passed before the Dutch made an appearance. It took the Dutch less than a hundred years, however, to so devastate both the San and the KhoiKhoi
populations that by 1750 there was little sign of either tribe within 250 miles of Table Bay.

Because they had so quickly taken over the Cape, the Dutch believed that as they began to push deeper into the African interior, they would easily conquer any tribes they might meet. What they did not know was that, while they were moving north from the coast, seizing land, cattle and slaves along the way, another powerful group of immigrants had already made its way south, from the center of the continent. Known as the Bantu, which means “people” or “humans,” they were a loosely knit linguistic family with hundreds of different ethnic groups, including two of Africa’s largest, most powerful and most feared tribes—the Xhosa and the Zulu.

Tall, strong and nearly as brutal to the San and the KhoiKhoi as the Boers had been, the Bantu were not Stone Age Africans. They had large populations, grew their own crops and, perhaps most important from the standpoint of the Dutch, knew how to forge metal tools and weapons. It is widely believed that the Bantu came to southern Africa from the region that is today Nigeria and Cameroon. Five thousand years ago, they began what has become known as the Bantu expansion, a vast migration that moved steadily southward, ranging across thousands of miles of central Africa and covering stunningly diverse terrain, from the sprawling central African rain forest, second in size only to the Amazon, to the Kalahari Desert, the eastern Great Lakes and the southern savannas.

The steady and seemingly unassailable conquest of southern Africa by the Boers and the Bantu, one from below and the other from above, came to an abrupt halt by the 1770s, when they finally met face-to-face on the banks of the Great Fish River. The Bantu, who had seen few white men beyond the occasional desperate shipwrecked sailor, were as shocked as the Boers. At first, both sides had proceeded with caution, and, for a time, they had lived in relative peace. It took ten years for full-fledged war to break out, but when it did, it seemed as though it would never end. The Frontier Wars alone, a series of nine bloody battles between the Boers and the Xhosa, a large Bantu tribe, lasted nearly a century.

As fierce as they were, however, the Xhosa would not become the Boers’, and later England’s, bitterest rivals in Africa. That distinction belonged to the Zulu. An insignificant offshoot of the Nguni, a Bantu group that had migrated east while the Xhosa continued south, the tribe at first numbered no more than two hundred people. What transformed the Zulu into not just a powerful tribe but arguably the most storied group of people ever to live in southern Africa was the irresistible and terrifying rise of a single man—a young warrior named Shaka.