Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill (16 page)

Hauling his bag from the train, Churchill looked for a place to stay near the railroad station, where most of the men had set up camp. He found an empty bell tent in the shunting triangle where train cars were coupled and uncoupled, and decided to make it his home for the time being. Because there were more men than tents, he was obliged to share his, choosing for his roommates two other journalists—Atkins, who had accompanied him as he had raced across the Great Karoo, and a young London
Times
correspondent named Leo Amery.

Although in theory Atkins was his competition, Churchill liked him. He admired his Cambridge education and the fact that, at just twenty-eight years of age, he had already covered several wars, including the Spanish-American War and the Greco-Turkish War two years earlier. Atkins was, Churchill wrote to his mother, “
exceedingly clever & accomplished.” Perhaps what he liked best about his new friend, however, was how interested Atkins seemed to be in him, and how willing he was to listen to him talk about himself.

For his part, Atkins found Churchill not just amusing but fascinating. He had seen his like only once before, in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, where Atkins had had lunch with Theodore Roosevelt.
The young reporter had watched as the Rough Riders, the motley crew of cowboys, college athletes and law enforcement officials Roosevelt had brought together to fight in the war, gathered eagerly around him, hanging on his every word. “It was like a conference,”
Atkins later wrote, “with Roosevelt as both principal speaker and chairman.” Before they parted ways, Roosevelt, who just three years later would become the youngest president in U.S. history, pulled Atkins aside to tell him that “so far as he knew, he was the only officer who had ‘performed the feat’ of shooting a Spaniard with his revolver in the charge up the slopes.” Atkins, who was used to the almost extreme discretion and modesty of British military men, was startled by Roosevelt’s blatant self-promotion, but he didn’t hold it against him. In fact, he found his honesty refreshing. “I noted the simplicity with which he said this, in the manner of a man genuinely recording a fact of sufficient interest,” he wrote. “Few British officers would have mentioned it, but Roosevelt was not boasting.”

Nor did Atkins believe that Churchill was simply boasting when he reeled off his accomplishments and outlined his audacious plans. On the contrary, he thought that Churchill, like Roosevelt, was probably telling the truth. He struck him as a “
most unusual young man,” and as they lived and worked side by side, Atkins studied him with the eye not of a journalist but of a historian. “
When the prospects of a career like that of his father, Lord Randolph, excited him, then such a gleam shot from him that he was almost transfigured,” Atkins would later write. “I had not before encountered this sort of ambition, unabashed, frankly egotistical, communicating its excitement, and extorting sympathy.”

Few people, however, shared Atkins’s open admiration for Churchill. Although he was well known, and widely believed to be on his way to Parliament, if not 10 Downing Street, he was too brash and self-assertive to be generally well liked. Even Sir George White, then trapped in Ladysmith, would find Churchill annoying, although he had little doubt that the bold young man would rise quickly through the ranks of British politics. “
I don’t like the fellow,” White would dryly tell another officer just a few months later, “but he’ll be Prime Minister of England one day.”

Even within the confines of Churchill’s own tent, there was a man who was hardly impressed by him. As highly as Atkins regarded Churchill, Leo Amery had formed a distinctly less favorable opinion of him. A thin, bespectacled Oxford graduate, Amery had known Churchill much longer than Atkins had. In fact, the two men had met eleven years earlier, at Harrow, when Churchill was just thirteen years old and Amery a year older. It had not been an auspicious beginning for a friendship.

Churchill had only been at the school for about a month when he saw Amery standing near the edge of a large outdoor swimming pool, which the students had nicknamed Ducker. Churchill, like many of the boys, spent most of his time around the pool pushing other kids into it, so when he spied Amery, who was small for his age, he assumed he was fair game. Sneaking up behind his victim, Churchill suddenly shoved him in the back with his foot, grabbing Amery’s towel at the last minute “out of humanity, so that it should not get wet.” The resulting effect, however, was not what Churchill had expected. “I was startled to see a furious face emerge from the foam, and a being evidently of enormous strength making its way by fierce strokes to the shore,” he would recall years later. “I fled, but in vain. Swift as the wind my pursuer overtook me, seized me in a ferocious grip and hurled me into the deepest part of the pool.” When Churchill climbed back out, he was quickly surrounded by the other boys, who gleefully explained the extent of his crime. “You’re in for it,” they said. “Do you know what you have done? It’s Amery, he’s in the Sixth Form. He is Head of the House; he is champion at Gym; he has got football colours.”

Amery, too, had not forgotten the incident. He couldn’t decide whether he was more infuriated by the “
outrage on my dignity…[by] a red-haired freckled urchin” or the fact that, in a misguided attempt at an apology the next day, Churchill had explained to him that he had pushed him into the pool because he was small. “My father, too, is small,” Churchill had said, awkwardly hoping to make amends, “though he also is a great man.”

Churchill had been pleased to see Amery in Estcourt because
he felt that they could “
for the first time meet on terms of equality and fraternity.” To Amery, however, they were still far from equals. Although Churchill was the best-paid journalist, Amery believed himself to be the most senior newspaperman in South Africa. He was, first of all, working for
The Times
of London, one of the most admired newspapers in the world. Already more than a century old, it was the first newspaper to bear the name “Times,” giving inspiration to every similarly named newspaper from the
Times of India
, which was started more than fifty years later, to the
New York Times
, thirteen years after that. Amery was not only a reporter for
The Times
, he was the chief of its war correspondent service. “
I had an effective team of something like a score of representatives covering the whole field of action,” he later boasted. “I found myself, in virtue of the status of
The Times
, at the age of twenty-five, chief representative of the Press in South Africa.”

As much as Amery and Churchill were alike in their backgrounds, their early education, their ambition and their self-regard, there was one striking difference between the two young men: Churchill had a sense of humor, even about his own pretensions. He “
could laugh at his dreams of glory,” Atkins would later write. He had “an impish wit. It was as though a light was switched on inside him which suddenly shone out through his eyes….The whole illuminated face grinned.” Amery, on the other hand, was as thin-skinned as he was proud.

Although Amery, Churchill and Atkins were all desperate to be part of the war, in Estcourt they were far from alone in their frustration. Constantly on edge and in danger, the British soldiers they had come to report on felt not only helpless but useless as they stared impotently in the direction of Ladysmith.
It was difficult enough just to find a place to sleep and, if they were very lucky, an occasional bath in a tiny canvas tub. Clean water was so scarce that obtaining it would become one of Buller’s greatest challenges throughout the
war. In just a few months, it would lead to a typhoid epidemic that would kill thousands of British soldiers in Bloemfontein, just three hundred miles west of Estcourt.

Food was in more plentiful supply, but until Buller and his wagons arrived, it was barely edible.
The camp had a bleak tin building that the men used for a mess, but if they were marching from town to town or on reconnaissance, there was little more to eat than canned corned beef, known as bully beef, and rock-hard ration biscuits, which were themselves a danger to the soldiers who had bad teeth, as nearly all of them did.
Occasionally, they were even forced to resort to something called Johnston’s Fluid Beef, which they squeezed out of metal or waxed fiberboard tubes. So far removed was this processed paste from actual fresh beef that the leftovers would be given to British soldiers serving in World War I, twenty years later.

Dirty, tired and hungry as they were, the men in Estcourt knew that they were better off than their counterparts in Ladysmith, whom the Boers were hoping to starve out if they did not kill them first.
From the hills surrounding the town, they could hear the Boer guns that were trained on Ladysmith, and they could see the bursts of light and billows of white smoke as they were fired. They could also see White’s desperate attempts to communicate with the Estcourt relief force across the intervening Boer lines.

Although the trapped British general was in dangerously short supply of arms and rations, he did have an array of new battlefield technologies with which to signal his pleas for help to the outside world.
From Estcourt, Churchill watched the flashes of Morse code White sent by sunlight and mirrors using a heliograph. White also had access to a pigeon post that had been established between Ladysmith and Durban by Colonel Hassard of the Royal Engineers, a man who had, an article in
Collier’s Weekly
assured its readers, “
spent years in pigeon culture for just this sort of an emergency.”

Perhaps White’s most inventive and elegant means of escaping Ladysmith, if only for one man and for a few hours, was a hydrogen-filled balloon. Used largely for reconnaissance, the balloon had a narrow basket with room for only one man, a set of binoculars,
a telescope, a compass and signaling equipment. Occasionally, Churchill could see it, looking like a “
brown speck floating above and beyond the distant hills…plainly visible.” Unfortunately, the Boers could see it too and, whenever they did, tried their best to shoot it down. In fact, George Warrington Steevens, who was now trapped in Ladysmith with White, wrote that the “
favourite diet” of the Boers’ twelve-pounder field guns “appeared to be balloons.”

In Estcourt, the most the men could do until Buller arrived was monitor the Boers’ movements, which in itself was an almost impossible task. Every day, they sent out the cavalry for ten to fifteen miles, searching for their elusive enemies. The British only had three hundred horses, though, and it was difficult to keep even that number fed and free from disease. The twenty-five bicycles the Natal volunteers had brought with them were slightly more useful, but they had their own problems.
Bicycles, which had been used for military purposes since the Franco-Prussian War nearly thirty years before, were light, fast, easily taken apart, shipped and reassembled. They didn’t have to be fed, and they didn’t die. They could, however, and often did, blow a tire in the scrubby veld. In actual combat, they were worse than useless because they couldn’t withstand the recoil of a rifle or offer their riders any balance while they tried to wield a sword.