Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill (18 page)

News of the Boer advance had been brought in by the cyclist scouts, pedaling as quickly as they could through the heavy mud on their thin metal bikes, rifles strapped to their backs or below their seats with wide strips of leather.
The day before, a new battalion, the West Yorkshires, had arrived to bolster the town’s defenses, and that morning Pietermaritzburg had sent three new guns, two long naval twelve-pounders and a seven-pounder. The men, however, had no illusions that they were suddenly a match for the tens of thousands of burghers who now faced them. They were desperate to do something in response to the threat, but no one, certainly not Long, seemed to know what that was. “
A dense, paralyzing mist of uncertainty enveloped all things beyond a narrow radius from the village,” Amery wrote. “The appearance of the Boer patrols…was the signal for a display of nervous irresolution, profoundly depressing to those who watched it, and full of portent for any one who reflected upon the future course of the campaign.”

Seemingly incapable of making a decision and terrified of the potential consequences should he make a mistake, Long hardly projected an image of cool, confident command. One moment he was determined that his men would stand their ground, no matter how outnumbered they were, and the next he was frantically ordering everyone to pack up. “
A moment of confidence and the tents were pitched again on ground which the pouring rain had meanwhile converted into a swamp,” Amery wrote. “A passing cloud of despondency, and down once more fluttered the white walls and packing-up was
resumed.”
All around them guy ropes were loosened, and the bell tents, which a minute earlier had stood in tight rows like starched white teepees, collapsed to the ground, their canvas sides flapping in the wet wind like sails.

Most of the men were sent to meet the Boers head-on—Haldane’s Dublin Fusiliers, the Border Regiment, the West Yorkshires, the mounted troops. They stretched along the veld in silent firing lines while they waited for the enemy to arrive, rain dripping from their peaked pith helmets, the wet ground darkening their khaki jackets and seeming to seep into their very bones. Although tense and miserable, they were at least by then no strangers to drenching rains. Summer is the rainy season in the Highveld, and there had seldom been a day when the men hadn’t been pummeled by a torrential afternoon thunderstorm, leaving them not just soaked but, more often than not, sick. “
Lord, O poor Tommy!” George Warrington Steevens wrote of the wretched plight of the British soldier in South Africa. “He sops and sneezes, runs at the eyes and nose, half manful, half miserable.”

The men were also terrifyingly vulnerable to lightning, which streaked across the sky like the finger of God that the deeply religious Boers had promised would vindicate them. “
I saw the flash of lightning coming towards me rather high up,” one British soldier would later recall, “it then seemed to me to come straight down over my head. The flash was rather circular in shape and pink in colour. I received a blow on the top of the head, just as if I had been struck by a mallet.” On another occasion, four men were struck while sleeping in a tent. “The current seemed to have passed along the legs of the men,” a report later noted, “and to have passed out about the buttocks, causing severe burning.”
In the end, eighty-six British servicemen would be struck by lightning during the war, many of whom would not survive the blow.

So frequent and violent were the rains that they had transformed the dry, dusty veld into a sea of mud, and the soldiers into something that seemed less man than monster. Mud caked the long strips of cloth called puttees, from the Hindi word
patti
, for “bandage,” that wound from the tops of their shoes to their knees, weighing down
their legs or stiffening and cracking in the sun, either way making it almost impossible for them to walk. “
As for their boots, you could only infer them from the huge balls of stratified mud men bore round their feet. Red mud, yellow mud, black mud, brown mud,” Steevens wrote. “Rents in their khaki showed white skin; from their grimed hands and heads you might have judged them half red men, half soot-black….Only the eye remained—the sky-blue, steel-keen, hard, clear, unconquerable English eye.”

After hours in the hills, however, the men returned with little to show for their time and misery. Only the mounted infantry had had any contact with the enemy, and even then it was only about two hundred burghers with whom they had exchanged “
perhaps thirty harmless shots,” Atkins wrote in disgust. When he returned to Estcourt, exhausted, frustrated and drenched, it was to find a camp full of men who were neither excited nor relieved, but merely “jumpy.” “The camp wore an air of vacillation,” he wrote, “and vacillation is the blood-brother to demoralization.”

That night, Churchill invited Long, who had been in the Sudan with him, in command of the artillery during the Battle of Omdurman, to join him and Atkins for dinner. Even as the rain continued to fall in torrents, Long ordered his men to sleep, tentless, on the ground so they would be ready to retreat at a moment’s notice. The journalists, among the few who had been allowed to keep their tent, sat with Long as he drank Churchill’s wine and talked of nothing but the Boer advance on Estcourt, wringing his hands in painful and, for Churchill, maddening indecision. In the background, just behind their tent, they could hear the heavy clang of metal and the grunts of soldiers as they loaded the battalions’ guns in preparation for what they had been told would be the evacuation of the town the following day.

Finally, unable to endure Long’s nervous indecision any longer, Churchill broke in. Addressing the colonel, Atkins would later write, “
with an unblushing assurance, which I partly envied and partly deprecated,” he gave him the benefit of his opinion. The fact that he was much younger and much less experienced than Long, and that
he was not even a member of the military, did not give Churchill a moment’s hesitation. “He had small respect for authority,” Atkins wrote. He had “no reverence for his seniors as such, and talked to them as though they were of his own age, or younger.”

You should stay in Estcourt, Churchill told Long. Joubert, the Boer commandant general, was cautious, and unlikely to make a move just yet. Their position was fairly safe because it was south of the Tugela River, and as good a place as any to wait for Buller. Leaving Estcourt, and leading the Boers to Pietermaritzburg, would be “
a pity and a blunder.”

When Long finally said good night, neither Churchill nor Atkins knew if Churchill’s words had had any effect on him. Just minutes after he had strode from sight, however, the clanging, which had ceased half an hour earlier, suddenly started up again. Dashing outside, the journalists watched with delight as the soldiers who had only just finished packing the trucks began the tedious and grueling process of unpacking them. “
There could be only one explanation,” Atkins wrote. “We were going to remain in Estcourt.” Grinning at his friend, Churchill said triumphantly, “I did that!” Then, after a moment’s reflection, he said, in a gesture of friendship so generous it surprised Atkins, “We did that.”

As Atkins would later write, “
There was to be no retreat, no miserable night march, no military disgrace.” Long realized, however, that there had already been one personal disgrace that day: his own. He had betrayed a weakness unseemly in a British military commander, and he was desperate to correct the impression, whatever the cost. Emphatically stating “ ‘what he’d be’ before he would leave Estcourt,” Long vowed that he was prepared to fight the following day, “if the Boers would have it so.”

Later that night, not long before midnight, Churchill’s old friend Aylmer Haldane was surprised when a young officer in his battalion named Tom Frankland appeared before him with a message from the
colonel. He was, Frankland told Haldane, to report immediately to the brigade office for an assignment. Unlike Churchill, Haldane did not know Long. In fact, he had never even met him, but he could guess why the colonel had summoned him. It was his turn to take command of the armored train.

Haldane walked to Long’s tent “
with a heart full of misgivings.” Although he was more than prepared to risk his own life, he was reluctant to put the lives of his soldiers in the hands of a man who clearly had no idea what he was doing. “Had he known anything of the country in which the train was to operate,” Haldane wrote, “one where hostile guns could readily be concealed in places close to the railway line, in positions from which to fire without warning—he would surely have modified so inappropriate an order.” As Haldane had suspected, however, as soon as he stepped into Long’s makeshift office, the colonel informed him, “as if he were lavishing a favor,” that he would be leaving on the armored train at dawn the next morning.

As he ducked out of Long’s tent, angry but resigned, Haldane looked up to see Churchill standing with a group of journalists, “
hanging about to pick up some crumbs of information.”
When he grimly told Churchill about his assignment, Haldane made no effort to pretend that he agreed with his commanding officer. “
I need hardly point out that a single man on horseback would have sufficed to accomplish what was required,” he later wrote. “It was the height of folly.” Long had made a disastrous decision, and it would probably end in tragedy, but, Haldane told Churchill, ignoring the other journalists, he was welcome to come along if he was willing to take the chance.

After his first ride aboard the armored train, Churchill had tried every other method he could think of to get news from Ladysmith. He had even tried to hire a guide to take him into the besieged town. When word got around that Churchill was offering to pay anyone who was brave or crazy enough to test the Boers, a young trooper in the Natal Carbineers named Park Gray, who had grown up game hunting between Estcourt and Ladysmith and was widely considered a crack shot, had decided to take the job. “
When I approached him
he was sitting in the tent and gave me the impression that he was a lonely young, very young, Englishman,” Gray would write years later. “He had a complexion that many a South African girl would envy and although four years older than I, looked to be about 17 or 18. He became very animated when I told him what I had come for.” Gray’s commanding officer, however, had put an end to the adventure before it could even begin. He “could not spare a single man,” he had told Gray, let alone his best rifleman “to lead a bloody war correspondent into Ladysmith.”

Churchill, Gray later recalled, was “
more disappointed than I when I told him the news.” He was bored, frustrated and, he would later admit, “
eager for trouble.” By the time he saw Haldane leaving Long’s tent, even the armored train was starting to look appealing. If it was not a good idea, it was at least an interesting one. “
I accepted the invitation,” Churchill later wrote, “without demur.”

It was already raining when Thomas Walden, Churchill’s long-suffering if well-traveled valet, woke him at 4:30 the next morning. Amery, who had decided against his best judgment to get back on the train with Churchill, took one look out the tent flap, the rain drumming against the canvas sides, and didn’t stir from his sleeping bag. Although the train was scheduled to leave at 6:00 a.m., in all the trips it had made out of Estcourt, it had never actually departed before 8:00. “
It was no possible use spending two hours getting wet at the siding only 300 yards away,” Amery muttered to Churchill before closing his eyes and falling back asleep.

Churchill, already up and ready to go, decided to run over to the tracks to find out if the train would be leaving on time. Before he left, he woke Atkins and asked if he would like to join them. Although he was as eager as Churchill to get news from Ladysmith, Atkins refused the offer. His job was to tell the story of the war from the British point of view, he said, and if he ended up being captured by the Boers, his editor would hold him “very much to blame.” After
listening carefully, Churchill gravely replied that while he agreed with Atkins and knew that his own reasoning was far less logical, he had “a feeling, a sort of intuition, that if I go something will come of it.”