Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill (19 page)

When Churchill approached the train, which in the dim, early-morning light looked far more impressive and substantial than it was, he was surprised to find that it was already packed and ready to leave. Eager to get the trip over with, Haldane had insisted on starting early. There was no time to go back for Amery, or to change his mind.

Quickly assessing the situation, Churchill climbed into the front truck with Haldane, where he would have the best vantage point. Already inside were the seven-pounder that had arrived from Pietermaritzburg the day before and four sailors from the HMS
Tartar
, who would man the gun should it come to that. Behind them, stretching down the tracks, was a short line of cars and a large crowd of men. There were, in order, another armored car, the engine with its wide-mouthed black funnel and narrow tender, two more armored cars and finally an ordinary, low-sided car that held the tools and materials they would need if the line was damaged.

There was some confusion and difficulty while the soldiers tried to climb into the armored trucks, but as they knew themselves to be not just uniquely vulnerable but the object of great amusement as they scrambled over the tall, slate-colored sides, they moved quickly. Haldane’s Dublin Fusiliers, their wool blankets rolled and hooked into suspenders that crisscrossed their backs, their arms straining as they gripped the sides, heaved themselves over the top of the first armored car. There were too many of them to fit, however, so one section had to move down the line and pile into an armored car behind the engine with a company of Durban Light Infantry and a small group of civilians. They were taking along a few platelayers and a telegraphist, who carried with him a small instrument that would allow Haldane to tap into the wires at the stations they passed and send messages back to Long.

As the train pulled out of the station a few minutes later, rain
splashing on the peaked tops of the khaki pith helmets crowded into open cars, Colonel Walter Kitchener, a member of Buller’s staff and the youngest brother of Lieutenant General Horatio Kitchener, stood nearby, watching in shock. He had not known until that morning that Long intended to send out the train after the Boers had been spotted so close to Estcourt just the day before. Turning to the colonel, Kitchener said bluntly that he did not expect to ever again see any of the men now disappearing in the distance. “
In dispatching the train,” he told Long, he had “sent the occupants to their death.”

CHAPTER 11

INTO THE LION’S JAWS

F
or the first fourteen miles, Churchill could see nothing but the wide, seemingly empty veld that stretched before him. There wasn’t “
a sign of opposition or indeed of life or movement on the broad undulations of the Natal landscape,” he wrote. To the European eye, used to moors and woodlands, fields and pastures, the land seemed to be an open expanse with little variety in its flat, scrubby topography. There were a few kopjes, or low hills, but rather than relieving the monotony, they seemed only to emphasize it. “
If the veld can only be compared with the sea,” one contemporary historian of the war wrote, “the kopjes…resemble in as marked a degree the isolated islands which rise abruptly from the waters of some tropic archipelago.” Despite what seemed like an almost hypnotic, unwavering sameness, however, the veld was actually filled with thousands of places, small hills and valleys, folds and nooks, where the enemy could, and did, hide.

In stark contrast to the British, the Boers saw no shame in hiding. On the contrary, to them the shame would have been in risking the life God had given them simply in the pursuit of personal glory or, in their enemy’s case, to gratify some inconceivable British vanity. For them, war was not an exciting adventure but the cold, cruel, ines
capable business of life. The Boer “
went out in a businesslike way to kill men,” Amery wrote, “as he would to kill dangerous wild beasts, and he saw no more glory in dying at an enemy’s hand than in being eaten by a lion.”

The Boers knew the veld inside and out, every river and kopje, boulder and bush, and they used it all to get as close as possible to the enemy without being seen.
Where there was no natural feature in the landscape to shield them, they made their own. They built sangars, or small shelters, out of piles of stones. They dug deep and incredibly long trenches, some stretching for as many as thirty miles, and covered them so expertly with grass and twigs that even to a British marksman within rifle range they blended seamlessly into the surrounding landscape.

They also had, in their simple leather kits, the one thing that could almost guarantee their invisibility, even after they had fired their guns: smokeless gunpowder. Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, had patented a form of smokeless gunpowder twelve years earlier, dramatically changing warfare and making it almost impossible to track down a sniper. The impact of these inventions was so profound that a year later, after seeing his own accidental obituary—to his horror titled “The Merchant of Death Is Dead”—the Swedish inventor would establish the Nobel Prize.

Unlike the Boers, who had been sharpshooters nearly all their lives, this was an entirely new world to the British. So alien was the concept of a man who shot from a distance and in hiding, rather than in a highly visible battlefield formation, that even the word “sniper” was new to them. It had originated in India, where riflemen skilled enough to shoot a snipe, a small bird with a notoriously erratic flight pattern, were referred to as snipers. Churchill himself had used the word in print for the first time just a few years earlier, in his book
The Story of the Malakand Field Force
, and so foreign did it seem to him that every time he wrote it, he put it in quotation marks.

Instead of admiring the effectiveness of the Boers’ guerrilla tactics, however, the British derided them as ungallant and cowardly. The Boers were “
a people whose only mode of warfare…has been
that of crawling behind stones and picking off their enemy like springbok while themselves well protected,” a British expatriate, or Uitlander, sneered in a letter to a Natal newspaper. “A wise mode of warfare no doubt, but not one that fills us with admiration.” A soldier didn’t hide in the brush like an animal. He stood in the open and faced his death like a man.

For the British, war was about romance and gallantry. They liked nothing more than a carefully pressed uniform, a parade ground and a razor-sharp fighting line. At most, British soldiers spent two months of the year actually training to fight. The other ten were devoted to parading, attending to their uniforms and waiting on their officers, for whom they were expected to serve as cook, valet, porter and gardener. “
The actual conditions of warfare were studiously disregarded,” Amery wrote. “Nowhere was there any definite preparation for war, nowhere any clear conception that war was the one end and object for which armies exist. In their place reigned a…hazy confidence that British good fortune and British courage would always come successfully out of any war that the inscrutable mysteries of foreign policy might bring about.”

What took the place of actual training was an emphasis on character and courage so extreme it left room for little else. British officers in particular were expected not only to be brave, but to show a complete disregard for their own safety, an approach to warfare that often led to their untimely, if widely lauded, death. General Penn Symons was far from the only British officer killed in war because he refused to find cover. “
These experienced soldiers never care how fast bullets may whizz about them,” Solomon Plaatje, a native South African intellectual, journalist and statesman, wrote after observing the British army during the war. “They stroll about in a heavy volley far more recklessly than we walk through a shower of rain.”

As the world had changed and warfare had changed with it, even the British army had been forced to make adjustments, but they had been bitter pills to swallow. The most painful change had been the loss of their dashing red jackets, which had earned them the often reviled nickname redcoats. Although they had originally been
a practicality, allowing them to find one another quickly on smoky battlefields before the days of smokeless gunpowder, Britons had taken great pride in their traditional uniforms, and they hated the new ones. Not only were they forced to wear the dull, unromantic khaki, derived from the Urdu word for “dust,” but they were prohibited from wearing their gleaming medals and ordered to cover their swords, hilts and scabbards in khaki paint. The new uniforms, they grumbled, left them looking less like military officers than bus drivers.

Whether they liked it or not, however, battle by battle the British were learning from the Boers. They were beginning to see the advantages of blending into their surroundings, being quiet and quick, and even ducking. “
When this siege is over this force ought to be the best fighting men in the world,” George Warrington Steevens wrote from Ladysmith. “We are learning lessons every day from the Boer. We are getting to know his game, and learning to play it ourselves….Nothing but being shot at will ever teach men the art of using cover.”

Whatever their efforts with khaki uniforms and painted swords, the men on the armored train could not help but be painfully aware that they were not invisible to anyone, let alone the Boers. Standing out in bold relief against the flat landscape and rocky kopjes, the train, in Churchill’s words, looked like a “
long brown rattling serpent with the rifles bristling from its spotted sides.” Loudly puffing and chuffing along the tracks, it sent a stream of smoke into the air so visible it must have seemed to the Boers that the British were signaling to them exactly where to strike. “
It would be hard,” Amery wrote, “to devise a better target than…that death trap.”

In fact, not far away, standing on a hillside with about three thousand men and four field guns, was Louis Botha, listening as the train, a little early this morning, traced its well-known route to Colenso. While Churchill had spent the past two weeks trying to
find a way to get nearer to Ladysmith, Botha had been inching closer to Estcourt. It seemed that they were destined to meet somewhere in the middle.

Had Botha had his way, they would have met sooner, but he, and all of the burghers, had been held back by Joubert. Although the commandant general, a kindly, elderly man, was revered for his bravery and brilliance during the First Boer War, nearly twenty years earlier, he was also disparaged by many Boers for his longing for peace and his insistence that, although they had been forced to fight, they would conduct themselves with the utmost compassion and civility.

Joubert even went so far as to prohibit his men from attacking a British force in retreat, believing that it was wrong to take advantage of his enemy’s misfortune. After one victory, Joubert had, to his officers’ wild frustration, refused to allow them to follow the retreating forces, which had proceeded to make their way to Ladysmith, and the protection of White, largely unmolested. When asked why he would not let them finish the job they had so successfully begun, Joubert responded by quoting a famous Dutch saying: “
When God holds out a finger, do not take the whole hand.”

Even Botha, whom Joubert trusted and admired, had difficulty convincing him that, if the Boers were going to defeat the British, they would have to do more than just defend their land. They would have to go on the offensive. Finally, after weeks of persistent pressure from Botha, Joubert had agreed to allow him to go deeper into Natal, and to take with him the men and arms he would need to show the British what it meant to fight the Boers.

Moving slowly, the armored train took about an hour to reach the first station at Frere, a small settlement with an iron bridge that crossed the Blaauwkrantz River. At this point, Haldane was ready to turn back. Although they had yet to see any Boers, the closer they got to the Tugela River, the more likely that was to change. Some
how, however, he knew that he would keep going. Although Haldane was the commanding officer on the train, he had with him a man whose opinions about the objective of their journey, and the risks they should take, were stronger and more irresistible than his own. “
Had I been alone and not had my impetuous young friend Churchill with me…I might have thought twice before throwing myself into the lion’s jaws,” Haldane would later write. “But I was carried away by his ardour and departed from an attitude of prudence.”