Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill (23 page)

In 1891, Churchill’s father, Randolph, had traveled to South Africa at the invitation of Cecil Rhodes, then prime minister of Cape Colony. Already beginning to suffer from the mental degeneration that would lead to his death just four years later, Randolph had hoped that the trip might improve his health and perhaps even revive the political career he had wantonly destroyed. He had brought with him
Thomas Walden, the valet who now traveled with Winston, and, before setting sail, had also signed on as a correspondent with the
Daily Graphic
, the same newspaper for which Winston would cover the prelude to the Spanish-American War.

Randolph’s dispatches, however, which were supposed to simply relate his adventures and describe this exotic land, were far more controversial than his son’s had ever been. Never one to mince words, he had spent his three months in southern Africa insulting nearly everyone who had the misfortune to make an appearance in one of his articles. He even attacked the women of his own, exalted social class. After visiting a diamond mine and seeing how incredibly dangerous it was to extract “
from the depths of the ground, solely for the wealthy classes, a tiny crystal to be used for the gratification of female vanity,” Randolph had, to the horror and outrage of his British readership, come “coldly to the conclusion that, whatever may be the origin of man, the woman is descended from an ape.”

The Boers themselves, who failed to meet Randolph’s exacting standards in any respect, could not hope to escape his scathing critique.
Although he was more than justified in his criticism of their treatment of native Africans, he did not confine his attacks to human rights abuses, lashing out at the Boers for what he perceived to be their lack of hygiene, innate laziness and complete and willful ignorance. “
The Boer farmer…is perfectly uneducated,” Randolph had sneered. “His simple ignorance is unfathomable, and this in stolid composure he shares with his wife, his sons, his daughters, being proud that his children should grow up as ignorant, as uncultivated, as hopelessly unprogressive as himself.”

It had not taken long for news of the former Chancellor of the Exchequer’s jaw-droppingly offensive articles to make its way into every parlor and pub in London. The response in the British press had been fast and unforgiving. “
Lord Randolph Churchill in his time has played many parts, but not even in the famous somersault which terminated his career as leader of the House of Commons…has he afforded the public a more unseemly exhibition of irresponsibility than in his letters from South Africa,” a journalist for the
Review
of Reviews
spat. “They furnish the culminating evidence, if further evidence were necessary, as to the impossibility of Lord Randolph Churchill as the leader of men.”

Randolph had been well aware of the offense he was giving, and the effect it was having both in South Africa and in England. Like his rebellious wife, however, he was uninterested in and unconcerned by others’ opinions of him, no matter how damaging they might be to his political career and personal reputation, not to mention his country’s relationship with the Transvaal. “
I have composed here a sixth letter to the
Daily Graphic
in which I again come down on these Boers heavily,” he wrote cheerfully to Jennie. “I imagine they will be furious when they see what I write of them.”

Winston, however, who was then sixteen years old, did care what people said about his father, and he was outraged by the attacks in the newspapers. “
You cannot imagine what vials of wrath you have uncorded [
sic
],” he had written to Randolph from Harrow. “All the papers simply rave….The
Standard
quotes the
Speaker
& is particularly offensive. It states that—but oh I will not bore you with the yapping of these curs.” A few months later, he again wrote to his father, still angrily defending him, but, because Randolph’s articles had only grown more offensive and outrageous, now also concerned for his safety. “
I hear the horrid Boers are incensed with you,” he wrote. “It would have been much wiser, if you had waited till you came back before you ‘slanged the beggars.’ ”

Churchill could have had no doubt that most, if not all, of the men now staring at him had heard about his father’s trip just eight years earlier and the defamatory things he had written about the Boers. As he stood alone, separated from the other prisoners and the object of intense interest by his captors, he began to fall “
prey to gnawing anxiety.” Struggling to come up with answers to any questions the Boers might ask him, he could not help but consider the possibility that he would be executed. “What sort of appearance,” he
wondered, could he “keep up if I were soon and suddenly told that my hour had come.”

When the field cornet returned with Churchill’s credentials fifteen minutes later, he said nothing beyond brusquely ordering him to rejoin the other prisoners. Churchill realized with a wave of relief that he would not be killed. Neither, however, would he be freed. Despite the fact that moments earlier he had feared for his life, Churchill could not resist again protesting his capture. A Scottish Boer standing nearby laughed at him. “
Oh,” he said, “we do not catch lords’ sons every day.” Joining in his laughter, the rest of the men assured Churchill that he would be allowed to play football in prison, but made it clear that they would keep an especially close eye on their young British aristocrat.

After a ten-mile march, without food, water or relief from the rain, the men finally reached the ravaged town of Colenso. They were taken to a corrugated-iron shed near the station, a place that Churchill had seen on his first ride aboard the armored train, little thinking that he would soon be imprisoned there. As he tried to step deeper into the shed, he heard the dry, crackling sound of paper at his feet and looked down to find that the floor was covered with old railway forms and account books, ripped, stained and piled at least four inches deep. Above him, in the raftered ceiling, a skylight blurred as the rain fell on it in a dull, heavy tapping.

Outside, the Boers prepared dinner for their prisoners. Finally opening the shed door, they beckoned to the men to come out and eat. Before them burned two fires, near which lay an ox that had clearly been slain only minutes before. As the men, feeling slightly like cannibals but too hungry to care, tore bloody strips of meat from the carcass, speared them on sticks and cooked them over the fires, the Boers stood around them, watching quietly.

Churchill struck up a conversation with two of the men. They
were, he would later write, “
English by race, Afrikanders by birth, Boers by choice.” Although they disagreed with him on why the war was being waged and who would win it, by the time the prisoners had finished eating, they regarded Churchill as a friend. One of the men even pulled off the blanket he had been wearing like a cloak, his head sticking out of a hole in the middle, and handed it to Churchill.

Even with a full stomach and wrapped in the Boer’s blanket, Churchill had difficulty sleeping that night. He had fallen into a dark, brooding mood. With the loss of his freedom, he had, for the first time, also lost his ferocious grip on life. He was no longer master of his fate, in command of his own future. Robbed of his ability to make even the most basic decisions—where he went, how long he stayed, what he ate—he felt stripped of that part of his personality that had most defined him from his youth. “
It seemed that love of life was gone,” he would later write, “and I thought almost with envy of a soldier I had seen during the fight lying quite still on the embankment, secure in the calm philosophy of death.”

Haldane too found himself so frustrated and discouraged that he was unable to summon the strength and determination he would need if he were to win back his freedom. For Haldane, searching for a means of escape was not only his best hope of regaining his pride and returning to the war, it was his sworn duty as a military officer. Nearly twenty years earlier, during the First Boer War, England had attempted to reform and modernize its military law by passing the Army Act. Haldane couldn’t remember the exact clause that referred to the obligations of a prisoner of war, but he did remember that the implication was “
if any officer, a prisoner, sees the opportunity of escaping, and does not take it, he can be punished.”

The problem was that no one ever told these young men, in extraordinarily desperate and dangerous situations, exactly how they were supposed to pull off this feat. In the gloom of the metal shed, Haldane could feel the weight of the problem lying heavily on his shoulders. Tired and dispirited, he looked up at the raftered ceiling and studied its darkened skylight. He could, he thought, somehow
shimmy up to the rafters, shatter the skylight, crawl out onto the roof and jump to the ground. There were guards, but not on all sides of the building, and in the dark and pouring rain escape was possible, although certainly at the risk of his life.

As much as Haldane longed for his freedom, in his exhaustion and sorrow he didn’t have the heart to try that night. Unfortunately, that first night in captivity, he would later realize with deep regret, was his best chance. “
I think that it is a cardinal fact that no time should be lost in effecting one’s escape,” he would later write, “for every mile one is removed deeper into the enemy’s country it will be found that the precautions to prevent this become greater.”

When Churchill woke early the next morning after a fitful night, he listened to the sharp sounds of the other men’s snores and watched the first light of dawn filter into the shed from the skylight above him. As he lay on the cluttered floor, the memory of where he was and why he was there came back to him in a sudden, sickening rush, and the reality of his situation descended “with a slap.” With it, however, returned his iron resolve. It was true that he was a prisoner, but prisoners, he thought, can escape.

While Haldane had looked above him for help, Churchill stared down at the trash covering his shoes. Maybe he didn’t need to go anywhere. Maybe all he needed to do was to remain there, hidden, while the rest of the men were led away. “
Why not lie buried underneath this litter until prisoners and escort had marched away together?” he thought. “Would they count? Would they notice?” Like Haldane’s, however, Churchill’s hesitation proved fatal to his plan. While he was still considering the strength of his strategy, the shed door opened, and a guard ordered them all outside.

Soon after a breakfast of last night’s oxen, even less appealing on the second day, and a puddle of rainwater, they resumed their march. They were, Churchill wrote, a “sorry gang of dirty, tramping prisoners, but yesterday the soldiers of the Queen.” The rains of the day before had gone, and the skies had cleared, but the gullies they had to wade through were now swollen into broad, fast-moving streams, and there was no shelter from the pitiless South African sun. What
was more trying to Churchill than his wet feet and his sweltering body were the constant stares of the men guarding him, the “irritating disdain and still more irritating pity.”

Later in the day, as they drew nearer to Ladysmith, the men looked up to see hanging above them a sight they had often seen from the hills surrounding Estcourt: General White’s lonely balloon. Hovering over the besieged town, its goldbeater’s skin—the outer membrane of a calf’s intestine that’s traditionally used in making gold leaf—catching the sun, it was a fresh reminder to the prisoners of the extent of the disaster that had befallen them. Only days earlier, they had pitied the men trapped in Ladysmith. Now the fate of those soldiers seemed far better than their own. “
Beleaguered Ladysmith,” Churchill wrote, “with its shells, its flies, its fever, and its filth seemed a glorious paradise to me.”