Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill (28 page)

The day after the new prisoners arrived in Pretoria, Louis de Souza visited them at the Staats Model School. Concerned about the treatment of the POWs, he considered the prison an important part of his responsibilities. On November 19, however, he stayed so long his wife remarked on his late return in her diary that night.

As soon as he met de Souza, Churchill knew that he had found his man. Not only was the secretary of state for war willing to listen to his story, but he sympathized with the young correspondent and did what he could to help him. As Churchill’s time in captivity stretched from days to weeks, de Souza became increasingly indispensable
to him.
He gave Churchill news of the war, arranged for him to meet with high-ranking officials so that he could petition for his release in person, and even brought him baskets of fruit, many of which had a bottle of whiskey hidden in their depths, a forbidden gift that de Souza was also known to conceal in a pocket of his tailcoat.

In stark contrast to de Souza, the men directly responsible for running the prison had little interest in Churchill, or any of the men in their custody. The warden—the
commandant van de wacht
, or commandant of the guard—was a man named
R. W. L. Opperman, who, Churchill wrote with disgust, was “too fat to go and fight.” He was still a fierce proponent of the Boer cause, though, and, in the words of one of his prisoners, “
a terrible hater of the English.” Opperman’s assistant, Dr. Jan Gunning, was more courteous to the British officers and well liked by many of them, but he had little say in how the prison was run, so had less potential value to Churchill. He also had problems of his own. In times of peace, Gunning was the director of the State Museum, a role that he relished but that had gotten him into trouble.
Before the war, Cecil Rhodes, arguably the most hated man in the Transvaal, had offered him a lion for his pet project, a zoological garden that was to be built in Pretoria, and, unable to resist, he had accepted. When Kruger found out, Gunning nervously confided to Churchill, the president had been furious and had spoken “most harshly” to him.

Churchill’s only hope for a sympathetic hearing was de Souza. The secretary of state for war was not only concerned about the prisoners, he seemed to have a broader perspective than most Boers. He was, Churchill wrote, “
a far-seeing little man who had travelled to Europe, and had a very clear conception of the relative strengths of Britain and the Transvaal.”
Although de Souza had gone to Europe on an arms-buying mission three years earlier, when he was the first secretary in the Office of the Commandant General, like Joubert, he had continued to believe that war might be averted. When the end came, he had been devastated. “
Louis is worried to death!” his wife
had written in late September, just weeks before the Boers issued their ultimatum. “The General [Joubert] told him that he had given up all hope of peace tonight.”

As interested as de Souza was, however, his ability to help Churchill was severely limited. Although he held a powerful position in the Transvaal government, he himself had long been on shifting ground. Since the war had begun, his status in Pretoria had only become more tenuous.

As a member of the Volksraad, de Souza was an anomaly. His family had come to the Transvaal by way of not the Netherlands or France but Portugal. In the early nineteenth century, his grandparents had moved from Lisbon to the small Indian state of Goa, where his father, Mariano Luis, was born and where, according to family history, the rest of the family had been killed in an epidemic. In the mid-nineteenth century, Mariano Luis traveled as an orphan to Portuguese East Africa, modern-day Mozambique, on the Indian Ocean coast. After making his way to the Transvaal, he had met and married Trui Joubert, the young daughter of a
Voortrekker
and the distant cousin of Piet Joubert, now the commandant general.

Although Louis de Souza, the first child of Mariano Luis and Trui, had coursing through him the blood of one of the Transvaal’s oldest
Voortrekker
families, he still looked Portuguese. Small, thin, dark-haired and with a deep olive complexion, he instantly stood out among the pale, pink-cheeked Dutchmen who filled the streets of Pretoria. He was also, like his Portuguese grandfather, Catholic, a religious affiliation that the strongly Calvinistic Boers considered almost blasphemous. In fact, until 1858 no one outside the Dutch Reformed Church had even been allowed citizenship in the Transvaal, much less a place in its government.

Among his fellow Boers, de Souza also had one more strike against him: He was married to the daughter of an Englishman.
Although Marie de Souza had been born in Durban, not far from where Louis Botha had grown up, in the minds of many of her neighbors she was as British as the queen of England. Now that they were at war with the British Empire, the de Souzas were looked at with
even greater suspicion. Even Kruger did not fully trust them, asking Louis during an executive meeting of the Volksraad if his wife was English.

De Souza’s situation was not improved by the fact that he felt compassion not just for the prisoners but for the British citizens who had long been living in the Transvaal. Life for so-called Uitlanders, Afrikaans for “outlanders,” or “foreigners,” had never been easy, but as the Boers and the British inched toward war, it had become increasingly difficult.
Finally, on September 27, the Volksraad had passed a proclamation that ordered all British subjects to leave the country in the event of war. Although she had expected it, Marie had been horrified when, soon after the war began, she had watched as English citizens were crowded into cattle trucks and forcibly removed from the city.

Many Englishmen had come to de Souza, asking his advice and help. “
He has been so dreadfully worried over the uitlanders,” Marie confided to her diary. There was little de Souza could do, however, either for them or for himself. Even Churchill understood that his new friend had to be “
very careful.”

Despite his precarious position, de Souza continued to visit the men at the Staats Model School, and to spend much of his time while there with the prison’s most troublesome inmate. About a week and a half after Churchill had arrived in Pretoria, de Souza stopped by his dormitory, where he found his young friend standing before the map that had been drawn on the wall. Churchill had attached red and green paper squares to the map, indicating the various columns as he attempted to chart the war’s course. On this day, he had new information to add to his collage.

The day before, Churchill had received an unexpected windfall. While standing on the veranda, leaning on the railings, he had noticed a man with a red mustache walking quickly down the street, two collies trotting after him. Since coming to Pretoria, Churchill
had learned to pay careful attention to the townspeople. Although some, as Haldane wrote, looked “
as if they would be glad to have a shot at us through the railings,” a few showed the men not just sympathy but a willingness to help, even at great risk to themselves. As time went on, in fact, the sympathizers’ efforts to communicate with the prisoners would become increasingly elaborate, from a man who used his walking stick to tap out messages by Morse code to two young women who lived across the street from the Staats Model School and signaled news with a white flag from their veranda.

As the man with the mustache approached Churchill, he did not alter his pace. Just before he passed by, however, he said something that made Churchill’s heart soar. “Methuen beat the Boers to hell at Belmont,” he muttered. Paul Methuen was the general officer commanding the First Division of the British army, and his victory was all Churchill needed to lift his spirits and convince him that the war was finally turning his way. “
That night the air seemed cooler,” he wrote, “and the courtyard larger.”

When de Souza walked into his room the next day, Churchill was eager to discuss this new development in the war. “
What about Methuen?” he asked de Souza. “He has beaten you at Belmont. Now he should be across the Modder. In a few days he will relieve Kimberley.” De Souza, however, was unconcerned. Shrugging his shoulders, and without asking Churchill where he had gotten this information, he replied simply, “Who can tell?” Then, pressing his finger on the map, he said, “There stands old Piet Cronje in a position called Scholz Nek, and we don’t think Methuen will ever get past him.”

As it turned out, de Souza was right. The reason, however, was less Methuen and Cronjé than Joubert and Botha.
Just a few days before de Souza and Churchill stood over the hand-drawn map in the Staats Model School, Piet Joubert’s horse had stumbled and thrown him. The result of the Boers’ humiliating defeat at Belmont and Joubert’s injuries, which were so severe he had to return to Pretoria riding in a closed carriage, was that Botha was put in command. Botha’s promotion would be made permanent a few months later, when Joubert succumbed to peritonitis.

Joubert’s death devastated de Souza, who would be with him three months later when he died and would be a pallbearer at his funeral, but it freed Botha. The sudden turn of events meant that for the first time since the war began, Botha’s hands were finally untied. Just days before his fall, the commandant general had ordered his intense young general to pull back from Estcourt, where Botha had been relentlessly and successfully attacking the British forces in the wake of the armored train derailment. At first, Botha had refused the order, but when Joubert threatened to relieve him of his command, he had given in. With Joubert gone, there was finally no one to tell him no, no one to hold him back. Botha knew that left to his own devices, he could advance the war, and teach the arrogant British what the Boers were capable of.

Little more than a week after Botha was put in command, the British, to their horror, found themselves lurching from one defeat to another, a staggering series of losses that would come to be known as Black Week.
The first blow came on December 10, in the Battle of Stormberg, which, although the British had roughly three thousand men to the Boers’ fewer than two thousand, ended with nearly seven hundred British killed or captured. The very next day, Methuen fell to Cronjé and the legendary Boer general Koos de la Rey in the Battle of Magersfontein, known to the Boers as Scholz Nek, where the British lost almost a thousand men.

It did not take long for news of Black Week to reach London, where the reaction was not only shock but utter bewilderment. This was, after all, the “British century,” and no Briton then alive could remember a time when their empire had not dominated the world stage. As December 1899 brought with it news of devastating defeats at the hands of the Boers, an opponent they had dismissed as insignificant and unsophisticated, a chilling thought crept in: Would this, the last month of the century, mark the beginning of the end of the British Empire? To Queen Victoria, who had been on the throne for sixty-three of the past one hundred years, the question was one that must not even be asked. “
Please understand that there is no one depressed in this house,” she told Arthur Balfour, then leader of the
House of Commons. “We are not interested in the possibilities of defeat; they do not exist.”

For the men of the Staats Model School, the news of Black Week came as a particularly painful blow. They had learned to be wary of what they were told by the gloating guards or read for themselves in the shamelessly slanted Boer newspapers, but they could no longer deceive themselves that the war was going well. “
All the news we heard in Pretoria was derived from Boer sources, and was hideously exaggerated and distorted,” Churchill would later write. “However much one might doubt and discount these tales, they made a deep impression. A month’s feeding on such literary garbage weakens the constitution of the mind. We wretched prisoners lost heart.”

The guards, naturally, took great satisfaction in the course of the war, and rarely missed an opportunity to taunt their prisoners about the “
huge slaughters and shameful flights of the British.” Even in the best of times, the men now guarding the prison were not, for the most part, gentle men. Now, far from the war and surrounded by men who, although they were prisoners now, were at least fresh from the battlefield, they choked on their humiliation and barely contained their rage. Adrian Hofmeyr, a clergyman from Cape Colony who had been taken prisoner because of his British sympathies, so detested the guards at the Staats Model School that he would later devote an entire chapter in his book
The Story of My Captivity
to detailing their offenses. The ZARPs, he wrote, were “
as brutal a lot of men, with very few exceptions, as one could find in a day’s march.”