Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill (33 page)

“
Cannot get out,” Haldane said. “The sentry suspects. It’s all up. Can you get back in?” On the opposite side of the fence, alone and terrified of being found, Churchill knew that he had no one and nothing to help him, and was truly on his own. Instead of panicking, however, he suddenly felt freed. “All my fears fell from me at once,” he wrote. “To go back was impossible….Fate pointed me onward.” There was nothing to do now but test his luck. Whispering through the iron paling for the last time, he told Haldane, “I shall go on alone.”

CHAPTER 19

TOUJOURS DE L’AUDACE

A
s he climbed out of his tangled hiding place, straightening his back and turning toward the garden gate, Churchill knew only one thing with any certainty: He would be caught. “
Of course, I shall be recaptured, but I will at least have a run for my money,” he said to himself. “Failure being almost certain, no odds against success affected me. All risks were less than the certainty.”

Taking Hofmeyr’s hat out of his pocket, Churchill put it on and strode into the garden as if he were as free as any man in Pretoria. As he passed the house, its lights glowing, voices drifting through the windows, he made no attempt to hide or even keep to the shadows. “
I said to myself, ‘
Toujours de l’audace
,’ ” he wrote, quoting the famous words of Georges Danton, a leader of the French Revolution who was eventually guillotined. “Always more audacity.”

Churchill passed through the same gate he had watched the two men walk through just minutes earlier, and then turned left into the street. He was, he thought with exultation, “
at large in Pretoria.” There was a sentry only five yards away, but Churchill did not give him a second look. Although he was known to most of the ZARPs by sight, he walked with such confidence that if the sentry did see him, his suspicions were not aroused. Outwardly, Churchill continued
on his way, utterly unruffled. Inwardly, he resisted “with the utmost difficulty an impulse to run.”

As Churchill made his way through the town, wearing the brown flannel suit he had ordered from the prison, his hat slouching low over his eyes, no one paid any attention to him. He sauntered down the middle of the road and, because he hated whistling, hummed a carefree tune. Looking the picture of comfort and ease, he kept walking east on Skinner Street until everything in Pretoria that he most feared and hated, and that represented his loathed imprisonment, slowly disappeared behind him—President Kruger’s house, the train station where he had first arrived nearly a month earlier and, above all, the Staats Model School.

Even walking at a leisurely pace, Churchill soon reached the outskirts of Pretoria. There were fewer stone buildings here, more shanties and modest cottages, and, in the distance, the steep banks of a low, muddy river—the Apies. The river, whose name means “little ape” in Afrikaans, flows north into the Pienaars, a tributary of the thousand-mile-long Limpopo. Narrow and shallow, the Apies could easily be forded, but as Churchill approached the river, he noticed that a small bridge had been built over it. Stepping onto the bridge, he sat down and tried to figure out what to do next.

Although in many ways he was an optimist, even a dreamer, Churchill was also a realist. He had no illusions about how difficult it would be simply to get out of Pretoria, let alone cross hundreds of miles of enemy territory. “
I was in the heart of the enemy’s country,” he wrote. “All exits were barred. The town was picketed, the country was patrolled, the trains were searched, the line was guarded.”

He was also painfully aware that he was completely unprepared. Escaping with Haldane and Brockie had been one thing. Escaping alone was something else altogether. His friends not only had the compass and the map, they had opium tablets and even meat lozenges. Tinned disks of dried meat that one British company advertised as “a meal in the vest pocket…for tourists, athletes, invalids,” the lozenges could sustain a hungry man on the veld for days. Taking an inventory of his own pockets, Churchill found that beyond £75,
four slabs of melting chocolate and a crumbling biscuit they were empty. Even if he wasn’t quickly recaptured, he wondered, how could he find his way to freedom, or survive the journey?

Only one direction offered any prospect of success. The closest city of the British-held Cape Colony, where he had landed with Buller, lay almost five hundred miles to the south. Rhodesia, now known as Zimbabwe, was closer, about three hundred miles northeast of Pretoria, but the Boers fiercely patrolled its border. In fact, the city of Mafeking, which sat on its border, was, like Ladysmith, under siege. To the west, below the Kalahari Desert, the British protectorate of Bechuanaland was teeming with Boers. Churchill knew that he had to go east, to Portuguese East Africa. What he did not know was how he could possibly get there.

As he contemplated the hopelessness of his situation, his feet dangling over the Apies, Churchill looked up and caught sight of an old friend in the night sky: Orion. A year earlier in Egypt, he had become separated from his unit and lost his way in the desert. Growing more and more desperate for water, he had found Orion, one of the brightest constellations in the northern sky, and followed it to the Nile. Now, in southern Africa rather than northern, he again looked to Orion for help. “
He had given me water,” he wrote. “Now he should lead me to freedom. I could not endure the want of either.”

Strengthened by the help of this welcome celestial guidepost, Churchill summoned the courage he needed to keep going. Leaving the bridge behind, he began walking again, still east but also south this time, moving steadily farther from the center of town. The land surrounding Pretoria was very different from the view he had had from Estcourt. Instead of mile after mile of flat veld, the landscape here was broken by hills, dells and valleys, even trees and shrubs. The climate was much milder, but the nights, he knew, would be colder.

After walking for half an hour, Churchill suddenly came upon a set of train tracks. It was an opportunity, but also a danger. He could follow the tracks, but it was impossible to know with any certainty where they would lead him. Three railway lines ran through Pretoria. Only one carried trains in the direction Churchill needed
to go—east, to the Indian Ocean coast and the neutral Portuguese colony. The other, however, ran north, toward a town called Pietersburg, which was just south of Rhodesia and the assiduously patrolled border.

Churchill stood for a while, peering into the distance, trying to determine in what direction the tracks beside him were headed. Unlike railways in the relatively featureless Natal, where he was captured, trains in the Transvaal were forced to climb low mountains and skirt deep valleys, and rarely went in one direction for long. A man without a compass could very easily follow a railway line for miles in the wrong direction without knowing it. As far as Churchill could tell, and farther than he could see, the set of tracks at his feet traveled north. “
Still,” he thought, ever the optimist, “it might be only winding its way out among the hills.”

Either way, Churchill had little choice in the matter. This was the only railway line he had seen since his escape, and he had no idea where, or if, he would find another. The only thing he could do as he set off along the tracks was hope against hope that they would, eventually, lead him in the right direction.

Although he could not have been more vulnerable or in greater danger, Churchill clung to the theory that had brought him over the wall, out of the garden and through Pretoria.
Toujours de l’audace
. “
When hope had departed,” he wrote, “fear had gone as well.” As he followed the tracks, he ignored the picket fires, bright and flickering against the night sky, and he walked without flinching past the “watchers,” the men who were posted at every bridge.

Reveling in the cool night air as it swept against his face and listening to the red dirt crunch beneath his boots, Churchill gloried in his release from captivity. He knew that he could be caught at any moment, but for now he was free. Even if he had only a single hour alone, outside the walls that had so recently penned him in, it seemed to him well worth the risk.

More even than his freedom, Churchill delighted in the thrill of adventure, which he had longed for since the war began. “
A wild feeling of exhilaration took hold of me,” he wrote. Flush with the success of the first phase of his escape, he boldly began to plan the next. He knew that if he was ever going to make it to Portuguese East Africa, he could not do so by walking. It was too far. The obvious, and only, answer was a train. “
I would board a train in motion,” he thought, “and hide under the seats, on the roof, on the couplings—anywhere.”

It would be a grand adventure, an exploit of the most romantic kind. He at once imagined himself as one of the principal characters in the 1882 novel
Vice Versa
. In the book, a father and son switch bodies after coming in contact with a magical stone from India. While his son runs his company, the father, Paul Bultitude, is forced to go to the boy’s boarding school, and run away by hiding on a train. “
I thought of Paul Bultitude’s escape from school,” Churchill wrote. “I saw myself emerging from under the seat, and bribing or persuading some fat first-class passenger to help me.”

Although he could not jump on a train that was moving at full speed, Churchill thought that if it slowed down long enough, he might make it. Haldane and Brockie had worried about his fitness and his injured shoulder, but he had climbed over the fence of the Staats Model School without their help. He was young and thin and, most important of all, determined.

For the next two hours, Churchill followed the tracks with no sign of a train. Finally, in the distance, he saw something that instantly stood out among the natural surroundings of rocks, dirt and trees—the unmistakable bright red and green flashing of signal lights. He had found a station.

For the first time since his escape, Churchill decided that the best strategy would be to hide. Quickly making his way around the back of the station, he found a ditch about two hundred yards from the tracks and, sliding down its crumbling sides, settled in to wait for a train. “What train should I take?” he asked himself, and instantly answered, “The first, of course.”

At the outset of war, southern Africa had about forty-six hundred miles of railway lines, about thirteen hundred miles of which were in the Boer republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. In times of peace, the railway system was carefully maintained and run with the same precision and consistency with which it would have been managed in Europe. Now that there was war, however, everything was, in the words of Sir Édouard Girouard, a railway builder and chronicler of the war, “
suddenly and entirely altered.”

From one day to the next, there could be profound and completely unpredictable changes to the lines, changes that had a devastating effect on the trains’ ability to run on time, or at all. It was impossible to know, for instance, if a watering station, as essential as coal in keeping the steam engines running, still existed, had accidentally been destroyed during the fighting or was intentionally sabotaged. Instead of carrying a small number of passengers, the trains now shuttled tens of thousands of men across the republics, often making unscheduled stops during which they unloaded enormous quantities of supplies. The trains themselves had also become dangerous to ride. The drivers were overworked and exhausted, and even the most unreliable engines could not be spared and so were rarely pulled off the line for repairs.