Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill (36 page)

While Pretoria seethed with fury and frustration and launched a sprawling manhunt for Winston Churchill, hundreds of miles to the south, in the thick of the war, Louis Botha was doing what the British Empire had thought impossible: winning. Standing on Hlangwane Hill, a five-hundred-foot-high, scrub-covered kopje on the outskirts of Colenso, halfway between Estcourt and Ladysmith, Botha was planning a new battle. For the British, it would be the most devastating yet.

Even John Atkins, Churchill’s friend and fellow journalist,
could feel the battle coming. He was in Frere, the little town where Churchill had been captured and where the British army had moved after Buller finally arrived at the front. They had twenty thousand men now, enough, Buller hoped, to finally free Ladysmith. Botha, however, had nearly as many, an arsenal that was the envy of Europe, and a string of victories behind him. Even Buller, who had as much experience fighting in South Africa as any man in the British army, did not know what to expect. “
At Frere we are now spending a period of deep and peculiar calm, a calm significant because it is itself a symptom of the storm,” Atkins had written just a week before Churchill’s escape. “It is a period of preparation—the machine is being perfected—and it will end, if the Boers stay in their present position near Colenso, in one of the great battles, perhaps the greatest battle of the campaign.”

As the British army, with Atkins in tow, had shifted its camp from Estcourt to Frere, warily moving north, they had passed the destruction that the Boers had left in their wake. Their enemy had used explosives to blow up the little iron railway bridge at Frere. “
It is a beautiful job,” Atkins had to admit. “The bridge has been lifted bodily from its masonry piers and lies in the river bed, the iron framework and girders contorted like a tangle of forest creepers.” They had also destroyed the six-hundred-foot-long bridge that spanned the Tugela and led to Colenso, and that had cost £80,000 to build.

Colenso itself was a disaster scene, with every house looted and vandalized, not, it seemed, to prevent those who lived in the largely English town from helping the enemy, but simply to punish them. “
They pulled drawers out of chests and broke them; they ripped open mattresses and distributed the flock with amazing industry equally over the floors and stairs,” Atkins wrote. “They burned photographs; they broke the glass of pictures and windows; they stuffed clocks upside down into flower-pots; and they pulled up flowers in the garden and threw them in at the windows.”

No scenes of destruction, however, affected Atkins like the sight of the wreckage of the armored train. It lay just a mile north of the
Frere station, “
a melancholy heap.” Little had changed since the day he and Amery had watched, shocked and sickened, as the engine limped back to Estcourt alone, its broken cars and broken men left in smoking, bloody heaps behind it. The car that had been knocked over on its side, wedging the third car between it and the tender, was now home to a military cobbler who had set up a small shop within its shattered interior. The first car that had been knocked off the rails when it plowed into the boulders still lay on its back, its wheels in the air like the stiff legs of a dead animal. All the cars, whether on the tracks or off, were riddled with huge holes from the Boer shells that had ripped through them—“clean as a whistle where the shells came in,” Atkins wrote, “and jagged and gaping where they passed out.” Next to the wreckage lay a small mound, the grave that had been dug by the Boers for the British soldiers who had died in the attack. Men from Buller’s Border Regiment had since added a stone border and a tombstone upon which they had carved the words “Here lieth the remains of those who were killed in the armoured train on Nov. 15th, 1899.”

In the month that had passed since the Boers had buried those men and imprisoned Churchill, Botha had never stopped fighting. In that time, he had won not just battles but the respect and loyalty of his men. For most Boer generals, it was a daily struggle to persuade the fiercely independent burghers to follow orders, or even to stay with their regiment rather than simply riding off on their own horses, returning by the hundreds to their families and farms. For Botha, they stayed. Although, at thirty-seven years of age, he seemed to most Boers to be extraordinarily, even ridiculously, young to be leading a regiment, let alone the entire southern force, it was apparent to all who met him that he was a natural leader. His men, both those he led and those he was supposed to follow, loved him. Jan Smuts, the brilliant young Transvaal state attorney, wrote of Botha that he had a natural sympathy that made it possible for him to “
get extremely close to others and to read their minds and divine their characters with marvellous accuracy. It gave him an intuitive power of understanding and appreciating men which was very rare.”

Botha also had a quality that would have been extremely rare if not unheard of in a British general: genuine modesty. Everyone, regardless of rank, achievement or, certainly, social standing, was welcome in his tent.
It was the simplest sort of tent. He had found it at Penn Symons’s camp at Dundee, and it held little more than a packing case and a single chair. Botha himself rarely sat in the chair, insisting on giving it to any elderly burgher who visited him and quietly taking a seat for himself on the ground.

Botha knew that in the coming months he would need all the goodwill his strength and humility had engendered.
In fact, even he was struggling to hold his men at the Tugela River as Buller marched toward them with sixteen battalions of infantry, the largest force the British army had sent into battle in fifty years. On December 13, the day after Churchill’s escape, they had retreated from Hlangwane Hill, which was central to their defense. Telegraphing Pretoria for advice, Botha had received in reply only religious fervor and dire warnings from Kruger. “
God will fight for you,” the president promised his young general. “So give up position under no circumstances…dead or alive.” The next morning, Kruger sent a second telegram, again urging Botha and his men to hold fast. “Understand please, if you give up position there, you give up the whole land to the enemy,” he wrote. “Fight in the name of the Lord….Fear not the enemy but fear God.”

That night, with just eight hundred men, Botha reoccupied Hlangwane Hill. His force was waiting there now, watching in tense silence for Buller’s khaki army to appear below them. Buller knew they were there, the only real obstacle in his path. “
Only this we know, that at the end of this calm we advance to relieve Ladysmith,” Atkins wrote. “The Boers wait for us on the hills.”

CHAPTER 21

ALONE

A
s Botha looked to God for help in the coming clash of thousands of men at Colenso, Churchill was on his knees alone on the northern veld, praying that he would survive his solitary trial. When he looked up, the sun had begun to set. “
The western clouds flushed into fire,” he wrote. “The shadows of the hills stretched out across the valley.”

Even for the Boers, whose idea of a good neighbor was one who lived at least a day’s wagon ride away, Churchill was in the middle of nowhere. Since escaping from the Staats Model School, he had been following the Delagoa Bay Railway, the line that connected Pretoria with the Portuguese port of Delagoa Bay on the Indian Ocean and that had opened only four years earlier. If he had been able to sit down with a map, a pencil and a ruler, he could have drawn nearly a straight line, roughly following the 25° latitude, between Pretoria and Lourenço Marques, the capital of Portuguese East Africa. Even after riding for hours on a train, however, Churchill was less than a third of the way there. He had jumped off in an area called Witbank, a small farming and mining community that was about seventy miles east of Pretoria, but still more than two hundred miles west of Lourenço Marques.

As Churchill cautiously stepped out of the grove in which he had been hiding, he could see for some distance in every direction. Not that there was much to see. A small town lay perhaps three miles to the west, its tin roofs catching the last of the fading light. A rough Boer wagon trundled heavily across the landscape in the direction of the town. In between were a few farms, scattered here and there and marked by their own groupings of trees, which, Churchill wrote, helped to “relieve the monotony of the undulating ground.”

At the bottom of the hill, apart from the town, lay a kraal. Adopted by the Boers from the Portuguese word
curral
, a cognate of the Spanish, and later English, word “corral,” the African kraal was a circular livestock enclosure or rural village surrounded by a mud wall or a fence, often made of thornbush branches. Churchill could see the people of the village, tiny figures in the distance, rounding up their cows and goats as they headed home for the night. Occasionally, the wind would catch part of a word or a cry and carry it up to him, but it quickly faded, leaving him as isolated and alone as before.

Churchill carefully watched the people in the kraal, regarding anyone, Boer or African, as a potential danger. Most of his attention, however, was consumed by the railway track that cut through the little tableau stretched out below him. Throughout the day, he had eagerly counted the trains as they passed, four heading east and four west. If that many trains ran during the day, he told himself, the same number would likely operate at night. He planned to be on one of them before sunrise.

Having waited to leave his hiding place until the sun had fully set and it was “quite dark,” Churchill finally began to make his way down the hill and toward the tracks. Nightfall had itself been a mercy because it meant he could finally venture out to find water. Ravaged by thirst after the long, hot day, he found a stream that, even years later, he would remember as running with “cold, sweet water” and stopped to drink deeply before continuing on.

Churchill was headed not for the valley, where the trains ran straight and swift, but for the summit of a nearby hill. The night
before, he had noticed that not far from his promontory the tracks ran up this steep gradient. Here, the trains, especially the long, heavy freight trains such as the one he had hidden on the night before, inched up the hill like oxen straining against a heavy yoke. “Sometimes,” he noted with satisfaction, “they were hardly going at a foot’s pace.” It would certainly be far easier to hop on a train car as it struggled up a hill than it had been to lunge at one while the engine rushed straight at him with mounting speed.

The plan came together quickly in Churchill’s mind. “
I saw myself leaving the train again before dawn, having been carried forward another sixty or seventy miles during the night,” he wrote. “That would be scarcely one hundred and fifty miles from the frontier.” After that, he’d catch another train, and another, as many as it took to deliver himself safely and triumphantly into Portuguese territory. “Where was the flaw?” he thought. “I could not see it.”

Reaching the top of the hill, Churchill found a small bush near a curve in the track and sat down behind it. The bush would have to do as a hiding place while he waited, and the curve, he hoped, would shield him from the eyes of the engine driver when he leaped. “
I could board some truck on the convex side of the train,” he wrote, “when both the engine and the guard’s van were bent away.” For the first time since he had awoken, afraid and depressed, on the speeding train, Churchill felt relatively optimistic. He even had a little food to carry him through, not much, but enough “
to keep body and soul together at a pinch.” There were several pieces of chocolate left, and one of his pockets was still bulging with the crumbling biscuit. It would not sustain him nearly as well as Haldane’s meat lozenges, but at least he would not be forced to steal food and risk being captured in the process.

It seemed to be a perfect plan, and it was, but for one problem: No trains came. Churchill waited for an hour, his spirits and hope strong. Then a second hour passed with no vibrating tracks, no telltale steam whistle, no train. He could not understand it. Throughout the day, he had watched the trains steaming along this very line, and he had carefully kept track of their times. The last one had passed by
six hours earlier. Something was wrong. Another two hours passed without a single train in sight. As the minutes ticked by, Churchill slowly turned from puzzled to desperate. “
My plan began to crumble,” he wrote, “and my hopes to ooze out of me.”