Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill (39 page)

So shocked was Churchill by Howard’s warm offer of refuge that he felt a “spasm of relief” sweep over him. Not only was this man not going to shoot, or even arrest, him, he was going to help him. He was no longer alone. “
I felt,” Churchill would later write, “like a drowning man pulled out of the water.”

After introducing himself to Churchill, Howard explained to him how he had managed to remain in the Transvaal when most Britons had been forced out. Not only was he uniquely skilled, capable of keeping the mine in perfect condition until the war had ended and it could again run at full capacity, but the Boers trusted him. Howard had lived in the Transvaal for many years. He spoke the language and had even become a naturalized citizen.

Howard’s decision to become a burgher, however, could now have consequences that he had never anticipated. Because he had been born British, the Boers had excused him from fighting in the war, but if he were caught harboring a fugitive, he could not hope to be shown any leniency. He would be tried for treason, and, very likely, shot. By helping Churchill, Howard was not only risking his freedom, he was risking his life.

The threat to both their lives, moreover, was even closer than Churchill knew. The weary fugitive was not the first visitor Howard had had that day. Just hours before Churchill had knocked on the mine manager’s door, a Boer field cornet had come looking for him. The Boers were scouring the veld, searching for an escaped prisoner, the man had said, and if Howard saw any sign of him, he was to report it immediately. “
They have got the hue and cry out,” Howard now told Churchill, “all along the line and all over the district.”

Realizing the danger he was placing Howard in simply by being there, Churchill said that he would leave that night. If he could have “
food, a pistol, a guide, and if possible a pony,” he said, “I would make my own way to the sea.” Howard would not hear of it. With the help of four other British citizens who had also been allowed to stay and work at the colliery—a secretary and an engineer as well as two Scottish miners—he would find a way to get Churchill out. “Never mind,” he assured the exhausted young man before him. “We will fix it up somehow.”

As determined as Howard was to help Churchill, he was not reckless. They would have to be extraordinarily careful, he warned. “Spies were everywhere.” Even in this very house, two Dutch maids were sleeping. It had been a miracle that Churchill had not awakened them with his knock.

Having fallen into a reverie about the dangers they faced, Howard suddenly remembered that his guest had been on the run for two days. “But you are famishing,” he said. Disappearing from the room as he called back to Churchill to use the whiskey bottle and soda water machine to make himself a drink, he soon reappeared with enough food to feed several men. As Churchill fell gratefully upon a cold leg of mutton, Howard left again, this time slipping out the back door.

Nearly an hour later, he returned with good news. “It’s all right,” he told Churchill. “I have seen the men, and they are all for it.” The other Englishmen who worked at the colliery had also taken an oath to “observe strict neutrality” during the war, but they were not about
to let that stop them from helping Winston Churchill. The most immediate problem was how to keep him hidden until they could come up with a plan. “We must put you down the pit tonight,” Howard said, “and there you will have to stay till we can see how to get you out of the country.”

As soon as he finished his meal, Churchill found himself following Howard out of the house and across a small yard. The sun was just beginning to rise, and the world could not have looked more different to him than it had just a few hours earlier. “
The message of the sunset is sadness,” he would write years later. “The message of the dawn is hope.”

For Churchill, hope now came in the form of a Transvaal colliery that lay deep in the heart of his enemy’s land. As soon as he opened the door, he could see, looming above him in the pale pink light, the mine’s processing plant, a roughly fifty-foot-tall, heavily weathered building with long, vertical windows. Rising over the roof was the large winding wheel that had been his first glimpse of the colliery when he had stepped out of the veld.

As he and Howard neared the mine, Churchill could see a rather round, short man waiting for them. Howard introduced him as Mr. Dewsnap, the mine engineer. To Churchill’s astonishment, it turned out that Dan Dewsnap was not only British but from Oldham, the constituency that Churchill had lost in the parliamentary election. Although it seemed a lifetime ago, the election had taken place less than six months earlier, and even in South Africa Dewsnap had heard about it. Now, grasping Churchill’s hand “
in a grip of crushing vigour,” he leaned in and whispered, “They’ll all vote for you next time.”

Together, the three men walked into the building and made their way toward a large, metal cage that would carry them down into the mine shaft.
Stepping into the cage, which was wide enough to hold fifteen men, they could feel it sway slightly beneath them as
their boots hit the barred floor. The door clanged shut, and “
down we shot,” Churchill wrote, “into the bowels of the earth.”

The seam was only about ninety feet deep, but as the men descended the shaft, it looked as if they were entering not just a mine but the underworld. With each foot they dropped down, it became progressively darker, as if a cloak were being wound ever more tightly around the cage. By the time they reached the bottom, it was as black as night, but with no South African stars to guide them.

Although there were no stars in the shaft, there were lanterns. Churchill could see them now, swinging in the hands of two men, the Scottish miners—Joe McKenna and Joe McHenry—whom Howard had told him about. When the cage clattered to a halt, the two Scotsmen, each carrying a bulky bundle as well as a lantern, led the small party into the tunnel.

For his four guides, this dark, eerie world was as familiar as life aboveground. For Churchill, everything he saw or couldn’t see, heard or couldn’t hear, was strange and new. As he walked deeper into the mine, he found himself in a “
pitchy labyrinth,” he wrote, “with frequent turns, twists, and alterations of level.”
It was, however, surprisingly spacious. There was no need for the men to stoop as they walked through the tunnel because it was between eight and ten feet high. It was also wide enough to allow them to easily proceed two by two rather than being strung out single file.

Despite the roominess, it would have been extremely easy for Churchill to become lost. Not only was it pitch-black, but there was no way to distinguish between the narrow timber pillars that lined the tunnels and held up the roof, each one looking very much like the last. It was also almost completely silent. But for the sound of their footfalls, which echoed through the tunnels, Churchill could hear nothing but the faint drip of water and the rare, startling crash as a flake of shale fell and smashed to bits on the tunnel floor.

The floor itself was smooth and hard-packed under Churchill’s feet, its natural bumps and divots beaten flat not by boots but by hooves. As the Boers found more coal and the tunnels had become longer, they had begun breeding ponies to haul their carts under
ground. So essential had the ponies become that stables with feeding and watering troughs had been built for them near the ventilation shafts. The ponies, which were brought down by the same cage that had just carried Churchill, lived in the tunnels for five and a half days at a time, with just a day and a half aboveground.

With so many ponies, teams of men were needed to clean up their droppings, and the men who worked in the mines had long since ceased to notice the smell. To someone like Churchill, however, who had never been in a coal mine, the stench would have been overwhelming, easily overpowering the mine’s naturally damp, musty scent.

By the time Churchill’s guides finally stopped, he had no idea where he was, and would not have been able to find his way back out if his life depended on it, which they all hoped it would not.
They had come to a sort of chamber where the air was surprisingly fresh, and it was noticeably cooler than it had been in the tunnel. The miners had decided he would be most comfortable in one of the pony stables. Fortunately for Churchill, this one was newly built and as yet unused. It would be his home until they could figure out what to do next.

In the meantime, the men promised to keep him supplied with everything he would need.
The large bundles that McKenna and McHenry had been carrying turned out to be a mattress and blankets. Howard had brought from the house a few candles, a bottle of whiskey and a box of cigars, all of which he now handed to Churchill. “There’s no difficulty about these,” he said. “I keep them under lock and key.” The problem would be the food, or, as Howard referred to it, the
skoff
. There was plenty of it to go around, but its absence would not go unnoticed. “The Dutch girl sees every mouthful I eat,” Howard had told Churchill. “The cook will want to know what has happened to her leg of mutton. I shall have to think it all out during the night.”

With that, and a warning to stay put, “
whatever happens,” the men took their leave. Standing in the stable with his small pile of supplies, Churchill watched as they walked away, his life having
taken another sudden and completely unexpected turn, his fate now resting in the hands of men he did not know but would have to trust. He could see their lanterns bobbing as they disappeared into the mazelike tunnel, leaving him alone in the “velvety darkness of the pit.”

CHAPTER 23

AN INVISIBLE ENEMY

O
n December 15, scarcely twenty-four hours after Churchill had knocked on John Howard’s door, John Black Atkins awoke before dawn in Colenso to the sound of men preparing for war. From his thin-walled tent, Atkins, the correspondent for the
Manchester Guardian
, could hear the coughing and tramping of horses, native drivers calling to their mules, and men quietly rallying each other for the day that lay ahead. “
The camp was filled with a steady, continuous, sweeping noise, which resembled silence,” Atkins wrote. “This was the morning of a battle.”

As the men moved across the plain, adjusting their helmets and swinging their rifles over their shoulders, a pall of dust rose up around them. “
The column at my tent door passed through [the dust] like men wading through a white level tide which reached the middle of men and the bellies of horses,” Atkins wrote. Before them, the veld sloped gently toward the winding Tugela River. Although it was neither deep nor wide near Colenso, the river was more than three hundred miles long, running west to east before emptying into the Indian Ocean. It was the only thing separating Buller from the Boers and, beyond them, Ladysmith.

Rushing to catch up, Atkins found the infantry sitting on the
plain, arranged in neat rows in the order of advance. In many ways, the young men before him were indistinguishable from his friend Winston Churchill—shining with youth, excitement, confidence and, in their own minds, immortality. “
Chaffing and smoking,” Atkins wrote, they propped “themselves up on their elbows to inquire when the ‘fun’ was going to begin.”