Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill (45 page)

When the train made its first stop at Witbank, the branch line Churchill had been riding on joined the main railway line. While he waited for his freight cars to be coupled to another train, Burnham saw one of the railway men approaching him. He knew it wasn’t likely to be good news, and he was right. It would be impossible, the man told Burnham, to continue his journey that day. His trucks would have to wait by the siding until the following morning.

Burnham had expected to bribe a few men before he and Churchill reached their final destination, but he now realized that he would have to open his wallet before they had even left Witbank. Turning to the man, Burnham used “a little gentle persuasion” and then slipped him some cash—“
a Christmas box,” he would later say, “as it was near Christmastide.” It worked. Soon after, the man returned, this time with much better news. “Look here, Burnham,” he said, “I’ll put your wool on the next train that passes through.”

Burnham had no way of communicating with his stowaway without risking his discovery, so Churchill had to simply wait in silence, hoping that nothing had gone wrong as the boxcars sat idly in the Witbank station. Finally, after about an hour had passed, he felt his car being hooked to a train. Then, to his relief, he could tell that they were not only moving again but chugging along at what seemed to him to be a “
superior and very satisfactory pace.”

After a short delay at the next station, Middelburg, where Burnham was forced to bribe yet another railway man to keep his cars moving, they finally began to roll quickly through the countryside.
In his wool cocoon, Churchill was not missing anything he had not already seen countless times over the past three months. Mile after mile of flat veld, bordered by distant, jagged mountains, spooled out behind them.

As he was jostled around on the floor of the car, growing progressively more soot stained from the coal dust that coated everything, Churchill tried to distract himself from his fears by imagining his triumphant return to the larger world. In his mind, he painted “
bright pictures of the pleasures of freedom, of the excitement of rejoining the army, of the triumph of a successful escape.” Despite the satisfaction of imagining himself the hero of every scene, he could not forget the fact that his trial was far from over. No matter what he did, he could not rid himself of his “anxieties about the search at the frontier, an ordeal inevitable and constantly approaching.”

Sometime between 6:00 and 7:00 that night, the train pulled into Waterval Onder. Stepping out of the guard’s van, Burnham, who, like Churchill, had with him a bottle of whiskey, offered a drink to a Boer guard standing nearby. The man gratefully accepted, and Burnham, who had already been told once again that his boxcars would be detained, took the opportunity to ask his help. Could the guard hook his cars onto the next train that came into the station? Unfortunately, he couldn’t, the man told Burnham, because he would not be traveling any farther that night. He would, however, introduce him to the man who was to relieve him. If Burnham happened to have another bottle of whiskey on hand, they should be able to sort things out to everyone’s satisfaction.

Told that he had enough time to have dinner in a nearby hotel, Burnham took advantage of the chance to buy more whiskey for the new guard. To his amazement, as he sat down to his dinner, he overheard the hotel’s proprietor talking about Winston Churchill. As Burnham listened, the man informed his astonished guests that not only was Churchill still on the run, but he had passed through their little town of Waterval Onder just two days earlier, disguised as a Catholic priest. Finishing his meal, Burnham happily watched as the hotelier’s story was accepted and thus passed into the general
circulation of the Boer rumor mill. “
So long as it was believed,” he wrote, “I had little fear of my charge being discovered or disturbed in his truck.”

It would have surprised both Burnham and the proprietor of the Waterval Onder hotel to know that, at that moment, Boer officials not only believed that Winston Churchill was no longer on the run, they thought he was in their possession, on his way back to Pretoria. Soon after Churchill had left the colliery that morning, Howard had boarded a train traveling in the opposite direction, getting on at Brugspruit, less than ten miles west of Witbank, with the intention of taking it all the way to Pretoria. When he had stepped into his train car, he had found to his surprise that among the other passengers was a British prisoner. Perhaps knowing that Howard was English, one of the men had excitedly explained to him that this was no ordinary prisoner of war. This man, he told Howard, was none other than Winston Churchill.

Saying nothing to clear up the mistake, Howard kept his thoughts to himself as the train rumbled on toward Pretoria. When they finally reached the Transvaal capital, he watched as a Boer official approached the train to take custody of the famous escapee. The Boers might have been humiliated by the escape of this insufferable young British aristocrat, but, they believed, his recapture would right that wrong, and restore their dignity in the eyes of the world.

Howard would never forget the look on the official’s face when he “
met the train at Pretoria Station expecting to receive his illustrious prisoner.” For Howard, who had done little else but feed, protect and hide Churchill for the past five days, the coincidence of his being there to witness the moment when the Boers realized they had the wrong man could not have been more delicious. Although he knew that he would immediately be arrested if they had any idea that he had helped Churchill escape, it was all Howard could do to keep a
straight face as he watched the farce play out. “I would have given much,” he later wrote, “to have had a hearty laugh.”

As much as Churchill had already overcome, both Howard and Burnham knew that he was still far from free.
Although Burnham had managed to befriend the new guard at Waterval Onder with his new bottle of whiskey, when the train pulled in to Kaapmuiden the next morning, less than fifty miles from the border, he was met with a sickening sight. As soon as he climbed out of the guard’s van and began walking toward Churchill’s boxcar, he saw to his horror that someone had already beaten him to it. Leaning against the side of the car, holding a rifle with a bandolier strapped across his chest, was a leathery old burgher.

Seized by fear that Churchill had already been discovered, Burnham tried his best to mask his apprehension as he approached the guard. Forcing himself to speak calmly and casually, he asked the man if he knew where he could get a cup of coffee. Staring at Burnham as if he had lost his mind, the guard said, “Why there it is,” glancing at the coffee stall that was directly in front of them. “All right, Oom,” Burnham replied, using the Afrikaans word for “uncle,” a sign of respect among the Boers. Then, in the hope that he might lure him away from the boxcar, he asked the guard if he’d like to join him. To Burnham’s relief, he accepted, and the two men walked together to the coffee shop, apparently in easy camaraderie. When the train was ready to depart, Burnham offered a quick apology and slipped away.

It was late in the afternoon by the time they reached Komatipoort, the station Churchill had been dreading more than any other. It was the last stop before Portuguese East Africa, and he knew that if the Boers were going to catch him anywhere, it would be here. Peering through a chink in the wall of his car, he surveyed the station. It was much larger than the others, and everywhere he looked,
he could see people, trains, tracks and a bustle of activity. It was also much louder, the sounds of shouting voices and the bright, piercing whistle of steam engines filling the station. There was little Churchill could do but trust in Burnham and hide himself as best as he could. Moving to the center of the boxcar, he pulled a piece of sacking over the length of his body and lay perfectly still.

Quickly alighting from the train, Burnham immediately sought out the chief customs officer, a man named Morris.
Unlike the other station officials along the route, Morris was not a stranger to Burnham. In fact, he had already discussed with him his concerns about getting his wool to the capital as quickly as possible. After Burnham reminded Morris of their conversation, the customs officer ordered his men not to search the shopkeepers’ personal property. Burnham, however, was far from satisfied. It was not his own suitcase but his boxcars that he wanted the burghers to stay as far away from as possible. “
I gave a very plausible excuse for that being kept intact,” he wrote, “especially as I wanted to have it delivered at its destination with the minimum of delay.” Finally, he asked Morris if he could talk to the stationmaster, perhaps use his influence to ensure that his wool would go through. Morris agreed, and although the rest of the train was carefully searched, Burnham’s cars were left untouched.

While Burnham used every means at his disposal to avoid an inspection, Churchill lay alone under his sacking, as vulnerable and impotent as he had feared he would be. Time passed, the sun set, and still he waited in agonizing suspense. “
It was tantalizing to be held so long in jeopardy after all these hundreds of miles had been accomplished,” he wrote, “and I was now within a few hundred yards of the frontier.”

As he waited for hours with no news, Churchill’s fears only intensified. “
Perhaps they were searching the train so thoroughly that there was consequently a great delay,” he thought. “Alternatively, perhaps we were forgotten on the siding and would be left there for days or weeks.” Desperate to peer out of his hiding place and have his fears dispelled or even confirmed—anything was better than not knowing—Churchill resisted the temptation with great effort and
remained tucked away until he finally felt his car being coupled up and, at long last, resume its journey.

Although, relying on his knowledge of the railway line, the stations that he and Haldane had memorized, Churchill thought that he had finally crossed the border and was in Portuguese territory, he had no way of knowing for sure. After being on the run for days, constantly hiding and living in fear, he was filled with self-doubt. He worried that he had made a mistake, that he had somehow miscounted the stations and that the train had not yet left the Transvaal. “
Perhaps there was still another station before the frontier,” he thought. “Perhaps the search still impended.”

It was not until the train reached the next station that Churchill’s fears fell away. Putting his eye to a crack in the wall of his boxcar, he saw two things that made his heart leap: the distinctive uniform caps of the Portuguese officials, bobbing through the crowded station, and, written in large letters upon a wall, the words “Ressano Garcia,” the first train station in Portuguese East Africa.

Churchill continued to crouch silently in his hiding place until the train had pulled out of the station. As soon as he was certain that no one could see or hear him, however, he forced his head out of the tarpaulin and felt the wind rushing through his hair as they rattled toward Lourenço Marques. Lifting Dewsnap’s revolver into his hands, he suddenly realized that he did, after all, have a use for it. Pointing it into the air, he shot it again and again and again, literally screaming for joy. “
I…sang and shouted and crowed at the top of my voice,” he later wrote, “carried away by thankfulness and delight.”