Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill (17 page)

Without question, however, the least popular means of reconnaissance the men in Estcourt had at their disposal was their armored train. In theory, the trains were useful. They could quickly transport men and supplies wherever they were most needed, and there were thousands of miles of railway line crisscrossing southern Africa, which the Boers had been loath to destroy. They were also cleverly designed, with the engine not at the front of the train but sandwiched between two armored cars. If the front was attacked or the rail line sabotaged, the engine could be quickly uncoupled from the damaged car, leaving it free to pull the rest of the train to safety. Later in the
war, the British would cloak some of their armored engines in long coils of heavy rope. Nicknamed Hairy Marys, they looked like giant woolly mammoths lumbering down the tracks, but they were useful in protecting the engines from small arms fire.

The problem was that, confined as they were to conspicuous, unchanging rail lines, the trains were easy, slow-moving targets for Boer ambushes. “
Nothing looks more formidable and impressive than an armoured train,” Churchill wrote, “but nothing is in fact more vulnerable and helpless.” The Boers needed to do little more than hide near the tracks and wait for a British train to come trundling by, filled with men and guns. At the outset of war, the British had thirteen armored trains in southern Africa. By the time Churchill had reached Cape Town, they had already lost two of them to the Boers. In fact, the first act of war, which, in Churchill’s words, had given the Boers “
the advantage of drawing first blood,” had been the capture of an armored train near Mafeking, west of Johannesburg. The second was captured just a few weeks later. In that incident, only the engine driver, who lost four fingers in the attack, had escaped. The rest of the men had been taken prisoner, and the officer in charge was reported to have “
seriously underrated the nature of the risk incurred.”

If riding any armored train was a bad idea, then riding the train in Estcourt was madness. The men openly referred to it as “
Wilson’s death-trap,” laying blame for the incredibly dangerous conveyance at the feet of Arthur Wilson, third naval lord and controller of the navy, who had famously improvised an armored train during the Anglo-Egyptian War seventeen years earlier. That train, however, had at least been a legitimate armored train. The one in Estcourt was hardly deserving of the name. “
It was not really an armored train at all,” Atkins wrote. “It was made up of an ordinary engine and ordinary iron trucks belonging to the Natal Government Railway protected by boiler plates; and through the boiler plates were cut loopholes for the rifles.” It didn’t have trapdoors or custom-built openings for gun muzzles. It didn’t even have a roof. “To get in or out of the trucks one had to climb over the walls,” Atkins marveled. “It was fun to
see a small and clumsy climber pushed up from the inside by his comrades, then squirm preposterously on his stomach over the wall and drop or scramble down the seven feet on the outside.” It wasn’t hard to imagine the disaster that would occur if the train came under heavy fire, and the men inside were forced to perform their “slow and painful acrobatic feat to get out of their cage.”

The train was also as regular as clockwork, an attribute that might have been admirable in a London commuter train but was disastrous in war. “
Day after day, generally at the same hour, the armoured train…used to press forth unattended beyond the line of outposts,” one officer in Estcourt wrote, “heralding, by agonized gasps and puffs, and clouds of smoke and steam, its advent to the far-sighted, long-hearing Boer.” Although watching it leave the station every morning was, in Atkins’s words, the “
chief diversion of our life at Estcourt,” waiting for it to come back was a source of widespread anxiety, not least of all for the men who had been forced to board it earlier in the day. “
How relieved the occupants looked when they climbed over its plated sides,” an officer would later recall, “and congratulated themselves that their turn to form the freight of this moribund engine of war would not come round again for at least some days!”

Although he was well aware of the dangers of riding in an armored train, so determined was Churchill to get out of Estcourt and get as close as he could to Ladysmith that a few days after arriving, he tucked his pistol in his belt and climbed aboard. Part of the impetus for his decision was doubtless the fact that Amery was going, and Churchill was not about to take the chance that the
Times
correspondent, his old nemesis turned tent mate, might see something of the war that he would not. Even had Amery not been there, however, Churchill almost certainly would have gone. It was not in his nature to pass up any opportunity, especially if it might give him an edge, and put his life in danger. A man “
should get to the front at all costs,” he wrote. “For every fifty men who will express a desire to go on service…there is only about one who really means business, and will take the trouble and run the risk of going to the front.”

There was also something oddly romantic and exciting about an armored train, especially for a man like Churchill who loved nothing more than awe-inspiring displays of military might. It was a far cry from the glittering processions of soldiers and officers he used to admire marching through the streets of London on parade, the sun flashing on their bayonets, their gloves dazzlingly white, but it had an exotic aura that could only be found in a distant land. “
An armoured train!” Churchill wrote from Estcourt. “The very name sounds strange. A locomotive disguised as a knight-errant; the agent of civilisation in the habiliments of chivalry. Mr. Morley attired as Sir Lancelot would seem scarcely more incongruous.”

The train, with Churchill and Amery aboard, pulled out of Estcourt at 1:00 on the afternoon of November 8, rattling along the railway line that stretched toward Ladysmith. Although they made frequent stops to question locals and check in with their own scouts, the train moved relatively quickly through the empty veld until it reached the small town of Chieveley. From there, however, they were forced to slow down considerably. “
Beyond Chieveley,” Churchill wrote, “it was necessary to observe more caution.” The train inched, yard by yard, along the tracks. The men scanned the horizon with their field glasses and telescopes, and if they came to a bridge or culvert, they stopped, climbed out and carefully inspected it before continuing on their excruciatingly slow journey.

When they finally reached Colenso, a village just thirteen miles south of Ladysmith, they were stunned by what they found. The town, which the British had been forced to evacuate, had been ransacked and then completely abandoned. Several houses had been burned down. The belongings of the former inhabitants were scattered all over the streets, and in the middle of one lay a horse that had clearly been dead for some time. It was on its back, belly swollen and legs sticking straight up in the air. On their way home, they passed broken telegraph wires trailing lazily over the ground, twisted
posts and a cut in the rail line, where the tracks had been pulled up and thrown over the embankment. What they did not see was a single Boer.

When they pulled back in to Estcourt that night, the soldiers stretched out on the floor of the open truck, smoke from their cigarettes disappearing into the black plume of exhaust billowing out of the engine, they were all relieved simply to have gotten back alive. For Churchill and Amery, the trip had been not only a tremendous risk, but a colossal waste of time. The train “
could see nothing, trundling along the valley bottoms,” Amery wrote in disgust, “advertised its presence for miles by its puffing, and was at a hopeless disadvantage against any enemy who cared to tear up the rails behind it.”

While his ride in the armored train had diminished Amery’s respect for Estcourt’s commanding officers, it had significantly improved his opinion of Churchill. Throughout the long, dangerous day, the “red-haired freckled urchin” had shown nothing but courage and pluck.
As they climbed out of the car in which they had been riding, the two men vowed that, although there were many ways to die in this war, this was the last time they would risk their lives aboard the armored train.

CHAPTER 10

A PITY AND A BLUNDER

O
ne night soon after arriving in Estcourt, Churchill, Amery and Atkins were walking along the town’s only street when Churchill saw someone he had not expected to see there, or perhaps anywhere ever again. Because there was only starlight and the glow of campfires and the occasional lantern to illuminate the dirt road, it was at first difficult to tell who it was. As the man drew closer, however, his features began to come more clearly into view. There was the dark hair, there the thick, carefully combed mustache and the ramrod-straight back. Without question, the man standing before him was Aylmer Haldane.

The last time Churchill had heard any news of Haldane had been while he was still aboard the
Dunottar Castle
, and his friend’s name had been read out among the list of the first known casualties of the war. Now here he was, nonchalantly walking down the street in Estcourt, alive and fairly, if not wholly, well. It also quickly became apparent that up to this point Haldane’s time in South Africa had been far more interesting than Churchill’s own.

Haldane had left for Africa about a month before Churchill and had soon found himself in the opening battles of the war.
During the Battle of Elandslaagte, which had taken place midway between
Ladysmith and Dundee on October 21, the day after Penn Symons was fatally wounded, Haldane had been hit by rifle fire. Seventy percent of the British officers in that battle had been either killed or wounded, so he was lucky to have gotten away with his life. He had been injured in the leg, and there had been a hasty operation because he was eager to catch up with his battalion, the Gordon Highlanders, who had fallen back to Ladysmith. His leg had yet to completely heal, leaving Haldane with a pronounced if temporary limp and, like Churchill, stuck in Estcourt, in command of the Dublin Fusiliers until he could be reunited with his men.

Churchill was delighted to see his old friend, who seemed to have returned from the dead, but he could not help envying Haldane’s battlefield experience and position in the war. Unlike in the past, when they had both been military men, Churchill was now just a journalist, a spectator forced to hover around the periphery, while Haldane was a real participant. “
I can never doubt which is the right end [of the telegraph wire] to be at,” Churchill had written a few years earlier, after returning from Malakand. “It is better to be making the news than taking it; to be an actor rather than a critic.”

Although Churchill had had little luck getting to the war, on November 14 the war seemed finally to come to him. At 11:00 that morning, less than a week after his ride aboard the armored train, the thunderous boom of an alarm gun suddenly shook Estcourt. The gun, which had been placed in front of the camp, a hundred paces from the artillery posts, was there to warn the men, not kill them, but the sudden, explosive sound was as jolting and sickening as that of the Boer field guns trained on Ladysmith. Even after weeks of tense waiting, and endless discussions about when and how the enemy would attack, it was hard to believe the Boers had finally arrived.

Despite the initial shock, the men did not lose a moment in leaping to their own defense. “
Instantly the camp sprang to life,” Atkins wrote. “In a moment belts were being buckled, straps thrown across
shoulders, helmets jammed on heads, puttees wrapped feverishly round legs.” Colonel Charles Long, who had been left in temporary command while his superior was sixty miles farther back in Pietermaritzburg, quickly strode to the center of the town’s only street with his staff, anxiously peering through his field glasses while the wind and the rain picked up around him, darkening the skies and whipping the loose edges of the canvas tents. Long could see little more than shadowy figures in the low hills, slightly blurred by distance and mist, but they were there, dotting the horizon, threatening to sweep down upon them at any moment.