Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill (27 page)

After the death of Penn Symons, Joubert had sent his widow a letter of sympathy. During the siege of Ladysmith, which was then still ongoing, he allowed a train full of sick and injured to leave the town every day, and he demanded that the Boers treat wounded British as they would their own men. To an astonishing degree, however, the burghers were even more compassionate than their softhearted
commandant general. After the Battle of Nicholson’s Nek, the
Daily Mail
correspondent George Warrington Steevens had marveled at the Boers’ kindness toward their prisoners. They gave them “
the water out of their own bottles,” he wrote. “They gave the wounded the blankets off their own saddles and slept themselves on the naked veldt.”

Despite their compassion, the depiction of them as unwashed and uneducated bumpkins, long encouraged by men like Randolph Churchill, persisted. The Boers bristled with wounded pride, deeply resenting even the slightest suggestion of condescension. There was one man among them, however, with whom even the most over-bred, meticulously educated Briton could not hope to compete. He was, in the words of Leo Amery, a “
lean, fair-haired young man with angry blue eyes,” and his name was Jan Smuts, the Transvaal state attorney. Smuts had been raised to be a cattle herd on his father’s farm in Cape Colony, but his life had taken a dramatic turn when he was twelve years old and his older brother died. Because it was the Boer custom to educate only the oldest son, the death of Smuts’s brother meant that he could go to school, a sudden turn of the hand of fate that eventually led him to Victoria College, just east of Cape Town, and then, after winning a scholarship, to Christ’s College, Cambridge. Years later, the master of Christ’s College, the Nobel Prize–winning chemist Alexander Todd, would say that in the college’s five-hundred-year history only three of its students had been truly outstanding, a rarefied group that included John Milton, Charles Darwin and Jan Smuts.
Even Albert Einstein had been impressed, insisting that only a few men in the world understood the theory of relativity, and Smuts was one of them.

Determined to prove to the British that, like Smuts, they were men of learning, the Boers allowed their prisoners almost unheard-of latitude. The men were permitted to receive visitors, to buy newspapers and to be waited on by their soldier-servants if those men had been captured with them. In fact, ten batmen were then living in tents in the yard behind the Staats Model School, where Thomas Walden would likely have set up camp had he joined Churchill on the armored train three days earlier.

The officers were even allowed to chart the progress of the war on a large and astonishingly detailed map of Natal and the Transvaal. The men, who had been carefully trained in cartography at military academies, sketched the map themselves, giving it a scale of five miles to one inch and taking up the better part of a wall in a room across the hall from Churchill’s.
A resident artist, likely the talented Tom Frankland, also drew a roughly six-foot-tall skeleton, one arm outstretched, the bony fingers pointing toward the map, above which had been written the hopeful words “The War in South Africa 1899–1900.”

Although the food at the Staats Model School was adequate, and often far better than what the Boers were eating in the field, the prisoners were allowed to supplement it with purchases from a storekeeper in Pretoria named Mr. Boshof. They could buy almost anything they could afford, from cigarettes to bottled beer to even clothing. Although, upon entering the prison, every officer was handed bedding, towels and a new suit of clothes, Churchill immediately put in an order for a tweed suit in a “
dark neutral colour, and as unlike the suits of clothes issued by the Government as possible.” He had hoped to buy a hat as well, but here his captors finally drew the line. “What use could I find for a hat,” he would recall them asking him, “when there were plenty of helmets to spare if I wanted to walk in the courtyard?”

Although Churchill acknowledged that he was the “least unfortunate kind of prisoner to be,” from the moment he had raised his hands in surrender he had hated his captivity with an intensity that surprised even him. Not only was he eager to return to the war, but he couldn’t bear the thought of being in another man’s control. It had been hard enough to take orders from his superiors while he was in the army. To yield to the demands and whims of a Boer guard, in his eyes a mere troglodyte, was intolerable. “
You are in the power of your enemy. You owe your life to his humanity, and your daily bread to his compassion,” he later wrote, in an attempt to describe his sense of desperation. “You must obey his orders, go where he tells you, stay
where you are bid, await his pleasure, possess your soul in patience.” The prison was warm, dry, safe and clean, with plenty of food and even little luxuries, but Churchill would have traded it in a heartbeat for the heat, rain, filth and death of the battlefield. “The war is going on,” he wrote angrily, restlessly, “great events are in progress, fine opportunities for action and adventure are slipping away.”

Time was passing, and, even as a young man, Churchill could feel his life slipping away. “
I am 25 today,” he wrote to Bourke Cockran, an American politician who was an old friend of Churchill’s mother, on November 30. “It is terrible to think how little time remains.”

So much did Churchill loathe his imprisonment that the experience would stay with him for the rest of his life. “
Looking back on those days I have always felt the keenest pity for prisoners and captives,” he would write years later. “What it must mean for any man, especially an educated man, to be confined for years in a modern convict prison strains my imagination. Each day exactly like the one before, with the barren ashes of wasted life behind, and all the long years of bondage stretching out ahead.” When, just ten years after his own imprisonment, he was made home secretary and put in charge of the British prison system, Churchill would be exceptionally compassionate to prisoners, especially those with life sentences, which he believed to be a far worse fate than a sentence of death. He made sure they had access to books, exercise and even occasional entertainment, “to mitigate as far as is reasonable,” he wrote, “the hard lot which, if they have deserved, they must none the less endure.”

His own imprisonment, Churchill passionately believed, was not only unendurable but unjust. Although only a few days earlier he had feared summary execution for taking part in a battle as a civilian, by the time he reached Pretoria, Churchill had already shrugged off that very real, and still present, threat. As soon as he entered the Staats Model School, he began again to demand his release, constantly reminding anyone who would listen that he was not a combatant but a correspondent.

In fact, on the very day Churchill arrived at the POW camp, he found pencil and paper and wrote a series of letters, all with the objective not just of explaining his situation but of making a case for his immediate release. To the
Morning Post
, he simply sent a telegram. “
Captured unarmed 15th Frere detained Pretoria,” it read. “Urge release.” To his mother, who had always been the most constant and effective ally in his ambitions, he sent a longer letter. “
Dearest Mama, a line to explain that I was captured in the armoured train at Frere,” he began matter-of-factly, and then quickly took up his argument. “As I was quite unarmed and in possession of my full credentials as a Press correspondent, I do not imagine they will keep me.” Well aware that the Boers would read his letters before sending them on, he was careful to praise his captors. “They have always treated press correspondents well and after Majuba Hill the
Morning Post
correspondent was released after a few days detention,” he wrote. “You need not be anxious in any way but I trust you will do all in your power to procure my release.”

Even when writing to Pamela Plowden, the beautiful young woman with whom he had fallen in love in India, Churchill could not resist using the letter as an opportunity to state his case. “
Not a vy satisfactory address to write from,” he began, “although it begins with a P.” He assured Pamela, thousands of miles away and surrounded by rival suitors, that “among new and vivid scenes I think often of you,” but not before slipping in information that was certainly more for the edification of a Boer reader than a London socialite. “I expect to be released as I was taken quite unarmed,” he reminded his readers, “and with my full credentials as a correspondent.”

The most important letter Churchill wrote that day, however, was to a man named Louis de Souza, the Transvaal secretary of state for war.
De Souza, a quiet, thoughtful man who had been named head of the Prisoners Commission at the outset of war, had not only known of the attack on the armored train the day that it happened, but had known that Winston Churchill had been taken prisoner during it. “
The burghers took an armoured train near Estcourt,” his wife, Marie, had written in her diary on November 15. “56
prisoners, among them Winston Churchill, a son of the late Randolph Churchill.” De Souza was well aware of Churchill’s position and lineage, and understood what his capture might mean to the Transvaal.

Churchill, believing that de Souza might have the power to free him, or at least be willing to make an argument on his behalf, laid out his case in careful and, he hoped, persuasive detail.

18 November 1899

Pretoria

Sir

1. I was acting as a special correspondent of the
Morning Post
newspaper with the detachment of British troops captured by the forces of the South African Republic on the 15th instant at Frere, Natal, and conveyed here with the other prisoners.

2. I have the honour to request that I may be set at liberty and permitted to return to the British lines by such
route
as may be considered expedient, and in support of this request I would respectfully draw the attention of the Secretary of State to the following facts:

a. I presented my credentials as special correspondent immediately after the British force surrendered and desired that they might be forwarded to the proper authority. This was promised accordingly.

b. I was unarmed.

c. My identity has been clearly established.

3. I desire to state that on my journey from the scene of the action to this town I have been treated with much consideration and kindness by the various officers and other burghers of the Republic with whom I have been brought into contact.

I am Sir, Your obedient servant

W
INSTON
S
PENCER
C
HURCHILL

Special correspondent,
The Morning Post
, London

Churchill was not about to let a few inconsequential facts stand in the way of his freedom. No one need know that the only reason he had been unarmed at the time of his capture was because he had forgotten his pistol on the train when he jumped off to help the wounded men. In a later letter to de Souza, he would go even further, denying that he had played any role at all in the freeing of the engine. “
I have consistently adhered to my character as a press correspondent, taking no part in the defence of the armoured train and being quite unarmed,” he assured the secretary of state for war. “I have learned that it is alleged that I took an active part in the said defence. This I deny, although being for an hour and a half exposed in the open to the artillery of the Transvaal force, I naturally did all I could to escape from so perilous a situation and to save my life.”

Searching for any weapon and willing to take any tactic, Churchill even set his sights on what he knew to be the Boers’ Achilles’ heel: their wounded pride. They wanted respect not only from the British Empire but from the powerful countries of Europe and North America, many of which they hoped would support them in the war. “
My case while under detention as a prisoner of war has doubtless attracted a great deal of attention abroad and my release would be welcomed as a graceful act of correct international behaviour by the world’s press,” Churchill wrote to de Souza. “My further detention as a prisoner will most certainly be attributed in Europe and America to the fact that being well known I am regarded as a kind of hostage; and this will excite criticism and even ridicule.”

The Boers were not buying it. In a telegram sent the day after Churchill’s arrival in Pretoria, the commandant general himself warned the Transvaal secretary of state, Francis Reitz, that their aristocratic prisoner was not, as he claimed to be, merely an innocent correspondent. “
I understand that the son of Lord Churchill maintains that he is only a newspaper reporter and therefore wants the privilege of being released,” Joubert wrote. He had, however, received a full account of the attack from Louis Botha, the man who had led it, and had read the glowing newspaper accounts of Churchill’s bravery and critical role in the defense of the armored train. Churchill “must be
guarded and watched as dangerous for our war; otherwise he can still do us a lot of harm,” Joubert urged Reitz. “In one word, he must not be released during the war.”

The telegram took three days to find Reitz. By November 21, however, the secretary of state had not only received it but attached a note of his own. “
The Government,” he wrote, “will act accordingly.”

CHAPTER 16

BLACK WEEK

F
rom her house on Skinner Street, Marie de Souza, the wife of the Transvaal secretary of state for war, could almost see the prison. It was just four blocks away, and she knew the walk well. Her husband made it nearly every day.

A lifelong diarist, Marie had begun a new diary just thirteen days before the declaration of war. Instinctively, she knew there were horrors to come, and dangers that were particular to her own family. “
War! What a terrible thing it is,” she had written on October 30, the day the British had let the ultimatum pass. “And for what?”