Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill (29 page)

The prisoners were not the guards’ only targets. Knowing that they were carefully watched by de Souza, the ZARPs rarely indulged in physical violence, although they incessantly goaded and mocked the men under their control. Their rage, however, was in full, unthrottled display when it came to Pretoria’s black and mixed-race inhabitants, especially those who made the mistake of passing by the Staats Model School. “
How our blood boiled when we were forced
to be passive spectators of this Zarpian ruffianism!” Hofmeyr wrote. “Poor fellow! He does not know that the street is not wide enough for his Majesty the Zarp and himself, and thus walks on with that apologetic air which every [black man] in the Transvaal wears, till he has passed the Rubicon—that rope which excludes him and forces him to walk a block round.”

None of the guards, however, was as intolerable as Hans Malan. It did not take Churchill and Haldane long to be confirmed in their initial assessment of Kruger’s grandson. “
A foul and objectionable brute,” Churchill wrote of Malan. “His personal courage was better suited to insulting the prisoners in Pretoria than to fighting the enemy at the front.” Churchill was not alone in his contempt. Word had filtered down to the prisoners that, despite his close ties to Kruger, Malan had been openly scorned within the Volksraad for his cowardice. Even Marie de Souza, who had heard of his cruel treatment of native Africans, loathed him. “
He is no man but a brute!!” she wrote in her diary. “Oh, if I could only speak or had power.”

Although he did not want to place himself in danger, or fight anyone who could defend himself, Malan had been a vociferous proponent of the war. As the chief inspector of the roads, he had, in the words of John Buttery, an editor for the
Standard and Diggers’ News
, “
brought a great deal of influence to bear during the secret Raad [Volksraad] sittings on those members known to be wavering in the direction of peace, and whom it was necessary to intimidate and coerce into joining the war-gang.” Malan, Buttery wrote, had made a practice of “button-holing the members as they went in and out, and there was no mistaking his truculent bearing.”

While many of the officers found Malan intimidating and did their best to avoid him, Churchill found it difficult to swallow his incessant jeering without striking back. One day, when Malan had been particularly insufferable, Churchill rounded on him. Reminding the guard that in war either side might emerge victorious, he then asked him if it was wise to “
place himself in a separate category as regards behavior to the prisoners.” Should they win the war, Churchill said, looking pointedly at Malan, the British government
might wish to make examples of a few Boers. The implication had clearly made Malan, a “great gross man [whose] colour came and went on a large over-fed face,” nervous, and, Churchill later wrote, “he never came near me again.”

As the war continued, however, Malan was the least of the men’s worries. To their great dismay, they quickly learned that Commandant Opperman, who ran the prison, had little control over his wildly swaying emotions. If the Boers were winning, he was elated. If not, he looked, Churchill wrote, “
a picture of misery.” So tightly tied were Opperman’s emotions to the outcome of the war that he had often told the prisoners that should the Boers lose, he would “perish in the defence of the capital.” Although the officers had little concern for Opperman’s fate, they were sickened when he told them that before dying in a blaze of glory, he would first shoot his own wife and children.

While Opperman threatened to kill his own family, his superiors, the men who were actually running the war, suddenly began to reconsider the lives of their prisoners.
The day before Churchill had arrived in Pretoria, the British had captured a man named Nathan Marks, whom they accused of being a Boer spy. Disguised as an ambulance driver, Marks had infiltrated British lines, carrying with him a wounded man. When discovered, he had admitted that he had been sent there to find out if the Boer shells were as devastating as those of the British. When told of Marks’s capture, the Boers not only vehemently denied that he was a spy but threatened to retaliate if anything happened to him.

Reitz, the Transvaal secretary of state, made clear his intentions to the governor of Cape Colony, Alfred Milner.
If Marks were executed, Reitz assured Milner, the Boers would “put to death six British officers now held as prisoners of war at Pretoria.” Although the men at the Staats Model School would continue to be fed, clothed and protected from the wrath of their guards, they understood that, from one day to the next, their lives could not be guaranteed.

Not long after Reitz delivered his threat to Milner, he traveled to Pretoria, stopping in at the Staats Model School to see the men whose lives hung in the balance. Since Churchill had been demanding a meeting with Reitz since the day he was captured, the secretary of state decided to oblige him. Reitz’s son Deneys, who had ridden out of Pretoria with Botha the day the war began, happened to be in the capital as well and accompanied his father as he walked from his office to the prison. The two men entered the building, walked past the guards and stepped into a large room, where they found Churchill “playing games,” most likely chess, with the other prisoners.

Deneys already knew exactly who Churchill was, as did his father. Not only had Reitz read Joubert’s telegram urging him to deny the correspondent his freedom, but he had since received several other angry complaints about Churchill. “
I see a rumour in the papers that Lord Churchill’s son…will soon be released by the government,” a Boer general who had been with Botha at the attack on the armored train had written to Reitz on November 28. “If this person is released so can any other P.O.W. be released. He was most active in directing the soldiers in stultifying our operations….He must therefore be treated as any other P.O.W. and if needs be guarded with even greater vigilance.” Reitz even received a letter from a man named Danie Theron, who had witnessed Churchill’s capture and now implored the secretary of state to ensure his continued captivity. “
According to the
Volkstem
and
Standard and Diggers News
he [Churchill] now declares he took no part in the fight,” Theron wrote. “This is a pack of lies; nor would he stand still when warned by Field-Cornet Ooosthuizen to surrender or do so till covered by the latter’s rifle. In my opinion he is one of the most dangerous prisoners in our hands.”

When Churchill looked up and saw Reitz, he quickly launched into what was by then a well-rehearsed argument for his release. Unlike de Souza, however, Reitz was not easily persuaded. After Churchill argued that he was a war correspondent, not a combatant, Reitz reminded him that he had been carrying a Mauser. Churchill replied that in the Sudan all correspondents had carried weapons for self-protection. This comparison had the opposite effect Churchill
had hoped it would. Rather than changing Reitz’s mind, it irritated him. Boers, he stiffly informed Churchill, were “
not in the habit of killing non-combatants.” In the end, Churchill succeeded only in persuading Reitz to take with him some articles he had written and that he hoped the secretary of state would send on to the
Morning Post
.

Churchill’s last hope was a prisoner exchange then being discussed between the Boers and the British. “
Unless I am regarded for the purpose of exchange as a military officer,” he wrote to Colonel Frederick Stopford, Buller’s military secretary, on November 30, “I am likely to fall between two stools. Pray do your best for me.” Joubert, however, then still clinging to life, adamantly refused to let him go. “
I agree to the exchange proposed,” he wrote on December 10, the same day as the Battle of Stormberg, “but am resolved against the exchange of Churchill.”

Churchill finally gave up. The Boers, he realized, would never willingly let him go. “
As soon as I learned of [Joubert’s] decision in the first week of December,” he wrote, “I resolved to escape.”

CHAPTER 17

A SCHEME OF DESPERATE AND MAGNIFICENT AUDACITY

C
hurchill began pacing the courtyard after sundown. Every night, he would watch as the sun sank behind a fort that sat on a hill overlooking the prison, thus marking the end of “another wretched day.” Then he would begin circling the building, following a path so well known to the prisoners that
they had long ago estimated that nine times around equaled a mile. He slunk past the guards, carefully appraising them, disdainful of their “dirty, unkempt” uniforms, and he bitterly eyed the fences. “
You feel a sense of constant humiliation in being confined to a narrow space,” he would later write, “fenced in by railings and wire, watched by armed men.” As his mind, like his feet, traced the same paths, over and over again, he thought that there must be some way, “
by force or fraud, by steel or gold, of regaining my freedom.”

In his fevered desire for escape, Churchill was far from alone. Ever since there have been prisoners and guards, men have tried everything, from climbing to digging, from bribery to brute force, to make their escape. In the end, if there is no hope that a prisoner will lose his shackles, he may lose his mind. Twenty years after Churchill traced his restless path around the Staats Model School, a Swiss surgeon named Adolf Vischer would write a small book titled
Barbed Wire Disease: A Psychological Study of the Prisoner of War
. In it, Vischer, who had visited POW camps during World War I to study the psychological impact of captivity, would make the argument that almost without exception men exposed to long-term incarceration develop what he termed “barbed wire disease.”

“
They find intense difficulty in concentrating on one particular object; their mode of life becomes unstable, and there is restlessness in all their actions,” Vischer wrote. “All in common have a dismal outlook and a pessimistic view of events….Many are inordinately suspicious.” Although the men affected most severely were those who had been imprisoned for months or years, to some degree all POWs were prey to the disease. Unlike “
the criminal who knows to the day and hour the length of his imprisonment and can tick off each day,” Vischer wrote, “the prisoner of war remains in complete uncertainty.”

In the Boer War, there were, of course, Boer POWs as well as British, and they too thought obsessively about escape—although for them it was all but impossible.
After first keeping their prisoners on barges anchored in Simon’s Bay, just around the corner from Cape Town, the British soon moved them to a volcanic island twelve hundred miles off the coast of Africa: St. Helena. Despite the fact that St. Helena was, in many ways, a perfect prison—surrounded by thousands of square miles of ocean, ringed by cliffs and with very few places to land a boat—there were several escape attempts, one of which involved another of Kruger’s grandsons, Commandant P. Eloff.
None of them worked.

St. Helena, in fact, had a history of failed escape attempts, many of which revolved around its most famous prisoner, the French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, who was imprisoned on the island in 1815 following the Napoleonic Wars.
During his six miserable years on St. Helena, there were dozens of plots to free Napoleon, but he died, allegedly of poisoning but more likely from stomach cancer, before any of them could succeed.

After he walked through the doors of the Staats Model School, Churchill had quickly begun to exhibit the same characteristics described by Vischer. He was restless and irritable. Even the activities
that came most naturally to him were suddenly a chore. “
I could not write, for the ink seemed to dry upon the pen,” he would later recall. “I could not read with any perseverance.” Usually able to devour entire books in a single sitting, Churchill now struggled to read even two over the span of a month, “neither of which,” he wrote, “satisfied my peevish expectations.” He also took no interest in the other prisoners and had very little patience with them, especially when they whistled, which he particularly loathed. “
He no doubt felt that such a display of lightheartedness did not sit well on those in the clutches of the enemy,” Haldane wrote.

Churchill would allow nothing to distract him from his one overriding, all-consuming goal—escape. As he circled the grounds at night and studied the building by day, his plan began to emerge. It was, of course, no ordinary plan. An elaborate, multistep strategy, it was as bold as it was complicated. It was, in Churchill’s own words, “
a scheme of desperate and magnificent audacity.”