Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill (47 page)

Churchill knew that by asking Buller to give him a commission, he was putting the general in an “awkward” position. “
Here then was the new rule in all its inviolate sanctity,” Churchill would later write, “and to make an exception to it on my account above
all others—I who had been the chief cause of it—was a very hard proposition.” Still, in very Churchillian fashion, he wanted both jobs, and he wasn’t about to withdraw his request simply to spare Buller discomfort. Buller paced the room, circling it several times while he studied the impertinent young man before him. Finally, he made up his mind. “All right,” he said. “You can have a commission….You will have to do as much as you can for both jobs. But you will get no pay for ours.” It was a deal.

As soon as Churchill had his commission, having been made a lieutenant in the South African Light Horse, he wasted no time in going straight to the heart of the conflict. A month later, he was fighting in, and writing about, one of the most infamous battles of the war: Spion Kop. Played out on a fourteen-hundred-foot rocky hilltop overlooking Ladysmith, the Battle of Spion Kop left nearly six hundred men dead and some fifteen hundred wounded. So great was the carnage that both sides were stunned as they called a temporary truce so that they could collect their dead. “
The scenes on Spion Kop,” Churchill admitted in a letter to Pamela Plowden, “were among the strangest and most terrible I have ever witnessed.”

In fact, so horrific were the stories coming out of southern Africa that Pamela begged Churchill to come home. After news of his safe arrival in Lourenço Marques had reached her, she had telegraphed just three words to Churchill’s mother: “
Thank God—Pamela.”
Now, having endured his capture, his escape and his participation in one of the bloodiest battles of the war, in which a bullet had come so close to his head it severed the jaunty feather on his hat, she had had enough.

As much as he loved Pamela, Churchill was shocked that she would think for a moment that he would abandon the war. “
I read with particular attention your letter advising and urging me to come home,” he wrote to her. “But surely you would not imagine that it
would be possible for me to leave the scene of war….I should forfeit my self respect forever if I tried to shield myself like that behind an easily obtained reputation for courage….I am really enjoying myself immensely and if I live I shall look back with much pleasure upon all this.”

It was certainly no accident that, for the remainder of his time in South Africa, wherever there was an opportunity for an epic battle, a heroic triumph or a great story, there was Churchill. Just a month after the Battle of Spion Kop, he rode triumphantly into Ladysmith at the head of the relief column. He would never forget watching with a mixture of pity and exaltation as heartbreakingly thin, weak men in tattered clothing raced through the streets, some laughing, some crying, all cheering the relieving troops and the end of the devastating four-month siege. It was, Churchill would later write, “
one of the most happy memories of my life.”

Not even being present at the relief of Ladysmith, however, could compare with the day, three months later, when Pretoria fell to the British. Early that morning, Churchill and his cousin Sunny, the 9th Duke of Marlborough, rode as victors into the Transvaal capital. It was the first time Churchill had been there since his escape from the Staats Model School, and his first thoughts were for the men he had left behind.

Churchill knew that not long after he had climbed the prison fence, the Boers had moved their British captives to a new location. After asking for directions, he and Sunny rode through the largely abandoned streets, looking for the POW camp. Finally, they found it: a long, low tin building encircled with a heavy wire fence.

Inside the prison, Charles Burnett, an officer in the Eighteenth Hussars, was watching from a window. He and the other prisoners had been in a frenzy of excitement for days, ever since they had first heard guns booming just outside the Transvaal capital and witnessed the panic that had gripped Pretoria, with stores looted and entire families frantically fleeing the city. The guards, as furious as they were frightened, had threatened to move the prisoners to yet another
location, but nothing had happened. Now, from his window, Burnett thought that he could see troops in the distance. Through a heavy morning mist, he could not be sure.

Suddenly out of the fog appeared not an army or even a regiment but just two men on horseback. “
Then, and then only,” Burnett wrote, “we knew that our deliverance was at hand.” As soon as he saw the prison, Churchill raised his hat into the air and let out a loud cheer. Instantly, he heard it echoed within the prison walls. “
Hats were flying in the air,” Burnett wrote, “and we were all shouting and cheering like madmen.” Moments later, although they were surrounded by fifty-two armed Boer guards and only two men had come to set them free, the prison gates sprang open, and 180 prisoners swept out the doors and into the yard, surrounding Churchill and Sunny in a cheering, shouting, crazed throng. “
Some in flannels, hatless or coatless,” Churchill wrote, “but all violently excited.”

Surrendering to their inevitable fate, the Boer guards were quickly disarmed and forced inside the prison. The men they had once held hostage now carried the guards’ rifles and wore their bandoliers, joyfully assuming the role of jailers to their former captors. Churchill’s great pleasure at watching this transformation take place was marred only by the fact that Opperman, the warden who had been “too fat to go and fight” and had taken pleasure in making known his hatred of Englishmen, and Hans Malan, Kruger’s malicious grandson, were already gone, having fled the city in terror of the advancing troops.

While the chaotic celebration unfolded, one of the POWs tore down the prison flag and hoisted in its place the Union Jack. It was a handmade version, secretly stitched together from a Transvaal flag found in a prison cupboard and kept carefully hidden. As he watched his own flag now waving over the Boer prison, Churchill carefully marked the moment. “
Time: 8:47, June 5,” he would remember many years later with perfect clarity. “Tableau!”

Among the jubilant prisoners flocking around Churchill and Sunny in the prison yard, two were strikingly absent—Adam Brockie and Aylmer Haldane. Both men, along with one other prisoner, Lieutenant Frederick Le Mesurier of the Dublin Fusiliers, had escaped from the Staats Model School more than three months earlier. When they had been forced to come up with another plan after Churchill’s escape, their thoughts had turned from the prison fence to the floor beneath their feet.

After learning that the Boers were going to move the POW camp, Haldane suggested that they make use of a trapdoor they had found under one of the beds. They could hide in the shallow space beneath the floorboards in the hope that the guards would think they had already escaped. When the camp left without them, they would emerge from their hiding place and make their way to freedom. In late February, believing that the prison would be moved in a matter of days, they had opened the trapdoor and slipped into the dark, damp world beneath the Staats Model School.

As soon as they climbed in, the three men realized that they had not been prepared for what awaited them. Their roommates had agreed to help them, providing food and information, but that did little to change the fact that their new home was little better than a torture chamber. Just two and a half feet high, it was divided into five narrow, eighteen-foot-long compartments. They could not sit up, talk above a whisper or wash themselves. There was no light or fresh air, and it was so damp that their leather boots soon turned green. The only way they could stand it was by constantly reminding themselves that it wouldn’t last long.

Their absence was discovered the next morning. As the three men listened intently to the sounds above them, a fruitless search ensued. They were never found, but, to their despair, the Boers’ plan to move the prisoners was delayed. Then it was delayed again, and again, until, in Haldane’s words, they were “
doomed to occupy this earthly chamber for nearly three weeks.”

When the prisoners were finally moved and the three men were
able to emerge, filthy and weak, from the trapdoor, it took them less time to make their way to Portuguese East Africa than it had to hide beneath the prison floor. Just two weeks later, two of the men, Haldane and Le Mesurier, climbed out of a train in Lourenço Marques. Following essentially the same path that Churchill had taken three months earlier, the men had received assistance from native Africans, and ultimately made contact with the same underground network of Englishmen that John Howard had organized to help their former prison mate. Emboldened by the success of their first, improvised scheme, Howard and his trusted neighbors simply repeated their dangerous adventure, hiding the fugitives in their colliery and spiriting them across the border as stowaways in Charles Burnham’s wool trucks.

Not long after leaving the empty prison, Haldane and Le Mesurier had become separated from Brockie.
Although he would later say that he searched for the two English officers for four days, the scrappy Irish enlisted man might have concluded he was better off without them. Able to speak Dutch and Zulu and with a good grasp of the terrain, he had found his own way to Kaapmuiden, one of the last stops on the railway line to Portuguese East Africa, and even worked briefly in the train station bar.
By the time Haldane and Le Mesurier boarded the steamship to Durban, Brockie was already on it.

When the three men reached the Natal port, no welcoming party with bands and cheering crowds was waiting to celebrate their escape. Haldane did, however, find a letter from Winston Churchill. “
My heartiest congratulations on your wonderful exploit which will mark you as a man of daring, endurance and resource among all soldiers,” Churchill had written. “I am delighted to think you are safe. I feared they had murdered you in the veldt.”

They had survived the veld, but soon after reaching Durban, both Haldane and Le Mesurier nearly lost their lives to illness.
Le Mesurier was immediately invalided home with enteric fever, and a few days later Haldane was hospitalized in Pietermaritzburg with malaria. Only Brockie appeared to be wholly unaffected, Haldane wrote in astonishment, “having suffered not at all during our adventures.”

Little more than a week after the fall of Pretoria in June 1900, having taken part in one last battle, Churchill decided it was time to go home. “
Our operations were at an end,” he wrote. “The war had become a guerrilla and promised to be shapeless and indefinite.” By now, even the most stalwart Britons were forced to admit that the war was far from over. Worse, it was quickly becoming clear that it would finally end not with pageantry, precision or gallantry but with cruelty of the most brutal and modern kind.

Six months after Churchill left, Lord Roberts himself, the commander in chief, sailed back to England, declaring the war over, or near enough. In his place, he left in command Lord Kitchener, the man Churchill had attacked for his brutality in the Sudan campaign. In command of overwhelmingly superior firepower, but frustrated by the Boers’ unrelenting guerrilla tactics, Kitchener took a route that would hasten the end of the war, at a staggering cost.