The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (55 page)

They took this to mean that the enemy had been routed in three engagements, though the loss of Symonds, a Natal general, was difficult to reconcile with victory. Winston heard an aide tell Buller, “It looks as if it will be over, sir.” Sir Redvers replied, “I dare say there will be enough left to give us a fight outside Pretoria.” The soundness of this military judgment was confirmed when, two days later, on October 31, they anchored in Table Bay and a launch sped out bearing, in Winston’s words, a “Man Who Knew.” All the tidings were grim. Mafeking and Kimberley were surrounded by Boers—had been, in fact, since the
Dunottar Castle
left Southampton. After Symonds’s death General Sir George White had begun retreating into Ladysmith, which was itself threatened with encirclement. The enemy had been defeated nowhere. So much for the reliability of tramp steamers as news media. Ashore, Winston interviewed a distraught Milner and sent off a report: “We have greatly underestimated the military strength and spirit of the Boers. I vy much doubt whether one army Corps will be enough to overcome their resistance.” Moreover, Kruger wasn’t the only man with troublesome immigrants. Milner had told Winston that the Boers who lived here in Cape Colony under the Union Jack were “trembling on the verge of rebellion.” Winston concluded that the British government could, “for the moment, be sure of nothing beyond the gunshot of the Navy.”
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Buller intended to remain in Cape Town, pondering his choices and awaiting the arrival of his troop transports. At home, Salisbury was telling a Guildhall audience that his confidence in the British soldier “is only equalled by my confidence in Sir Redvers Buller.” Churchill wasn’t so sure. The general struck him as the kind of man who plodded “on from blunder to blunder and from one disaster to another.” It was, Winston felt, time to leave him. During the voyage he and J. B. Atkins of the
Manchester Guardian
had agreed to knit their fortunes; now they decided to reach Ladysmith before the enemy slammed the door. On inquiry at the Mount Nelson Hotel they learned that by taking a train to East London, seven hundred miles away, and continuing by small mail boat or tug to Durban, they could beat other correspondents to the front by four days. It would be risky; the railroad skirted Boer strongpoints and was undefended. They caught the last express to get through safely and reached Durban, but the sea leg was an ordeal. Their ship, a steamer of about 150 tons, had to fight its way through a howling Antarctic gale. Between waves Winston could see “rocks which showed their black teeth endlessly a bare mile away upon our port beam.” The seasickness, however, was far worse. He lay in his bunk “in an extreme of physical misery while our tiny ship bounded and reeled, and kicked and pitched, and fell and turned almost over and righted itself again… through an endless afternoon, a still longer evening and an eternal night.”
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Arriving at midnight, they slept six hours and awoke only to be told that they were too late; Ladysmith was invested. The disappointment was deep, but they resolved to get as close to it as possible. Another train, zigzagging up and down hills and negotiating hairpin curves, took them sixty miles to Pietermaritzburg and on to Estcourt, a town of about three hundred stone-walled houses roofed with corrugated iron. Estcourt was the end of the line. They could hear the Ladysmith cannonade from there. While his valet pitched his tent, Winston uncapped his pen and began to write. All along the way he had been interviewing everyone who had fought or seen the Boers, beginning, in Durban, with Reggie Barnes, his companion in Cuba and polo teammate later. Barnes had been wounded in the groin storming a hill at Elandslaagte; his colonel had fallen beside him; sixty-seven of their men had been killed or wounded in the assault. He had said: “All these colonials tell you that the Boers only want one good thrashing to satisfy them. Don’t you believe it. They mean going through with this to the end.” Again, Churchill’s instincts told him Barnes was right. They betrayed him, however, when he talked to Uitlander refugees. On November 5 he reported “the fullest confirmation of the horrible barbarities perpetrated by the Boers,” telling of a woman who had been flogged across the breasts and commenting: “Such is the Boer—gross, fierce, and horrid—doing the deeds of the devil with the name of the Lord on his lips. It is quite true that he is brave, but so are many savage tribes.”
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One is struck, in reading Churchill’s accounts from the South African battlefields, by the frequency with which he encountered old friends and acquaintances. Barnes was one. Ian Hamilton commanded troops nearby. Brabazon, back in uniform, was on his way. Leo Amery, Winston’s fellow Harrovian, was the
Times
correspondent in Estcourt, and among the officers there was Captain Aylmer Haldane, whom he had known in India. On the night of November 14 the captain was ordered by his commanding officer, Colonel Charles Long, to lead two companies aboard an armored train and probe the Boer lines. As he later wrote in his memoirs, he was leaving headquarters when he noticed Churchill “hanging about to pick up such crumbs of information for his newspaper as might be available.” Haldane described his mission to Winston and “suggested that he might care to accompany me next day. Although he was not at all keen he consented to do so, and arranged to be at the station in time for the start.”
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Churchill’s lack of enthusiasm was sensible. Buller, when he heard of Long’s decision, called it “inconceivable stupidity.” Winston had already described the armored train. It was “cloaked from end to end with thick plates and slabs of blue-grey iron.” Slits permitted soldiers aboard to fire out. It looked formidable but was, as Thomas Pakenham puts it, “a parody of modern mobile war: an innovation that was already obsolete.” All the Boers had to do was blow up a bridge or sabotage the rails; the locomotive would then be immobile and helpless. Winston should have turned Haldane down. He didn’t, he wrote afterward, “because I thought it was my duty to gather as much information as I could for the
Morning Post
” and he was “eager for trouble.” On those grounds it was justified. The trip would produce plenty of news and danger. It would do more; before the adventure was over, his name would be a household word throughout England. Although it almost cost him his life the decision was, by the light of his flaming ambition, well worth the risk. He would have but one regret. Only yesterday he had posted a letter to the War Office in London, and before he saw another sunset he would wish he had left it unmailed. He had written: “There has been a great deal too much surrendering in this war, and I hope people who do so will not be encouraged.”
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L
ouis Botha, the swarthy Boer general besieging Ladysmith, overestimated the number of British troops in Estcourt. Apprehensive that they might be preparing to break his grip on the town, Botha, on the day Churchill agreed to join Haldane, led a column of five hundred mounted raiders southward to investigate, and the next morning, standing in his stirrups atop a ridge, he sighted the armored train steaming north. After the lumbering monstrosity had passed, he ordered rocks strewn on the rails just around a curve and then awaited its return. As the engine reappeared, headed back toward the British lines, his gunner fired two shells at it. Peering out from inside his car, or truck, as they were called, Churchill had just spotted a clump of Boers on a nearby knoll. At that instant he was dazzled by a flash of light and jarred by the sound of steel fragments rattling on the train’s iron shield: “It was shrapnel,” he later wrote—“the first I had seen in war.” He thought the train might be headed into a trap and turned to Haldane to say so. Simultaneously the engineer up ahead, frightened by the shells, rocketed around the curve at full throttle and crashed into the rocks. Before Churchill could speak “there was a tremendous shock, and [Captain Haldane] and I and all the soldiers in the truck were pitched head over heels on to its floor.”
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Scrambling up, Winston saw scores of Boers lying on the grass outside, delivering heavy and accurate rifle fire upon one side of the train. He and Haldane ducked and put their heads together. The captain, they agreed, should move to the rear and order his troops to pin down the Boer riflemen while Churchill inspected the damage and tried to repair it. Winston found the locomotive still on the rails. The next three cars had been derailed, however, and the civilian engineer, bleeding from a superficial face wound, was on the verge of hysteria. Churchill lectured him on duty. Then he congratulated him. This, he told him, was the chance of a lifetime. He might even be rewarded for “distinguished gallantry.” Besides, he assured him, no man could be hit twice in one battle. This absurd fiction quieted the driver and they went to work.

It was the subsequent recollection of all the survivors, including the Boers, that Winston was under intermittent fire for the next seventy minutes. He himself would remember the “soft kisses” of bullets as they “sucked in the air” around him, but he was completely engrossed in “the heat and excitement of the work”; his choice, he felt, lay between “danger, captivity and shame on the one hand, and safety, freedom and triumph on the other.” It was just possible, he thought, that the engine could be used as a ram to clear the wrecked cars from the line. He darted back and forth, straining at car couplings, conferring with Haldane, and calling for volunteers from the troops in the cars behind. Few responded. His own conduct is best described in Haldane’s official report, written after he and Winston had fallen out. The captain noted that “owing to the urgency of the circumstances,” he formally placed Churchill on duty. He added: “I would point out that while engaged on the work of saving the engine, for which he was mainly responsible, he was frequently exposed to the full fire of the enemy. I cannot speak too highly of his gallant conduct.” As a good valet, Walden was on the spot. Afterward he wrote Jennie: “the driver was one of the first wounded, and he said to Mr Winston: ‘I am finished.’ So Mr Winston said to him: ‘Buck up a bit, I will stick to you,’ and he threw off his revolver and field-glasses and helped the driver… knock the iron trucks off the road by running into them with the engine.”
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It proved impossible to link the locomotive and the rear cars. Yet the situation wasn’t entirely hopeless. Just ahead lay a railroad trestle and, beyond that, safety. Churchill herded Walden and forty Tommies, many of them wounded, aboard the engine and its tender, and took up a position behind the engineer until they had crossed the bridge. There he left them. He was returning to Haldane, on foot, trying to think how he might bring more men out, when two men in mufti arose from the bushes beside the tracks, “tall figures,” he would later remember, “full of energy, clad in dark, flapping clothes, with slouch, storm-driven hats, poising on their levelled rifles hardly a hundred yards away.” His mind flashed: “Boers!” He tried to climb the railroad embankment; they fired and missed. Next he turned to dash back to the bridge. A Boer horseman came galloping from that direction, shaking a rifle and shouting. Churchill decided to kill him. He reached for his pistol—and realized that he had left it on the locomotive. The horseman—it was Botha himself—now had him in his sights. Winston remembered a quotation from Napoleon: “When one is alone and unarmed, a surrender may be pardoned.” He raised his hands and stepped forward, a prisoner of war.
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He was prodded toward Haldane and the cowering British troops, who had already been rounded up. Churchill blurted out to Atkins when next he met him that the soldiers had indeed been rounded up “like cattle,” and that this had been “the greatest indignity of my life.” A heavy rain had begun to fall, and Churchill was drenched, wading through a patch of high grass, when “a disquieting and timely reflection” crossed his mind. In the breast pocket of his khaki jacket were two clips of Mauser ammunition from Omdurman, politely known in army quartermaster manifests as “MK IV and MK V issue” but notorious to the public as dumdum cartridges—soft-nosed or expanding bullets which disintegrated when they hit a man’s body. Dumdums had been outlawed at the Hague Conference the previous July, and Churchill knew it. As his guard turned to open an umbrella he managed to drop one clip unseen. He had the other in his fist when the Boer, looking down from his horse, said sharply in English: “What have you got there?” Winston opened his hand and asked, “What is it? I just picked it up.” Botha took the clip, glanced at it, and tossed it in the grass. It is sad to note that the following March 9 Churchill indignantly informed his
Morning Post
readers that the Boers were using “expansive” bullets and piously commented that “the character of these people reveals in stress a dark and spiteful underside. A man, I use the word in its fullest sense, does not wish to lacerate his foe, however earnestly he may desire his death.”
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Even without the dumdums he was anxious about his fate. He ranged himself in line with the other prisoners but was brusquely picked out by the Boers and told to stand apart. It was an ominous order. He “had enough military law,” as he put it, “to know that a civilian in a half uniform who has taken an active and prominent part in a fight, even if he has not fired a shot himself, is liable to be shot at once by drumhead court martial.” Then, just as curtly, he was directed to rejoin the others; an enemy officer came over and told him they knew who he was and regarded him as a prize: “We don’t catch the son of a lord every day.” Churchill, in his own phrase, felt “quite joyful” at the realization that he would live. His euphoria lasted during the subsequent three-day trek north, on foot sixty miles around the booming cannons pounding Ladysmith and then by train from Elandslaagte to their prisoner-of-war camp in Pretoria’s State Model Schools. Once there behind wire, however, he forgot his gratitude for escaping a firing squad and he convinced himself that his captivity was illegal.
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