The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (56 page)

An artist’s reconstruction of the armored-train ambush, in the
Daily News Weekly
of November 25, 1899

Winston’s response to imprisonment tells a great deal about him. He felt disgust, despair, rage. This is not a universal reaction to restraint. Many public men have adjusted to it without great difficulty; it has served as a temporary refuge for them, a place for reflection, study, and writing. Mohandas Gandhi, now toiling in South Africa as a leader of Indian stretcher-bearers, would later flourish in British prisons. But not Churchill. He found, he wrote, “no comfort in any of the philosophical ideas which some men parade in their hours of ease and strength and safety.” His wrath and tremendous frustration probably arose from his depressive nature. He needed outer stimuli, the chances for excitement and achievement which were his lifelong defenses against melancholia. The prisoner-of-war camp was like being back in the harness of school. It was worse; their long tin POW dormitory was enclosed by a ten-foot corrugated iron fence rimmed by barbed wire, watched by armed guards fifty yards apart, and brilliantly illuminated at night by searchlights on tall standards. Elsewhere the war continued, great events were in progress, but here he was penned in, entirely in the power of the Boers. He owed his life to their mercy, his daily bread to their compassion, his movements to their indulgence. In this atmosphere he found himself picking quarrels with other British officer inmates over trivial matters—he couldn’t tolerate their whistling—and took no pleasure from their company. He felt, he wrote, “webbed about with a tangle of regulations and restrictions. I certainly hated every minute of my captivity more than I have ever hated any other period in my whole life.”
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At the end of his first week behind wire he wrote the Transvaal authorities, demanding his release as “a non-combatant and a Press correspondent.” He argued disingenuously that he had taken “no part in the defence of the armoured train,” had been “quite unarmed,” and had merely done “all I could to escape from so perilous a situation and to save my life.” Unfortunately, his fellow war correspondents had interviewed survivors of the wreck, and British newspapers were reporting details of his audacity under fire; the Natal
Witness
of November 17 had carried a statement by the railwaymen expressing their “admiration of the coolness and pluck displayed by Mr Winston Churchill… who accompanied the train, and to whose efforts… is due the fact that the armoured train and tender were brought successfully out.” Churchill, it was reported, was being considered for the Victoria Cross. Under these circumstances, the Kruger government endorsed the recommendation of their commandant-general, Piet Joubert, who, upon hearing of his application, urged that he be “guarded and watched as dangerous for our war; otherwise he can still do us a lot of harm. In a word, he must not be released during the war. It is through his active part that one section of the armoured train got away.” Winston protested that because he was well known the world would regard him “as a kind of hostage” and that this would “excite criticism and even ridicule.” If given his freedom, he said, he would “withdraw altogether from South Africa during the war.” The Boers were unimpressed. He wrote his mother and the Prince of Wales, begging for help. They could do nothing. In a darker mood he wrote Pamela (“Not a vy satisfactory address to write from—although it begins with P…. I write you this line to tell you that among new and vivid scenes I think often of you”) and, on November 30, to Bourke Cockran: “I am 25 today—it is terrible to think how little time remains!”
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His weeks in prison would have been limited, whatever happened. Somehow, one feels, powerful friends of Jennie’s, HRH’s, or even Cockran’s found a way to intervene successfully on his behalf. There is simply no other explanation for the extraordinary judgment Joubert rendered on December 12, completely reversing himself. Pondering Winston’s denial that he played an active role in the events which followed the train wreck, and having decided (he didn’t say why) that he was an honorable English gentleman and could therefore be only truthful, the commandant-general wrote: “I have to accept his word in preference to all the journalists and reporters.” Their accounts, he said, must have been “exaggerated.” He therefore concluded: “I have no further objections to his being set free.”
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Had it ended there, the incident would have had little effect on Churchill’s political fortunes at home. But before this order could reach the POW camp, he had taken matters into his own hands. Like his lie about the wreck, the story of his breakout from Pretoria is not entirely creditable, but a special tolerance has always been extended to prisoners of war bent on freedom, and there is no reason to withhold it from him, particularly in light of the courage and imagination with which he carried out the escape plan. The plan was not, however, his. It was the brainchild of Haldane and one A. Brockie, a regimental sergeant major, who, to get better quarters, had passed himself off as an officer. In the back of the enclosure, shielded from the searchlights, stood a circular toilet. The night sentry there seemed lax. Brockie spoke both Afrikaans, developed from seventeenth-century Dutch, and the native Bantu language. If he and Haldane could jump the wall there unobserved, he might be able to talk their way across the countryside to Portuguese East Africa—“Portuguese East”—and freedom. Churchill, overhearing them, insisted that they take him with them. He would see to it, he said, that Haldane’s name appeared in headlines all over the world. Brockie didn’t want him; he thought him unpredictable and believed another fugitive would increase their risks. But although the key to the scheme, the sergeant major was an enlisted man; his opinion didn’t count for much. Haldane, having invited Winston aboard the train, felt a certain responsibility for his plight. He would include him, he said, provided he “conform to orders.”
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From Churchill’s later version of the escape

Their chances of success were slight, and were to become slighter, but Winston, ever confident, wrote an impudent letter to the Boer under secretary of war on Monday, December 11, and left it in his bunk. It was headed “p.p.c.”—
pour prendre congé
(to take furlough). “I do not concede,” he began, “that your Government was justified in holding me… and I have consequently resolved to escape.” Friends “outside,” he said, were “making this possible.” Before leaving he wanted to “place on record my appreciation of the kindness which has been shown to me,” promised to “set forth a truthful and impartial account of my experiences in Pretoria,” expressed the hope that “this most grievous and unhappy war” would end the enmity between the Boers and British “races,” and ended: “Regretting the circumstances have not permitted me to bid you a personal farewell, believe me, Yours vy sincerely, Winston S. Churchill.”
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Tuesday night, unaware of Joubert’s order, which had gone out that afternoon, the three donned civilian suits acquired by barter and awaited their chance. Haldane and Churchill entered the latrine and returned, discouraged by the sentinel’s unexpected vigilance. Brockie accused them of timidity, but when he went in, he, too, was thwarted. Churchill reentered alone, passing Brockie coming out. Once inside, he saw his chance—the guard had turned to light a pipe—and leaping to the top of the wall he dropped into a garden on the other side. There he crouched, awaiting the others. But they were luckless. At one moment Haldane was in the toilet, ready to jump, when the sentry stirred and leveled his rifle at him. Churchill waited for an hour and a half, then decided to go on alone. He left behind two very resentful countrymen. The idea, after all, had been theirs. Haldane was “bitterly disappointed to find that Winston had gone,” he would later write in his memoirs, adding, “I resist the temptation of stating what Brockie had to say on the subject.”
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Yet it is difficult to see what else Winston could have done. A ledge on the outer side of the wall prevented him from climbing back. His prospects in any case were extremely dim. Ahead of him lay three hundred miles of wild and hostile country. He didn’t know the language. He lacked a compass and a map—Brockie had those. His pockets contained seventy-five pounds in British money, four slabs of chocolate, and a few biscuits. Believing he had no other choice, he rose from the garden, making no attempt at concealment, and strode past another sentry, unchallenged, into the moonlit evening.

Pretoria was crowded with burghers. He strode right through them, humming to himself until he reached the suburbs, where he sat on a little bridge to reflect. At dawn he would be missed; pursuit would be immediate. At any rate he was free, “if only for an hour.” Wandering about, he found a railroad track and followed it to the nearest station. There he waited in a ditch until the next train arrived. It paused five minutes and started moving again. He had no idea where it was going, but it offered the only way out of town. As the locomotive passed him he saw the engineer “silhouetted against the furnace,” the “black profile of the engine,” and “clouds of steam.” His moment was now. Twice he hurled himself at cars and fell back; on the third try he found a handhold and vaulted into a mass of empty coal bags. Burrowing into them, he fell asleep.
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The sky was still dark when he awoke. Remaining aboard till daybreak was out of the question; his presence would be betrayed when the bags were unloaded. He had to alight quickly, find water, and hide, awaiting the return of night and another train. Springing from the speeding car, he took two gigantic strides and sprawled in a shallow trench. Then, finding a pool in a nearby gully, he forced himself to drink all he could hold because he had no way of knowing when he would find more. Dawn broke and he felt jubilant: the train tracks ran straight toward the sunrise and Portuguese territory. That day was spent huddled in a ravine, nibbling at chocolate; his sole companion was “a gigantic vulture, who manifested an extravagant interest in my condition, and made hideous and ominous gurglings from time to time.”
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As dusk deepened he crawled out and made his way to a point where the tracks lay uphill and on a curve, reasoning that a train would slow there, permitting him to hop aboard. But no train came. Sometime after midnight, having waited six hours in vain, he struck out on foot, hoping to put ten or fifteen miles of roadbed behind him before another day dawned. Presently he saw the flaw in this plan. Every railroad bridge was guarded by armed men. To avoid them he had to creep across the moonlit veld or detour through bogs, swamps, and streams. A station loomed. On a siding lay three long strings of freight cars. He was studying their markings, hoping to learn their destinations and then hide in one which seemed promising, when loud voices came toward him, scaring him away and driving him out into the grass of the boundless plain.

By now he was exhausted, wandering aimlessly. Out in the darkness to his left gleamed what appeared to be the fires of a Kaffir kraal, a native village. It occurred to him that the Kaffirs, who were said to be disillusioned with the Boers, might be cooperative. He spoke no Bantu tongues, but perhaps sign language would do; it had worked when he was lost in the Sudanese desert. There seemed to be no alternative, so he turned that way. As he approached the settlement, he saw he had been mistaken. It wasn’t kraal at all. The lights came from furnace fires outside several stone houses clustered around what could be identified, by the wheel of a winding gear, as a coal mine. He felt a flicker of hope. In the POW pen he had heard that a few Englishmen, needed by the Boers for their skills, had been permitted to remain in some of the Witbank and Middelburg mining districts, seventy-five miles east of Pretoria. This might be one of them. But which houses would be British, and which Boer? He would have to guess. If he picked a wrong one he would produce his bank notes, explain who he was, and promise to pay anyone who would help him another thousand pounds later. Striding out of the veld and past the furnace fires, he chose a darkened home at random and knocked. A light sprang up. A man’s voice called,
“Wie is daar?”
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Churchill’s heart sank. He spoke no Afrikaans. He said, “I want help; I have had an accident.” The door opened and he saw a tall, pale, mustachioed figure, hastily attired and holding a revolver. The man said in English, “What do you want?” Winston improvised a story: he was a burgher en route to join his commando at Komati Poort, on the Portuguese frontier; he and some friends had been skylarking on their train; he had fallen off and dislocated his shoulder. Obviously the man didn’t buy it. He stared hard, backed into the house, and roughly demanded details. Winston decided to throw in the towel. Stepping inside he said, “I think I had better tell you the truth,” and, after his host had nodded grimly, “I am Winston Churchill, war correspondent for the
Morning Post.
I am making my way to the frontier”—as he said it, he reflected bitterly on how wretchedly he had done—“and I have plenty of money. Will you help me?”
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A silence grew, and grew uncomfortable. The tall man continued to stare, as though struggling to make up his mind. Suddenly he closed the door behind them, thrust out his hand, and blurted: “Thank God you have come here! It is the only house for twenty miles where you would not have been handed over. But we are all British here, and we will see you through.” Churchill sagged with relief. Wringing the man’s hand he felt, as he later put it, “like a drowning man pulled out of the water and informed he has won the Derby.” His savior introduced himself as John Howard, manager of the Transvaal Collieries. He led the way to the kitchen, produced whiskey and a leg of mutton, and explained their situation. Within were his British secretary, a mechanic from Lancaster, and two Scottish miners. All four had given the Boers their parole to observe strict neutrality. Howard himself was a Transvaal citizen; if caught harboring an escaped prisoner, he would be shot for treason. But the prospect didn’t seem to alarm him. He vanished while Winston ate, consulted the others, and returned to say that the five of them had agreed that the best course, for the time being, was to hide their fugitive in the mine. Howard led him out to the winding wheel. There, to Churchill’s astonishment, the mechanic introduced himself as a prospective constituent—Dan Dewsnap of Oldham. Gripping his arm, Dewsnap whispered: “They’ll all vote for you next time.”
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