The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (57 page)

The Scotsmen were waiting at the bottom of the shaft with a mattress and blankets. By lantern light Howard gave Winston two candles, cigars, and the whiskey bottle. He warned him not to move until they returned the next night; blacks would be around during the day, and if they saw him, they would talk. Winston, weary but elated, “saw myself once more rejoining the Army with a real exploit to my credit.” Then he had misgivings. He was putting these men in real danger. He offered to move on alone; he asked only for food, a pistol, a guide, and, if possible, a pony. He wouldn’t have a chance, the departing Howard told him. Only that afternoon a Boer officer had been there, asking about him. “They have got the hue and cry out all along the line,” he said, “and all over the district.”
¹³⁹

B
ack at the camp the previous morning Churchill’s absence had been discovered, his letter found. Its reference to friends “outside” had led his guards to believe, as he had meant them to, that he had accomplices in Pretoria. Warrants were issued, houses searched; nothing was found. This being the capital of the republic, correspondents from neutral countries heard of the hunt. Then the name of the missing man leaked out. Borthwick sent Jennie word: “Just received the following from Reuter, ‘Churchill escaped.’ ” The
Daily Telegraph
speculated: “If Mr Churchill is caught the Boers won’t let him have the privileges of being a prisoner-of-war again. He cannot be shot unless he uses arms to resist capture, but he may be subjected to confinement rigorous enough to control the innate daring and resourcefulness of which he inherits his full share.” He wasn’t expected to reach the frontier; within forty-eight hours two papers reported he had been seized, first at Waterval-Boven and then at Komati Poort. The Boers were certainly determined to find him. Joubert felt betrayed. He furiously wired Kruger’s state secretary: “With reference to Churchill’s escape I [wonder] whether it would not be a good thing to make public the correspondence about the release of Churchill to show the world what a scoundrel he is.”
¹⁴⁰

Despite the
Daily Telegraph,
a newsman in Pretoria cabled that on recapture he “may probably be shot,” and one London paper, the
Phoenix,
actually thought that reasonable, commenting that “the Boer General cannot be blamed should he order his execution. A non-combatant has no right to carry arms. In the Franco-Prussian War all non-combatants who carried arms were promptly executed.” A. E. Brofman, the Boer deputy superintendent of police, posted notices all over the Transvaal describing the fugitive as: “Englishman 25 years old, about 5 ft 8 in tall, average build, walks with a slight stoop, pale appearance, red brown hair, almost invisible small mustache, speaks through the nose, cannot pronounce the letter ‘S’, cannot speak Dutch, during long conversations occasionally makes a rattling noise [
voggeld
] in his throat, was last seen in a brown suit of clothes.” Boers were asked “to remain on the alert and in case aforementioned Churchill appears to arrest him at once.” Presses were rolling with a police photograph of him, and a price was set on his head.
¹⁴¹

Brofman’s quarry awoke the following afternoon, reached for the candles, and found nothing. It would be dangerous, he knew, to blunder around the shaft in the dark, so he lay still until, several hours later, a faint gleam of lantern light heralded the return of Howard, bearing a chicken and several books. The chicken, he explained, came from the home of an English physician who lived twenty miles away. It was a necessary precaution; Howard’s Boer servants had been inquisitive about the missing mutton. Policemen were knocking on every door here. The presence of English residents in the mining district made it a natural focus of suspicion. But he assured Churchill he was safe. He could pass the time reading. Where, by the way, were his candles? Winston told him they had vanished. His host gave him a half-dozen replacements and apologized; he should have warned him to keep them under the mattress. If left out, he explained, they would be devoured by the swarms of savage white rats in the mine.

Fortunately Churchill did not share the common revulsion for rats. During his three days in the mine they were his biggest problem, pulling at his pillow when he stored the candles beneath it, scurrying around him whenever he blew the flame out, and even wakening him from a doze by running across his face. Once the two miners came down and led him on a tour of the shaft’s subterranean tunnels and galleries; Winston, ever interested in new experiences, questioned them closely about their work. But mostly he glared at rats and read. On the fourth day Howard visited him and said the manhunt seemed to be losing its momentum. The police were combing Pretoria again, convinced he could not have left the town, that a British sympathizer there must be harboring him. He was brought up for a walk on the veld that night and then moved into new quarters behind packing cases in Howard’s office. There he remained for three more days, and was frightened but once, when intermittent rifle fire broke out in the neighborhood. A Boer police officer was in fact there, but the shots had been the result of a ruse of Howard’s. To draw the man away from the house, he had challenged him to a rifle match, shooting bottles. The gullible policeman had won and left no wiser.

Howard now had an escape plan. He had recruited another plotter, Charles Burnham, a local shipping agent.
^*
On Tuesday, December 19, Winston’s seventh day of freedom, a consignment of wool was to be loaded on the mine’s railroad branch and sent, via the main line at Balmoral, to Lourenço Marques in Portuguese territory. Churchill would be hidden among the bales. At first, curiously, he balked. He said he would rather cross the veld with directions and a horse. Imprisonment, he later reflected, had warped his judgment. He was reading Stevenson’s
Kidnapped
at the time, identifying with David Balfour and Alan Breck in the glens. Like them, he was a victim of his need for concealment and deception, which, he later concluded, “breeds an actual sense of guilt very undermining to morale. Feeling that at any moment the officers of the law may present themselves or any stranger may ask the questions, ‘Who are you?’ ‘Where do you come from?’ ‘Where are you going?’—to which questions no satisfactory answer could be given—gnawed at the structure of self-confidence.” He agreed to the trip but dreaded it.
¹⁴²

Notice of reward for Churchill’s return to prison

Tuesday dawned. Howard led him to the car, and he squeezed through a tunnel in the wool to an enclosed space among the bales large enough for him to lie and sit. On the floor were a pistol, two roast chickens, several slices of meat, bread, a melon, and three bottles of cold tea. He had memorized the names of the train stations they would pass and hoped to follow their progress through a chink in the bales. A tarpaulin was tied over the car; they rumbled off. But Winston found his chink inadequate. He saw few signs. The couplings and uncouplings of cars, the banging and jerking in freight yards, the long waits on sidings, baffled and exasperated him.

It was just as well he knew no more. Burnham had decided to accompany the train in one of the passenger cars, and before the trip was over he felt he had aged a lifetime. Churchill would never have made it without him. At Middelburg, their second stop, a trainman wanted to shunt the wool car off on a sidetrack and leave it there overnight; at Waterval-Boven a railroad agent ordered it sidetracked because of a petty regulation; an armed Boer started to untie the tarpaulin when they paused in Kaapmuiden; and when they reached Komanti Poort and the frontier, a detective stepped forward to search the entire train. Burnham dissuaded all of them with bribes and drinks until they had crossed the border and reached Ressano Garcia, where, for the first time, he encountered an honest man. The stationmaster, refusing his money, said the wool could not proceed with the passenger cars. The best he would do was promise it would follow within a half hour. Burnham therefore reached Lourenço first, bribed another policeman—who wanted to arrest him for “loitering with intent”—and was waiting when his cargo arrived. According to Burnham’s account in the Johannesburg
Star
twenty-four years later, “The truck had not been stationary a minute when Churchill, black as a sweep by reason of the coal-dust which was in the bottom of the truck, sprang out.” Meanwhile, Winston, squinting through his peephole, had already seen a Portuguese place-name painted on a board. He was so carried away that he shoved aside the bale overhead and “fired my revolver two or three times in the air as a
feu de joie
.”
¹⁴³

Burnham led him out of the station, around several corners, and paused. He looked up silently at the roof of a building opposite. Winston followed his gaze “and there—blest vision!—I saw floating the gay colours of the Union Jack. It was the British Consulate.” A piece of opéra bouffe ensued. At the door a minor official took one look at his filthy clothes and snapped: “Be off. The Consul cannot see you today. Come to his office at nine tomorrow if you want anything.” Churchill stepped back, threw back his head, and shouted at the upper stories: “I am Winston Bloody Churchill! Come down here at once!” An upstairs window flew open; it was the startled consul, Alexander Ross. Ross called hurried instructions to the man downstairs, and within a quarter hour Winston was lolling in a hot bath. In borrowed clothes he accompanied Burnham to a store, where, Burnham recalled, “he bought a rigout and a cowboy hat.” Back at the consulate, after an enormous dinner, Churchill dispatched a sheaf of telegrams to London. At Great Cumberland Place Jennie picked up the telephone and heard a reporter shouting into the mouthpiece: “Hurrah! Hurrah!” Miss Plowden sent a three-word telegram: “Thank God—Pamela.”
¹⁴⁴

Churchill addressing the crowd at Durban

Winston meanwhile was devouring newspapers. All the news was bad. During what was being called Black Week, December 10–15, British forces had suffered appalling casualties and three staggering defeats, including a rout of an attempt by Buller to relieve Ladysmith by frontal attack up the railway line. Churchill, chagrined, wanted to rejoin the army as soon as possible. Ross was equally anxious to see him go; Lourenço Marques was a hotbed of Boer partisans, and there were rumors that his guest was about to be kidnapped and returned to the Transvaal. On December 21, nine days after Churchill’s escape, a party of armed Englishmen escorted him from the consulate garden to the waterfront, where he boarded the steamer
Induna.
Two days later he docked at Durban. An enormous, cheering crowd awaited him. The entire harbor was decorated with bunting and flags; bands were playing; the mayor, an admiral, and a general leapt up the gangplank to embrace him. After Black Week, the British had been yearning for a hero, and here was a handsome young patrician who had broken out of a Boer prison and made his way across three hundred miles of hostile territory to freedom. The mob whirled him along on its shoulders, deposited him on the steps of the town hall, and demanded a speech. His remarks have not survived, but the mood of the moment, the vitality, confidence, and innocence of the English in that last month of the nineteenth century, are caught in the lively strains of the war’s hit song, trumpeted by the bands as he finished:

And then, as he climbed down, they struck up that spine-tingling anthem of Victorian conquest:

T
hat afternoon he caught a train to Pietermaritzburg, where he remained overnight as the guest of Sir Walter Hely-Hutchinson, governor of Natal, and picked up more disquieting information. The kaiser had written his grandmother the Queen, threatening to side with the Boers. (“I cannot sit on the safety valve forever. My people demand intervention.”) Buller had cabled the War Office that the investment of Ladysmith could not be lifted without further reinforcements. More troopships were on their way to him, but he had been demoted. Although he would retain command of the Natal forces, Lord Roberts was sailing down to take over as commander in chief, with Kitchener, Winston’s nemesis, as chief of staff. Back at the front, Churchill celebrated Christmas Eve with the rest of the press corps, scarcely a hundred yards from the site of the armored-train ambush. In a flush of patriotism he cabled the
Morning Post:
“More irregular corps are wanted. Are the gentlemen of England all fox-hunting? Why not an English Light Horse? For the sake of our manhood, our devoted colonists, and our dead soldiers, we must persevere with the war.” Buller wrote Lady Theresa Londonderry: “Winston Churchill turned up here yesterday escaped from Pretoria. He really is a fine fellow and I must say I admire him greatly. I wish he was leading irregular troops instead of writing for a rotten paper. We are very short of good men, as he appears to be, out here.” He then sent for Churchill and questioned him closely about conditions in the Transvaal. All he got were impressions Winston had gleaned by looking through a tiny crack between bales of wool, but at the end he said: “You have done very well. Is there anything we can do for you?”
¹⁴⁵

To his delight, Winston asked for a commission. The general said, “What about poor old Borthwick?” and his face fell when Churchill replied that he couldn’t possibly break his contract with the
Morning Post.
It might be a rotten paper to the general, but it paid twelve times as much as the army. That put Buller in a dilemma. After the Nile expedition, the War Office had ruled that no soldier could double as a war correspondent. Now Churchill, whose dispatches had been responsible for the ruling, was asking that he be made an exception to it. The general circled the room three times, worried an ear, and said: “All right. You can have a commission in Bungo’s regiment. You will have to do as much as you can for both jobs. But you will get no pay for ours.” Winston quickly agreed, and “Bungo”—Colonel Julian Byng, commanding the South African Light Horse, an Uitlander regiment—appointed him assistant adjutant, with the understanding that while not actually fighting he could go where he liked. Happily stitching his badges of rank on his khaki jacket, Churchill stuck the SALH’s long plume of “cockyolibird” feathers in his hat and headed toward the sound of the guns.
¹⁴⁶

In London, Borthwick raised no objection—since the escape his circulation had soared—but the arrangement was a poor one. Taken as a whole, Churchill’s youthful war correspondence reveals a remarkable grasp of strategy and tactics and an admirable readiness to criticize senior officers. He felt indebted to Buller, however, and here, as in Cuba, gratitude warped his judgment. He wrote: “If Sir Redvers Buller cannot relieve Ladysmith with his present force we do not know of any other officer in the British Service who would be likely to succeed.” That was absurd, and in moments of clarity he knew it. On January 10, after a bloody reverse on the Tugela River, he wrote Pamela: “Alas dearest we are again in retreat. Buller started out full of determination to do or die but his courage soon ebbed and we stood still and watched while one poor wretched brigade was pounded and hammered and we were not allowed to help them…. And the horrible part of it all is that Ladysmith will probably fall and all our brave friends be led off to captivity and shame.” In the aftermath of another disaster—the general had delegated authority to a weak officer, then relieved him—Churchill pictured Buller at last gripping “the whole business in his strong hands.” He failed to note that by then it was too late for the men who had died in vain.
¹⁴⁷

The toll was mounting. And the British, including Churchill, were shocked and bewildered. None of them had ever known anything like this slaughter. Even Majuba, fought near here, had been relatively tame. In their defeat there the British had lost just ninety-two men. The Boer bullet which had crippled Ian Hamilton’s left wrist—Winston called it Hamilton’s “glorious” deformity—had been enough to distinguish him. Now, abruptly, everything had changed. This time the Boers, unlike the Pathan and Omdurman tribesmen, were armed with weapons just as modern as Buller’s. Machine guns shredded the Queen’s dense khaki ranks. Distant Long Toms, sited far beyond the reach of the English cavalry, fired 40-pound, 4.7-inch shrapnel shells that dismembered men or even obliterated them. Barbed wire had appeared, and sandbagged entrenchments. The Boers understood the new warfare. They told one another: “Dig now, or they’ll dig your grave later.”
¹⁴⁸
The baffled British clung stubbornly to their Sandhurst principles. Cavalrymen like Major Douglas Haig assured one another that their
arme blanche,
the lance and sword, would winkle out the foe. They tried and failed and tried and failed and learned nothing. In British regimental accounts one finds the first pathetic strains of a theme which would be sounded throughout all the wars of the twentieth century, now less than a month old. This or that local engagement was “imperishable,” or “immortal”; it would “go down in history,” “enshrined forever” in the records of the past. So it was said in South Africa that winter of Hussar Hill, Mount Alice, Conical Hill, Aloe Knoll, and Potgeiter’s Ferry. So it would be said of Broodseinde in 1917, Galloping Horse Ridge in 1942, the Punchbowl in 1951, and Pleiku in 1965. Eventually all would be forgotten, even by the descendants of those who had fought there.

The first of the century’s butcheries was Spion Kop, or Spion Mountain, and Churchill was there, as was Gandhi with his stretcher-bearers. Abandoning the plan of forcing the Tugela at Colenso, Buller tried to turn Botha’s right flank by fording the river upstream and seizing this 1,470-foot height, the hub of the range of hills between Buller and Ladysmith. On the night of January 23 his men stealthily mounted the steep slopes, scarred with huge rocks. They achieved total surprise. The enemy’s defenses were thin here, and a dense mist covered the flat crest; it was 4:00
A.M.
before a Boer picket on the summit challenged them:
“Wie is daar
?
”
He was answered by hoarse yells of “Waterloo!” and “Majuba!,” a zigzag line of Lee-Enfield flashes, and a charge which took the kop at a cost of ten casualties. The victors held the key to the Ladysmith lock. But before they could turn it they had to face the greater challenge of holding it.

Botha, roused in his tent and told “the Khakis” were on the height, called for long-range rifle fire and salvos from his five Krupp field guns and two pom-poms. Presently Boer shells were bursting over the hilltop, seven every minute. The effect was devastating. By now the summit, an area about the size of Trafalgar Square, was packed with Uitlanders. They had no cover. One survivor later described the peak as “the most awful scene of carnage.” Atkins, the
Guardian
’s correspondent, perched on a nearby ridge, reported that it was becoming an “acre of massacre.”
¹⁴⁹
Buller had expected to support this embattled force with an assault on the other Boer flank, but now the necessary men couldn’t be found. One Uitlander raised a white flag; an officer furiously tore it from his hand. He was right to do so. Their position was precarious, but far from desperate. Around midnight Botha’s artillery commander panicked and fled with his guns. The first wave of counterattacking Boer commandos was driven off the kop’s reverse slope. At this point the obvious move for the British was to renew their drive, clearing a knoll and a spur just ahead. Their problem was that no one seemed to be in charge.

Into this muddle, out of breath but full of resolution, climbed Lieutenant Winston Churchill. He had been waiting in the vicinity with his regiment, hoping to be sent up the hill. Lacking orders and impatient, he had galloped over here on his own, tethered his horse at the bottom, and ascended on foot, gripping boulders and struggling through “streams of wounded.” Soldiers, he wrote, were “staggering along alone, or supported by comrades, or crawling on hands and knees, or carried on stretchers. Corpses lay here and there. Many of the wounds were of a horrible nature. The splinters and fragments of the shell [sic] had torn and mutilated in the most ghastly manner.” To Pamela he wrote: “The scenes on Spion Kop were among the strangest and most terrible I have ever witnessed.” He had, he said, been “continually under shell & rifle fire and once the feather in my hat was cut through by a bullet. But—in the end I came serenely through.”
¹⁵⁰

He came through and went back again, though hardly with serenity. He was rushing around the front in complete violation of regulations, intent on rescuing the situation by sorting everything out personally and then persuading nearby commanders to intervene. Incredibly, no one put him in his place; superior officers, distraught in the confusion, heard him out and pondered his advice. Night fell and he toiled back up the hill, which in his words was now “hopelessly congested” with stragglers and casualties, toward “an intermittent crackle of musketry at the top.” Battalions were intermingled. Regimental officers, he noted, were “everywhere cool and cheery, each with a little group of men around him, all full of fight and energy. But the darkness and the broken ground paralysed everyone.” He was off again, rounding up sappers and miscellaneous troops. Finding the senior officer, a newly promoted brigadier, he explained what he had done and what he proposed be done next. The brigadier, in shock, on the verge of a complete breakdown, mumbled that it was all hopeless and he had decided to withdraw: “Better six good battalions safely down the hill than a bloody mop-up in the morning.” Churchill insisted the gains could still be consolidated—military historians agree with him—and harangued the brigadier about “Majuba” and “the great British public.” It was in vain; the order to retreat went up. Down the Uitlanders came, leaving their dead three deep. In the first olive moments of dawn Churchill glowered up, his thumbs in his braces and his lower lip thrust out in that way he had, and saw two of Botha’s burghers standing jubilantly on the pinnacle. They were waving their rifles and slouch hats, shouting that the Khakis had been
“kopschuw”
—routed.
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