The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (58 page)

His bitterness over the loss of Spion Kop was relieved by the arrival in South Africa of Lady Randolph Churchill. Jennie had solicited £41,597 from wealthy Americans and commissioned a hospital ship, the
Maine,
named after the U.S. warship lost in Havana harbor. In the forecastle were an American flag, sent by Theodore Roosevelt, and, from Queen Victoria, a Union Jack. (Jennie chose to fly the British colors.) Accompanying her on the voyage was Jack, just nineteen, whose brother had obtained a commission for him in the SALH. They had learned of Winston’s escape the day before they sailed, and he met them on the Durban docks. After they had killed a bottle of ’25 brandy, Jennie mounted a wild horse, tamed it, and rode it into the regiment’s camp. At forty-five her beauty had reached its autumnal glory, and if she seemed determined to prove that she retained the energy of youth, there was reason: she had decided to marry George Cornwallis-West, an impecunious junior officer just Winston’s age. There is no record of her sons’ reaction to this. Her friends, however, were appalled. Jennie didn’t care. She told one of them: “I suppose you think I’m very foolish, but I don’t care. I’m having such
fun
.”
¹⁵²

Winston’s family was well represented in South Africa now. There was his mother; his brother; his bland, mustachioed cousin Sunny, the young duke, serving in Cape Town as Lord Roberts’s military secretary; and, among the civilians in besieged Mafeking, his aunt Lady Sarah Wilson, Randolph’s glamorous thirty-five-year-old sister, who, bored by London, had come down here for excitement and found it. Captured in the Transvaal during a clumsy attempt at spying, she had been exchanged for a Boer cattle thief and now held court in a luxurious, white-paneled bunker hewn out of Mafeking’s red soil, the walls decorated with African spears from the Matabele War and a huge Union Jack. Lady Sarah was a survivor; no one seems to have been concerned about her. Winston was worried about Jack, however. He felt responsible for him, and almost immediately his fears were justified. In action for the first time on Hussar Hill, Jack was wounded in the calf. To Atkins, “It seemed as though he had paid his brother’s debts.” Winston thought it “an instance of Fortune’s caprice.” Jack, he wrote Pamela, had been “lying down. I was walking about without any cover—I who have tempted fortune so often. Jack was hit.” To his mother he wrote: “It is a coincidence that one of the first patients on board the
Maine
should be your own son… but you may be glad with me that he is out of harm’s way for a month. There will be a great battle in a few days and his presence—though I would not lift a finger to prevent him—adds much to my anxiety when there is fighting.”
¹⁵³

The great battle, for Vaal Krantz, was fought and succeeded by another, and then another. Slowly the weight of British numbers began to tell. Kimberley, 240 miles to the west, was relieved by Major General John French, while here in Natal, Botha fell back on Hlangwane Hill, then in further retreats on Inskilling Hill, Pieters Plateau, Railway Hill, and Hart’s Hill. Churchill was in action almost every day, and on the historic evening of February 28, the one hundred eighteenth day of Ladysmith’s investment, he rode with the first two squadrons to enter the beleaguered town, galloping “across the scrub-dotted plain, fired at only by a couple of Boer guns. Suddenly,” he wrote, “from the brushwood up rose gaunt figures waving hands of welcome. On we pressed, and at the head of a battered street of tin-roofed houses met Sir George White on horseback, faultlessly attired…. It was a thrilling moment.” That night he dined with White and Ian Hamilton on champagne and a roast from the garrison’s last trek-ox, saved for this occasion. But “better than feast or couch” was the reward, “which was all the more splendid since it had been so long delayed—victory.”
¹⁵⁴

Churchill remained in Ladysmith over a month, feverishly writing a new book,
London to Ladysmith via Pretoria.
His escape had fueled sales of his earlier works—8,000 copies of
Savrola
, 3,000 of the two-volume
River War
at 36 shillings ($9), and 600 of the
Malakand Field Force
—bringing him about £1,500 in royalties. This, with the checks from Borthwick, went into his political war chest. Already Tories in Southport had invited him to run in their constituency, but he wanted vindication in Oldham. When Joe Chamberlain sent him a long letter, inviting a discussion of public affairs, he cannily replied that, while he hoped “to find a seat before the dissolution, as I should like to record a vote on many points,” he could not return to England “until the end of the war or at least until the Transvaal is in our hands.” His Oldham defeat had taught him the need for planning. He meant to build a financial base, at the same time cultivating readers with his vivid prose—“Winston’s graphic tongue,” as Jennie called it. Yet he could never be a cautious politician. With casualty lists lengthening, the last thing his readers wanted from him was a plea for magnanimity toward the enemy. Nevertheless, he wrote: “Peace and happiness can only come to South Africa through the fusion and concord of the Dutch and British races, who must forever live side by side,” and “I earnestly hope, expect and urge that a generous and forgiving policy will be followed.” Angry subscribers disagreed, and his own paper ran an editorial demanding punishment of the Boers. Hely-Hutchinson wrote him that Boers who sought to return to Natal “shd be tried & punished…. You must remember that the Natal Dutch have been treated with special consideration in the past, and that if what we hear from many sources is true they have been the ringleaders in the looting & destruction that has been going on in Natal.” What looting? Winston asked. What destruction? It appeared to him that this was based on unconfirmed rumors. He refused to retract; indeed, with each Boer defeat his appeals for mercy and compassion grew stronger.
¹⁵⁵

As a suitor, on the other hand, he continued to be both indecisive and inept. He wrote his mother: “I think a great deal of Pamela; she loves me vy dearly.” Yet a considerate young man would have spared his beloved the grisly details of his brushes with death. Winston kept Pamela fully informed on every bullet, every shell fragment that came his way, reminding her over and over that each breath might be his last, that even as she read this he might already be a decomposing cadaver. “I was very nearly killed two hours ago by a shrapnel,” he wrote her in a typical missive, and, on the eve of a battle, “I pray to God that I may have no thoughts of myself when the time comes—but for you my darling always.” Unquestionably he missed her. Indeed, when Jennie had arrived he wrote Pamela: “Oh why did you not come out as secretary? Why did you not come out in the
Maine
so that I should be going to meet you now.” Then, as after her refusal to campaign in Oldham, he backed off: “Perhaps you are wise.” He didn’t understand women; he compared them with his eccentric mother and was puzzled by the variance. When Pamela, like Joe Chamberlain, hinted that he had done his part and ought to come home now, he bridled. “I do not know whether I shall see the end or not,” he replied, raising that specter again, “but I am quite certain that I will not leave Africa till the matter is settled. I should forfeit my self-respect forever if I tried to shield myself behind an easily obtained reputation for courage. No possible advantage politically could compensate—beside believe me none would result.” That was the nub of it. He was convinced he was making political capital down there and was therefore content. The possibility that he might make better time with her by leaving the front seems never to have occurred to him.
¹⁵⁶

T
he limelight, which he craved more than any woman’s company, now faded from Natal and shone down upon the Cape Colony, where England’s shortest and most popular soldier was preparing to move through the Orange Free State and into the Transvaal. Kipling understood the popularity of the diminutive Field Marshal Lord Roberts, KCB, GCB:

Churchill, forgetting his earlier bitterness, described him as “this wonderful little man.” Bobs, however, did not reciprocate. Kitchener, bitter over Winston’s criticisms at Omdurman, had deepened the field marshal’s distrust of this impudent subaltern who presumed to pass judgment on his commanding officers. Moreover, Bobs had been outraged by a Churchillian critique of a church parade on the eve of the assault on Vaal Krantz. Over five thousand men had assembled, awaiting inspiration. “The bridegroom Opportunity had come,” Winston had written. “But the Church had her lamp untrimmed.” Instead of a rousing sermon, the chaplain “with a raucous voice” had preached dully on Jericho, freezing the soldiers “into apathy.” Bobs was sensitive to criticism of army chaplains, who had come to South Africa in response to a War Office call for volunteers. But Hamilton and Sir William Nicholson, another of Winston’s friends from India, interceded on his behalf, and on April 11 a colonel wrote Churchill from Bloemfontein, the Orange capital: “Lord Roberts desires me to say that he is willing to permit you to accompany this force as a correspondent—
for your father’s sake
.”
¹⁵⁷

Winston seethed over Bobs’s “making me accept as a favour what was already mine as a right,” as he put it in a letter home.
¹⁵⁸
There was a marvelous inconsistency here. He had, after all, thrived on favors at every step on his journey to fame, and he continued to enjoy them by joining Hamilton, now an acting lieutenant general, and Sunny, who had become Hamilton’s aide, on the flank of Bobs’s drive across the Vaal River toward Pretoria. By choosing to remain among friends, he missed the relief of Mafeking by two flying columns on May 17; London’s hysterical joy added a verb to the language,
maffick,
“to indulge in extravagant demonstrations of exultation on occasion of national rejoicing,” and the release of Aunt Sarah, not to mention that of the heroic Colonel R. S. S. Baden-Powell, commander of the garrison, would have been worth columns of soaring copy which might have swung more than a few votes in Oldham. Yet he was flourishing where he was. By now he had become adept at creating his own dramas, investing skirmishes and patrols with a Churchillian aura that depended less on the news than the reporter.

The Prince of Wales, writing that he was a rapt follower of “all yr accounts fr the front,” had permitted himself a feeble little royal joke: “It is to be hoped you will not risk falling again into the hands of the Boers!” In fact, after attaching himself to Brabazon’s brigade in the open countryside around Dewetsdorp, forty miles from Bloemfontein, Winston risked precisely that. A party of mounted British scouts decided to beat the enemy to an unoccupied white stone kopje, or hillock, and Winston impetuously joined them “in the interests of the
Morning Post
.” They had dismounted 120 yards from the crest, and were cutting through a wire fence there, when they found they had lost the race. Over the top, Churchill wrote luridly, loomed the heads and shoulders of a dozen Boer riflemen—“grim, hairy and terrible.” The British captain called: “Too late; back to the other kopje. Gallop!” His scouts leapt on their mounts and bounded off, but just as Winston put his toe into his stirrup the riflemen opened fire, and his terrified horse, plunging wildly, slipped the saddle and ran off. He was alone, a mile from cover, an easy target. As he reached for his Mauser he saw a mounted British scout to his left, a tall man on a pale horse, and he thought: “Death in Revelation, but life to me!” He ran toward him, shouting, “Give me a stirrup!” The rider paused and Churchill vaulted up behind him. As they rode toward safety Winston wrapped his arms around his rescuer and gripped the mane. His hand came away soaked with blood. The animal had been badly hit, Churchill wrote, “but, gallant beast, he extended himself nobly.” His rider cried: “My horse, oh, my poor bloomin’ horse; shot with a dumdum! The bastards! Oh, my poor horse!” Churchill, realizing that they were out of range now, consoled him: “Never mind, you saved my life.” “Ah,” said the rider, “but it’s the horse I’m thinking about.” And that, Winston wrote, “was the whole of our conversation.” He never saw the man again.
¹⁵⁹

Poring over his dispatches, one feels that war had become like that to him, a great Hentyan adventure, heightened, here and there, by breathtaking flirtations with death, threats always turned aside at the last moment. The gore on Spion Kop, though faithfully chronicled at the time, had been forgotten; it was nasty, but not so nasty as its sequel, defeat. If Englishmen showed pluck and daring, if they were loyal to their Queen and their manhood, Britain would always win through; Saint George was sure to slay the dragon in the end. The facts, however ugly, were laundered to suit the Churchillian preconception. Those who have other memories of combat turn away troubled. Yet these incidents were real. The tall man on the pale doomed horse left no version of the episode, but the captain of the scouts made a full report, and it confirmed Winston. Virtually every event he described in South Africa, as in Cuba, on the North-West Frontier, and at Omdurman, was witnessed by others whose recollections were consistent with his. The difference, of course, lay in interpretation. Winston fashioned his own reality, created his own life. “I had thrown double sixes again,” he wrote after he had been saved from the kopje riflemen.
¹⁶⁰
He did it over and over. He had reached the prison latrine just as the sentry was lighting his pipe, had found the one train which passed through Pretoria that night, had blindly knocked on the door of the one man in the mining district who could and would help him through to the Portuguese border, and had been spared a thousand times in battle since then while the first bullet had found poor Jack. So it would continue throughout the march with Roberts, and if his view of life under Bobs seems fantastic, one can only observe that in his case life was, and continued to be, remarkably melodramatic.