The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (59 page)

Just once was he vouchsafed a glimpse of what the South African war was all about. On the last day of May, Roberts took Johannesburg, in the heart of the Witwatersrand, the “Rand,” that sixty-three-mile-long ridge, seamed with auriferous rock, which constitutes the world’s richest goldfield. After gazing down at the gray-stockinged feet of eighteen Highlanders awaiting burial, Churchill wrote, he found himself “scowling at the tall chimneys of the Rand.” But the moment passed. England wouldn’t send men to die for
that.
He turned away and presently found himself with Hamilton, Sunny, and the exhilarating advance of the eleven-thousand-man flank force’s move northward. The weather was magnificent, the scenery stunning. In later life he told his doctor, “I loved it: all movement and riding.” He spent £1,000 of
Morning Post
expense money on a pair of horses, a team of four oxen, and a wagon whose false bottom was crammed with liquor and Fortnum and Mason groceries. They almost lost the wagon fording a stream, but naturally Winston guided the team through the current. One night they found a flock of geese on a pond. Sunny shepherded them toward his cousin, who felled one with a flying kick. They ate it that night, and they let General Hamilton have some.
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Counting the main force under Roberts, Johannesburg and then Pretoria were the objectives of over 200,000 British troops. The Boers never had more than 88,000 men under arms on all fronts, and they prudently prepared to abandon the Transvaal capital and withdraw eastward. On June 2 they were still there, however, standing between Hamilton’s column and the main army under Roberts. Hamilton had just crushed an enemy force at Doornkop; he wanted Bobs to know of it. He was only twenty miles from the field marshal by direct route, but a courier avoiding Johannesburg would have to cover an eighty-mile detour over rough country. Churchill, as it happened, had just finished interviewing a Frenchman who had left the town only hours before on his bicycle. Boer security was lax there, said the Frenchman; he was certain Winston could safely cycle right through. He offered to lend him his bike, even volunteered to borrow another from a friend and act as his guide. If a Boer became suspicious, they would chat in French.

Here, surely, was temptation. Less than six months earlier, against all odds, Winston had fled prison just north of here. Then he had been merely a war correspondent. Now he held a Queen’s commission. He would have to travel in a civilian suit. In his pocket he would be carrying an urgent report from one British commander to another. Even the debonair Frenchman—if indeed he was what he said he was; Winston, with his own atrocious French, was no judge of that, and no one else here had ever laid eyes on the man before—conceded that armed Boers were thick in the streets. A simple search by any one of them and Winston would be shoved against the nearest wall and executed by an ad hoc firing squad. Nevertheless, he agreed. He took the plan to Hamilton, who, amused, gave him a copy of the dispatch he was sending by orderlies the long way. Changing clothes, Winston shoved it into the jacket with his
Morning Post
telegrams and cycled off with his carefree guide.

In Johannesburg they had one bad moment. They were pushing their bikes up a long steep street when a slowly trotting Boer horseman drew abreast, reined in his mount, and walked alongside, carefully scrutinizing them. The rider had a rifle slung on his back, a pistol in a holster, and three bandoliers of ammunition dangling from his shoulder. Altering their pace would have been a grave mistake. Turning away, Winston said as much in French, sounding all the final consonants as usual—his companion flinched—and the Boer trotted off. Encountering no enemy picket line, another stroke of luck, they reached Roberts’s advance patrols without further incident. Churchill was taken directly to Bobs. The commander in chief read the dispatch. Then he looked up and asked: “How did you come?” “Through Johannesburg,” Churchill said, and explained. The little man’s eyes twinkled. Winston wrote gaily, “Lord Roberts had very remarkable eyes, full of light. I remember being struck by this at the moment.” Bobs’s chilliness toward him had disappeared. Kitchener remained distant, but Winston’s new source of news and favors was at the very top.
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The first fruit of this conversion followed within seventy-two hours. Bobs permitted him to canter into Pretoria, with Sunny at his side, at the head of the lead column. They galloped toward the POW camp in the State Model Schools. It looked exactly as it had when he left nearly six months before, a long tin building surrounded by dense wire, and the Boer guards, still on watch, brought their rifles to the ready. “Surrender!” cried Sunny, and after an uneasy pause the commandant appeared and capitulated. Prisoners had rushed to the fence. Haldane and Brockie were gone—they had finally made it to the British lines on their own—but the others were all there. One of them, Lieutenant Thomas Frankland of the Second Dublin Fusiliers, had been wondering if the sound of distant gunfire meant approaching freedom. He wrote, “Who should I see on reaching the gate but Churchill, who, with his cousin, the Duke of Marlborough, had galloped on in front of the army to bring us the good tidings.” Another prisoner, a Yorkshire engineering officer named Melville Goodacre, recorded in his diary how he had been washing clothes in the compound “when suddenly Winston Churchill came galloping over the hill.” Goodacre watched, astonished, a wet shirt still in his hand, as Winston pushed past the guards—Sunny was giving the commandant a receipt for their rifles—and made for the flagpole. He produced a Union Jack. Then, Goodacre’s diary continues, he “tore down the Boer flag and hoisted ours amidst cheers,” whereupon “the Boer guards were put inside and our prisoners guard over
them!
” It was, the diarist thought, “roarable and splendid.” It was also the first time the British colors had flown over Pretoria since April 5, 1881, immediately after Majuba.
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Churchill saw action once more, a week later, in the battle of Diamond Hill. Kruger, brokenhearted, was preparing to leave the country aboard a Dutch cruiser, but Botha defiantly rallied seven thousand burghers fifteen miles outside the capital and dug in on a height athwart the railroad tracks leading to Portuguese East. Roberts sent Hamilton against them. The army’s elite infantry regiments, the Coldstream Guards and the Scots Guards, were bogged down on the lower slopes when Winston, according to Hamilton’s memoirs,
Listening for the Drums,
saw the key to victory—a path to the crest—and realized that most of it was dead ground to the Boers because they had their heads down, seeking cover from the heavy British fire. He headed that way, having managed “somehow,” Hamilton wrote, “to give me the slip.” Presently the amazed British troops saw him mounting the trail alone. “He climbed this mountain,” Hamilton recalled, “as our scouts were trained to climb on the Indian frontier and ensconced himself in a niche not much more than a pistol shot directly below the Boer commandos—no mean feat of arms in broad daylight and one showing a fine trust in the accuracy of our own guns. Had even half a dozen of the Burghers run twenty yards over the brow they could have knocked him off his perch with a volley of stones.” Waving a handkerchief on a stick, he signaled that this was the way up. The general sent men to the path; they rushed the summit and took the hill. Citing Winston’s “conspicuous gallantry,” Hamilton recommended him for the Victoria Cross, but, he wrote, “Bobs and K” vetoed it; Churchill “had only been a Press Correspondent—they declared—so nothing happened.” It must have hurt. The VC was the award Winston coveted above all others. To friends, however, he assumed a philosophical air. He said of war correspondents: “ ‘All the danger and one-half percent of the glory’: such is our motto, and that is the reason why we expect such large salaries.”
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C
hurchill assumed that the war was over. By the rules of traditional warfare, it should have been; once the enemy’s capital had fallen and his army had been beaten in the field, he was supposed to quit. Winston therefore began packing. “I need not say how anxious I am to come back to England,” he wrote his mother. “Politics, Pamela, finances and books all need my attention.”
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But the Boers disregarded the rules. Like the Cuban insurrectionists, they ignored Roberts’s demand for unconditional surrender and then dispersed into guerrilla commandos, the South African conflict’s last contribution to twentieth-century warfare. Their bands, brilliantly led, continued to fight for nearly two more years; one force under Jan Christiaan Smuts raided deep into the British colonies, striking within fifty miles of Cape Town. Suppressing them, and pacifying the countryside, fell to the ruthless Kitchener—Bobs had sailed back to Europe, calling the war “practically over”—with Hamilton as his chief of staff. “K” built blockhouses along the railways, burned the guerrillas’ farms, slaughtered their livestock, and penned Boer women and children in concentration camps, where over twenty thousand died. In the end the guerrillas capitulated, bitter but helpless. The two Boer republics were dissolved and incorporated in the Empire. That action could be reversed, however, and in time it was. England’s losses, on the other hand, were irreplaceable. The Boer blitz of 1899 had destroyed the myth of British invulnerability; now, in this final
fin de siècle
convulsion, Britain’s moral position was also crippled.

Winston missed all this. After interviewing Milner in Cape Town and spending a day foxhunting with the Duke of Westminster, he boarded the
Dunottar Castle
and set to work on a new book,
Ian Hamilton’s March,
a paste-up of his dispatches since leaving Buller.
London to Ladysmith
had appeared five days before the relief of Mafeking; the two books were to sell twenty-two thousand copies in England and the United States, the equivalent of over seventy thousand today. He was also planning his entrance into public life. He hoped his mother would tell him of the country’s political temper when he docked in Southampton July 20. To his consternation, she wasn’t there; she was busy preparing for her wedding and had let the house in Great Cumberland Place, which Winston regarded as his home as well as hers. Sunny rescued him, assigning him the lease of a spacious flat at 105 Mount Street in Mayfair. Winston bought furniture at Maples and asked his aunt Leonie to redecorate the rooms—“you cannot imagine how that kind of material arrangement irritates me; so long as my table is clear and there is plenty of paper I do not worry about the rest.”
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During the next seven months he was seldom there. Public interest in him was almost overwhelming. Eleven Conservative constituencies now sought him as their candidate, but he made straight for Oldham, which gave him a tremendous welcome. A band played “See the Conquering Hero Comes” as he entered the town in the midst of a procession of ten landaus. Shopkeepers and factory hands lined the streets, some shouting, “Young Randy!” At the Theatre Royal he addressed a full house. They wanted to hear of his escape, and when he responded, telling them of his arrival at the mine and mentioning Dan Dewsnap—British troops had occupied the Witbank colliery district, so he could name names—voices shouted: “His wife’s in the gallery!” Mrs. Dewsnap took a bow, plump and blushing; Winston, bowing back, was cheered to the rafters. A chorus of mill girls stood and sang the music hall ditty sweeping England that summer:
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If this mood held, he would be swept into office. But it didn’t hold; it couldn’t. The Liberal incumbents were popular, well financed, and well organized, and when he declared his candidacy on September 19, two days after the dissolution of Parliament, it was clear that the race would be fought at concert pitch. “The excitement is already great,” he wrote his mother after his first day on the stump, “and I have no doubt that before the end of the campaign the town will be in a state of frenzy.” Twice he appealed for her help (“I need not say that it would be very pleasing to me”; “I write again to impress upon you how very useful your presence will be”) but Jennie declined. She was enjoying her extended honeymoon; he would have to win by himself. Actually, no candidate in that election, “the khaki election,” as it became known, was to be judged by his own merits. Party tactics guaranteed that. Chamberlain had set the tone with his slogan, “Every seat lost to the Government is a seat gained to the Boers.” One poster declared:
OUR BRAVE SOLDIERS IN SOUTH AFRICA EXPECT THAT EVERY VOTER WILL DO HIS DUTY…. REMEMBER! TO VOTE FOR A LIBERAL IS A VOTE TO THE BOER
. Churchill himself was not above this. One of his Oldham hoardings read: “Be it known that every vote given to the radicals means 2 pats on the back for Kruger and 2 smacks in the face for our country.” He was stung when the Liberals retaliated with a whispering campaign, describing him as a fake and a cashiered officer. The
Daily Mail
of September 27 reported: “In nothing does Winston Churchill show his youth more than in the way he allows slanders to affect him…. They deeply wound him and he allows men to see it. When some indiscreet supporter brings these stories to him, his eyes flash fire, he clutches his hands angrily, and he hurries out to find opportunity of somewhere and somehow bringing his traducers to book.” He wrote the opposition in protest; their reply expressed “extreme regret,” but added, not unreasonably, that Liberals had been exasperated by the character of the Tory campaign and “the ill-advised attempt of your political friends to run this election on the question of your undoubted physical courage instead of upon the political issues involved.”
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