Victoria's Cross (14 page)

Winston Churchill never won the VC, although arguably he deserved it for his personal courage in battle on several occasions. Yet paradoxically he also represents a good illustration of what Stannus particularly disliked about the Cross: the encouragement it gave to a young and dashing officer, who so eagerly sought a decoration that he was prepared to risk his life whenever the opportunity arose, indifferent to larger questions of battlefield strategy. Churchill's courage was of the type that, had his friends at court been sufficiently powerful (or his enemies less formidable), he would have got the VC. Churchill joined the 4th Hussars in 1895 after passing out from Sandhurst eighth of the 150 cadets in the previous year. As a subaltern he fought in campaigns on the Northwest Frontier, the Nile, in the South African and First World Wars, and served in turn with the 31st Punjaub Infantry, the 21st Lancers, the South African Light Horse,
the Oxfordshire Yeomanry, the Grenadier Guards, the Royal Scots Fusiliers, and the Oxfordshire Artillery, the unit changes driven by his self-acknowledged lust for action. About the only thing he was afraid of was being shot in the mouth, as that might have stopped him from being able to talk.
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Hungry for medals, Churchill found the colonial campaigns in which he fought full of ‘fascinating thrills. It was not like the Great War. Nobody expected to be killed. Here and there in every regiment or battalion, half a dozen, a score, at the worst thirty or forty, would pay the forfeit; but to the great mass of those who took part in the little wars of Britain in those vanished light-hearted days, this was only a sporting element in a splendid game.'
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He participated in the last great cavalry charge, that of the 21st Lancers at the Battle of Omdurman on 2 September 1898, where Captain Raymond de Montmorency received a VC for having recovered the corpse of Lieutenant Grenfell.
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In October 1899 Churchill arrived in South Africa, where he was to experience his fourth war in as many years. Churchill was at the time the correspondent of the
Morning Post
, having resigned from the army on 3 May 1899 to fight a by-election in Oldham. It was in South Africa where he displayed, before a very public audience, the kind of bravery that unquestionably merited the Cross. At dawn on 15 November 1899, Churchill left Estcourt aboard a train carrying some Dublin Fusiliers and a company of the Durham Light Infantry, destined for Colenso, close to Ladysmith, where a beleaguered British garrison was under siege. He had been invited to accompany the trip by a friend, Captain James Haldane, DSO, of the Gordon Highlanders. As Churchill recalled: ‘Out of comradeship, and because I thought it was my duty to gather as much information as I could for the
Morning Post
, also because I was eager for trouble, I accepted the invitation without demur.'
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The train was ambushed and partially derailed, and three Creusot cannon, a thousand rifles and one Maxim gun poured fire
onto the stranded train, stuck in the open. Winston rallied the driver and promised that, if he ‘bucked up', he (Churchill) would ensure he got a medal. As they tried to pull the derailed trucks from blocking the engine's path, Churchill's party came under intense rifle, Maxim gun and artillery fire, killing four soldiers and wounding thirty more, at a range of around 900 yards. According to Haldane's later account, Churchill supervised the work to clear the line:

I knew him well enough to realise that he was not the man to stand quietly by and look on in a critical situation . . . his self-selected task, into which he threw all his energy, was carried out with pluck and perseverance, and his example inspired the platelayers, the driver of the locomotive, and others to work under the fire which the Boers were directing on the train.
⁶⁵

Churchill's working party managed to clear the rocks from the rail, allowing the tender and engine, laden with the wounded, to chug laboriously back towards Estcourt. After a few hundred yards, when he knew the train would escape, Churchill dismounted to go back to the stranded Haldane. The remnants of the small force, including Churchill and Haldane, became prisoners. Private Walls, a soldier who had been aboard the train, wrote to his sister, who sent the letter to Churchill's mother: ‘Churchill is a splendid fellow. He walked about in it all as coolly as if nothing was going on, & called for volunteers to give him a hand to get the truck out of the road. His presence and way of going on were as much good as fifty men would have been.'
⁶⁶

The story of Churchill's subsequent escape from captivity is well known; of greater significance here is the tangled tale of how he failed to win any decoration for his remarkable courage on that day. There was plentiful testimony of his exceptional bravery under fire; in London, the weekly
Black & White
reported on 23 December 1899 that it
was ‘rumoured that both Mr Churchill and the engine driver [Charles Wagner] will be recommended for the Victoria Cross which they appear to richly deserve'. Not for the first time, the press rumour proved false. In his report of the action Haldane said that he had ‘formally placed' Churchill under his command and he ‘could not speak too highly of his gallant conduct'.
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Despite the testimonies of Churchill's conspicuous courage and the precedents already set for civilians to gain the award, he received neither decoration nor any official recognition for that day's skirmish. Why not? He had made too many enemies in the preceding years; one in particular regarded him as an appalling whipper-snapper.

Churchill's skill with the pen, as well as the sword, was enviable – but not envied by all. When Churchill sought to join the Sudan forces in 1898, he ‘became conscious of the unconcealed disapproval and hostility of the Sirdar [commander] of the Egyptian Army, Sir [Horatio] Herbert Kitchener'.
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Kitchener refused his solicitations, but through connections Churchill persuaded Sir Evelyn Wood, himself a former Sirdar, and by then Adjutant General to the forces, Kitchener's superior, to intercede on his behalf. Kitchener's dislike of reporters and journalism was almost as profound as that for superiors who gave him instructions. A young and openly ambitious interloper such as Churchill was innately suspicious; that he also worked as a reporter was beneath contempt.
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In his account of the Sudan expedition,
The River War
, Churchill honestly – but unwisely – publicly condemned the Sirdar for desecrating the tomb of the Mahdi, the Dervish leader, and for carrying off the Mahdi's head in a kerosene can:

[I]t was an act of vandalism and folly to destroy the only fine building which might attract the traveller and interest the historian. It is a gloomy augury for the future of the Sudan that the first action of its civilised conquerors and present ruler [Kitchener] should have been
to level the one pinnacle which rose above the mud houses . . . I shall not hesitate to declare that to destroy what was sacred and holy [to the Dervishes] was a wicked act, of which the true Christian, no less than the philosopher, must express his abhorrence.

Churchill also referred to Kitchener's brutality towards wounded Dervish troops: ‘The stern and unpitying spirit of the commander was communicated to his troops, and the victories which marked the progress of the River War were accompanied by acts of barbarity not always justified even by the harsh customs of savage conflicts of the fierce and treacherous nature of the Dervish.' General Sir Ian Hamilton, who had himself been deprived of the VC in South Africa and was a gifted writer, considered that Kitchener had ‘magnificently primitive' ideas, and ‘was never himself amidst the complexities of Western civilisation'.
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Much later, in his memoirs, Churchill returned to the incident: ‘the Mahdi's head was just one of those trifles about which an immense body of rather gaseous feeling can be generated. All the Liberals were outraged by an act which seemed to them worthy of the Huns and Vandals. All the Tories thought it rather a lark.'
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Thus humiliated by a mere writer, the perpetually dyspeptic Kitchener, who moved up from chief of staff to take overall command of the South African forces from Lord Roberts in November 1900, never forgave Churchill. The evidence is circumstantial, but Kitchener would have been required to pass on to London any VC recommendation for Churchill's epic work on the railway line to Colenso; no such recommendation was ever made. Even Churchill's mother, a formidable networker on behalf of her son, would have been unable to persuade Kitchener to consider decorating such a scoundrel as Winston.
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If one valiant young officer who miraculously survived cannons and bullets in South Africa was automatically ruled out of the VC for having
failed to ingratiate himself with influential officers, another, who futilely died, was granted his, because one senior officer felt guilty. The first commander of the forces in South Africa, General Sir Redvers Henry Buller VC, suffered a series of humiliating defeats during the ‘Black Week' of 10–17 December 1899, during which Lord Roberts's son, Frederick, a lieutenant in the King's Royal Rifle Corps, was killed, for which Roberts senior never forgave Buller.

Young ‘Freddy' Roberts was on Buller's staff during the Battle of Colenso on 15 December 1899. Buller incorrectly believed Colenso was only lightly defended by the Boers; when his mistake became clear, Buller lost control of the battle and became obsessed with saving the guns of the 14th and 66th Batteries, which had been abandoned by their commander, Colonel Chris Long, who had in any case positioned them where they were completely exposed. The Boer commandos, firing smokeless cartridges (which concealed their positions) from a mile distant, stalled the advance of the British infantry, and forced the artillery's horses and limbers back to shelter about 800 yards behind the guns. The guns fired more than 1,000 shells but after an hour ran out of ammunition; Colonel Long, along with a quarter of the gunners, was injured and put out of action, whereupon Major A. C. Bauward took over command and ordered the crews back to shelter while they waited for resupply. Buller, by now on the scene with his staff, ordered Captain Harry Norton Schofield to take out some teams and drivers to recover the guns, but they were forced to turn back under a hail of bullets. Captain Walter Norris Congreve and others – including Freddy Roberts – then attempted the same, but were wounded or forced to turn back, Roberts managing to get only thirty yards before a shell exploded nearby, killing his horse and mortally wounding him. Another attempt succeeded in hauling back two of the guns, but the remaining ten were captured by the Boers after Buller ordered a withdrawal. Buller recommended Freddy for the VC, but VCs at that date were not for the dead.

The awarding of VCs to men who had died before they could officially be gazetted had prompted a question in the House of Commons on 21 May 1897, when the MP for Pembroke and Haverfordwest, Lieutenant General John Wimburn Laurie, asked William Brodrick, Under-Secretary of State for War,

whether the Secretary of State for War would reconsider his decision . . . with respect to Trooper Frank William Baxter, of the Buluwayo Field Force, in which it is stated that on account of the gallant conduct of this man in having, on 22nd April 1896, dismounted and given up his horse to a wounded comrade, Corporal Wiseman, who was being closely pursued by an overwhelming force of the enemy, would have been recommended to Her Majesty for the Victoria Cross had he survived; and, in consideration of the self-sacrificing act of devotion to his wounded comrade which cost Trooper Baxter his life, would he recommend to Her Majesty that the Victoria Cross should be conferred on the late trooper on the date of his gallant action, and that the decoration so heroically earned should be forwarded to his nearest relative?

Brodrick stated the situation according to the prevailing VC statutes:

I can assure my hon. and gallant Friend of the full sympathy of the Secretary of State in his wish to commemorate the noble deed of Trooper Baxter; but the statutes of the Victoria Cross do not contain any provision under which a man who is already dead can be recommended for the distinction. Many cases have occurred in which the Cross would have been awarded had the soldier or sailor survived, but no exception to the rule I have stated has ever been made.

Other VCs Buller recommended that day – Captain Congreve and Captain Hamilton Lyster Reed (7th Battery, Royal Field Artillery), who had brought three teams from his own battery to attempt to rescue
the guns – received theirs. The guns themselves were deserted; a cardinal military sin. Buller was acutely aware that he had not only disgraced himself at Colenso, but had also managed to oversee the pointless death of the son of the man who was shortly to replace him as commander-in-chief.
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The wording of Buller's recommendation, published in the
London Gazette
on 26 January 1900, carefully avoided revealing that Roberts had been fatally wounded:

Captain Congreve, Rifle Brigade, who was in the donga, assisted to hook a team into a limber, went out and assisted to limber up a gun; being wounded he took shelter, but seeing Lieutenant Roberts fall badly wounded he went out again and brought him in. Some idea of the nature of the fire may be gathered from the fact that Captain Congreve was shot through the leg, through the toe of his boot, grazed on the elbow and the shoulder, and his horse shot in three places. Lieutenant the Honourable F. Roberts, King's Royal Rifles, assisted Captain Congreve. He was wounded in three places. Corporal Nurse, Royal Field Artillery, 66th Battery, also assisted. I recommend the above three for the Victoria Cross.
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Frederick Roberts was not gazetted with the VC until the
London Gazette
of 2 February 1900 – where it was acknowledged that he was ‘since deceased'. Timing was everything: a dead Roberts was ineligible for the VC, but a ‘since deceased' Roberts was a different matter. The most that gallant but dead officers and men, who might otherwise have been granted the VC, might expect to receive was an official note in the
London Gazette
that they
would
have been recommended for the VC, had they survived. Buller may have felt the VC for Freddy Roberts was the least gesture he could make to a heartbroken Lord Roberts, but it was yet another example of a senior officer using sleight of hand to bestow an illegitimate VC. Nor should Roberts's corpse have been so honoured; all he did was die, perhaps fearlessly but certainly pointlessly.