Complete Fictional Works of John Buchan (Illustrated)

by John Buchan

  When he had walked for two hours he perceived the lights of a station, so he left the track and hid in a ditch 200 yards beyond the buildings. He argued that any train would stop at the station and by the time it reached him would not have got up much speed. After another hour he heard a train whistle and saw the yellow headlights of the engine. It waited five minutes in the station, and then, with a great rumbling, started again. Mr. Churchill flung himself on the trucks, got some sort of handhold, and with a great struggle seated himself on the couplings. It was a goods train, and the trucks were full of empty sacks covered with coal dust, among which he burrowed. He had no notion whether or not he was on the right line, and he was too tired to worry, so he simply fell asleep. He woke before daybreak and realized that he must leave the train ere dawn. So he sat himself again on the couplings, and catching hold of the iron handle at the back of the truck, sprang to the side. The next moment he was sprawling in a ditch, much shaken but not hurt.

  He found himself in the middle of a valley surrounded by low hills. Presently the dawn began to break, and to his relief he realized that he had taken the right railway. The line ran straight into the sunrise. He had a long drink from a pool, and resolved to select a hiding-place to lie up for the day. This he found in a patch of wood on the side of a deep ravine, where, in the company of a cynical vulture, he spent the daylight hours. From his eyrie he could see a little tin-roofed town in the west, through which he had passed in the night, and in the immediate neighbourhood farmsteads with clumps of trees. There was a Kafir kraal at the bottom of the hill, and he watched the natives drive the flocks of goats and cows to the pastures. His only food was one slab of chocolate, which produced a violent thirst; but as the water-pool was half a mile away in the open, and men were constantly passing, he dare not risk going for a drink.

  His prospects were pretty black when he started again at the first darkness. He had a drink from the pool, and then took to the railway line in hope of getting a second train ride. But no train came, and for six hours in the bright moonlight he walked on, avoiding the Kafirs’ huts and the guarded bridges. When he had to make a circuit he fell into bogs, and, as he was in a poor condition from the previous month’s imprisonment, he was very soon tired out.

  Mr. Churchill published the story of his escape during the war, when it was important not to implicate any friends still in the Transvaal, and so the next part of his journey has never been explicitly told. It appears that he fell in with a Mr. Burnham and a Mr. Howard, officials of a colliery, who gave him valuable assistance, as they were afterwards to assist Captain Haldane. On the fifth day after leaving Pretoria he reached Middelburg, where it was arranged that he should try and board a Delagoa Bay train.

  Meantime the hue and cry was out against him. Telegrams describing him at great length were sent along every railway; 3,000 photographs were printed, and warrants were issued for his immediate arrest. Officials of the prison who knew him by sight hurried off to Komati Poort, the frontier station, to examine travellers. It was rumoured that he had escaped disguised as a woman, and again disguised as a policeman; and finally it was reported that he was still in hiding in Pretoria. The Dutch newspapers considered it a sinister fact that just before he escaped he had become a subscriber to the State Library and had borrowed Mill’s On Liberty!

  On the sixth day he found a train to Delagoa Bay standing in a siding, which he boarded. The journey should take not more than thirty-six hours, so the provisions carried were not elaborate, and he had only one bottle of water. He managed to ensconce himself in a truck laden with great sacks of some soft merchandise, and worm his way to the bottom. The heat was stifling, for it was midsummer in the Transvaal, and the floor of the truck was littered with coal dust, which did not add to its amenities.

  These last days of the adventure were both anxious and uncomfortable. He scarcely dared to sleep for fear of snoring, and he was in terror that at Komati Poort, the frontier station of the Transvaal, the trucks would be searched. His anxiety there was prolonged, for the train was shunted for eighteen hours on to a siding. Indeed, his truck was actually searched, and the upper tarpaulin was removed, but the police were careless and did not search deep enough.

  At length, two and a half days after he left Middelburg, and eight and a half days from Pretoria, the train crawled into Delagoa Bay. Mr. Churchill emerged from his hole in the last stages of dirt, hunger, and weariness. But all troubles were now past. He went first to the British consul, who thought he was a fireman from one of the ships in the harbour, and who welcomed him with enthusiasm when he learned his real name. Clothes were bought; he had a long wash, and at last a civilized meal. That very night, as it happened, a steamer was leaving for Durban, and in case any of the Boer agents at Delagoa Bay should attempt to recapture him, some dozen of the English residents, armed with revolvers, escorted him on board. A few days later Mr. Churchill was back again in Natal with the British Army.

  III

  We return to Captain Haldane and his friends, who had been meditating escape from the first day of their arrival at the Staats Model School. The difficulty was, of course, the guards, and Mr. Churchill’s exploit made the Boer Government redouble its vigilance. It was found impossible to bribe the sentries; a plan for a rising of the prisoners was soon given up; and the scheme of sinking a shaft and then tunnelling to an adjacent kitchen garden proved impracticable, since the diggers very soon struck water. For three miserable months Captain Haldane cogitated in vain, and the best he could do was to get hold of a tourist map of South Africa and study the country east of Pretoria in case some way of escape should present itself. Meantime an incident cheered the prisoners. A man accompanied by a St. Bernard dog took to walking outside the school and signalling by the Morse code with his stick. He was warned off by the guards, but he found another means of communication and sent messages from an adjacent house giving the news of the war.

  In the middle of February 1900 there was a rumour that the officers were to be moved to a new building from which escape would be impossible. This gave Captain Haldane an idea. He resolved to go into hiding beneath the floor, so that the Boers should think he had escaped, and then, when the officers were moved and the building was left empty, to emerge and get out of the town. His companions in the attempt were Lieutenant Neil Le Mesurier of the Dublin Fusiliers and Sergeant-Major A. Brockie of the Imperial Light Horse. They collected a few necessary articles, opened the trap-door, and went to earth. It was a horrible place in which they found themselves. The floor of the building was about 2-½ feet above the ground, and the space below was divided into five narrow compartments by four stone walls, on which the cross beams rested. Each of these compartments was about 18 feet long and 3-½ feet wide, and there were manholes between them. The air, what there was of it, came through a small ventilator somewhere on the veranda. The place was pitch dark, and the atmosphere was stuffy to the last degree.

  The three thought that their imprisonment there would only last for twenty-four hours. They went to earth on 26th February, and next day there was a great to-do about their disappearance. Descriptions of them were circulated over the whole country. One of their friends above, Lieutenant Frankland of the Dublin Fusiliers, arranged a small daily supply of provisions. Alas! the twenty-four hours passed and there was no move above. For nineteen days the three men remained in that horrible dungeon. Their only exercise was crawling about, in which they broke their heads constantly against beams and walls. They were covered with dirt, for very little water could be passed through the trap-door. Still they managed to endure. By the light of a dip they played games of patience and talked, and their chief anxiety was lest by snoring or talking in their sleep they should give their hiding-place away. Their friends above who were in the secret tried to persuade them to come up occasionally to get some fresh air, but they were determined to play the game according to its rigour, and refused.

  But the situation was getting serious, for all three were falling ill. Cap
tain Haldane wrote to a fellow-prisoner in the school above, a Dutch pastor called Adrian Hofmeyer, begging him to try and get the move expedited. Hofmeyer did his best with the authorities, telling them the story of a bogus rising of the prisoners; but still nothing happened. At last came the good news that the move was fixed for Friday, 16th March. The prisoners underground heard the commandant going his rounds for the last time. Then their friends gave the agreed signal, and Frankland’s voice said, “Good-bye.” At a quarter-past ten the prisoners were heard leaving the school, and by midday the servants and baggage had left. The three stayed below till nightfall and then walked out of the empty building. Walking is, indeed, a misnomer, for they seemed to have lost the use of their legs. They fell repeatedly and reeled like drunken men. It was not till they had got out of the town that they recovered the use of their limbs.

  They had 300 miles of a difficult journey to make to safety, and surely never in the history of escapes have three men started out on a wilder enterprise in worse physical condition. Mr. Churchill had been out of training, but his physique at the time was that of an athlete’s compared to Captain Haldane and his companions. Brockie, who had lived in the country and knew the language, got himself up like a wounded Boer, with his left arm in a sling and the Boer colours round his head. The trio presented the appearance of the worst kind of Irish moonlighters.

  In the suburbs a special constable looked at them suspiciously, but was reassured by the sight of Brockie’s wounded arm. They struck the Delagoa Bay Railway and stumbled along it, Le Mesurier having the bad luck to sprain his ankle. Their one advantage was that, having been supposed to escape three weeks before, the immediate hue and cry after them had died down.

  Their first halting-place was near a station on the line, 13 miles east of Pretoria. There they lay up, suffering much from mosquitoes, and when darkness came made for the highroad running east. The Transvaal highways at that time were not like those of to-day, but simply raw red scars running across the veld, by no means easy to follow in the darkness. On this second night of their travels they were hunted by dogs, and Haldane and Le Mesurier took refuge in a stream, cowering up to their necks. Here they lost Brockie, but fortunately he was the one of the three best able to fend for himself, as he knew the country and could speak both Dutch and Kaffir. The two, soaked to the skin, spent the rest of the night in a clump of bracken, after taking a dose of quinine and opium. At daybreak they found themselves stiff with rheumatism. They had finished their whisky, and the provisions, matches, and tobacco were soaked.

  At dawn, in a tremendous thunderstorm, they made for the railway again, and there Haldane, to his consternation, discovered that he had left his money and belt in the last hiding-place. He dared not return for them, even if he had had any hope of finding the place again. So there were the two men, without food or money, weary, cramped, and sick, with the better part of 300 miles before them in an enemy country.

  Food must be found, and that night they came on a Kafir kraal with a field of water melons. They made a meal off the melons and stumbled on again. The next night their physical condition began to be really serious. In four nights they had only covered 36 miles, and their food was reduced to one tin of pemmican, one tin of cocoa, and a scrap of biltong. They had hoped for mealies from the fields, but the mealie harvest had just been gathered and not a cob remained. Another misfortune was the condition of the veld grass. They had expected it to be long enough to hide in, but it was far too short for shelter, and they were therefore compelled to lie up by day in wet swamps.

  That night, having finished every scrap of food, they blundered into a Kafir hut beside a coal-siding, where some natives were eating mealie-meal porridge. Their only course was to reveal themselves, for the Kafirs were in the main on the British side. They learned that the natives’ master, the manager of the coalmine, was a Dane, and to him they disclosed their identity. The manager was friendly. He said his own mine was sending no coals to the coast for the moment, but that at a colliery next door three trucks were being loaded up for Delagoa Bay next morning. He handed his visitors over to the storekeeper of the mine, Mr. Moore, who gave them a dry bed and a good meal.

  Next morning they heard that the mine doctor, a Scotsman called Gillespie, was coming to see them, and in him they found a stout ally, for he knew all about their escape, and had been looking for their arrival in order to help them. He was one of the people who had already assisted Mr. Churchill. That evening he undertook to drive them to another mine, where a plan of escape could be matured.

  In the early darkness they drove 14 miles over the veld to the colliery of the Transvaal Delagoa Bay Company. There they were handed over to Mr. J. E. Howard, who had been the chief agent in Mr. Churchill’s escape. There, too, they were introduced to Mr. Addams, the secretary of the mine, who turned out to be no other than the Englishman with the St. Bernard dog who had been accustomed to walk past the Staats Model School. He and the manager of the mine store, Mr. Burnham, at once set about planning their escape. It was arranged that Mr. Howard should feign illness for a few days and remain indoors, and that Haldane and Le Mesurier should take up their quarters with him. To their relief they also got news of Brockie, for he had turned up a little earlier at the same place, and had been given a passport to the border.

  The plan arranged was as follows: Wool was still being sent down from the high veld to Delagoa Bay, and the trucks for it were usually detached at Middelburg. It was arranged that Burnham should buy a truck-load of wool and wire to a firm at Delagoa Bay offering the consignment. This was done, wires were exchanged, and sixteen bales of wool were duly collected and consigned to the coast. The truck for the wool was brought up the line and carefully loaded. The bales, each of which weighed 400 lb., were so arranged that there was a kind of tunnel at the bottom down the centre, in which the fugitives could hide. From behind the blinds in the sickroom of Mr. Howard, Haldane and Le Mesurier watched with acute interest the last stages of these preparations.

  At 5 a.m. one morning they climbed into the tunnel below the wool, where their friends had provided them with ample provisions for a week in the shape of roast duck and chicken, beef and bread, butter and jam, nine bottles of cold tea, two of water, and one of whisky. The tarpaulin was made fast over the top, and for five hours the two waited. At ten o’clock that morning Mr. Howard came along and took a final farewell. A certain Field-Cornet Pretorius had arrived that morning and had shown himself very suspicious about the tablecloth in Mr. Howard’s dining-room, but the manager had explained it with the story of a dinner and card party. By midday the truck was taken by a colliery engine to Whitbank station. Mr. Addams and Mr. Burnham were on the look-out there, and to their horror saw the Dutch driver and stoker stroll up and lean against the truck. They endeavoured to draw them away by offers of drinks; but the driver would not move, and taking a paper from his pocket began to conduct his correspondence against the side of the truck. A sneeze or a word from inside would have given away the whole plan. Even when the man left the danger was not over, for while the truck was being shunted, one of the station officials actually undid the tarpaulin and looked in, but saw nothing.

  At 2.30 p.m. they were attached to a passenger train, and for the rest of the day jogged across the high veld, till at Waterval Boven, where the descent to the low veld begins, the train drew up for the night. They started again next morning, and presently they reached the last Transvaal station, Komati Poort, where a bridge spans the Komati river. This was the place where a search was likely, and to the intense disappointment of the fugitives they found the truck detached and pushed into a siding. Discovery seemed now certain, and Haldane decided to try and bribe the first comer. He got a bag of a hundred sovereigns ready, and destroyed any compromising matter in his diary.

  As it happened, the Pretoria Government had wired to Komati Poort to order the strictest search of all goods trucks. The stowaways heard the unloosening of the ropes of their tarpaulin, and down in their tunnel real
ized it had been lifted up and thrown back. They saw daylight flood in at the tunnel end, and believed that at any moment the face of a station official would look down on them. Then to their amazement the tarpaulin was returned to its place. They may not have been seen; or a Kafir may have caught a glimpse of them, and, having no desire to aid the law, said nothing.

  But though the tarpaulin was drawn again, their suspense was not over. All that day and all the following night they lay there, anxious, half stifled, and now very hungry, for they had thrown away most of their provisions, believing that they would not be needed. Saturday morning came, and they realized that they had hoped the day before to be inside the Portuguese border. At last, at 9 a.m., the train steamed off, and while crossing the Komati bridge the two men shook hands. They saw the white pillar which marked the boundary, and realized that they had won freedom.

  The train stopped at the first Portuguese station; but the two stowaways did not dare to alight. They waited till the evening and then crept out in the dusk. At a Kafir kraal close by they learned that the hotel there was kept by two Englishmen, and thither they stumbled. In five minutes they were in a back room being regaled with champagne by their excited compatriots.

  Brockie had also escaped, but all three paid for some time the penalty of their wild adventure with malaria, and in the case of Le Mesurier with enteric. In a few weeks, however, they were back on duty at the front. Captain Haldane, as we have seen, was to rise to be one of the most successful British generals in the Great War. Brockie was killed by a mining accident a few years later after the escape. Le Mesurier fell at the Second Battle of Ypres, and Frankland, who had assisted them to escape, died in a reconnaissance at the Dardanelles.

  V. — THE ESCAPE OF PRINCE CHARLES EDWARD