The Allies

by Winston Groom

  In the meantime, Kitchener’s army managed to reach and occupy Omdurman before the Dervishes could reoccupy it. Now the British held the enemy’s base of supply while the Dervishes were relegated to the desert wilderness. Kitchener vindictively had the Mahdi’s tomb demolished and his body exhumed; the head was cut off and put into a tin of kerosene. Word was that Kitchener planned to use it for an inkwell but was disabused of this notion by Lord Cromer, England’s chief diplomat in Egypt, on grounds of offending the Muslims throughout the land.

  Churchill was relieved to see the Union Jack lifted over Omdurman and Khartoum, but he felt grim upon learning of the 21st Lancers’ losses—nearly a quarter of the force had been killed or wounded, as well as 139 horses. He stayed for less than two weeks after the battle, and at one point he visited the battlefield, which he described as a vast pile of “corruption,” picking through the stinking dead on horseback with a friend. Corpses of thousands of the enemy were slowly being buried under the shifting sands; piles of white or brown cloth robes covered shrinking bodies, dead horses and donkeys, broken weapons, the miserable litter and junk of battle. Churchill reflected on it afterward in his dispatch to the Morning Post, saying that “these were as brave men as ever walked the earth. The conviction was borne in on me that their claim beyond the grave of a valiant death was as good as that any of our countrymen could make.”12

  * * *

  AS THE YEAR 1898 drew to a close, Churchill returned to England, staying with his mother at her rented grand mansion in London’s Hyde Park district. There he resolved to relieve her of paying his £500 a year allowance (about $60,000 in today’s dollars). Remaining in the cavalry was in fact costing him money, as his late father had predicted, and writing was more lucrative. He was also determined to run for a seat in Parliament—a more difficult proposition because, as he also discovered, getting a “safe” seat would entail spending more money than even his new career could afford him.

  Churchill’s next step was getting himself introduced to Richard Middleton, the manager of the Conservative Party better known as the “Skipper.” Middleton observed that surely a seat could be found for him, providing Churchill could cough up as much as £1,000 a year to the constituents in the form of “charitable contributions.” Informed that Churchill could pay only his personal expenses, the Skipper replied that Churchill would be relegated to seeking a “risky” seat or, worse, a “forlorn hope,” with little or no chance of election. But, he continued, because of Sir Randolph and because of Churchill’s war record, he would “see what could be done.” In the interim, the Skipper steered Churchill toward making speeches in some of the Parliamentary districts as a sort of “finger into the wind” test of his popularity.

  This notion momentarily paralyzed Churchill with fear. He’d never made a formal speech—not at Harrow, not at Sandhurst, and certainly not in the Hussars. But, he said charmingly, some years afterward, “In life’s steeplechases, one must always jump the fences when they come.”13

  He gave his maiden talk ten days later in the ancient city of Bath, in a little park on a hillside. It was well attended and covered by the Morning Post. To Churchill’s astonishment, the audience cheered at lines such as “England would gain far more from the rising tide of Tory Democracy than from the dried-up drainpipe of Radicalism.” To his wonder, he got an entire glowing column in next day’s Post, just as his father once had. With this new glory ringing in his ears, he left for India to play polo, the final vestige of his military connection there. After years of fond memories he would not have missed the Indian championship for the world.14

  * * *

  AFTER ARRIVING IN BANGALORE, Churchill almost immediately boarded a train for Meerut, fourteen hundred miles distant, where the 1899 India Inter-Regimental Polo Tournament was to be held. Along the way the team stopped in Jodhpur as guests of the maharajah, to relax in luxury and practice with the finest Indian polo teams.

  There, however, Churchill was overtaken by “a grievous misfortune”—he slipped on some stone steps and threw his right shoulder out again. He knew from experience that it took three weeks or more to heal, and the tournament was scheduled in four days. He tried to take himself off the team but was overruled by the vote of his fellow members. His position was the number 1 back; even if he would have tremendous difficulty hitting the ball, he could still perform a valuable role with his superb horsemanship by taking the opposing back out of the play with his own pony.15

  After winning their way to the championship match, the Fourth Hussars found themselves facing the formidable Fourth Dragoon Guards, with Churchill himself opposing the daunting Guards number 1 back Captain John Hardress-Lloyd, later an international high goal polo player. It would be a contest measured in tremendous emotion and grit. Galloping full speed, his arm once more strapped to his side, Churchill played the finest match of his career. All afternoon, he rode Hardress-Lloyd out of the game and managed in the process to score three goals in the 4 to 3 victory for the Hussars. “You would have thought it was not a game at all, but a matter of life and death,” Churchill said afterward.

  * * *

  BACK IN ENGLAND in the summer of 1899 Churchill failed to get elected to Parliament. He came up against a by-election in Oldham, a cotton mill city in Lancashire. In the two-seat parliamentary district, one sitting member died of pneumonia and the other submitted his resignation due to ill health, resulting in a double election. Churchill performed well, but he was dragged down by the fact that the other Conservative candidate was, in the most confounding of ironies, a practicing socialist. Besides, the only reason the Conservatives had held the seat in the first place was that the member who had died had also been the respected lawyer for the local trade union. Nevertheless, Churchill gained valuable experience on how a campaign was run, and his speaking manner improved immensely.

  In the meantime, he was feverishly working on a new book, The River War, an account of the Sudan campaign, which was to become a celebrated success upon publication. Churchill had interviewed all of the principal players—except for the formidable sirdar, who frowned on lieutenants reexamining military campaigns in the public forum. Foremost, the young man was developing what was to become the distinct Churchillian style that readers over the world would grow to know and respect. He interspersed official reports and intelligence documents with his keen and well-honed phraseology.16

  In the meantime, something very nasty that had been brewing in South Africa for more than a decade came to a boil. On October 8, 1899, the Boer government in Pretoria telegraphed an ultimatum to the British authorities, giving them three days to withdraw all British forces on the Boer frontiers and threatening the arrest of any who remained.*5 Within the hour, Winston Churchill had been appointed chief war correspondent for the Morning Post at a salary of £250 a month*6 plus all expenses, making him most likely the highest paid war reporter of the period. Within days he was aboard the steamship Dunottar Castle, headed for the bottom of the world.

  * * *

  TO CHURCHILL’S GREAT luck, Sir Redvers Buller, who had been charged to take command of all British operations in South Africa, was aboard his ship, along with his entire staff. Nobody knew what to expect and, as there was no wireless at sea at that time, their only sources of intelligence were what could be gleaned from ports of call or from passing ships.

  The British War Office had warned before they left that it might take two hundred thousand troops or more to put down the Boer rebellion, but most people thought that a gross exaggeration. Then, off South Africa’s southern coast, they encountered a tramp steamer and signaled for news. A blackboard was held up from the tramp:

  Boers Defeated

  Three Battles

  [General] Penn Symond Killed

  As the steamer faded into the mists behind, “we were left to meditate upon this cryptic message,” Churchill remembered. But the mood among the general’s staff was sanguine.
17

  But not for long. When they arrived at Cape Town a new, and less encouraging, picture soon emerged. It was true the British had defeated the Boers at the Battle of Talana Hill in Natal. But the Boers had killed the commanding general and sent his four thousand defenders reeling in retreat to Ladysmith. There, they joined the twelve thousand men of General Sir George White—who, contrary to orders to fall back until he could link up with the large force led by General Buller, instead made a stand. As a result his entire army was bottled up in Ladysmith, under siege by the Boers. The British were rushing forces from England, India, and other far-flung parts of the empire to help but, for the time being, all British plans in South Africa were disarranged.

  The Boer conflict in South Africa was not new. Since the British capture of the region from the Dutch in 1806, there had been friction between Boer settlers (of Dutch origin) and British settlers. The Boers were mostly farmers, while the British set up trading operations in the coastal towns and cities. The Boers were particularly incensed when the British abolished slavery in 1834;*7 in response, they moved themselves and their farms en masse across the Vaal River into the Transvaal, where they set up a capital at Pretoria. There, along with other Boers in the so-called Orange Free State, they went about their farming business.

  The British permitted this de facto secession until the discovery, in 1867, of vast quantities of diamonds and gold in the Boer-governed territories, which the Boers had neither the manpower nor industrial know-how to exploit. Many British settlers migrated into Boer areas, where they conducted mining operations that began making the Boers wealthy along with them. These immigrants, known to the Boers as “Outlanders”—most of them located in Johannesburg—soon outstripped the local population in size. Before long, the Outlanders began demanding the right to vote.

  The Boers just as adamantly refused them this privilege, leading to an incident known as the Jameson Raid, in which a large band of volunteers from the British sectors made a failed attempt to take over Johannesburg and rally the Outlanders into revolt. Tensions continued to escalate until the Boers’ ultimatum of 1899 triggered an actual war.

  The Boers were grossly underrated by the British. Their army consisted of more than sixty thousand Mauser-armed “commandos”—mounted riflemen, some of the finest shots on earth—who had been well trained under the generalship of such Boer luminaries as Paul Kruger and Louis Botha. As well, because of their newfound wealth and connections with Germany, the Boers were equipped with an array of the latest Krupp artillery and U.S. Maxim guns, including a new fast-firing weapon known as a “pom-pom” that shot 1-inch-diameter exploding bullets like a cannon shell.

  Churchill, of course, insisted on going to the most dangerous places to report for the Morning Post. That would have been Ladysmith, except that location was closed to him due to the Boer siege. The nearest he could get was the last station up the rail track—a tent city called Estcourt—where he encountered an array of old friends, including chums from Harrow, and Reggie Barnes, his polo teammate from India who had been shot earlier. There was little to do in Estcourt but sit and wait for an army of Boers to surround and capture them. With a force of twelve thousand enemy in the neighborhood, all the British could muster up was about a thousand infantry and cavalry, a couple of artillery pieces, and an armored train. Bad odds, but Churchill and his fellow troops were confident in the inherent superiority of the British military.18

  Churchill had been in Estcourt about a week when opportunity to get closer to the war offered itself in the form of an excursion in the armored train. As he put it: “Nothing looks more formidable and impressive than an armored train, but nothing is in fact more vulnerable and helpless.”

  Captain Haldane was the officer in charge of the armored train that morning. It was used as a reconnaissance tool to travel the fifteen miles or so from Estcourt to Chieveley, the last station before Ladysmith that the Boers had not wrecked. The train consisted of half a dozen open cars that were protected by sheets of iron plate, with the engine and tender in the middle. Along for protection were two companies of infantry and a dozen sailors with a six-pound naval cannon. At 5:10 a.m. on November 14, 1899, they steamed out of Estcourt. Despite his misgivings about the train, Churchill said he went along as part of his duty to the Morning Post and also “because I was eager for trouble.” It found him soon enough.

  The train had no sooner reached Chieveley without seeing enemy activity when, from the woods atop a hill only six hundred yards away, Boer soldiers began to emerge. They wheeled out three field cannons and immediately opened up on the train. Shrapnel burst overhead, maiming and killing soldiers in the open-top cars. There were sharp explosions from the front of the train. Bullets from rifle fire clanged against the iron sides. The engineer, who had reversed directions, picked up speed to more than 40 miles an hour, and they were soon careening downhill into a sharp curve. There, the Boers had placed a large boulder on the tracks, and the train hit it head-on. The first three cars were derailed, tumbling over and killing many of the soldiers inside. The first car was knocked off the tracks entirely; the next two obstructed the tracks ahead. The Boers kept up a constant fire at the wrecked train, including steady booms from one of the fast-firing Maxim pom-pom cannons.

  At the moment of the crash, everyone in Churchill’s car, which was behind the engine, was hurled violently to the floor, some badly injured. Churchill scrambled up the side of the open car and dropped to the ground, hoping to find a way to get the train moving again. The engineer, bleeding from a shrapnel wound to the head, sprang from the cab and sought shelter behind the wrecked cars, complaining that its wasn’t his job to get into gunfights with the Boers. Churchill calmly informed him that no man was ever hit twice in one day, that he would be rewarded for gallantry, and that he needed to use the engine to shove the wrecked cars off the tracks. Churchill’s manner was so steady and calming that the engineer, a Mr. Wagner, wiped the blood off his face and returned to the engine—and, Churchill said, “thereafter obeyed every order I gave him.”*819

  It was agreed that Captain Haldane would coordinate a covering fire against the Boers while Churchill would see to clearing the tracks—an extremely dangerous business. An enemy shell put the British naval gun out of the fight and another set the engine ablaze. All the while Churchill exposed himself outside. Seemingly oblivious to the hail of bullets, he called for volunteers to help move an overturned car and dashed back and forth from the engine to the wreck, shouting orders. The engine gave a mighty push to clear the tracks, but the derailed cars jammed together and ground to a halt; Churchill ordered the engineer to loosen them up by moving backward, but the coupling chains were too short. The enemy fire kept up. Longer chains were found and installed. The car directly ahead was cleared from the track, and the forward car was only partly obstructing their escape. The engine moved forward but the foot plate jammed on the derailed car and again things came to a halt. For seventy minutes they struggled to free the engine amid the horrible clanging, banging, explosive fire of the Boers.

  At length, the obstacle was removed. Haldane directed that wounded would be placed on the engine and the coal tender. Uninjured infantry retreated by walking on the lee side of the engine, away from the fire, and back to Estcourt. Nearly forty wounded soldiers were jammed into the engine and coal car; the dead were left alongside the tracks. The enemy fire actually seemed to increase as the furious Boers realized their quarry was escaping.

  Churchill was on the train, but by the time he noticed that the driver had outpaced the infantry outside they were three hundred yards behind, once more at the mercy of the Boers. Churchill told the driver to cross a bridge and wait on the other side while he went to get the beleaguered infantry. As he hurried back down the tracks, he saw figures on horseback “with dark flapping clothes and slouch hats,” riding toward him with rifles leveled. When they fired, Churchill heard the whistling bullets pass on both sides of him. He flung hims
elf into a rail cut but it gave no shelter. He began darting down the cut, hoping for the best, when ahead a lone rider came toward him. The large Boer pulled up short and, shaking his rifle, ordered him to surrender. Churchill reached for his Mauser pistol, only to discover he’d left it in the engine cab. He was trapped and made a prisoner.20

  * * *

  CHURCHILL AND ABOUT FIFTY other prisoners were made to march to the Boer capital of Pretoria, a three-day trip by foot and train. Along the way Churchill’s personal captor gave him his hat to help against the rain.*9 The officers were imprisoned in a former school building, enclosed by a ten-foot-high fence and constantly surrounded by ten heavily armed guards. Churchill was miserable. A man of action, he now had nothing to do.21

  Churchill insisted to the Boer command that he was not a combatant but a war correspondent and should be released. “We are not going to let you go, old Chappie,” he was told. “We don’t capture the son of a lord every day.” Churchill responded by writing letters to the Boer authorities, pleading this case. But his own newspapers back in London did him in, running stirring pieces on his heroism at the battle of the train. “[Churchill] needs to be guarded and watched, as he is dangerous to our war,” ordered the Boer commanding general Petrus Jacobus Joubert. “Otherwise, he can do us a lot of harm. In a word, he must not be released during the war.”