The Allies

by Winston Groom

  Churchill reproached himself for going back from the train to see about the others. In the Boer prison, “hours crawl by like paralytic centipedes. Nothing amuses you,” he wrote. “I certainly hated every moment of my captivity more than I have hated any other period in my whole life.”22

  The day after Churchill’s twenty-fifth birthday on November 30, Captain Haldane informed Churchill that he and another soldier—a tough sergeant major—intended to escape. Churchill immediately signed on. The sergeant major was dead set against this but was overruled by Haldane, who felt that Churchill’s gallant behavior at the train overcame any objections to his joining in the escape.

  The plan turned around getting over the wall at a particular spot in the back of the prison yard that sometimes attracted less attention from the guards than others. At nightfall, Haldane went to scout the potential escape hatch, only to find it too dangerous because of the alertness of the guards. The sergeant major encountered the same difficulty. When Churchill arrived for surveillance, he saw an opening when a guard whose back was turned began lighting a cigarette. On impulse he scrambled onto a ledge, leaped to the fence, and began scaling it. At one point he thought the jig was up when his coat became entangled with barbs on the top, but he managed to shake free and dropped down into the garden of an adjoining house.

  Churchill could see people in the house and hid in shrubs alongside the prison wall. A fellow officer walking along the wall inside the prison—an accomplice to the escape—was startled to hear a cough from Churchill. “They cannot get out,” he murmured. Churchill digested this powerful information, then responded, “I shall go on alone.”23

  Wearing a dark woolen suit and a Boer-style slouch hat, Churchill spotted a garden gate and made a break for it, exiting onto the street. When he saw a guard nearby, he stifled the urge to run and continued walking. After a hundred yards, he concluded he was past the second hurdle, free in Pretoria. The streets were full of Boers but not one paid him any attention. He crossed a bridge and was in the suburbs, where he sat on a small bridge and contemplated his predicament. He was alone in enemy territory with the nearest safety three hundred miles away. He knew no one to ask for help, spoke none of the language, had no map or compass, and no money he could spend because English pound notes would raise suspicion. All he had, in fact, was the constellation Orion to point him roughly in the right direction, so long as the nights were clear; walking around in daylight was out of the question.

  He found a rail track and followed it. All rail bridges were heavily guarded, but he found ways around them. He realized it would probably be impossible to walk three hundred miles without being spotted, so he resolved to hop a freight train and hope for the best. Presently he saw the “great yellow headlight” of an engine, and as the train passed he jumped aboard an open car.

  It contained sacks of coal and Churchill burrowed in, worrying whether he’d been seen, whether the train was headed in the right direction, and a hundred other important questions before finally falling asleep. When he woke up, he concluded he must leave the train before daybreak in order not to be discovered among the coal bags during unloading. He leaped off and wound up in a ditch. He found water and drank, then headed for a copse of trees to wait out the day until another train came along. A large vulture soaring overhead became his unsettling companion for much of the day. He had brought a bar of chocolate to eat, nothing else.

  By late afternoon hunger closed in on him. Churchill, never a strong man of the cross, began to pray “long and earnestly.” Near dusk he walked toward some hills because he had noticed that trains—especially the long ones—slowed dramatically while climbing a grade. The vulture followed him. He hid behind rocks and bushes and waited for a train, but none appeared. He had been there more than six hours, on the verge of despair. He once more considered his situation and decided to walk—at least to put ten more miles between him and Pretoria. To avoid bridge guards and Boer strongpoints, he slogged through a swamp, waist high in water, swam streams, climbed rocks, and kept Orion in position to lead him to the Portuguese-held coast where the British housed a consulate. He finally saw a train, but there were too many people around to safely board it. He plodded on until he reached the veld, the great rolling plain of South Africa. Ahead he saw lights and fires, thinking they belonged to “Kaffirs,”*10 who might be friendly toward Englishmen and might give him a warm meal and “a dry corner to sleep in.”

  The lights he’d seen were much farther off than Churchill had thought. After walking an hour and a half they were still in the distance. About 2 or 3 a.m. he arrived at a working coal mine with several outbuildings and houses; the fires drove the engines that mined the coal. Churchill saw nothing behind him that would lead to safety, and he determined to take a chance that the occupants of the houses were British Outlanders running the mine.

  He knocked on a door and a window above flew open with a flood of Dutch. He felt a shock of consternation but had the presence of mind to answer that he’d had an accident and needed help. Presently the door opened and a tall stern-looking man stood in the doorway and said, in perfect English, “What do you want?”

  Churchill began lying. He told the man he was in the Boer army, fell off a train, and had dislocated his shoulder. He was invited in and ushered to a small dining room, where he sat at a table. The man, clearly suspicious, inquired further about the rail accident.

  “I think,” said Churchill, “that I had better tell you the truth.”

  “I think you had,” the man replied very slowly.

  “I am Winston Churchill, war correspondent for the Morning Post.” He blurted it all out: his capture, his imprisonment in Pretoria, his escape, and that he needed help to get to the frontier.

  After a long pause, the man said, “Thank God you have come here.” It was, he said, the only house for twenty miles where Churchill would not have been handed over to the Boers. “We are all British here. We will see you through,” his host, a Mr. Howard, informed him.*11

  * * *

  FOR THE TIME BEING, Churchill’s rescuers decided to hide him in the mine until a plan for his escape could be organized. Thus, in the wee hours of the morning he was lowered into the darkened, rat-infested coal pit to await word of his fate. He stayed there nearly a week.

  After years of war reporting, Churchill had by now become a correspondent of worldwide repute. The wire services had picked up stories of his escape from Boer newspapers and broadcast them to the ends of the earth. But after five days, the heat was off, and various news reports had him captured in points all along the frontier. The hunt had moved on, and he was allowed to leave the coal pit late at night for long moonlit walks in the freshening breezes of the veld.

  At last a plan evolved that chilled Churchill to his bones, for he would now have to rely on others to see him through instead of his own burgeoning self-confidence. He had wanted no more than a pony, a revolver, some food, and a guide to take him to the Portuguese border—but instead, his rescuers planned to move him there in an open railcar filled with huge bales of sheep’s wool being sent by a Dutch farmer who was in on the scheme. All turned on how thorough a search would be made of the contents of the car on the Boer side of the border.

  Wedged into a small recess between the wool bales, Churchill was given food, water, tea, whisky, a revolver, and wishes of good luck. The trip was expected to take sixteen hours; in fact it took almost two nerve-wracking days. At every stop for coal, water, passengers, shunting, and so on, Churchill expected the tarpaulin to rip and angry Boers to discover his hiding place. In London the newspapers reported: “With reference to the escape from Pretoria of Mr. Winston Churchill, fears are expressed that he may be captured again before long—and if so, may probably be shot.”

  At daybreak, the train lurched and rattled toward Komatipoort, the last checkpoint on the line before reaching Portuguese territory. It waited there for three hours, Churchill said, w
ith lots of shouting in Dutch. He knew they were searching the train. It was only a few hundred yards to the frontier, and he considered jumping out and making a run for it. But ultimately he thought the better of it.

  At length the train pulled forward, and within a short time Churchill peered out from behind his wool bales to behold the uniforms of Portuguese police. He was so excited he began to shout and fired his revolver into the air “as a feu de joie.” He was free.

  He left the train and made his way through the streets to the British consul, who (after first mistaking him for a fireman or deckhand off one of the ships) provided him accommodations, new clothes, and a fashionable dinner “with real tablecloth and real glasses.” That night, he arranged passage for Churchill on a steamer bound for Durban, South Africa, and a hero’s welcome.

  Word of his escape had preceded him as Churchill disembarked from the steamer; British flags adorned the harbor at Durban, bands and wildly enthusiastic crowds jammed the dock and wharves. The mayor, a general, and an admiral greeted him and the crowd swept him up on their shoulders. “I was nearly torn to pieces by kindness,” Churchill said, as he was carried to the town hall. He was implored to make a speech, which he did. Baskets of telegrams from all corners of the world arrived with congratulations and blessings.

  Winston Churchill had experienced his first taste of greatness—but he did so with a certain charm and humility. Upon discovering that the newspapers had greatly exaggerated his role in the armored train fight, he felt embarrassed, but he showed a mature understanding of it. “I became for the time quite famous,” he wrote, adding, “The British nation was smarting under a series of military reverses…and the news of my outwitting the Boers was received with enormous and no doubt disproportionate satisfaction.”

  All of this lavish attention produced the inevitable backlash from the press, which began to question Churchill’s motives and even his credentials. “The question occurs, what was he doing in the armored train?” complained the Phoenix. He wasn’t a soldier, the newspaper went on, so he had no business in the train, and whoever invited him had “overstepped his duty”—or if Churchill went about without permission, he was an undue burden to the commanding officer. The Daily Nation called him dishonorable, and the Westminster Gazette accused him of playing a double game by claiming to be a news correspondent and then fighting and escaping.

  General Sir Redvers Buller, who remained disconcerted by the reverses suffered by the British army and the so far successful enemy siege of his army at Ladysmith, grilled Churchill at length over conditions in the Transvaal, then asked if there was anything he could do for him. Churchill replied that he would like his lieutenant’s commission back and volunteered for a position, for no pay, with the South African Light Horse regiment commanded by Colonel Julian Byng. This was granted, and Churchill became Byng’s assistant adjutant.*12

  Meanwhile, Churchill still retained his job with the Post. This profoundly infuriated “the old colonels and generals at the ‘Buck and Dodder Club,’ ” who telegraphed Churchill, “Best friends here hope you will not continue making an ass of yourself.”

  The focus of their scorn was a series of dispatches the Morning Post had published under Churchill’s byline, in which the young lieutenant maintained that “the individual Boer, mounted in suitable country, is worth from three to five regular [British] soldiers.” As if that were not bad enough, he also predicted that an army of as many as a quarter million men would be necessary to put down the rebellion. Both of these contentions were ridiculed as absurd, and Churchill himself was accused of being “infantile” by the incensed field officer class. In fact he was right, and in the end an army of more than half a million was needed to defeat the Boers—a manpower ratio of 5 to 1.

  * * *

  CHURCHILL’S FIRST ACTION AS an actual soldier in the Boer War was among the most dangerous of his career: the legendary Battle of Spion Kop, in Natal.

  The battle was a consequence of General Sir Redvers Buller’s attempt to relieve the British army at Ladysmith, with reinforcements he’d recently received totaling about twenty-five thousand infantry, artillery, and cavalry. Part of Buller’s force, which was engaged in a long right-flanking swing around the Boer positions, had observed a tall, flat-topped hill with a commanding view of the immediate territory through which the British needed to march. Churchill’s division commander sent one of the brigades to take the hill and hold it at all costs, which was where the trouble lay.

  Spion Kop was a steep hill—a mountain, actually—about fourteen hundred feet high, with a fairly flat top “about the size of Trafalgar Square,” as Churchill described it. These three acres were now crammed with more than two thousand British infantry on the sweltering rocky ground. The Boers had watched the British advance with growing alarm. On the morning of January 24, 1900, they found the Englishmen in control of the summit and determined to eject them.

  The Boer force, which was considerably smaller than the British contingent, was well armed to enfilade Spion Kop with rifle fire. Worse for Sir Redvers’s infantry, the Boers employed their extremely accurate Krupp-made artillery to sweep every foot of the table-topped plateau with shells, dropping at the rate of about sixty a minute. The Boers had cut their fuses to explode on contact so that the shells landed on the rocky surface, which sent deadly rock fragments tearing into men’s flesh. This horrific pounding went on all day until an afternoon attack by the Boers was repulsed by the sorely tested British riflemen at great cost to both sides.

  That afternoon, Churchill and a companion cavalryman arrived at the base of the mountain to find a veritable village of hospital tents and wagons tending to hundreds of mutilated British soldiers. They tethered their horses at the base of Spion Kop and climbed its boulder-strewn rear until they reached the top and encountered an exhausted and demoralized Colonel A. W. Thorneycroft, who had assumed command after the brigade commander was killed by Boer artillery. Taking stock of the terrific fire to which the troops were exposed, Churchill and his friend decided to return to the division staff and report the situation to the commanding general.

  “Our tidings did not cheer him,” Churchill said of the general’s reaction upon learning of conditions at Spion Kop. But he told Churchill to return to the hell-blasted hole with orders to Thorneycroft that fresh troops would be sent up later that night and for him to hold on.

  Churchill returned to the mountain after dark. He wandered for a long while over ground “thickly dotted with killed and wounded” before finding the colonel, who was in the process of ordering a retirement from the plateau. Churchill tried to convince him to countermand his decision in light of the general’s orders, but to no avail. Lieutenant Churchill and the colonel left the hill just as the reinforcements were arriving. Again, Churchill gently beseeched the colonel to return to the summit, but again he was rebuffed, and next day the Boers retook Spion Kop. It was an embarrassing British defeat, with upwards of three hundred British officers and soldiers killed and more than a thousand wounded or taken prisoner, which Churchill deemed a “military crime.”

  * * *

  WHEN THE FIRST VANGUARD OF Buller’s army finally rode into the bedraggled streets of Ladysmith after Spion Kop, the British army there had been reduced to eating horses and mules and was “starving as slowly as possible.” Churchill helped break the siege, and he dined that night on the last bottle of champagne and—instead of horsemeat—the last dray oxen in the now relieved army’s possession.

  Churchill remembered the days that followed as containing “the most happy memories of my life.” There were still numerous skirmishes to be fought with recalcitrant Boers, camping out under the stars, riding the length of the country and taking in its “wonderful air and climate.” It was not always the safest occupation, however, as Churchill learned late one afternoon when riding past a hill that, as an experienced officer, he felt gave off sinister emanations.

  He h
ad arranged a few months earlier for his nineteen-year-old brother Jack to join him in the South African Light Horse. As they rode together in a cavalry column, he had a premonition and remarked, “We are much too near those fellows,” just as shots rang out from the crest of the hill. The cavalrymen quickly galloped to the crest of a hill of their own and, after stashing their horses safely behind it, lay down and proceeded to engage in a gunfight with the surprisingly numerous Boers.

  Suddenly Jack grunted and backed off several feet. Churchill discovered his brother had been shot in the calf by a bullet that missed his own head by inches. He managed to get Jack off the firing line and into a wagon headed for the hospital at Durban, where a surgeon operated to remove the bullet. It was there he learned to his jaw-dropping surprise that a brand-new hospital ship had just entered the harbor, organized and directed by none other than his and Jack’s own mother, Jennie, who had raised a subscription fund by throwing parties and balls in London to equip it with the finest medical staff and nurses. In a stunning coincidence, Jack became its first patient.

  Jennie invented a grand time for herself in South Africa, attending all the luncheons, dinners, and military balls that behind-the-lines living offered. She was forty-five and in the full flower of her beauty and charm: still slender and fair, though it was said she dyed her hair now. Before she left she announced her engagement to Lieutenant George Cornwallis-West, a handsome and well-connected but impoverished British officer the same age as her son Winston. It scandalized her friends, but she replied, “I don’t care, I’m having fun!” Churchill’s reaction is lost to history. But in years afterward (and before her divorce) he frequently visited his mother at Salisbury Hall, a large estate in Surrey.24