*
THE FIGHT
Churchill at his advance post ripped a page from his notebook and rushed back a message to Kitchener: “The Dervish army is still in position a mile and a half south-west of Jebel Surgham.” He marked it XXX, meaning Urgent, or With All Dispatch, according to the drill book. With his patrol he rode to the top of a sand ridge and pulled up to watch. In a bright, quivering crescent, the Khalifa’s army was coming on, the sun glinting from thousands of spears, swords, and rifles. Preceding it was a shocking tumult of sound, the roar of 60,000 Mohammedans screaming to Allah for victory over the invader infidel.
“They’re at less than four hundred yards!” Churchill yelled to his troopers. “Open fire!” The several rapid-fire shots they directed into the wildly surging lines went unnoticed, and Churchill gave a more sensible order: “Let’s get out of here.” Even in his haste, he was unable to avoid adding a footnote, as identifying in his case as the black flag of the Sheikh-ed-din: “This is no place for a Christian.” They scrambled off the ridge and spurred their way back toward the regiment, only to meet a corporal coming up who drew in his horse so savagely that it stood upright. Churchill was handed a note from Kitchener’s Chief of Staff: “Remain as long as possible, and report how the masses of attack are moving.”
Both the gunboats and the artillery opened fire a moment later, the shells slamming through the air overhead with a steely bucketing reminiscent of rolling boxcars. Holes appeared momentarily in the Khalifa’s lines, and dozens of banners dropped into the sand. However, the general pace of the army was undiminished, and Churchill was not dismayed to get a note from Major Finn, saying, “Come back at once into the zereba [thorn fence] as the infantry are about to open fire.” In the smoky confusion of the next few minutes the recklessly advancing Dervishes suffered several thousand casualties, while no more than two or three hundred of the crouching and protected British infantrymen went down. The left flank of the enemy overshot the mark entirely, and the center, crumbling, broke into flight. But Kitchener’s Camel Corps had run into trouble. The ungainly beasts shuffled through the sand at only about seven miles an hour, and it was easy for Dervish infantrymen to overtake them and pull down their riders, who were cut to pieces instantly. The Camel Corps appeared to be headed in a rout toward the river. Simultaneously, the main body of the enemy were rallying for an entrenched stand before and inside of Omdurman. It was at this moment that the bugles of the 21st Lancers sounded the charge and Churchill found himself in the midst of his first cavalry attack.
The horses started up slowly, at a trot, the outriding patrols with sabers drawn. Young Lieutenant Grenfell, on the right, was somewhat ahead of the others. He would not survive; all of his younger brothers would eventually fall in England’s wars, one after winning the Victoria Cross at Château-Thierry. As the tempo of the mounted lines quickened into a gallop, with all horsemen still in a perfect, jingling line, the swelling cry of 400 Englishmen, with accents ranging from Limehouse to the halls of Eton and Harrow, mingled with the “Ul, ul, ul Akbar!” of the enemy. The fight was to be on even terms; in the main, the British would use mostly lances and swords, against the spears, scimitars, and rifles of the Dervishes. Churchill was one of the few exceptions. Because of his defective shoulder, he sheathed his sword and drew from its wooden holster his Mauser pistol, which held a clip of ten cartridges. Over the brow of a hill, as the ground fell away from his horse’s feet, he saw a long row of dark figures, cowled like monks, ride up suddenly out of a khor, or dry watercourse. It was the Hadendoa brigade of the unsavory Osman Digna.
The two lines came together with a terrible collision, the familiar clash of steel against steel, on this occasion to be virtually the last of its kind in history. Churchill leaped his horse over two blue-robed infantrymen who lay in his path. Both raised themselves up and fired, and the trooper behind him gave a cry and fell. In the smoke and flying sand a dozen or more of the enemy pressed close, seeking a decapitating cut at Churchill or a hamstringing blow at his horse. He and the subaltern on his right, Wormald, formerly of the 7th Hussars, spurred their way out to higher ground. Churchill fired at one man so closely that the pistol struck him in the face, and he rode off another with polo tactics — a gaunt Arab wearing a steel helmet and chain mail. Many of Churchill’s comrades on his far left were being pulled from their horses and hacked apart. “In one respect a cavalry charge is very like ordinary life,” he was to record years later. “So long as you are all right, firmly in your saddle, your horse in hand, and well armed, lots of enemies will give you a wide berth. But as soon as you have lost a stirrup, have a rein cut, have dropped your weapon, are wounded, or your horse is wounded, then is the moment when from all quarters enemies rush upon you.”
A young officer writing to his family about the fight at Omdurman said that the screams of the tom and bleeding horses formed his worst impressions of the field. “Their great rolling eyes flashing panic and the foaming saliva squeezed up by tortured nerves were printed on my memory even in the hottest din of battle. After all, they were not there by choice, poor beasts. I was there, I suppose, because I thought it would mean good sport. It was not sport. I am afraid that I have killed several men.” Churchill killed a Dervish who lunged up from the ground with a savage spear thrust. In the midst of the polyglot bedlam of curses and prayers, he emptied his Mauser and tried to draw his troop aside. Several men were missing, he noticed, but he felt that the Lancers had inflicted overwhelming casualties on the enemy without themselves sustaining very heavy losses. “But now,” he was to write, “from the direction of the enemy there came a succession of grisly apparitions; horses spouting blood, struggling on three legs, men staggering on foot, men bleeding from terrible wounds, fish-hook spears stuck right through them, arms and faces cut to pieces, bowels protruding, men gasping, crying, collapsing, expiring.”
When trumpets over the field sounded the call for a dismounted and enfilading fire, the Dervishes picked up their injured and fled toward their doomed city. Both sides had won the traditional victory of proving their valor and losing many men. Half an hour later, breakfasting in the watercourse where he had first shot at the enemy, Churchill asked his sergeant, “Did you enjoy yourself?”
“Well, I don’t exactly say I enjoyed it, sir, but I think I’ll get more used to it next time,” the man replied, and all the troop laughed.
Churchill modestly left certain personal details out of his account of the charge. Others there recall that he and a fellow subaltern, after riding out of the melee, sprang off their horses and dashed back to rescue from certain death two non-commissioned officers who had been dragged down into Dervish hands. Both men were pulled away and both afterward recovered from their wounds.
The right arm of Dick Molyneux, a subaltern friend of Churchill’s, had been all but severed by a sword cut. The muscles had been sliced through, and his weapon had dropped from his useless hand. Only the gallantry of one of his troopers, who dismounted, beat off three spearmen in a frenzied attack, and carried him to safety, saved his life. Before being returned to England, Molyneux was patched up by a doctor who desired that part of the wound be “skinned over” as soon as possible. A nurse volunteered some skin but fainted when an incision was started in her arm. Churchill then entered the tent, offered the services of any epidermal area that the doctor thought suitable, and stood in a corner smoking a cigar and chatting while a chunk the size of a fifty-cent piece was cut from the inside of his forearm. He still wears the scar, the only one he got from the battle of Omdurman.
The Khalifa cagily disappeared up the river, into the dim, unmarked reaches of the Nubian Desert, where pursuit by a large, adequately supplied force was impossible. But his army was broken, his capital taken, and his reign of terror in southern Egypt ended.
In the afternoon, when the regiment entered Omdurman, Churchill became a father, or a kind of foster father. He had been trotting along leisurely and noticed at the roadside a small bundle wrapped in soiled c
loth. Something about it, some extrasensory identification that always betrays humanity, impelled him to get down and investigate. It was a baby girl three or four hours old, abandoned by a refugee mother. The situation was entirely new to Churchill. First he laid the infant out of reach of the horses; then, when it started to cry, he sat down on a bank to consider. The child was quite obviously hungry. From his kit Churchill took his only fodder, a piece of very sustaining sausage of about the same consistency as a rhino’s hide. It was inexplicably rejected. By good fortune, an Arab now came along to whom Churchill had offered clemency on the battlefield. The man had some biscuits, and these, crumbled up, were seized on eagerly. “Allah be with you — you’ve fought well and acquired a family,” said Churchill, and he pushed the pair along on the road to Omdurman.
In search of information, he visited Kitchener’s headquarters in town and met Charles Neufeld, an Englishman who was having irons struck off his legs. Neufeld had been a prisoner of the Dervishes for thirteen years, during which he had lain chained to a stone floor. “Have I forgotten how to walk?” he kept saying. Later on, Churchill and a friend, the soon-to-be Duke of Atholl, rode back out to the battlefield. There they found two horribly wounded Dervishes crawling on their bellies toward the river. Churchill gave them water from his bottle, but they died soon afterward. The sight and stench everywhere around were so affecting that Churchill and his comrade rode away. They were sick and depressed, in the hollow, confused, too quiet lull that the most seasoned veterans usually find after a battle. The campaign was over. An important victory had been won. Nothing remained but to bury the dead.
Chapter 12
WHEN Churchill returned to England his head was spinning with dreams of grandeur. The ideas came tumbling through so fast that he was incapable of isolating them for exact appraisal. Underlying all was a resolve to quit the Army, for financial reasons. The golden vistas of journalism had knocked the Queen’s pittance into a cocked hat. Next in line was a sneaking desire to go to Oxford and become a famous scholar. This proved to be one of the worst notions he ever had. Taking the matter up, he was handed a sort of prospectus, or assay of examinations that it was necessary to pass before proceeding to his higher studies. The sheet was filled with the deadliest kind of allusions to both Latin and Greek, in about equal proportions. Churchill dropped it as though it had been a live hand grenade and turned his mind to more worthy problems.
At a dinner one evening he remarked to a friend of his father’s, an august member of the Cabinet, that he was “considering politics.” He said it somewhat in the manner of an impoverished stage actor bearding a Hollywood producer.
“How long have you been bent on a political career?” asked the minister courteously.
“Ever since I was so high,” replied Churchill, who had been visited by the inspiration shortly after the fish course.
“Ah, then, my advice is to drop around to party headquarters and announce yourself as available,” the minister went on, convinced that he had heard the end of it. Together with his colleagues he was amazed to learn that, the very next afternoon, Churchill had strolled jauntily into the Conservative offices in St. Stephen’s Chambers and made himself comfortable. He was stunningly got up, according to a man then employed there as a clerk. His uniform was brilliantly cut, and he was festooned with polychromatic reminders of his global excursions with pen and sword. One of his wealthy kinsmen, a Mr. Fitzroy-Stewart, held an honorary position in the establishment, and he showed the youngster around. It was mentioned conversationally that a speech or two might be in order.
“A speech?” inquired Churchill. “Where?”
“One of a dozen places,” said Fitzroy-Stewart. “Take your pick.”
“What shall I choose as my subject?”
“Anything that comes handy.”
Churchill in his memoirs mentions Bath as the scene of his “official maiden effort.” One of his friends was more forcibly struck by an unofficial warm-up canter he ran through in the outlying Rotherhithe Town Hall. Had it been well covered by the press, the chances are it would have got England into an immediate war with France. Relations between the two countries were already mildly tense; Churchill’s address would likely have snapped the cord. Certainly it was one of the most jingoistic first speeches ever heard, and it set the pace for some classic ones to follow. France, he told the ordinarily somnolent but now alarmed folk at Rotherhithe, “has deliberately crossed our path and brought upon us what cannot be regarded as less than a personal affront.” He continued in this vein as though he were still chasing Dervishes.
“My impression is,” says the friend who heard the speech, “that quite a number of the audience slipped outside to buy newspapers and find out precisely what was the nature of the schism referred to.”
“It is fortunate that our Government is strong,” shouted the speaker; “it is fortunate that those who compose it are possessed of the confidence of the country, for in the course of a few days, perhaps even a few hours, we may be called upon to make a great effort to hold what really belongs to us. War clouds are hovering over us.”
By this stage of the address, says the witness, several men quietly got up and went out to put their affairs in order, since it was plain that the recruiting officer could scarcely be more than half an hour behind Churchill. The audience was relieved to hear the latter say, a moment afterward, “I think it probable — we all hope that it is probable — that these clouds may pass away.”
However, Churchill was by no means done with France. Only a few days later he attended a dinner at Dover and sailed into the unfortunate nation again. It was, by chance, an excellent, well-rounded meal, and the orator was admirably fueled for his onslaught. At one important climax he held up his right arm, shook it, and challenged an anonymous but “well-known” foreign power “to come on.” Nothing happened; France was busy.
By contrast, his official opener at Bath was tepid. France got off surprisingly well, which was probably a good thing, since the Morning Post, perhaps stimulated by the high jinks at Rotherhithe, sent a correspondent down to report the occasion in full. Churchill was somewhat moved to find the man seated in a first-class carriage and attired in a gray frock coat. They became acquainted by intuition. With his easy charm, the veteran of Omdurman sat down and made himself agreeable. By the time they reached Bath, the correspondent was a devoted fan, and when the speech was delivered in a tent before a sprinkling of townsfolk, he stood glassy-eyed in front of Churchill and took down the remarks word for word. In its essence the talk was political. It was pro-Government in tone, or, rather, pro a Government that he took to be a developing “Tory democracy,” his father’s old phrase, and it contained a pretty sharp dig at “the dried-up drain pipe of Radicalism.” The audience received everything genially, with more calm than that attending the crowd at Rotherhithe. In London, the Post’s readers were informed editorially that “a new figure has arrived on the political scene,” and other papers included thumbnail portraits of the young genius. Among the comments made, a writer noted that Churchill “was born a demagogue and happens to know it,” and added that “at dinner he talks and talks, and you can hardly tell when he leaves off quoting his one idol, Macaulay, and begins his other, Winston Churchill.”
Before resigning from the Army, Churchill patriotically rejoined his regiment in India for a short tour of duty. Trouble was brewing at Meerut. One of the toughest polo tournaments of the year was in the offing, and he was needed. But soon after his arrival he slipped on a stairway, going in to dinner, and threw his shoulder out of joint again, this time very painfully. After the shoulder was strapped tightly into place, Churchill’s comrades persuaded him to take the field for a trial gallop. He performed creditably in the first two games, and in the finals, against the 4th Dragoon Guards (whose Captain Hardress Lloyd would afterward score brilliantly in international matches against the United States) he played with such incautious fervor that he accounted for three goals and the tournament. Churchi
ll still considers the finals at Meerut to have been the athletic high point of his life.
At dinner of the day he mustered out, his regiment drank him a toast and wished him well. In the two years since he joined them, Churchill had seen remarkably little of the 4th Hussars. While the regiment was going about its humdrum business, he had fought three separate wars and was an object of considerable glamor. Bronzed, widely read, hardened to gunfire and oratory, he represented what many of the Hussars hoped to turn into when they grew up and took advantage of their opportunities. Quite a few of the officers, replacements, knew him only by reputation; some of these were introduced to him before they went in to dinner and toasted him. Churchill made a brief but telling acknowledgment, in which he said that he would never forget his old regiment, and he implied that, even in absentia, it had been uniquely satisfying. As he looked about at the flushed, unfamiliar faces, he became quite visibly emotional. He essayed to single out for special mention one or two officers here and there, but he was apparently unable to recall their names and was heard to mumble things that sounded like “you there in the corner” and “the chap with the beige goatee.” It was a memorable leave-taking; several of the regiment treasure it to this day.
Winston Churchill: An Informal Study of Greatness Page 16
