My Early Life

by Winston Churchill

  Twelve days passed in silence, peace and speculation. I had constructed a dozen imaginary situations, ranging from the capture of Cape Town by Kruger to the capture of Pretoria by Sir George White or even by General Penn Symons. None of them carried conviction to my mind. However, in two more days we should know all that had happened in this trance-like fortnight. The Interval would be over. The curtain would rise again on the world’s scene. What should we see? I thought it must be very hard for General Buller to bear the suspense. What would he give to know what was taking place? How silly of the Government not to send out a torpedo boat to meet him five days from land and put him in possession of all the facts, so that he could adjust his mind to the problem and think over his first steps coolly and at leisure!

  Suddenly there was a stir on deck. A ship was sighted right ahead, coming that is to say from the land of knowledge. We drew together rapidly. I think she would have passed us about a mile away but for the fact that some of the younger ones among us started a buzz of excitement. ‘Surely we can get some news from her? Can’t we stop her? She will have the Cape newspapers on board! Surely we are not going to let her go by without making an effort?’

  These murmurs reached the ears of high seniority. Grave counsel was taken. It was decided that it would be unusual to stop a ship at sea. Possibly there might be a claim for damages against the Government, or some other penalty like that which happens if you pull the communication-cord without sufficient provocation. As a bold half-measure signals were made to the steamer, asking for news. On this she altered her course and steamed past us little more than a hundred yards distant. She was a tramp steamer with perhaps twenty persons on board. They all gathered to look at us, and we – as the reader may well believe – returned the compliment. A blackboard was held up from the deck of the tramp, and on this we read the following legend:

  BOERS DEFEATED.

  THREE BATTLES.

  PENN SYMONS KILLED.

  Then she faded away behind us, and we were left to meditate upon this cryptic message.

  The Staff were frankly consternated. There had evidently been fighting—actual battles! And a British General had been killed! It must therefore have been severe fighting. It was hardly possible the Boers would have any strength left. Was it likely, if they had been defeated in three battles, they would continue their hopeless struggle? Deep gloom settled down upon our party. Buller alone remained doggedly inscrutable, a tower of strength in times of trouble. He had read the message through his field-glasses, but had made no sign. It was not until some minutes had passed that a Staff Officer ventured to address him.

  ‘It looks as if it will be all over, sir.’

  Thus pressed, the great man answered in the following words:

  ‘I daresay there will be enough left to give us a fight outside Pretoria.’

  His military instinct was sure and true. There was quite enough left!

  This impressive utterance restored our morale. It was repeated from one to another, and it ran through the ship in a few moments. Every eye was brighter. Every heart felt lighter of its load. The Staff Officers congratulated one another, and the Aides-de-Camp skipped for joy. The optimism was so general that no one turned and rent me when I uplifted my voice and said that ‘it would only have taken ten minutes to have stopped the ship and got proper information so that we should all know where we were’.

  On the contrary reasonable answer was made to me as follows:

  ‘It is the weakness of youth to be impatient. We should know everything that had happened quite soon enough. Sir Redvers Buller had shown his characteristic phlegm in not seeking to anticipate the knowledge which would be at his disposal on landing at Cape Town. Moreover, as the remaining battle would, in the Commander-in-Chief’s opinion, not take place until we reached Pretoria, and as Pretoria was upwards of seven hundred miles from Cape Town, there would be plenty of time to make all the arrangements necessary for disposing of what was left of the Boer resistance. Finally, the habit of questioning the decisions of superior officers in time of war, or in time of peace for that matter, was much to be regretted even in a War-Correspondent, and more particularly in one who had quite recently worn the uniform of an officer.’

  I, however, remained impenitent and unconvinced.

  Chapter XIX

  The Armoured Train

  IT was dark when we anchored in Table Bay; but innumerable lights twinkled from the shore, and a stir of launches soon beset our vessel. High functionaries and naval and military officers arrived, bearing their reports. The Headquarters Staff sat up all night to read them. I got hold of a bundle of newspapers and studied these with equal attention.10

  The Boers had invaded Natal, had attacked our advanced forces at Dundee, and though defeated in the action of Talana Hill, had killed General Penn Symons and very nearly rounded up the three or four thousand troops he had commanded as they made their hurried and hazardous retreat to Ladysmith. At Ladysmith Sir George White at the head of twelve or thirteen thousand men, with forty or fifty guns and a brigade of cavalry, attempted to bar their further advance. The intention of the British Government, though this I did not know at the time, was that he should retire southwards across the Tugela, delaying the Boer advance until he could be joined by the large reinforcements now hastening across the oceans from England and India. Above all, he was not to let himself be cut off and surrounded. The British war plan contemplated the temporary sacrifice of Northern Natal, the projecting triangle of which was obviously not defensible, and the advance of the main army under Buller from the Cape Colony through the Orange Free State to Pretoria. All this was soon deranged.

  I remember one night in after years that I said to Mr Balfour at dinner how badly Sir George White had been treated. A look of implacable sternness suddenly replaced his easy, smiling, affable manner. A different man looked out upon me. ‘We owe to him,’ he said, ‘the Ladysmith entanglement.’

  On the very day of our arrival (October 31) grave events had taken place around Ladysmith. General White, who had gained a local success at Elandslaagte, attempted an ambitious offensive movement against the elusive, advancing, enveloping Boer commandos. A disaster had occurred. Nearly twelve hundred British infantry had been forced to surrender at Nicholson’s Nek, and the rest of the widely dispersed forces were thrown back upon Ladysmith. This they hastily converted into an entrenched camp of wide extent, and being speedily invested on all sides by the Boers, and their railway cut, settled down in a prolonged siege to await relief. The Boers, having encircled them on all sides, had left two-thirds of their forces to block them in, and were presumably about to press on with the rest across the Tugela River into Southern Natal. Meanwhile in the west other Boer forces had similarly encircled Mafeking and Kimberley, and sat down stolidly to the process of starving them out. Finally, the Dutch areas of the Cape Colony itself were quivering upon the verge of rebellion. Throughout the vast subcontinent every man’s hand was against his brother, and the British Government could, for the moment, be sure of nothing beyond the gunshot of the Navy.

  Although I knew neither our plan nor the enemy’s situation and all the news of the day’s disaster in Natal was still suppressed, it was clear as soon as we had landed that the first heavy fighting would come in Natal. Buller’s Army Corps would take a month or six weeks to assemble in Cape Town and Port Elizabeth. There would be time to watch the Natal operations and come back to the Cape Colony for the main advance. So I thought, and so, a few days later, to his subsequent sorrow, thought Sir Redvers Buller. All traffic through the Free State was of course interrupted, and to reach Natal involved a railway journey of 700 miles by De Aar Junction and Stormberg to Port Elizabeth, and thence by a small mailboat or tug to Durban – four days in all. The railroad from De Aar to Stormberg ran parallel to the hostile frontier. It was quite undefended and might be cut at any moment. However, the authorities thought there was a good chance of getting through, so in company with the correspondent of the Manchest
er Guardian, a charming young man, Mr J. B. Atkins, later the Editor of the Spectator, I started forthwith. Our train was in fact the last that got round, and when we reached Stormberg the station staff were already packing up.

  We sailed from East London upon a steamer of about 150 tons, in the teeth of a horrible Antarctic gale. Indeed I thought the little ship would be overwhelmed amid the enormous waves or else be cast away upon the rocks which showed their black teeth endlessly a bare mile away upon our port beam. But all these misgivings were quickly dispelled by the most appalling paroxysms of seasickness which it has ever been my lot to survive. I really do not think I could have lifted a finger to save my life. There was a stuffy cabin, or caboose, below decks in the stern of the vessel, in which six or seven members of the crew lived, slept and ate their meals. In a bunk of this I lay in an extreme of physical misery while our tiny ship bounded and reeled, and kicked and pitched, and fell and turned almost over and righted itself again, or, for all I know, turned right round, hour after hour through an endless afternoon, a still longer evening and an eternal night. I remembered that Titus Oates lived in good health for many years after his prodigious floggings, and upon this reflection, combined with a firm trust that Providence would do whatever was best, were founded such hopes as I could still retain.

  There is an end to everything, and happily nothing fades so quickly as the memory of physical pain. Still my voyage to Durban is a recollection which, in the jingle of the ‘Bab Ballads’,

  I shall carry to the catacombs of age,

  Photographically lined

  On the tablets of my mind,

  When a yesterday has faded from its page.

  * * * * * * *

  We landed at Durban and travelled a night’s journey to Pietermaritzburg. The hospital was already full of wounded. Here I found Reggie Barnes shot through the thigh. He had been hit at close range in our brilliant little victory at Elandslaagte station in which my friend Ian Hamilton, now a General, had commanded. He told me all about the fighting and how skilful the Boers were with horse and rifle. He also showed me his leg. No bone was broken, but it was absolutely coal black from hip to toe. The surgeon reassured me afterwards that it was only bruising, and not mortification as I feared. That night I travelled on to Estcourt, a tiny tin township of a few hundred inhabitants, beyond which the trains no longer ran.

  It had been my intention to get into Ladysmith, where I knew Ian Hamilton would look after me and give me a good show. I was too late, the door was shut. The Boers had occupied Colenso Station on the Tugela River and held the iron railway bridge. General French and his staff, which included both Haig and Herbert Lawrence,11 had just slipped through under artillery fire in the last train out of Ladysmith on his way to the Cape Colony, where the main cavalry forces were to be assembled. There was nothing to do but to wait at Estcourt with such handfuls of troops as were being hurriedly collected to protect the southern part of Natal from the impending Boer invasion. A single battalion of Dublin Fusiliers, two or three guns and a few squadrons of Natal Carabineers, two companies of Durban Light Infantry and an armoured train, were the only forces which remained for the defence of the Colony. All the rest of the Natal Army was blockaded in Ladysmith. Reinforcements were hurrying to the spot from all parts of the British Empire; but during the week I was at Estcourt our weakness was such that we expected to be ourselves surrounded almost every day, and could do little but fortify our post and wear a confident air.

  At Estcourt I found old friends. Leo Amery, the monitor I had unluckily pushed into the bathing pool at Harrow ten years before, afterwards long my colleague in Parliament and Government, was now one of the war-correspondents of the Times. We were able for the first time to meet on terms of equality and fraternity, and together with my friend of the Manchester Guardian we took up our abode in an empty bell tent that stood in the shunting triangle of the railway station. That evening, walking in the single street of the town, whom should I meet but Captain Haldane, who had been so helpful in procuring me my appointment to Sir William Lockhart’s staff during the Tirah Expedition. Haldane had been wounded at Elandslaagte, and had hoped to rejoin his battalion of Gordon Highlanders in Ladysmith, and being like me held up by the enemy, had been given the temporary command of a company of the Dublin Fusiliers. The days passed slowly and anxiously. The position of our small force was most precarious. At any moment ten or twelve thousand mounted Boers might sweep forward to attack us or cut off our retreat. Yet it was necessary to hold Estcourt as long and in as firm a posture as possible. Cavalry reconnaissances were pushed out every morning for ten or fifteen miles towards the enemy to give us timely notice of their expected advance; and in an unlucky moment it occurred to the general in command on the spot to send his armoured train along the sixteen miles of intact railway line to supplement the efforts of the cavalry.

  Nothing looks more formidable and impressive than an armoured train; but nothing is in fact more vulnerable and helpless. It was only necessary to blow up a bridge or culvert to leave the monster stranded, far from home and help, at the mercy of the enemy. This situation did not seem to have occurred to our commander. He decided to put a company of the Dublin Fusiliers and a company of the Durban Light Infantry into an armoured train of six trucks, and add a small six-pounder naval gun with some sailors landed from HMS Terrible, together with a breakdown gang, and to send this considerable portion of his force out to reconnoitre towards Colenso. Captain Haldane was the officer he selected for the duty of commanding this operation. Haldane told me on the night of November 14 of the task which had been set him for the next day and on which he was to start at dawn. He did not conceal his misgivings on the imprudence of the enterprise, but he was of course, like everyone else at the beginning of a war, very keen upon adventure and a brush with the enemy. ‘Would I come with him?’ He would like it if I did! 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.

  The military events which followed are well known and have often been discussed. The armoured train proceeded about fourteen miles towards the enemy and got as far as Chieveley station without a sign of opposition or indeed of life or movement on the broad undulations of the Natal landscape. We stopped for a few moments at Chieveley to report our arrival at this point by telegraph to the General. No sooner had we done this than we saw, on a hill between us and home which overlooked the line at about 600 yards distance, a number of small figures moving about and hurrying forward. Certainly they were Boers. Certainly they were behind us. What would they be doing with the railway line? There was not an instant to lose. We started immediately on our return journey. As we approached the hill, I was standing on a box with my head and shoulders above the steel plating of the rear armoured truck. I saw a cluster of Boers on the crest. Suddenly three wheeled things appeared among them, and instantly bright flashes of light opened and shut ten or twelve times. A huge white ball of smoke sprang into being and tore out into a cone, only as it seemed a few feet above my head. It was shrapnel—the first I had ever seen in war, and very nearly the last! The steel sides of the truck tanged with a patter of bullets. There was a crash from the front of the train, and a series of sharp explosions. The railway line curved round the base of the hill on a steep down gradient, and under the stimulus of the enemy’s fire, as well as of the slope, our pace increased enormously. The Boer artillery (two guns and a pom-pom) had only time for one discharge before we were round the corner out of their sight. It had flashed across my mind that there must be some trap farther on. I was just turning to Haldane to suggest that someone should scramble along the train and make the engine-driver reduce speed, when suddenly there was a tremendous shock, and he and I and all the soldiers in the truck were pitched head over heels on to its floor. The armoured train travelling at not less than forty miles an hour had been thrown off the metals by some obstruction, or by some in
jury to the line.

  In our truck no one was seriously hurt, and it took but a few seconds for me to scramble to my feet and look over the top of the armour. The train lay in a valley about 1,200 yards on the homeward side of the enemy’s hill. On the top of this hill were scores of figures running forward and throwing themselves down in the grass, from which there came almost immediately an accurate and heavy rifle fire. The bullets whistled overhead and rang and splattered on the steel plates like a hailstorm. I got down from my perch, and Haldane and I debated what to do. It was agreed that he with the little naval gun and his Dublin Fusiliers in the rear truck should endeavour to keep down the enemy’s firing, and that I should go and see what had happened to the train, what was the damage to the line, and whether there was any chance of repairing it or clearing the wreckage out of the way.

  I nipped out of the truck accordingly and ran along the line to the head of the train.12 The engine was still on the rails. The first truck, an ordinary bogey, had turned completely head over heels, killing and terribly injuring some of the platelayers who were upon it; but it lay quite clear of the track. The next two armoured trucks, which contained the Durban Light Infantry, were both derailed, one still upright and the other on its side. They lay jammed against each other in disorder, blocking the homeward path of the rest. Behind the overturned trucks the Durban Light Infantry men, bruised, shaken, and some severely injured, had found a temporary shelter. The enemy’s fire was continuous, and soon there mingled with the rifles the bang of the field-guns and the near explosion of their shells. We were in the toils of the enemy.