Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill (22 page)

Churchill, however, was as helpless to prevent the surrender as he had been to protect the men being butchered before his eyes.
As soon as they spotted the handkerchief, the Boers had ceased fire and were already descending on them in clouds of thundering hooves and billowing coats. Many of the soldiers, unaware that one of their own had raised the white flag, continued to fight, the Boers yelling at them to put down their weapons or be killed. Frankland in particular, Churchill noticed, was astonishingly brave, wearing a wide smile and encouraging the other men not to lose heart.

When the engine finally reached Frere, most of the men by this time dead, horribly wounded or captured, Churchill forced his way out of the cab and dropped to the ground, planning to run back to help Haldane and any men who had survived the journey by foot. As he got his bearings, however, he quickly realized that the others had already surrendered, and he was alone. Standing in a shallow cutting next to the train tracks, he looked up and saw two men
coming toward him. Because they were not wearing uniforms, he at first thought that they were platelayers, but then, in a sudden rush of understanding, he realized that he was wrong. They were Boers. “
Full of animated movement,” Churchill would later write, they were tall, “clad in dark flapping clothes, with slouch, storm-driven hats,” and only a hundred yards away.

Instinctively, Churchill turned and sprinted down the track, feeling the Boers’ bullets whizzing by, each pass a small miracle as it narrowly missed him. He launched himself into the cutting, but quickly realized that it was too shallow to provide any protection. As he scrambled desperately up the bank, he felt more bullets fly by as “two soft kisses sucked in the air.” Near the top, as a shower of dirt kicked up beside him, one of the bullets grazed his hand.

Crouching in a shallow depression, Churchill watched as a lone Boer galloped up to him. “With a rifle I could have killed him easily,” he wrote. “I knew nothing of white flags, and the bullets had made me savage.” Reaching for his pistol, the sight of the mangled bodies of young British soldiers and officers vivid in his mind, he looked at the grim, bearded man descending on him and thought to himself, “This one at least.” As his fingers touched the belt where he kept his Mauser, however, a terrible realization swept over him. It wasn’t there. He had left it behind on the engine.

Staring at the Boer as he moved closer, rifle at the ready, poised to shoot should he make the slightest move to escape, Churchill knew that he had run out of options. He could be killed, or he could be captured. “
Death stood before me,” he wrote, “grim sullen Death without his light-hearted companion, Chance.” The thought of surrender sickened him, but in this moment of fury, frustration and despair, the words of Napoleon, whom he had long studied and admired, came to him: “
When one is alone and unarmed, a surrender may be pardoned.”
Standing before the man who was now his captor, Churchill raised his hands in the air.

CHAPTER 13

TO SUBMIT, TO OBEY, TO ENDURE

S
till asleep in their tent at Estcourt, Amery and Atkins were suddenly wrenched awake by the sound of gunfire. Leaping up, they struggled out of their sleeping bags and dived through the canvas opening, racing toward the smoke and explosions. It was still raining hard, and the ground had become a slippery, slimy mess, making it almost impossible to get any purchase as they slid and skidded their way across the nearly five miles that separated them from the battle.

Just two miles outside Estcourt, they were confronted with a sickening sight. One look told them everything they needed to know about the fate of the armored train. Limping its way toward them was the battered and still-burning engine and tender, covered in bleeding and shell-shocked men. Approaching what Atkins described as “this emblem of calamity,” they tried to find out what had happened. At a distance, the men aboard the engine could do little more than gesticulate in dumb horror, desperately pointing back to the charred remains of the train they had left broken and burning on the tracks.
When they were finally close enough to be heard, most of what the returning soldiers said revolved around the man who had cheerfully left Amery and Atkins asleep in their tent just a few hours before. “They were full of praise of Winston’s gallantry,”
Amery wrote. What the men could not tell them was whether their friend was still alive.

Hurrying on, crossing miles of barren veld, the two journalists finally passed a platelayer, staggering toward Estcourt on his own. The man, his blue eyes bloodshot, his words coming “
shortly and stumblingly from his mouth,” told them what he could. Stuttering about shells and bullets and Boers, he finally gasped that he had never seen “nor heard anything like it.”

Peering into the distance, Amery and Atkins could now see the train wreckage for themselves and, just past it, a group of prisoners being led away by the Boers. They watched as the solemn procession disappeared over the skyline, not knowing who was among them and who lay dead on the veld. “
Well, I devoutly hope Churchill is safe,” Atkins wrote in his dispatch that night, hardly believing that the young man who had held so much promise could be so quickly lost. “But I half fear the gods love too much a man, only twenty-four years old, who…is that rare combination, the soldier, the reckless soldier even, and the bookman.”

As Churchill walked through the wet grass beside his mounted captor, the horse’s steaming flank and the man’s muddy boot rocking rhythmically next to his shoulder, he could think of nothing but the almost unbearable humiliation of his situation. “
All military pride, all independence of spirit must be put aside,” he would later write. “These may be carried to the grave, but not into captivity.” Only a few minutes earlier he had been on equal terms with the Boers, all brave, determined men fighting for their country and their honor. Now he was their prisoner, and he would be forced to “submit, to obey, to endure.”

Furious with himself, and ruminating over how differently things might have turned out had he not forgotten his gun, Churchill suddenly realized with a start that, although he had left his Mauser on the engine, he still had his ammunition. Two clips, each with ten
rounds, were thumping, hard and heavy, in the breast pockets on each side of his khaki coat. Realizing that it would be very dangerous indeed for a newly captured man to be found carrying ammunition, he quietly reached into one pocket, slipped the clip into his hand and dropped it onto the saturated ground without a sound. Just as he had eased the second clip out, however, his captor looked down sharply from his horse and demanded to know what he was holding. Thinking fast, Churchill pretended that he himself did not know. “What is it?” he asked. “I picked it up.” Taking the clip into his own hand, the man looked at it and, without saying another word, tossed it away.

The two men had not gone far when they reached the rest of Botha’s commando, who had taken prisoners of their own. Among the nearly sixty men standing dismally in the rain, Churchill saw the faces of Haldane and Frankland, the ardent young lieutenant who had fought so hard against the Boers. They had been captured together on the iron bridge at Frere, where Haldane had been trying to prevent more men from surrendering. He was furious at having lost his field glasses to a “stalwart Boer,” who, after seizing him, had tried to tear the glasses from his hands. Haldane had struggled to hold on to them until another Boer had warned him in English, “Better let him have them or he’ll shoot you.”

Utterly exhausted from the battle, the frantic efforts to free the engine and the race to elude capture, all of which had taken place in the span of just two hours, Churchill dropped to the ground. He quickly realized that he was surrounded not only by captors and fellow prisoners but by men who had been so severely wounded they would never make it to the “
deep and dreary dungeon” that Haldane imagined awaited them. Although he could hear the gasps and moans of the dying men, a fate that he had only narrowly escaped himself, Churchill was filled not with gratitude but with frustration. He was about to be shut up in a prison while the war raged on without him, and it had all been, he felt, a useless sacrifice. “
I had not helped anybody by attempting to return to the Company,” he wrote, cursing his decision to jump off the engine. “I had only cut myself
out of the whole of this exciting war with all its boundless possibilities of adventure and advancement.”

Looking up, Churchill saw in the distance the severely damaged engine hobbling toward Estcourt with its load of wounded men. “
Something at least was saved from the ruin,” he thought. Perhaps “some little honour had been saved as well.” Knowing that because of his actions other men had escaped his fate, however, was cold comfort. Sitting in the mud, surrounded by Boers, his future wrenched from his hands, he “
meditated blankly upon the sour rewards of virtue.”

As the prisoners were being rounded up—“
like cattle!” Churchill would later write. “The greatest indignity of my life!”—hundreds of Boers streamed out of the hills in seemingly endless columns, two and three abreast. When they had all finally gathered on the veld, the Boers staring with open curiosity at their British counterparts, a voice called out,
“Voorwärts,”
Afrikaans for “forward.” Forced to stand, the exhausted and disheartened men formed a ragged line and began their long march north, toward Pretoria.

As the Boers led them away, Churchill was struck by the civility of the men he had long thought of as backward, even barbaric. “
You need not walk fast,” one of them said, in perfect English. “Take your time.” Noticing that Churchill had lost his hat and had no way to keep the still-falling rain out of his eyes, another Boer tossed him a cap that had once clearly belonged to a Dublin Fusilier. Whether the hat, like his own, had been lost during the battle or had been taken off the head of a dead soldier, Churchill did not know, but he was grateful for it either way.

Moving steadily deeper into the hills, Churchill could now see what the men of Estcourt had for weeks blindly but instinctively known—that they were surrounded by the enemy. Thousands of Boers, slowly revealed to him like apparitions, stared at the grim procession as it passed by. “
Behind every hill, thinly veiled by the driving rain, masses of mounted men, arranged in an orderly disorder, were halted,” Churchill wrote. “Certainly I did not see less than 3,000, and I did not see nearly all.”

When they finally reached the commandant general’s camp and the prisoners were ordered to wait in a line, Churchill spoke up. Confidently addressing the nearest Boers, he demanded to be taken directly to Joubert. “
I am a newspaper correspondent,” he said, “and you ought not to hold me prisoner.” In his eagerness to escape imprisonment, however, Churchill had forgotten one critical detail: He had been in full view of the Boers during the attack, and they knew that, even if he was a civilian, he had acted as a combatant.

These men had watched as Churchill fought to free the engine, and his noisy protests over his capture were not only unhelpful, they placed him in immediate danger. “
A civilian in a half uniform who has taken an active and prominent part in a fight, even if he has not fired a shot himself,” Churchill later wrote, “is liable to be shot at once by drumhead court martial.” In the Franco-Prussian War, thirty years earlier, any noncombatant who was caught carrying a gun was immediately executed, and the same code would be observed twenty years later, during World War I. “None of the armies in the Great War,” Churchill would later admit, “would have wasted ten minutes upon the business.” They would have shot him quickly and been done with it.

To his surprise, instead of being whisked off to Joubert’s tent as he had expected, Churchill was suddenly removed from the line of prisoners and ordered to stand by himself. A field cornet took his credentials, which revealed a vital and, for Churchill, dangerous piece of information: his last name. It was, Churchill would later write, “
a name better known than liked in the Transvaal.”