Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill (24 page)

The Boers set up camp that night in the shadow of a looming mountain and surrounded by low, ragged hills. They arranged their wagons in a square, much as the American pioneers had circled their own wagons to protect themselves from attack. Inside the square, they set up a hodgepodge of tents, all shapes and sizes and strikingly different from the uniformly white and sturdy tents of the British army. Then they gathered the prisoners before them.

They had decided that, because they were drawing closer to Pretoria, it was time to separate the prisoners into two groups. Addressing the ragged group of men, they demanded to know who among them were officers, and who enlisted men. Churchill once again had a decision to make. As a civilian, he could have chosen either group. As a former military man, however, he naturally gravitated toward the officers, a group that would include Haldane. He chose to be housed with the officers, a decision that, by nightfall, he would regret.

Once inside his tent, peering through the triangular flap at the flickering fires and the Boers who sat just outside, their guns in their laps, Churchill realized that he had made a mistake. Ladysmith was only five miles away. If he could slip past the wagons without being seen, he could make it there before morning. Because he was in the officers’ tent, however, it would be impossible to move an inch with
out being noticed. Four guards were stationed outside, two at the back of the tent and two in front. He could hear them clicking the breech bolts on their Mausers, and he watched, dismayed, as they relieved one another at regular intervals throughout the night. Also, unlike the night before, when Haldane had considered escaping, the moon was now full and bright, illuminating every shrub and hollow where he might hide. “
One could not help regretting,” Haldane wrote, “the chance that had been lost twenty-four hours earlier.”

Early the next morning, they started out for Elandslaagte, a railway station midway between Ladysmith and Dundee where Haldane had been wounded in battle not even a month before and which would soon be the final stop in their long march. They spent one more night on the veld, and then, on the morning of November 18, three days after their capture, they walked into Elandslaagte, and saw a train already waiting for them in the station.

While arrangements for the final leg of the journey were being made, the Boers herded their uniformed prisoners into the baggage room, and, not sure what else to do with him, locked Churchill in the ticket office. “As I observed the ticket office with its copper bars under which the tickets were sold,” a burgher named Keuzenkamp would later write, “I felt it answered to the appearance of a jail.” Seeing where Churchill had been placed, Louis Botha ordered Keuzenkamp to stand guard at the door. From outside, he could hear Churchill in the small room, restlessly pacing the floors.

When it was finally time to leave, the enlisted men, who had been separated from their officers the night before, were directed toward six or seven closed cars, while the officers were given a first-class carriage. Soon after Churchill, Haldane and Frankland climbed in and sat down, the door opened and a man carried in what seemed to them, after their long, hungry march, to be extraordinary quantities of food—four tin cans, two of mutton and two of fish, several loaves of bread, six jars of jam and a big can of tea. “
The reader will
believe that we did not stand on ceremony,” Churchill wrote, “but fell to at once and made the first satisfying meal for three days.”

As the men ate, a crowd quickly gathered outside their windows. Churchill, desperately hungry, ignored them until one man identified himself as a doctor and asked about his hand, which had been grazed by a bullet just before his capture. It wasn’t a large wound, but because it had not been cleaned or cared for in any way during their three-day march, it had begun to fester. After Churchill raised his hand to be examined through the window, the man hurried off, soon returning with bandages and hot water. “
Amid the approving grins of the rough fellows who thronged the platform,” Churchill wrote, “he soon bound me up very correctly.”

Inside the train car, the prisoners had been joined by a rather tough and scrappy young man named Adam Brockie. Brockie was an Irish sergeant major, not an officer, and so belonged in one of the other cars. Churchill and Haldane knew his secret, but both for his safety and their own benefit they had decided to keep it. Brockie was smart and resourceful, and he would, they felt, prove useful.

Brockie was an unusual young man. His mother had died when he was very young, and he had enlisted in the British army in Dublin at just fourteen years of age. He had lived in South Africa for much of his adult life and, four years earlier, had taken part in the Jameson Raid, which had humiliated Joseph Chamberlain and nearly led to the imprisonment of Cecil Rhodes. He was now a prisoner of war like the rest of them, but he had been captured only after a stunningly long and effective streak of testing the Boers and, time and again, evading them.

In fact, Brockie had managed to do something that Churchill had only dreamed of attempting.
Also stationed in Estcourt, Brockie had requested to be attached to General James Wolfe-Murray’s staff as a scout. On November 4, eleven days before the train derailment, three Zulu whom Wolfe-Murray had sent to Ladysmith with messages for White had been captured by the Boers. Upon hearing this, Brockie had asked the general if he could give it a try. “
He told me I would never get through,” Brockie later wrote. “I said, Sir never
try, never win….He gave me the despatches.”
Brockie had to crawl on his hands and knees for at least a mile of the forty-some miles separating Estcourt and Ladysmith, but he made it through without being caught. White, astonished, asked him if he thought he could return to Estcourt. Not only did Brockie make it back, but he was so good at slipping past the Boers that Wolfe-Murray sent him four more times. Not until the sixth attempt was he finally caught.

When he was captured and asked his rank, Brockie, who had earlier removed the corps insignia from his hat and coat, had claimed to be a lieutenant of the Natal Carbineers. He was certain that if his captors had known who he was, and that he had taken part in the Jameson Raid, they would have shot him without hesitation. Inside the officers’ first-class train car, Brockie’s fellow prisoners agreed to “
maintain the fiction.” Not only was this new addition to their small group clever and brave, but he knew the land well and was fluent in both Dutch and Zulu. “
We thought,” Churchill would later write, “he was the very man for us.”

As the train sped north toward Pretoria, passing Talana Hill, where Penn Symons had been killed, and then Majuba, where the British army had fallen in humiliating defeat to the Boers in the First Boer War, twenty years earlier, the four British prisoners thought of little else but escape.
Speaking in undertones when they thought the two guards were not listening, they tried to make plans. It was impossible, though, to know what awaited them in Pretoria.

Churchill, who had quickly regained his old lust for life, found it impossible to simply bide his time.
Continuously looking about the train car, he searched for an escape route even there. At one point, he considered climbing out a window while the train hurtled through a long tunnel. One of the guards, however, perhaps guessing his thoughts, stood, balancing on the swaying car floor, and reached up to close both windows. Looking pointedly at Churchill, he then opened the breech of his Mauser to show him that it was fully loaded, and to make it clear that he would not hesitate to use it if necessary. Although the Boers took pride in treating their prisoners well, they were not about to lose a single man, especially this one.

CHAPTER 14

“I REGRET TO INFORM YOU”

O
n November 18, the day that her son would reach Pretoria as a prisoner of war, Lady Randolph Churchill threw one of the most celebrated social events of the year in London. As the chairman of a fund-raiser to refurbish the
Maine
, a hospital ship that was scheduled to sail to South Africa the following month, she had designed a party so lavish it stunned even this jaded, society-weary city. The venue was Claridge’s, but the everyday splendor of that legendary hotel was not sufficient for Lady Churchill. As a reporter covering the party for the
Daily Mail
would write, although Claridge’s had “
always been noted as the resort of kings and princes, [it] was really Royal in its preparations for this great occasion.”

As Jennie’s guests stepped into the hotel that afternoon, the vast entry hall was filled with the bright, lilting music of pipes, played by a contingent of Scots Guards, who, in their vibrant red dress jackets, lined the hotel’s sweeping central staircase, tucked in among a lush array of potted palms and enormous flowers. As they were ushered inside, they found that the dining room, with its soaring ceilings and paneled walls, had been transformed for the afternoon into a magnificent concert hall. A large stage had been erected at one end of the room, over which two flags had been draped—not just the
Union Jack but, to the surprise of some guests and the indignation of others, the Stars and Stripes of Lady Churchill’s own country as well. The rest of the room was filled with an elegant arrangement of tables, each topped with a vase of yellow and pink chrysanthemums, perfectly matching the shades on the lamps, which cast a soft, golden glow over the dazzled guests.

Although Jennie had billed the event as a “Thé-concert,” this was still her party, which meant that there was quite a bit more than tea for sale. “
Pretty women wearing the prettiest frocks moved deftly about to wait upon every newcomer,” the reporter for the
Daily Mail
wrote, “and in the Royal room especially very high prices were paid.” Guests could buy everything from alcohol, including a particularly strong drink that had been named for the
Maine
, at the “American bar” in the adjoining room, to cigarettes, five hundred boxes of which had been donated by the Virginia-based Pasquali Cigarette Syndicate, to souvenir programs bound in white vellum. On the program’s cover was a striking portrait of a woman whom everyone in the city, let alone the room, would have known at a glance. Sketched in chalk by the most famous portrait painter of the Victorian era, John Singer Sargent, were the dark curls, heavily lidded eyes and famously full, sensuous lips of the hostess herself.

As beguiling as it was, however, Sargent’s sketch was the only glimpse Jennie’s guests would have of her that day. Nearly everyone she knew, or deemed worth knowing, was there, a glittering crowd that included the most prominent and powerful members of British society.
Everyone from the Prince of Wales, who had arrived with the Duchess of Marlborough, dressed in ruby red and wearing a chic, narrow-brimmed black hat, to Sir Arthur Sullivan, who had written the music for two of the biggest theatrical hits of the century—
H.M.S. Pinafore
and
The Pirates of Penzance
—filled the concert hall. Only Lady Churchill herself was nowhere to be seen.

Two days earlier, a telegram had arrived at Jennie’s home in London. It began with the five words that every mother fears most when her son is at war. “
I regret to inform you,” it read, “that Mr. Winston Churchill has been captured by the Boers.” Although the author of
the telegram, Oliver Borthwick, Churchill’s editor at the
Morning Post
, had been able to assure Jennie that Winston had “fought gallantly,” he could tell her nothing more. Nor could anyone else. Her younger son, Jack, who had been the first to see the telegram, had quickly written to her, hoping to stem her fears. “He is not wounded,” he told her. “Don’t be frightened. I will be here when you come home.”

By the day of the benefit at Claridge’s, news of the attack on the armored train was in every newspaper in London. From South Africa, Buller had referred to the decision to send out the train that morning as an example of “inconceivable stupidity.” In London, however, there was far less interest in the attack itself than in Churchill’s actions during it. He had become not only the talk of the city but the subject of widespread praise and admiration, something he had long felt deserving of, but had certainly never before been.

The wounded men who had been able to cling to the engine as it lurched back to Estcourt had told everyone who would listen of the heroism of Winston Churchill. In fact, on the same day as the attack, the platelayers had asked the railway inspector to write a special letter of tribute to the newspaper correspondent who had led the effort to free the engine, thus enabling them to escape, and quite possibly saving their lives. “
The railway men who accompanied the armoured train this morning ask me to convey to you their admiration of the coolness and pluck displayed by Mr. Winston Churchill,” the letter, which was reprinted in newspapers across England, read. “The whole of our men are loud in their praises of Mr. Churchill who, I regret to say, has been taken prisoner. I respectfully ask you to convey their admiration to a brave man.”