Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill (26 page)

As the men shuffled their feet uncomfortably, kicking up loose pebbles on the flat, open stretch of dirt where they had been ordered to wait, the heat from a midday summer sun bore down on them.
Haldane, trying with little luck to find some shade, pulled his hat low over his eyes. Peeking out from under the brim at the other prisoners, still divided into two groups, officers and soldiers, he suddenly spotted a man whom he knew to be an officer in the Natal Carbineers, the same regiment in which Brockie had claimed to be a lieutenant.
Worried that the man would accidentally give their secret away, Haldane called him over and quickly muttered an explanation of the situation. Despite his efforts to protect the young sergeant major, however, Haldane watched in dismay as Brockie was pulled away and ordered to join the enlisted men. Minutes later, a large Boer policeman, one of the white-helmeted Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek Politie, or ZARPs, singled out another man—Winston Churchill.

Startled from his angry reverie, Churchill looked up when the ZARP, who looked to him like a “
broken-down constabulary,” clapped a hand on his shoulder. Growling that Churchill was not an officer, the man demanded that he “go this way with the common soldiers.” Churchill, who had been annoyed with the lower-ranking men since hearing them talking and laughing as they emerged from the train cars, took the opportunity of being thrust into their midst to correct their behavior. As if he were their commanding officer, he sternly urged them to be “
serious men who cared for the cause they fought for” and was gratified by their immediate response. As he studied the men, now standing in quiet, sober rows, a thought occurred to Churchill, whose mind was never far from escape. “When I saw…what influence I possessed with them,” he would later write, “it seemed to me that perhaps with two thousand prisoners something some day might be done.”

While Churchill congratulated himself on his influence over the soldiers, Haldane, at the risk of his own safety, argued with the “
burly, evil-looking police official” who had led him away. “I remonstrated with this Jack-in-office,” Haldane wrote, “and pointed out to him that a war correspondent ranked as an officer.” He made the mistake, however, of also telling the man exactly who Churchill was, forgetting for a moment how different the Boer attitude toward aristocracy was from the British. “We know and care nothing for your
lords and ladies here,” the man barked at Haldane before walking away.

After about twenty minutes, during which the “crowd had thoroughly satisfied their patriotic curiosity,” the prisoners were ordered to march. When the first British POWs had been brought to Pretoria weeks earlier, they had been forced to take a long, meandering route from the station to the prison, “
a trophy,” as Haldane would later learn, “for the inhabitants to see.” The Boers had been disappointed in their captives, bitterly complaining that they were not wearing the famous red coats. Since that time, the prisoners had been taken directly to the prison.

The journey, which took them along two sandy, bisecting streets, was nonetheless long enough for the men to see some of the town. Angry and defiant as they were, they could not help but admit that the Boer capital, while small, backward and astonishingly dusty, had its charms. Even Churchill’s father, who had had few good things to say about anything he had seen in southern Africa, had been favorably impressed with Pretoria, writing that it was “
a pretty place, much more attractive than any other Transvaal town.” As it nestled in its fertile green valley, sheltered by low hills dotted with mimosa shrubs, the capital was, as Leo Amery would later write, “
an attractive, if baking hot, townlet.”

Nearly a thousand miles north of Cape Town, and four hundred miles inland from the British-held eastern coast, Pretoria had as yet been relatively untouched by the war. After the deadline for the ultimatum had passed, and thousands of burghers had thundered out of the town in fierce, determined waves, it had been left “
deserted,” Amery wrote, “a city of the dead.” Apart from the ZARPs, it was also largely a city of women and children. The Boer women gathered, their long skirts trailing in the red dust, at the bulletin boards that had been erected to post updates on the war, searching for news of their husbands, fathers and brothers. They drove the ox wagons that rumbled down the dirt roads, the crack of their rawhide whips shattering the town’s unnatural quiet. The only exceptions were Pretoria’s two largest hotels—the Grand and the Transvaal—which were filled
with men, although there was rarely a Boer among them. “
Soldiers of fortune, Red Cross delegations, visitors, correspondents, and contractors,” the American journalist Howard Hillegas wrote of the hotels’ patrons, “and almost every language except that of the Boers could be heard in the corridors.”

In the town itself, the public squares, the shops, the modest houses that lined the streets, the fighting seemed to be so distant it was at times difficult to believe it was happening. “
When cannon were roaring on the frontier,” Hillegas wrote, “Pretoria itself seemed to escape even the echoes.” For the town’s citizens, left behind to keep life going as best they could, the only daily evidence that a war was raging in their country was the almost palpable absence of Boer men, and the very real presence of British prisoners.

For Haldane, the march to the prison was, if humiliating, at least useful. As he made his way along the dirt streets, he sized up the town, gathering information he hoped might come in handy one day. “
The town is regularly laid out in parallelograms, the sides which form them running nearly due north and south, and east and west,” he noted, “a not inconsiderable advantage to those who may desire to find their way out of the city in some particular direction.” Haldane also noticed that the town was “brilliantly lighted by electricity,” a modern convenience that had been introduced to Pretoria only seven years earlier.

While they walked, Haldane took advantage of the opportunity not only to study the city but to try again to retrieve Churchill. Although the officer he approached, a man named Hans Malan, seemed to Haldane to be a “
still more ill-favoured-looking person” than the ZARP who had seized Churchill, he was obviously a more senior member of the force. Perhaps because he agreed with Haldane, or more likely because Churchill’s name and family status interested him, Malan strode over to Churchill moments later and ordered him to return to the officers.

Although happy to be reunited with Haldane, Churchill was as unimpressed with Malan as his friend had been. To Churchill, the ZARP “
looked a miserable creature,” a first impression that would only darken with time. In fact, it would not take long for Malan to become known to him as the “
odious Malan,” a crude, cruel and jeering guard who was also uniquely dangerous, because he was the grandson of Kruger, the president of the Transvaal.

Soon after Churchill rejoined the officers, the two groups were, for the first time since their capture, led in different directions. For the soldiers, the final destination would be a racetrack about a mile and a half away that had been enclosed in barbed wire and converted into an outdoor prison camp. Although, as an editor for the Johannesburg-based newspaper the
Standard and Diggers’ News
wrote, “
life on the racecourse was not an altogether miserable experience,” the camp, which would hold some two thousand British prisoners, offered its captives far less in the way of shelter, food, sanitary conditions and medical care than the officers’ prison. The conditions would leave the men angry and determined to escape by almost any means, a situation that Churchill would soon hope to turn to his advantage.

After watching their men disappear into the distance, the officers turned a corner and suddenly found themselves facing a large redbrick-and-sandstone building: their prison. Standing on about an acre of land at the corner of Skinner and Van der Walt Streets, the building, known as the Staats Model School, was more elaborate than most in the modest town. Built just three years earlier to be used as a teachers training college, it had been designed by the Dutch architect Sytze Wierda in the style of the Neo-Dutch Renaissance. It had a peaked roof with a collection of cupolas along the center, long windows on each side and, in the front of the building, a tall, narrow archway flanked by a recessed veranda.

In jarring contrast to the beauty of the building were the newly added fixtures of war. Ten feet in front of the veranda stood a breast-high iron fence that enclosed the entire west side, wrapping around it to the south. The north and east sides were surrounded by a roughly six-and-a-half-foot-tall corrugated-iron paling.
Nine stony-faced
ZARPs patrolled the building, pacing in the dust and clutching their whistles and Lee-Metford rifles.

As the men took in the Staats Model School, what they noticed first, after the railings and the rifles, was the veranda, which was already crowded with prisoners. Bearded men, many still in their khaki uniforms, were leaning on their elbows over a long railing, watching as they approached. As Churchill would soon learn, the prison was already home to some fifty British officers, most of whom had been captured at the Battle of Nicholson’s Nek two weeks earlier, the day the
Dunottar Castle
had entered Table Bay. In fact, Haldane recognized a few of them as men with whom he had fought before being injured at Elandslaagte. Others had been taken prisoner at Dundee, on the very first day of the war.

As soon as they stepped through the gate, Churchill and the officers in his group were immediately swarmed by the other prisoners. “Hullo!” they shouted. “How are you? Where did they catch you? What’s the latest news of Buller’s advance?” This welcoming party, a rite of passage for new prisoners, would be repeated many times over the coming months as the prison quickly filled to twice its original number and the men inside grew more and more desperate for news of the war. “
All are mobbed, as they enter our prison gates,” Charles Burnett, a captured officer from the Eighteenth Hussars, wrote in his diary. “This excess is perhaps excusable, as we bitterly feel our present situation. Could we but have one short period of our lives to act again…we would allow no such combination of circumstances to again take place, as those which landed us, in some cases so easily, in the Staats Model School.”

Still tired from his long journey and sickened by the sight of the prison, Churchill wanted nothing more than to get away from the other prisoners. Their intensely curious, almost frantic greeting reminded him of “
the sort of reception accorded to a new boy at a private school, or as it seemed to me, to a new arrival in hell.” As soon as he could, he extricated himself and made his way inside the building, his new home.

As he walked past the front door, Churchill found himself in
a long, cool corridor that ran nearly the length of the building.
On each side of the corridor were six dormitories and at each end two larger rooms, one of which was used as a dining hall and the other as a gymnasium. All of the new prisoners were assigned to the same dormitory—the second room on the west side. It was a group that included Churchill, Haldane, Frankland and, to everyone’s relief, Brockie, who had also been returned to the officers, likely because of Haldane’s efforts on his behalf.

Although the four men were grateful that they were still together, they were far from resigned to their fate. As soon as they entered their room, they began a meticulous search, looking for anything—a hole in the wall, a forgotten tool, a loose window frame—that might help them. “
We thought of nothing else but freedom,” Churchill wrote, “and from morn till night we racked our brains to discover a way of escape.”

As determined as Churchill and his roommates were to flee the Staats Model School, they quickly learned that life there was nothing like the rumors of horrors and atrocities they had heard from fellow soldiers. So eager were the Boers to prove that they were not the savages the British had made them out to be, they went to extreme lengths both on the battlefield and in their prison camps to dispel the myth.
Although during battle they did not always abide by the newly signed Geneva Convention, sending their shells sailing into field hospitals over which soared twelve-foot-high Red Cross flags, when the damage had been done, they were surprisingly compassionate toward the dead and the dying.