by Celia Sandys
Thirty years later, when recounting the voyage on the Dunnotar Castle, the pen-portrait by a less inhibited and vastly more experienced Churchill is more illuminating:
Buller was a characteristic British personality. He looked stolid. He said little, and what he said was obscure. He was not the kind of man who could explain things, and he never tried to do so . . . He had shown himself a brave and skilful officer in his youth . . . Certainly he was a man of considerable scale. He plodded on from blunder to blunder and from one disaster to another, without losing either the regard of his country or the trust of his troops, to whose feeding as well as his own he paid serious attention.
After calling at Madeira, where there was no news of the war, the Dunnotar Castle continued her steady passage southwards, not even increasing her speed above the normal commercial peacetime rate. Such a measure would have been unprecedented, signalling an undue concern over events which the British forces expected to take in their stride. Understandably, Churchill found the voyage frustrating: ‘I am very excited to know what will have happened when we land,’ he wrote to his mother on 25 October. ‘Fourteen days is a long time in war, especially at the beginning.’ He predicted that the British Army would be in Pretoria by the end of February, and that he might be home by March. However, he did hedge his bets: ‘But it is perhaps early to make such speculation.’
The River War was about to be published, and his letter continued: ‘I am all eagerness to hear about my book and I beg you to send me everything that occurs in connexion with it. I forgot to put Pamela down on the list I gave you. Please send her one of the first copies and write a line with it . . .’ However much in love he was with Pamela, she flitted from his mind quite easily: he had not forgotten to send copies of his book to the Prime Minister, the Commander-in-Chief of the Army or the Adjutant-General.
Churchill’s first dispatch to the Morning Post was datelined ‘RMS Dunnotar Castle, at sea: October 26th’. In the course of its two thousand words it left the reader in no doubt of what its author thought of sea travel: ‘What an odious affair is a modern sea journey! . . . In the sixteenth century nobody minded taking five months to get anywhere. But a fortnight is a large slice out of the nineteenth century.’ He went on to describe shipboard life – deck games, a fancy dress ball and ‘light gusts of controversy’, such as the question of who should read the Sunday service: the parson or the captain. He also reported the extremes of opinion in forecasting events: ‘Speculation arises out of ignorance. Many and various are the predictions as to what will be the state of the game when we shall have come to anchor in Table Bay,’ but soon returned to his original theme: ‘Monotony is the characteristic of a modern voyage . . . Monotony of view . . . monotony of food . . . monotony of existence . . . all fall to the lot of the passenger on great waters.’
Churchill then offered a few thoughts on inoculation against enteric fever: ‘The doctors lecture in the saloon . . . Nearly everyone is convinced . . . Others, like myself, remembering that we stand only on the threshold of pathology, remain unconvinced, resolved to trust to “health and the laws of health”. But if they will invent a system of inoculation against bullet wounds I will hasten to submit myself.’
It seems incredible that the voyage could have proceeded in as leisurely a manner as it did. Even when an occasion arose to discover what was happening in South Africa, the opportunity was ignored, as Churchill’s dispatch records: ‘Yesterday we passed a homeward-bound liner, who made great efforts to signal us, but as she was a Union boat [i.e. from a rival line] the captain refused to go near enough to read the flags.’ Had the military passengers been aware of the true situation in South Africa they would surely have objected to this petty attitude, but no one on board, Churchill included, doubted the ability of the British troops already in Natal under Major-General Sir Penn Symons to inflict a resounding defeat on any Boer incursion.
In fact, as the homeward-bound liner slipped astern of the Dunnotar Castle, Symons was already in his grave, having died of wounds in a field hospital at Dundee, which had been abandoned to the Boers as the British troops retreated into Ladysmith. True, there had been small tactical victories, but the tide of war was running in favour of the Boers. Buller’s fears had been realised, though no one on board yet had an inkling of this.
The news of Symons’s death came several days later, when another ship bound from the Cape passed the Dunnotar Castle. Churchill’s dispatch, which he continued on 29 October, describes the incident:
This morning we sighted a sail – a large homeward-bound steamer spreading her canvas to catch the trades . . . She passed us at scarcely two hundred yards, and . . . displayed a long black board, on which was written in white paint ‘Boers defeated; three battles; Penn Symons killed.’ What does it mean – this scrap of intelligence which tells so much and leaves so much untold? ‘Boers defeated.’ . . . The crisis is over, and the army on the seas may move with measured strides to effect a settlement that is both wise and just.
In the circumstances of a threefold Boer defeat, the death of a British general seemed unusual. But Penn Symons was known to lead his men from the front – and had not Nelson died at the moment of his greatest victory? Thus, no one on board doubted that the Boers had suffered a crushing defeat, and the sombre thoughts among Buller’s staff at the loss of Penn Symons were matched by gloom at the thought of the war being over before they arrived in Cape Town. Buller, though, remained inscrutable. A staff officer ventured, ‘It looks as if it will all be over, sir.’
Economical as ever with his words, Buller replied, ‘I dare say there will be enough left to give us a fight outside Pretoria.’
With this reassurance, morale was restored. Churchill was the odd man out when he suggested that the message raised more questions than it answered. It would, he pointed out, have taken but ten minutes to stop the ship and request fuller information. The staff officers to whom he aired his views replied that a war correspondent, particularly one who had recently worn uniform, should not question the decisions of superior officers in time of war.
Churchill declared himself impenitent and unconvinced. He had often met General Symons while he was campaigning in India. The toast three years before, when the two men had dined together in Jumrood Fort, on the North-West Frontier, had been ‘Our men.’ Never hesitant to appear in the very forefront of battle – which was how he had been fatally wounded – Penn Symons was the sort of romantic soldier Churchill admired. The last page of his dispatch written aboard the Dunnotar Castle was virtually an obituary, ending with the tribute: ‘May the State in her necessities find others like him.’
When the ship docked at Cape Town late in the evening of 30 October, her passengers were soon made aware that they had not in fact missed the war. A series of military disasters had occurred that very day: Ladysmith, Kimberley and Mafeking had all been besieged by the advancing Boer forces. The most perilous situation appeared to be in Natal. The opening battle of the war, a mile or two north-east of Dundee at Talana Hill, where Penn Symons had fallen, had been at best a hollow victory, and not the Boer defeat which the shipborne blackboard had suggested. Having encircled General White and his forces in Ladysmith, it now seemed possible that the Boers could break through to the port of Durban, 150 miles to the south-east, and so gain their much-needed access to the sea.
Much of Buller’s army corps was still at sea, and would be arriving throughout November and early December. The original plan, made before Buller left England, was to await the assembly of the entire corps of thirty-five thousand men, and then advance through the Orange Free State. Within a few days of arriving in the Cape Buller had abandoned this idea, and taken the difficult decision to dispatch the troops as they arrived, in the hope of stemming the tide of invasion. On 22 November he left for Natal to take personal command of the situation there.
Meanwhile, Churchill, not content to watch the plans unfold, had set off towards the sound of gunfire – which was at its loudest in Natal
. He could have conveniently continued to Durban on board the Dunnotar Castle, but having by now had quite enough of the ship’s leisurely progress, he decided on a short-cut by rail and coastal steamer, in the hope of reaching Ladysmith before it was entirely surrounded.
Although he was in Cape Town for less than a day, Churchill managed to take up his introduction to the High Commissioner, Sir Alfred Milner. From Milner, the local newspapers and military sources, he formed a broad assessment of the situation which he used as the basis of a wide-ranging dispatch, running to two thousand words, which he had written before nightfall. This dispatch was calculated to reassure and rally public opinion at home. It appealed to emotional Victorian patriotism: ‘It is a long casualty list of officers . . . all lying under the stony soil or filling the hospitals of Pietermaritzburg and Durban.’ It reflected the High Commissioner’s concern, as had been explained to Churchill that very day: ‘it is no exaggeration to say that a considerable part of the Colony trembles on the verge of rebellion.’ And it balanced the bad news by painting a picture of Imperial grandeur: ‘Sir Redvers Buller landed in state . . . The ship was decked out with bunting from end to end . . . The crew and stokers of the Dunnotar Castle gave three hearty cheers . . . streets bright with waving flags and black with cheering people.’
Churchill was not a man to say ‘I told you so’ when things were going badly because his advice had been unheeded. His positive attitude in times of adversity was reflected in his dispatches, and although he had foreseen the need to pick a fight and, in his conversations with the Colonial Secretary, had urged a tough line against the Transvaal, his readers were not to be distracted by even a hint that he had been proved right. (History was to repeat itself in the next century: in his rallying calls as wartime Prime Minister, Churchill would waste no words on those who had ignored his warnings.) Now was the time for support, not recrimination, and he took care to provide reasons for Britain’s lack of military preparedness: ‘A democratic Government cannot go to war unless the country is behind it. The difficulties of rallying public opinion in the face of the efforts of [the names of members of the anti-war Peace Party were listed] and others has caused a most dangerous delay in the dispatch of reinforcements.’
The dispatch gave an honest military analysis of the situation, while at the same time seeking to allay any panic over the recent disasters:
The Natal Field Force is now concentrated at Ladysmith, and confronts in daily opposition the bulk of the Boer army. Though the numbers of the enemy are superior and their courage claims the respect of their professional antagonists, it is difficult to believe that any serious reverse can take place in that quarter, and meanwhile many thousands of soldiers are on the seas. But the fact is now abundantly plain . . . that a fierce, certainly bloody, possibly prolonged struggle lies before the army of South Africa.
Churchill ended on a note designed to help cement Imperial ties:
At last,’ says the British colonist as he shoulders his rifle and marches out to fight, no less bravely than any other soldier (witness the casualty lists), for the ties which bind South Africa to the British Empire – ‘at last they have made up their mind at home.’
Already in South Africa as Churchill disembarked was his aunt, the glamorous and strong-willed Lady Sarah Wilson. Sister of Lord Randolph and a friend of Rhodes, Jameson and others involved in the raid, she had first come out to the country in 1895, and was now acting as a war correspondent for the Daily Mail. With her reputation and undoubted knowledge of Southern Africa, it may seem strange that Churchill, who left no source untapped as he raced around gathering news and views, made no attempt to contact her. Her meddlesome nature was the reason. She had caused Churchill much embarrassment by concocting a tale of his ‘thievish practices’ when, as an impecunious cadet at Sandhurst, he had advertised a surplus pair of his own field glasses for sale. To Lady Randolph he had described his aunt as ‘a cat’, proclaiming, ‘such a liar that woman is.’
Churchill’s short-cut to Natal involved a train journey to East London, skirting enemy frontiers as the line ran through De Aar, Naauwpoort and Queenstown, and an overnight steamer to Durban. Setting out within twelve hours of his disembarkation at Cape Town, Churchill’s train was the last to get through before the Boers cut the line. On 3 November, as the train approached East London, he wrote to Lady Randolph.
My dearest Mamma,
I write you a line – it can be no more [than] to tell you my plans. The rest the Morning Post will inform you of as well as I can. We landed on 31st and started the same night for Natal – train to E. London boat thence. I have two pleasant companions – Captain Campbell the correspondent of Laffan’s Agency and a young gentleman named Atkins – who represents the Manchester Guardian and is an exceedingly clever & accomplished specimen of Cambridge.
I hope to reach Ladysmith tomorrow or the day after and I shall remain there until the preparations for the main advance are completed. This I may tell you privately is to be straight north through the Orange Free State. I expect George [Cornwallis-West, Lady Randolph’s future husband] will land at Port Elizabeth. Troops are very badly needed all along the N of Cape Colony as well as in Natal. The Boer advance southward has just begun and you will I think hear of fighting all along the line from Orange River – de Aar – Naauwpoort – Queenstown – before a week is out.
We have greatly underestimated the military strength and spirit of the Boers. I vy much doubt whether one Army Corps will be enough to overcome their resistance – at any rate a fierce and bloody struggle is before us in which at least ten or twelve thousand lives will be sacrificed and from which the Boers are absolutely certain that they will emerge victorious. Naturally I do not share that last opinion – but it is well to bear it in mind. Sir Alfred Milner told me that the whole of Cape Colony was ‘trembling on the verge of rebellion’ – and this will further complicate the issue. I will write to you from Ladysmith. We have had good luck so far, this being the last train to get thorough from de Aar, and we have gained four days on all the other correspondents. I shall believe I am to be preserved for future things.
Your ever loving son Winston.
He was right to strike a note of caution. Buller’s single army corps would not be nearly enough, though it is unlikely that Churchill could have prophesied the tenfold increase which would eventually be required. His warning of casualties was nearer the mark. Some twelve thousand British and Boers were to be killed in action, and at least as many again died of wounds or disease.
The final line of his letter reflected yet again Churchill’s sense of destiny. It would be echoed a number of times during the coming months, as he survived one close shave after another.
The overnight voyage to Durban was by a small coaster of some 150 tons. Sailing a mile off the rocky shore in the teeth of a gale was an alarming experience, but Churchill’s ‘misgivings were dispelled by the most appalling paroxysms of seasickness’, and he spent a miserable night in the cramped confines of the crew’s quarters. The passage left such an indelible impression on him that in his autobiography My Early Life, published in 1930, he devoted over half a page to it.
In the few hours Churchill spent in Durban he went aboard the hospital ship Sumatra, where among the wounded he found a number of friends, including Reggie Barnes, with whom he had played polo and shared his baptism of fire in Cuba. That adventure was pale by comparison with what Barnes had just been through. Thirty per cent of his regiment had been killed or wounded in a single action.
Travelling onwards by rail, Churchill and his companions were soon in Pietermaritzburg, where they hired a special train to take them on to Ladysmith. However, the line had been cut by the Boers and their journey ended at Estcourt, the railhead for those troops not already besieged in Ladysmith, forty miles away. It was a small township of about three hundred tin-roofed houses, mostly single-storeyed, some lining the town’s two broad streets, others straggling away into the surrounding hills.
Here, on 6
November 1899, in the centre of a reversing triangle in the railway yard, Thomas Walden unpacked Churchill’s kit in an empty bell tent.
FOUR
The Station Yard
‘A long and bloody war is before us – and the end is by no means as certain as most people imagine.’
WINSTON CHURCHILL,
letter to Sir Evelyn Wood, 10 November 1899
CHURCHILL’S BASE WAS ONLY A small-town station yard, but although it was not the centre of attention, it was certainly the hub of military activity. While Ladysmith grabbed the headlines, its relief depended upon the reinforcements and supplies which came in through the railhead at Estcourt. Churchill had occupied the centre ground.
From here he set out daily, on foot through the town or on horseback through the green, undulating countryside, to collect information on which to base his almost daily dispatches. Scribbled out in a single draft with only occasional alterations, their quality made them required reading in London. Running to at least fifteen hundred words, and often much longer, composing them would have occupied the entire waking time of most correspondents. Only a master of the English language, blessed with keen political and strategic antennae and a military background, could have carried them off with such aplomb.
Yet to Churchill, his dispatches were simply the end-products of days spent constantly on the move. Evoking atmosphere, conveying information and laced with wisdom, they were intended to convince the reader of the rightness of an Imperial strategy in which the British flag was synonymous with protection and good government. Yet they were never jingoistic, and always showed respect for a decently behaved enemy. Nor in his writing was there any trace of the bumptiousness which the young Churchill undoubtedly displayed in ample measure. His dispatches took a humane and charitable view of men doing their best against the odds. However, he never hesitated to pour scorn on hypocrisy of all sorts, and he was unrelenting in his criticism of official ineptitude.