by Celia Sandys
a lonely, young, very young, Englishman. He had a complexion that many a South African girl would envy and although four years older than I, looked to be about 17 or 18. He became very animated when I told him what I had come for and asked what plans we should adopt. I assured him the only danger we would encounter would be when we approached our outposts outside Ladysmith . . . I then approached my commanding officer . . . I was crestfallen when I was told he could not spare a single man, let alone me, to lead a bloody war correspondent into Ladysmith. I think that Churchill was more disappointed than I when I told him the news.
Within a day or two Churchill had found another volunteer to lead him through the Boer lines. This was Richard Norgate, the army guide whose wife had remained with him in Estcourt. Whereas Park Gray wrote of his encounter with Churchill, Norgate’s account has been passed down by word of mouth, which may explain some of its inconsistencies – it is said, for example, that he agreed to undertake the perilous task for the paltry sum of £5. His wife tried unavailingly to dissuade him, and a rendezvous was agreed for the following morning. However, the venture was postponed when Churchill accepted an invitation for a second ride on the armoured train.
The officer in charge of the armoured train that day was Captain Aylmer Haldane, a friend of Churchill’s from the Tirah expedition in India. Wounded in a battle at Elandslaagte the previous month, Haldane was attached to the Dublin Fusiliers in Estcourt while he awaited the opportunity to rejoin his battalion, the Gordon Highlanders, who were now cooped up in Ladysmith. He had been ordered by the garrison commander to take the armoured train on a reconnaissance.
Haldane had some misgivings about the nature of the mission he had been given. However, he was eager for adventure, and thought that Churchill, who had already accompanied the train on. a reconnaissance as far as Colenso, would be an admirable companion. In the dispatch which had taken his Morning Post readers along on his previous mission, Churchill had called the train ‘a locomotive disguised as a knight errant’, pointing out that it was by no means as impressive as it looked. Nevertheless, he agreed to join the expedition, considering it his duty to gather as much information as possible for his paper, and as ever hoping for a brush with the enemy. Amery and Atkins declined his invitation to join him, the former with the excuse that it was raining, the latter on the grounds that he was being paid to follow the war, not to land up in enemy hands.
Thus the scene was set for the most exciting adventure of Churchill’s first quarter-century.
FIVE
Knight Errant
‘Nothing looks more formidable and impressive than an armoured train; but nothing is in fact more vulnerable and helpless . . . This situation did not seem to have occurred to our commander.’
WINSTON CHURCHILL, My Early Life
THROUGH THE EARLY-MORNING MIST, clear across the stillness of the rolling veldt, came the unmistakable panting sound of an approaching railway engine. General Louis Botha stood in his stirrups, straining his eyes to penetrate the thin grey curtain drifting over the long grass. After a few minutes he was rewarded by a plume of black smoke rising from behind a hill, and then by the sight of the train itself – six trucks, with the engine in the middle. As it rattled across the trestle bridge spanning the rocky gorge of the Blaaw Kranz River, its fate was as good as sealed.
Botha’s cavalcade, some five hundred Boers from the Krugers-dorp and Wakkerstroom commandos, had been riding south for two days in order to probe the British position at Estcourt, still fifteen miles away. Theirs was a reconnaissance in force. They had no intention of getting into a serious fight, although they would seize any plums that might drop into their laps. And here, only twenty-four hours after crossing the Tugela, they had stumbled across one waiting to fall.
Botha watched the train rumble past, less than a half a mile away, on its way north. He then gave orders for boulders to be placed across the track, deployed three field guns and a quick-firing Maxim on the hill above, and settled down to await the train on its return journey. By now it was raining heavily.
The soldiers who manned the armoured train had no illusions about its limitations, and often called it ‘Wilson’s death trap’, the identity of Wilson being lost in the mists of time. ‘Hairy Mary’ was another well known nickname, but this applied to a later version in which the locomotive was festooned for protection by thick rope mantling. The expedition with Captain Haldane was a more substantial reconnaissance than the one Churchill had accompanied to Colenso. At the head of the train was a flat railway truck on which was mounted a muzzle-loading seven-pounder naval gun manned by four seamen and a petty officer from HMS Tartar. Next came two armour-plated trucks, with slits through which the soldiers could fire their rifles, then the locomotive and tender. At the rear were two more armoured trucks, and finally a truck for a breakdown gang and the guard.
The train made regular forays along this piece of track: five had taken place in the ten days before Haldane invited Churchill to accompany him. Designed both to reconnoitre the unoccupied country as far as Colenso and to mask the weakness of the British position at Estcourt by a display of activity and strength, a more fatuous and pointless military manoeuvre would be hard to devise. Two or three men on horseback would have been more effective at reconnaissance, while the train was no more than a hostage to fortune. A force of three officers and 117 men from the Durban Light Infantry and the Dublin Fusiliers, together with five sailors and an ancient cannon, were making routine excursions along a fixed route highly vulnerable to ambush. The size, smoke and noise of their transport precluded any possibility of surprise or concealment. That the train was certain one day to be caught in a trap was the opinion of every officer in Estcourt.
The train, with Haldane and Churchill in the leading armoured truck, had left Estcourt early in the morning of 15 November. Colonel Long, the garrison commander, had instructed Haldane to reconnoitre cautiously towards Colenso, keeping out of the range of enemy guns – a curious instruction from an artillery man, who would have been well aware that guns could move anywhere at will, and could be concealed in such a way that they need only announce their presence when they opened fire.
In a dispatch for his paper written five days after the event, Churchill recorded: We started at half-past five and . . . reached Frere station in about an hour. Here a small patrol of the Natal police reported that there were no enemy within the next few miles and that all seemed quiet in the neighbourhood.’ This patrol’s report was fatally misleading. At that moment less than four miles separated General Botha and the stationary train hissing and steaming in the little station which served the small community of Frere.
Normally, at this point during the reconnaissance the commander of the train would wire back to the garrison commander at Estcourt before proceeding further north. On this day Haldane did send a report to Colonel Long, but then moved on across the Blaaw Kranz River without waiting for a reply. Had he waited, Long would have told him to sit tight, as he had learned from other patrols that Boers had been spotted at Chieveley, twelve miles beyond Frere.
However, it would seem that Churchill had begun to call the tune. Captain Haldane, twelve years Churchill’s senior, an experienced officer with a Distinguished Service Order already to his name, admitted as much many years later when he wrote: ‘I do not wish to lay blame on anyone but myself but had I not had my impetuous young friend Churchill with me . . . I might have thought twice before throwing myself into the lion’s jaws . . . But I was carried away by his ardour and departed from an attitude of prudence.’ Churchill himself, two months after the action, would admit that they had driven confidently to within firing range of the Boers, intending to teach them a lesson. Although he was well blooded in tribal wars, he had as yet no experience of artillery bombardment or being under concentrated rifle fire.
His dispatch describes his first sight of the enemy:
As the train reached the station [at Chieveley] I saw about a hundred Boer horsemen cantering s
outhwards about a mile from the railway. Beyond Chieveley a long hill was lined with a row of black spots, showing that our further advance would be disputed. The telegraphist who accompanied the train wired back to Estcourt . . . and Colonel Long replied by ordering the train to return to Frere. We proceeded to obey and were about a mile and three quarters from Frere when on rounding a corner we saw that a hill which commanded the line at a distance of 600 yards was occupied by the enemy.
Churchill’s response, as reported by his friend Atkins in the Manchester Guardian, was to say, ‘Keep cool, men! This will be interesting for my paper.’ Edgar Wallace, the future novelist and then also employed as a war correspondent in South Africa, would set the event to verse:
There’s risk on the ballasted roadway,
There’s death on the girded bridge,
Red ruin from sleeper to sleeper,
And wreck on the bouldered ridge.
The Morning Post’s readers were treated to a less poetic but more graphic first-hand account:
The Boers held their fire until the train reached that part of the track nearest their position. Standing on a box in the rear armoured truck [the train was now moving backwards] I had an excellent view through my glasses. Suddenly three wheeled things appeared on the crest, and within a second a bright flash of light . . . Then two much larger flashes . . . The iron sides of the truck tanged with a patter of bullets. There was a crash from the front of the train . . . The Boers had opened fire on us at 600 yards with two large field guns, a Maxim firing small shells in a stream, and from riflemen lying on the ridge . . . I got down from my box into the cover of the armoured sides of the car . . . the driver [Charles Wagner] put on full steam, as the enemy had intended. The train leapt forward, ran the gauntlet of the guns, which now filled the air with explosions, swung round the curve of the hill, ran down a steep gradient, and dashed into a huge stone which awaited it on the line at a convenient spot.
To those who were in the rear truck there was a tremendous shock, a tremendous crash, and a sudden full stop. What happened to the trucks in front of the engine is more interesting. The first, which contained the materials and tools of the breakdown gang and the guard who was watching the line, was flung into the air and fell bottom upwards on the embankment. (I do not know what befell the guard, but it seems probable that he was killed.) The next, an armoured car crowded with Durban Light Infantry, was carried on twenty yards and thrown over on its side, scattering its occupants in a shower on the ground. The third wedged itself across the track, half on and half off the rails.
Haldane admitted to being dazed and for the moment indecisive, while Churchill, ‘quick witted and cool was speedily on his feet’. Haldane’s subsequent official report takes up the story: ‘Mr Winston Churchill . . . offered me his services and knowing how thoroughly I could rely on him, I gladly accepted them, and undertook to keep down the enemy’s fire while he endeavoured to clear the line. Our gun came into action at 900 yards, but after four rounds was struck by a shell and knocked over.’
Churchill had now assumed control.
Together with the engine-driver Charles Wagner’s grandson, who shares his name, I revisited the scene a century later. What he showed me confirmed how cleverly the Boer trap had been sprung. From that curve in the track the view all around is today much as it was then: open and bare. The rails have been repositioned in order to make the curve where the ambush took place less sharp, so the modern Johannesburg to Durban express can thunder through without hindrance. The original line of the railway, still visible as a dirt track on a low embankment, is dominated by the higher ground ahead, so that the Boer gunners would have had an easy target. The curve in the line is on a slight downward incline, so the train would already have been running at speed. It needs little imagination to visualise the driver putting on more steam as soon as the Boer guns opened fire. He probably never saw the boulders that had been placed on the track around the bend, as his engine was in the middle of the train. In any case, he would have been going too fast to stop in time, and derailment was inevitable.
As we stood there on the very spot where our grandfathers had come under such intense fire on 15 November 1899, we looked at the old sepia photographs taken after the event. It was not difficult to picture the scene: the iron trucks hurled at crazy angles while their khaki-clad occupants, many of whom were wounded, scampered for cover among the wreckage. Running along the line towards the engine, oblivious to the bullets ricocheting off the metal and the shrapnel bursting overhead, the young Winston Churchill. Wounded in the head, the engine-driver Charles Wagner had abandoned all thought of continuing at his post, and took shelter behind an armoured truck.
His grandson and I recalled the scene, which both our grandfathers had remembered in much the same way. ‘No man is hit twice on the same day,’ Churchill had told Wagner, who was the only man capable of driving the train and the troops to safety. Encouraged by this improbable assertion, and also by the promise of a reward for gallantry, Wagner wiped the blood from his face and climbed back into his cab.
As we walked away from the scene of the ambush, both of us moved by our grandfathers’ shared experience, we spoke with pride of their actions. We also reflected that if just one of the many bullets and pieces of metal flying around had found their mark, this joint pilgrimage a century later could not have taken place.
Having quickly sized up the situation, Churchill called for twenty volunteers to clear a way for the engine by manhandling the wreckage of one of the trucks, which was blocking the line. Deterred by the constant fusillade of Boer rifle-fire and the frequent exploding shells, the majority remained under cover in and around the trucks, and only nine men, led by Captain James Wylie of the Durban Light Infantry, stepped forward. Wylie was to be badly wounded, but recovered to enjoy a distinguished career, finally retiring as a Brigadier. Thirty-six years after the action, he described Churchill as ‘a very brave man but a damned fool’.
Churchill had no military rank or authority. He carried the day entirely as a result of the inspiring leadership which, forty years later, his country came to take for granted. The fact that he had to make do with only half the number of men he called for is hardly surprising. Dr Moorhead, an Englishman who was serving with Red Cross ambulances supporting the Boer forces, described the scene: ‘All the time the Boers were pouring in a dreadful fire from practically perfect cover, and the artillery kept putting shells clean through the trucks.’
As might be expected, the picture Churchill painted was more vivid than the doctor’s. It shows him revelling in the danger:
I have had, in the last four years, the advantage, if it be an advantage, of many strange and varied experiences. But nothing was so thrilling as this: to wait and struggle among these clanging, rending iron boxes, with the repeated explosions of the shells and the artillery . . . the grunting and puffing of the engine – poor, tortured thing, hammered by at least a dozen shells, any one of which by penetrating the boiler, might have made an end of it all.
There was, for him, nothing so exhilarating as a risk successfully run.
Had the Boer artillery been more accurate and better directed, it would surely have destroyed the stranded engine. The guns had a clear view over open sights of their target, yet only three shells inflicted any telling damage, starting a fire in the tender and severing a water pipe, but still not incapacitating it. Some fourteen years later General Botha, speaking as a guest of the Durban Light Infantry, recounted that he was so annoyed by the poor shooting that he pushed one gunner aside and fired the gun himself. His aim was no better, and he quickly ushered the man back into his rightful place. Nevertheless, the artillery fire was effective enough to keep all but the bravest handful of men cowering in the shelter of the armoured trucks. Shells burst above them, rending the air with flying shrapnel. Others glanced off the steel plating, spinning away across the veldt. Haldane’s official report continued:
The Boers maintained a hot fire with rifles, th
ree 15 pdr Creusot guns and a Maxim shell gun . . . For an hour efforts to clear the line were unsuccessful . . . but Mr Churchill with indomitable perseverance continued his difficult task, and about 8.30 a.m. the engine forced its way past the obstructing truck, which, however, again fell forward some inches across the line.
Although the tender could now get past, the engine was six inches too wide. After several unsuccessful attempts to nudge the obstacle aside, going carefully lest the engine should derail itself, the risk was taken of driving at it at full tilt. In Churchill’s words: ‘There was a grinding crash; the engine staggered, checked, shore forward again, until with a clanging, tearing sound it broke past the point of interception, and nothing but the smooth line lay between us and home.’
Churchill had hoped that the engine would be able to tow the rear trucks and all the men to safety, but was dismayed to find that shellfire had smashed the couplings, leaving the trucks stranded some way behind. He ran back to Haldane and suggested the men push the trucks forward, but the enemy fire became too intense when the task of pushing prevented the troops from shooting back. Haldane decided to abandon the trucks and use the engine and its tender to evacuate the wounded and provide a shield behind which the remainder could escape on foot. Once they were across the Blaaw Kranz River the troops could hold out in the houses around Frere station, while the engine returned to Estcourt for assistance.
With Churchill directing operations, the wounded were loaded on to the engine and tender, which then began to move towards the trestle bridge half a mile away. Those who had been sheltering in the trucks ran alongside. Churchill, squashed in the crowded cab, was well placed to provide Morning Post readers with a vivid description:
As many wounded as possible were piled on to the engine, standing in the cab, lying on the tender, or clinging to the cowcatcher . . . The shell firing Maxim continued its work, and its little shells, discharged with an ugly thud, thud, thud exploded with startling bangs on all sides. One, I remember, struck the foot-plate of the engine scarcely a yard from my head, lit up into a bright yellow flash, and left me wondering why I was still alive. Another hit the coals in the tender, hurling a black shower in the air. A third – this also I saw – struck the arm of a private in the Dublin Fusiliers. The whole arm was smashed to a horrid pulp – bones, muscle, blood, and uniform all mixed together. At the bottom hung the hand, unhurt, but swelled instantly to three times its ordinary size. The engine was soon crowded and began to steam homewards – a mournful, sorely battered locomotive – with the woodwork of the firebox in flames and the water spouting from its pierced tanks. The infantrymen straggled along beside it at the double.