Churchill

by Celia Sandys

  ‘Then the musketry crashed out, and the “swish” and “whirr” of bullets filled the air. I put my foot in the stirrup. The horse, terrified at the firing, plunged wildly.’ When Churchill tried to spring into the saddle it slipped and his horse, breaking away, galloped after the fast-disappearing Scouts: ‘I was alone, dismounted, within the closest range, and a mile at least from cover of any kind.’ For the second time in South Africa, Churchill had to run for his life from Boer riflemen. Then a lone rider appeared ahead of him. From his cap badge he was a member of Montmorency’s Scouts, ‘a tall man, with a skull and crossbones badge, and on a pale horse. Death in Revelation, but life to me.’ Churchill called for a stirrup, and when, to his surprise, the man stopped, mounted behind him.

  I called on Trooper Clement Roberts’s daughter, Mrs Doris Maud, in Durban. She showed me the letter which my grandfather had sent to her father, expressing his ‘great admiration’ for Roberts’s ‘coolness and courage’. He continued: ‘I have always felt that unless you had taken me up on your saddle I should myself certainly have been killed or captured.’

  As they raced away with bullets whistling past, Churchill grasped the horse’s mane and found his hand soaked with blood from where the horse had been hit by an expanding bullet. ‘Oh, my poor horse,’ exclaimed Roberts. It was his own horse, Rajah, which he had bred and broken on his farm before joining the Scouts.

  ‘Never mind,’ said Churchill, ‘you’ve saved my life.’

  ‘Ah, but it’s the horse I’m thinking about,’ replied Roberts.

  That, Churchill reported to his readers, was the total of their conversation. He characteristically summed up this latest adventure as if it had been no more than a game of backgammon: ‘I had thrown double sixes again.’

  All the officers who witnessed what had happened agreed that Roberts was worthy of some honour – even the Victoria Cross was mentioned. Six years later, on hearing from the British High Commission in Johannesburg that no award had been made to Roberts, Churchill had the case reopened. Doris Maud proudly showed me the Distinguished Conduct Medal which her father had then received as a result.

  By the time Lord Roberts had assembled the twenty-five thousand men and seventy guns he thought necessary to capture Dewetsdorp, the 2,500 Boer defenders, who had given the impression of much greater strength, had slipped away. With them went the prisoners and guns they had captured at Sannah’s Post and Wepener. Churchill’s report that the episode could not be ‘contemplated with feelings of wild enthusiasm’ foreshadowed, in the muted terms he thought appropriate at the time, his comments thirty years later when he described the events around Dewetsdorp as ‘the most comical operations I have ever witnessed’. No doubt this impression was coloured by Brabazon’s droll commentary on the daily shillyshallying of the high command.

  When Brabazon was left to mop up after the capture of Dewetsdorp, Churchill attached himself to General French’s cavalry division, which was advancing northwards. He found the atmosphere in the headquarters strained. His simultaneous use of sword and pen had earned French’s disapproval, and his friendship with Brabazon was a further irritant. Fortunately he had one ally in French’s headquarters. Jack Milbanke, the closest of the few friends he had made at Harrow, had recently recovered from wounds, was newly decorated with the Victoria Cross, and was French’s ADC. Yet even he was unable to ease the tension. French ignored Churchill’s presence to such an extent that the two men, who would later become friends and colleagues, exchanged not a single word during the Boer War.

  In a long letter to Lady Randolph from Bloemfontein on 1 May, Churchill assessed the impact on his reputation of his activities in South Africa. He thought that on the whole he had gained, although there was an undercurrent of hostile criticism. He touched on his political future. As long ago as 14 January the Conservatives of Southport had wanted to adopt him as their candidate for the forthcoming general election. In the hectic days before Spion Kop he had wired back hastily, ‘Impossible decide here.’ They persisted in their attempts to persuade him, but without success. In April, in a letter to Joseph Chamberlain mainly about the course of the war, Churchill wrote that he hoped to find a seat before the dissolution of Parliament, which was already in the air. Having virtually made up his mind to stand again for the Conservatives in Oldham, he sent his mother a cheque for £50 for registration expenses. It was intended that she should forward it after she had determined that he had sufficient funds in his bank account to meet it.

  Money remained a constant concern. In his letter he aired his concern over the expense of a political career, and asked Lady Randolph to find out from leading politicians whether appearing as a paid lecturer in order to bolster his finances would weaken his political position. Pamela received a brief mention. She wrote long letters, but although he avowed that they were very interesting to him, they did not make him any wiser ‘as concerns the general situation at Home’. Lady Randolph, who remained his closest confidante, should therefore write and tell him everything.

  The letter was posted as Churchill joined General Ian Hamilton, who had been given the task of protecting the right flank of Lord Roberts’s advance on Johannesburg. Hamilton was another of Churchill’s heroes. When Churchill’s Boer War dispatches were published later in 1900 as Ian Hamilton’s March, he inserted a chapter devoted entirely to Hamilton’s career, a tribute to a soldier with the same instincts for active service as himself. The admiration was mutual, as Lady Hamilton noted in her diary on 20 June 1902: ‘I can’t bear him [Churchill], which is rather a pity as Ian thinks such a lot of him and says he is bound to be a Commander-in-Chief or a Prime Minister – which ever line he cares to cultivate.’ However, within nine months she had also taken an admiring view, writing ‘terrific Winston’ in her entry for 24 March 1903.

  For the advance with Hamilton, Churchill was joined by his cousin ‘Sunny’, the 9th Duke of Marlborough. The close friendship between the two cousins had started in childhood when they had played together at Blenheim Palace under the strict eye of their grandmother, the Duchess. Three years older than Churchill, Marlborough had succeeded to the title in 1892, and had married Consuelo Vanderbilt, an American heiress, three years later. He would later hold a number of government posts, including Undersecretary of State for the Colonies.

  He had gone out to South Africa with the Imperial Yeomanry, and had become an Assistant Military Secretary, one of a considerable number of the aristocracy on Roberts’s staff. Because of the pointed criticism this had occasioned in the radical press, Roberts began to dispense with some of their undoubtedly superfluous services. Marlborough, on being told he would remain in Bloemfontein when the refreshed and replenished forces advanced north, appealed to Churchill, who persuaded Hamilton to take them both with his column.

  Bloemfontein to Diamond Hill

  The cousins set off in Churchill’s wagon, which had a ‘raised floor of deal boards beneath which reposed two feet of the best tinned provisions and alcoholic stimulants London could supply’. They caught up with Hamilton at Winburg, having come through ‘the Boer infested countryside defenceless but safely’.

  Churchill’s dispatches over the next fortnight, from Winburg, Kroonstadt and Heilbron, describe a series of actions as the British advanced rapidly to the Vaal. As usual his London readers are given the flavour of life in the field. At ‘the pretty little town of Lindley’ he sought to replenish his wagon and found a store where: ‘You may buy a piano, a kitchen range, a slouch hat, a bottle of hair wash, or a box of sardines over the same counter . . . Personally I sought potatoes.’

  The Vaal was crossed on 26 May, and Hamilton’s column was switched to the left flank of Lord Roberts’s advance. By 2 June it had cut the main road running west from Johannesburg. It had not all been easy going. Churchill’s dispatch of the previous day recorded a final stiff fight at Doornkop, the very place where the Jameson Raiders had surrendered four years earlier. Here the Gordons, Hamilton’s own regiment, lost eight officers a
nd eighty-eight men. The dispatch painted a picture of the battlefield after dark, with lanterns flickering among the rocks as search parties moved hither and thither, occasionally calling out for stretcher-bearers.

  The following morning, Churchill visited the slopes where the worst slaughter had occurred. He asked a Gordon Highlander to explain what had happened. Well you see, sir, we was regularly tricked,’ was the reply, followed by an explanation of how they had charged a crest line, thinking it was held by the Boers, only to find the enemy lining another crest a little further on. ‘We couldn’t get back – never a man would ha’ lived to cross the black ground again with the fire where it was.’ The Gordons carried on ‘soon as we’d got our breath. It had to be done.’ As had often been the case before, the Boers flinched from close combat with the bayonet, and the day was won.

  Having recounted this conversation, Churchill told his readers that the ‘melancholy spectacle’ of eighteen dead Highlanders lined in a row, their faces covered with blankets, caused him and a fellow officer a moment of ‘illogical anger, and we found ourselves scowling at the tall chimneys of the Rand’. Their rage was illogical, he wrote, because the war was not being fought to win the goldmines. If he had privately begun to doubt the political motives behind the unfolding military strategy, he did not intend to disillusion his readers.

  With the Boers still holding Johannesburg, Hamilton, to the west of the town, was not in communication with Lord Roberts’s main force to the south. He had sent two mounted men with dispatches, but as they would have to make a wide detour through broken country overrun with Boers, it would be many hours before they arrived, if they ever got through at all. Meanwhile, Churchill was pondering on his own communications. An important action had been fought, and he was anxious to get the news to London before any other correspondent. His problem was that the telegraph terminal was on the other side of Johannesburg. Perhaps he could manage to slip through the town itself.

  While he was considering how he might do this, two cyclists arrived from the direction of Johannesburg. One of them, a Monsieur Lautré, a Frenchman connected with the mining industry, said he would guide Churchill through the town, while the other offered the loan of his bicycle. Hamilton produced more dispatches for Lord Roberts, and with these in their pockets the two cyclists pedalled off, with the sun setting behind them.

  Well might Churchill write: ‘As we passed our farthest outpost line I experienced a distinct sensation of adventure.’ Having changed his uniform and slouch hat for a civilian suit and soft cap, he was, in effect, an officer operating in plain clothes behind enemy lines. If he were captured, he would most likely be shot out of hand.

  Soon after starting, the cyclists came across a scout from the Rimington Tigers* moving cautiously forward. He was unsure of the military situation, and only knew for certain that the Times correspondent from Hamilton’s headquarters had passed that way on a horse. Lautré, fired with enthusiasm, declared that they would get through before The Times. Cycling on, they were soon in Johannesburg.

  In his dispatch of 2 June, Churchill described houses with boarded-up windows, and groups of people chatting at the street comers. Two cyclists raised no undue suspicion, but there was one moment of alarm when a mounted Boer with full campaigning kit, wearing a slouch hat with a white feather, reined into a walk alongside them. Lautré and Churchill conversed in French, and after a while the Boer spurred his horse into a trot and drew away.

  Eventually, as the streets turned again to country roads, three British soldiers came into view. They were scavenging for food to supplement their rations. They turned back when Churchill warned them that they would be shot or taken prisoner if they proceeded further, and, followed by the cyclists, the three men returned to their bivouac area. Here Churchill learned the whereabouts of Lord Roberts’s headquarters, still some seven miles distant. Striking across country, pushing their bicycles for an hour, he and Lautré came across another bivouac area, which turned out to be the headquarters of General Tucker, yet another acquaintance of Churchill’s from his days in India. He provided whisky and clear directions to Lord Roberts.

  On a good road again, the cyclists spun along at ten miles an hour, until, passing a hotel, Churchill decided the time had come for dinner. Inside he found Lionel James, the principal correspondent of The Times, who was awaiting the arrival of his subordinate from Hamilton’s headquarters. Then, having ‘dined hastily and none too well’ and ‘secured the reversion of half the billiard table, should all other couches fail’, Churchill and Lautré pedalled on. At half past ten, after a further two miles, they reached Lord Roberts’s headquarters, in the local magistrate’s house. The dispatches were taken in by an orderly, and in a few minutes Lord Kerry, an aide-de-camp, appeared with a summons from the Commander-in-Chief. Hospitably entertained, and with the offer of a comfortable bed for the night – ‘the first for a month’ – Churchill gave an account of Hamilton’s achievements ‘to my father’s old friend and now once again my own’.

  The following day, 3 June, under arrangements agreed between British and Boers, Johannesburg surrendered. The war appeared to be nearly over. The Rand and its untold wealth was virtually within the British grasp, as was the vision of a British Federation of South Africa. There seemed no point in fighting for a prize which was being offered on a plate. In return for surrendering without a fight and a guarantee that the mines would be left in working order, the Boers were allowed an armistice of twenty-four hours in which to withdraw their army.

  The breathing-space allowed General Botha to withdraw all his heavy guns. Jan Smuts, the young Attorney-General who, on that damp veldt back in November, had resisted requests for Churchill’s release as a non-combatant, also put the twenty-four hours to good use. He removed to safety the contents of the mint and the Standard Bank, the last boxes of gold from the Rand, and all the reserve ammunition from the magazine. Thus the armistice, which had seemed a good idea at the time, would enable Botha, with Smuts as his Assistant Commandant General, to prolong the war.

  As the Boers trundled away to fight another day there was a ceremonial parade in Johannesburg at which the Viekleur was hauled down and the Union Jack hoist in its place. While the occupying army were celebrating, the correspondent of the Morning Post was hurrying back to Hamilton. As he returned by what had become a safe route he could reflect that, while no one could claim to have. captured it, he had been the first British soldier to enter Johannesburg.

  Two days later, in the early morning of 5 June, Churchill was among the first to enter Pretoria, and the first to reach the British prisoners of war. They had been moved in the six months since he had fled the States Model School, but a mounted Boer directed him to the camp where they were now being held. Lieutenant Thomas Frankland recorded: ’At about half past eight two figures in khaki came round the comer, crossed the little brook and galloped towards us. Who should I see on reaching the gate but Churchill, who, with his cousin, the Duke of Marlborough, had galloped in front of the army to bring us the good tidings.’ Another prisoner, Augustus Goodacre, described in his diary how ‘Suddenly Winston Churchill came galloping over the hill and tore down the Boer flag, and hoisted ours amid cheers.’ An officer in the Dublin Fusiliers named Grimshaw produced the Union Jack, which he had made from rearranged pieces of a Boer Viekleur. It was the first British flag to fly over Pretoria since 1881. Churchill’s dispatch of 8 June gives the time as 8.47 a.m.

  During May the war had been going badly for the Boers. They had made little effort to defend Johannesburg and Pretoria, and their siege of Mafeking had been lifted on 17 May. Lord Roberts hoped that they would now be inclined to treat for peace. An armistice was agreed and a meeting between the Commander-in-Chief and the Boer generals arranged for 9 June. Meanwhile the British force in Pretoria had been reduced to sixteen thousand men, camped in convenient places around the city. But Botha had merely been stalling for time while he regrouped his forces, and when he called off the meeting just as it was abo
ut to begin, ‘the imperious necessities of war demanded fresh efforts’. Reading Churchill’s dispatch of 14 June, it is clear that the Boers had humbugged the British, who now had to do something about the threat posed by Botha’s seven thousand Transvaal burgers and twenty-five pieces of artillery assembled some fifteen miles to the east of Pretoria.

  After the fall of Pretoria, Churchill had written to his mother on 9 June: ‘I propose to come home . . . Politics, Pamela, finances and books all need my attention.’ All the key Boer centres were now in British hands, and there were no longer any besieged British garrisons. Churchill could see that the war would soon turn into the guerrilla campaign of which he had warned. His adventures to date had been to the mutual benefit of his country and himself, and there was little point in him staying any longer in South Africa. However, Lord Roberts was about to launch his army against Botha’s force to the east, and Churchill would not leave until that action was over. He told his mother: ‘should I come through all right I will seriously turn my face towards home.’

  Having, against all normal odds, been preserved thus far, it would have been only human for Churchill not to have pushed his luck any further. He was well aware of the ‘indiscriminating bullet’, about which he had written in The Story of the Malakand Field Force, where he pointed out that no matter how bright a future is forecast for a rising soldier, each time he goes into action ‘his chances of being killed are as great as, perhaps greater, than those of the youngest subaltern whose luck is fresh’. However, in this final action, which became known as Diamond Hill, Churchill’s bravery and initiative rose to new heights. It was as if he realised this was his last opportunity to chance his arm and demonstrate the sense of destiny of which he had so often written and spoken.

  The Boers were deployed along a line of hills astride the railway line to Delagoa Bay. It was the very country through which Churchill had ridden among the coal sacks six months earlier. Lord Roberts’s plan was to use his cavalry to turn the flanks of the Boer position while pressing their centre with his infantry. His aim was modest: to clear any threat to Pretoria. But it was hoped that the Boers would be forced to abandon many of their heavy guns. Against an enemy of seven thousand Roberts’s force numbered some fifteen thousand, not an overwhelming superiority against a strongly entrenched position.