Churchill’s lack of enthusiasm was sensible. Buller, when he heard of Long’s decision, called it “inconceivable stupidity.” Winston had already described the armored train. It was “cloaked from end to end with thick plates and slabs of blue-grey iron.” Slits permitted soldiers aboard to fire out. It looked formidable but was, as Thomas Pakenham puts it, “a parody of modern mobile war: an innovation that was already obsolete.” All the Boers had to do was blow up a bridge or sabotage the rails; the locomotive would then be immobile and helpless. Winston should have turned Haldane down. He didn’t, he wrote afterward, “because I thought it was my duty to gather as much information as I could for the Morning Post” and he was “eager for trouble.” On those grounds it was justified. The trip would produce plenty of news and danger. It would do more; before the adventure was over, his name would be a household word throughout England. Although it almost cost him his life the decision was, by the light of his flaming ambition, well worth the risk. He would have but one regret. Only yesterday he had posted a letter to the War Office in London, and before he saw another sunset he would wish he had left it unmailed. He had written: “There has been a great deal too much surrendering in this war, and I hope people who do so will not be encouraged.”123
Louis Botha, the swarthy Boer general besieging Ladysmith, overestimated the number of British troops in Estcourt. Apprehensive that they might be preparing to break his grip on the town, Botha, on the day Churchill agreed to join Haldane, led a column of five hundred mounted raiders southward to investigate, and the next morning, standing in his stirrups atop a ridge, he sighted the armored train steaming north. After the lumbering monstrosity had passed, he ordered rocks strewn on the rails just around a curve and then awaited its return. As the engine reappeared, headed back toward the British lines, his gunner fired two shells at it. Peering out from inside his car, or truck, as they were called, Churchill had just spotted a clump of Boers on a nearby knoll. At that instant he was dazzled by a flash of light and jarred by the sound of steel fragments rattling on the train’s iron shield: “It was shrapnel,” he later wrote—“the first I had seen in war.” He thought the train might be headed into a trap and turned to Haldane to say so. Simultaneously the engineer up ahead, frightened by the shells, rocketed around the curve at full throttle and crashed into the rocks. Before Churchill could speak “there was a tremendous shock, and [Captain Haldane] and I and all the soldiers in the truck were pitched head over heels on to its floor.”124
Scrambling up, Winston saw scores of Boers lying on the grass outside, delivering heavy and accurate rifle fire upon one side of the train. He and Haldane ducked and put their heads together. The captain, they agreed, should move to the rear and order his troops to pin down the Boer riflemen while Churchill inspected the damage and tried to repair it. Winston found the locomotive still on the rails. The next three cars had been derailed, however, and the civilian engineer, bleeding from a superficial face wound, was on the verge of hysteria. Churchill lectured him on duty. Then he congratulated him. This, he told him, was the chance of a lifetime. He might even be rewarded for “distinguished gallantry.” Besides, he assured him, no man could be hit twice in one battle. This absurd fiction quieted the driver and they went to work.
It was the subsequent recollection of all the survivors, including the Boers, that Winston was under intermittent fire for the next seventy minutes. He himself would remember the “soft kisses” of bullets as they “sucked in the air” around him, but he was completely engrossed in “the heat and excitement of the work”; his choice, he felt, lay between “danger, captivity and shame on the one hand, and safety, freedom and triumph on the other.” It was just possible, he thought, that the engine could be used as a ram to clear the wrecked cars from the line. He darted back and forth, straining at car couplings, conferring with Haldane, and calling for volunteers from the troops in the cars behind. Few responded. His own conduct is best described in Haldane’s official report, written after he and Winston had fallen out. The captain noted that “owing to the urgency of the circumstances,” he formally placed Churchill on duty. He added: “I would point out that while engaged on the work of saving the engine, for which he was mainly responsible, he was frequently exposed to the full fire of the enemy. I cannot speak too highly of his gallant conduct.” As a good valet, Walden was on the spot. Afterward he wrote Jennie: “the driver was one of the first wounded, and he said to Mr Winston: ‘I am finished.’ So Mr Winston said to him: ‘Buck up a bit, I will stick to you,’ and he threw off his revolver and field-glasses and helped the driver… knock the iron trucks off the road by running into them with the engine.”125
It proved impossible to link the locomotive and the rear cars. Yet the situation wasn’t entirely hopeless. Just ahead lay a railroad trestle and, beyond that, safety. Churchill herded Walden and forty Tommies, many of them wounded, aboard the engine and its tender, and took up a position behind the engineer until they had crossed the bridge. There he left them. He was returning to Haldane, on foot, trying to think how he might bring more men out, when two men in mufti arose from the bushes beside the tracks, “tall figures,” he would later remember, “full of energy, clad in dark, flapping clothes, with slouch, storm-driven hats, poising on their levelled rifles hardly a hundred yards away.” His mind flashed: “Boers!” He tried to climb the railroad embankment; they fired and missed. Next he turned to dash back to the bridge. A Boer horseman came galloping from that direction, shaking a rifle and shouting. Churchill decided to kill him. He reached for his pistol—and realized that he had left it on the locomotive. The horseman—it was Botha himself—now had him in his sights. Winston remembered a quotation from Napoleon: “When one is alone and unarmed, a surrender may be pardoned.” He raised his hands and stepped forward, a prisoner of war.126
He was prodded toward Haldane and the cowering British troops, who had already been rounded up. Churchill blurted out to Atkins when next he met him that the soldiers had indeed been rounded up “like cattle,” and that this had been “the greatest indignity of my life.” A heavy rain had begun to fall, and Churchill was drenched, wading through a patch of high grass, when “a disquieting and timely reflection” crossed his mind. In the breast pocket of his khaki jacket were two clips of Mauser ammunition from Omdurman, politely known in army quartermaster manifests as “MK IV and MK V issue” but notorious to the public as dumdum cartridges—soft-nosed or expanding bullets which disintegrated when they hit a man’s body. Dumdums had been outlawed at the Hague Conference the previous July, and Churchill knew it. As his guard turned to open an umbrella he managed to drop one clip unseen. He had the other in his fist when the Boer, looking down from his horse, said sharply in English: “What have you got there?” Winston opened his hand and asked, “What is it? I just picked it up.” Botha took the clip, glanced at it, and tossed it in the grass. It is sad to note that the following March 9 Churchill indignantly informed his Morning Post readers that the Boers were using “expansive” bullets and piously commented that “the character of these people reveals in stress a dark and spiteful underside. A man, I use the word in its fullest sense, does not wish to lacerate his foe, however earnestly he may desire his death.”127
Even without the dumdums he was anxious about his fate. He ranged himself in line with the other prisoners but was brusquely picked out by the Boers and told to stand apart. It was an ominous order. He “had enough military law,” as he put it, “to know that a civilian in a half uniform who has taken an active and prominent part in a fight, even if he has not fired a shot himself, is liable to be shot at once by drumhead court martial.” Then, just as curtly, he was directed to rejoin the others; an enemy officer came over and told him they knew who he was and regarded him as a prize: “We don’t catch the son of a lord every day.” Churchill, in his own phrase, felt “quite joyful” at the realization that he would live. His euphoria lasted during the subsequent three-day trek north, on foot sixty miles around the booming ca
nnons pounding Ladysmith and then by train from Elandslaagte to their prisoner-of-war camp in Pretoria’s State Model Schools. Once there behind wire, however, he forgot his gratitude for escaping a firing squad and he convinced himself that his captivity was illegal.128
An artist’s reconstruction of the armored-train ambush, in the Daily News Weekly of November 25, 1899
Winston’s response to imprisonment tells a great deal about him. He felt disgust, despair, rage. This is not a universal reaction to restraint. Many public men have adjusted to it without great difficulty; it has served as a temporary refuge for them, a place for reflection, study, and writing. Mohandas Gandhi, now toiling in South Africa as a leader of Indian stretcher-bearers, would later flourish in British prisons. But not Churchill. He found, he wrote, “no comfort in any of the philosophical ideas which some men parade in their hours of ease and strength and safety.” His wrath and tremendous frustration probably arose from his depressive nature. He needed outer stimuli, the chances for excitement and achievement which were his lifelong defenses against melancholia. The prisoner-of-war camp was like being back in the harness of school. It was worse; their long tin POW dormitory was enclosed by a ten-foot corrugated iron fence rimmed by barbed wire, watched by armed guards fifty yards apart, and brilliantly illuminated at night by searchlights on tall standards. Elsewhere the war continued, great events were in progress, but here he was penned in, entirely in the power of the Boers. He owed his life to their mercy, his daily bread to their compassion, his movements to their indulgence. In this atmosphere he found himself picking quarrels with other British officer inmates over trivial matters—he couldn’t tolerate their whistling—and took no pleasure from their company. He felt, he wrote, “webbed about with a tangle of regulations and restrictions. I certainly hated every minute of my captivity more than I have ever hated any other period in my whole life.”129
At the end of his first week behind wire he wrote the Transvaal authorities, demanding his release as “a non-combatant and a Press correspondent.” He argued disingenuously that he had taken “no part in the defence of the armoured train,” had been “quite unarmed,” and had merely done “all I could to escape from so perilous a situation and to save my life.” Unfortunately, his fellow war correspondents had interviewed survivors of the wreck, and British newspapers were reporting details of his audacity under fire; the Natal Witness of November 17 had carried a statement by the railwaymen expressing their “admiration of the coolness and pluck displayed by Mr Winston Churchill… who accompanied the train, and to whose efforts… is due the fact that the armoured train and tender were brought successfully out.” Churchill, it was reported, was being considered for the Victoria Cross. Under these circumstances, the Kruger government endorsed the recommendation of their commandant-general, Piet Joubert, who, upon hearing of his application, urged that he be “guarded and watched as dangerous for our war; otherwise he can still do us a lot of harm. In a word, he must not be released during the war. It is through his active part that one section of the armoured train got away.” Winston protested that because he was well known the world would regard him “as a kind of hostage” and that this would “excite criticism and even ridicule.” If given his freedom, he said, he would “withdraw altogether from South Africa during the war.” The Boers were unimpressed. He wrote his mother and the Prince of Wales, begging for help. They could do nothing. In a darker mood he wrote Pamela (“Not a vy satisfactory address to write from—although it begins with P…. I write you this line to tell you that among new and vivid scenes I think often of you”) and, on November 30, to Bourke Cockran: “I am 25 today—it is terrible to think how little time remains!”130
His weeks in prison would have been limited, whatever happened. Somehow, one feels, powerful friends of Jennie’s, HRH’s, or even Cockran’s found a way to intervene successfully on his behalf. There is simply no other explanation for the extraordinary judgment Joubert rendered on December 12, completely reversing himself. Pondering Winston’s denial that he played an active role in the events which followed the train wreck, and having decided (he didn’t say why) that he was an honorable English gentleman and could therefore be only truthful, the commandant-general wrote: “I have to accept his word in preference to all the journalists and reporters.” Their accounts, he said, must have been “exaggerated.” He therefore concluded: “I have no further objections to his being set free.”131
Had it ended there, the incident would have had little effect on Churchill’s political fortunes at home. But before this order could reach the POW camp, he had taken matters into his own hands. Like his lie about the wreck, the story of his breakout from Pretoria is not entirely creditable, but a special tolerance has always been extended to prisoners of war bent on freedom, and there is no reason to withhold it from him, particularly in light of the courage and imagination with which he carried out the escape plan. The plan was not, however, his. It was the brainchild of Haldane and one A. Brockie, a regimental sergeant major, who, to get better quarters, had passed himself off as an officer. In the back of the enclosure, shielded from the searchlights, stood a circular toilet. The night sentry there seemed lax. Brockie spoke both Afrikaans, developed from seventeenth-century Dutch, and the native Bantu language. If he and Haldane could jump the wall there unobserved, he might be able to talk their way across the countryside to Portuguese East Africa—“Portuguese East”—and freedom. Churchill, overhearing them, insisted that they take him with them. He would see to it, he said, that Haldane’s name appeared in headlines all over the world. Brockie didn’t want him; he thought him unpredictable and believed another fugitive would increase their risks. But although the key to the scheme, the sergeant major was an enlisted man; his opinion didn’t count for much. Haldane, having invited Winston aboard the train, felt a certain responsibility for his plight. He would include him, he said, provided he “conform to orders.”132
From Churchill’s later version of the escape
Their chances of success were slight, and were to become slighter, but Winston, ever confident, wrote an impudent letter to the Boer under secretary of war on Monday, December 11, and left it in his bunk. It was headed “p.p.c.”—pour prendre congé (to take furlough). “I do not concede,” he began, “that your Government was justified in holding me… and I have consequently resolved to escape.” Friends “outside,” he said, were “making this possible.” Before leaving he wanted to “place on record my appreciation of the kindness which has been shown to me,” promised to “set forth a truthful and impartial account of my experiences in Pretoria,” expressed the hope that “this most grievous and unhappy war” would end the enmity between the Boers and British “races,” and ended: “Regretting the circumstances have not permitted me to bid you a personal farewell, believe me, Yours vy sincerely, Winston S. Churchill.”133
Tuesday night, unaware of Joubert’s order, which had gone out that afternoon, the three donned civilian suits acquired by barter and awaited their chance. Haldane and Churchill entered the latrine and returned, discouraged by the sentinel’s unexpected vigilance. Brockie accused them of timidity, but when he went in, he, too, was thwarted. Churchill reentered alone, passing Brockie coming out. Once inside, he saw his chance—the guard had turned to light a pipe—and leaping to the top of the wall he dropped into a garden on the other side. There he crouched, awaiting the others. But they were luckless. At one moment Haldane was in the toilet, ready to jump, when the sentry stirred and leveled his rifle at him. Churchill waited for an hour and a half, then decided to go on alone. He left behind two very resentful countrymen. The idea, after all, had been theirs. Haldane was “bitterly disappointed to find that Winston had gone,” he would later write in his memoirs, adding, “I resist the temptation of stating what Brockie had to say on the subject.”134 Yet it is difficult to see what else Winston could have done. A ledge on the outer side of the wall prevented him from climbing back. His prospects in any case were extremely dim. Ahead of
him lay three hundred miles of wild and hostile country. He didn’t know the language. He lacked a compass and a map—Brockie had those. His pockets contained seventy-five pounds in British money, four slabs of chocolate, and a few biscuits. Believing he had no other choice, he rose from the garden, making no attempt at concealment, and strode past another sentry, unchallenged, into the moonlit evening.
Pretoria was crowded with burghers. He strode right through them, humming to himself until he reached the suburbs, where he sat on a little bridge to reflect. At dawn he would be missed; pursuit would be immediate. At any rate he was free, “if only for an hour.” Wandering about, he found a railroad track and followed it to the nearest station. There he waited in a ditch until the next train arrived. It paused five minutes and started moving again. He had no idea where it was going, but it offered the only way out of town. As the locomotive passed him he saw the engineer “silhouetted against the furnace,” the “black profile of the engine,” and “clouds of steam.” His moment was now. Twice he hurled himself at cars and fell back; on the third try he found a handhold and vaulted into a mass of empty coal bags. Burrowing into them, he fell asleep.135
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