“I’ve found a spot in the fence that the searchlight misses, and the guard passes every five minutes,” Churchill told Haldane, who wearily acquiesced, having no further strength to find flaws in the Plans which were now materializing every hour or so. Together they talked it over. The fence where Churchill meant to climb it looked on to a garden that offered easy access to a main thoroughfare. “And what do we do then?” inquired Haldane.
“We proceed down the street,” said Churchill.
“And what if we’re hailed?”
“We reply in conversational tones.”
“Any particular language?” Haldane wanted to know.
Since he had hit on an obvious weakness, Churchill enlisted a third man, a sergeant who spoke both Dutch and Kaffir, the local native tongue. That night, carrying the chocolate, the meatballs, a compass, and several maps, they crouched in the bushes by the fateful spot. But a lazy sentry perversely took up a stand there and refused to budge.
“We’ll have to put it off until tomorrow,” Churchill told his colleagues.
The next night, they hid in a lavatory near the fence, with the intention of sprinting out one at a time and clambering over. The area was free of sentries and the moon was obscured by flying clouds — the road to freedom beckoned. As might have been expected, Churchill was the first man out. He scrambled up the six-foot enclosure, looked around briefly, dropped down, and disappeared into a flowering shrub. As the minutes ticked by slowly, nobody came to join him. A man appeared from the house that the garden adjoined and lit a cigar. He walked back and forth for a while, stopping once to stare directly at the bush which Churchill had gathered round him like a Turkish towel. Presumably he saw nothing, for eventually he strolled on and re-entered the house. At the end of an hour, there was heard an anguished hiss from across the fence and the strained voice of Haldane explained that they were stuck. The sentries had become grouped in the escape zone like a pack of beagles. For some reason that Churchill never understood, then or later, the sergeant repeated the situation in both Dutch and Kaffir.
“You’d better come back,” added Haldane.
It was an unkind blow. Having made a daring advance, Churchill was now unable to bring up his reinforcements. Tactically, he was in an unenviable spot; to go on minus Haldane and the polyglot sergeant was risky, to retreat raised the chance of getting shot, and to take up an indefinite residence in the shrub was unthinkable. To make his plight more odious, a cat closely followed by a pair of hungry bulldogs now cut across the yard, doubled back, and ran right under him, creating a frightful snarl. This last indignity was too much. Churchill emerged from his covert and stepped down the street. He had only four bars of chocolate. Mapless, minus meatballs, without a compass, absurdly hatted, and lacking even a rudimentary knowledge of any tongue save English, he was footloose in Africa at last.
Chapter 14
THE Boers were outraged by the loss of their gaudy exhibit. His absence went unnoticed until nearly noon the next day. Playing it as low-down as he could, Churchill had left a dummy in his bed, arranged in a sprawling position and clutching the copy of Mill’s Liberty. Even the Boers, saintly and unamused in a flat world, recognized the sarcastic touch of this grouping. They appropriated the book and classified it as “dangerous,” a piece of literary criticism that ranks among the most arbitrary in history. Their feelings were not eased by an exceedingly pompous letter that Churchill left behind. Addressed to the Minister of War, it expressed the hope and belief that they would soon “meet again” in Pretoria under different circumstances. Had it not been Churchill’s morning for a shave, his flight would likely have been undiscovered for days. The prison barber called out his name, ready for the periodic outpouring of rhetoric, and the search was begun.
Haldane first told the barber that his garrulous client was in the bathroom, but when a suitable time had elapsed this was felt to be exaggerated. Churchill’s room was entered, the dummy unmasked, and the incendiary volume carted off to headquarters. For their pains in helping him, his comrades were relieved of their small prerogatives. Chess, checkers, and cards were rationed, and room-to-room visiting was held up for a while. The sole person undismayed by these stringencies was the preacher with the missing hat. In a rather worldly vein, he observed testily that the hat was the only one he had and God knew where he would get another. As far as he was concerned, he said, they could cut out the visiting altogether.
The Boer newspapers broke out in a rash of rumors. The prisoner, the Duke of Churchill, had fled from the State Model School disguised as a woman, a paper in Pretoria said. The article implied that it would be well for everybody to watch strange females carefully on the streets, see how they walked, look for drooping petticoats, and so on. Two editions later, this same paper ran a bulletin killing the woman. The duke had made his escape while dressed as a policeman. He was reputed to be violent. The policeman lasted nearly twenty-four hours and then expired in favor of a waiter. This latest suggestion entertained Haldane and his friends, who could hardly imagine a man less fitted for the job. Simultaneously, a reward was flashed over the countryside. Handbills were struck off by the military; they went as follows:
£25
TWENTY-FIVE POUNDS REWARD IS OFFERED BY THE SUB-COMMISSION OF THE FIFTH DIVISION, ON BEHALF OF THE SPECIAL CONSTABLE OF THIS DIVISION, TO WHOEVER BRINGS TO THIS OFFICE, DEAD OR ALIVE, THE ESCAPED PRISONER OF WAR CHURCHILL.
For the Sub-Commission of the Fifth Division,
LODK. DE HAAS, Secretary.
*
Churchill has always been piqued by the uninspired description of himself that was appended to the reward:
ENGLISHMAN, 25 YEARS OLD, ABOUT FIVE FEET EIGHT INCHES TALL, INDIFFERENT BUILD, WALKS WITH A FORWARD STOOP, PALE APPEARANCE, RED-BROWNISH HAIR, SMALL AND HARDLY NOTICEABLE MOUSTACHE, TALKS THROUGH HIS NOSE AND CANNOT PRONOUNCE THE LETTER “S” PROPERLY.
*
Every means was seized by the Boers to take him into custody again. Their enterprise was so clamorous that they appeared to view his attempt as the war in microcosm. Warrants were issued by the wholesale, most of them granting permission to ransack the houses of known British sympathizers, and those of some suspected ones, bringing about the usual number of senseless and unjust incidents. Several of his former jailers were sent to patrol the railways leading from the town. And a perfectly innocent nurse was drummed out of the country on the suspicion she had harbored the captive and contrived his escape. The wildest insinuations were made about this apocryphal connection; Churchill was presented as a lover more potent than the late Benvenuto Cellini. It was said that the girl, hysterical and abandoned, had managed to nurse him right out of prison and onto the road to safety in a manner not made public. This account had all the documented authority of President Kruger’s unspherical world; nevertheless, the nurse lost her position and was deported. Beyond doubt, the most reprehensible act committed by the Boers during Churchill’s escape was General Joubert’s announcement that the prisoner had been officially declared a civilian and was going to be released. When this ruse failed to flush him, the Boers stepped up their hunt. “For some days the whole state machinery came to a standstill,” Captain Haldane said later.
Not all of the Boers viewed the escape as critical. The truth is that many of them were ripe for a spiritual backslide. Kruger’s godly manifestoes were beginning to bind and chafe. In recent years, some of the farmers — renegades whose reading had ventured beyond the Old Testament and the sulphurous hymnals — would have liked to relax and take a few trips out past Kruger’s Flats. De Haas, for example, the officer who had composed the laconic reward bill, saw the hue and cry as pretty much of a joke. He was an upper-class native of the Netherlands who had gone out to help the Boer cause in response to the promptings of both sympathy and boredom. Transferred from the volunteer cavalry to police duties, he was playing cards in his hut with a Boer plumber and two Kaffir boys when the phone rang on December 13 to announce the glittering jailbreak. In 1946
he wrote an article for the Strand, a British magazine now defunct, in which he explained, somewhat jocularly, his part in the attempted recapture.
Upon receiving the first news, De Haas inquired what all the commotion was about. “Headquarters seemed to consider us responsible,” he said later.
“What is so sacred about this Churchill chap?” he wanted to know.
He was severely rebuked. Pretoria replied that Churchill, the son of the Duke of Marlborough, was “a very dangerous individual,” a correspondent who had taken part in the fighting and “sabotaged” an armored train. He was known to be a “leading Jingo.”
“I conferred with my colleagues,” said De Haas. The plumber raised the relevant question whether the sons of dukes were dukes themselves. One of the Kaffirs settled this by assuring him that this was so, except if illegitimate, when they were known as “marquesses.” De Haas broke out a bottle of wine he’d been saving and there was some discussion about calling Pretoria and ascertaining if the fugitive was legitimate.
“We had just decided that he wasn’t worth bothering with,” says De Haas, “when the phone rang again, to say, ‘What are you doing about the escaped prisoner?’ ”
De Haas advised headquarters to relax; he would see to everything. Then he got a piece of paper and scribbled off what struck him as a well-conceived reward notice. “Having to provide the cash myself, I decided that twenty-five pounds was ample,” he said in his article. “So I took pen and ink and then and there wrote the proclamation. When it was dry we pinned it up outside and confidently awaited.”
Sure enough, a minor constable turned up a few hours later with a prisoner in tow. “Haul him in,” cried De Haas, delighted that the nuisance was finished. “Put him in the chair.”
“Now, sir,” he went on, according to witnesses, “what have you got to say for yourself?”
“Ay ban vish to go home,” replied the captive.
“Why, confound it, this fellow’s a Swede!” cried De Haas.
“Will that affect the reward?” asked the constable. “I’d like to get the money right away. I want to buy some things.”
After more urgent goading from headquarters, De Haas organized a house-to-house search. He himself led one party, in a desultory fashion. His first call was upon the Bishop of Pretoria, who looked at the guns in their belts and said, “I hope there will be no occasion to use those.” De Haas murmured something propitiatory and asked what was inside a huge wooden bin that stood in a hallway. “I was wondering if Churchill might be in there?” he inquired pleasantly.
When the bishop refused to open the bin, De Haas had a soldier force it, to reveal some garments in use before their host had succeeded to his bishophood. In the nearby home of a rich English woman, De Haas insisted on entering a briskly defended wardrobe and found a cache of whiskey and gin that would easily have carried her for several years.
In some ways, however, the search netted a skimpy haul, and De Haas went back to his hut to resume his card game. Before he could think up any further devices, the news of Churchill had taken another turn, and he was relieved of all responsibility.
In later years De Haas himself became a correspondent, for the English news agency Reuters. In conversation with friends in the House of Lords he was often pressed as to how he fixed on the niggardly twenty-five pounds as the price of the reward. And Churchill, too, queried the sum. In 1908, when the former fugitive, now the president of the Board of Trade, was being married, De Haas wrote him a little note of felicitation. Churchill replied:
Sir —
I am very much obliged to you for your courtesy and good wishes. I look back with feelings of thankfulness to my share in that long South Africa story. I earnestly hope that all will now be peace.
I think you might have gone as high as 50 pounds without an overestimate of the value of the prize — if living! Yours faithfully,
Winston Churchill
*
The central figure in all this commotion had assumed an air of proprietary ease after vacating his shrub. It had not required any unnatural effort. He strolled past the lighted windows of the house, out into the street, and toward the center of town. He was, he says, humming a tune, and he is known to have tipped his unlovely hat to various of the burghers. In response, seeing the disheveled but consecrated young cleric, they executed little bows and spoke the Boer and Kaffir equivalents of “Good evening, Father,” and “Your Worship.” Past the illuminated business area, Churchill accelerated his gait and made toward the railroad, any railroad. There remained in his mind a plan to strike for the nearest neutral territory, in this case Delagoa Bay, in Portuguese East Africa, three hundred miles distant. From his inconclusive schooling he had unwillingly absorbed a knowledge of astronomy that centered on the constellation Orion. Once before, while looking for Dervishes, he had wandered off into the desert and found his way back by studying his old favorite. He now looked to Orion for guidance, as Shadrach and his associates had followed Cassiopeia.
Good luck soon led him to a railroad, and Orion led him eastward along the tracks, walking out of town. Almost immediately he came perilously close to being retaken. The bridges were all picketed — he saw the pickets just in time. Very carefully, he crept around them, gave a suburban station a wide berth, and hid in a ditch on the far side, waiting to snag a freight, as the saying goes. This represented an important comedown for Churchill. Since the time of the first duke, the Marlboroughs had all ridden first class, and he was now reduced to seeking accommodations amongst the crates and livestock. It was a bitter thought, but the time was not ripe for titled distinctions. Churchill was as joyous as if he had been in the brasserie of Waterloo Station when he heard the sickly hoot of a Boer mixed freight and saw it laboring past the station and up the gradient in his direction. To scramble from his ditch and hurl himself toward the nearest rungs was the work of a few seconds. And again, his adventure all but ended in disaster, as he missed one handhold and went banging between the cars and against the couplings. But instead of falling, he grabbed a projecting piece of iron, hung on, and exhaustedly hauled himself up. From the couplings, he climbed into an open truck filled with empty coal sacks. Then he made himself blackly comfortable and slept like a baby until the first gray streaks of morning.
Not long after he awakened, it came over Churchill that he was starving. He ate the chocolate and decided to leave the train, though it was rolling briskly and visibility was next to zero. Unhappily, as a public school man he had not enjoyed the advantages of the professional bindle stiff, or hobo, and was unacquainted with the orthodox methods of descending from a fast freight. It is a skill not to be despised, particularly in an era of quick economic change. Standing on the low-hung ladder, one pushes backward with a violent heave from the right foot, lands on the left, and takes three or four short, running steps. The secret lies in the rearward shove, to counteract the forward motion of the train, and in starting from the right rather than the left foot, which to an amateur would seem to be the logical choice. Churchill leaped forward from his left foot, hit the roadbed, executed a series of admirable gymnastic loops in the air, then came to rest, somewhat loosely, in a ravine. He pulled himself together and took inventory. Everything accounted for.
In the growing dawn, he saw that he was near a Kaffir kraal, or native village (from whose term is derived the Western “corral”), and at the fringe of a wood. The great thing now was to find some water, since the chocolate had given him a raging thirst. A pool lay in tantalizing sight between the kraal and the wood, but he was afraid to creep forward and drink lest he be noticed and seized, enriching some native herdsman to the tune of twenty-five pounds. He spent an exceedingly miserable day hidden in the trees, with an African sun blazing overhead. His only companion was a gigantic vulture that sat patiently on a nearby limb, plainly confident that luncheon was soon to materialize. Because of his weeks in captivity, Churchill was in inferior physical condition at this time, and the rigors of the trip now began to
tell. Famished, thirsty, and with fading hope, he spent much of the afternoon on his knees, praying. There are few instances of overt prayer in Churchill’s early history; this genuflection in the South African glade must be classed as extraordinary to unique. While not anti-or unreligious, he has never been (as previously stated) notable for those humbling devotions that mark the God-fearing man. His treatment of the Lord’s servants, for example, has been distinguished by amiable jocularity, often tinged with respect. The business of taking the Boer’s hat should not be taken as typical. Churchill is keenly aware that the leading churchmen of England are, like the royal family, valuable symbols of stability and cohesion.
At the start of the recent London bombings, he sent a note to the Archbishop of Canterbury, saying, “Can you spare me a few minutes?” The Archbishop rushed up to London to see him, and Churchill said, “Hitler is threatening us with destruction from the air. What steps have you taken to protect your person?”
A little startled, the Archbishop replied, “We have a perfectly fine cellar and have moved some beds into it.”
“That won’t do at all,” said the Prime Minister. “You must go down to the farthest recesses of the cathedral and get a crypt. Put sandbags in it, place girders along the top, and then put on more sandbags and more sandbags. I want it so strong that it will survive anything but a direct hit. If it takes a direct hit, Your Grace may regard it as a Summons.”
When darkness fell over the kraal, Churchill scuttled like a land crab across the veldt to the pool, where he drank long and noisily. Then, his hunger sharpened, he began hiking eastward along the railroad again. The moon rose and shed its pale radiance on the bridges and trestles, around which he trudged through swamps and razorlike weeds soaked with dew. He was, he estimated later, less than halfway to the frontier. His clothing was now in tatters and he had despaired of finding another friendly freight train; all traffic seemed to have stopped. As he rounded a curve in the track, he observed the tipples of a mining village off to the right, and he resolved to essay a bluffing account of being a lost English-Boer recruit, tumbled from a train. Ironically enough, in making for the village he became authentically lost. He found himself at length on the steps of a cottage a good distance from town. Half fainting, he knocked, saw the intelligent-looking proprietor stare out of the window, hesitate, and then come to the door.
Winston Churchill: An Informal Study of Greatness Page 19