by Giles Foden
The following morning was unremarkable except for the arrival by runner of a newspaper reporting the escape of Winston Churchill from the Boers. Apparently he had climbed over the wall of the place in which he had been imprisoned, and without maps or food had decided to head for the border with Portuguese East Africa, nearly 300 miles away. This he had achieved by following the railway and using the stars to guide himself. After diverse excitements, including hiding down a mine, he had secreted himself in a goods train and finally reached Delagoa Bay, and was now bound for Durban by the steamer Induna. Knowing that Steevens would be interested in the adventures of his old friend (who now had a Boer price on his head), and thinking it might help him regain his senses, Nevinson took the paper down to the sick man’s tent.
But before he even got to the tent, he knew that Steevens was in no condition to read the story. The poor man was singing, at the top of his voice and to the tune of ‘Three Blind Mice’: “Yes please, sirs! Yes please, sirs! Yes please, sirs!”
“He was convalescent yesterday,” said the nurse, who was sitting outside, “but he has been raving ever since he woke up this morning. I am afraid that he hangs by a thread.”
Nevinson pulled aside the tent flap and went in. The air was filled with a typhoid stench, and Steevens was thrashing about on the camp bed. On seeing his friend, he froze, looked him in the eye and said peremptorily, “On deck! Get me up on deck!”
At a loss as to what to do, Nevinson sat down and read him the article about Churchill. Every now and then, as he read, Steevens moaned, or shouted a scrap of verse:
There was an Old Person of Troy
Whose drink was brandy and soy…
Thirty-Seven
MR WINSTON CHURCHILL’S ESCAPE
Details Of His Journey
From our special correspondent
By Eastern Telegraph Company Cable
Chieveley Camp, Monday 5.35 pm
Mr Winston Churchill has arrived here. He tells us that the Boers treated him with kindness and even unselfishness. When he refused to answer questions, they admitted that it was not fair to put them, and they were scrupulous not even to contradict a prisoner in argument. He returns with very high opinions of the Boer military genius. Before leaving Pretoria he left letters for the officials regretting that the circumstances did not permit him to take a formal farewell.
* * *
In a special edition published yesterday, the Morning Post prints the following telegram from Mr Churchill:
Lourenço Marques, December 21, 10 pm
I was concealed in a railway truck, under great sacks. I had a small store of good water with me. I remained hidden, chancing discovery. The Boers searched the train at Komati Poort, but did not search deep enough, so after sixty hours of misery I came safely here.
I am very weak, but I am free. I have lost many pounds weight, but I am lighter in heart.
I shall also avail myself of every opportunity from this moment to urge with earnestness an unflinching and uncompromising prosecution of the war.
On the afternoon of the 12th, the Transvaal Government Secretary for War informed me that there was little chance of my release. I therefore resolved to escape the same night, and left the State schools prison in Pretoria by climbing the wall when the sentries’ backs were turned momentarily. I walked through the streets of the town without any disguise, meeting many burghers, but I was not challenged in the crowd.
I got through the pickets of the town guard and struck the Delagoa Bay railroad. I walked along it, evading the watchers at the bridges and culverts. I waited for a train beyond the first station. The 11.10 goods train from Pretoria arrived, and before it had reached full speed I boarded it, with great difficulty, and hid myself under coal sacks. I jumped from the train before dawn, and sheltered during the day in a small wood, in company with a huge vulture who displayed a lively interest in me. I walked on at dusk. There were no more trains that night.
The danger of meeting the guards of the railway line continued, but I was obliged to follow it, as I had no compass or map. I had to make detours to avoid the bridges, stations, and huts.
My progress was very slow, and chocolate is not a satisfying food. The outlook was gloomy, but I persevered, with God’s help, for five days. The food I had to have was very precarious. I was laying up at daylight and walking on at night time, and meanwhile my escape had been discovered and my description telegraphed everywhere.
All the trains were searched. Everyone was on the watch for me. Four wrong people were arrested. But on the sixth day I managed to board a train beyond Middleburg, whence there is a direct service to Delagoa.
* * *
News in brief
THE PLAGUE
Oporto, Wednesday
There was one fresh case of plague here today, and one death from the disease.
Election Intelligence
SOUTH MAYO
Mr John O’Donnell and Major John MacBride of Westport, County Mayo, who is at present leading the Irish Brigade of the Transvaal Boers, were yesterday (says the Globe ) nominated at Claremorris to contest the vacancy in the representation of South Mayo caused by the resignation of Mr M. Davitt as a protest against the war. Several papers were handed in on behalf of each candidate, and afterwards a large public meeting was held. The polling takes place on Monday.
* * *
The Theatres
THE YEOMAN OF THE GUARD AT SADLER’S WELLS
The leading members of the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company who are this week playing Gilbertian opera are all well known to audiences. Miss Lina Carr, who is once more prima donna, was effective as usual, and she was very well supported by Mr Leon Graham as Fairfax. The humours of Miss Billington’s gaoler were enjoyed as on many previous occasions. Sergeant Meryll was represented by Mr Kavanagh and Dame Carruthers by Miss Kate Forster, and another performance none the less successful for being familiar was Miss Gaston Murray’s as Phoebe. Mr Workman was to have played Jack Point the jester, but owing to indisposition he was replaced by Mr Alfred Beers. The Gondoliers will be given this evening and The Mikado at the matinee on Wednesday. The rest of the week’s programme includes Trial by Jury and Utopia Limited.
* * *
Letters to the Editor
TAM O’ SHANTERS
Sir—I am given to understand that wool Tam-o’-Shanters are very beneficial as sleeping caps for soldiers. I shall be pleased to provide sufficient wool for at least 200 caps, if a number of ladies volunteer to make them. I sincerely hope that a few of the ladies of Manchester who have the time and can do this class of work will communicate with me at once, so as to get the task in hand as early as possible.—Yours, &c.,
(Mrs.) T. M’Cormick, Director, Crosby & Walker Limited, Oldham Street, Manchester, November 18, 1899.
* * *
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…which he took with a spoon,
By the light of the moon,
In sight of the city of Troy.
Thirty-Eight
Nevinson stayed with Steevens late into the night, dozing in the nurse’s chair outside the tent. At about 3 AM, he was awoken by rifle fire. Nothing new in that—except that it seemed very near. On getting up to investigate,
he discovered that the Boers were making a concerted effort to storm the town from several directions, concentrating their attack on the crucial point of Caesar’s Camp, which along with Wagon Hill next to it was the strategic key to the town’s defence.
He rushed up to General White’s headquarters to see what was happening. The place was chaos, with staff officers, signallers and messengers running in and out, bringing news of a battle of increasing intensity. The new field telephones came into their own that night—it was the first time they had been used in combat. As each line rang, and the message came down the gleaming wires that streamed across the town and its surroundings, a signaller would take advice from a post commander and pass it to a staff officer, who would then shout to General White the latest developments. Above the hubbub could be heard the squeal of the dynamos as the telephone operators wound them up, and then spoke in a gabble before the charge ran out.
“Heavy firing on south-east and west!”
“NMR in fight, five killed, twelve wounded.”
“A hot action at Wagon Hill. Pickets are retiring. Being shot against skyline. Reinforcements requested.”
“Boers have captured south-east of Caesar’s. Artillery support requested.”
Although the General had a scale model of the town and its fortifications on a table in front of him, and was moving garishly painted blocks of wood (representing contingents of troops) around it, he seemed somewhat bemused by the scale of the attack. In places the Boers had broken through the lines and were shooting into the tents, killing and wounding men through the canvas.
Unable to determine much in the confusion of White’s HQ, Nevinson decided to go and see for himself. On riding up to Caesar’s Camp as dawn began to break, he saw that the Boers were indeed in possession of a part of it. If they take it outright, he reflected, we might not hold Ladysmith for very much longer. He wondered how near to go, and then the matter was settled when a volley of bullets flew by close enough for him to hear the whine of their flight. None hit him, luckily, but he took the precaution of dismounting and taking shelter in a nearby sangar. And there he remained for most of the day, in the company of some men of the Irish Fusiliers, under a Major Churcher. Shells and bullets came whistling from every direction for the next twelve hours, as seemingly endless waves of Boers came on and were repulsed by the troops General White was sending into the breach. Nevinson watched the panoramic show of the actions and, as the new men moved in over the dead, imagined the General where he had left him in the telephone room—the controlling Immanent Will, spinning out his electric messages across a brain-like web of resonating, twitching wires. Then he saw a real brain smashed open as a man next to him went down to a bullet, lumps of pink jelly and chipped bone spilling out with the blood.
The sun grew fierce above the sangar. Through a loophole in the stone breastwork, Nevinson could see the ambulance wagons and the stretcher-bearers going to and fro. There were no more casualties in his fort, although splinters of rock from bullet strikes were continually falling on him. Partly this was because the Fusiliers had put up a line of straw dummies, as though peering over the parapet, to draw the Boer fire and enable some of them to get out and move forward. These dummies, which even had sun helmets, uniforms and rifles strapped to their vestigial hands, must—through the smoke of the battle—have seemed quite lifelike to the Boers, for they certainly kept shooting at them.
The dummies’ camouflage received a boost later in the day, when a heavy storm came on and rain and hail obscured the opposing sides. The downpour also added to the discomfort of the living bodies. No one manning the defences had any food, nor any water except what was in the canteens on their belts, and after having burned up earlier, all were now shivering with cold.
Nevinson managed to get out at about five in the afternoon, but returned after half an hour with a tin of milk and some arrowroot for Major Churcher, who was exhausted. By this time, the British were gaining the upper hand, and at about six the Devons carried out a successful bayonet charge over on Wagon Hill. By seven, control over the two hills had been re-established. The mopping-up lasted till dark. On getting back to the cottage and taking off his soaking clothes, Nevinson went straight to bed feeling ill. He’d be damned if he’d catch a chill.
The morrow brought a dull, damp day, as if to thwart him in his determination to ward off a cold. He sat down to write up the battle, after getting an idea of the casualties from Colonel Hamilton at White’s HQ. Altogether, about five hundred men had been killed or wounded on the British side, to some eight hundred on the Boer side. He was about to set this down when, struck by a thought, he stopped and laid aside his pen in disgust. He did not seem to be able to get beyond the background of glory, the military shorthand with its ‘algebraic signs and formulae of slaughter’ (he had picked up his pen again, and was writing this instead), its ‘conventional language that conceals reality as well as any legal convention can’: the bayonets sliding into flesh as though it were butter, the overpowering smell of horses, the gashes in a stomach raked by shrapnel. Journalism was not up to the task. Nor was literature: only Mr Hardy came close. No wonder that the armies of the past vanish, their ancient dead only rising from the furrows of buried time to laugh, invisibly, at the very pageants of memory by which we seek to summon them.
Thirty-Nine
By January 15, Steevens had lost consciousness. He looked so much worse that Nevinson, who saw him that morning, decided to send off a warning message to Mrs Steevens by heliograph. After despatching the nurse to fetch Major Donegan of the Royal Army Medical Corps, said to be the best doctor in the town, Nevinson climbed up to each of the signal stations in turn. But to his irritation he found them busy with military traffic. He left instructions with a signaller, and rushed back down to Steevens’s tent. Major Donegan was already inside. He decided to inject strychnine, and about noon things began to look a bit more hopeful. Nevinson went outside and sent a galloper to prevent the heliograph message. There was no point in causing unnecessary distress to Mrs Steevens.
The strychnine stimulant proved relatively effective, and Steevens regained consciousness. MacDonald and Maud were fetched, and Steevens lay there blinking at his three fellow correspondents—Donegan having left to see to other patients.
“He’s sweating heavily,” observed MacDonald.
“You don’t say sweating, Mac,” said Steevens. “You say perspiring.” Then he lifted his hands to his face and groaned.
“Come on, George,” said Maud. “You’ve got to fight it. It’s gripped you, and you’ve got to strengthen yourself—will it away.”
Steevens took his hands away, and gave Maud a cynical look. “All right then,” he said, “let’s have a drink.”
The war artist went and fetched some champagne, part of a cache that had been hidden against the event of relief, and poured it into a beaker, which he held against Steevens’s lips. Nevinson was pained to see how swollen and split they had become. The sick man winced when the fizzy liquor went into the cracks, although he managed to finish the beaker. It seemed to have a good effect, and he began talking—about another colleague, Churchill.
“I remember once, when he came to dinner at my house, he said we were all worms, but he was a glow-worm. It made me laugh, but even then you could see how ambitious he was. It came off him like light off a lamp. Astonishing. I’m so glad he has escaped. Nevinson, if I don’t make it, tell him that I love him.”
“That you love him?” The signs of raving were coming back, and along with it a high-pitched, tumbling tone of voice, so different from his usual restrained yet casual tones.
“Yes, he is a nice boy. You will tell him, won’t you? But don’t tell him what a worm you feel when the enemy is plugging shells into you and you can’t plug back.”
He tried to struggle up out of the camp bed, but then fell back exhausted.
“Don’t be thinking like that,” said Maud, laying a hand on his shoulder. “You are going to be all right.”
“What’s that?” queried Nevinson.
“I had a bet with him of a dinner. I backed our cottage to be hit against another that he selected; and I won. He was to pay the dinner at the Savoy when we returned. He said, too, that the shells were like angels’ visits, more or less. Well, soon I will be in a place where I can verify his conjecture. Tell him that, too.”
“Stop talking now, old chap, you’ll tire yourself,” said MacDonald.
“Well, you are in command. I’ll do what you like. We are going to pull through.”
Then he rolled over and went to sleep, and between four and five o’clock that afternoon, passed quietly from sleep into death. The funeral was set for that very night. It was the rule of the town: so many were dying now that they could not be left unburied for more than a few hours, for fear that the corpses, rapidly decaying in that heat, would spread the disease.
On their way back to the cottage, Nevinson and MacDonald walked in silence at first, falling into step so that they matched each other pace for pace.
Then MacDonald spoke. “I shall miss the cocksure, logic-chopping blighter.”