That evening Churchill took the night train from Cape Town with a fellow-correspondent, John Atkins. Their aim was to get, by train, ship and train, to Ladysmith, then under threat of capture by the Boers. On reaching Beaufort West the next day they learned of the surrender near Ladysmith of 1,200 British soldiers. This made speed all the more urgent; on reaching De Aar they caught the very last train to leave the town for East London on the Indian Ocean. The Boer advance towards De Aar had just begun; at one point on their journey Churchill learned that the Boers were only twenty-five miles away.
'We have greatly underestimated the strength and spirit of the Boers,' Churchill wrote to his mother on November 3 as the train drew near to East London. But he was in good spirits, telling her that as a result of catching the last train from De Aar 'we have gained four days on all other correspondents'. Churchill added, 'I believe I am to be preserved for future things.'
As soon as their train reached East London, Churchill and Atkins made haste to get as quickly as possible to Durban, intent on proceeding from Durban to Ladysmith by rail. 'We joined a tiny coastal vessel and had a gruelling passage,' Atkins later recalled, 'both of us being very sick.' Reaching Durban at midnight on November 4, Churchill was shocked to find Reginald Barnes on board a hospital ship, having been shot through the groin in one of the first battles. He also learned at Durban that Ladysmith was cut off, that Sir George White and his troops were inside the town, and that General Buller, although ordered to relieve Ladysmith as soon as possible, would not reach Durban for three days.
Buller would need several more days before all his stores would be ready for the move up the railway line. Churchill and Atkins decided to proceed alone. Their first step, on the morning of November 5, was to take the morning train to Pietermaritzburg, sixty miles and four hours away. There, however, they found that the line northward was no longer operating. Ever resourceful, Churchill hired a special train and instructed its driver to proceed as near to Ladysmith as possible. On reaching Colenso, a few miles short of Ladysmith on the south bank of the Tugela River, they found that the railway line to the north was cut. 'The Boers were across it,' Atkins later recalled. Ladysmith was besieged.
'We scurried out of Colenso,' Churchill wrote to Sir Evelyn Wood, 'cornered by a 12-pounder gun.' The correspondents then returned to Estcourt, a station further down the line, guarded by two battalions of British troops in what Churchill described to Wood as 'an untenable cup in the hills'.
'We pitched our tents in the railway yard at Estcourt,' Atkins wrote. 'We had found a good cook and we had some good wine. We entertained friends every evening, to our pleasure and professional advantage and, we believed, to their satisfaction.' Churchill was critical of the British military authorities in South Africa. 'It is astonishing how we have underrated these people,' he wrote to Sir Evelyn Wood from Estcourt. He was also critical of the British forces engaged in the fighting. The Boers had captured twice as many soldiers as they had hit, 'not a very pretty proportion. I think we ought to punish people who surrender troops under their command.'
On November 6 The River War was published in London. Two days later Churchill returned to the outskirts of Colenso, travelling as a passenger on a special armoured train which the Army had devised. The train was made up, from front to back, of a gun truck, with a nine-inch naval gun and sailors to operate it, an armoured truck with troops, an engine, a tender, two further armoured trucks with troops, and a breakdown gang truck with a platelaying gang to repair any destroyed rails.
Reaching Chieveley, those on the train could see the balloon which the soldiers besieged in Ladysmith had put up in order to spot any Boer attack. The train then continued to within half a mile of Colenso, where, on foot, Churchill followed an officer and a sergeant to the deserted British trenches on the outskirts of the town, and then into the town itself. There were no Boers anywhere. At one end of the town, Churchill wrote in his despatch to the Morning Post that evening, a few natives, 'alarmed at the aspect of the train, waved a white rag on a stick steadily to and fro'. The train continued a little way further northward, to where, as it approached the bridge over the Tugela, the line had been cut. It then returned to Estcourt without incident.
On November 9, not by the train but riding with the British troops, Churchill returned to the outskirts of Colenso. He and Atkins then rode to a hilltop to look across the Tugela. As they stood silhouetted against the skyline, they were surrounded by armed horsemen. 'Got you, I think,' said one of them; fortunately he was a British sergeant. The journalists produced their passes and the crisis was over. 'The sergeant looked disappointed,' Churchill reported to the Morning Post, 'but was appeased by being photographed "for the London papers".'
After riding back to Estcourt, Churchill wrote to Evelyn Wood, 'I have been afraid to ride through the lines, although it has been done-so I down my heels pending the arrival of an army to clear the way.' Ladysmith was 'blocked completely' and the British cavalry shut up inside it. Even the railway line was vulnerable. If the Boer General, Joubert, decided to leave the security of the Boer line on the Tugela River and advance on Estcourt, 'we must fly'.
The officer commanding the troops at Estcourt, fearing he could not hold the position there in the event of a Boer attack, decided to pull his troops back towards Pietermaritzburg. On the night of the planned withdrawal he was dining with Churchill and Atkins in their tent while, Atkins later recalled, 'the clang of field guns being loaded into trucks went on unceasingly'. Churchill was convinced that no withdrawal was necessary. 'As dinner proceeded,' Atkins wrote, 'Winston, with an assurance which I partly envied and partly deprecated, argued that Joubert was probably too cautious to advance yet; that he was no doubt delighted with the security of the Tugela River; that it would be a pity to point the way to Maritzburg, and so on.'
The dinner came to an end and the officer left. Shortly afterwards, Atkins noted, 'the clanging in the trucks, which had ceased, began again. The trucks were being unloaded. Winston gleamed. "I did that!" he said; but added gracefully, "We did that!" Whether he did it or not we shall never know. The officer may have acted on fresh information. At least Winston's effort was singular for persuasive reasoning.'
On his ninth day at Estcourt, Churchill's friend from the Indian frontier, Captain Aylmer Haldane, was ordered to take the train out at first light on November 15 to reconnoitre once more in the direction of Colenso. In his official report, Haldane wrote that, on receiving his orders and leaving the military office, 'I noticed Churchill, who, as well as some other correspondents, was hanging about to pick up such crumbs of information for his newspaper as might be available.' Haldane told Churchill what he had been ordered to do and 'aware that he had been out in the train and knew something of the country through which it was wont to travel, suggested that he might care to accompany me the next day'.
Churchill hesitated at first. He had made that particular journey twice already, but in the end he agreed to go. It was to be one of the most fateful days of his life. The armoured train, with 150 men on board, left Estcourt at 5.10 in the morning, in the direction of Colenso. An hour and ten minutes later it reached Frere station. 'No enemy had been seen,' Haldane reported back to Estcourt. After a fifteen-minute halt, therefore, he ordered the train to proceed to Chieveley, which it reached at 7.10. There it was learned that Boer troops had been in Chieveley during the night.
A message from Estcourt now warned Haldane that about fifty Boers had been seen to the west of the railway, moving south. He was therefore to 'remain at Frere in observation, watching your safe retreat'. He at once reversed the train out of Chieveley towards Frere. Then, as he later wrote, 'on rounding the spur of a hill which commanded the line, the enemy opened on us at 600 yards with artillery, one shell striking the leading truck'.
The engine-driver, Charles Wagner, hoping to run past the ambush, put on full steam. The train ran down the gradient at full speed. Three quarters of a mile from Frere, as it reached level ground, the breakdown gang truck and the two armoured trucks, which were now in front of the engine, were derailed. A large stone had been placed on the line by the Boers after the train had passed by on its way to Chieveley.
As a result of the derailment, one of the armoured trucks now straddled the line. Churchill, who was with Haldane in the armoured truck next to the gun truck, 'immediately offered me his services,' Haldane wrote, '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.'
Leaving the armoured truck, Churchill went to the three derailed trucks and began to organise the men to push them off the track. This was done with the help of the engine-driver, whom Churchill instructed to move the engine to and fro along the track, butting at the wreckage and gradually pushing it clear. Then Wagner was wounded in the head by a shell fragment. Later he was to tell Churchill's valet, Walden, that on being hit he turned to Churchill with the words, 'I'm finished,' to which Churchill replied, 'Buck up a bit, I will stick to you.'
'I feared he would not work his engine any more,' Churchill wrote to the Prince of Wales two weeks later. 'But when I promised him that if he did so, he should be mentioned for distinguished gallantry in action, he pulled himself together and under my directions returned to his post.' As Churchill, the engine-driver and the soldiers worked at their difficult task, the British naval gun opened fire on the Boers. After firing four rounds it was struck by a Boer shell and knocked over. Haldane then ordered the gun crew into the safety of the armoured truck, from where, he reported, 'a continuous fire was kept up on the enemy's guns, considerably disconcerting their aim'.
Two Boers were killed by the fire from the armoured truck. Meanwhile, at the track, Churchill continued to direct efforts to right the three derailed wagons, as rifle, artillery and Maxim-gun fire was directed against him, the engine and the soldiers. Four soldiers were killed and thirty wounded. Churchill later learned from the commandant of the Boer artillery that the three heavy artillery guns averaged thirty rounds per gun per minute. 'When you reflect,' he told the Prince of Wales in his letter of two weeks later, 'that the range was only 900 & 1,300 yards, you may imagine the pounding we had and what an astonishing din the great projectiles exploding and crashing among the iron trucks made.'
'For an hour,' Haldane wrote in his official report, 'efforts to clear the line were unsuccessful, as the trucks were heavy and jammed together, and the break-down gang could not be found,' but Churchill 'with indomitable perseverance, continued his difficult task'. He was the man 'mainly responsible' for trying to get the engine clear of the derailed trucks. While working at this task 'he was frequently exposed to the full fire of the enemy. I cannot speak too highly of his gallant conduct'.
One of the soldiers with the armoured train, Private Walls, wrote a month later to his sister, who sent the letter to Lady Randolph: 'Churchill is a splendid fellow. He walked about in it all as coolly as if nothing was going on, & called for volunteers to give him a hand to get the truck out of the road. His presence and way of going on were as much good as fifty men would have been.'
Churchill's efforts were successful. At about 8.30 a.m. the engine was able to force its way past the obstructing truck, which, however, then fell forward again some inches across the line. The engine was past the obstruction. Churchill thereupon directed Wagner to steam back to the rear trucks which were still on the line, intending to hook them on to the engine and take the majority of the men back to Frere. But the coupling had been damaged by a Boer shell and could not be used. Churchill then 'threw off his revolver and field glasses', Wagner reported, 'and helped the engine-driver pick twenty wounded up and put them on the tender of the engine'. Wagner watched as Churchill brought the wounded to the engine. 'He was as cool as anything,' he told Churchill's valet a few days later, 'and worked like a nigger, and how he escaped he doesn't know, as about fifty shells hit the engine.'
Once the wounded were on the engine Churchill directed Wagner, whom later he was to recommend for an Albert Medal, to drive the engine and its tender slowly towards Frere. As they proceeded, several more wounded men were seen. Churchill managed to get them on board. His conduct, one officer told the Natal Witness two days later, was that 'of as brave a man as could be found'.
With its cab and tender crowded with the wounded, the engine returned towards Frere. Churchill went with it. 'After the engine got clear,' Private Walls told his sister, 'he came about half a mile on it and then coolly got off & walked back to help the others.' Having assured himself that Wagner and the other wounded men would be taken care of, Churchill returned on foot in the direction of the scene of the derailment, to 'look after Captain Haldane', Walden told Lady Randolph. Haldane, meanwhile, was hoping to get his fifty men to a nearby farmhouse and to continue fighting the Boers from there. But even as he gave the order, two British soldiers standing two hundred yards from the train held up white handkerchiefs. At this signal of surrender the Boers stopped firing and rode up.
It was 8.50 in the morning. Haldane had no option but to surrender with his men. At that moment Churchill was still walking back along the line to the scene of the derailment. He was never to reach it. After walking about two hundred yards he thought he saw two of the platelayers. He was wrong, the two men were Boers, who immediately pointed their rifles at him. He turned and ran back along the railway line towards the engine, 'the two Boers firing', he later recalled, 'as I ran between the metals. Their bullets, sucking to right and left, seemed to miss only by inches'.
Churchill was in a cutting some six foot deep. Its banks gave him no cover. The two Boers were aiming their rifles again. 'Movement seemed the only chance. Again I darted forward: again two soft kisses sucked in the air; but nothing struck me.' He tried to leave the cutting, clambered up the bank, and crawled through the wire fence at the top. There, he found a tiny hollow, and crouched for cover, 'struggling to get my breath again'. Looking up, he saw that he was only two hundred yards from a deep river gorge. 'There was plenty of cover there,' he later recalled. He therefore rose from his hollow, determined to make a dash for the gorge. Suddenly he saw a horseman galloping 'furiously' towards him.
When the mounted Boer and the crouching Briton were forty yards apart, the Boer, Field Cornet Oosthuizen, reined in his horse and shouted something Churchill did not understand. 'I thought I would kill this man,' he later recalled, 'and after the treatment I had received I earnestly desired to do so.'
Churchill put his hand to his belt, feeling for his pistol. It was not there. In his effort to help the engine-driver after the derailment he had taken it off and put it on the engine. It was now back at Frere. The Boer horseman was now pointing his rifle at him, looking at him through the sights. Churchill held up his hands. He was a prisoner.
***
Those soldiers who were safe at Frere spoke warmly in praise of Churchill, whose bravery at the scene of the derailment made headlines everywhere. Cartoonists vied with each other in portraying how he had helped to right the engine. Many newspapers suggested that he would be recommended for the Victoria Cross. From Pietermaritzburg, Walden wrote to Lady Randolph, 'I am sorry to say Mr Churchill is a prisoner, but I am almost certain he is not wounded.' Walden was in Pietermaritzburg, he explained, 'to bring all his kit until Mr Winston gets free'. Every officer in Estcourt, he added, 'thinks Mr C and the engine-driver will get the VC.'
It was not yet ten in the morning. At the scene of the derailment the prisoners were rounded up 'like cattle!' Churchill later told Atkins. 'The greatest indignity of my life!' He was then led, he wrote in one of his newspaper articles five months later, 'a miserable captive, casting longing eyes at the Ladysmith balloon, and vigilantly guarded by the Boer mounted escort'. The prisoners were marched for two days across country to Modderspruit, a small station on the railway to Pretoria. While waiting for a train, Churchill handed over his credentials as a Press correspondent and asked that they might be forwarded 'to the proper authority'. He was then locked in the ticket office.
The train journey to Pretoria took nearly twenty-four hours. Once in the Boer capital the officers were taken to the States Model School building near the centre of the town, which had been requisitioned to serve as a prisoner-of-war camp. 'As I was quite unarmed and in possession of my full credentials as a Press correspondent,' Churchill wrote to his mother from the prison three days after his capture, 'I do not imagine they will keep me.' He was wrong; the Boers had no intention of letting him go. General Joubert, in a telegram to the Boer State Secretary, pointed out that although Churchill claimed he was 'only a newspaper correspondent', yet from the newspaper accounts of the action 'it appears entirely otherwise and it is for this reason that I urge you that he must be guarded and watched as dangerous for our war; otherwise he can still do us a lot of harm. In other words he must not be released during the war. It is through his active part that one section of the armoured train got away.'
Particularly galling for the Boers was their failure to capture the engine, for they had none of their own running south of Ladysmith.
After three days as a prisoner, Churchill pressed the Boer authorities to let him go, writing direct to the Secretary for War, Louis de Souza. He also sought help from home. 'I trust you will do all in your power to procure my release,' he wrote to his mother from Pretoria on November 18, commenting on his captivity, 'this is a new experience-as was the heavy shell fire'. Having received no reply to his formal request for release, on November 21 he wrote again to de Souza to ask what course was to be taken 'with regard to setting me at liberty'. He was 'naturally anxious to continue my journalistic work and I have already been detained for six days'. Surely the Boers would welcome the war being chronicled 'by one who has had the opportunity of being well treated by its citizens'.
Five days later Churchill wrote a third letter to de Souza. Once more he denied having taken an active part in the defence of the train, though 'I naturally did all I could to escape from so perilous a situation and to save my life. Indeed in this aspect my conduct was precisely that of the civilian platelayers & railway servants, who have since been released by your Government.' He offered, if released, to give 'any parole that the Transvaal Government may require'. Even though he wanted to continue his journalistic work, he would agree, if asked to do so, 'to withdraw altogether from South Africa during the war'.
No reply was made to this offer; Captain Theron, a Boer officer who was present at the action at Frere, opposed Churchill's release, telling de Souza that during the action 'Churchill called for volunteers and led them at a time when the officers were in confusion.' According to Press reports, 'he now claims that he took no part in the battle. That is all lies. He also refused to stand still until Field Cornet Oosthuizen warned him to surrender. He surrendered only when he aimed his gun at him.' Theron added that in his view Churchill was 'one of the most dangerous prisoners in our hands', not least because the Natal newspapers 'are making a big hero out of him'.
Among the members of the official board of the prison was one who took particular pleasure in insulting and goading the prisoners, Churchill included. Churchill went up to him one day and after reminding him 'that in war either side may win', asked if he was wise to place himself in a separate category 'as regards behaviour to prisoners'.
'Why?' asked the man.
'Because it might be convenient to the British Government to be able to make one or two examples,' Churchill replied. Neither he nor the others were troubled by the man again.
November 30 was Churchill's twenty-fifth birthday. He spent it in the States Model School prison, writing letters. One was to the Prince of Wales, in which he noted that the prisoners-of-war had been allowed to become members of the Transvaal State Library 'so that now, although it is irritating to be out of everything while so much is doing, I have a secure refuge and I shall hope, philosophically, to improve my education'. His thoughts, he wrote that day to Bourke Cockran, were on the 'vast combinations of capital' against which many Americans railed. Capitalism in the form of trusts and cartels, Churchill told his American friend, 'has reached a pitch of power which the old economists never contemplated and which excites my most lively terror'. Merchant princes were 'all very well, but if I have anything to say to it, their kingdom shall not be of this world'.
The new century, Churchill told Cockran, 'will witness the great war for the existence of the Individual'. Prison was 'damnably prosaic'. His body was penned up 'and all the while great matters are being settled and history made-the history, mind you, I was to have recorded. I am 25 today. It is terrible to think how little time remains!' Almost five years had passed since his father's death; the fear of dying young through some hereditary fault could not be shaken off. On December 8 he again wrote to de Souza, stressing: 'I did not fight against the Boer forces, but only assisted in clearing the line from the debris.' This was precisely what the civilian platelayers and railway staff had done. 'They have since been released.'
In this letter Churchill again offered, if released, 'to give any parole that may be required not to serve against the Republican forces or to give any information affecting the military situation'. He received no reply. Two days later he asked Haldane if he could join him in an escape plan whereby Haldane, and Sergeant-Major Brockie, who came from Johannesburg and spoke Dutch, would climb over the wall next to the latrine, into the garden of the private house behind the wall, and then leave Pretoria, hiding by day and travelling by night, walking the three hundred miles to the border of Portuguese Mozambique.
Brockie was reluctant to add a third person to the escape plan, especially one whose absence would be noticed, but Haldane agreed that Churchill should go 'as he served me so well at Chieveley'. The night chosen for the escape was December 11. That day Haldane noted in his diary, 'Churchill is in a great state of excitement and letting everyone know that he means going tonight.' During the day, news of two British military defeats seemed to give urgency to the escape. 'I passed the afternoon in positive terror,' Churchill wrote eleven days later, in his first account of that dramatic moment. 'Nothing, since my schooldays, has ever disturbed me so much as this.'
That afternoon Churchill tried to read but could not concentrate. Then he played chess 'and was hopelessly beaten'. Finally it grew dark, and at ten minutes to seven he and Haldane crossed the back yard of the building to the latrine. Brockie followed a few minutes later. The sentries, however, 'gave us no chance,' Churchill wrote. 'They did not walk about. One of them stood exactly opposite the only practicable part of the wall. We waited for two hours but the attempt was plainly impossible, and so, with a most unsatisfactory feeling of relief, to bed.'
On December 12 there was more bad news from the battlefield. 'As you remember,' Churchill wrote to Haldane nine months later, 'I was for making a desperate venture and risking the chance of detection, while you were in favour of patience and waiting night after night until the best opportunity could be secured.' During the day, Churchill told Brockie that he thought he could have got over the wall the previous night.
'Why the hell didn't you?' Brockie asked.
'Where should I have been,' Churchill replied, 'if I had got over and you had found it impossible to follow?'
'If you will ever get over,' Brockie retorted, 'we will follow all right, don't be afraid of that.'
That afternoon the tension between the three would-be escapees was considerable. Haldane wrote in his diary: 'Churchill, whose excited condition as he strode up and down the backyard was evident to his fellow-prisoners, said to me, "We must go tonight". I answered, "There are three of us to go, and we will certainly do so if the chance is favourable".'
'I was insistent,' Churchill wrote in a private account twelve years later, 'that at whatever risk, we should force the thing through that night.' The previous day he had written his fifth letter to de Souza, which he now placed under his pillow. 'I do not consider your Government was justified in holding me, a press correspondent and a non combatant, and I have therefore resolved to escape,' the letter began. In it he wrote of his 'admiration of the chivalrous and humane character of the Republican forces', and expressed the hope 'that when this most grievous and unhappy war shall have come to an end, a state of affairs may be created which shall preserve at once the national pride of the Boers and the security of the British, and put a final stop to the rivalry and enmity of both races.' His letter ended, 'Regretting that circumstances have not permitted me to bid you a personal farewell, believe me, yours very sincerely, Winston S. Churchill.'
As soon as it got dark, but before the moon had risen, Haldane and Churchill again walked over to the latrine. There, Churchill later recalled, the two men 'waited for a chance of climbing over; but after much hesitation we could not make up our minds to it, we thought it too dangerous; and came back to the verandah again'. On the verandah sat Brockie. 'He jeered,' wrote Haldane in his diary, 'and said that we were afraid and that he could go any night. I said to him, "Then go and see for yourself"'. Brockie crossed the yard to the latrine. After quite some time, as he had not emerged, Churchill said to Haldane, 'I am going across, follow me presently.' Crossing the yard, Churchill reached the entrance to the latrine. As he did so he met Brockie coming out, but, he later wrote, 'we dared not speak to each other in the presence of the sentry, and though he muttered something as he went by, I did not hear what it was'.
Churchill entered the latrine. 'I had come to the conclusion,' he later recalled, 'that we should waste the whole night in hesitations unless the matter were clinched once and for all; and as the sentry turned to light his pipe, I jumped on the ledge of the wall and in a few seconds had dropped into the garden safely on the other side. Here I crouched down and waited for the others to come.' In later years Churchill was insistent that he had expected Haldane and Brockie to come over the wall after him. 'According to our agreement, which was that I should go first and wait for the others,' he wrote to Haldane nine months later, 'I waited for half an hour and began to get very anxious.'
Waiting was agonising; 'I expected them to come every minute,' Churchill later wrote. 'My position in the garden was a very anxious one, because I had only a few small and leafless bushes to hide behind, and people kept passing to and fro, and the lights of the house were burning.' Twice, as he waited for Haldane and Brockie to join him, a man from the house came out into the garden and walked along a path within seven or eight yards of where he was crouching.
After fifteen minutes it became clear to Churchill that something had gone wrong. In fact, Haldane and Brockie had gone to the dining-room, where the evening meal had begun. In an attempt to contact them, he managed to attract the attention 'by tapping gently' of an officer who had come into the latrine, and told him to tell Haldane 'that I had succeeded in getting over, and that he must come and make the attempt to join me as soon as he could'.
After another fifteen minutes Haldane and Brockie came to the latrine. Haldane then tried to climb the wall, but at the very moment his shoulders were level with the top, the sentry turned round, challenged him, and levelled his rifle at him. Haldane was ordered back to the main building. The sentry did not suspect that an escape attempt was in progress.
Alone in the garden, Churchill waited; he had no compass, no map, no money and no medicine. He was also dependent on Brockie to be able to communicate with anyone they might meet during their three-hundred-mile walk through the Transvaal. An hour passed. Then Churchill heard tapping. It was Haldane, 'who had come to tell me that he had made his attempt and been stopped by the sentry; that the position of the sentry now made it quite impossible for him or Brockie to follow that night'.
Churchill now thought of climbing back, but as the wall on the garden side was higher than on the latrine side, and had no ledge, he could not do it without considerable noise. To walk round the front of the building and give himself up would only lead to an enquiry, and the closing of the 'loophole of escape' for the future. Still whispering to Haldane, he spoke of his position as hopeless. He would never reach the frontier undetected. 'Haldane and I discussed the situation in whispers through the chinks in the corrugated iron fence,' he later wrote. 'He quite agreed with me that it was impossible to come back, and that I must go on alone. It was a great disappointment to him to be left behind.'
'If I remember rightly,' Churchill wrote to Haldane nine months after the event, 'you offered to throw your compass over to me, but I declined, thinking it would make a noise, so you bade me good-bye.'
Churchill decided that he could never succeed on foot, alone, over such a great distance. Instead he would to try to reach the railway line that ran from Pretoria to the Portuguese port of Lourenço Marques, on the Indian Ocean, and make the journey hidden on a goods train. Leaving his hiding-place in the garden he walked straight out of the gate into the road, passing a sentry who stood in the roadway scarcely three yards from him. In bright moonlight, with electric street lights at regular intervals, he walked down the middle of the street in the direction by which he believed he could most quickly reach the railway line. Luckily, he was wearing a brown civilian jacket and trousers. 'There were many people passing in the street to and fro,' he wrote, 'but nobody spoke to me.'
Humming a tune, Churchill reached the railway line. There, he calculated that his best chance of jumping on a train would be about two hundred yards out of the station, before it had gathered speed, on an uphill gradient when it would be slowing down, and on an outward curve when he would be hidden from the view both of the engine-driver and the guard. When the train came he jumped on the coupling between two wagons. Then he clambered on to a wagon full of empty coal bags. The train moved slowly eastward through the night. Just before dawn, afraid that he might somehow be discovered once it was daylight, he jumped down from the wagon on to the ground. He was near Witbank, a small mining community sixty miles east of Pretoria. There he waited, at the side of the railway track, intent on clambering on to a train the following night and continuing to the coast. 'My sole companion,' he later wrote, 'was a gigantic vulture, who manifested an extravagant interest in my condition, and made hideous and ominous gurglings from time to time.'
As Churchill hid by the railway at Witbank, his escape was discovered in Pretoria and a considerable search was begun in the hope of catching him. His picture was circulated throughout the Transvaal together with the description, 'Englishman 25 years old, about 5 ft 8 inches tall, average build, walks with a slight stoop, pale appearance, red brown hair, almost invisible small moustache, speaks through the nose, cannot pronounce the letter "s", cannot speak Dutch, has last been seen in a brown suit of clothes.'
That night, hungry and thirsty, Churchill made his way from the railway line towards some lights, which he thought came from a native kraal which might befriend him. The lights, however, were those of a coal mine. Fearful that the man who came to the door might be hostile, Churchill asked him, 'Are you an Englishman?' The man, worried lest the stranger was a Boer spy, kept him covered with a pistol, and without answering Churchill's question, asked who he was. 'I am Dr Bentinck,' Churchill replied, 'I have fallen off the train and lost my way.'
The man ordered Churchill inside, into his dining-room, and, still covering him with the pistol, urged him to tell the truth. Hesitating at first, Churchill suddenly declared, 'I am Winston Churchill.' To his good fortune the man to whom he revealed his secret was an Englishman, John Howard, the manager of the mine. 'Thank God you have come here!' Howard exclaimed. 'It is the only house for twenty miles where you would not have been handed over, but we are all British here, and we will see you through.' That night Howard let four other men into the secret, among them his mine engineer, Dan Dewsnap. It was agreed to hide Churchill in the mine. As he was being hidden, Dewsnap, who was from Oldham, pressed his hands with the words, 'They'll all vote for you next time.'
On December 14 a two-word Reuter news agency telegram reached London, 'Churchill escaped.' In sending a copy to Lady Randolph, Oliver Borthwick wrote that 'knowing his practical turn of mind, I have no doubt that he knows what he is about, and will turn up with an extra chapter of his book finished in a few days time at some English encampment'.
Churchill remained hidden at the mine at Witbank. The Boers were searching for him everywhere and had posted a reward of £25 alive or dead. For three days he stayed deep underground in a stable recently built for the underground pit ponies. 'The mine was infested with white rats,' Howard later recalled. 'On one occasion when I paid him a surreptitious visit, I found him in absolute darkness, for the rats had commandeered his candle.' On another occasion Churchill, who had been smoking a cigar, was discovered by an African mine boy. 'When the native got the whiff,' Howard later recalled, 'he trailed it down into the stable, but as soon as he saw Mr Churchill he bolted and told the other boys there was a spook in that part of the mine. For a long time afterwards we could not get any of the boys to move in that vicinity at all.'
After three days underground, in virtual solitary confinement, Churchill was taken ill. A doctor, James Gillespie, was let into the secret, and advised that he be brought up to the surface, as he had become 'very nervy'. He was taken to a store-room on the surface, given a key and locked in. Then, on the evening of December 19, with Howard's connivance and that of a second Englishman, Charles Burnham, he left the colliery and was hidden in some bales of wool in a railway wagon Burnham was loading for despatch to the coast. With him he took a revolver, two roast chickens, some slices of cold meat, a loaf of bread, a melon and three bottles of cold tea. The revolver, a semi-automatic German Mauser, was a gift from his mining friends.
The wagon in which Churchill hid was shunted by the colliery engine, with six other wagons, from the coal mine to Witbank station. There it was linked to a train going to the coast. Burnham, who travelled on the train, was relieved to be told at one station on the route, 'Oh yes, Churchill passed here two days ago, dressed as a Roman Catholic priest.'
Churchill stayed hidden among the bales of wool as the train reached the Transvaal side of the Portuguese border. There it was shunted on to a siding for eighteen hours. At one moment some men approached the wagon in which Churchill was hiding and began to search it. 'I heard the tarpaulin rustle as they pulled at it,' he later wrote, 'but luckily they did not search deep enough.' The train then continued on its way through Portuguese East Africa. Churchill, who had memorized the names of the stations, emerged from his bales of wool as soon as he saw the first station name on the Portuguese side of the border, and, he later recalled, 'sang and shouted and crowed at the top of my voice'.
So carried away was Churchill with 'thankfulness and delight', he later wrote, 'that I fired my revolver two or three times in the air'. On reaching the goods yard at Lourenço Marques he jumped down 'black as a sweep', Burnham later recalled, 'by reason of the coal dust which was in the bottom of the truck'. It was four in the afternoon of December 21. Churchill went at once to the British Consulate, where the consul telegraphed to Milner, 'Please inform relations that Winston Churchill arrived today.'
At the Consulate, Churchill found 'a hot bath, clean clothes, an excellent dinner, means of telegraphing-all I could want'. Among the telegrams he sent that afternoon was one to Louis de Souza in Pretoria, in which he assured him, 'Escape not due to any fault of your guards'. This was a magnanimous gesture, intended to protect the sentries from undue punishment.
Reading the newspapers which the consul gave him, Churchill saw for the first time the full extent of the recent British defeats, greater than any since the Crimean War nearly half a century earlier. Among those beaten in the field had been General Buller, forced back from Colenso when he tried to cross the Tugela and lift the siege of Ladysmith. Eager to return to the front, Churchill decided to leave that very night by steamer for Durban. There were fears, however, that Boer sympathisers in Lourenço Marques might try to kidnap him and take him back to Pretoria. To prevent this, a group of Englishmen living in the town gathered in the Consulate garden, fully armed, escorted him to the quayside, and, four hours after his arrival, saw him safely on board ship.
'It is from the cabin of this little vessel as she coasts along the sandy shores of Africa,' Churchill informed the Morning Post, 'that I write the concluding lines of this letter, and the reader will perhaps understand why I write them with a feeling of triumph, and better than triumph, a feeling of pure joy.'
Reaching Durban on the afternoon of December 23, Churchill was amazed to find a large and enthusiastic crowd at the quayside. Cheering and excited, they escorted him to the steps of the Town Hall, where he told them of his escape and spoke with confidence of the outcome of the war. 'After an hour of turmoil,' he wrote, 'which I frankly admit I enjoyed extremely, I escaped to the train.' Eager to return to the front, he travelled back on the very railway line on which he had been captured a month earlier, to Pietermaritzburg, to link up with the British forces.
That night Churchill was the guest of the Governor of Natal. On the following day he continued by rail to Buller's headquarters. To his surprise, the General's headquarters were virtually at the same spot as the ambush of the armoured train. It was Christmas Eve. Churchill spent it in the platelayers' hut a few hundred yards from where he had been captured thirty-six days earlier. 'Winston Churchill turned up here yesterday escaped from Pretoria,' Buller wrote to a friend on December 26. 'He really is a fine fellow and I must say I admire him greatly. I wish he was leading irregular troops instead of writing for a rotten paper. We are very short of good men, as he appears to be, out here.'
At a bad time for the war Churchill's escape provided a gratifying moment of excitement and success. It made him known throughout Britain, ensuring that his subsequent reports to the Morning Post were widely read. In the words of a popular music hall song that month:
You've heard of Brimstone Chapel,
So of course I needn't say
He's the latest and the greatest
Correspondent of the day.
On 3 January 1900 the British newspapers announced that on the previous day Churchill had accepted a commission in the South African Light Horse. He was once again a soldier, and yet, he wrote to his mother on January 6, Buller had given him a lieutenancy 'without requiring me to abandon my status of correspondent so that I am evidently in very high favour'. To Pamela Plowden, however, he commented in a letter on January 10 that Buller himself was worth 'very little'. There was 'only one great General, but the War Office will not consider him-Sir Bindon Blood-so what is the use of crabbing the man at the wheel'. Churchill also urged Miss Plowden to be 'brave and confident' about the outcome of the conflict, 'and do not let the incidents of war obscure the general trend of events'. The Boer Republics, he added, 'are wearing thin'.
The Boer determination to resist was, however, formidable. When, in the second week of January, Buller crossed the Tugela, Churchill wrote of the battle in his report to the Morning Post, 'I have often seen dead men, killed in war-thousands at Omdurman, scores elsewhere, black and white, but the Boer dead aroused the most painful emotions.' He then described a man in his sixties, 'with firm aquiline features and a short beard' who had refused all suggestions of surrender and who, when his left leg was smashed by a bullet, continued to load his rifle until he bled to death. Next to him was a boy of about seventeen, shot through the heart. And a little further on lay 'our own two poor riflemen with their heads smashed like egg-shells'. Churchill added, 'Ah, horrible war, amazing medley of the glorious and squalid, the pitiful and the sublime, if modern men of light and leading saw your face closer, simple folk would see it hardly ever.'
Across the Tugela, Churchill saw many further examples of war's severity. 'The scenes on Spion Kop were among the strangest and most terrible I have ever witnessed,' he wrote to Pamela Plowden on January 28. The battle had been a 'serious reverse' with the loss of seventy officers and 1,500 men 'to little purpose'. He had just gone through 'five very dangerous days continually under shell & rifle fire and once the feather in my hat was cut through by a bullet'. Even if he were only a journalist he would not come home now. 'For good or ill I am committed and I am content. I do not know whether I shall see the end or not, but I am quite certain that I will not leave Africa until the matter is settled.'
Two weeks earlier Churchill had declined an appeal from the Conservative electors of Southport to be their candidate at the next General Election.
***
On January 28, Lady Randolph arrived at Durban, in charge of the hospital ship Maine, which she had helped to organise and equip. Churchill hurried back to Durban to meet her, and to take back with him to the Tugela front his brother Jack, now an officer in the Territorials, who had come out with her. From his cousin Hugh Frewen, who had written about the bad mood at home, Churchill wrote on February 5, from the Tugela: 'You must not allow your mother and friends to be despondent about this war. It is the duty of some British citizens to shoot straight, but of all to remain cheerfully determined.'
'We are going to make a general attack this afternoon or tomorrow morning, upon the Boer positions beyond the Tugela,' Churchill told Frewen, 'and I hope and pray that you may soon have some good news of victory.' In the action that followed, Jack was wounded in the calf; he was sent back to Durban and to his mother's hospital ship. 'Poor Jack,' Churchill wrote to Pamela Plowden. 'Here is an instance of Fortune's caprice. There was a very hot fire, bullets hitting the ground or whizzing by in dozens. Jack, whose luck was fresh, was lying down. I was walking about without any cover-I who have tempted Fortune so often. Jack was hit.'
Churchill was again in the midst of action on February 25. 'I was very nearly killed two hours ago by a shrapnel,' he wrote to Miss Plowden that day. 'But though I was in the full burst of it God preserved me. Eight men were wounded by it.' He wondered now 'whether we shall get through it, and whether I shall live to see the end'. There was 'a continual stream of wounded flowing by' to the hospitals, nearly a thousand in the previous two days. 'The war is very bitter, but I trust we shall not show ourselves less determined than the enemy.' His letter ended on a personal note, 'My nerves were never better, and I think I care less for bullets every day.'
***
On February 28, Lord Dundonald, with two cavalry squadrons, prepared to enter Ladysmith. He invited Churchill to ride with him. Also on that historic ride was Ronald Brooke, one of Churchill's soldier friends, whose brother Alan was to become Chief of the Imperial General Staff in the Second World War. 'Never shall I forget that ride,' Churchill wrote in the Morning Post. 'The evening was deliciously cool. My horse was strong and fresh, for I had changed him at midday. The ground was rough with many stones, but we cared little for that.' As the cavalry rode forward, they could hear British artillery still firing. 'What was happening? Never mind, we were nearly through the dangerous ground. Brigadier, staff and troops let their horses go.' Suddenly there was a challenge; it was an armed picket.
'Halt, who goes there?'
'The Ladysmith relief column,' came the answer.
Then, wrote Churchill, 'from out of trenches and rifle pits artfully concealed in the scrub a score of tattered men came running, cheering feebly, and some were crying. In the half light they looked ghastly pale and thin. A poor, white-faced officer waved his helmet to and fro, and laughed foolishly, and the tall, strong colonial horsemen, standing up in their stirrups, raised a loud resounding cheer, for then we knew we had reached the Ladysmith picket line.'
The siege of Ladysmith was over; that night Churchill dined there with the town's defender, Sir George White. Next to him at dinner sat another of the defenders, his friend Ian Hamilton. 'Never before have I sat in such brave company,' he later wrote, 'nor stood so close to a great event.' His account of the entry into Ladysmith, appearing in the Morning Post, was widely read and appreciated. As well as describing the excitement of the ending of the siege, he wrote of his conviction that, in England itself, once the war was won, 'the people of England must devote themselves to stimulating and sustaining the spirit of the people by measures of social improvement and reform'.
Among those reading Churchill's reports from South Africa was Joseph Chamberlain, who wrote to him of how 'amiable and graphic' they were, and wished him 'continued success and distinction'. Also from England came news that his novel Savrola had been published. Many of the reviewers had praised its scenes of action; the Manchester Courier called them 'brilliant in the extreme'. Many phrases in the novel were singled out for favourable comment, among them his description of a degenerate imperialism, 'Our morals will be gone, but our Maxims will remain.'
On the day after the relief of Ladysmith, Churchill sent the Morning Post a telegram describing the victory parade. 'It was a procession of lions. And presently when the two battalions of Devons met-both full of honours-and old friends breaking from the ranks gripped each other's hands and shouted, everyone was carried away, and I waved my feathered hat, and cheered and cheered until I could cheer no longer for joy that I had lived to see the day.'
Churchill's reports were widely appreciated; one officer, Captain Skipwith, after writing critically in a private letter about the lack of any real experience on the part of the many journalists then in South Africa, added, 'Winston Churchill is the one exception to the lot-he does go and see things with his own eyes and not through a long-range telescope, or through his ears.' While he was still in Ladysmith, Churchill received a letter from an American lecture agent, Major James Pond, offering to set up a lecture tour for him throughout the United States. He at once wrote to his mother, 'Now please don't let this thing be thrown away,' and instructed her to find out if the agent concerned was 'the biggest man, and if not who is'.
Full of inventiveness, Churchill also decided to write a play about the Boer War, telling Pamela Plowden that he wanted the play to be performed in London in the autumn, at Her Majesty's Theatre. 'It will be perfectly true to life in every respect, and the scenic effects should be of such a novel and startling character that the audience will imagine themselves under fire.' The play would have to be 'largely spectacular', he added, 'but I believe that with my name, and a good deal of assistance from a skilful playwright, a great success might be obtained'. He would need help with the plot, but was confident, he told her, that 'I can make the people talk and act as they would do in real war.'
On a personal note Churchill commiserated with Pamela that so many of her friends had been killed in the war. 'I trust I shall not fulfil the general rule.' To a correspondent who urged him to take care of himself, he replied: 'I do not think the Boers are taking any especial pains to kill me. If they are, I cannot so far congratulate them on their skill, for they have had plenty of opportunity and as yet, I thank God, no success.'
Many of those who now came across Churchill realised that he was a person of remarkable quality. 'I am very proud to have met you,' wrote the naval gunnery expert, Captain Percy Scott, then Military Commandant of Durban, 'because without any luck you have made a wonderful career.' Scott felt 'certain that I shall some day shake hands with you as Prime Minister of England, you possess the two necessary qualifications, genius and plod. Combined, I believe nothing can keep them back.'
While in Ladysmith, Churchill had been shocked at the violence of popular feeling against the Boers. 'I would treat the Boers with all generosity and tolerance,' he wrote to one correspondent on March 22, 'even to providing for those crippled in the war and for the destitute women and children.' To last, a peace would have to be honourable. 'We do not seek vengeance,' he wrote to the Natal Witness on March 29, even from the 'load of shame' of the early defeats. The aim of the war had been 'to win peace for ourselves, not to give others their deserts'. Nothing should be done to prevent the attainment of peace. 'While we continue to prosecute the war with tireless energy,' he wrote, 'and remorselessly beat down all who resist-to the last man if necessary-we must also make it easy for the enemy to accept defeat. We must tempt as well as compel.'
Churchill then set out a general rule for the last phase of the conflict: 'Beware of driving men to desperation. Even a cornered rat is dangerous. We desire a speedy peace and the last thing we want is that this war should enter upon a guerrilla phase. Those who demand "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" should ask themselves whether such barren spoils are worth five years of bloody partisan warfare and the consequent impoverishment of South Africa.'
There had to be 'fusion and concord' between the Dutch and the British, Churchill wrote. Nothing should be done that would enable it to be said of the people of Natal that they had fought well 'but they were drunk with racial animosity', that they were brave in battle 'but they are spiteful in victory'. The reaction to this call for moderation, and to similar calls in his telegrams to the Morning Post, was hostile. 'Winston is being severely criticised about his peaceful telegrams,' Jack, who was also then in Ladysmith, wrote to their mother at the beginning of April, 'and everyone here in Natal is going against his views.'
That week, learning that Haldane had escaped from Pretoria by tunnelling out of the States Model School, Churchill wrote to congratulate him. He also noted that the episode of the armoured train in which they had both been captured 'has become rather famous in the story of the war'.
Churchill now asked permission to join Ian Hamilton's column in its advance through the Orange Free State, to the Transvaal and Pretoria. Later he learned that Lord Roberts had not wanted him to go to the Orange Free State as a correspondent on the grounds that his presence there, he told his mother, 'would probably be obnoxious to Lord Kitchener in consequence of The River War'. But Roberts deferred to Churchill's fame and now, in April, he was on his way to a new campaign, travelling by train from Ladysmith to Durban, past the scene of the ambush of the armoured train and the wreck of the train itself, 'still lying', he wrote to the Morning Post, 'where we had dragged it with such labour and peril, just clear of the line'.
From Durban, Churchill set sail for East London, then took the train to Cape Town, then travelled inland again by train, to Bloemfontein and the front. There, at Dewetsdorp, as he had promised his friend Angus McNeill a few days earlier, he joined McNeill's Scouts for the day. It was April 22; their task that day was to cut off a Boer commando from the crest of a hill. Forty or fifty Scouts, Churchill with them, rode towards the crest, but the Boers had got there first. McNeill ordered his men back. At that very moment the Boers opened fire with their rifles. Churchill, who had dismounted, put his foot in the stirrup. 'The horse, terrified at the firing, plunged wildly. I tried to spring into the saddle; it turned under the animal's belly. He broke away, and galloped madly off.'
Most of the Scouts were already two hundred yards away. Churchill was alone, dismounted, within close range of the Boers, and a mile at least from cover of any kind. 'One consolation I had-my pistol. I could not be hunted down unarmed in the open as I had before. But a disabling wound was the brightest prospect.' He turned and, as he had done in the railway cutting five months earlier, ran for his life on foot from the Boer marksmen. As he ran, he thought to himself, 'Here at last I take it.'
Suddenly one of McNeill's Scouts rode past him. Churchill shouted out to him, 'Give me a stirrup.' The Scout stopped and Churchill jumped up behind him. 'Then we rode. I put my arms round him to catch a grip of the mane. My hand became soaked with blood. The horse was hard hit; but, gallant beast, he extended himself nobly. The pursuing bullets piped and whistled-for the range was growing longer-overhead.'
'Don't be frightened,' Churchill's rescuer called out to him, then cried out: 'My poor horse, oh, my poor horse; shot with an explosive bullet. The devils! But their hour will come. Oh, my poor horse!'
'Never mind,' said Churchill, 'you've saved my life.'
'Ah,' rejoined the soldier, 'but it's the horse I'm thinking about.'
A few moments later Churchill was safe, and unscathed. 'I had thrown double sixes again,' was his comment when he telegraphed the story to the Morning Post, in which he also noted that Trooper Charles Roberts, the horseman who had saved his life, had been mentioned as a possible recipient of the Victoria Cross for his bravery. Roberts received no award of any sort, however. It was not until 1906, when Churchill was Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, that he was able to persuade the authorities to award him the Distinguished Conduct Medal.
Churchill was aware of his good fortune at Dewetsdorp. 'Indeed,' he wrote to his mother, 'I do not think I have ever been so near destruction.' Together with his cousin Sunny, and a new friend, 'Bendor' Duke of Westminster, Churchill now rode with General Hamilton's column towards Pretoria. As they advanced, several of his closest soldiering friends were killed. Churchill wrote to his mother of how George Brasier-Creagh, her friend as well as his, after being shot in the stomach, 'died in great pain, and all alone at a farm-house'.
Another of Churchill's friends, Ronald Brooke's brother Victor, had just had his left hand smashed. 'He is such a nice, bright, clever fellow,' Churchill told his mother, 'very good-looking, very brave.' She should ask him to lunch 'and treat him kindly for my sake', and 'do him a service' by asking one or two important Generals of her acquaintance to meet him. Fourteen years later, Victor Brooke was to be killed in action in France in the opening months of the First World War.
***
As Churchill rode with Hamilton's army on its long march through the Orange Free State, witnessing each engagement at close quarters, he decided to accept the repeated pleas of the Oldham Conservatives to stand again at the next General Election. Several other constituencies had asked for him, but Oldham it would be. 'They have implored me not to desert them,' he told his mother on May 1.
'I have had so many adventures,' Churchill wrote to his Aunt Leonie two weeks later, 'that I shall be glad of a little peace and security. I have been under fire now in forty separate affairs in this country alone, and one cannot help wondering how long good luck will hold.' As to himself, 'I stand the wear and tear pretty well, and indeed my health, nerve and spirits were never better than now, at the end of seven months of war.'
On May 15, while Churchill was riding with Hamilton towards Pretoria, his fourth book was published in London. Based on the first twenty-two reports he had sent to the Morning Post, it was given the title London to Ladysmith via Pretoria. Two weeks after its publication he had another adventure. Hamilton was then south of Johannesburg, and Lord Roberts west of the town, which the Boers had not yet fully evacuated. Wanting to send the Morning Post his account of the most recent battle by the quickest means possible, Churchill decided to risk going through Johannesburg in order to send it from Roberts's headquarters. Hamilton, impressed by Churchill's daring, gave him his own official account of the battle, to be handed to Roberts. A Frenchman, Lautré by name, who worked in one of the nearby gold mines, warned that the journey on horseback through Johannesburg would be dangerous, as the Boers would surely arrest any horseman riding through the town. It could, however, he believed, be done by bicycle by someone wearing civilian clothes.
Lautré offered to go with him. 'I doffed my khaki,' Churchill told his readers in his next report, 'and put on a suit of plain clothes which I had in my valise, and exchanged my slouch hat for a soft cap.' Thus disguised he cycled with Lautré into Johannesburg. 'If they stop us,' Lautré told him, 'speak French.' The two men cycled on. 'Groups of moody-looking people chatted at street corners,' Churchill wrote, 'and eyed us suspiciously.' At one point an armed Boer, on horseback, rode up alongside them. 'I looked at his face and our eyes met. Then he turned away carelessly. Presently he set his spurs to his horse and cantered on.'
Cycling out of the town, Churchill was accosted by three British soldiers. They were looking for something to eat. Churchill warned them that there were still armed Boers roaming the streets. The soldiers turned back, accompanying the two cyclists to the British lines. Churchill was safe again. He was also able to report to Roberts's headquarters that the Boers had all but evacuated Johannesburg. That night, after he had sent his telegram to the Morning Post and delivered Hamilton's despatch, he was invited in by Roberts himself. 'How did you get through?' asked the Commander-in-Chief. Churchill told him. 'His eyes twinkled,' Churchill wrote. They 'twinkled brightly with pleasure or amusement or approbation, or, at any rate, something friendly'.
Johannesburg was occupied, and the British advance to Pretoria continued. On June 4 the Boer forces were defeated outside their capital. On the following morning, before the main body of British troops entered the town, Churchill set off with a large group of officers, overtaking at one point the General who was advancing on the railway station. As they rode forward, the officers were stopped by the closed gates of a level crossing. 'Quite slowly,' Churchill later recalled, 'there now steamed past before our eyes a long train drawn by two engines and crammed with armed Boers whose rifles bristled from every window. We gazed at each other dumbfounded at three yards' distance. A single shot would have precipitated a horrible carnage on both sides. Although sorry that the train should escape, it was with unfeigned relief that we saw the last carriage glide slowly past our noses.'
Churchill's path was to the new building where the British soldiers were now being held captive. That morning, fifty Boer sentries in and around the prison were guarding 150 British officers and thirty men. One of the prisoners, Melville Goodacre, wrote in his diary of how, at about nine o'clock, 'suddenly Winston Churchill came galloping over the hill and tore down the Boer flag, and hoisted ours amid cheers'.
'I raised my hat and cheered,' Churchill wrote. 'The cry was instantly answered from within.' Among those who saw Churchill's hat raised was Lieutenant Frankland, who had been captured with him on the armoured train. 'There was a wild rush across the enclosure,' Frankland later wrote; 'hoarse discordant yells, and the prisoners tore like madmen to welcome the first of their deliverers. Who should I see on reaching the gate but Churchill.' In the First World War, Frankland was to be killed at Gallipoli, one of the first British officers to land on the Peninsula.
Five hours after the release of the prisoners, Roberts entered Pretoria, where he took the salute of his victorious troops. Now that Pretoria was taken, Churchill wrote to his mother on June 9, 'I propose to come home. Politics, Pamela, finances and books all need my attention.' He also advised his brother, who was still serving with the forces in Natal, to return to England, 'Indeed, when I reflect upon the unguarded condition of our island home, I strongly recommend you to volunteer for service in London.'
Churchill continued with Hamilton's army to Diamond Hill. There, on June 11, he was in the midst of a violent battle, a 'rat trap' of rifle and artillery fire he called it in his telegram to the Morning Post. What he did not write was anything about his own action on that occasion, nor did he even refer to his own action in his memoirs thirty years later. Forty-four years after the battle, however, Hamilton published a full account of what he called Churchill's 'conspicuous gallantry (the phrase often used in recommendations for the VC) for which he has never received full credit'.
Hamilton's troops lay below a high mound, the crest of which was held by the Boers. The key to the battlefield, Hamilton wrote, lay on the summit, 'but nobody knew it until Winston, who had been attached to my column by the High Command, somehow managed to give me the slip and climb this mountain, most of it being dead ground to the Boers lining the crestline, as they had to keep their heads down owing to our heavy gunfire. He climbed this mountain as our scouts were trained to climb on the Indian frontier, and ensconced himself in a niche not much more than a pistol shot directly below the Boer commandos-no mean feat of arms in broad daylight.' It was also a feat, Hamilton reflected, which showed 'a fine trust' on Churchill's part in the accuracy of the British artillery firing at the crest.
Had even half a dozen of the Boers 'run twenty yards over the brow', Hamilton wrote, 'they could have knocked him off his perch with a volley of stones. Thus it was that from his lofty perch Winston had the nerve to signal me, if I remember right, with his handkerchief on a stick, that if I could only manage to gallop up at the head of my mounted infantry, we ought to be able to rush this summit.'
That was what Hamilton did; the battle, which ensured that the Boers could not recapture Pretoria, was in Hamilton's opinion 'the turning point of the war'. That night the Boers retreated. Watching the victorious British troops march past Lord Roberts, Churchill, who made no reference to his own part in the battle, described them as 'weary of war, but cheered by the hopes of peace, and quite determined to see the matter out. May they all come safely home.'
From Diamond Hill, Churchill returned to Pretoria. He was there on June 16 when 3,000 copies of his book London to Ladysmith via Pretoria were published in the United States. Four days later he took the train for Cape Town; a hundred miles south of Johannesburg, after the train had gone through Kopjes Station, it stopped suddenly. Churchill got out. Then to his horror a Boer shell burst almost at his feet, 'with a startling bang' he later recalled, 'throwing up clods from the embankment'. A hundred yards ahead, a wooden bridge was in flames. The train was crowded with soldiers being sent south, or home. 'No one was in command. The soldiers began to get out of the carriages in confusion. I saw no officers.'
Churchill now took charge. Fearing an ambush like that of the armoured train at Frere, he ran along the track to the engine, 'climbed into the cab, and ordered the engine-driver to blow his whistle to make the men get back into the train, and steam back instantly to Kopjes Station'. The engine-driver obeyed. 'While I was standing on the footplate to make sure the soldiers had got back into the train,' Churchill later recalled, 'I saw, less than a hundred yards away in the dry watercourse under the burning bridge, a cluster of dark figures. These were the last Boers I was to see as enemies. I fitted the wooden stock to the Mauser pistol and fired six or seven times at them. They scattered without firing back. Then the engine started and we were soon all safely within the entrenchment at Kopjes Station.'
'What an escape he must have had,' Jack wrote to his mother.
At Kopjes Station it was learned that a fierce action was proceeding only a few miles further down the line, where the train before Churchill's was even then being attacked by a large Boer guerrilla force complete with artillery. More than fifty of the soldiers on the train were killed or wounded. The line to Cape Town thus being cut, Churchill borrowed a horse to continue his journey homeward. 'I thought for many years,' he wrote in 1930, 'that the 2-inch Creusot shell which had burst so near us on the embankment was the last projectile I should ever see fired in anger.'
Back in Cape Town, Churchill had a third talk with Milner, who was hopeful of obtaining the help of the Boer moderates against the extremists. 'I spoke very freely of my ideas as to the future,' Milner wrote to him on the following day, 'because I see your interest and want your help.' While in Cape Town, Churchill learned of the considerable success of London to Ladysmith via Pretoria: it had sold 11,000 copies in less than six weeks. This, he explained to his brother, 'means £720 to me'. The income from his other books, skilfully invested by his father's friend Sir Ernest Cassel, had brought in a further £427. The Morning Post telegrams had earned him a total of £2,050, the highest sum yet paid to a journalist for such work, and the equivalent of £88,000 in 1990. The money worries of a year before were over.
Churchill left South Africa on July 7. He was never to see it again.
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