Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill

by Candice Millard

“In my interest she left no wire unpulled,” Churchill wrote, “no stone unturned, no cutlet uncooked.”

Speaking of his mother, the former Jennie Jerome.

Since the earliest days of the war, both the Boers and the British had held an unshakable belief in the righteousness of their cause and the unworthiness of their enemy. Neither group, however, had given a moment’s thought, or would have cared if they had, to the fact that the land over which they were fighting did not belong to either one of them.

“When one is alone and unarmed, a surrender may be pardoned.”

In the Franco-Prussian War, thirty years earlier, any noncombatant who was caught carrying a gun was immediately executed, and the same code would be observed twenty years later, during World War I.