Hero of the Empire: The Making of Winston Churchill

by Candice Millard

While the rest of the men dived behind trees and rough tombstones, however, Churchill, sensing an opportunity and the eyes of the other officers, refused even to dismount. “I rode on my grey pony all along the front of the skirmish line where everyone else was lying down in cover,” he would later confess. “Foolish perhaps, but given an audience there is no act too daring or too noble. Without the gallery things are different.”

The tower, which was only fifteen years older than Churchill himself, was famous not just for its Great Clock but for its nearly fourteen-ton bell, nicknamed Big Ben, most likely in honor of Ben Caunt, a six-foot-two-inch, two-hundred-pound bare-knuckle boxer who had been the heavyweight champion of England in 1841.

We shape our buildings,” he would later write, “and then our buildings shape us.”

If the human race ever reaches a stage of development—when religion will cease to assist and comfort mankind,” he had written to his mother two years earlier, “Christianity will be put aside as a crutch which is no longer needed, and man will stand erect on the firm legs of reason.”

These men, dressed in wide-brimmed hats and simple, loose-fitting khaki uniforms, a white band with a red cross on it wrapped around their left arms, were known to Buller’s troops as “body-snatchers,” retrieving not just bodies from the battlefield but, they hoped, young men from the jaws of death. In all, there were about eight hundred of them in Colenso that day, and they were led by one man: a thirty-year-old Indian lawyer and civil rights activist by the name of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Gandhi had been living in South Africa for six years when the Boer War began, and had already begun to develop his ideas of nonviolent resistance.

mind boggling

By the end of the war, more than twenty-six thousand Boer civilians would die in British concentration camps, some twenty-two thousand of whom were children. Those statistics, however, do not even take into account the roughly twenty thousand Africans who, having been forced to fight in a war that was not their own, subsequently died in separate black concentration camps.