Hero of the Empire: The Making of Winston Churchill

by Candice Millard

As he had learned early in his military career, although “the picture of war moves very swiftly,” the British army does not.

Fifteen years later, Burberry would design another coat for soldiers in World War I, with straps on the shoulders for their epaulets and brass D-rings on the belt for their swords and hand grenades. Because most of the men wearing it would be fighting in the trenches, it was called a trench coat.

the average life expectancy of a horse in southern Africa during the Boer War was six weeks. Most were killed by bullets, disease, overwork or starvation, but occasionally, during sieges, they were eaten by soldiers who boiled their meat down to a paste and drank it like beef tea.

For his part, Atkins found Churchill not just amusing but fascinating. He had seen his like only once before, in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, where Atkins had had lunch with Theodore Roosevelt. The young reporter had watched as the Rough Riders, the motley crew of cowboys, college athletes and law enforcement officials Roosevelt had brought together to fight in the war, gathered eagerly around him, hanging on his every word. “It was like a conference,” Atkins later wrote, “with Roosevelt as both principal speaker and chairman.” Before they parted ways, Roosevelt, who just three years later would become the youngest president in U.S. history, pulled Atkins aside to tell him that “so far as he knew, he was the only officer who had ‘performed the feat’ of shooting a Spaniard with his revolver in the charge up the slopes.” Atkins, who was used to the almost extreme discretion and modesty of British military men, was startled by Roosevelt’s blatant self-promotion, but he didn’t hold it against him. In fact, he found his honesty refreshing. “I noted the simplicity with which he said this, in the manner of a man genuinely recording a fact of sufficient interest,” he wrote. “Few British officers would have mentioned it, but Roosevelt was not boasting.”

I had not before encountered this sort of ambition, unabashed, frankly egotistical, communicating its excitement, and extorting sympathy.

Sir George White,

I don’t like the fellow,” White would dryly tell another officer just a few months later, “but he’ll be Prime Minister of England one day.

“An armoured train!” Churchill wrote from Estcourt. “The very name sounds strange. A locomotive disguised as a knight-errant; the agent of civilisation in the habiliments of chivalry. Mr. Morley attired as Sir Lancelot would seem scarcely more incongruous.”

“He had small respect for authority,” Atkins wrote. He had “no reverence for his seniors as such, and talked to them as though they were of his own age, or younger.”

As December 1899 brought with it news of devastating defeats at the hands of the Boers, an opponent they had dismissed as insignificant and unsophisticated, a chilling thought crept in: Would this, the last month of the century, mark the beginning of the end of the British Empire? To Queen Victoria, who had been on the throne for sixty-three of the past one hundred years, the question was one that must not even be asked.

“Please understand that there is no one depressed in this house,” she told Arthur Balfour, then leader of the House of Commons. “We are not interested in the possibilities of defeat; they do not exist.”

Although the men at the Staats Model School would continue to be fed, clothed and protected from the wrath of their guards, they understood that, from one day to the next, their lives could not be guaranteed.

I perhaps have seen Churchill in a situation of greater danger than have others, and can affirm with confidence that he possesses one at least of the attributes of his great ancestor,” Haldane wrote, referring to Churchill’s famously courageous forebear, the 1st Duke of Marlborough. “He can be splendidly audacious at times and, sometimes, at the wrong time.”

but

In fact, the Transvaal government was so shocked and infuriated by Churchill’s escape that tracking him down suddenly became the first order of business. “So great was the Government’s … desire to capture [Churchill],” Haldane wrote, that “the whole State machinery came to a standstill.” To Hofmeyr, the Boer officials appeared to be almost paralyzed with rage. “It seemed to me,” he wrote, “that even the war was forgotten.”

What worried Haldane and Brockie, however, was that it would now be a thousand times harder to escape. Additional sentries were added not just to the enclosure but to the neighboring yards. Several guards were accused of taking bribes and removed from the prison altogether. Even de Souza’s wife, Marie, believed that they were guilty, writing in her diary that Churchill “must have bribed the guards, who are policemen!” The new ZARPs were angrier, more vigilant and less easily distracted than their predecessors. They were not about to be humiliated again.

Churchill had had moments of worry, fear, even despair. Never before, however, had he been tentative. He had fearlessly thundered into battle on his white pony; instantly, and without any authority, taken charge of the defense of the armored train as Boer shells rained down upon it; and pulled himself over the prison wall just feet from an armed guard, striking out alone into the unknown. Each time, he had somehow, instinctively, known what to do.

By an incredible stroke of luck, Churchill had stumbled upon one of the few places in the 110,000 square miles of the Transvaal where it was still possible to find an Englishman.

While Buller’s men were at ease, confident in their innate superiority and their commander’s wisdom, Buller himself was tense as he watched them make their way toward the seemingly empty hills. After a week of devastating losses, he was still no closer to Ladysmith, and he knew that every move he made, every miscalculation, every slip of the tongue or sword, was being watched not only by the Boers and the British but by most of the Western world.

“You oughtn’t be here,” Lieutenant David Ogilvy, who was in charge of the naval guns, gasped when he saw Buller. “I’m all right, my boy,” Buller replied. Shouting to his men, the shells and bullets pounding the ground so loudly that he could barely be heard above the din, Buller said, “Now, my lads, this is your last chance to save the guns; will any of you volunteer to fetch them?” A tense moment passed, and then one man stood up, a corporal, and with him six more. It was an incredible display of bravery, but it was not enough. There were twelve guns out there, and Buller needed more men if he was to have any hope of retrieving them. Turning to his own staff, which had followed him from Naval Gun Hill, Buller now said, “Some of you go and help.”

As he set out on his horse toward the guns, Roberts looked back at the British lines, laughing as he swung his riding stick in circles, trying to persuade his horse to plunge into the barrage of bullets. “He was in the full exhilaration,” Atkins wrote, “that is to say, of a man riding to hounds.”

In the silence, with the full brunt of the South African sun now bearing down on the wounded and the dead, the men finally found Freddy Roberts. He was unconscious, but still alive. He had been shot three times, once in the stomach, and he was lying alone on the veld. His friends rushed out to him, dragged him to shelter, and used his coat to shade his head from the merciless sun. He would die two days later.

If there was anything Britons knew how to do, it was to show courage in the face of tragedy.

For this far-distant war, a war of the unseen foe and of the murderous ambuscade, there were so many volunteers that the authorities were embarrassed by their numbers and their pertinacity,” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote. “It was a stimulating sight to see those long queues of top-hatted, frock-coated young men who waited their turn for the orderly room with as much desperate anxiety as if hard fare, a veld bed, and Boer bullets were all that life had that was worth the holding.”

The only exception to the seemingly endless series of disasters that had befallen the British Empire since the beginning of the war was the escape of Winston Churchill.

He had reminded the world what it meant to be a Briton—resilient, resourceful and, even in the face of extreme danger, utterly unruffled.

In fact, three thousand copies of Churchill’s picture had been printed for distribution so that any Boer could recognize the fugitive instantly.

The victory at Omdurman was disgraced by the inhuman slaughter of the wounded,” he had written to his mother at the time, “and Kitchener is responsible for this.

As much as he loved Pamela, Churchill was shocked that she would think for a moment that he would abandon the war. “I read with particular attention your letter advising and urging me to come home,” he wrote to her. “But surely you would not imagine that it would be possible for me to leave the scene of war. … I should forfeit my self respect forever if I tried to shield myself like that behind an easily obtained reputation for courage. … I am really enjoying myself immensely and if I live I shall look back with much pleasure upon all this.”