Gandhi & Churchill (22 page)

“Nothing looks more formidable and impressive than an armored train,” Winston wrote, “but nothing is in fact more vulnerable and helpless.” The long line of armor-plated railway cars with the engine in the middle set out before dawn in a fierce downpour. The weather, however, cleared, and after chugging fourteen miles out of Estcourt they stopped to check the tracks in a narrow defile. Suddenly Churchill and Haldane realized that the hills around and behind them, overlooking the rail line, were swarming with Boers.

The enemy opened fire with rifles and artillery. A shell exploded over Winston’s head—“my first experience with shrapnel,” he wrote later laconically, “and almost my last.”
²⁸
The train kicked into reverse but had to go back over a blind curve where the Boers had rolled a boulder onto the tracks. The rear armored truck was knocked on its side, and two more went off the rails, blocking any escape. Churchill, Haldane, and their men were trapped.

They had no time to think. Winston jumped down and scrambled back to the engine. The civilian driver had been grazed in the head by flying shrapnel and was not inclined to put himself in danger again, but Winston persuaded him to get back in the cab by repeating the old and transparently untrue army axiom, “No one gets wounded twice in the same day.”
²⁹
Then Winston tried to round up men to dislodge the derailed cars and clear the track, even as Boer bullets whizzed and shells exploded all around him.

The Dubliners set down their rifles to push over the disabled cars. “The enemy, relieved of our counter-fire,” as Winston described it, “were now plainly visible in large numbers on the face of the hill, firing furiously.”
³⁰
At last the track was clear. Winston scrambled back to the train engine, which had filled up with wounded men, and ordered the driver to back up slowly. But the Boers, sensing the train was trying to get away, redoubled their fire, scattering soldiers in all directions. “Order and control vanished…The engine, increasing its pace,” raced away and before Winston could get the driver to stop, he had left the Dubliners some three hundred yards behind.

Churchill ordered the driver to wait, while he set out on foot to find Haldane and his men, not knowing they had already surrendered. Suddenly two Boers appeared. Winston turned and ran back for the engine. The Boers’ shots flew past his head with a peculiar sound, he remembered, like “two soft kisses sucking in the air.” He dropped to the ground but could find no cover in the narrow railway cutting. After dodging a few more bullets, he scrambled up the six-foot bank to escape.

A solitary horseman came from nowhere, cutting him off. Winston reached for his trusty Mauser pistol, but it was gone, left in the engine cab while he was trying to clear the tracks. There was nothing left to do but throw up his hands: “thereupon my captor lowered his rifle and beckoned me across to him.” Minutes later he joined Haldane and his fifty-six unwounded men as prisoners of war, wearily trudging away into captivity. Later they even met the Boer commando who had put the boulder on the tracks. He was “a dear old gentleman…[who] hoped we bore no malice. We replied by no means, and that we would do the same for him with pleasure some day.”
³¹

Winston would spend almost a month in a POW camp, a converted States Model School outside Pretoria, with a host of other British officers, including Haldane. The Boers were fascinated by their prominent young guest. A steady stream of generals, journalists, and dignitaries, including the American consul, came to see and interview him. Yet for Churchill, captivity was “one long boredom from dawn until slumber,” and he and his fellow prisoners “thought of nothing else but freedom, and wracked our brains to discover a way to escape.”
³²

Winston did try the legal way out, protesting that he was a journalist noncombatant, and Haldane even signed a statement that Winston had taken no part in the battle (which was hardly true). The Boer commander turned him down. Still, Churchill remained upbeat.
³³
He was thrilled when newspaper reports of his capture also told of his courage in clearing the track and commandeering the engine. His reputation had been made. Not even spending his twenty-fifth birthday in prison could dampen his spirits, or lessen his impatience to get away.

Finally, on December 12, 1899, the Boer commander relented and signed an order for Churchill’s release. Early the next morning a Boer orderly came to Churchill’s bunk to rouse him, but there was no response from under the covers.

Finally the man reached down to shake him awake—only to realize the bed had been stuffed with pillows. The very night the release order had been signed, their prominent prisoner had slipped over the fence and escaped.
³⁴

The plan for escape had been Haldane’s, not Churchill’s. In fact, if Haldane and his coconspirator, a burly sergeant in the Imperial Light Horse named Brockie, had had their way, he wouldn’t have been going along at all. Brockie considered Churchill a serious liability, with his bad shoulder and his face known everywhere from the newspapers. When Winston still insisted they count him in, Haldane persuaded Brockie that Churchill would do all right.

The trio had hoped to jump the fence at an unguarded corner behind the camp latrine on the night of December 11, but the unexpected appearance of a Boer sentry forced them to abandon the attempt. They tried again the next night, but the same thing happened. Brockie and Haldane then retired into the latrine; Winston waited outside. When they returned, the sentry had vanished. So had Winston. When the Boer had turned his back and moved away from the fence, Winston had seen his chance and jumped over, leaving his two comrades behind.

“Your trusted friend,” Brockie kept repeating in disgust, “a nice kind of gentleman.” Other officers in the camp were furious, too; any other escape plans were useless once Winston’s absence was noticed and security tightened.
³⁵
Still, without Brockie, who spoke Afrikaans, Winston would have had no hope of buying food or supplies without detection, and it was nearly three hundred miles to Delagoa Bay in Portuguese East Africa, and safety.

“But when hope had departed,” Winston would later write, “fear had gone as well. I formed a plan.”
³⁶
Using the cover of night and the stars to guide him, he struck out for a railway line in order to smuggle himself onto a train that would carry him eastward to the port of Lourenço Marques. For almost a week he hid in empty railway cars and in a house belonging to an English employee of the Delagoa Bay Railroad.

Finally, on December 19, even as the Boers were circulating wanted posters looking for “an Englishman, 25 years old, about 5 feet 8 inches tall, average build, walks with a slight stoop…cannot pronounce the letter ‘s,’” Winston’s English protector slipped him onto a train car full of wool bales that carried him across the Portuguese border. Later the next day he strolled into the British consulate at Lourenço Marques and ordered a much-needed bath.
³⁷

Churchill was an instant celebrity. The story of his daring escape (no one had yet heard Haldane’s version) and of life on the lam was something out of a fictional thriller; combined with his heroism on the armored train, it revealed him as a man equipped with audacity, courage, and initiative—along with a strong dose of luck. Winston’s heroic story was especially welcome when all the other news out of the war was so glum. On the fifteenth Sir Redvers Buller had suffered a humiliating defeat at Colenso, losing eleven hundred men and ten artillery pieces, making him the first British general to lose a gun in more than a century.
³⁸
Winston Churchill gave the British public something to cheer about, and he was delighted to help lead the cheering.

On December 23, 1899, he arrived by steamer in Durban harbor, not far from where Gandhi had disembarked two years earlier, but to a very different reception. When he stepped forward from the captain’s bridge, the crowd that jammed the quayside raised “a rousing cheer,” the
Natal Mercury
reported, and everyone recognized “his round boyish face shielded by a large brimmed hat.” Winston made an impromptu speech, saying that the Boers’ effort to drive the British out of South Africa would fail. When Britain finally prevailed, he concluded, “you will see in this country the beginning of a new era…an era of peace, purity, liberty, equality, and good government in South Africa.”
³⁹

Followed by loud cheers and cries of “God bless you, my boy!” he set off for the town hall and then to the railway station, where a triumphal procession escorted his rickshaw behind a huge Union Jack. The crowd was still cheering when his train at last rolled out of sight. There would be no stopping him now. A couple of months later, during the relief of Ladysmith, a British officer saw a young man in a South African Light Horse uniform talking with an infuriatingly patronizing air to the commanding general, Sir George White.

“Who on earth is that?” the officer said when the young man left. “That’s Randolph Churchill’s son Winston,” White replied. “I don’t like the fellow, but he’ll be Prime Minister of England one day.”
⁴⁰

Winston stayed another seven months in South Africa, where he witnessed some of the war’s bloodiest fighting. In January a reorganized British Army under General Roberts tried to lift the siege of Ladysmith by breaking through a range of hills to the city’s south, at Spion Kop. Churchill, now with the volunteer South African Light Horse but still the
Morning Post
’s star reporter, galloped out to watch Major-General Edward Woodgate’s brigade push forward into the Boer trenches and over the summit.

The next morning the Boers counterattacked. “A fierce and furious shelling opened forthwith on the summit,” Winston told his readers, causing many casualties and mortally wounding General Woodgate. “No words in these days of extravagant expression,” he wrote extravagantly, “can do justice to the glorious endurance which the English regiments—for they were all English—displayed through the long dragging hours of shell fire,” which dotted the hillside with chains of smoke and dust.
⁴¹
Down the hill came a steady stream of wounded, including General Woodgate on a
dooli
or stretcher. As Winston surveyed the scene with his telescope, he would never know that the slender khaki-clad figure holding the general’s dooli was Mohandas Gandhi.

When Gandhi volunteered for ambulance service, the initial reaction had been incredulity, even derision. “You Indians know nothing of war,” a Natal legislator told him. “You would have to be taken care of, instead of being a help to us.”
⁴²

It was a standard assumption of British imperialism that Hindus, unlike the Muslim “martial races,” were unfit for a manly life of danger and exertion. Part of the reason, it was believed, was their vegetarian diet—mere “slops,” as Churchill might have said. In fact, Gandhi could recite a Gujarati ditty from his childhood that used vegetarianism to explain the entire history of the Raj:

Behold the mighty Englishman

He rules the Indian small,

Because being a meat-eater

He stands five cubits tall.

Gandhi was determined to prove the myth wrong. His ambulance drivers and medics were not just going to serve as hospital orderlies. He wanted them on the front line risking their lives alongside Britons, to show they had the same “pluck, determination, and bravery” as the Boers and other white men.
⁴³
He got his volunteers medically certified as fit for service at the front and had Dr. Booth give them a quick training in battlefield medicine.

Gandhi had found eleven hundred Indian volunteers. They were a hodgepodge of ethnicity, religion, and caste. All but three hundred were indentured laborers, and the rest came from similarly humble backgrounds. Gandhi’s merchant friends proved generous with their money but found excuses not to risk either their lives or those of their children. Gandhi did not care. The men under his command were born and bred to endure hardship; many of them were Christians, with whom Gandhi had enjoyed working at Booth’s hospital.
⁴⁴
Gandhi believed they would all do him, and the Indian nation, proud.

Their first task was to tend the casualties after the defeat at Colenso on December 15. One of the wounded whom Gandhi personally handled was the only son of General Frederick Roberts, Randolph Churchill’s mentor on Indian matters—ironically, the man who, more than any other, had institutionalized the notion of Hindus as the “nonfighting races.” Now General Roberts was on his way to assume overall command in South Africa. Lieutenant Roberts would die of his wounds just five days before his father arrived.

Gandhi had been impressed with young Roberts and the other English soldiers, who willingly shared their canteens with their dark-skinned companions. “There was, shall I say, a spirit of brotherhood irrespective of color or creed,” he wrote later, as well as the spirit of the
Bhagavad Gita,
in which able men did their duty by cheerfully accepting danger.
⁴⁵
So while Winston Churchill was enthusing to his
Morning Post
readers about how war brought out the best characteristics of the “strong races,” another correspondent found Gandhi, after a day’s hard work, crouching beside his ambulance and eating a regulation army biscuit, looking “stoical in his bearing, cheerful, and confident.”
⁴⁶

The British Army had been at first reluctant to send the Indians into action, for fear of inflaming the Boers’ racial feelings.
^*26
But the heavy fighting at Spion Kop forced the high command to drop its scruples, and Gandhi and his stretcher-bearers were ordered in.