Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill (10 page)

It had not taken him long to fall hopelessly in love. Everyone could see the signs except, perhaps, Pamela herself, who had so many admirers she was used to being more vigorously pursued. “
Why do you say I am incapable of affection,” Churchill, offended, had demanded in a letter to her the previous year. “Perish the thought. I love one above all others. And I shall be constant. I am no fickle gallant capriciously following the fancy of the hour. My love is deep and strong. Nothing will ever change it.” The month before war had been declared, Pamela had gone to Germany, leaving Winston bereft. “
I am lonely without her,” he had admitted to his mother. “The more I know of her, the more she astonishes me. No one would understand her as I do.”

Jennie, however, believed she did understand Pamela, all too well. In late August, she had shared with Winston a conversation she had had with Baron Revelstoke, who had told her that Pamela had broken his brother’s heart and ruined his career. Churchill had quickly leaped to her defense, insisting that “
while not madly in love” with the baron’s brother, Pamela “respected his devotion” and would even have married him. “Now,” he shrugged, “she loves me.”

Two days later, Jennie received another troubling report about Pamela, this time from a much closer source: the young man with whom she was romantically involved, George Cornwallis-West. “
Jack [Winston’s brother] dined with me last night, and opened his heart to me about Miss Pamela,” George wrote to her late that summer. “He doesn’t often talk so I was pleased with his confidence. He doesn’t think much of her, in fact he dislikes her, he says she is such an awful humbug, and is the same to three other men as she
is to Winston. He tells me they went about at Blenheim as if they were engaged, in fact several people asked if it was so. I am sorry for Winston, as I don’t think he would be happy with her. I can’t make her out. She is certain[ly] very clever, in a doubtful sense of the word.”

When it came to taking advice, however, especially from George, Churchill was his mother’s son. He was defiantly determined to decide for himself where he would go, what he would do and whom he would love. The question, anyway, like everything else in his life, had temporarily been cast aside. Nothing, not even Pamela, had been able to compete for his attention since war had been declared.

Churchill was no longer a soldier, but he was still a writer, and a very good one. It had been that skill alone that had earned him a ticket to South Africa and an excuse to be near the fighting. As war had grown increasingly more likely, the most powerful publishers in London had begun rounding up their best foreign correspondents and scouring the city for new ones. Again and again, among the country’s most cutthroat newspapermen, one name in particular had risen to the fore: Winston Churchill.

In fact, a bidding war for Churchill had begun before the Boers had even sent their ultimatum.
On September 18, nearly a month before war had seemed inevitable, Churchill had received a telegram from Sir Alfred Harmsworth. Harmsworth had built Amalgamated Press, then the world’s largest periodicals empire, and was the publisher of two of the most popular newspapers in the country—the
Daily Mail
and the
Daily Mirror
. He wanted Churchill to work for him as a correspondent in South Africa, and he was willing to pay him handsomely to do it.

Churchill, however, being Churchill, believed he could do better and was not shy about taking matters into his own hands.
As soon as he received Harmsworth’s telegram, he had turned around and wired
it to a man named Oliver Borthwick, who was the editor of the
Morning Post
. A highly respected newspaper known for its coverage of foreign affairs, the
Morning Post
prided itself on having the best correspondents, regardless of their background, or even their sex. Nearly twenty years earlier, Borthwick’s father, Algernon, who looked much like Father Christmas in a three-piece suit, had famously hired the first female war correspondent, Lady Florence Dixie, to cover the First Boer War.
Responding immediately to Churchill’s telegram, Borthwick had promised him £1,000 (approximately $150,000 today) for just four months’ work, “shore to shore,” and another £200 per month after that. It was an offer that not only eclipsed Harmsworth’s but would make Churchill the best-paid war correspondent in England.

The fact that newspaper publishers had been fighting over Churchill was all the more impressive considering the competition.
Not only would more journalists cover this war than any before it, but among them would be some of the most famous names in literature.
Edgar Wallace, who would get the last scoop of the war for the
Daily Mail
, would go on to write hundreds of short stories, more than a dozen plays and 175 books, many of which were so popular his publisher claimed that a quarter of all books read in England at the time were written by him.

Rudyard Kipling, who would be covering the war for the
Friend
, a newspaper based in South Africa, was already a household name. He had published
The Jungle Book
five years earlier and, soon after, had written one of his most famous poems—“If,” which was inspired by events leading up to the Boer War and offers some of the best-known advice in the English language: “If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, /…you’ll be a Man, my son.”
Kipling would also raise £250,000 (more than $30 million today) for the British troops with his poem “The Absent-Minded Beggar,” which Harmsworth, always looking for an opportunity, had commissioned. After naming a medal after the poem, and hiring Sir Arthur Sullivan to set it
to music, Harmsworth sold copies for a shilling each, two pence of which went to the
Daily Mail
’s Kipling Poem War Fund.

The war had also attracted to it a rather pompous-looking physician turned writer who had created one of the most famous detectives—arguably
the
most famous—in literary history. Arthur Conan Doyle had published his first Sherlock Holmes story, “A Study in Scarlet,” in
Beeton’s Christmas Annual
twelve years earlier. The popularity of this story, along with the series of Sherlock Holmes mysteries that followed in the
Strand
magazine, had allowed him to give up his medical practice and begin writing full-time. He planned to go to South Africa in the capacity of a doctor, volunteering at Langman Hospital in Bloemfontein, but he would end up writing one of the best-known histories of the war:
The Great Boer War
.

Although the field was crowded with not just good writers but legendary ones, Borthwick knew what he was doing in choosing Churchill. He had hired him to cover the war in the Sudan, the dispatches for which had been turned into
The River War
, and he knew that in his reporting Churchill was not just relentless but fearless, even to the point of recklessness. His writing, moreover, had already been hailed as “
exceedingly brilliant,” and praised by everyone from the prime minister to Arthur Conan Doyle. Conan Doyle, in fact, would later refer to Churchill as “
the greatest living master of English prose.”

Churchill could not, in all modesty, disagree. He had long had, as he told his mother, “
faith in my pen.” The success of his books—the most recent of which the
Daily Mail
had called “
an astonishing triumph”—had only strengthened his already substantial confidence. Churchill was no hack, and he knew it. “
My literary talents,” he wrote soberly, “do not exist in my imagination alone.”

Churchill understood that the work of a war correspondent was among the most dangerous he could find, but although he was willing to risk his life in South Africa, he could not see any point in being uncomfortable while he was there.
He had gone shopping for his wartime equipment not in army supply stores or back-alley bargain bins but on Bond Street, the most famous and expensive shopping
district in London. Churchill had purchased what seemed to him to be the necessities for war.
At the famous optical shop W. Callaghan & Co., he had chosen a compass set in bronze and a carefully crafted saddleback leather case with a pigskin lining, spending, or pledging to spend—because it was a transaction between gentlemen, payment was to be delivered at some unspecified time in the future—£3.15.6, approximately $500 in today’s money. That bill, however, paled in comparison to his tally at Randolph Payne & Sons, where he had ordered a dizzying array of fine wines, spirits and liqueurs: six bottles each of an 1889 Vin d’Ay Sec, a light port, French vermouth and very old eau-de-vie landed 1866; eighteen bottles of St.-Émilion; another eighteen of ten-year-old scotch whiskey and a dozen of Rose’s cordial lime juice. The final order, which cost more than £27 (roughly $4,000 today), had been packed and delivered directly to the
Dunottar Castle
.

Although he had little money to spare, Churchill would not even have considered traveling without his valet, Thomas Walden. Walden, who had once worked for Randolph Churchill and had enlisted in the army as a private, was to be Winston’s soldier-servant, or batman, a term that derived from the French
bât
, or packsaddle. Most officers had their own batman to press their uniforms and deliver their orders to subordinates, but few had highly trained professional valets who had traveled the world with a single aristocratic family, as Walden had.

No one aboard the
Dunottar Castle
, however, from the cook to the commander in chief, was more serious than Churchill about the work he was there to do. Neither was he about to let rolling seas, which, just a few days into the trip, had already made him “
grievously sick,” keep him from it. As soon as he was able to stagger onto deck, Churchill set out in search of General Buller.

Buller could usually be found on the deck, wearing a dark suit and a flat cap and sitting on a fragile-looking wicker chair. The general
seemed to him to be “
v[er]y amiable” and, naturally, “well disposed towards me,” Churchill wrote. At the same time, Buller was famously difficult to get to know. Taciturn to a fault, he spent more time grunting and nodding during a conversation than actually talking. He was, Churchill wrote, “
a characteristic British personality. He looked stolid. He said little, and what he said was obscure.”

Fortunately, Churchill had enough to say for both of them and, on any subject, including the war, was more willing to share his opinions than the general and all of his advisers combined. Despite the fact that they were sailing to a war that had already begun, there seemed to be no sense of urgency among Buller and his men. “
The idea that time played any vital part in such a business seemed to be entirely absent,” Churchill marveled. “Absolute tranquillity lapped the peaceful ship….Buller trod the deck each day with a sphinx-like calm.”

Churchill had encountered this remarkably unhurried attitude toward the war well before he had climbed aboard the
Dunottar Castle
, and it was most conspicuous within the highest ranks of the British government. A few days before setting sail, he had called on Joseph Chamberlain, the secretary of state for the colonies, at his home in Prince’s Gardens. Remembering Churchill fondly after their long talk on the Thames that summer, Chamberlain had agreed to write a letter of introduction for him to use in South Africa and, offering him a cigar, had strolled through the garden with him, smoking and discussing the coming war with the Boers. Finally, he had invited his young friend to ride with him to the War Office. During their fifteen-minute cab ride, Chamberlain had confided to Churchill that he believed that, by waiting until now to leave for South Africa, Buller was taking a serious risk and might miss the war altogether. He “
may well be too late,” Chamberlain warned. “He would have been wiser to have gone out earlier.”

Chamberlain was far from alone in his belief that the war would be short-lived. Most Britons were confident that it would be over before the end of the year, in time for them to savor their victory over
their Christmas pudding. The only surprise was that the Boers, weak and insignificant as they were, had dared to challenge the British Empire at all. When they had sent their ultimatum, it had immediately been dismissed among the British press as an “
infatuated step,” an “extravagant farce.”