Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill (13 page)

THE BLACKEST OF ALL DAYS

O
n October 29, the day before the Battle of Ladysmith, the passengers of the
Dunottar Castle
, their long journey nearly over, sighted another vessel on the horizon. It was a large steamship, the
Australasian
, heading away from South Africa with soldiers aboard and bearing, Churchill excitedly wrote, “
who should say what tidings.”
Desperate for news of the war, the men rushed to the decks, hanging over the railings with their telescopes, binoculars and cameras trained on the ship as the distance between them quickly closed. Even Buller stepped onto the lower deck and peered at the ship through his field glasses.

When the two ships came within two hundred yards of each other, the men on the
Australasian
gave their fellow soldiers a raucous three-cheer salute. What happened next, however, sent an electric thrill of shock through the passengers of the
Dunottar Castle
. “It was,” Atkins, the reporter for the
Manchester Guardian
, would later write, “
the most dramatic encounter at sea that any of us could call to mind, or was likely to experience again.”

As the ship passed by, the men on its decks, too far away to be heard, slid onto the ratlines a long black board with words written on it in bright white chalk:

BOERS DEFEATED

THREE BATTLES

PENN SYMONS KILLED

The men surrounding Churchill gasped and took a collective, reeling step back from the bulwark. The fighting had already begun, and it had been fierce. “
Under Heaven,” Churchill wrote, “we have held our own,” but the shock of Penn Symons’s death reverberated throughout the ship. If the general, who had had “no misfortunes” in India, whose men, even his rear guards, had always come “safely into camp,” had fallen to the Boers, how many more had shared his fate?

As the ship swiftly disappeared from sight, taking with it the answers to their many, desperate questions, Churchill, never shy about making his opinion known, openly complained that “
it would only have taken ten minutes to have stopped the ship and got proper information.” Buller, with “characteristic phlegm,” dryly replied that it was “the weakness of youth to be impatient. We should know everything that had happened quite soon enough.” Churchill, however, although not even a soldier, let alone the commander in chief, remained “impenitent and unconvinced.”

The next day, when the
Dunottar Castle
arrived at Cape Town’s Table Bay, and waited to be pulled into the harbor, Churchill watched hungrily as a tugboat ran alongside the ship and a man stepped aboard. He was, in Churchill’s words, not just any man, but a “
Man Who Knew.” It was the moment Churchill had been waiting for since leaving Southampton two weeks earlier, and he was determined to extract every last bit of information there was.

Churchill was not alone in his impatience. Surrounded by nearly three hundred soldiers and journalists, the man was practically chased across the oiled floorboards until he reached the ladder leading to the hurricane deck. Quickly climbing the rungs, he chose a step halfway up and took a seat. Only then, with an “odd quiver of excitement in his voice,” did he finally tell his story.

While his audience stood transfixed, the man described one battle after another that had already been fought between the Boers and the
British, every major battle but Ladysmith, which was taking place as he spoke. Finally, after listening to tales of “stubborn, well-fought fights with honour for both sides, triumph for neither,” one man in the audience asked the question that was on all of their minds. “Tell us about the losses,” he said. “Who are killed and wounded.”

It was a stunningly long list, Churchill would later remember, a list “of the best officers in the world.” As the names of friends, mentors, fathers and brothers were read out loud, the men who had gathered eagerly at the foot of the ladder began to turn, one by one, and hurry away, overcome with emotion that they did not want their fellow soldiers to see. Churchill himself knew several of the men on the list—“all lying under the stony soil or filling the hospitals at Pietermaritzburg and Durban”—but one name in particular leaped out at him with a painful jolt of recognition: Aylmer Haldane.

Churchill had met Haldane the year before, when he was trying to persuade Sir William Lockhart, then commander in chief of Her Majesty’s army in India, to let him fight on the northwest frontier. Haldane, who was Lockhart’s aide-de-camp, had at first been “none too cordial,” Churchill remembered, but for a reason that Churchill could not quite understand, his attitude had abruptly and completely changed. “I don’t remember what I said nor how I stated my case,” Churchill later wrote, “but I must have hit the bull’s eye more than once. For after about half an hour’s walking up and down on the gravel-path Captain Haldane said, ‘Well, I’ll go and ask the Commander-in-Chief and see what he says.’ ” Churchill had continued pacing back and forth by himself until Haldane returned with news that Lockhart had decided to add another orderly officer to his staff, and Churchill was to fill the position.

After that first meeting, Churchill had joined Haldane every day on his morning walk, and a friendship had quickly developed between the two young men. Although he thought Haldane a “clever, daring, conscientious & ambitious fellow,” Churchill was baffled by his willingness not just to help him but to go out of his way to open doors and clear paths. “The success which has attended my coup is in some measure I feel, deserved,” Churchill had written to his mother after
winning the assignment with Lockhart, “but I have received a most remarkable assistance from Captain Haldane—the general’s ADC. I have never met this man before and I am at a loss to know why he should have espoused my cause—with so strange an earnestness.”

Despite his skepticism, Churchill had not hesitated to take advantage of the situation, and to ask Haldane for any favors he thought might be within his power to grant. “
I am entitled to a medal and two clasps for my gallantry for the hardships & dangers I encountered [while in India],” he had written to Haldane soon after leaving for the Sudan. “I am possessed of a keen desire to mount the ribbon on my breast while I face the Dervishes here. It may induce them to pause….If you will do me a favor and materially add to my joy as well as to my gratitude, please write me a letter to say exactly when I may consider my medal as issued & enclose in the envelope a little slip of the ribbon.”

Although, in the intervening year, Churchill and Haldane had both moved quickly between countries and continents, and Churchill had left the army for his political campaign, they had somehow stayed in touch. Churchill had sent Haldane a copy of
The River War
, had made plans to see him again—“
We shall meet anon. Piccadilly or the Pyramids”—and had even introduced him to his mother. But, having grown used to encountering people who were offended by his brash pride and obvious ambition and who wished to knock the rungs out of the ladder he was so determined to climb, he continued to wonder why Haldane would wish to help him, and ask for nothing in return. The only answer that made sense to him was that it must be the strength of his own résumé. “
My idea is that my reputation—for whatever it may be worth—has interested him,” Churchill had speculated to his mother. “Of course you will destroy this letter and show it to no one…or I may be found a fool as well as an ingrate.”

Churchill had known that Haldane was already in Africa, but until that moment he had known nothing more. Even if his friend was not yet “lying under the stony soil,” Churchill was not likely to see him, or be able to rely on his help, which he needed now more than ever. As a noncombatant, unattached to a regiment and with no
official status beyond his assignment with the
Morning Post
and his letter of introduction from Chamberlain, he would have a difficult time getting anywhere near the front, which was exactly where he planned to be. This was quickly shaping up into a war that not only would sell newspapers but could make heroes out of men, and members of Parliament out of heroes.

The next morning, however, when the ship finally docked in Cape Town, Churchill immediately realized that he was not going anywhere quickly with Buller. As he had learned early in his military career, although “
the picture of war moves very swiftly,” the British army does not.
In the midst of the pomp and circumstance that surrounded Buller’s arrival—a thundering salute from the harbor batteries, the streets lined with bunting-covered homes and cheering expatriates—the sluggish, overburdened machine that was the British military struggled to shake off the lethargy of the long voyage and shudder to life.

Even for England, used to dispersing its troops to the farthest reaches of its empire, it was no small undertaking to fight a war some seven thousand miles from home.
In the month of October 1899 alone, including the men that Churchill was accompanying on the
Dunottar Castle
, the British Empire sent nearly 30,000 soldiers and officers to southern Africa. By March 1900, more than 160,000 men—an average of over 1,000 a day—would set sail from either Great Britain or Ireland. And that was just the troops.

In comparison to the astonishingly mobile Boers, who were able to wage war with little more than men, horses and Mausers, and to move from battlefield to battlefield at a moment’s notice, the British army moved at a glacial pace, weighed down by the sheer number of its possessions.
As, one after another, ships left Southampton, their cargo holds were filled with thousands of firearms—carbines, pistols and rifles with long bayonets—as well as huge pieces of artillery, everything from fifteen-pounders, which took their name from the
fifteen-pound shrapnel shells they shot, to short-barreled howitzers, which lobbed gunpowder-filled cast-iron shells. There were hundreds of thousands of water bottles and bars of soap, thousands of tents and wagons and hundreds of camp kettles.

Even clothing its men was a complicated and time-consuming task for the British army. While the Boers were lucky to have any coat at all, Her Majesty’s forces had the latest in rain gear to protect them from the South African summer downpours. The British clothier Thomas Burberry had developed a new fabric called gabardine, a chemically processed wool that could repel rain and was resistant to tears. The soldiers in the Boer War would be the first to wear jackets made from this fabric, which they called Burberrys. 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.

British troops were no longer wearing their famous red coats, which had prudently been abandoned in favor of khaki. To the Boers, however, even the khaki uniforms seemed elaborate, if not ridiculous. British officers wore high, peaked pith helmets that shaded their eyes from the sun but were hot and uncomfortable and made easy targets for Boer sharpshooters. Their khaki jackets were crisscrossed with leather belts and straps—brown, white or black, depending on their regiment—that held everything from knapsacks to ammunition pouches to round, wooden water casks with pewter stoppers, the perfect breeding ground for disease. The Scottish Highland troops still wore kilts, but they were now required to wrap a khaki apron over them. They would also quickly learn to wear thick hose over their bare legs to protect them from the blistering South African sun.

When Deneys Reitz’s commando had entered Dundee in the wake of Yule’s frantic departure, he was stunned by the multitude of supplies that had been left behind, extravagant luxuries that he and his fellow burghers could not even imagine, much less expect
to be issued. “
Knowing the meagre way in which our men were fed and equipped I was astonished at the numberless things an English army carried with it in the field,” he wrote. “There were mountains of luxurious foods, comfortable camp-stretchers and sleeping bags, and there was even a gymnasium, and a profusion of other things too numerous to mention.”

To carry all these supplies, the British army had bought £645,000 worth of mules and oxen, ordered just weeks earlier. To carry their men, they had been forced to ship hundreds of thousands of horses to southern Africa, not just from England, but from Europe, North and South America and Australia. For the horses, the journey by sea was even more miserable than it was for Churchill.
In an attempt to keep them calm and less inclined to kick as they were forced onto the ships, they were kept “rather low in flesh,” deprived of food and water for hours before embarking. Their handlers kept the horses’ shoes on so that they had a better chance of staying upright in rough seas as they slid and skidded in their wooden stalls, but also because it was assumed that they would be mounted as soon as the ship landed, which they always were.
Those that survived the journey had little hope of returning home alive after the war. In fact, 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.