Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill (21 page)

Although it was painfully apparent that there was nothing they could do to salvage the first three trucks, if they could use the engine as a ram to shove the car in front of it off the tracks, they might be able to escape. The third truck was wedged between the second truck, which was on its side, and the engine, but the tracks themselves seemed to be intact, and there were enough men still alive and unwounded to give them a glimmer of hope, however small. “
This arrangement gave us the best possible chance of safety,” Churchill wrote, although “the position appeared quite hopeless.”

Turning on his heels, Churchill ran back to his own truck and, shouting to Haldane through one of the narrow, vertical gun slots, explained the situation and the plan he had devised. Although the role Churchill was suggesting for himself was a military one, Haldane immediately agreed to it. “
I knew him well enough,” Haldane wrote, “to realise that he was not the man to stand quietly by and look on in a critical situation.” He also knew that if anyone could free the engine, Churchill could. In the meantime, Haldane told his friend, he would do what he could to distract the Boers.

Even hunkered down inside their armored car, Haldane and his men were in as much danger as Churchill. Although in theory the metal sides would shield them from the Boer onslaught, the men were well aware that the protection they offered was little more than an illusion. “
Any direct shell must pierce it like paper and kill everyone,” Churchill himself acknowledged. “It seemed almost safer outside.”

As if to prove that theory, soon after Churchill left, a shell struck the car, passing clean through the side with little more than a hitch in its trajectory. By an incredible stroke of luck, it did not explode until it continued through to the other side, but it was to be only the first of many. Three more shells tore through the armor, and several more exploded just outside, each time landing with such a concussive
force that they slammed the men onto their backs. They were able to answer the Boer fire with three rounds from their field gun, but before they could fire a fourth, another shell struck the gun directly, and it, along with its smashed-to-splinters base, fell completely out of the truck. Shaken and terrified, the men struggled to maintain their positions. “
It took more than verbal persuasion to keep the loopholes of the wagon continuously manned,” Haldane admitted. “I felt that every moment must be our last.”

The enemy quickly surrounded the wrecked train on three sides, intensifying their barrage as the men frantically sought cover. For the next hour, as he ran the length of the train, trying to help free it, or stood in the open, instructing the terrified driver, Churchill was constantly in the line of fire. Had the platelayers not already been dead or running for their lives, and their tools scattered across the veld, caught in bushes or slipping down sandy holes, his job might have been easier. As it was, the work of clearing the line was one of the most difficult and, to Churchill’s mind, thrilling moments of his young life, and he rose to the challenge as though he had been waiting for just such a disaster, which in many ways he had. “
I know myself pretty well and am not blind to the tawdry and dismal side of my character,” he had written to his mother from India two years earlier, “but if there is one situation in which I do not feel ashamed of myself it is in the field.”

Although Churchill had been called many things—opportunist, braggart, blowhard—no one had ever questioned his bravery. “
Winston is like a strong wire that, stretched, always springs back. He prospers under attack, enmity and disparagement,” Atkins would later write of him. “He lives on excitement….The more he scents frustration the more he has to fight for; the greater the obstacles, the greater the triumph.”

Surrounded by screaming shells and deafening explosions, dead and dismembered men, desperation and almost certain failure,
Churchill, eyes flashing, cheeks flushed, began shouting orders. The first thing they had to do was uncouple the second and third trucks, and then drag the third car, which was half on and half off the rails, back until it could be pushed off the tracks altogether. Although the job seemed fairly straightforward, it was anything but. As useless as the armored trucks were when it came to repelling shells, they were unmanageably heavy, and it took several attempts, the engine’s wheels spinning, skidding and squealing as it tried to pull the deadweight, before they had moved the car back far enough that Churchill could call for volunteers. He asked for twenty men and got nine, but they were enough. Together, with help from the engine, and under constant fire, they were finally able to push the car off the rails.

There was an exhilarating moment of triumph, followed, devastatingly fast, by utter disbelief. Although the tender could finally pass the derailed car, the engine, which was about six inches wider, could not. It was, Churchill would later write, “
one of the bitterest disappointments of my life.” It was a matter of only a few inches—the edge of the engine’s footplate catching on the edge of the car—but each time they tried to nudge it farther, it became more and more tightly jammed against the second, overturned truck. They tried again to use men to push it, but despite the incredible risk they ran as they stood fully exposed to Boer fire, they were unable to make any progress.

Terrified that if they pushed too hard they would end up derailing the engine as well, thus destroying any hope they might have had, Churchill repeatedly cautioned the driver to proceed carefully. The Boers, however, who understood now what the British were trying to do, had intensified their fire, directing most of it at the engine. Suddenly one of the shells landed directly on the engine, causing it to burst into flames. In a spasm of reaction, the driver, already in a frenzy of excitement and terror, poured on the steam. “
There was a grinding crash,” Churchill wrote, “the engine staggered, checked, shore forward again until with a clanging, tearing sound it broke past the point of interception, and nothing but the smooth line lay between us and home.”

Churchill would later remember this hour, fraught with danger of the most exceptional and immediate kind, with a fondness usually reserved for moments of the greatest joy and triumph. He would never forget “
the expectation of destruction as a matter of course, the realization of powerlessness, and the alternations of hope and despair,” he later wrote, “with only four inches of twisted iron work to make the difference between danger, captivity, and shame on the one hand—safety, freedom, and triumph on the other.” Although, with the freeing of the engine, the latter outcome now seemed to be a possibility, however remote, they still faced almost insurmountable odds.

The most immediate problem was that in the process of trying to clear the line, someone had uncoupled the engine from the last train car. After all they had endured to move it forward, it was too dangerous to risk moving the engine back again in an attempt to recouple it. Haldane and his men would have to abandon their posts.

Climbing out of his battered truck, Haldane was aghast when he saw the engine. The firebox was in flames, steam pouring out on all sides, but it was all they had. They would have to put the wounded men into and on top of the engine, and those who could still walk would have to try to run alongside it, using it as a shield until they could reach Frere, about half a mile away.

Shouting for Frankland, the young man who had summoned him to Long’s tent the night before, Haldane instructed him to bring the other soldiers. Together they forced as many men onto the engine and tender as could possibly fit. The machine soon looked as though it had been quilted in khaki, with wounded soldiers shoved, stuffed and draped into and over every available space. They were “
standing in the cab, lying on the tender, or clinging to the cowcatcher,” Churchill wrote. “And all this time the shells fell into the wet earth throwing up white clouds, burst with terrifying detonations overhead, or actually struck the engine and the iron wreckage.”

The sound was deafening, and the fire and bright flashes of the exploding shells seemed almost supernatural in the gray morning light. One shell struck the engine’s footplate, which was only about a yard from Churchill’s face, erupting in a flash of yellow so brilliant and blinding he was astonished he was still alive. A black plume of coal filled the air as another shell hit the tender, and then, to Churchill’s horror, a third struck the arm of a young private from the Dublin Fusiliers who was standing next to him. “
The whole arm was smashed to a horrid pulp—bones, muscle, blood, and uniform all mixed together,” he would write years later, still unable to free himself from the sickening memory. “At the bottom hung the hand, unhurt, but swelled instantly to three times its ordinary size.”

In the midst of the chaos, Haldane had climbed onto the engine’s step, perched precariously on the edge to make room for more wounded inside. So tightly packed were they, however, that a man in front of him suddenly lurched back, stepping on Haldane’s fingers. Reflexively jerking his hand away, he lost his grip and, before he could regain his hold, fell backward off the engine onto the wet ground. By the time he had scrambled to his feet, it was too late. The engine had already gone too far, and he could do nothing but watch it move farther and farther out of reach. “
No shouting on my part would have caused the driver to stop,” he wrote. “I prayed fervently that one of the bullets would come my way and put an end to the business.”

The Boers, determined to prevent the enemy from escaping, now directed all their firepower at the engine. As Churchill watched, helpless, the men who had been running alongside it, desperately trying to use it for protection, began to fall under the barrage, dropping suddenly to the ground like birds from the sky. “
Several screamed—this is very rare in war,” Churchill wrote, “and cried for help.” As the wounded or just exhausted began to fall behind, leaving them completely unprotected, Churchill shouted at the driver to slow down.
Even had they been able to creep along, however, he knew that there would have been little they could do to shield the men, and the slaughter continued unabated.

So untenable did the situation become that finally, to Churchill’s outrage, one man, a wounded soldier, pulled his white handkerchief out of his pocket and began to wave it in an unmistakable sign of surrender. Although in the British army surrender was considered a fate worse than death, there had already been an unusually and, to the minds of the British public, appallingly high number in this war. “
What a shame! What a bitter shame for all the camp!” Steevens had written two weeks earlier when he learned of the British surrender after the Battle of Nicholson’s Nek, just outside Ladysmith. “All ashamed for England! Not of her—never that!—but for her.”

Churchill himself had often complained bitterly about the rash of surrenders. In fact, just two days earlier he had written to a friend who was a high-ranking officer that “
there has been a great deal too much surrendering in this war.” He and Haldane had spent many nights in Estcourt, Atkins would later recall, “
crying out about the number of prisoners taken in this campaign.”