Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill (37 page)

Finally, after sitting at the side of the railway tracks for four hours without a single train in sight, Churchill decided that he had no other choice. He would have to abandon his plan and walk. To remain on top of the hill, with nothing more than a bush to hide him when the sun rose, would be tantamount to surrender. His visions of traveling swiftly and securely, burrowed deep inside the snug car of a freight train, vanished.

As soon as he began his journey, Churchill realized that it was going to take even longer than he had imagined. Although the area was sparsely populated, there were occasional huts, kraals and even small towns, all of which he had to trace wide circles around. So brightly did a full moon illuminate the veld that it seemed as though it were the middle of the day, making it far too dangerous for him to follow the train tracks, or even to cross bridges, all of which were guarded by armed Boers, almost certainly sent there for no other reason than to search for Churchill. He crawled through high, wet grass, waded across rivers and splashed through bogs and swamps. Before long, he was soaking wet from the waist down and, as Haldane and Brockie had predicted, completely exhausted after spending the past month doing nothing more physically taxing than slouching in slow circles around the perimeter of the Staats Model School. He still had two hundred miles of enemy territory to cross, and he had no idea how he was going to do it on foot, alone and with nothing to eat.

Forcing himself to keep trudging forward, dodging huts and bridges, crossing rivers, Churchill finally saw a train station up ahead. It was as simple as the towns he had seen, nothing more than a platform surrounded by a handful of buildings and huts. On the sidings, however, were three trains, sitting perfectly still, clearly silenced for
the night. As he stared at the trains, Churchill suddenly understood why he had waited for hours on top of the hill without seeing a single engine. After his escape had become known, the Boers had shut down rail service after sundown.

As the war intensified, even British trains would be forbidden to operate at night. A manual distributed by the Royal Engineers Institute declared that, with very few exceptions, “
no trains are to run after 7 p.m. until daylight and until permission has been given…that traffic may be resumed.” The hope was that the trains would be safer during the day than at night, even though the derailment of Churchill’s armored train had been just one of dozens of attacks that had been carried out by the Boers in the full light of day.

As he stood looking at the trains, remembering the plan that earlier in the night had seemed to be so perfect, so infallible, Churchill was struck by the thought that although he was free, he was still far from master of his own fate. No matter how clever his plans, how “
fine and sure,” there was no guarantee that they would work. On the contrary, they were far more likely to fail. Too much was out of his hands. There were too many factors that he could not control, or even anticipate.

Even the trains before him, “motionless in the moonlight,” held a legion of unanswerable questions. He had no idea where they were going, at what stations they would stop, or when they would be unloaded. He could choose one at random, climb into it and hide, waiting for it to carry him away, but he knew that if he did, he would be taking a tremendous risk. “Once I entered a wagon,” he wrote, “my lot would be cast.” He would have to gather as much information about the trains as he could before boarding one. Even this seemingly simple venture, however, held inestimable risks.

Crouching low, Churchill slipped into the station and wound his way between the trains. He was looking for labels, either on the freight cars themselves or on the goods they held, anything that would tell him where they were headed. As he was studying the markings on one of the trains, he suddenly heard voices, perilously
near. He wasn’t sure, but it sounded as if there were two African men, laughing, and a Boer arguing with someone, or perhaps giving orders. Whoever they were and whatever they were doing there, Churchill had heard enough. As quickly and quietly as he could, he left the station and slid back between the tall stalks of grass, no better off than he had been but at least still unseen.

“
There was nothing for it but to plod on,” he thought, “in an increasingly purposeless and hopeless manner.” Not just the desperateness of his situation but the loneliness of it had begun to bear down on him. As he passed the small houses scattered across the veld, he looked longingly at their windows, glowing with warm, welcoming light. As much as he wished for help, comfort or even simple companionship, he knew that every sign of human habitation or industry he came across “meant only danger to me.”

Even in this remote corner of the Transvaal, Churchill saw signs of human life all around him. In the distance shone the lights of what he guessed must be another train station, either Witbank or Middelburg. Some eight lights, lined up in a row on the wavering horizon, shone like bright, alien eyes. Then he saw something nearer, the softer light of fire. He could see two or three, glowing in the night. He could not tell how far away they were, but he was certain they were not coming from houses. Perhaps, he thought with a rush of hope, they might be the fires of another kraal.

Churchill knew that he would be taking a risk making any human contact, and he had gone to great lengths since his escape to avoid it. But if there was any safe place for him in the hundreds of miles that stretched between Pretoria and Portuguese East Africa, it was an African kraal. “
I had heard,” he recalled, that native Africans “hated the Boers and were friendly to the British.” Although what Churchill had heard was true, it was not because the British had become Africans’ champions or even their protectors. They were simply the lesser of two evils.

More than half a century earlier, the British Empire had done one thing that had redeemed it in the eyes of the Africans, and vilified it in the eyes of the Boers: It had abolished slavery. This decision had ignited fury among the Boers and, just a year after the law was enacted in South Africa, prompted the Great Trek. The famous Scottish missionary and explorer David Livingstone had continually clashed with the Boers over slavery, spending much of his time in Africa fighting what he called the “open sore of the world.” Randolph Churchill had openly criticized Boer treatment of native Africans, writing in his dispatches from the Transvaal that “
the Boer does not recognize that the native is in any degree raised above the level of the lower animals. His undying hatred for the English arises mainly from the fact that the English persist in according at least in theory equal rights to the coloured population as are enjoyed by whites.”

Nearly twenty years later, Lord Randolph’s son had come to the same conclusion. Before reaching the Staats Model School,
Churchill had had a long, spirited conversation with a Boer guard that had quickly turned into a debate about equal rights. The guard was openly disgusted by the rights Britain’s law afforded its black citizens, and astonished that the British expected the Boers to do the same. “Brother! Equal! Ugh!” he had spat. “Free! Not a bit.” Churchill believed he had finally gotten to the heart of what seemed to him to be the Boers’ bewilderingly vehement opposition to British rule. “It is the abiding fear and hatred of the movement that seeks to place the native on a level with the white man,” he wrote. “British government is associated in the Boer farmer’s mind with violent social revolution. Black is to be proclaimed the same as white. The servant is to be raised against the master….The dominant race is to be deprived of their superiority; nor is a tigress robbed of her cubs more furious than is the Boer at this prospect.”

Despite the Boers’ fierce determination to deny native Africans their freedom or, certainly, any rights under their laws, change had already begun to take place within the African community itself. Throughout the Transvaal, Africans, unwilling to wait to be freed by an Anglo-Saxon empire, which had motives of its own, or for
the Boers to finally find their way to enlightenment and reason, had taken matters into their own hands. Among them, no man was more effective, or more striking for his shining intelligence, quiet courage and innate, unassailable dignity, than Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje.

Although he was only twenty-three years old at the outset of the Boer War, Plaatje was already as well known among Boers as he was among Africans. Raised in a Lutheran mission, he had received only three years of formal education but had somehow managed to teach himself not just all of the major African vernaculars but also eight European languages, including Dutch, English and German. In fact, in any examination he took—from typing to a civil service test—Plaatje unfailingly received the top score, even though the other candidates were European and the tests given in their native languages.

When the Boer War began, Plaatje was sent to Mafeking to serve as a court interpreter. In this position, he interpreted the proceedings not just between Boers and Britons but for native defendants as well, who, for the first time, could actually understand the charges being leveled against them. During this time, Plaatje, whose childhood in a mission and his own striking achievement had shielded him from the harshest realities of native life, saw firsthand the brutal injustices native people endured under Boer rule. Having earned extra money by working as a typist and assistant for foreign correspondents, Plaatje began writing his own articles on native issues and, soon after, started his own newspaper,
Koranta ea Becoana
, the first paper written in both English and Setswana, the language of Plaatje’s own tribe, the Barolong.

During the war, Plaatje believed that if he and his fellow Africans were to have any ally, it would have to be the British Empire, but he was under no illusions that even the British could be trusted. Although the Boers continued to think of native people as slaves or, at best, a pestilence on the land that God had given to them, the British were rarely much better.
During the siege of Mafeking, two hundred miles north of Pretoria, Plaatje watched as the British army made sure that when the suffering began, the Africans were first in line. General Robert Baden-Powell, later founder of the Boy Scouts,
drastically cut African rations in an attempt to spare not just his own men but any white civilians trapped in the town with them. His plan was to starve the native population until they were forced to break out of the besieged city in search of food, thus reducing the number of mouths to feed.

Plaatje witnessed Baden-Powell’s cruelty to the town’s black inhabitants firsthand. At one point, he watched as a gaunt group of nearly a thousand people, who had been living for weeks on little more than porridge made from oat husks, hungrily devoured a slaughtered horse. “
It looked like meat with nothing unusual about it,” Plaatje wrote, “but when they went to the slaughter-pole for the third time and found that there was no more meat left and brought the heads and feet, I was moved to see their long ears and bold heads, and those were the things the people are to feed on. The recipients, however, were all very pleased to get these heads and ate them nearly raw.”

Despite the fact that the British were losing the war and treated Africans only marginally better than did the Boers, from tribe to tribe, native Africans had made it clear that should they be forced to choose a side, it would be England. It was a situation that made the Boers, who knew that they were not only greatly outnumbered but deeply hated by the Africans, increasingly nervous. “
The attitude of the natives causes some uneasiness [among the Boers],” the journalist George Warrington Steevens had written before the war even began. “Every Basuto…has returned to his tribe, one saying, ‘Be sure we shall not harm our mother the Queen.’ ”

As Churchill stood alone on the veld, the fires seemingly within easy reach, he wondered if he might find help in an African kraal, if nowhere else. Knowing the native Africans’ hatred of the Boers, he thought it was at least unlikely that they would arrest him and turn him over to their common enemy. He wouldn’t ask for much. In fact, without Brockie there to translate, he wouldn’t be able to. Thinking
of the £75 he still had in his pocket, he wondered if he might be able to persuade the villagers to let him buy a pony, maybe hire a guide. In the end, though, all he really wanted was just a safe place to stop for a while. “
They might give me food and a dry corner to sleep in,” he thought with a flicker of hope. Just “rest, warmth, and food.”