Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill (38 page)

As desperately as Churchill wanted to walk into the kraal and ask for help, he hesitated. Concealing himself had become an instinct, essential to his survival, and he found it almost impossible to turn off. To come out into the open and reveal himself to anyone, even people who had far greater reason to hate the Boers than he did, seemed rash, even reckless.

Churchill continued walking for about a mile in the direction of the fires, struggling with his fears and doubts, and then he stopped, overwhelmed by a sense of the “weakness and imprudence” of his plan. Turning around, he retraced his steps, walking halfway back to the railway line. Somewhere in between the two points, he stopped again and, unsure what to do next, finally just sat down. He was, he would later write, “completely baffled, destitute of any idea what to do or where to turn.”

Throughout his adult life, which had largely been made up of a series of wars, each one following hard on the heels of the last, Churchill had had moments of worry, fear, even despair. Never before, however, had he been tentative. He had fearlessly thundered into battle on his white pony; instantly, and without any authority, taken charge of the defense of the armored train as Boer shells rained down upon it; and pulled himself over the prison wall just feet from an armed guard, striking out alone into the unknown. Each time, he had somehow, instinctively, known what to do. This time, for perhaps the first time in his life, he was paralyzed with indecision.

Moments after Churchill had sat down, disconsolate and alone on the veld, his mind suddenly cleared. Just as unexpectedly as the cloud of confusion and doubt had descended on him, it lifted. “
Suddenly without the slightest reason all my doubts disappeared,” he wrote. “
It was certainly by no process of logic that they were dispelled.” He was reminded of the sensation he had had years earlier
when holding a planchette. A wooden, shield-shaped board on brass castors with wheels often made of bone, a planchette, French for “little plank,” was used during séances, seeming to move with a mind of its own, its user convinced that a spirit was guiding his hand. “I acted,” Churchill wrote, “in exactly the same unconscious or subconscious manner now.”

Standing up, he began walking toward the fires once again, this time moving quickly and with a clear sense of purpose. As fast as he walked, however, it took Churchill several hours to reach the fires, which had seemed to be much closer than they actually were. It was about three in the morning when he finally came close enough to get a good look at them, and what he saw made him stop in his tracks. Before him stood not a friendly, African kraal, but a coal mine.

As Churchill drew closer, he could see the outline of buildings taking shape. There were a number of small structures, a few houses and a large wheel that turned the winding gear. He also now saw that the warm glow that had beckoned to him from miles away had come not from open fires but from large, industrial furnaces.

Standing just outside the glow of the furnaces, hidden in shadow on the veld, Churchill considered his options. He did not have to do this, he told himself. Walking into a kraal would have been difficult enough, but a coal mine was something else altogether. He could turn around right now and continue his solitary journey, perhaps find an actual kraal farther on.

His strength, however, was slipping. The chocolate and biscuit could not sustain him much longer, especially because he now knew he would have to walk the hundreds of miles that still stood between him and freedom. Looking back the way he had come, Churchill could see “nothing but the prospect of further futile wanderings terminated by hunger, fever, discovery or surrender.”

Turning once again toward the coal mine, Churchill’s eyes settled on a house that was closer to him than the rest. It was small, made of stone and seemed to be two stories high but was only one, resting on the slope of a hill. Beyond these basic details, Churchill could see little more, and the house’s outward appearance told him nothing
of what lay inside. “What did this house which frowned dark and inscrutable upon me contain?” he wondered. Could his £75, and the promise of more, buy him help, or would he be immediately arrested and returned to Pretoria? The latter outcome was, he knew, far more likely than the former, but what other choice did he have? This sleepy coal mine, this dark, forbidding house, were his only hope.

Finally, gathering all the resolve he had left, Churchill stepped out of “
the shimmering gloom of the veldt into the light of the furnace fires,” he later wrote, “advanced towards the silent house, and struck my fist upon the door.”

CHAPTER 22

“W
IE
I
S
D
AAR
?”

C
hurchill stood in the moonlight, nervously waiting for a response to his knock, but none came. After a moment, he knocked again. Almost instantly, a light came on in a room overhead, and the window opened. A man’s voice shattered the night’s silence.
“Wie is daar?”
he called. Who is there?

Just the sound of the man’s voice was jolting, and, Churchill would later write, he could feel it vibrate through him down to his fingertips. “I want help,” he was finally able to say. “I have had an accident.” He could hear the man muttering something as he moved around his room, and then came the sound of footsteps. A moment later, there was the heavy, metallic thump of a bolt being drawn. A lock turned in its tumbler, and the door swung open.

Standing before Churchill in a narrow, darkened hallway was a tall, rumpled man. It was difficult to see him well, but Churchill could tell that he had a dark mustache and a pale face, and he had the appearance of having dressed in a hurry. “What do you want?” the man asked, switching to the same language as the stranger who had knocked on his door.

Now that he was standing face-to-face with the man, Churchill suddenly realized that he was completely unprepared to answer this
question, or any other. When he had been sitting on the veld, agonizing over whether he should reveal himself or remain hidden, he had never really considered what he would say if he were to find himself in exactly this situation. To his own astonishment, however, a fully formed story slid easily off his tongue.

“I am a burgher,” Churchill told the man. “I have had an accident.” From there, the tale seemed to take on a life of its own, expanding and becoming more detailed, and no doubt less believable, as he spoke. “I was going to join my commando at Komati Poort [the last train station in the Transvaal],” he continued. “I have fallen off the train. We were skylarking. I have been unconscious for hours. I think I have dislocated my shoulder.”

Churchill could not help but marvel at his own ability to spin a story out of whole cloth. “It is astonishing how one thinks of these things,” he later wrote. “This story leapt out as if I had learnt it by heart. Yet I had not the slightest idea what I was going to say or what the next sentence would be.” He had even managed to weave into the story a reference to the injured shoulder that he really did have, although he had dislocated it years earlier, on a different continent.

What Churchill most wanted was simply an opportunity to talk to this man quietly, in the privacy of his home. If he could only persuade him to invite him inside, he thought, he might have a chance to win him over. Out here, in the night, within hearing distance of curious neighbors, the man was more likely to turn him away, or perhaps even sound the alarm.

After a moment’s pause while he carefully scrutinized Churchill, the man finally said, “Well, come in.” Moving deeper into shadow as he walked back along the hallway, he came to a door on one side and opened it, silently motioning with his hand for Churchill to enter. As Churchill stepped into the room, he wondered what would happen to him. Would this place be his salvation, or his prison?

The first thing Churchill saw when he walked through the door was a large table standing in the middle of the room. He walked to the far side of it and watched as the man struck a match and lit a lamp, producing a dim, wavering light that revealed more of the
small room. It seemed to Churchill that it must serve as both an office and a dining room. Besides the table, there was a rolltop desk, a few chairs and an oddly shaped device—a vertical stack of two glass globes covered with wire netting—which he guessed must be used for making soda water. There was one object in the room, however, that consumed his attention. When he had stepped in behind Churchill, the man had set a revolver on top of the table. Churchill now realized that he must have been carrying it all along.

With the gun lying on the table in front of him, the man sat down and, finally breaking the silence, said, “I think I’d like to know a little more about this railway accident of yours.” Churchill immediately understood that he had no hope of fooling this man, whoever he was. He had not given his story a moment’s thought before blurting it out, and he knew that if he tried to spin it any further, it would quickly come unraveled. It would also be impossible to hide the fact that although he had said he was a burgher, he could not speak a word of either Afrikaans or Dutch.

There was nowhere left to turn. “I think,” Churchill finally said, “I had better tell you the truth.” “I think you had,” the man replied.

As soon as he made the decision to confide in this perfect stranger, Churchill held nothing back. “
I am Winston Churchill, War Correspondent of the
Morning Post
,” he said, in a rush of confession. “I escaped last night from Pretoria. I am making my way to the frontier. I have plenty of money. Will you help me?” Another long, tension-filled moment passed while the man stared at Churchill, saying nothing. Finally, he pushed out his chair, stood up slowly, turned and locked the door. It was an act, Churchill wrote, that “struck me as unpromising.”

Turning back around to face Churchill, the man took a few steps toward him. To Churchill’s surprise, however, instead of reaching for the gun that still lay on the table, he abruptly thrust out his empty hand. “Thank God you have come here!” he said as he clasped Churchill’s hand in his. “It is the only house for twenty miles where you would not have been handed over. But we are all British here, and we will see you through.”

By an incredible stroke of luck, Churchill had stumbled upon one of the few places in the 110,000 square miles of the Transvaal where it was still possible to find an Englishman. Since the proclamation ordering British subjects to leave the country had been passed nearly two months earlier, thousands of men, most of whom worked in mines, had been forced to leave their homes and lives in South Africa. Bracing themselves for the long journey, they had made their way in droves to Cape Colony, from where they had set sail for England. “
They had been turned out of work, packed in cattle-trucks, and had come down in sun by day and icy wind by night, empty-bellied, to pack off home again,” George Warrington Steevens had written. “Faster than the ship-loads could steam out the trainloads steamed in.”

It was not just the men working in the mines who had been forced to leave but those who owned the mines as well. They too had wandered, shocked and angry, through the streets of Cape Town, loudly, bitterly, and usually drunkenly, complaining to anyone who would listen. “
They spoke now of intolerable grievance and hoarded revenge,” Steevens wrote, “now of silent mines, rusting machinery, stolen gold.”

As eager as the Boers were to rid themselves of the British, they knew that there was a price to pay for this forced mass exodus. They would not have a hope of winning the war if the largely British-run mines ground to a halt. Their concern, moreover, was less for the glittering gold and diamonds that had brought wave after wave of Englishmen to South Africa than for the black prehistoric remains of swamp and bog vegetation that lay hundreds of feet below the earth’s surface.

Because most of the war was being played out in Natal—from Dundee to Ladysmith—the Boers were now forced to rely heavily on the collieries of the Transvaal.
Witbank, the part of the Transvaal where Churchill had found himself after jumping from the train, had one of the richest coal deposits in South Africa, with seams that
ran both thick and shallow, at a depth of just three hundred feet or less. In fact, so well known would the region become for its coal that more than a century later it would be renamed eMalahleni, Zulu for “place of coal.”

The furnaces whose bright light Churchill had followed for miles across the veld belonged to the Transvaal and Delagoa Bay Colliery. Although it had only been operating for four years, having opened in anticipation of the completion of the railway that ran between Pretoria and Portuguese East Africa, it was already one of the most productive collieries in Witbank.
Its owner, Julius Burlein, was German, but he had hired a British man to run the place. That man, John Howard, was now shaking hands with Winston Churchill.