CHAPTER 13

TO SUBMIT, TO OBEY, TO ENDURE

Still asleep in their tent at Estcourt, Amery and Atkins were suddenly wrenched awake by the sound of gunfire. Leaping up, they struggled out of their sleeping bags and dived through the canvas opening, racing toward the smoke and explosions. It was still raining hard, and the ground had become a slippery, slimy mess, making it almost impossible to get any purchase as they slid and skidded their way across the nearly five miles that separated them from the battle.

Just two miles outside Estcourt, they were confronted with a sickening sight. One look told them everything they needed to know about the fate of the armored train. Limping its way toward them was the battered and still-burning engine and tender, covered in bleeding and shell-shocked men. Approaching what Atkins described as “this emblem of calamity,” they tried to find out what had happened. At a distance, the men aboard the engine could do little more than gesticulate in dumb horror, desperately pointing back to the charred remains of the train they had left broken and burning on the tracks. When they were finally close enough to be heard, most of what the returning soldiers said revolved around the man who had cheerfully left Amery and Atkins asleep in their tent just a few hours before. “They were full of praise of Winston’s gallantry,” Amery wrote. What the men could not tell them was whether their friend was still alive.

Hurrying on, crossing miles of barren veld, the two journalists finally passed a platelayer, staggering toward Estcourt on his own. The man, his blue eyes bloodshot, his words coming “shortly and stumblingly from his mouth,” told them what he could. Stuttering about shells and bullets and Boers, he finally gasped that he had never seen “nor heard anything like it.”

Peering into the distance, Amery and Atkins could now see the train wreckage for themselves and, just past it, a group of prisoners being led away by the Boers. They watched as the solemn procession disappeared over the skyline, not knowing who was among them and who lay dead on the veld. “Well, I devoutly hope Churchill is safe,” Atkins wrote in his dispatch that night, hardly believing that the young man who had held so much promise could be so quickly lost. “But I half fear the gods love too much a man, only twenty-four years old, who…is that rare combination, the soldier, the reckless soldier even, and the bookman.”

As Churchill walked through the wet grass beside his mounted captor, the horse’s steaming flank and the man’s muddy boot rocking rhythmically next to his shoulder, he could think of nothing but the almost unbearable humiliation of his situation. “All military pride, all independence of spirit must be put aside,” he would later write. “These may be carried to the grave, but not into captivity.” Only a few minutes earlier he had been on equal terms with the Boers, all brave, determined men fighting for their country and their honor. Now he was their prisoner, and he would be forced to “submit, to obey, to endure.”

Furious with himself, and ruminating over how differently things might have turned out had he not forgotten his gun, Churchill suddenly realized with a start that, although he had left his Mauser on the engine, he still had his ammunition. Two clips, each with ten rounds, were thumping, hard and heavy, in the breast pockets on each side of his khaki coat. Realizing that it would be very dangerous indeed for a newly captured man to be found carrying ammunition, he quietly reached into one pocket, slipped the clip into his hand and dropped it onto the saturated ground without a sound. Just as he had eased the second clip out, however, his captor looked down sharply from his horse and demanded to know what he was holding. Thinking fast, Churchill pretended that he himself did not know. “What is it?” he asked. “I picked it up.” Taking the clip into his own hand, the man looked at it and, without saying another word, tossed it away.

The two men had not gone far when they reached the rest of Botha’s commando, who had taken prisoners of their own. Among the nearly sixty men standing dismally in the rain, Churchill saw the faces of Haldane and Frankland, the ardent young lieutenant who had fought so hard against the Boers. They had been captured together on the iron bridge at Frere, where Haldane had been trying to prevent more men from surrendering. He was furious at having lost his field glasses to a “stalwart Boer,” who, after seizing him, had tried to tear the glasses from his hands. Haldane had struggled to hold on to them until another Boer had warned him in English, “Better let him have them or he’ll shoot you.”

Utterly exhausted from the battle, the frantic efforts to free the engine and the race to elude capture, all of which had taken place in the span of just two hours, Churchill dropped to the ground. He quickly realized that he was surrounded not only by captors and fellow prisoners but by men who had been so severely wounded they would never make it to the “deep and dreary dungeon” that Haldane imagined awaited them. Although he could hear the gasps and moans of the dying men, a fate that he had only narrowly escaped himself, Churchill was filled not with gratitude but with frustration. He was about to be shut up in a prison while the war raged on without him, and it had all been, he felt, a useless sacrifice. “I had not helped anybody by attempting to return to the Company,” he wrote, cursing his decision to jump off the engine. “I had only cut myself out of the whole of this exciting war with all its boundless possibilities of adventure and advancement.”

Looking up, Churchill saw in the distance the severely damaged engine hobbling toward Estcourt with its load of wounded men. “Something at least was saved from the ruin,” he thought. Perhaps “some little honour had been saved as well.” Knowing that because of his actions other men had escaped his fate, however, was cold comfort. Sitting in the mud, surrounded by Boers, his future wrenched from his hands, he “meditated blankly upon the sour rewards of virtue.”

As the prisoners were being rounded up—“like cattle!” Churchill would later write. “The greatest indignity of my life!”—hundreds of Boers streamed out of the hills in seemingly endless columns, two and three abreast. When they had all finally gathered on the veld, the Boers staring with open curiosity at their British counterparts, a voice called out, “Voorwärts,” Afrikaans for “forward.” Forced to stand, the exhausted and disheartened men formed a ragged line and began their long march north, toward Pretoria.

As the Boers led them away, Churchill was struck by the civility of the men he had long thought of as backward, even barbaric. “You need not walk fast,” one of them said, in perfect English. “Take your time.” Noticing that Churchill had lost his hat and had no way to keep the still-falling rain out of his eyes, another Boer tossed him a cap that had once clearly belonged to a Dublin Fusilier. Whether the hat, like his own, had been lost during the battle or had been taken off the head of a dead soldier, Churchill did not know, but he was grateful for it either way.

Moving steadily deeper into the hills, Churchill could now see what the men of Estcourt had for weeks blindly but instinctively known—that they were surrounded by the enemy. Thousands of Boers, slowly revealed to him like apparitions, stared at the grim procession as it passed by. “Behind every hill, thinly veiled by the driving rain, masses of mounted men, arranged in an orderly disorder, were halted,” Churchill wrote. “Certainly I did not see less than 3,000, and I did not see nearly all.”

When they finally reached the commandant general’s camp and the prisoners were ordered to wait in a line, Churchill spoke up. Confidently addressing the nearest Boers, he demanded to be taken directly to Joubert. “I am a newspaper correspondent,” he said, “and you ought not to hold me prisoner.” In his eagerness to escape imprisonment, however, Churchill had forgotten one critical detail: He had been in full view of the Boers during the attack, and they knew that, even if he was a civilian, he had acted as a combatant.

These men had watched as Churchill fought to free the engine, and his noisy protests over his capture were not only unhelpful, they placed him in immediate danger. “A civilian in a half uniform who has taken an active and prominent part in a fight, even if he has not fired a shot himself,” Churchill later wrote, “is liable to be shot at once by drumhead court martial.” In the Franco-Prussian War, thirty years earlier, any noncombatant who was caught carrying a gun was immediately executed, and the same code would be observed twenty years later, during World War I. “None of the armies in the Great War,” Churchill would later admit, “would have wasted ten minutes upon the business.” They would have shot him quickly and been done with it.

To his surprise, instead of being whisked off to Joubert’s tent as he had expected, Churchill was suddenly removed from the line of prisoners and ordered to stand by himself. A field cornet took his credentials, which revealed a vital and, for Churchill, dangerous piece of information: his last name. It was, Churchill would later write, “a name better known than liked in the Transvaal.”

In 1891, Churchill’s father, Randolph, had traveled to South Africa at the invitation of Cecil Rhodes, then prime minister of Cape Colony. Already beginning to suffer from the mental degeneration that would lead to his death just four years later, Randolph had hoped that the trip might improve his health and perhaps even revive the political career he had wantonly destroyed. He had brought with him Thomas Walden, the valet who now traveled with Winston, and, before setting sail, had also signed on as a correspondent with the Daily Graphic, the same newspaper for which Winston would cover the prelude to the Spanish-American War.

Randolph’s dispatches, however, which were supposed to simply relate his adventures and describe this exotic land, were far more controversial than his son’s had ever been. Never one to mince words, he had spent his three months in southern Africa insulting nearly everyone who had the misfortune to make an appearance in one of his articles. He even attacked the women of his own, exalted social class. After visiting a diamond mine and seeing how incredibly dangerous it was to extract “from the depths of the ground, solely for the wealthy classes, a tiny crystal to be used for the gratification of female vanity,” Randolph had, to the horror and outrage of his British readership, come “coldly to the conclusion that, whatever may be the origin of man, the woman is descended from an ape.”

The Boers themselves, who failed to meet Randolph’s exacting standards in any respect, could not hope to escape his scathing critique. Although he was more than justified in his criticism of their treatment of native Africans, he did not confine his attacks to human rights abuses, lashing out at the Boers for what he perceived to be their lack of hygiene, innate laziness and complete and willful ignorance. “The Boer farmer…is perfectly uneducated,” Randolph had sneered. “His simple ignorance is unfathomable, and this in stolid composure he shares with his wife, his sons, his daughters, being proud that his children should grow up as ignorant, as uncultivated, as hopelessly unprogressive as himself.”

It had not taken long for news of the former Chancellor of the Exchequer’s jaw-droppingly offensive articles to make its way into every parlor and pub in London. The response in the British press had been fast and unforgiving. “Lord Randolph Churchill in his time has played many parts, but not even in the famous somersault which terminated his career as leader of the House of Commons…has he afforded the public a more unseemly exhibition of irresponsibility than in his letters from South Africa,” a journalist for the Review of Reviews spat. “They furnish the culminating evidence, if further evidence were necessary, as to the impossibility of Lord Randolph Churchill as the leader of men.”

Randolph had been well aware of the offense he was giving, and the effect it was having both in South Africa and in England. Like his rebellious wife, however, he was uninterested in and unconcerned by others’ opinions of him, no matter how damaging they might be to his political career and personal reputation, not to mention his country’s relationship with the Transvaal. “I have composed here a sixth letter to the Daily Graphic in which I again come down on these Boers heavily,” he wrote cheerfully to Jennie. “I imagine they will be furious when they see what I write of them.”

Winston, however, who was then sixteen years old, did care what people said about his father, and he was outraged by the attacks in the newspapers. “You cannot imagine what vials of wrath you have uncorded [sic],” he had written to Randolph from Harrow. “All the papers simply rave….The Standard quotes the Speaker & is particularly offensive. It states that—but oh I will not bore you with the yapping of these curs.” A few months later, he again wrote to his father, still angrily defending him, but, because Randolph’s articles had only grown more offensive and outrageous, now also concerned for his safety. “I hear the horrid Boers are incensed with you,” he wrote. “It would have been much wiser, if you had waited till you came back before you ‘slanged the beggars.’ ”

Churchill could have had no doubt that most, if not all, of the men now staring at him had heard about his father’s trip just eight years earlier and the defamatory things he had written about the Boers. As he stood alone, separated from the other prisoners and the object of intense interest by his captors, he began to fall “prey to gnawing anxiety.” Struggling to come up with answers to any questions the Boers might ask him, he could not help but consider the possibility that he would be executed. “What sort of appearance,” he wondered, could he “keep up if I were soon and suddenly told that my hour had come.”

When the field cornet returned with Churchill’s credentials fifteen minutes later, he said nothing beyond brusquely ordering him to rejoin the other prisoners. Churchill realized with a wave of relief that he would not be killed. Neither, however, would he be freed. Despite the fact that moments earlier he had feared for his life, Churchill could not resist again protesting his capture. A Scottish Boer standing nearby laughed at him. “Oh,” he said, “we do not catch lords’ sons every day.” Joining in his laughter, the rest of the men assured Churchill that he would be allowed to play football in prison, but made it clear that they would keep an especially close eye on their young British aristocrat.

After a ten-mile march, without food, water or relief from the rain, the men finally reached the ravaged town of Colenso. They were taken to a corrugated-iron shed near the station, a place that Churchill had seen on his first ride aboard the armored train, little thinking that he would soon be imprisoned there. As he tried to step deeper into the shed, he heard the dry, crackling sound of paper at his feet and looked down to find that the floor was covered with old railway forms and account books, ripped, stained and piled at least four inches deep. Above him, in the raftered ceiling, a skylight blurred as the rain fell on it in a dull, heavy tapping.

Outside, the Boers prepared dinner for their prisoners. Finally opening the shed door, they beckoned to the men to come out and eat. Before them burned two fires, near which lay an ox that had clearly been slain only minutes before. As the men, feeling slightly like cannibals but too hungry to care, tore bloody strips of meat from the carcass, speared them on sticks and cooked them over the fires, the Boers stood around them, watching quietly.

Churchill struck up a conversation with two of the men. They were, he would later write, “English by race, Afrikanders by birth, Boers by choice.” Although they disagreed with him on why the war was being waged and who would win it, by the time the prisoners had finished eating, they regarded Churchill as a friend. One of the men even pulled off the blanket he had been wearing like a cloak, his head sticking out of a hole in the middle, and handed it to Churchill.

Even with a full stomach and wrapped in the Boer’s blanket, Churchill had difficulty sleeping that night. He had fallen into a dark, brooding mood. With the loss of his freedom, he had, for the first time, also lost his ferocious grip on life. He was no longer master of his fate, in command of his own future. Robbed of his ability to make even the most basic decisions—where he went, how long he stayed, what he ate—he felt stripped of that part of his personality that had most defined him from his youth. “It seemed that love of life was gone,” he would later write, “and I thought almost with envy of a soldier I had seen during the fight lying quite still on the embankment, secure in the calm philosophy of death.”

Haldane too found himself so frustrated and discouraged that he was unable to summon the strength and determination he would need if he were to win back his freedom. For Haldane, searching for a means of escape was not only his best hope of regaining his pride and returning to the war, it was his sworn duty as a military officer. Nearly twenty years earlier, during the First Boer War, England had attempted to reform and modernize its military law by passing the Army Act. Haldane couldn’t remember the exact clause that referred to the obligations of a prisoner of war, but he did remember that the implication was “if any officer, a prisoner, sees the opportunity of escaping, and does not take it, he can be punished.”

The problem was that no one ever told these young men, in extraordinarily desperate and dangerous situations, exactly how they were supposed to pull off this feat. In the gloom of the metal shed, Haldane could feel the weight of the problem lying heavily on his shoulders. Tired and dispirited, he looked up at the raftered ceiling and studied its darkened skylight. He could, he thought, somehow shimmy up to the rafters, shatter the skylight, crawl out onto the roof and jump to the ground. There were guards, but not on all sides of the building, and in the dark and pouring rain escape was possible, although certainly at the risk of his life.

As much as Haldane longed for his freedom, in his exhaustion and sorrow he didn’t have the heart to try that night. Unfortunately, that first night in captivity, he would later realize with deep regret, was his best chance. “I think that it is a cardinal fact that no time should be lost in effecting one’s escape,” he would later write, “for every mile one is removed deeper into the enemy’s country it will be found that the precautions to prevent this become greater.”

When Churchill woke early the next morning after a fitful night, he listened to the sharp sounds of the other men’s snores and watched the first light of dawn filter into the shed from the skylight above him. As he lay on the cluttered floor, the memory of where he was and why he was there came back to him in a sudden, sickening rush, and the reality of his situation descended “with a slap.” With it, however, returned his iron resolve. It was true that he was a prisoner, but prisoners, he thought, can escape.

While Haldane had looked above him for help, Churchill stared down at the trash covering his shoes. Maybe he didn’t need to go anywhere. Maybe all he needed to do was to remain there, hidden, while the rest of the men were led away. “Why not lie buried underneath this litter until prisoners and escort had marched away together?” he thought. “Would they count? Would they notice?” Like Haldane’s, however, Churchill’s hesitation proved fatal to his plan. While he was still considering the strength of his strategy, the shed door opened, and a guard ordered them all outside.

Soon after a breakfast of last night’s oxen, even less appealing on the second day, and a puddle of rainwater, they resumed their march. They were, Churchill wrote, a “sorry gang of dirty, tramping prisoners, but yesterday the soldiers of the Queen.” The rains of the day before had gone, and the skies had cleared, but the gullies they had to wade through were now swollen into broad, fast-moving streams, and there was no shelter from the pitiless South African sun. What was more trying to Churchill than his wet feet and his sweltering body were the constant stares of the men guarding him, the “irritating disdain and still more irritating pity.”

Later in the day, as they drew nearer to Ladysmith, the men looked up to see hanging above them a sight they had often seen from the hills surrounding Estcourt: General White’s lonely balloon. Hovering over the besieged town, its goldbeater’s skin—the outer membrane of a calf’s intestine that’s traditionally used in making gold leaf—catching the sun, it was a fresh reminder to the prisoners of the extent of the disaster that had befallen them. Only days earlier, they had pitied the men trapped in Ladysmith. Now the fate of those soldiers seemed far better than their own. “Beleaguered Ladysmith,” Churchill wrote, “with its shells, its flies, its fever, and its filth seemed a glorious paradise to me.”

The Boers set up camp that night in the shadow of a looming mountain and surrounded by low, ragged hills. They arranged their wagons in a square, much as the American pioneers had circled their own wagons to protect themselves from attack. Inside the square, they set up a hodgepodge of tents, all shapes and sizes and strikingly different from the uniformly white and sturdy tents of the British army. Then they gathered the prisoners before them.

They had decided that, because they were drawing closer to Pretoria, it was time to separate the prisoners into two groups. Addressing the ragged group of men, they demanded to know who among them were officers, and who enlisted men. Churchill once again had a decision to make. As a civilian, he could have chosen either group. As a former military man, however, he naturally gravitated toward the officers, a group that would include Haldane. He chose to be housed with the officers, a decision that, by nightfall, he would regret.

Once inside his tent, peering through the triangular flap at the flickering fires and the Boers who sat just outside, their guns in their laps, Churchill realized that he had made a mistake. Ladysmith was only five miles away. If he could slip past the wagons without being seen, he could make it there before morning. Because he was in the officers’ tent, however, it would be impossible to move an inch with out being noticed. Four guards were stationed outside, two at the back of the tent and two in front. He could hear them clicking the breech bolts on their Mausers, and he watched, dismayed, as they relieved one another at regular intervals throughout the night. Also, unlike the night before, when Haldane had considered escaping, the moon was now full and bright, illuminating every shrub and hollow where he might hide. “One could not help regretting,” Haldane wrote, “the chance that had been lost twenty-four hours earlier.”

Early the next morning, they started out for Elandslaagte, a railway station midway between Ladysmith and Dundee where Haldane had been wounded in battle not even a month before and which would soon be the final stop in their long march. They spent one more night on the veld, and then, on the morning of November 18, three days after their capture, they walked into Elandslaagte, and saw a train already waiting for them in the station.

While arrangements for the final leg of the journey were being made, the Boers herded their uniformed prisoners into the baggage room, and, not sure what else to do with him, locked Churchill in the ticket office. “As I observed the ticket office with its copper bars under which the tickets were sold,” a burgher named Keuzenkamp would later write, “I felt it answered to the appearance of a jail.” Seeing where Churchill had been placed, Louis Botha ordered Keuzenkamp to stand guard at the door. From outside, he could hear Churchill in the small room, restlessly pacing the floors.

When it was finally time to leave, the enlisted men, who had been separated from their officers the night before, were directed toward six or seven closed cars, while the officers were given a first-class carriage. Soon after Churchill, Haldane and Frankland climbed in and sat down, the door opened and a man carried in what seemed to them, after their long, hungry march, to be extraordinary quantities of food—four tin cans, two of mutton and two of fish, several loaves of bread, six jars of jam and a big can of tea. “The reader will believe that we did not stand on ceremony,” Churchill wrote, “but fell to at once and made the first satisfying meal for three days.”

As the men ate, a crowd quickly gathered outside their windows. Churchill, desperately hungry, ignored them until one man identified himself as a doctor and asked about his hand, which had been grazed by a bullet just before his capture. It wasn’t a large wound, but because it had not been cleaned or cared for in any way during their three-day march, it had begun to fester. After Churchill raised his hand to be examined through the window, the man hurried off, soon returning with bandages and hot water. “Amid the approving grins of the rough fellows who thronged the platform,” Churchill wrote, “he soon bound me up very correctly.”

Inside the train car, the prisoners had been joined by a rather tough and scrappy young man named Adam Brockie. Brockie was an Irish sergeant major, not an officer, and so belonged in one of the other cars. Churchill and Haldane knew his secret, but both for his safety and their own benefit they had decided to keep it. Brockie was smart and resourceful, and he would, they felt, prove useful.

Brockie was an unusual young man. His mother had died when he was very young, and he had enlisted in the British army in Dublin at just fourteen years of age. He had lived in South Africa for much of his adult life and, four years earlier, had taken part in the Jameson Raid, which had humiliated Joseph Chamberlain and nearly led to the imprisonment of Cecil Rhodes. He was now a prisoner of war like the rest of them, but he had been captured only after a stunningly long and effective streak of testing the Boers and, time and again, evading them.

In fact, Brockie had managed to do something that Churchill had only dreamed of attempting. Also stationed in Estcourt, Brockie had requested to be attached to General James Wolfe-Murray’s staff as a scout. On November 4, eleven days before the train derailment, three Zulu whom Wolfe-Murray had sent to Ladysmith with messages for White had been captured by the Boers. Upon hearing this, Brockie had asked the general if he could give it a try. “He told me I would never get through,” Brockie later wrote. “I said, Sir never try, never win….He gave me the despatches.” Brockie had to crawl on his hands and knees for at least a mile of the forty-some miles separating Estcourt and Ladysmith, but he made it through without being caught. White, astonished, asked him if he thought he could return to Estcourt. Not only did Brockie make it back, but he was so good at slipping past the Boers that Wolfe-Murray sent him four more times. Not until the sixth attempt was he finally caught.

When he was captured and asked his rank, Brockie, who had earlier removed the corps insignia from his hat and coat, had claimed to be a lieutenant of the Natal Carbineers. He was certain that if his captors had known who he was, and that he had taken part in the Jameson Raid, they would have shot him without hesitation. Inside the officers’ first-class train car, Brockie’s fellow prisoners agreed to “maintain the fiction.” Not only was this new addition to their small group clever and brave, but he knew the land well and was fluent in both Dutch and Zulu. “We thought,” Churchill would later write, “he was the very man for us.”

As the train sped north toward Pretoria, passing Talana Hill, where Penn Symons had been killed, and then Majuba, where the British army had fallen in humiliating defeat to the Boers in the First Boer War, twenty years earlier, the four British prisoners thought of little else but escape. Speaking in undertones when they thought the two guards were not listening, they tried to make plans. It was impossible, though, to know what awaited them in Pretoria.

Churchill, who had quickly regained his old lust for life, found it impossible to simply bide his time. Continuously looking about the train car, he searched for an escape route even there. At one point, he considered climbing out a window while the train hurtled through a long tunnel. One of the guards, however, perhaps guessing his thoughts, stood, balancing on the swaying car floor, and reached up to close both windows. Looking pointedly at Churchill, he then opened the breech of his Mauser to show him that it was fully loaded, and to make it clear that he would not hesitate to use it if necessary. Although the Boers took pride in treating their prisoners well, they were not about to lose a single man, especially this one.