CHAPTER 15

A CITY OF THE DEAD

When his train pulled into Pretoria, Churchill listened as the door of his car was finally unlocked. Climbing out onto a dirt platform, blinking in the sunlight, he looked at the large crowd that had gathered around the station, and, for the first time since the war began, felt hatred for the enemy. “The simple, valiant burghers at the front, fighting bravely…claimed respect, if not sympathy,” he wrote. “But here in Pretoria all was petty and contemptible.” As he stood in a small space that had been carved out of the throng, his hands clasped behind his back and a look of contempt on his face, Churchill took in the people of Pretoria with a furious, raking glance. “Ugly women with bright parasols, loafers and ragamuffins, fat burghers too heavy to ride at the front,” he would later write, remembering with scorn the Boers who had elbowed and squirmed their way through the crowd to get a better look at the prisoners. “Slimy, sleek officials of all nationalities—the red-faced, snub-nosed Hollander, the oily Portuguese half-caste.” Glaring into their eager, curious faces, he bristled at the idea of being their captive.

As the men shuffled their feet uncomfortably, kicking up loose pebbles on the flat, open stretch of dirt where they had been ordered to wait, the heat from a midday summer sun bore down on them. Haldane, trying with little luck to find some shade, pulled his hat low over his eyes. Peeking out from under the brim at the other prisoners, still divided into two groups, officers and soldiers, he suddenly spotted a man whom he knew to be an officer in the Natal Carbineers, the same regiment in which Brockie had claimed to be a lieutenant. Worried that the man would accidentally give their secret away, Haldane called him over and quickly muttered an explanation of the situation. Despite his efforts to protect the young sergeant major, however, Haldane watched in dismay as Brockie was pulled away and ordered to join the enlisted men. Minutes later, a large Boer policeman, one of the white-helmeted Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek Politie, or ZARPs, singled out another man—Winston Churchill.

Startled from his angry reverie, Churchill looked up when the ZARP, who looked to him like a “broken-down constabulary,” clapped a hand on his shoulder. Growling that Churchill was not an officer, the man demanded that he “go this way with the common soldiers.” Churchill, who had been annoyed with the lower-ranking men since hearing them talking and laughing as they emerged from the train cars, took the opportunity of being thrust into their midst to correct their behavior. As if he were their commanding officer, he sternly urged them to be “serious men who cared for the cause they fought for” and was gratified by their immediate response. As he studied the men, now standing in quiet, sober rows, a thought occurred to Churchill, whose mind was never far from escape. “When I saw…what influence I possessed with them,” he would later write, “it seemed to me that perhaps with two thousand prisoners something some day might be done.”

While Churchill congratulated himself on his influence over the soldiers, Haldane, at the risk of his own safety, argued with the “burly, evil-looking police official” who had led him away. “I remonstrated with this Jack-in-office,” Haldane wrote, “and pointed out to him that a war correspondent ranked as an officer.” He made the mistake, however, of also telling the man exactly who Churchill was, forgetting for a moment how different the Boer attitude toward aristocracy was from the British. “We know and care nothing for your lords and ladies here,” the man barked at Haldane before walking away.

After about twenty minutes, during which the “crowd had thoroughly satisfied their patriotic curiosity,” the prisoners were ordered to march. When the first British POWs had been brought to Pretoria weeks earlier, they had been forced to take a long, meandering route from the station to the prison, “a trophy,” as Haldane would later learn, “for the inhabitants to see.” The Boers had been disappointed in their captives, bitterly complaining that they were not wearing the famous red coats. Since that time, the prisoners had been taken directly to the prison.

The journey, which took them along two sandy, bisecting streets, was nonetheless long enough for the men to see some of the town. Angry and defiant as they were, they could not help but admit that the Boer capital, while small, backward and astonishingly dusty, had its charms. Even Churchill’s father, who had had few good things to say about anything he had seen in southern Africa, had been favorably impressed with Pretoria, writing that it was “a pretty place, much more attractive than any other Transvaal town.” As it nestled in its fertile green valley, sheltered by low hills dotted with mimosa shrubs, the capital was, as Leo Amery would later write, “an attractive, if baking hot, townlet.”

Nearly a thousand miles north of Cape Town, and four hundred miles inland from the British-held eastern coast, Pretoria had as yet been relatively untouched by the war. After the deadline for the ultimatum had passed, and thousands of burghers had thundered out of the town in fierce, determined waves, it had been left “deserted,” Amery wrote, “a city of the dead.” Apart from the ZARPs, it was also largely a city of women and children. The Boer women gathered, their long skirts trailing in the red dust, at the bulletin boards that had been erected to post updates on the war, searching for news of their husbands, fathers and brothers. They drove the ox wagons that rumbled down the dirt roads, the crack of their rawhide whips shattering the town’s unnatural quiet. The only exceptions were Pretoria’s two largest hotels—the Grand and the Transvaal—which were filled with men, although there was rarely a Boer among them. “Soldiers of fortune, Red Cross delegations, visitors, correspondents, and contractors,” the American journalist Howard Hillegas wrote of the hotels’ patrons, “and almost every language except that of the Boers could be heard in the corridors.”

In the town itself, the public squares, the shops, the modest houses that lined the streets, the fighting seemed to be so distant it was at times difficult to believe it was happening. “When cannon were roaring on the frontier,” Hillegas wrote, “Pretoria itself seemed to escape even the echoes.” For the town’s citizens, left behind to keep life going as best they could, the only daily evidence that a war was raging in their country was the almost palpable absence of Boer men, and the very real presence of British prisoners.

For Haldane, the march to the prison was, if humiliating, at least useful. As he made his way along the dirt streets, he sized up the town, gathering information he hoped might come in handy one day. “The town is regularly laid out in parallelograms, the sides which form them running nearly due north and south, and east and west,” he noted, “a not inconsiderable advantage to those who may desire to find their way out of the city in some particular direction.” Haldane also noticed that the town was “brilliantly lighted by electricity,” a modern convenience that had been introduced to Pretoria only seven years earlier.

While they walked, Haldane took advantage of the opportunity not only to study the city but to try again to retrieve Churchill. Although the officer he approached, a man named Hans Malan, seemed to Haldane to be a “still more ill-favoured-looking person” than the ZARP who had seized Churchill, he was obviously a more senior member of the force. Perhaps because he agreed with Haldane, or more likely because Churchill’s name and family status interested him, Malan strode over to Churchill moments later and ordered him to return to the officers.

Although happy to be reunited with Haldane, Churchill was as unimpressed with Malan as his friend had been. To Churchill, the ZARP “looked a miserable creature,” a first impression that would only darken with time. In fact, it would not take long for Malan to become known to him as the “odious Malan,” a crude, cruel and jeering guard who was also uniquely dangerous, because he was the grandson of Kruger, the president of the Transvaal.

Soon after Churchill rejoined the officers, the two groups were, for the first time since their capture, led in different directions. For the soldiers, the final destination would be a racetrack about a mile and a half away that had been enclosed in barbed wire and converted into an outdoor prison camp. Although, as an editor for the Johannesburg-based newspaper the Standard and Diggers’ News wrote, “life on the racecourse was not an altogether miserable experience,” the camp, which would hold some two thousand British prisoners, offered its captives far less in the way of shelter, food, sanitary conditions and medical care than the officers’ prison. The conditions would leave the men angry and determined to escape by almost any means, a situation that Churchill would soon hope to turn to his advantage.

After watching their men disappear into the distance, the officers turned a corner and suddenly found themselves facing a large redbrick-and-sandstone building: their prison. Standing on about an acre of land at the corner of Skinner and Van der Walt Streets, the building, known as the Staats Model School, was more elaborate than most in the modest town. Built just three years earlier to be used as a teachers training college, it had been designed by the Dutch architect Sytze Wierda in the style of the Neo-Dutch Renaissance. It had a peaked roof with a collection of cupolas along the center, long windows on each side and, in the front of the building, a tall, narrow archway flanked by a recessed veranda.

In jarring contrast to the beauty of the building were the newly added fixtures of war. Ten feet in front of the veranda stood a breast-high iron fence that enclosed the entire west side, wrapping around it to the south. The north and east sides were surrounded by a roughly six-and-a-half-foot-tall corrugated-iron paling. Nine stony-faced ZARPs patrolled the building, pacing in the dust and clutching their whistles and Lee-Metford rifles.

As the men took in the Staats Model School, what they noticed first, after the railings and the rifles, was the veranda, which was already crowded with prisoners. Bearded men, many still in their khaki uniforms, were leaning on their elbows over a long railing, watching as they approached. As Churchill would soon learn, the prison was already home to some fifty British officers, most of whom had been captured at the Battle of Nicholson’s Nek two weeks earlier, the day the Dunottar Castle had entered Table Bay. In fact, Haldane recognized a few of them as men with whom he had fought before being injured at Elandslaagte. Others had been taken prisoner at Dundee, on the very first day of the war.

As soon as they stepped through the gate, Churchill and the officers in his group were immediately swarmed by the other prisoners. “Hullo!” they shouted. “How are you? Where did they catch you? What’s the latest news of Buller’s advance?” This welcoming party, a rite of passage for new prisoners, would be repeated many times over the coming months as the prison quickly filled to twice its original number and the men inside grew more and more desperate for news of the war. “All are mobbed, as they enter our prison gates,” Charles Burnett, a captured officer from the Eighteenth Hussars, wrote in his diary. “This excess is perhaps excusable, as we bitterly feel our present situation. Could we but have one short period of our lives to act again…we would allow no such combination of circumstances to again take place, as those which landed us, in some cases so easily, in the Staats Model School.”

Still tired from his long journey and sickened by the sight of the prison, Churchill wanted nothing more than to get away from the other prisoners. Their intensely curious, almost frantic greeting reminded him of “the sort of reception accorded to a new boy at a private school, or as it seemed to me, to a new arrival in hell.” As soon as he could, he extricated himself and made his way inside the building, his new home.

As he walked past the front door, Churchill found himself in a long, cool corridor that ran nearly the length of the building. On each side of the corridor were six dormitories and at each end two larger rooms, one of which was used as a dining hall and the other as a gymnasium. All of the new prisoners were assigned to the same dormitory—the second room on the west side. It was a group that included Churchill, Haldane, Frankland and, to everyone’s relief, Brockie, who had also been returned to the officers, likely because of Haldane’s efforts on his behalf.

Although the four men were grateful that they were still together, they were far from resigned to their fate. As soon as they entered their room, they began a meticulous search, looking for anything—a hole in the wall, a forgotten tool, a loose window frame—that might help them. “We thought of nothing else but freedom,” Churchill wrote, “and from morn till night we racked our brains to discover a way of escape.”

As determined as Churchill and his roommates were to flee the Staats Model School, they quickly learned that life there was nothing like the rumors of horrors and atrocities they had heard from fellow soldiers. So eager were the Boers to prove that they were not the savages the British had made them out to be, they went to extreme lengths both on the battlefield and in their prison camps to dispel the myth. Although during battle they did not always abide by the newly signed Geneva Convention, sending their shells sailing into field hospitals over which soared twelve-foot-high Red Cross flags, when the damage had been done, they were surprisingly compassionate toward the dead and the dying.

After the death of Penn Symons, Joubert had sent his widow a letter of sympathy. During the siege of Ladysmith, which was then still ongoing, he allowed a train full of sick and injured to leave the town every day, and he demanded that the Boers treat wounded British as they would their own men. To an astonishing degree, however, the burghers were even more compassionate than their softhearted commandant general. After the Battle of Nicholson’s Nek, the Daily Mail correspondent George Warrington Steevens had marveled at the Boers’ kindness toward their prisoners. They gave them “the water out of their own bottles,” he wrote. “They gave the wounded the blankets off their own saddles and slept themselves on the naked veldt.”

Despite their compassion, the depiction of them as unwashed and uneducated bumpkins, long encouraged by men like Randolph Churchill, persisted. The Boers bristled with wounded pride, deeply resenting even the slightest suggestion of condescension. There was one man among them, however, with whom even the most over-bred, meticulously educated Briton could not hope to compete. He was, in the words of Leo Amery, a “lean, fair-haired young man with angry blue eyes,” and his name was Jan Smuts, the Transvaal state attorney. Smuts had been raised to be a cattle herd on his father’s farm in Cape Colony, but his life had taken a dramatic turn when he was twelve years old and his older brother died. Because it was the Boer custom to educate only the oldest son, the death of Smuts’s brother meant that he could go to school, a sudden turn of the hand of fate that eventually led him to Victoria College, just east of Cape Town, and then, after winning a scholarship, to Christ’s College, Cambridge. Years later, the master of Christ’s College, the Nobel Prize–winning chemist Alexander Todd, would say that in the college’s five-hundred-year history only three of its students had been truly outstanding, a rarefied group that included John Milton, Charles Darwin and Jan Smuts. Even Albert Einstein had been impressed, insisting that only a few men in the world understood the theory of relativity, and Smuts was one of them.

Determined to prove to the British that, like Smuts, they were men of learning, the Boers allowed their prisoners almost unheard-of latitude. The men were permitted to receive visitors, to buy newspapers and to be waited on by their soldier-servants if those men had been captured with them. In fact, ten batmen were then living in tents in the yard behind the Staats Model School, where Thomas Walden would likely have set up camp had he joined Churchill on the armored train three days earlier.

The officers were even allowed to chart the progress of the war on a large and astonishingly detailed map of Natal and the Transvaal. The men, who had been carefully trained in cartography at military academies, sketched the map themselves, giving it a scale of five miles to one inch and taking up the better part of a wall in a room across the hall from Churchill’s. A resident artist, likely the talented Tom Frankland, also drew a roughly six-foot-tall skeleton, one arm outstretched, the bony fingers pointing toward the map, above which had been written the hopeful words “The War in South Africa 1899–1900.”

Although the food at the Staats Model School was adequate, and often far better than what the Boers were eating in the field, the prisoners were allowed to supplement it with purchases from a storekeeper in Pretoria named Mr. Boshof. They could buy almost anything they could afford, from cigarettes to bottled beer to even clothing. Although, upon entering the prison, every officer was handed bedding, towels and a new suit of clothes, Churchill immediately put in an order for a tweed suit in a “dark neutral colour, and as unlike the suits of clothes issued by the Government as possible.” He had hoped to buy a hat as well, but here his captors finally drew the line. “What use could I find for a hat,” he would recall them asking him, “when there were plenty of helmets to spare if I wanted to walk in the courtyard?”

Although Churchill acknowledged that he was the “least unfortunate kind of prisoner to be,” from the moment he had raised his hands in surrender he had hated his captivity with an intensity that surprised even him. Not only was he eager to return to the war, but he couldn’t bear the thought of being in another man’s control. It had been hard enough to take orders from his superiors while he was in the army. To yield to the demands and whims of a Boer guard, in his eyes a mere troglodyte, was intolerable. “You are in the power of your enemy. You owe your life to his humanity, and your daily bread to his compassion,” he later wrote, in an attempt to describe his sense of desperation. “You must obey his orders, go where he tells you, stay where you are bid, await his pleasure, possess your soul in patience.” The prison was warm, dry, safe and clean, with plenty of food and even little luxuries, but Churchill would have traded it in a heartbeat for the heat, rain, filth and death of the battlefield. “The war is going on,” he wrote angrily, restlessly, “great events are in progress, fine opportunities for action and adventure are slipping away.”

Time was passing, and, even as a young man, Churchill could feel his life slipping away. “I am 25 today,” he wrote to Bourke Cockran, an American politician who was an old friend of Churchill’s mother, on November 30. “It is terrible to think how little time remains.”

So much did Churchill loathe his imprisonment that the experience would stay with him for the rest of his life. “Looking back on those days I have always felt the keenest pity for prisoners and captives,” he would write years later. “What it must mean for any man, especially an educated man, to be confined for years in a modern convict prison strains my imagination. Each day exactly like the one before, with the barren ashes of wasted life behind, and all the long years of bondage stretching out ahead.” When, just ten years after his own imprisonment, he was made home secretary and put in charge of the British prison system, Churchill would be exceptionally compassionate to prisoners, especially those with life sentences, which he believed to be a far worse fate than a sentence of death. He made sure they had access to books, exercise and even occasional entertainment, “to mitigate as far as is reasonable,” he wrote, “the hard lot which, if they have deserved, they must none the less endure.”

His own imprisonment, Churchill passionately believed, was not only unendurable but unjust. Although only a few days earlier he had feared summary execution for taking part in a battle as a civilian, by the time he reached Pretoria, Churchill had already shrugged off that very real, and still present, threat. As soon as he entered the Staats Model School, he began again to demand his release, constantly reminding anyone who would listen that he was not a combatant but a correspondent.

In fact, on the very day Churchill arrived at the POW camp, he found pencil and paper and wrote a series of letters, all with the objective not just of explaining his situation but of making a case for his immediate release. To the Morning Post, he simply sent a telegram. “Captured unarmed 15th Frere detained Pretoria,” it read. “Urge release.” To his mother, who had always been the most constant and effective ally in his ambitions, he sent a longer letter. “Dearest Mama, a line to explain that I was captured in the armoured train at Frere,” he began matter-of-factly, and then quickly took up his argument. “As I was quite unarmed and in possession of my full credentials as a Press correspondent, I do not imagine they will keep me.” Well aware that the Boers would read his letters before sending them on, he was careful to praise his captors. “They have always treated press correspondents well and after Majuba Hill the Morning Post correspondent was released after a few days detention,” he wrote. “You need not be anxious in any way but I trust you will do all in your power to procure my release.”

Even when writing to Pamela Plowden, the beautiful young woman with whom he had fallen in love in India, Churchill could not resist using the letter as an opportunity to state his case. “Not a vy satisfactory address to write from,” he began, “although it begins with a P.” He assured Pamela, thousands of miles away and surrounded by rival suitors, that “among new and vivid scenes I think often of you,” but not before slipping in information that was certainly more for the edification of a Boer reader than a London socialite. “I expect to be released as I was taken quite unarmed,” he reminded his readers, “and with my full credentials as a correspondent.”

The most important letter Churchill wrote that day, however, was to a man named Louis de Souza, the Transvaal secretary of state for war. De Souza, a quiet, thoughtful man who had been named head of the Prisoners Commission at the outset of war, had not only known of the attack on the armored train the day that it happened, but had known that Winston Churchill had been taken prisoner during it. “The burghers took an armoured train near Estcourt,” his wife, Marie, had written in her diary on November 15. “56 prisoners, among them Winston Churchill, a son of the late Randolph Churchill.” De Souza was well aware of Churchill’s position and lineage, and understood what his capture might mean to the Transvaal.

Churchill, believing that de Souza might have the power to free him, or at least be willing to make an argument on his behalf, laid out his case in careful and, he hoped, persuasive detail.

18 November 1899

Pretoria

Sir

1. I was acting as a special correspondent of the Morning Post newspaper with the detachment of British troops captured by the forces of the South African Republic on the 15th instant at Frere, Natal, and conveyed here with the other prisoners.

2. I have the honour to request that I may be set at liberty and permitted to return to the British lines by such route as may be considered expedient, and in support of this request I would respectfully draw the attention of the Secretary of State to the following facts:

a. I presented my credentials as special correspondent immediately after the British force surrendered and desired that they might be forwarded to the proper authority. This was promised accordingly.

b. I was unarmed.

c. My identity has been clearly established.

3. I desire to state that on my journey from the scene of the action to this town I have been treated with much consideration and kindness by the various officers and other burghers of the Republic with whom I have been brought into contact.

I am Sir, Your obedient servant

WINSTON SPENCER CHURCHILL

Special correspondent, The Morning Post, London

Churchill was not about to let a few inconsequential facts stand in the way of his freedom. No one need know that the only reason he had been unarmed at the time of his capture was because he had forgotten his pistol on the train when he jumped off to help the wounded men. In a later letter to de Souza, he would go even further, denying that he had played any role at all in the freeing of the engine. “I have consistently adhered to my character as a press correspondent, taking no part in the defence of the armoured train and being quite unarmed,” he assured the secretary of state for war. “I have learned that it is alleged that I took an active part in the said defence. This I deny, although being for an hour and a half exposed in the open to the artillery of the Transvaal force, I naturally did all I could to escape from so perilous a situation and to save my life.”

Searching for any weapon and willing to take any tactic, Churchill even set his sights on what he knew to be the Boers’ Achilles’ heel: their wounded pride. They wanted respect not only from the British Empire but from the powerful countries of Europe and North America, many of which they hoped would support them in the war. “My case while under detention as a prisoner of war has doubtless attracted a great deal of attention abroad and my release would be welcomed as a graceful act of correct international behaviour by the world’s press,” Churchill wrote to de Souza. “My further detention as a prisoner will most certainly be attributed in Europe and America to the fact that being well known I am regarded as a kind of hostage; and this will excite criticism and even ridicule.”

The Boers were not buying it. In a telegram sent the day after Churchill’s arrival in Pretoria, the commandant general himself warned the Transvaal secretary of state, Francis Reitz, that their aristocratic prisoner was not, as he claimed to be, merely an innocent correspondent. “I understand that the son of Lord Churchill maintains that he is only a newspaper reporter and therefore wants the privilege of being released,” Joubert wrote. He had, however, received a full account of the attack from Louis Botha, the man who had led it, and had read the glowing newspaper accounts of Churchill’s bravery and critical role in the defense of the armored train. Churchill “must be guarded and watched as dangerous for our war; otherwise he can still do us a lot of harm,” Joubert urged Reitz. “In one word, he must not be released during the war.”

The telegram took three days to find Reitz. By November 21, however, the secretary of state had not only received it but attached a note of his own. “The Government,” he wrote, “will act accordingly.”