CHAPTER 16

BLACK WEEK

From her house on Skinner Street, Marie de Souza, the wife of the Transvaal secretary of state for war, could almost see the prison. It was just four blocks away, and she knew the walk well. Her husband made it nearly every day.

A lifelong diarist, Marie had begun a new diary just thirteen days before the declaration of war. Instinctively, she knew there were horrors to come, and dangers that were particular to her own family. “War! What a terrible thing it is,” she had written on October 30, the day the British had let the ultimatum pass. “And for what?”

The day after the new prisoners arrived in Pretoria, Louis de Souza visited them at the Staats Model School. Concerned about the treatment of the POWs, he considered the prison an important part of his responsibilities. On November 19, however, he stayed so long his wife remarked on his late return in her diary that night.

As soon as he met de Souza, Churchill knew that he had found his man. Not only was the secretary of state for war willing to listen to his story, but he sympathized with the young correspondent and did what he could to help him. As Churchill’s time in captivity stretched from days to weeks, de Souza became increasingly indispensable to him. He gave Churchill news of the war, arranged for him to meet with high-ranking officials so that he could petition for his release in person, and even brought him baskets of fruit, many of which had a bottle of whiskey hidden in their depths, a forbidden gift that de Souza was also known to conceal in a pocket of his tailcoat.

In stark contrast to de Souza, the men directly responsible for running the prison had little interest in Churchill, or any of the men in their custody. The warden—the commandant van de wacht, or commandant of the guard—was a man named R. W. L. Opperman, who, Churchill wrote with disgust, was “too fat to go and fight.” He was still a fierce proponent of the Boer cause, though, and, in the words of one of his prisoners, “a terrible hater of the English.” Opperman’s assistant, Dr. Jan Gunning, was more courteous to the British officers and well liked by many of them, but he had little say in how the prison was run, so had less potential value to Churchill. He also had problems of his own. In times of peace, Gunning was the director of the State Museum, a role that he relished but that had gotten him into trouble. Before the war, Cecil Rhodes, arguably the most hated man in the Transvaal, had offered him a lion for his pet project, a zoological garden that was to be built in Pretoria, and, unable to resist, he had accepted. When Kruger found out, Gunning nervously confided to Churchill, the president had been furious and had spoken “most harshly” to him.

Churchill’s only hope for a sympathetic hearing was de Souza. The secretary of state for war was not only concerned about the prisoners, he seemed to have a broader perspective than most Boers. He was, Churchill wrote, “a far-seeing little man who had travelled to Europe, and had a very clear conception of the relative strengths of Britain and the Transvaal.” Although de Souza had gone to Europe on an arms-buying mission three years earlier, when he was the first secretary in the Office of the Commandant General, like Joubert, he had continued to believe that war might be averted. When the end came, he had been devastated. “Louis is worried to death!” his wife had written in late September, just weeks before the Boers issued their ultimatum. “The General [Joubert] told him that he had given up all hope of peace tonight.”

As interested as de Souza was, however, his ability to help Churchill was severely limited. Although he held a powerful position in the Transvaal government, he himself had long been on shifting ground. Since the war had begun, his status in Pretoria had only become more tenuous.

As a member of the Volksraad, de Souza was an anomaly. His family had come to the Transvaal by way of not the Netherlands or France but Portugal. In the early nineteenth century, his grandparents had moved from Lisbon to the small Indian state of Goa, where his father, Mariano Luis, was born and where, according to family history, the rest of the family had been killed in an epidemic. In the mid-nineteenth century, Mariano Luis traveled as an orphan to Portuguese East Africa, modern-day Mozambique, on the Indian Ocean coast. After making his way to the Transvaal, he had met and married Trui Joubert, the young daughter of a Voortrekker and the distant cousin of Piet Joubert, now the commandant general.

Although Louis de Souza, the first child of Mariano Luis and Trui, had coursing through him the blood of one of the Transvaal’s oldest Voortrekker families, he still looked Portuguese. Small, thin, dark-haired and with a deep olive complexion, he instantly stood out among the pale, pink-cheeked Dutchmen who filled the streets of Pretoria. He was also, like his Portuguese grandfather, Catholic, a religious affiliation that the strongly Calvinistic Boers considered almost blasphemous. In fact, until 1858 no one outside the Dutch Reformed Church had even been allowed citizenship in the Transvaal, much less a place in its government.

Among his fellow Boers, de Souza also had one more strike against him: He was married to the daughter of an Englishman. Although Marie de Souza had been born in Durban, not far from where Louis Botha had grown up, in the minds of many of her neighbors she was as British as the queen of England. Now that they were at war with the British Empire, the de Souzas were looked at with even greater suspicion. Even Kruger did not fully trust them, asking Louis during an executive meeting of the Volksraad if his wife was English.

De Souza’s situation was not improved by the fact that he felt compassion not just for the prisoners but for the British citizens who had long been living in the Transvaal. Life for so-called Uitlanders, Afrikaans for “outlanders,” or “foreigners,” had never been easy, but as the Boers and the British inched toward war, it had become increasingly difficult. Finally, on September 27, the Volksraad had passed a proclamation that ordered all British subjects to leave the country in the event of war. Although she had expected it, Marie had been horrified when, soon after the war began, she had watched as English citizens were crowded into cattle trucks and forcibly removed from the city.

Many Englishmen had come to de Souza, asking his advice and help. “He has been so dreadfully worried over the uitlanders,” Marie confided to her diary. There was little de Souza could do, however, either for them or for himself. Even Churchill understood that his new friend had to be “very careful.”

Despite his precarious position, de Souza continued to visit the men at the Staats Model School, and to spend much of his time while there with the prison’s most troublesome inmate. About a week and a half after Churchill had arrived in Pretoria, de Souza stopped by his dormitory, where he found his young friend standing before the map that had been drawn on the wall. Churchill had attached red and green paper squares to the map, indicating the various columns as he attempted to chart the war’s course. On this day, he had new information to add to his collage.

The day before, Churchill had received an unexpected windfall. While standing on the veranda, leaning on the railings, he had noticed a man with a red mustache walking quickly down the street, two collies trotting after him. Since coming to Pretoria, Churchill had learned to pay careful attention to the townspeople. Although some, as Haldane wrote, looked “as if they would be glad to have a shot at us through the railings,” a few showed the men not just sympathy but a willingness to help, even at great risk to themselves. As time went on, in fact, the sympathizers’ efforts to communicate with the prisoners would become increasingly elaborate, from a man who used his walking stick to tap out messages by Morse code to two young women who lived across the street from the Staats Model School and signaled news with a white flag from their veranda.

As the man with the mustache approached Churchill, he did not alter his pace. Just before he passed by, however, he said something that made Churchill’s heart soar. “Methuen beat the Boers to hell at Belmont,” he muttered. Paul Methuen was the general officer commanding the First Division of the British army, and his victory was all Churchill needed to lift his spirits and convince him that the war was finally turning his way. “That night the air seemed cooler,” he wrote, “and the courtyard larger.”

When de Souza walked into his room the next day, Churchill was eager to discuss this new development in the war. “What about Methuen?” he asked de Souza. “He has beaten you at Belmont. Now he should be across the Modder. In a few days he will relieve Kimberley.” De Souza, however, was unconcerned. Shrugging his shoulders, and without asking Churchill where he had gotten this information, he replied simply, “Who can tell?” Then, pressing his finger on the map, he said, “There stands old Piet Cronje in a position called Scholz Nek, and we don’t think Methuen will ever get past him.”

As it turned out, de Souza was right. The reason, however, was less Methuen and Cronjé than Joubert and Botha. Just a few days before de Souza and Churchill stood over the hand-drawn map in the Staats Model School, Piet Joubert’s horse had stumbled and thrown him. The result of the Boers’ humiliating defeat at Belmont and Joubert’s injuries, which were so severe he had to return to Pretoria riding in a closed carriage, was that Botha was put in command. Botha’s promotion would be made permanent a few months later, when Joubert succumbed to peritonitis.

Joubert’s death devastated de Souza, who would be with him three months later when he died and would be a pallbearer at his funeral, but it freed Botha. The sudden turn of events meant that for the first time since the war began, Botha’s hands were finally untied. Just days before his fall, the commandant general had ordered his intense young general to pull back from Estcourt, where Botha had been relentlessly and successfully attacking the British forces in the wake of the armored train derailment. At first, Botha had refused the order, but when Joubert threatened to relieve him of his command, he had given in. With Joubert gone, there was finally no one to tell him no, no one to hold him back. Botha knew that left to his own devices, he could advance the war, and teach the arrogant British what the Boers were capable of.

Little more than a week after Botha was put in command, the British, to their horror, found themselves lurching from one defeat to another, a staggering series of losses that would come to be known as Black Week. The first blow came on December 10, in the Battle of Stormberg, which, although the British had roughly three thousand men to the Boers’ fewer than two thousand, ended with nearly seven hundred British killed or captured. The very next day, Methuen fell to Cronjé and the legendary Boer general Koos de la Rey in the Battle of Magersfontein, known to the Boers as Scholz Nek, where the British lost almost a thousand men.

It did not take long for news of Black Week to reach London, where the reaction was not only shock but utter bewilderment. This was, after all, the “British century,” and no Briton then alive could remember a time when their empire had not dominated the world stage. As December 1899 brought with it news of devastating defeats at the hands of the Boers, an opponent they had dismissed as insignificant and unsophisticated, a chilling thought crept in: Would this, the last month of the century, mark the beginning of the end of the British Empire? To Queen Victoria, who had been on the throne for sixty-three of the past one hundred years, the question was one that must not even be asked. “Please understand that there is no one depressed in this house,” she told Arthur Balfour, then leader of the House of Commons. “We are not interested in the possibilities of defeat; they do not exist.”

For the men of the Staats Model School, the news of Black Week came as a particularly painful blow. They had learned to be wary of what they were told by the gloating guards or read for themselves in the shamelessly slanted Boer newspapers, but they could no longer deceive themselves that the war was going well. “All the news we heard in Pretoria was derived from Boer sources, and was hideously exaggerated and distorted,” Churchill would later write. “However much one might doubt and discount these tales, they made a deep impression. A month’s feeding on such literary garbage weakens the constitution of the mind. We wretched prisoners lost heart.”

The guards, naturally, took great satisfaction in the course of the war, and rarely missed an opportunity to taunt their prisoners about the “huge slaughters and shameful flights of the British.” Even in the best of times, the men now guarding the prison were not, for the most part, gentle men. Now, far from the war and surrounded by men who, although they were prisoners now, were at least fresh from the battlefield, they choked on their humiliation and barely contained their rage. Adrian Hofmeyr, a clergyman from Cape Colony who had been taken prisoner because of his British sympathies, so detested the guards at the Staats Model School that he would later devote an entire chapter in his book The Story of My Captivity to detailing their offenses. The ZARPs, he wrote, were “as brutal a lot of men, with very few exceptions, as one could find in a day’s march.”

The prisoners were not the guards’ only targets. Knowing that they were carefully watched by de Souza, the ZARPs rarely indulged in physical violence, although they incessantly goaded and mocked the men under their control. Their rage, however, was in full, unthrottled display when it came to Pretoria’s black and mixed-race inhabitants, especially those who made the mistake of passing by the Staats Model School. “How our blood boiled when we were forced to be passive spectators of this Zarpian ruffianism!” Hofmeyr wrote. “Poor fellow! He does not know that the street is not wide enough for his Majesty the Zarp and himself, and thus walks on with that apologetic air which every [black man] in the Transvaal wears, till he has passed the Rubicon—that rope which excludes him and forces him to walk a block round.”

None of the guards, however, was as intolerable as Hans Malan. It did not take Churchill and Haldane long to be confirmed in their initial assessment of Kruger’s grandson. “A foul and objectionable brute,” Churchill wrote of Malan. “His personal courage was better suited to insulting the prisoners in Pretoria than to fighting the enemy at the front.” Churchill was not alone in his contempt. Word had filtered down to the prisoners that, despite his close ties to Kruger, Malan had been openly scorned within the Volksraad for his cowardice. Even Marie de Souza, who had heard of his cruel treatment of native Africans, loathed him. “He is no man but a brute!!” she wrote in her diary. “Oh, if I could only speak or had power.”

Although he did not want to place himself in danger, or fight anyone who could defend himself, Malan had been a vociferous proponent of the war. As the chief inspector of the roads, he had, in the words of John Buttery, an editor for the Standard and Diggers’ News, “brought a great deal of influence to bear during the secret Raad [Volksraad] sittings on those members known to be wavering in the direction of peace, and whom it was necessary to intimidate and coerce into joining the war-gang.” Malan, Buttery wrote, had made a practice of “button-holing the members as they went in and out, and there was no mistaking his truculent bearing.”

While many of the officers found Malan intimidating and did their best to avoid him, Churchill found it difficult to swallow his incessant jeering without striking back. One day, when Malan had been particularly insufferable, Churchill rounded on him. Reminding the guard that in war either side might emerge victorious, he then asked him if it was wise to “place himself in a separate category as regards behavior to the prisoners.” Should they win the war, Churchill said, looking pointedly at Malan, the British government might wish to make examples of a few Boers. The implication had clearly made Malan, a “great gross man [whose] colour came and went on a large over-fed face,” nervous, and, Churchill later wrote, “he never came near me again.”

As the war continued, however, Malan was the least of the men’s worries. To their great dismay, they quickly learned that Commandant Opperman, who ran the prison, had little control over his wildly swaying emotions. If the Boers were winning, he was elated. If not, he looked, Churchill wrote, “a picture of misery.” So tightly tied were Opperman’s emotions to the outcome of the war that he had often told the prisoners that should the Boers lose, he would “perish in the defence of the capital.” Although the officers had little concern for Opperman’s fate, they were sickened when he told them that before dying in a blaze of glory, he would first shoot his own wife and children.

While Opperman threatened to kill his own family, his superiors, the men who were actually running the war, suddenly began to reconsider the lives of their prisoners. The day before Churchill had arrived in Pretoria, the British had captured a man named Nathan Marks, whom they accused of being a Boer spy. Disguised as an ambulance driver, Marks had infiltrated British lines, carrying with him a wounded man. When discovered, he had admitted that he had been sent there to find out if the Boer shells were as devastating as those of the British. When told of Marks’s capture, the Boers not only vehemently denied that he was a spy but threatened to retaliate if anything happened to him.

Reitz, the Transvaal secretary of state, made clear his intentions to the governor of Cape Colony, Alfred Milner. If Marks were executed, Reitz assured Milner, the Boers would “put to death six British officers now held as prisoners of war at Pretoria.” Although the men at the Staats Model School would continue to be fed, clothed and protected from the wrath of their guards, they understood that, from one day to the next, their lives could not be guaranteed.

Not long after Reitz delivered his threat to Milner, he traveled to Pretoria, stopping in at the Staats Model School to see the men whose lives hung in the balance. Since Churchill had been demanding a meeting with Reitz since the day he was captured, the secretary of state decided to oblige him. Reitz’s son Deneys, who had ridden out of Pretoria with Botha the day the war began, happened to be in the capital as well and accompanied his father as he walked from his office to the prison. The two men entered the building, walked past the guards and stepped into a large room, where they found Churchill “playing games,” most likely chess, with the other prisoners.

Deneys already knew exactly who Churchill was, as did his father. Not only had Reitz read Joubert’s telegram urging him to deny the correspondent his freedom, but he had since received several other angry complaints about Churchill. “I see a rumour in the papers that Lord Churchill’s son…will soon be released by the government,” a Boer general who had been with Botha at the attack on the armored train had written to Reitz on November 28. “If this person is released so can any other P.O.W. be released. He was most active in directing the soldiers in stultifying our operations….He must therefore be treated as any other P.O.W. and if needs be guarded with even greater vigilance.” Reitz even received a letter from a man named Danie Theron, who had witnessed Churchill’s capture and now implored the secretary of state to ensure his continued captivity. “According to the Volkstem and Standard and Diggers News he [Churchill] now declares he took no part in the fight,” Theron wrote. “This is a pack of lies; nor would he stand still when warned by Field-Cornet Ooosthuizen to surrender or do so till covered by the latter’s rifle. In my opinion he is one of the most dangerous prisoners in our hands.”

When Churchill looked up and saw Reitz, he quickly launched into what was by then a well-rehearsed argument for his release. Unlike de Souza, however, Reitz was not easily persuaded. After Churchill argued that he was a war correspondent, not a combatant, Reitz reminded him that he had been carrying a Mauser. Churchill replied that in the Sudan all correspondents had carried weapons for self-protection. This comparison had the opposite effect Churchill had hoped it would. Rather than changing Reitz’s mind, it irritated him. Boers, he stiffly informed Churchill, were “not in the habit of killing non-combatants.” In the end, Churchill succeeded only in persuading Reitz to take with him some articles he had written and that he hoped the secretary of state would send on to the Morning Post.

Churchill’s last hope was a prisoner exchange then being discussed between the Boers and the British. “Unless I am regarded for the purpose of exchange as a military officer,” he wrote to Colonel Frederick Stopford, Buller’s military secretary, on November 30, “I am likely to fall between two stools. Pray do your best for me.” Joubert, however, then still clinging to life, adamantly refused to let him go. “I agree to the exchange proposed,” he wrote on December 10, the same day as the Battle of Stormberg, “but am resolved against the exchange of Churchill.”

Churchill finally gave up. The Boers, he realized, would never willingly let him go. “As soon as I learned of [Joubert’s] decision in the first week of December,” he wrote, “I resolved to escape.”