Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill (15 page)

In many ways, Shaka both created the Zulu Nation and nearly destroyed it. Although he rose to power as an effective and merciless warrior, it was Shaka’s skill as a military tactician that would transform the Zulu tribe. He completely reorganized the army, instituting a regimental system that separated soldiers by age and assigned them kraals, or villages, in which they were forced to live celibate lives. He is credited with creating the famous “bull horn” battle formation, in which the enemy is trapped by the chest of the bull, the principal force; the horns, the secondary unit, circle in on them from both sides; and the loins, a reserve force stationed behind the chest, with their backs to the battle, ensure that no one escapes with his life.

Shaka also redesigned the most essential Zulu weapon, the assegai, turning the fragile throwing spear into a much heavier thrusting stick, with a broad blade and shortened haft. The new weapon quickly became known as an
iKlwa
, in imitation of the sucking sound it made as it was pulled from a body. After impaling his enemies on an
iKlwa
, Shaka, gorged with blood and victory, would shout, “Ngadla!”—“I have eaten!”

More than changing how the Zulu fought, Shaka changed who they were. Fear was his principal weapon, and he used it not just against his enemies, but against his own people. He trained his warriors in brutality, forcing them to dance barefoot over thorns, drill
from dawn to dusk until they literally dropped from exhaustion, and walk more than fifty miles in a single day. On a whim, he would bury entire regiments alive or order them to march, one by one, over a cliff simply to prove their loyalty. He ordered men to be executed because they had sneezed in front of him or because he didn’t like the way they looked.

So complete was Shaka’s control over his people that, although the death he meted out was often lingering and always as excruciating as his imagination allowed, few of his victims tried to escape their horrible fate. “
No fetters or cords are ever employed to bind the victim,” recalled a Briton who, as a boy, had witnessed Zulu executions while on African hunting trips with his father. “He is left at liberty to run for his life or to stand and meet his doom….Many stand and meet their fate with a degree of firmness that could hardly be imagined.”

Shaka was finally assassinated in 1828, stabbed to death by his half brothers who used
iKlwas
, the weapon of his own creation, to put an end to his reign of terror. Although he had ruled the Zulu for only twelve years, the mark Shaka left on the tribe was as indelible as those of history’s most legendary leaders, from Genghis Khan to Napoleon to, one day, Churchill himself. For the Boers, as for anyone who clashed with the Zulu, Shaka’s impact on the tribe could be felt long after his death.

The British too had fought the Zulu, and had come so close to defeat that a stunned Queen Victoria had demanded to know, “Who are these Zulus?” But the Boers had lived beside them, fought with them and learned from them in a way that the British could not possibly understand. Through their bloody altercations with the Zulu, the Boers’ military tactics had been forged in fire. They had learned how to fight like no other Europeans, and they were going to use everything Shaka had taught them to rid themselves of the British once and for all.

Although the most famous battle between the Zulu and the Boers took place ten years after Shaka’s assassination, it bore the unmistakable mark of his particular brand of military genius, and the widespread suffering that was also his legacy. It was a battle, moreover, that had begun where Churchill’s journey into Natal in 1899 was about to end: a small, now largely abandoned town named Estcourt.

Situated on a broad expanse of green tufted veld and surrounded by low hills, Estcourt, just forty miles south of Ladysmith, was to the British nothing more than a convenient site from which to mount a defense of the besieged town. It could have been any rural village in any forgotten backwater of their sprawling empire. To the Boers, however, the town stood on hallowed ground.

Sixty years earlier, Estcourt and the surrounding area had been the scene of a brutal massacre of some five hundred
Voortrekkers
and KhoiKhoi laborers by Dingane, Shaka’s half brother who had assumed the throne after murdering him. Not quite a year later, a group of Boers led by Andries Pretorius, a close friend of Louis Botha’s grandfather, had retaliated, confronting the Zulu on the banks of the Ncome River. The Zulu had arrived for the battle in terrifying waves of as many as twelve thousand warriors, chanting and hissing as they brandished
iKlwas
and curled around the Boers in Shaka’s own bull-horn battle formation. The Boers, however, although they had fewer than five hundred men, were armed with rifles and a cannon. By the end of the day, some three thousand Zulu lay dead. In fact, so great was the slaughter that the river was said to have run red with their blood, and the Boers changed its name from Ncome River to Blood River.

After the Battle of Blood River, the Boers had claimed much of southern Natal, including Estcourt. Families such as Botha’s quickly moved in and established farms that stretched over thousands of acres. Just five years later, the British swept in, annexing the republic and forcing out most Boers, who refused to live under British rule.

As they had with the Zulu more than half a century before, the Boers had now returned to settle the score. This time, they had not
hundreds of men in their ranks but thousands. They were encamped near Estcourt and Ladysmith, and were hiding in all the hills in between. They were heavily armed, flush with recent victory, fueled with moral outrage and impatient for the next battle to begin.

After his ship landed at the Indian Ocean port of Durban, on the eastern coast of Natal, Churchill was torn from his daydreams about this golden land of opportunity, and harshly reminded of “the hideous fact that Natal is invaded and assailed by the Boers.” As he and Atkins waited impatiently for the sun to rise, Churchill wanted only one thing, news of the war. When morning finally came, however, what he learned was exactly what he had feared: Ladysmith, just 125 miles to the northwest, had been cut off by the advancing Boers, and no one could get out, or in. He had crossed Africa’s southern extremity at an incredible clip, easily outpacing Buller, his men and the other correspondents in the race to Natal, but he had not been fast enough. “
I was too late,” he wrote dismally. “The door was shut.”

Angry and exhausted, Churchill was nonetheless determined to keep going. “ ‘
As far as you can as quickly as you can’ must be the motto of the war correspondent,” he wrote. Finding a place on a mail train that was headed inland, he made his way through the mountains once again, northwestward this time, on a zigzagging railway that “contorts itself into curves that would horrify the domestic engineer.” Finally, on November 6, his train pulled into the railway station at Estcourt, the new front for the war.

Most of the British troops in Estcourt knew little, and likely cared less, about the history of the blood-soaked land over which they had carelessly set up their tents and tossed their bags. They were very much aware, however, of the modern-day Boers watching them from the surrounding hills. Even the Boers themselves were stunned by the sheer number of burghers now scattered between Estcourt and Ladysmith. “
As I approached I saw thousands of fires springing up on the hills,” Deneys Reitz, the young man who had left Pretoria with
Botha, wrote after arriving in the region one night from Dundee. “The commandos were strung out over several miles.”

In sharp contrast to the enemy, the British force in Estcourt was so small it had little hope of defending itself, much less charging into Ladysmith and freeing White and his men.
Because Buller had yet to arrive, there were then only two battalions—the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, who had already fought one battle and had only just made it out of Ladysmith themselves, and a squadron of the Imperial Light Horse. A group of three hundred volunteers from Natal had also arrived, bringing with them twenty-five bicyclists and a battery of nine-pounder guns rolled in on enormous, spoked wheels.
Even with this welcome addition, there were still only about twenty-three hundred men in Estcourt, fewer than three hundred of whom were mounted. “
The enemy crouches at our door,” Atkins wrote uneasily as he and Churchill took stock of their new home. “This place is scarcely defensible.”

Every British soldier and officer knew that the question was not whether the Boers would attack Estcourt but when. What they couldn’t understand was why the commandos hadn’t already descended on their small force, which every day threatened to grow into a much larger one. “
It was a period of strained waiting, when everyone wondered whether a Boer commando or a British brigade would be the first arrival,” one of the soldiers would later write. “Reliable news was scarce, though rumours of every kind were rife.” It was not difficult to picture the Boers streaming down the hills, or suddenly turning their massive guns from Ladysmith to Estcourt. “
We live,” Churchill wrote matter-of-factly, “in expectation of attack.”

CHAPTER 9

THE DEATH TRAP

C
hurchill cursed his luck for missing the chance to enter Ladysmith, but it was not the first time in war that he had arrived too late. Less than a year earlier, after talking his way into a military assignment in the Sudan, he had raced to Africa, only to find that the position that had been promised to him had already been given to another man. Churchill was particularly furious about that missed opportunity because his squadron was to lead the attack on the Dervishes. The man who had taken his place, Second Lieutenant Robert Grenfell, on the other hand, was thrilled. “
Fancy how lucky I am,” he had written to his family after hearing the news. “Here I have got the troop that would have been Winston’s, and we are to be the first to start.” Not long after he had written the letter, Grenfell rode triumphantly into battle, only to be slaughtered along with many of the men in his regiment. “Chance is unceasingly at work in our lives,” Churchill would write years later, thinking back on Grenfell and the fate that might have been his, “but we cannot always see its workings sharply and clearly defined.”

Churchill, now still too young to see the workings of chance in his life, certainly could not imagine that there might be any benefit or excitement to being trapped in Estcourt. Bitterly resigning
himself to this “
tiny tin township,” he took in his new home with a weary eye. It was “
of mean and insignificant aspect,” he wrote gloomily. There were a few shops, but they were housed in “unpretentious shanties” and nearly all abandoned since the outset of war. A scattering of low stone and corrugated-iron houses lined Estcourt’s only street, and Churchill could see a few more “straggling away towards the country.” Beyond that toward the northwest and the Boer lines, there was nothing but the flat green veld and a few low hills. To the southwest, he could see the misty blue peaks of the Drakensberg, Afrikaans for “dragon mountains.”