Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill (20 page)

Despite Haldane’s reluctance, the train crept on, passing Frere and making its way to the next station, a tiny outpost named Chieveley that consisted of little more than a platform and a telegraph post. Just before they pulled into the station, Churchill and Haldane saw in the distance the one sight they had both feared and expected: the unmistakable form of Boers. “
A long hill was lined with a row of black spots,” Churchill wrote, “showing that our further advance would be disputed.” The Boers were still about a mile away, but they could see perhaps a hundred of them, and they had with them teams of oxen pulling wagons that doubtless carried field guns. They were also, Churchill noted, moving south. “
Certainly they were Boers,” he wrote. “Certainly they were behind us. What would they be doing with the railway line?”

Churchill and Haldane had no idea what the Boers were up to. They did know, however, that not only were the burghers almost invisible when in hiding, they could also move with enormous speed when they chose to. Every Boer had a horse, and that horse was as familiar with and comfortable in the veld as its master.
Whenever they were forced to go on foot, British mounted troops had to leave a soldier behind to watch the horses, but Boer horses stayed where they had been left until their owners returned. Although they asked a lot of their horses, often riding them as many as sixty miles in a single day, the Boers always made sure their loads were light. While
a British cavalryman and his equipment rarely weighed less than four hundred pounds, a Boer, who had with him only a saddle, rifle, blanket and food, was half that weight.

The Boer burghers themselves were often as different from their British counterparts as were their horses. In fact, most of the men Botha had brought with him were not at all what Britons would picture when they thought of a soldier. Many of them, despite their extraordinary skill with rifles and horses and their intimate knowledge of the region, would not even have been allowed to join the British army. “
There were men in the Boer forces who had only one arm, some with only one leg, others with only one eye,” Howard Hillegas, an American journalist who followed the Boers during the war, wrote. “Some were almost totally blind, while others would have felt happy if they could have heard the report of their rifles.”

The Boers did not have the luxury of turning down men who wanted to fight, and it wouldn’t have occurred to them to do it even if they had. They were free men—free to refuse orders, to make their own decisions in the heat of battle, and to fight whether they were well or ill, whole of body or severely maimed. Whatever their physical condition, they could still shoot, and they could kill a British soldier as well as any man.

As soon as the Boers passed Chieveley, heading south while the armored train continued north, they set their plan in motion. Their bush hats sagging and drooping in the rain, they worked quickly, careful to hide behind the kopjes that lay between them and the route to Chieveley. About a mile and a half from Frere, there was a long slope that was not only steep but curved sharply near the bottom. In fact, so steep was the gradient and so sharp the curve that a guide rail had been installed to prevent trains from running off the rails if they made the turn too quickly. It was Botha’s plan to help this particular train do just that.
Ordering his men to find as many stones as they could hold, he directed them to fill the space between the guide rail and the track so that when the train clattered down the hill, it would skid onto the stones as it made the sharp turn and, he hoped, jump the tracks.

The only factor not within their control was how fast the train would be going. Botha, however, was not the kind of man who left things to chance. As soon as the rocks had been piled along the guide rail, he ordered his men to push their guns up the hills that flanked the tracks. When the train crested the steep slope, they would greet it with such a barrage of bullets and shells that the driver would do everything in his power to escape, and there was only one way to go: down the hill as fast as he possibly could.

When their work was finished, rain was still falling, but the Boers ignored it. They stretched out on the wet ground, pulled down their hats and got out their pipes. Smoking in silence, they waited patiently for their prey to return.

CHAPTER 12

GRIM SULLEN DEATH

A
s he pulled into Chieveley, his mind on the Boers he had seen only a mile away, Haldane was startled from his reverie by his telegraphist, who handed him a message from Long. “
Remain at Frere in observation guarding your safe retreat,” it read. “Remember that Chieveley station was last night occupied by the enemy.” Haldane could not remember that the Boers had been at Chieveley the night before because Long, perhaps accidentally or perhaps because he was determined to send out the armored train, had not shared that particular piece of information with him before he left Estcourt. As soon as they reached Chieveley, however, Haldane could see for himself that the Boers had been there. “
Everything about the station,” he wrote, “showed signs of a hostile visitation.”

Ordering the telegraphist to report to Long what they had just seen, and inform him that they were about to return to Frere, Haldane climbed back onto the train. Leaning forward, he pressed a button, which was his only means of communicating with the engine, to signal to the driver that they should begin their slow journey home. The engine reversed direction, and Haldane and Churchill felt their car lurch back toward Estcourt, now forming the final, rather than the first, car in the train.

Haldane knew that the Boers he had seen earlier were likely waiting for them up ahead, but beyond maintaining a constant vigilance, he could do little about it now.
When the train reached the crest of a hill not far from Frere and he found that the land rising to his left blocked his view of everything beyond it, Haldane pushed the button to signal the driver to stop. Knowing that his wounded leg would not allow him to easily climb over the tall sides of the truck, he handed his binoculars to Churchill and asked him to scout ahead. Without hesitating, Churchill scrambled out of the truck and scaled the closest hill. He had only been gone a few minutes, the binoculars pressed to his eyes as the rain blurred the lenses, when he heard the sharp, piercing sound of Haldane’s whistle, urgently signaling him to return to the train.

Churchill had just dropped down into the open truck, his feet landing heavily on the floor, when a shell flew overhead, narrowly missing him. When it hit the ground just beyond them with a shuddering thud, there was no question in any of the men’s minds that it was a pom-pom. Designed by the American inventor Hiram Maxim and nicknamed for the coughing sound they made when fired, pom-poms were a new automatic cannon that used unusually small, one-pound shells but shot them at the impressive rate of sixty rounds per minute. Rejected by the British army as both unnecessary and ineffective, pom-poms had quickly become a favorite weapon of the Boers, who liked the fact that they were light and easy to move, and so fit perfectly with their guerrilla style of warfare. “
This noisome beast always lurks in thick bush,” George Warrington Steevens had warned his fellow Britons in a dispatch just a few weeks earlier, “whence it barks chains of shell at the unsuspecting stranger.” The British soon came to regret their decision and, later in the war, would ship fifty pom-poms to South Africa. At this moment, however, they had none, and Botha had two, pointing directly at the armored train.

Urgently pressing the button to signal the driver to start down the hill, Haldane stood back and felt the reassuring tug as the train began to pick up speed. He felt “
rather elated,” he would later write,
“as the pace grew faster and faster.”
Churchill, standing on a box in the back of the truck so that his head and shoulders were above the sides, giving him a good view of the surrounding land, suddenly saw a group of Boers at the top of a nearby hill. Seconds later, he saw something else. “Three wheeled things,” undoubtedly field guns, appeared among the men. Moments later, blinding streaks of yellow light filled the sky, flashing ten or twelve times in rapid succession. Then there were two more flashes, larger this time, followed by an enormous ball of white smoke that “sprang into being and tore out into a cone like a comet.” It was shrapnel, the first Churchill had ever seen, and, he would later write, “
very nearly the last.”

As the roar of the shells continued, whizzing and whirring overhead and then exploding in geysers of blue-white smoke, the Boer snipers joined the chorus. Having jumped down from his box, Churchill stood next to Haldane, listening to the rifle fire as it rattled the metal sides of the truck, bright pings like popcorn in a tin container. “
When all is said, there is nothing to stir the blood like rifle-fire,” a British journalist had written from Ladysmith. It “sends the heart galloping.” Frantically, the sailors swung their heavy gun around to face the enemy. With a sinking heart, Churchill now saw, however, that this, their only secret weapon, which just minutes earlier he had believed would be a “
nice surprise” for the Boers, was little more than “an antiquated toy.”

As the train picked up speed, rushing down the hillside in a desperate attempt to outrace the Boers, a thought flashed through Churchill’s mind with sudden, startling assurance: This was a trick. They were rushing toward a trap, and the only way to save themselves was to go not faster, but slower. Just as he was turning to Haldane to suggest that someone run, hunched and dodging, along the train to tell the driver to slow down, a tremendous jolt suddenly shook the car so violently that everyone in it was thrown to the floor.

While Haldane was still lying on his back, dazed by the impact and trying to collect his thoughts, Churchill leaped to his feet, volunteering to find out what had happened. Hoisting himself over the side, he dropped to the ground and began to run in the direction of the engine, bullets whistling shrilly around him, punctuated by the deeper, jarring rasp of the shells that screamed overhead.

The first thing Churchill saw was that the train had not just been hit, it was in pieces. Botha’s plan had worked even better than he had hoped. The moment the first car had struck the rocks, it had been catapulted into the air, flipping completely over and landing at the bottom of the hill, killing or horribly wounding the platelayers who had been riding in it. The armored car behind it had slid another twenty yards down the tracks before crashing onto its side and launching dozens of men onto the ground, where they lay, some wounded, some dead, all caught in a shower of Boer bullets. The third car, which was just in front of the engine, somehow remained upright, but its front half had twisted off the rails, leaving the other half on the tracks, blocking the rest of the train.

Just as Churchill passed the engine, another shell seemed to explode right over his head, spewing shrapnel everywhere. Terrified, the engine driver leaped from the cab, racing to the overturned truck in desperate search of protection. Fury contorting his face as it bled from a gash delivered by a shell splinter, he turned to Churchill and poured out his rage. “
He was a civilian,” Churchill would recall the man declaring. “What did they think he was paid for? To be killed by bombshells? Not he. He would not stay another minute.”

Realizing that they were about to lose their driver, the only man who knew how to move what was left of the armored train, Churchill said the only thing he could think of that might persuade him to return to the engine. “No man,” he assured the driver, “was ever hit twice on the same day.” What was more, he said, if he climbed back into the cab and did his duty, he would be “rewarded for distinguished gallantry.” This was a rare opportunity, one for which every Briton, soldier or civilian, hungered, and it might never come
again. Astonishingly, after listening carefully to Churchill, the man reached a trembling hand to his face, wiped away the blood, and pulled himself back into the cab. “Thereafter,” Churchill wrote, he “obeyed every order which I gave him.”