Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill (34 page)

As he crouched in the ditch near the station, Churchill did not know any of this. He knew only that an hour had passed and still there was no train in sight. With each passing minute, his impatience grew. Not only was he eager to try his luck, but he was running out of time. Even if no one at the Staats Model School had yet noticed his absence, as soon as the sun rose, they would know that he was gone. “
My escape must be known at dawn,” he wrote. “Pursuit would be immediate.”

Straining his ears for the sound of an approaching train, Churchill suddenly heard something: the deep-throated, wet whistle of a steam engine, and the heavy, rhythmic rattle of wheels on tracks. Looking up from his ditch, he saw two large yellow headlights swing into
view. After waiting for an hour, he would now have only minutes, perhaps seconds, to make his move.

As the train came closer, Churchill climbed out of his ditch and scrambled over to the tracks. “I argued that the train would stop at the station,” he wrote, “and that it would not have got up too much speed by the time it reached me.” Counseling himself to be patient, to wait until the train had passed by him before jumping so that he would not be seen, he mentally rehearsed what he was about to do. The train would pass, he thought, and then he would “make a dash for the carriages.”

As had so often happened in Churchill’s young life, however, nothing turned out quite as he had planned.
When the engine pulled away from the station, “with much noise and steaming,” it picked up speed quickly, much more quickly than Churchill had anticipated. In what seemed like a mere heartbeat, the blinding lights were upon him, the pleasant rattle had grown into a thunderous roar, and he was staring up at the “dark mass” of the engine. Everything came in a massive, churning, irresistible rush—“the engine-driver silhouetted against his furnace glow, the black profile of the engine, the clouds of steam.”

Crouching next to the tracks, Churchill knew that it was, once again, now or never. Before he could hesitate or even think, he leaped. What happened next was a blur of wheels, smoke and terror. “I hurled myself on the trucks,” he wrote, “clutched at something, missed, clutched again, missed again, grasped some sort of hand-hold, was swung off my feet—my toes bumping on the line.” Finally, with a surge of effort, he pulled himself off the tracks and onto the couplings of the fifth car.

His body surging with fear and adrenaline, Churchill crawled as quickly as he could into the interior of the boxcar. It was a goods train, and the car was filled with sacks, all of which were coated in coal dust. They were filthy, but Churchill did not care as he tunneled his way into their depths. In just a few minutes, he was all but invisible, tucked deep within the mass of warm, soft bags, comfortable and, for the moment, safe.

As he lay in his cocoon, breathing in coal dust and sweat and feeling the bulky bags heavy on his legs and uneven beneath his back, Churchill’s mind churned with questions. Had the engine driver seen him as he jumped onto the train and struggled to pull himself onto the couplings? Would they unload the car at the next station? Would they search it? Where was the train taking him? To Delagoa Bay or Pietersburg?

“Ah, never mind that,” he finally told himself. “Sufficient for the day was the luck thereof.” Lying in his dusty nest, Churchill listened to the soothing sound of the train clattering along the tracks, carrying him away from Pretoria at twenty miles an hour. Exhausted, triumphant and content, he quickly fell asleep.

When Churchill awoke with a start several hours later, he was a different man from the one who had drifted off to sleep among the coal bags. The rush of excitement, the thrill of his newly won freedom, the feelings of triumph and invincibility, had all gone. All that was left, he wrote, was “
the consciousness of oppressive difficulties heavy on me.”

Disoriented and frightened, Churchill had no idea how long he had been sleeping, or where the train had taken him. Peering out from the boxcar, he was relieved to see that it was at least still dark. No longer full of swagger, he took comfort in the night, relying on it to hide him while he did what he knew he had to do—jump from the train.

Unwilling to risk being found at the next station and desperate for water, Churchill reluctantly crawled from his “
cosy hiding place” and climbed back onto the same couplings that had been his savior a few hours earlier. The train was still moving fast, but he knew that he did not have the luxury of waiting for it to slow down. Grasping an iron handle at the back of the boxcar with his left hand, he pulled it as hard as he could and jumped. He struck the ground hard, took two “gigantic strides” and found himself sprawled in a ditch next to
the tracks. Looking up, he watched as the train, “my faithful ally of the night,” hurtled on without him, quickly disappearing in the dark.

As he stood, his legs shaky beneath him, Churchill tried to take stock of his surroundings. He was standing in a broad valley, encircled by low hills and filled with tall, dew-covered grass. He had no idea where he was, but, he thought with a small twinge of consolation, neither did anyone else. He also noticed with even greater relief that the tracks he had been traveling on ran toward the rising sun. At some point as he had slept, the train had turned from north to east, carrying him in the direction of Portuguese East Africa and freedom.

Savagely thirsty, Churchill’s first thoughts were of water. Finding a clear pool in a nearby gully, he drank more than he wanted, and then he drank some more. He knew that after the sun had risen, he would have to spend the entire day in hiding. Walking toward the surrounding hills, the grass drenching his pant legs, he came upon a small grove of trees that bordered a deep ravine. It would have to do as a hiding place until the sun set once again.

It was now 4:00 in the morning. Roughly nine hours had passed since his escape, but he would have to wait at least fourteen more before he could continue his journey. When he had first jumped from the train, he had felt the cold night air sharp on his hands and face and stealing through his thin flannel suit. With little humidity in the air, there was nothing to hold the heat after the sun went down. As it came up, however, Churchill knew that he would soon long for the chill of night.

He had experienced extreme heat before. In India, he had described it in tactile, almost anthropomorphic terms. “
You could lift the heat with your hands,” he had written, “it sat on your shoulders like a knapsack, it rested on your head like a nightmare.” Now it was not only oppressive, it was a threat. The pool from which he had drunk before the sun rose was only about half a mile away, beckoning him, but it was too dangerous to walk even that short distance in the daylight. By 10:00, even in the shade of his grove, Churchill
was boiling, and his thirst had returned with a vengeance. Because he had had nothing to eat since before dinner the previous day, he ate one of his four precious bars of chocolate, but it did little to satisfy his hunger and only heightened his thirst.

Exhausted from his ordeal, Churchill lay down among the trees and tried to sleep, but it was too hot, and he was too anxious. “I had scarcely slept, but yet my heart beat so fiercely and I was so nervous and perplexed about the future that I could not rest,” he wrote. “I thought of all the chances that lay against me; I dreaded and detested more than words can express the prospect of being caught and dragged back to Pretoria.”

Even here, in the middle of nowhere, the likelihood of Churchill being captured, or even shot, was high. Although he was many miles from Pretoria and far from the fighting, he was not alone. From his hiding place, he could see the silhouettes of men, some walking, others on horseback, crossing the valley. One man, hunting birds, came right up to the grove of trees in which he was hidden. He fired twice, but left without seeing the British escapee who was silently watching him between the branches.

At the moment, the only creature paying careful attention to Churchill was a large, ferocious-looking bird of prey, which, he wrote, “
manifested an extravagant interest in my condition.” Churchill believed it was a vulture, but whatever it was, it “made hideous and ominous gurgling” sounds at it stared intensely at the frightened young man standing before it.

As Churchill hid among the trees, a hunted man, the hopelessness and peril of his situation became almost too much to bear. His famously strident confidence had left him, leaving behind only the impossibility of finding his way to freedom, or even surviving the attempt. “I found no comfort in any of the philosophical ideas which some men parade in their hours of ease and strength and safety,” he wrote. “I realized with awful force that no exercise of my own feeble wit and strength could save me from my enemies.” Finally, desperate and nearly defeated, Churchill turned for hope and help to the only source he had left: his God.

Churchill was not a religious man. “
If the human race ever reaches a stage of development—when religion will cease to assist and comfort mankind,” he had written to his mother two years earlier, “Christianity will be put aside as a crutch which is no longer needed, and man will stand erect on the firm legs of reason.” As a child, he had been forced to spend many hours in church, and would later say that he was grateful for them only because, aside from weddings and funerals, he had felt little need to return. “
I accumulated in those years so fine a surplus in the Bank of Observance,” he wrote, “that I have been drawing confidently upon it ever since.”

Churchill had, however, room not only in his heart but in his mind for a God. He had never been able to understand why his intellect and his soul must be in conflict. “
It seemed good to let the mind explore so far as it could the paths of thought and logic, and also good to pray for help and succor, and be thankful when they came,” he wrote. “I could not feel that the Supreme Creator who gave us our minds as well as our souls would be offended if they did not always run smoothly together in double harness. After all He must have foreseen this from the beginning and of course He would understand it all.”

Now, with no new ideas, no clever plans, no strutting confidence in the strength of his mind and the agility of his young body, Churchill was forced to admit to himself that he needed help. “Without the assistance of that High Power which interferes in the eternal sequence of causes and effects more often than we are always prone to admit,” he wrote, “I could never succeed.” He was, by all measures but one, alone, and so he did the only thing he could think to do. He prayed, “long and earnestly.”

CHAPTER 20

“TO TAKE MY LEAVE”

W
hen the sun rose over the Staats Model School, the alarm did not sound as Churchill had thought it would. In fact, only a handful of men knew that anything was amiss, and they were not talking. While Churchill had been strolling through Pretoria, doing his best imitation of a man enjoying a summer evening, Haldane and Brockie had been scrambling to buy him time. They did this even though the mere mention of Winston Churchill’s name filled them with fury.

Since Churchill’s escape the night before, the two men had been stunned to find themselves shut out of their own plan. Brockie, who had been adamantly against even including Churchill, was unable to choke back his rage. He let loose “
a full dose of opprobrious epithets of which [he] had a liberal command,” Haldane wrote. There was, in fact, “a chorus of vituperation” against Churchill, because the officers who had wanted to join the plan themselves felt certain that it would be far harder for any of them to escape now. Haldane, while enduring Brockie’s “sneering allusions to ‘Your trusted friend—a nice kind of gentleman!’ ” struggled to tamp down his own anger. “I said little,” he wrote, “swallowing my chagrin as best I could.”

What was done was done. They could not get Churchill back,
and they could no longer use the same plan. There was nothing to do but find another way out and, in the meantime, try to help Churchill succeed. Working as fast as they could, Haldane and Brockie fashioned a “dummy figure” and tucked it into Churchill’s bed, its head on the same pillow that had once hidden Hofmeyr’s hat.

It was apparently an effective disguise.
When a soldier-servant stepped into their room that morning, carrying a cup of coffee, he spoke to what he believed was Churchill, still wrapped, motionless, in blankets on his bed. When there was no answer, he simply set the coffee on a chair and walked away.

Churchill’s next visitor, however, was not so easily discouraged. While at the Staats Model School, Churchill had not only made purchases, from clothing to alcohol, he had arranged for services from local vendors. For the past month, he had been receiving regular haircuts and shaves from a Boer barber. In the excitement of his escape, he had forgotten that he had an appointment for the morning of December 13.