Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill (4 page)

As he rode out with the cavalry on his gray charger, like a bright fish in a sea of khaki and brown, Churchill took great satisfaction in the knowledge that, if nothing else, he would be impossible to miss.

What struck Churchill most forcefully that morning as he entered the valley, cloaked in the mountains’ deep shadows, was the pervading silence. Every village the cavalry passed was deserted, all the plains empty. The men knew that thousands of Pashtun were watching as they rode farther and farther from camp, but they could neither see nor hear them. It was not until Churchill pulled out his telescope and scanned the mountains where the watch fires had burned the night before that he could see, covering the terraced sides, long white rows of Pashtun.

As the cavalry came closer, the tribesmen silently turned and began to scale the mountainside. Stopping at a small cemetery, the British dismounted and, unable to bear the tension any longer, opened fire. The response was immediate. Puffs of white smoke erupted on the mountain, and the sound of bullets whistling through the air filled the cemetery. While the rest of the men dived behind trees and rough tombstones, however, Churchill, sensing an opportunity and the eyes of the other officers, refused even to dismount. “
I rode on my grey pony all along the front of the skirmish line where everyone else was lying down in cover,” he would later confess. “Foolish perhaps,
but given an audience there is no act too daring or too noble. Without the gallery things are different.”

The skirmish, which was relatively brief and bloodless, seemed to make the men in Churchill’s unit forget who they were fighting. Before climbing deeper into the mountains, on the trail of the Pashtun, therefore, they divided again. Reluctantly leaving his pony behind, Churchill joined a group of just ninety men who were headed toward an isolated village, which, when they reached its small collection of mud houses, they found, like all the others, completely deserted.

On the way up, Churchill had stopped to squint through his telescope, scanning the mountains and plains for the rest of the army. Memories of his days at Sandhurst and the repeated warnings of his professors about the danger of “dispersion of forces” slipped through his mind as he searched without luck for the thousand men with whom he had left camp that morning. “
Mud villages and castles here and there, the deep-cut water-courses, the gleam of reservoirs, occasional belts of cultivation, isolated groves of trees,” he wrote, “but of a British-Indian brigade, no sign.” The entire region, in fact, was unnaturally, almost eerily still, with neither friend nor enemy in sight.

Although Churchill had spent much of his young life thinking about war, until this moment it had all been supposition. He had never been the intended target of a sword or bayonet, and he did not know what it felt like to try to kill another man. Young, eager and desperate for adventure and opportunity, it all seemed to him little more than a game. “
This kind of war was full of fascinating thrills,” he would later admit. “Nobody expected to be killed.” This, at last, was a real battle, and he wanted nothing more than to charge into it, launching his own thin body, fresh from childhood, into the knives and swords, rocks and bullets of the enemies of the empire.

As Churchill stared intently at the silent, apparently empty hills around him, it seemed as though the chance he had been waiting for might not come after all. The captain of his small unit, however, sensed something different. Realizing that he and his men were
“rather in the air here,” and as such extraordinarily vulnerable, he ordered them to withdraw. Before they could even begin to retrace their steps, the mountainside, in Churchill’s words, “sprang to life.”

“
Now suddenly,” Churchill wrote, “black tragedy burst upon the scene.” Seemingly materializing from the stones of the mountain, Pashtun tribesmen descended on the tiny village from all directions. Everywhere the stunned British soldiers looked, Pashtun were leaping from cover, letting out sharp, shrill cries as they raced in a terrifying frenzy toward their enemy. “
From high up on the crag, one thousand, two thousand, three thousand feet above us,” Churchill would later recall, “white or blue figures appeared, dropping down the mountainside from ledge to ledge.”

Before Churchill could fully understand what was happening, young men, friends and fellow soldiers, were dying all around him. It was a scene that, even after a long and war-strewn life, he would never forget. “One man was shot through the breast and pouring with blood, another lay on his back kicking and twisting,” he would write years later. “The British officer was spinning round just behind me, his face a mass of blood, his right eye cut out.” The war cries of the Pashtun were punctuated by the high-pitched screams of even the bravest young soldiers as they were butchered beyond recognition.

Turning, Churchill watched in outrage and fury as a dozen Pashtun fell upon a wounded British soldier when the men who had been desperately trying to rescue him dropped him in their frantic race to cover. The man who Churchill believed was the leader of the tribesmen stood over the fallen soldier and repeatedly slashed at him with his sword. “
I forgot everything else at this moment,” Churchill would write, “except a desire to kill this man.” Pulling out his revolver, he fired into the melee—again and again and again. “
It was a horrible business. For there was no help for the man that went down. I felt no excitement and very little fear,” he would later write home. “I cannot be certain, but I think I hit 4 men. At any rate they fell.”

Churchill would never know how many men he killed that day before help came in the form of a relief column, or if any had fallen by his hand, but even as he looked down on the mutilated bodies all
around him, the bodies of men he knew, men very much like him, he knew that he would not share their fate. He was meant to live, of that he was certain. More than that, he was meant to do something great with his life, and he was eager to take the next step in what he was confident would be a remarkable and dizzyingly fast ascension. “
Bullets—to a philosopher my dear Mamma—are not worth considering,” he would assure his mother in a pencil-written letter from Bangalore two months later, after the siege of Malakand had been lifted and the Pashtun forced to retreat. “I do not believe the Gods would create so potent a being as myself for so prosaic an ending.”

CHAPTER 2

THE GRAVEN PALM

F
or Churchill, it was not enough to believe that power and fame would come eventually. As soon as the New Year, 1898, began, he set his sights on realizing not one daunting ambition but three, daring the world to ignore him.
He published his first book,
The Story of the Malakand Field Force
, began agitating for an assignment to fight in the Sudan, and made it clear to anyone who would listen that despite his youth he was not only eager to begin his political career but eminently qualified to do so. “
I am somewhat impatient of advice as to my beginning in politics,” he complained to his mother soon after returning from Malakand. “If I am not good enough—others are welcome to take my place….Of course—as you have known for some time—I believe in myself. If I did not I might perhaps take other views.”

Convinced that another war, and another opportunity for heroism, would be of use in his political life, Churchill recruited no less than the prime minister of Great Britain to help him win an assignment in the Sudan, where the British were trying to wrest power from the Mahdists, followers of the Muslim leader Al-Mahdī. He set sail for Africa before the Indian army had even granted his leave. What he witnessed there would leave a lasting mark. He described the
campaign in
The River War
, the book he would publish the following year. Even years later he described a nightmarish scene of death and dismemberment, with “
horses spouting blood, struggling on three legs, men staggering on foot…fish-hook spears stuck right through them, arms and faces cut to pieces, bowels protruding, men gasping, crying, collapsing, expiring.” Churchill himself shot and likely killed half a dozen men, one of whom was so close to him that the pistol itself struck the man as Churchill galloped by. In fact, although the British ultimately prevailed, so horrific was the campaign that even for Churchill war was finally beginning to lose a little of its gallant gleam. “
You cannot gild it,” he wrote to his mother from Khartoum. “The raw comes through.”

As sobering as Churchill had found the carnage he witnessed in the Sudan, his faith in himself and his future had not for a moment been shaken. On the contrary, he was acutely aware of the fact that once again he had forced his way into the deadliest colonial battle the British Empire had to offer, watched as men all around him were killed and horribly wounded, and emerged not just alive but whole. “
Nothing touched me,” he calmly wrote just two days after the Battle of Omdurman, in which the British had lost five hundred men to death and injury and the Mahdists twenty thousand. “I destroyed those who molested me and so passed out without any disturbance of body or mind.”

Churchill believed that, whatever had kept him alive on the battlefield, whether divine intervention or simply good fortune, his luck had been “
set fair,” and he was eager to test its indulgence. “On what do these things depend,” he mused as a train carried him home. “Chance-Providence-God-the-Devil—call it what you will….Whatever it may be—I do not complain.”

Nor did he hesitate. As 1898 came to an end, so did Churchill’s career as a soldier. Although he was in considerable debt, had not been trained for any other occupation and had been warned against leaving the army by everyone from his formidable grandmother, the Duchess of Marlborough, to the Prince of Wales, he resigned his commission in the British army early in the New Year. “
I have sent
my papers in and in three months more I shall not be a soldier,” he wrote to his cousin Sunny Marlborough in the first weeks of 1899, confessing, in a rare admission of uncertainty, that he knew he was taking a very great risk. “It is not without some misgivings that I let go of my tow rope,” he wrote, “and commit myself unaided to the waves of life’s oceans, propelled only by my own machinery.” He would not have to tread water for long.

In early April, when the spring rains lashing London’s cobblestoned streets still had the bite of winter, Churchill approached the entrance to the House of Commons, a wide, Gothic archway cut into the imposing stone face of the Palace of Westminster. Looming hundreds of feet above him, its reflection wavering in the ruffled surface of the river Thames, was
the Clock Tower, one of the most immediately recognizable architectural structures in the world. The tower, which was only fifteen years older than Churchill himself, was famous not just for its Great Clock but for its nearly fourteen-ton bell, nicknamed Big Ben, most likely in honor of Ben Caunt, a six-foot-two-inch, two-hundred-pound bare-knuckle boxer who had been the heavyweight champion of England in 1841.

As Churchill stepped into the shadow of Big Ben, he knew that waiting for him in the cool, hushed interior of the House of Commons was a man who could open the doors to this iconic seat of political power. One of two members of Parliament for the town of Oldham in the northwest of England, Robert Ascroft, with his graying hair, full, dark mustache, and fine features, not only looked more substantial and respectable than his young visitor but seemed to be the embodiment of old-world dignity. As he led Churchill through the dimly lit halls and down the narrow stairs to the members-only smoking room, Ascroft had a gravitas that Churchill, with his feverish ambition and blatant self-promotion, did not yet have, but that they both hoped he could do without.

Despite Churchill’s youthful energy and awkwardness, when he
stepped through the heavy doors that led into the smoking room, he easily slipped into a world that most Britons not only would never see but could not even fully imagine. Although this was the House of Commons, more than half its members came from the British aristocracy. To most young men, the room alone, with its soaring ceilings, paneled walls, casually scattered chess tables and curved wooden chairs upholstered in rich leather and tarnished brass tacks, would be imposing, even awe inspiring. For Churchill, it was, in reputation at least, as familiar as his own childhood. Although this was not yet his world, it had long been his father’s.