Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill (46 page)

Even as he celebrated his escape from the Transvaal, Churchill knew that he was not yet out of his enemy’s grasp. Until he stepped inside the doors of the British consulate in Lourenço Marques, he could still be recaptured. Boers flooded the streets of the Portuguese capital, and they would like nothing more than to haul the young fugitive all the way back to Pretoria on the next train out. What
Churchill did not know was that his situation was even more perilous now than it had been when he climbed into his wool-filled boxcar at the colliery. The man who had watched over him for two days and had made it possible for him to make it this far without being discovered was no longer aboard his train.

With a little help from his bribes and his whiskey, Burnham’s luck had held until they crossed the border, but it had run out in Ressano Garcia. “
The station master there,” he would explain years later to Churchill, “was the only one on the whole journey who was proof against a bribe.” When the man told Burnham that passengers were not allowed to travel through Portuguese East Africa on freight trains, and passenger trains could not carry goods, Burnham had asked him to make an exception. “
If I allowed you to do that,” the man replied, “I would be fined.” Even after Burnham offered him £20, more than any fine he might receive, he had remained steadfast. “All my pleadings and inducements were of no avail,” Burnham wrote, “but he promised me faithfully that he would send the trucks on by the next goods train, which was due to reach Lourenco Marques at 4 p.m.” Deeply worried about Churchill but unable to do anything about it without exposing them both, Burnham was forced to continue on to the capital alone.

When Burnham’s train pulled into Lourenço Marques, he quickly made his way to the section of the station where the goods trains came in. Knowing that he risked arrest if he was found to be loitering in this area, which was for staff only, he looked for someone who could be his eyes and ears. Inside the station, he found a native worker and enlisted his help. Handing the man a half crown, Burnham explained that a freight train would soon be arriving with wool. If he saw a man emerge from one of the boxcars, he was to say nothing to anyone, but quickly bring him to Burnham at the goods gate. Promising the man another half crown if he did as he asked, Burnham slipped back out into the yard and sat down among some goods that had been heaped into teetering piles.

Soon after Burnham settled in, he saw a Portuguese soldier approaching him. As he had feared, the man ordered Burnham to
follow him, intending to arrest him for loitering. Just as he was about to be led out of the station, the native worker who was keeping an eye out for Churchill saw what was happening and hurried over. A heated argument in Portuguese, which Burnham could not understand, ensued. By the end of it, Burnham was released, but ordered to leave the station immediately and not return.

Relieved that he had not been arrested, Burnham left, but he did not go far. Standing just outside the goods gate, he kept a careful watch until, at 4:00 p.m., as promised, he saw his own seven trucks being shunted into the station yard. Knowing that if the soldier saw him return, he would not have a hope of avoiding arrest, Burnham quietly slipped back through the gate and quickly walked toward the freight cars, weaving his way between them until he came to the one that he knew was Churchill’s.

The boxcar had barely stopped moving when Churchill leaped from it, covered in coal dust and looking, Burnham thought, as “black as a sweep.” As he emerged from his “
place of refuge and of punishment,” Churchill would later write, he felt “weary, dirty, hungry, but free once more.”
He had somehow already managed to discard his leftover food, and other waste, and had done his best to rearrange the truck so that it wouldn’t be obvious that someone had been living in it for nearly three days.
Walking up to Churchill, Burnham muttered that he should follow him, and the two men quickly left the train station, going out the same way Burnham had just come in.

As an Englishman living in the Transvaal, not far from Portuguese East Africa, Burnham understood the importance of Lourenço Marques. A three-hundred-year-old seaside town, it had been named for the Portuguese navigator who explored the region in the sixteenth century. For much of its existence, the town had been poor and largely forgotten, its narrow streets and grass huts little populated.

With the completion of the rail line to Pretoria, however, Lourenço
Marques had transformed into a thriving metropolis, uniquely important not just to the Portuguese but, even more so, to the landlocked Boers. “
As an outlet to the sea and as a haven for foreign ships bearing men, arms, and encouragement it was invaluable,” the journalist Howard Hillegas had written at the beginning of the war. “Without it, the Boers would have been unable to hold any intercourse with foreign countries, no envoys could have been despatched, no volunteers could have entered the country, and they would have been ignorant of the opinion of the world.”

As Churchill followed Burnham through the streets of Lourenço Marques, he passed sign after sign of modern development and progress. The piers were crowded with tall, arching cranes and large landing sheds. There were hotels and warehouses, broad, tree-lined streets, electric streetlamps and thin, metal trolley tracks.

Since the beginning of the war, however, the city had been overwhelmed by refugees, coming in ever-growing waves of increasingly desperate British subjects. In his offices at the British consulate, in the heart of the city, the consul general, Alexander Carnegie Ross, was harried and exhausted, with no idea what to do with them all. “
Without shelter, badly fed, crowded together,” he had wired to the governor of Natal in mid-October. “Local Authorities impatient. Military called out to maintain order. Several collisions last night. Populace and police both injured.”

As the war had progressed, the situation had only become worse. Now, instead of receiving help or even a sympathetic hearing from Natal, Cape Colony or the War Office in London, Ross had only been getting bad news. Another loss, another reverse, thousands dead, millions spent. Buller had been humiliated. Roberts had not yet even reached South African soil. No one seemed to know what to do, or how to stem the tide of disaster flowing out of the Transvaal.

The streets that Burnham and Churchill now navigated were crowded with Portuguese, Britons, Boers and Africans, a potent cocktail of races, languages, prejudices and ambitions. As Churchill followed Burnham through this churning chaos, the two men did not exchange a single word or even acknowledge each other’s existence.
With no idea where he was, Churchill turned tight corners, passed small houses, crossed street after street until, suddenly, Burnham stopped. Standing in silence, the older man gazed across the street, his eyes on the roof of a large building. It was white and two stories tall, with wide verandas on both the bottom and the top floors and an expansive lawn in front. It sat well away from the street, behind a metal fence, and, Churchill suddenly realized with a catch in his throat, flying from its roof were the bright red and blue colors of the Union Jack.

Crossing the street, Churchill passed through the gates, across the garden and up to the front door. Thin, exhausted, covered in soot from head to toe and with a crazed gleam of triumph in his eyes, he demanded to see the consul general. Ross’s secretary, who had no idea who this filthy madman was, attempted to turn him away. “
Be off,” he said contemptuously to Churchill. “The Consul cannot see you to-day. Come to his office at nine to-morrow, if you want anything.”

Instantly filled with outrage and fury, Churchill did not even acknowledge the fact that the secretary had spoken. Shouting at the top of his lungs, he simply repeated his demand, insisting that he see “
the Consul personally at once.” So great was his indignation and so loud his voice that it carried up to an open window on the second floor of the consulate. Wondering who could possibly be making such a racket, the consul general himself, his nerves already frayed, put his head out the window.

A moment later, the consul had descended the stairs, walked past his secretary, stepped up to the young man standing at his door and asked his name. It was one of the last times in a long life that anyone would ever again need to ask Winston Churchill that question.

EPILOGUE

A
s soon as Churchill was free, he wanted to fight. It wasn’t enough to have escaped from the Boers, he wanted to help win the war for his country, and, if possible, a medal or two for himself. First, however, he had to get out of Lourenço Marques.

News of his arrival at the British consulate spread quickly, and the consul general was rattled when, just hours after Churchill had first appeared at his door, he looked outside during dinner to see armed men gathering on his lawn. They were not, as Ross had feared, Boers who had come to recapture Churchill. On the contrary, they were Englishmen, there to make sure their new hero made it safely into British territory. After Churchill had finished his dinner, the men escorted him to the quay, marching along some of the same streets through which he had followed Burnham, and watched protectively as he boarded a steamship for the British colony of Natal.

To Churchill’s great surprise, an enormous, raucous welcoming party awaited him in Durban, Natal’s largest city, when he arrived on Saturday, December 23. At first, he couldn’t understand why the harbor was so choked with boats, some anchored, others restlessly circling while they waited to be pulled in, and the dock filled with crowds of people. Everywhere he looked, there were cheering throngs
and waving flags, even a band was playing. “
It was not until I stepped on shore,” he wrote, “that I realised that I was myself the object of this honourable welcome.” An admiral, a general and the mayor were all there to congratulate Churchill on his escape, but they were not allowed to keep him long. “
I was nearly torn to pieces by enthusiastic kindness,” Churchill wrote. “Whirled along on the shoulders of the crowd, I was carried to the steps of the town hall, where nothing would content them but a speech.”

After “
a becoming reluctance,” Churchill agreed to address the crowd. Wearing a clean new suit, his hat doffed and his hands on his hips, he regarded the men and women before him. “I need not say how deeply grateful I am for the great kindness you have shown in your welcome to me,” he said. “When I see this great demonstration, I regard it not only as a personal kindness to me, and as a demonstration of hospitality to a stranger [at which point he was interrupted by a shout of “You’re not a stranger!”] but as a token of the unflinching and unswerving determination of this Colony to throw itself into the prosecution of the war.” He spoke for only a few minutes, proclaiming that they were now “outside the region of words,” and then he wound his way through the cheering crowd and set off, he later wrote, “
in a blaze of triumph” for the front.

Before the sun had risen the next morning, Churchill had passed through Estcourt and, as daylight broke, stopped in Frere, the small town where he had been captured a month earlier. Stepping off the train, he made his way down the tracks and after some inquiries found that the tent that had been pitched for him sat on the exact same cutting where he had been forced to raise his hands in surrender. That night was Christmas Eve, and Churchill spent it celebrating “
with many friends my good fortune.”

Churchill had returned to the scene of his capture not to revel in his personal triumph but to meet with Sir Redvers Buller, who, after the disaster at Colenso, was trying once again to free Ladysmith. Since their journey to Cape Town together on the
Dunottar Castle
, Churchill had lost some of his early admiration for Buller. “
I am doubtful,” he wrote, “whether the fact that a man has gained the
Victoria Cross for bravery as a young officer fits him to command an army twenty or thirty years later.” Buller, on the other hand, had been impressed by Churchill’s act of daring, which had given his men a much-needed boost, and was more than willing to meet with him. “
Winston Churchill turned up here yesterday escaped from Pretoria,” he wrote to a friend. “He really is a fine fellow and I must say I admire him greatly. I wish he was leading regular troops instead of writing for a rotten paper.”

Buller would quickly learn that Churchill actually wanted to do both—write for his paper and fight for his country. After asking the young correspondent to tell him everything he had witnessed in enemy territory during his escape, Buller finally asked the question Churchill had been waiting to hear. “You have done very well,” he said. “Is there anything we can do for you?” Churchill was ready with his reply. He wanted a commission. The Boers had nearly killed him, imprisoned him and hunted him down. Now he wanted to fight back.

Clearly surprised by Churchill’s request, Buller paused for a moment before asking, “What about poor old Borthwick?” Churchill knew that the general was referring to his editor at the
Morning Post
. He also knew that the War Office had a rule barring correspondents from being soldiers and soldiers from being correspondents. Churchill was particularly aware of this rule because it had been established primarily because of him. He had never shied away from openly criticizing military leaders, but he had been especially harsh in his assessment of Herbert Kitchener’s conduct during the Sudan campaign a year earlier. “
The victory at Omdurman was disgraced by the inhuman slaughter of the wounded,” he had written to his mother at the time, “and Kitchener is responsible for this.” It was after the release of Churchill’s book
The River War
that the War Office finally put its foot down. No more soldier correspondents.