Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill (8 page)

What was foremost on the minds of both Chamberlain and Churchill that afternoon, however, was not old disputes but the shadow of a new one. There had been whispers of war, a war unlike anything the empire had seen since the Crimean War nearly half a century earlier, perhaps even the American Revolution more than a hundred years in the past. This war, however, was brewing not in eastern Europe or North America but in southern Africa, thousands of miles away in a part of the world that was difficult to reach and almost impossible to fully understand. Nor was it simply the threat of another colonial war, to add to the scores of others taking place at that moment around the globe. This would be a European war on African soil, a prospect that seemed to most Britons to be far less terrifying than tantalizing, and few hoped it could be averted, least of all Winston Churchill.

Although southern Africa had been an object of great interest to the British Empire for centuries, more recently the allure had turned to lust. Perfectly positioned as it was, the region had long been a critical link in the trade route to India, which led British ships down the jutting western coast of Africa, around the Cape of Good Hope, where they would stop for supplies before heading back north, up the eastern coast, past the Horn of Africa and into the Indian Ocean. The British had colonized the southern tip of the continent, Cape Colony, as well as Senegal in the west, parts of northern Africa—Algiers and Tripoli—and a swath of Egypt that dipped down into the Abyssinian Empire, now Ethiopia. For many years, that had been enough.

Just seven years before Churchill was born, however, everything had changed. In 1867, Erasmus Jacobs, the fifteen-year-old son of a South African farmer, is said to have sat down to rest beneath a tree on his father’s farm and found an extremely large and shiny stone
lying at his feet. The stone turned out to be a 21.25-carat diamond, later known as the Eureka Diamond, the first diamond ever discovered in South Africa. Four years later, more diamonds were found not far from the Jacobses’ home, on the farm of two brothers named Johannes Nicolaas and Diederick Arnoldus de Beer, a discovery that would lead to the formation of De Beers S.A., the largest diamond company in the world.

Then came the gold.
About two decades after the Eureka Diamond was discovered, the world’s largest known gold reserve was found in the Witwatersrand mountain ridge. The tiny, filthy camp that sprouted up around the mine quickly became flooded with fortune seekers and eventually grew to become one of South Africa’s largest and most important cities: Johannesburg. Together, these discoveries transformed the region from one of the poorest in the world to one of the wealthiest.

As is often true, with great wealth came great trouble. As Churchill put it, “
The discovery of an El Dorado had attracted…a vast and various swarm of humanity.” Tens of thousands of prospectors descended on the region, the great majority of whom were British. The problem was that neither the gold nor the diamonds had been discovered in British territory. They had been found in the South African Republic, also known as the Transvaal, an independent country that belonged to a group of Dutch, German and Huguenot descendants known as the Boers.

A deeply religious, stubbornly independent people, the Boers wanted, above all else, to be left alone. Many of them could trace their ancestry back to the members of a Dutch East India Company expedition who had sailed to the Cape of Good Hope in 1652 to establish a shipping station and decided to stay. When Cape Colony became a British possession in 1806, they had grudgingly submitted to British rule, but not for long. After centuries of devastating entire populations of native Africans and taking over vast swaths of their land, much like the Pilgrims and pioneers in North America, the Boers were furious when the British Empire abolished slavery in 1833. Just two years later, in what would become known as the Great
Trek, large groups of Boers, called
Voortrekkers
, or pioneers, left Cape Colony and began pushing their way hundreds of miles into the African interior, eventually establishing three Boer republics: the Orange Free State; the Republic of Natalia, later Natal; and the Transvaal.

The Boers’ independence, however, had lasted only as long as their poverty. “This gold,” Paul Kruger, who would become president of the Transvaal, had predicted, “will cause our country to be soaked in blood.” He was right, and he knew well the dangers it posed. Ten years after the discovery of diamonds, Britain had annexed the Transvaal, a move that infuriated the Boers and quickly led to the Transvaal War—later known as the First Boer War. Although the war had lasted only a few months, from the end of 1880 to the early spring of 1881, it held a prominent place in the collective memories of both countries for one reason: The British Empire did not win.

The turning point of the Transvaal War had been the Battle of Majuba Hill, which ended not with the Union Jack triumphantly planted on Boer soil but with the shocking, sickening sight of British soldiers fleeing in humiliating retreat. For the Boers, the day of that battle, February 27, had become a national holiday. For the British, it was a searing memory, one that they vowed to repay. Even Churchill, who had been only six years old at the time, hungered for revenge. “
I longed for the day,” he wrote, “on which we should ‘avenge Majuba.’ ”

That day, Churchill now believed, had not only come, it was long overdue. He fiercely defended the importance, even the benevolence, of British imperialism, and he had been brooding over the problem of South Africa for years. The more he thought about it, the more certain he was that war was the only answer. “
It is not yet too late to recover our vanished prestige in South Africa,” he had written two years earlier in a treatise titled “Our Account with the Boers.” “Imperial troops must curb the insolence of the Boers. There must be no half measures.”

As he continued his conversation with Chamberlain over dinner
at Lady Jeune’s home following their cruise on the Thames, Churchill did not try to hide or even temper his belief that the empire should take a hard line with the Boers. Chamberlain, he knew, had a long history with the Transvaal, and none of it was good. He had been Prime Minister William Gladstone’s lieutenant in the House of Commons during the Transvaal War, an experience that had left him with an undisguised loathing of the Boers. Then, at the end of 1895, in the first year of his tenure as secretary of state for the colonies, he had been tied to an ill-conceived and spectacularly failed raid on the Transvaal. Concocted by the mining magnate Cecil Rhodes and led by his closest friend, Leander Starr Jameson, what became known as the Jameson Raid had ended with Jameson’s capture and Rhodes’s forced resignation as prime minister of Cape Colony. Rhodes had narrowly escaped imprisonment, and the raid, as well as Chamberlain’s involvement in it, had been splashed across the front pages of every newspaper in England and South Africa and had led to a parliamentary investigation of Chamberlain himself.

Even Chamberlain, though, who could not forgive an old political slight much less a humiliating scandal that could have destroyed his career, was taken aback by Churchill’s fervor for war. “
A war in South Africa would be one of the most serious wars that could possibly be waged,” Chamberlain had warned the House of Commons after the raid on the Transvaal three years earlier. “It would be a long war, a bitter war and a costly war…it would leave behind it the embers of a strife which I believe generations would hardly be long enough to extinguish.” After listening to Churchill’s passionate argument for war with the Boers, Chamberlain advised him to resist the urge to call for arms. “
It is no use blowing the trumpet for the charge,” he warned, “and then looking around to find nobody following you.”

The last thing that Churchill was worried about, however, was finding followers. Although he was only twenty-four years old, he was already confident of his ability to stir the hearts of men, and where the Boers were concerned, he was not about to back down, not when there was so much to be gained. “
Sooner or later,” he had
written in “Our Account with the Boers,” “in a righteous cause or a picked quarrel, with the approval of Europe, or in the teeth of Germany, for the sake of our Empire, for the sake of our honour, for the sake of the race, we must fight the Boers.”

Within just a few weeks of Lady Jeune’s dinner party, Churchill stood at the imposing, pillared entrance of Blenheim Palace, surrounded this time not just by tributes to the 1st Duke of Marlborough but by an eager audience of hundreds, and, heedless of Chamberlain’s advice, made his case for war.
His opportunity had come at the annual meeting of the Woodstock Conservative Association, following a day of festivities that had included everything from a ladies’ bicycle race over the palace grounds to a potato-picking race in one of the gardens to an obstacle course that had ended with the exhausted challengers shakily trying to thread a needle. At 6:00 p.m., long before the summer sun had begun to set, the association’s members gathered at the foot of the palace’s broad stone steps to hear remarks by the 9th Duke of Marlborough as well as two of his cousins: the calm, dark-haired Ivor Guest, who was the son of Lady Cornelia, Randolph Churchill’s older sister, and Guest’s polar opposite, the fair-haired and forceful Winston Churchill.

As soon as Sunny had finished his perfunctory welcome, but before Ivor Guest, with his thick black mustache, sharply twisted at the ends, could deliver his brief remarks, Winston took the stage. As his audience stood patiently in the blazing August heat, he wasted little time getting to the subject that he believed had the greatest power to affect the empire’s future, not to mention his own: South Africa. Nor did he temper his remarks with even a single note of caution. On the contrary, as the reporters attending the event noted with growing alarm, he was unabashedly beating the drums of war.

“
Inspired possibly by memories of that great warrior the founder of his house, he was in a warlike vein,” a reporter for the
Manchester Evening News
wrote of Churchill. “The present condition of things
could not go on indefinitely without war breaking out, he said, and he was not sure that the prospect of war was very terrible or one to be trembled at.” England, after all, was a “
very great power,” Churchill reminded his rapt audience, and the Boers were “a very small and miserable people.”

While Churchill’s audience was swept up in his speech, laughing at his jokes and cheering at his energetic declarations, many of the reporters in the crowd were astonished by the force of his argument, and deeply concerned by his powers of persuasion. “
If he would encourage the political supporters of Mr. Chamberlain to enter upon war in a cavalier fashion, careless of the amount of suffering and misery it causes because they know that we are strong and the Boers are weak,” one reporter railed, “he commits himself to a course of action which is highly reprehensible.” He also guessed that Churchill’s motives, like those of his most famous ancestor, were not entirely pure. “The first Duke of Marlborough was more than suspected of bringing about a great battle in the hope that the victory he was pretty sure to obtain would restore his popularity,” the reporter charged. Fortunately, he wrote, “in a more enlightened age,” Churchill’s radical point of view “finds no advocates outside the ranks of the young aristocracy.”