Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill (9 page)

In this last pronouncement, however, the reporter could not have been more mistaken. Churchill was far from alone in his desire to take on the Boers. Nor, on this issue at least, was there any class divide. In fact, the British people seemed to be not following the charge to war but leading it. Not only did they still feel sharply the sting of Majuba, but most had never experienced what they considered to be a real war—a “civilized war” between men of European descent—and the idea was electric. As the summer began to fade, England’s interest in South Africa and its excitement over the possibility of war only grew in strength. “
The atmosphere,” Churchill would still remember years later, “gradually but steadily became tense, charged with electricity, laden with the presage of storm.”

The coming storm was also felt thousands of miles away in South Africa. The atmosphere there, however, was one not of exhilaration but of grim determination. The thousands of Britons who had flooded the Transvaal were now demanding not just a share in the country’s riches but an equal vote and a voice in its government. The British Empire, meanwhile, had begun amassing troops at the Transvaal borders and claiming large swaths of new territory in southern Africa. As well as Cape Colony, which it had taken in 1806, during the Napoleonic Wars, and the former Boer republic of Natalia, which it had annexed in 1843, it began surrounding the country to the west, north and southeast, effectively cutting it off from the sea.

Finally, on October 9, driven by fear and fury, the Boers issued an ultimatum to the British Empire: Stand down or prepare for war. “
The Government must press for an immediate and affirmative answer before or upon Wednesday, October 11, 1899, not later than 5 o’clock p.m.,” read the ultimatum, which had been telegraphed to London from the Transvaal capital of Pretoria. “It desires further to add, that in the event of unexpectedly no satisfactory answer being received by it within that interval, it will, with great regret, be compelled to regard the action of Her Majesty’s Government as a formal declaration of war.”

The British allowed the deadline for the ultimatum to pass with little more than a sneer. At 3:00 p.m. on October 11, just two hours before the deadline, William Conyngham Greene, Her Majesty’s agent at Pretoria, received a telegram from London, which he brought immediately to the president of the Transvaal, Paul Kruger, and his secretary of state for war, Louis de Souza.
After reading the telegram, which dismissed his government’s claims out of hand and refused to abide by its terms, Kruger, a large man with a wide, solemn face ringed by a graying chin-curtain beard, sat for a long time without saying a word, filling the nearly empty room with a heavy silence. Finally, bowing his head, he said simply, “So must it be.” “We have crossed the Rubicon,” de Souza’s wife, Marie, wrote in her diary that night, “and God alone knows the end of it all.”

Churchill had gotten his wish. England was going to war, and
the bloody, war-torn twentieth century was about to begin. “
The age of Peace had ended,” Churchill would write years later, looking back on this moment from the vantage of a man who had witnessed the horrors of one world war and was about to endure those of another. “There was to be no lack of war. There was to be enough for all. Aye, enough and to spare.”

CHAPTER 5

“SEND HER VICTORIOUS”

T
hree days after war was declared, Churchill, now a journalist, was at the port of Southampton on England’s southern coast, fighting his way through a massive crowd toward his ship, the
Dunottar Castle
. Known as the Gateway to the Empire, Southampton had been used as a port since the Middle Ages. The
Mayflower
and its sister ship, the
Speedwell
, had set sail from there for the New World in 1620, and in just a few years the RMS
Titanic
would do the same. Southampton, however, was best known as the port from which England had sent its young men into battle since 1415, when Henry V had left to fight the French at the Battle of Agincourt.

Although England had been engaged in countless conflicts in the nearly five hundred years since Agincourt, it had been a long time since Southampton had seen such frenzied excitement accompany the commencement of war.
Since early that morning, the port had been choked with thousands of people breathlessly awaiting the arrival of Sir Redvers Buller, the newly appointed commander in chief of Her Majesty’s army in South Africa. In fact, they had arrived at the port well before Buller had even reached
Waterloo Station, where he had been given a grand send-off from London earlier that afternoon by the Prince of Wales. While Southampton continued to fill with
eager revelers, men’s silk hats glistening in the damp, salty air, women’s long, layered dresses sweeping the ground, their hems already stained a stubborn black, the corpulent prince had been clapping Buller on the back, muttering, “Good bye; good-bye! Wish you jolly good luck!”

When Buller’s special five-car train, its interior upholstered in a rich yellow silk, finally reached the port at 3:47 p.m., the long, low steam whistle announcing his arrival was immediately swallowed by the deafening roar of the crowd.
Those who had resorted to sitting on everything from packing crates and cast-aside boxes to the port’s filthy ground during their long wait leaped to their feet, cheering wildly.
A rope that had been strung the fifty yards between the customs house and the ship in an effort to separate passengers from onlookers was straining to its snapping point. Harried policemen, their belted tunics by now wrinkled and stained and their helmets barely hanging on by the chin straps, fought to maintain order.

Even the most desperate attempts to control the crowd proved useless when Buller himself appeared.
Although dressed for the chill, early autumn air, a felt bowler hat covering his strikingly large head and a dark gray overcoat that was, as one reporter disdainfully noted, “not quite new” thrown over his bearlike shoulders, he was absolutely unmistakable. If, as he looked over the crowd with a benign smile beneath his heavy mustache, he seemed more like a gentleman farmer than the commander of one of the most feared armies in the world, he was loved none the less for it. As he navigated the narrow passageway carved between the pressing crowds and ascended the steep ramp to the
Dunottar Castle
, the cheering rose with him, filling the port with the voices of thousands.

The ship itself had arrived from the Thames three days earlier, 420 feet long and displacing about 5,500 tons. Although it was ten years old, it had recently been renovated, the ladies’ waiting room transformed into a sprawling stateroom for Buller. More important, it was fast.
The
Dunottar Castle
could sail at sixteen knots per hour, a pace that had dramatically reduced the average travel time between
Southampton and Cape Town from a month and a half to just over two weeks.

Even that was too long for Churchill. To nearly everyone who gazed up at it, the
Dunottar Castle
, with its straight, strong masts, slanting lines of rigging and elegantly curving bow, was a thing of beauty. To Churchill, it was a sight that made his stomach churn. He had already crossed the ocean many times in his young life, traveling between England, India, Africa and North America before the invention of the airplane, and he had hated every moment he was forced to spend on a ship. Not once had he avoided becoming violently ill. Even crossing the English Channel was “
worse than a flogging,” he had written to his mother after returning to India from London, and it made him “wretched.”

Churchill would never lose his hatred of traveling by sea. Later in life, quoting Samuel Johnson, he would compare being on a ship to being in prison, only “
with the chance of being drowned.” As much as he dreaded the two weeks that stretched before him now, however, he resolutely took his place in line and solemnly boarded the ship, knowing that whatever misery he was about to endure aboard the
Dunottar Castle
, war lay on the other side.

At 6:00 p.m., with the final cry of “Any more for the shore!” hanging in the air, Churchill watched from the ship as reporters and photographers frantically dashed down the gangplank and the throng that swarmed the long pier shouted their last good-byes.
As Buller stood on the captain’s deck, waving to the upturned faces, the
Dunottar Castle
slipped its moorings, and the shouts slowly began to die away. In their place rose the soft, swelling sound of women’s voices, singing “God Save the Queen.” As men joined in the chorus, the words, solemn and strong—“Send her victorious, happy and glorious, long to reign over us”—followed the ship out to sea, and the passengers, looking “
back towards the shores swiftly fading in the
distance and the twilight,” Churchill wrote, “wondered whether, and if so when, they would come safe home again.”

Even Churchill, who had never been particularly nostalgic and now wanted nothing more than to leave England and the dashed dreams of the past year behind him, had brought along a few items of purely sentimental value.
Inside his stitched brown leather wallet, a small bird tooled in gold on the front, four pencil sketches had been slipped in next to the silky dark green lining. One of the portraits was of Churchill’s mother, looking proud and youthful with her long neck and perfect, bow-shaped lips, but the other three were of a much younger woman. She had delicate features, wide, heavily lidded eyes and a serene, thoughtful expression. Her name was Pamela Plowden, and she was the first great love of Churchill’s life.

He had met her three years earlier in India, soon after arriving in Bangalore. “
I was introduced yesterday to Miss Pamela Plowden,” he had written breathlessly to his mother. “I must say that she is the most beautiful girl I have ever seen.” Although Pamela had been born in India, the daughter of Sir Trevor John Chichele Chichele-Plowden, who was in the Indian civil service, she had only recently returned to the subcontinent. Five years before, following her mother’s death from a poisonous snakebite, her father had remarried, and Pamela had moved for a short time to London, where her beauty and intelligence had attracted a great deal of attention. Even the acerbic Arthur Balfour, the future prime minister who had been so dismissive of Churchill after his defeat, referred to her as “
the brightest star in London’s social firmament.” Winston could not agree more.

While in India, he had taken every opportunity to see Pamela. He had dined several times with her family and had even toured Hyderabad with her, on the back of an elephant. “
You dare not walk,” he had explained in a letter to his mother. “The natives spit at Europeans—which provokes retaliation leading to riots.”

Once back in England, Pamela and Winston’s relationship had deepened. He had invited her to Blenheim, where they had strolled the estate’s expansive grounds, and while he worked on his second book,
The River War
, he had let her read the first two chapters, taking
great satisfaction in the fact that she had been “
very much impressed.” He had even hoped that Pamela would help his mother campaign for him in Oldham. “
I quite understand your not coming,” he had written to her after learning that she could not, or would not, travel to the gritty mill town. “It would perhaps have been a mistake—but I shall be sorry nevertheless.”
In an attempt to make up for Pamela’s absence, Churchill had worn a charm she had given him, which he had hoped would bring him luck.