The Dangerous Book of Heroes (30 page)

C
hurchill is one name that has not been forgotten. With men like Marlborough and Wellington, he stands atop a pantheon of British, commonwealth, and empire heroes, and rarely a year goes by without a new book or television special on his life. For that reason, he nearly didn't make it into this book. Yet how can any list of heroes be complete without him? Long before he was prime minister, he had an extraordinary life, as a soldier, politician, and writer. As a young man he rode in one of Britain's last cavalry charges with a sword, and later he saw a nuclear bomb explode. There have been few lives in history to witness such changes. As important, he has come to represent a sense of stubborn Britishness, of indomitability and courage. His wit and intelligence were famous in his own lifetime, and when he died, the U.S. ambassador said that he was “the greatest apostle of freedom of the twentieth century. Foremost in courage, many-sided in genius.”

Churchill witnessed the end of the British Empire, seeing it battered and broken in a fight to the death against Nazi Germany. That final struggle justified the centuries of empire, so that when the time came, there were men who could come home to fight: from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, America, India, Africa, and anywhere else that felt kin to the mother country. As a result of that relationship and shared history, Hitler's Reich and his grandiose dreams died with him.

Winston Churchill was born prematurely in a bedroom at Blenheim Palace on November 30, 1874. By the time he was six, the Anglo-Zulu War was being fought, and young Winston was thrilled to hear stories of the battle of Rorke's Drift. He made assegai spears out of fern stems and stalked the countryside with them.

He was a naughty child at school and earned numerous canings for his misdemeanors. He stole sugar from the school pantry and, when he was punished, destroyed the headmaster's hat in revenge. He bore a grudge against that head for many years, and when he was fully grown, he returned to the school with the intention of birching the headmaster in front of the boys. To his disappointment, the man had died long before.

At thirteen, he went to Harrow School. His prodigious memory showed itself when he won the Headmaster's Prize for memorizing
twelve hundred
lines of Macaulay's
Lays of Ancient Rome.
He was never particularly skillful on the sports field, but he devoured books, soaking up information at a terrific rate and creating the beginnings of an extraordinary general knowledge. At home he played with his vast collection of toy soldiers. When his father asked him if he wanted to join the army, Winston was overjoyed. It was many years before he discovered that his father had believed him unsuitable for anything else.

At Harrow he learned to box and fence, winning the public schools fencing championship of 1892. With his father's colleagues often in attendance at home, young Winston took a keen interest in politics from an early age. His views were Conservative, and he enjoyed lively debates, often taking the time to sit in the gallery at the House of Commons. When one of his father's friends learned that Winston had heard a speech he had made, he asked the boy what he had thought. With characteristic bluntness, Winston replied: “I concluded from it, sir, that the Ship of State is struggling in heavy seas.”

He left Harrow and scraped into the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, where he appears to have matured almost overnight. He delighted in all things military and threw himself into learning everything
he could. At the same time, his father became seriously ill. Winston and his brother John met him for the last time a month before his death in 1895.

In spring, Churchill became a subaltern in the Fourth Hussars. He was eager to see active service and used his leave to persuade a newspaper to appoint him to report on a revolt against Spanish rule in Cuba. Before he left home, Churchill gave a dinner party for those “who are yet under twenty-one years of age, but who in twenty years, will control the destinies of the British Empire.” He might have meant the other diners; he certainly meant himself.

In Cuba, Churchill saw his first fighting and took part in repulsing Cuban rebels, writing about his experiences in letters to the newspaper, for which he was paid five pounds each. For his service, the Spanish authorities awarded him the Order of Military Merit, first class. In 1896, as his leave ended, he returned to his own regiment and was sent to India on a tour of duty.

British India was a strange place in those long-ago days. Churchill was introduced to the parades, the heat, polo, and boredom. It was a far-from-exciting life, and it wore on him. At only twenty-one, he wanted to see action and perhaps earn some of the glory his ancestors had won for themselves.

Copyright © 2009 by Graeme Neil Reid

In 1897, when a British garrison was besieged in Afghanistan, Churchill volunteered to join punitive expeditions against the Mohmand tribes of Bajaur. He found little excitement until he joined a squadron of Bengal
Lancers and fought with them against the tribesmen. Churchill was mentioned in dispatches for his courage, though he was officially a noncombatant. When his leave expired, he had to return to India, where he wrote a book on the campaign.

He was regarded by his superiors as a young man in a hurry, a “medal-snatcher” and a nuisance. Churchill tried to find action on every leave or returned home to apply influence with those who could send him to conflicts. He was balked by Lord Kitchener, who disliked his brash self-confidence and refused to allow Churchill to take part in an expedition in Egypt against Arab forces. Kitchener's powers in Egypt did not extend to the Twenty-first Lancers, however, and Churchill managed to persuade General Evelyn Wood VC to send him out to them with the condition that if he was killed, he would pay his own funeral expenses. He became a correspondent for the
Morning Post
before he went to Cairo.

Kitchener was disgusted that the young soldier had come despite his wishes and put Churchill in charge of lame horses, following the main force as they trekked into the Sudan. However, it would be Churchill who spotted the army of sixty thousand Arab Dervishes when he rode out to reconnoiter an area. He galloped back to tell Kitchener.

The main charge of what would become known as the battle of Omdurman occurred later in the day, when four hundred Lancers, Churchill among them, attacked a vastly superior force. They crashed through the enemy, and Churchill emerged unscathed from his first major battle. He then turned back to rescue fallen men.

Copyright © 2009 by Graeme Neil Reid

He returned to England as a successful author and journalist, though that reputation had only come about from his
desire to see battle. In 1898 he also expressed the ambition to follow his father in a political career. At the same time, the
Daily Mail
published a piece on him as one of the most promising young men of the day. With surprisingly accurate foresight, the war correspondent wrote: “There will hardly be room for him in Parliament at thirty or in England at forty.”

However, before he began his political career, Churchill returned to India to take part in the regimental polo tournament. His team won and he scored three of the goals, despite his right shoulder being torn from an old injury. With that done, he resigned his commission and completed his book on the Kitchener campaign,
The River War.

In June 1899, Churchill launched his first campaign for Parliament, representing for Oldham. His speeches against his opponents had the wit and verve that would become his hallmark. When his opponent, Mr. Runciman, mentioned disdainfully that he had not been a swashbuckler as Churchill had, Churchill replied: “The difference between Mr. Runciman and the Lancashire Fusiliers is that, while they were fighting at Omdurman for their country, he was fighting at Gravesend for himself. And another difference between them is that, while the Fusiliers were gaining a victory, Mr. Runciman at Graves-end was being defeated.”

Nonetheless, Mr. Runciman won the election, though Churchill was not particularly disheartened. The Boer War had broken out in South Africa, and he arranged to act as a war correspondent once more, traveling to Cape Town in the autumn of 1899. It would be the scene of some of his greatest adventures.

The city of Ladysmith was under siege by the Boers when Churchill joined other war correspondents and the main army. He met an old friend near the city and was invited to join a regular patrol that used an armored train to survive the Boer snipers. The train was ambushed when Boers opened up on it with two field pieces and a Maxim machine gun. The driver put on full speed, and the train struck a rock the Boers had laid on the tracks. The engine was in the middle of the train, with cars before and behind. In the impact, the front three cars were
derailed and overturned. Churchill climbed out of the wreckage as the Boers opened fire on the helpless train. He ran to inspect the damage and found the driver about to run for it. As the man had already been shot, Churchill assured him “No man is hit twice on the same day” and steadied his nerves.

Churchill then ran back to report that the train could be saved if the front cars were dragged out of the way by the engine. He took command of the entire operation, with bullets whistling around him. Under his orders, the driver uncoupled the rear cars and then dragged free the one blocking the line ahead. Churchill called for volunteers as the Boer fire increased and nine men helped him shove the car off the rails. The car jammed while still on the line, and Churchill told the driver to ram it clear. By that time, the Boers had brought up their heavy guns and shells were bursting against the side of the train. In a final surge of power, the wrecked train car crunched aside.

Churchill ordered the men to push the rear trucks up to the engine, but the storm of Boer fire made it impossible. In the end, they brought their wounded onto the engine itself and Churchill told the driver to get clear, riding with him before jumping off and running back.

It was too late to save the other men. The Boers had forced them to surrender. As he lay watching, Churchill himself was captured by a Boer horseman and made a prisoner.

One of the wounded men later wrote to his mother: “If it hadn't been for Churchill, not one of us would have escaped.” It was also said that if Churchill had been a regular soldier, he would have received the Victoria Cross.

Interestingly, when Churchill later met the prime minister of South Africa, General Botha, Churchill told him the story. Botha replied: “So you were the man? I was the Boer on the horse.”

Churchill was held in Pretoria, with sixty other British prisoners. His captivity was not particularly harsh, and he was able to read and plan an escape. Two separate plans were abandoned, and on the third attempt, Churchill climbed onto the top of the prison wall and had to wait in agonized silence while guards walked just feet away. His companions had a compass, maps, and food, while Churchill
had just four bars of chocolate in his pocket. He waited until one of them shouted a mixture of English and Latin, letting him know that the guards were watching and they could not follow. He was on his own. He could have gone back and waited for a better chance, but that was not in his character. He climbed down the outer wall and strolled past the sentry, who assumed he had every right to be there. Churchill was in Pretoria and free, but in enemy territory and unable to speak a word of Dutch.

He found the railway tracks and in darkness waited at a curve in the line where trains would slow, then jumped aboard an open car as it passed. He jumped off before dawn and began life as a hunted fugitive.

Wanted posters went up all over South Africa, and Boer newspapers were full of the escape. Meanwhile, Churchill hid by day and walked the train tracks at night, heading to the neutral frontier with Portuguese territory. For weeks he lived on whatever he could find or steal, almost starving to death. In desperation, he knocked on the door of a lonely house and, by incredible good fortune, found it owned by an Englishman, Mr. Howard.