The sky was still dark when he awoke. Remaining aboard till daybreak was out of the question; his presence would be betrayed when the bags were unloaded. He had to alight quickly, find water, and hide, awaiting the return of night and another train. Springing from the speeding car, he took two gigantic strides and sprawled in a shallow trench. Then, finding a pool in a nearby gully, he forced himself to drink all he could hold because he had no way of knowing when he would find more. Dawn broke and he felt jubilant: the train tracks ran straight toward the sunrise and Portuguese territory. That day was spent huddled in a ravine, nibbling at chocolate; his sole companion was “a gigantic vulture, who manifested an extravagant interest in my condition, and made hideous and ominous gurglings from time to time.”136 As dusk deepened he crawled out and made his way to a point where the tracks lay uphill and on a curve, reasoning that a train would slow there, permitting him to hop aboard. But no train came. Sometime after midnight, having waited six hours in vain, he struck out on foot, hoping to put ten or fifteen miles of roadbed behind him before another day dawned. Presently he saw the flaw in this plan. Every railroad bridge was guarded by armed men. To avoid them he had to creep across the moonlit veld or detour through bogs, swamps, and streams. A station loomed. On a siding lay three long strings of freight cars. He was studying their markings, hoping to learn their destinations and then hide in one which seemed promising, when loud voices came toward him, scaring him away and driving him out into the grass of the boundless plain.
By now he was exhausted, wandering aimlessly. Out in the darkness to his left gleamed what appeared to be the fires of a Kaffir kraal, a native village. It occurred to him that the Kaffirs, who were said to be disillusioned with the Boers, might be cooperative. He spoke no Bantu tongues, but perhaps sign language would do; it had worked when he was lost in the Sudanese desert. There seemed to be no alternative, so he turned that way. As he approached the settlement, he saw he had been mistaken. It wasn’t kraal at all. The lights came from furnace fires outside several stone houses clustered around what could be identified, by the wheel of a winding gear, as a coal mine. He felt a flicker of hope. In the POW pen he had heard that a few Englishmen, needed by the Boers for their skills, had been permitted to remain in some of the Witbank and Middelburg mining districts, seventy-five miles east of Pretoria. This might be one of them. But which houses would be British, and which Boer? He would have to guess. If he picked a wrong one he would produce his bank notes, explain who he was, and promise to pay anyone who would help him another thousand pounds later. Striding out of the veld and past the furnace fires, he chose a darkened home at random and knocked. A light sprang up. A man’s voice called, “Wie is daar?”*
Churchill’s heart sank. He spoke no Afrikaans. He said, “I want help; I have had an accident.” The door opened and he saw a tall, pale, mustachioed figure, hastily attired and holding a revolver. The man said in English, “What do you want?” Winston improvised a story: he was a burgher en route to join his commando at Komati Poort, on the Portuguese frontier; he and some friends had been skylarking on their train; he had fallen off and dislocated his shoulder. Obviously the man didn’t buy it. He stared hard, backed into the house, and roughly demanded details. Winston decided to throw in the towel. Stepping inside he said, “I think I had better tell you the truth,” and, after his host had nodded grimly, “I am Winston Churchill, war correspondent for the Morning Post. I am making my way to the frontier”—as he said it, he reflected bitterly on how wretchedly he had done—“and I have plenty of money. Will you help me?”137
A silence grew, and grew uncomfortable. The tall man continued to stare, as though struggling to make up his mind. Suddenly he closed the door behind them, thrust out his hand, and blurted: “Thank God you have come here! It is the only house for twenty miles where you would not have been handed over. But we are all British here, and we will see you through.” Churchill sagged with relief. Wringing the man’s hand he felt, as he later put it, “like a drowning man pulled out of the water and informed he has won the Derby.” His savior introduced himself as John Howard, manager of the Transvaal Collieries. He led the way to the kitchen, produced whiskey and a leg of mutton, and explained their situation. Within were his British secretary, a mechanic from Lancaster, and two Scottish miners. All four had given the Boers their parole to observe strict neutrality. Howard himself was a Transvaal citizen; if caught harboring an escaped prisoner, he would be shot for treason. But the prospect didn’t seem to alarm him. He vanished while Winston ate, consulted the others, and returned to say that the five of them had agreed that the best course, for the time being, was to hide their fugitive in the mine. Howard led him out to the winding wheel. There, to Churchill’s astonishment, the mechanic introduced himself as a prospective constituent—Dan Dewsnap of Oldham. Gripping his arm, Dewsnap whispered: “They’ll all vote for you next time.”138
The Scotsmen were waiting at the bottom of the shaft with a mattress and blankets. By lantern light Howard gave Winston two candles, cigars, and the whiskey bottle. He warned him not to move until they returned the next night; blacks would be around during the day, and if they saw him, they would talk. Winston, weary but elated, “saw myself once more rejoining the Army with a real exploit to my credit.” Then he had misgivings. He was putting these men in real danger. He offered to move on alone; he asked only for food, a pistol, a guide, and, if possible, a pony. He wouldn’t have a chance, the departing Howard told him. Only that afternoon a Boer officer had been there, asking about him. “They have got the hue and cry out all along the line,” he said, “and all over the district.”139
Back at the camp the previous morning Churchill’s absence had been discovered, his letter found. Its reference to friends “outside” had led his guards to believe, as he had meant them to, that he had accomplices in Pretoria. Warrants were issued, houses searched; nothing was found. This being the capital of the republic, correspondents from neutral countries heard of the hunt. Then the name of the missing man leaked out. Borthwick sent Jennie word: “Just received the following from Reuter, ‘Churchill escaped.’ ” The Daily Telegraph speculated: “If Mr Churchill is caught the Boers won’t let him have the privileges of being a prisoner-of-war again. He cannot be shot unless he uses arms to resist capture, but he may be subjected to confinement rigorous enough to control the innate daring and resourcefulness of which he inherits his full share.” He wasn’t expected to reach the frontier; within forty-eight hours two papers reported he had been seized, first at Waterval-Boven and then at Komati Poort. The Boers were certainly determined to find him. Joubert felt betrayed. He furiously wired Kruger’s state secretary: “With reference to Churchill’s escape I [wonder] whether it would not be a good thing to make public the correspondence about the release of Churchill to show the world what a scoundrel he is.”140
Despite the Daily Telegraph, a newsman in Pretoria cabled that on recapture he “may probably be shot,” and one London paper, the Phoenix, actually thought that reasonable, commenting that “the Boer General cannot be blamed should he order his execution. A non-combatant has no right to carry arms. In the Franco-Prussian War all non-combatants who carried arms were promptly executed.” A. E. Brofman, the Boer deputy superintendent of police, posted notices all over the Transvaal describing the fugitive as: “Englishman 25 years old, about 5 ft 8 in tall, average build, walks with a slight stoop, pale appearance, red brown hair, almost invisible small mustache, speaks through the nose, cannot pronounce the letter ‘S’, cannot speak Dutch, during long conversations occasionally makes a rattling noise [voggeld] in his throat, was last seen in a brown suit of clothes.” Boers were asked “to remain on the alert and in case aforementioned Churchill appears to arrest him at once.” Presses were rolling with a police photograph of him, and a price was set on his head.141
Brofman’s quarry awoke the following afternoon, reached for the candles, and found nothing. It would be dangerous, he knew, to blunder around the shaft in th
e dark, so he lay still until, several hours later, a faint gleam of lantern light heralded the return of Howard, bearing a chicken and several books. The chicken, he explained, came from the home of an English physician who lived twenty miles away. It was a necessary precaution; Howard’s Boer servants had been inquisitive about the missing mutton. Policemen were knocking on every door here. The presence of English residents in the mining district made it a natural focus of suspicion. But he assured Churchill he was safe. He could pass the time reading. Where, by the way, were his candles? Winston told him they had vanished. His host gave him a half-dozen replacements and apologized; he should have warned him to keep them under the mattress. If left out, he explained, they would be devoured by the swarms of savage white rats in the mine.
Fortunately Churchill did not share the common revulsion for rats. During his three days in the mine they were his biggest problem, pulling at his pillow when he stored the candles beneath it, scurrying around him whenever he blew the flame out, and even wakening him from a doze by running across his face. Once the two miners came down and led him on a tour of the shaft’s subterranean tunnels and galleries; Winston, ever interested in new experiences, questioned them closely about their work. But mostly he glared at rats and read. On the fourth day Howard visited him and said the manhunt seemed to be losing its momentum. The police were combing Pretoria again, convinced he could not have left the town, that a British sympathizer there must be harboring him. He was brought up for a walk on the veld that night and then moved into new quarters behind packing cases in Howard’s office. There he remained for three more days, and was frightened but once, when intermittent rifle fire broke out in the neighborhood. A Boer police officer was in fact there, but the shots had been the result of a ruse of Howard’s. To draw the man away from the house, he had challenged him to a rifle match, shooting bottles. The gullible policeman had won and left no wiser.
Howard now had an escape plan. He had recruited another plotter, Charles Burnham, a local shipping agent.* On Tuesday, December 19, Winston’s seventh day of freedom, a consignment of wool was to be loaded on the mine’s railroad branch and sent, via the main line at Balmoral, to Lourenço Marques in Portuguese territory. Churchill would be hidden among the bales. At first, curiously, he balked. He said he would rather cross the veld with directions and a horse. Imprisonment, he later reflected, had warped his judgment. He was reading Stevenson’s Kidnapped at the time, identifying with David Balfour and Alan Breck in the glens. Like them, he was a victim of his need for concealment and deception, which, he later concluded, “breeds an actual sense of guilt very undermining to morale. Feeling that at any moment the officers of the law may present themselves or any stranger may ask the questions, ‘Who are you?’ ‘Where do you come from?’ ‘Where are you going?’—to which questions no satisfactory answer could be given—gnawed at the structure of self-confidence.” He agreed to the trip but dreaded it.142
Notice of reward for Churchill’s return to prison
Tuesday dawned. Howard led him to the car, and he squeezed through a tunnel in the wool to an enclosed space among the bales large enough for him to lie and sit. On the floor were a pistol, two roast chickens, several slices of meat, bread, a melon, and three bottles of cold tea. He had memorized the names of the train stations they would pass and hoped to follow their progress through a chink in the bales. A tarpaulin was tied over the car; they rumbled off. But Winston found his chink inadequate. He saw few signs. The couplings and uncouplings of cars, the banging and jerking in freight yards, the long waits on sidings, baffled and exasperated him.
It was just as well he knew no more. Burnham had decided to accompany the train in one of the passenger cars, and before the trip was over he felt he had aged a lifetime. Churchill would never have made it without him. At Middelburg, their second stop, a trainman wanted to shunt the wool car off on a sidetrack and leave it there overnight; at Waterval-Boven a railroad agent ordered it sidetracked because of a petty regulation; an armed Boer started to untie the tarpaulin when they paused in Kaapmuiden; and when they reached Komanti Poort and the frontier, a detective stepped forward to search the entire train. Burnham dissuaded all of them with bribes and drinks until they had crossed the border and reached Ressano Garcia, where, for the first time, he encountered an honest man. The stationmaster, refusing his money, said the wool could not proceed with the passenger cars. The best he would do was promise it would follow within a half hour. Burnham therefore reached Lourenço first, bribed another policeman—who wanted to arrest him for “loitering with intent”—and was waiting when his cargo arrived. According to Burnham’s account in the Johannesburg Star twenty-four years later, “The truck had not been stationary a minute when Churchill, black as a sweep by reason of the coal-dust which was in the bottom of the truck, sprang out.” Meanwhile, Winston, squinting through his peephole, had already seen a Portuguese place-name painted on a board. He was so carried away that he shoved aside the bale overhead and “fired my revolver two or three times in the air as a feu de joie.”143
Burnham led him out of the station, around several corners, and paused. He looked up silently at the roof of a building opposite. Winston followed his gaze “and there—blest vision!—I saw floating the gay colours of the Union Jack. It was the British Consulate.” A piece of opéra bouffe ensued. At the door a minor official took one look at his filthy clothes and snapped: “Be off. The Consul cannot see you today. Come to his office at nine tomorrow if you want anything.” Churchill stepped back, threw back his head, and shouted at the upper stories: “I am Winston Bloody Churchill! Come down here at once!” An upstairs window flew open; it was the startled consul, Alexander Ross. Ross called hurried instructions to the man downstairs, and within a quarter hour Winston was lolling in a hot bath. In borrowed clothes he accompanied Burnham to a store, where, Burnham recalled, “he bought a rigout and a cowboy hat.” Back at the consulate, after an enormous dinner, Churchill dispatched a sheaf of telegrams to London. At Great Cumberland Place Jennie picked up the telephone and heard a reporter shouting into the mouthpiece: “Hurrah! Hurrah!” Miss Plowden sent a three-word telegram: “Thank God—Pamela.”144
Churchill addressing the crowd at Durban
Winston meanwhile was devouring newspapers. All the news was bad. During what was being called Black Week, December 10–15, British forces had suffered appalling casualties and three staggering defeats, including a rout of an attempt by Buller to relieve Ladysmith by frontal attack up the railway line. Churchill, chagrined, wanted to rejoin the army as soon as possible. Ross was equally anxious to see him go; Lourenço Marques was a hotbed of Boer partisans, and there were rumors that his guest was about to be kidnapped and returned to the Transvaal. On December 21, nine days after Churchill’s escape, a party of armed Englishmen escorted him from the consulate garden to the waterfront, where he boarded the steamer Induna. Two days later he docked at Durban. An enormous, cheering crowd awaited him. The entire harbor was decorated with bunting and flags; bands were playing; the mayor, an admiral, and a general leapt up the gangplank to embrace him. After Black Week, the British had been yearning for a hero, and here was a handsome young patrician who had broken out of a Boer prison and made his way across three hundred miles of hostile territory to freedom. The mob whirled him along on its shoulders, deposited him on the steps of the town hall, and demanded a speech. His remarks have not survived, but the mood of the moment, the vitality, confidence, and innocence of the English in that last month of the nineteenth century, are caught in the lively strains of the war’s hit song, trumpeted by the bands as he finished:
Goodbye, Dolly, I must leave you
Thought it breaks my heart to go
Something tells me I am needed
At the front to fight the foe
See the boys in blue are march-ing
And I can no longer stay
Hark! I hear the bugle call-ing
Goodbye, Dolly Grey!
And then, as he
climbed down, they struck up that spine-tingling anthem of Victorian conquest:
Britons always loyally declaim
About the way we rule the waves
Every Briton’s song is just the same
When singing of her soldiers brave…
We’re not forgetting it
We’re not letting it
Fade away or gradually die!
So when we say that England’s master
Remember who has made her so!
It’s the soldiers of the Queen, my lads,
Who’ve been the lads, who’ve seen the lads
In the fight for England’s glory, lads—
Of her world-wide glory let us sing!
And when we say we’ve always won
And when they ask us how it’s done
We’ll proudly point to every one
Of England’s soldiers of the Queen!
That afternoon he caught a train to Pietermaritzburg, where he remained overnight as the guest of Sir Walter Hely-Hutchinson, governor of Natal, and picked up more disquieting information. The kaiser had written his grandmother the Queen, threatening to side with the Boers. (“I cannot sit on the safety valve forever. My people demand intervention.”) Buller had cabled the War Office that the investment of Ladysmith could not be lifted without further reinforcements. More troopships were on their way to him, but he had been demoted. Although he would retain command of the Natal forces, Lord Roberts was sailing down to take over as commander in chief, with Kitchener, Winston’s nemesis, as chief of staff. Back at the front, Churchill celebrated Christmas Eve with the rest of the press corps, scarcely a hundred yards from the site of the armored-train ambush. In a flush of patriotism he cabled the Morning Post: “More irregular corps are wanted. Are the gentlemen of England all fox-hunting? Why not an English Light Horse? For the sake of our manhood, our devoted colonists, and our dead soldiers, we must persevere with the war.” Buller wrote Lady Theresa Londonderry: “Winston Churchill turned up here yesterday escaped from Pretoria. He really is a fine fellow and I must say I admire him greatly. I wish he was leading irregular troops instead of writing for a rotten paper. We are very short of good men, as he appears to be, out here.” He then sent for Churchill and questioned him closely about conditions in the Transvaal. All he got were impressions Winston had gleaned by looking through a tiny crack between bales of wool, but at the end he said: “You have done very well. Is there anything we can do for you?”145