To his delight, Winston asked for a commission. The general said, “What about poor old Borthwick?” and his face fell when Churchill replied that he couldn’t possibly break his contract with the Morning Post. It might be a rotten paper to the general, but it paid twelve times as much as the army. That put Buller in a dilemma. After the Nile expedition, the War Office had ruled that no soldier could double as a war correspondent. Now Churchill, whose dispatches had been responsible for the ruling, was asking that he be made an exception to it. The general circled the room three times, worried an ear, and said: “All right. You can have a commission in Bungo’s regiment. You will have to do as much as you can for both jobs. But you will get no pay for ours.” Winston quickly agreed, and “Bungo”—Colonel Julian Byng, commanding the South African Light Horse, an Uitlander regiment—appointed him assistant adjutant, with the understanding that while not actually fighting he could go where he liked. Happily stitching his badges of rank on his khaki jacket, Churchill stuck the SALH’s long plume of “cockyolibird” feathers in his hat and headed toward the sound of the guns.146
In London, Borthwick raised no objection—since the escape his circulation had soared—but the arrangement was a poor one. Taken as a whole, Churchill’s youthful war correspondence reveals a remarkable grasp of strategy and tactics and an admirable readiness to criticize senior officers. He felt indebted to Buller, however, and here, as in Cuba, gratitude warped his judgment. He wrote: “If Sir Redvers Buller cannot relieve Ladysmith with his present force we do not know of any other officer in the British Service who would be likely to succeed.” That was absurd, and in moments of clarity he knew it. On January 10, after a bloody reverse on the Tugela River, he wrote Pamela: “Alas dearest we are again in retreat. Buller started out full of determination to do or die but his courage soon ebbed and we stood still and watched while one poor wretched brigade was pounded and hammered and we were not allowed to help them…. And the horrible part of it all is that Ladysmith will probably fall and all our brave friends be led off to captivity and shame.” In the aftermath of another disaster—the general had delegated authority to a weak officer, then relieved him—Churchill pictured Buller at last gripping “the whole business in his strong hands.” He failed to note that by then it was too late for the men who had died in vain.147
The toll was mounting. And the British, including Churchill, were shocked and bewildered. None of them had ever known anything like this slaughter. Even Majuba, fought near here, had been relatively tame. In their defeat there the British had lost just ninety-two men. The Boer bullet which had crippled Ian Hamilton’s left wrist—Winston called it Hamilton’s “glorious” deformity—had been enough to distinguish him. Now, abruptly, everything had changed. This time the Boers, unlike the Pathan and Omdurman tribesmen, were armed with weapons just as modern as Buller’s. Machine guns shredded the Queen’s dense khaki ranks. Distant Long Toms, sited far beyond the reach of the English cavalry, fired 40-pound, 4.7-inch shrapnel shells that dismembered men or even obliterated them. Barbed wire had appeared, and sandbagged entrenchments. The Boers understood the new warfare. They told one another: “Dig now, or they’ll dig your grave later.”148 The baffled British clung stubbornly to their Sandhurst principles. Cavalrymen like Major Douglas Haig assured one another that their arme blanche, the lance and sword, would winkle out the foe. They tried and failed and tried and failed and learned nothing. In British regimental accounts one finds the first pathetic strains of a theme which would be sounded throughout all the wars of the twentieth century, now less than a month old. This or that local engagement was “imperishable,” or “immortal”; it would “go down in history,” “enshrined forever” in the records of the past. So it was said in South Africa that winter of Hussar Hill, Mount Alice, Conical Hill, Aloe Knoll, and Potgeiter’s Ferry. So it would be said of Broodseinde in 1917, Galloping Horse Ridge in 1942, the Punchbowl in 1951, and Pleiku in 1965. Eventually all would be forgotten, even by the descendants of those who had fought there.
The first of the century’s butcheries was Spion Kop, or Spion Mountain, and Churchill was there, as was Gandhi with his stretcher-bearers. Abandoning the plan of forcing the Tugela at Colenso, Buller tried to turn Botha’s right flank by fording the river upstream and seizing this 1,470-foot height, the hub of the range of hills between Buller and Ladysmith. On the night of January 23 his men stealthily mounted the steep slopes, scarred with huge rocks. They achieved total surprise. The enemy’s defenses were thin here, and a dense mist covered the flat crest; it was 4:00 A.M. before a Boer picket on the summit challenged them: “Wie is daar?” He was answered by hoarse yells of “Waterloo!” and “Majuba!,” a zigzag line of Lee-Enfield flashes, and a charge which took the kop at a cost of ten casualties. The victors held the key to the Ladysmith lock. But before they could turn it they had to face the greater challenge of holding it.
Botha, roused in his tent and told “the Khakis” were on the height, called for long-range rifle fire and salvos from his five Krupp field guns and two pom-poms. Presently Boer shells were bursting over the hilltop, seven every minute. The effect was devastating. By now the summit, an area about the size of Trafalgar Square, was packed with Uitlanders. They had no cover. One survivor later described the peak as “the most awful scene of carnage.” Atkins, the Guardian’s correspondent, perched on a nearby ridge, reported that it was becoming an “acre of massacre.”149 Buller had expected to support this embattled force with an assault on the other Boer flank, but now the necessary men couldn’t be found. One Uitlander raised a white flag; an officer furiously tore it from his hand. He was right to do so. Their position was precarious, but far from desperate. Around midnight Botha’s artillery commander panicked and fled with his guns. The first wave of counterattacking Boer commandos was driven off the kop’s reverse slope. At this point the obvious move for the British was to renew their drive, clearing a knoll and a spur just ahead. Their problem was that no one seemed to be in charge.
Into this muddle, out of breath but full of resolution, climbed Lieutenant Winston Churchill. He had been waiting in the vicinity with his regiment, hoping to be sent up the hill. Lacking orders and impatient, he had galloped over here on his own, tethered his horse at the bottom, and ascended on foot, gripping boulders and struggling through “streams of wounded.” Soldiers, he wrote, were “staggering along alone, or supported by comrades, or crawling on hands and knees, or carried on stretchers. Corpses lay here and there. Many of the wounds were of a horrible nature. The splinters and fragments of the shell [sic] had torn and mutilated in the most ghastly manner.” To Pamela he wrote: “The scenes on Spion Kop were among the strangest and most terrible I have ever witnessed.” He had, he said, been “continually under shell & rifle fire and once the feather in my hat was cut through by a bullet. But—in the end I came serenely through.”150
He came through and went back again, though hardly with serenity. He was rushing around the front in complete violation of regulations, intent on rescuing the situation by sorting everything out personally and then persuading nearby commanders to intervene. Incredibly, no one put him in his place; superior officers, distraught in the confusion, heard him out and pondered his advice. Night fell and he toiled back up the hill, which in his words was now “hopelessly congested” with stragglers and casualties, toward “an intermittent crackle of musketry at the top.” Battalions were intermingled. Regimental officers, he noted, were “everywhere cool and cheery, each with a little group of men around him, all full of fight and energy. But the darkness and the broken ground paralysed everyone.” He was off again, rounding up sappers and miscellaneous troops. Finding the senior officer, a newly promoted brigadier, he explained what he had done and what he proposed be done next. The brigadier, in shock, on the verge of a complete breakdown, mumbled that it was all hopeless and he had decided to withdraw: “Better six good battalions safely down the hill than a bloody mop-up in the morning.” Churchill insisted the gains could still
be consolidated—military historians agree with him—and harangued the brigadier about “Majuba” and “the great British public.” It was in vain; the order to retreat went up. Down the Uitlanders came, leaving their dead three deep. In the first olive moments of dawn Churchill glowered up, his thumbs in his braces and his lower lip thrust out in that way he had, and saw two of Botha’s burghers standing jubilantly on the pinnacle. They were waving their rifles and slouch hats, shouting that the Khakis had been “kopschuw”—routed.151
His bitterness over the loss of Spion Kop was relieved by the arrival in South Africa of Lady Randolph Churchill. Jennie had solicited £41,597 from wealthy Americans and commissioned a hospital ship, the Maine, named after the U.S. warship lost in Havana harbor. In the forecastle were an American flag, sent by Theodore Roosevelt, and, from Queen Victoria, a Union Jack. (Jennie chose to fly the British colors.) Accompanying her on the voyage was Jack, just nineteen, whose brother had obtained a commission for him in the SALH. They had learned of Winston’s escape the day before they sailed, and he met them on the Durban docks. After they had killed a bottle of ’25 brandy, Jennie mounted a wild horse, tamed it, and rode it into the regiment’s camp. At forty-five her beauty had reached its autumnal glory, and if she seemed determined to prove that she retained the energy of youth, there was reason: she had decided to marry George Cornwallis-West, an impecunious junior officer just Winston’s age. There is no record of her sons’ reaction to this. Her friends, however, were appalled. Jennie didn’t care. She told one of them: “I suppose you think I’m very foolish, but I don’t care. I’m having such fun.”152
Winston’s family was well represented in South Africa now. There was his mother; his brother; his bland, mustachioed cousin Sunny, the young duke, serving in Cape Town as Lord Roberts’s military secretary; and, among the civilians in besieged Mafeking, his aunt Lady Sarah Wilson, Randolph’s glamorous thirty-five-year-old sister, who, bored by London, had come down here for excitement and found it. Captured in the Transvaal during a clumsy attempt at spying, she had been exchanged for a Boer cattle thief and now held court in a luxurious, white-paneled bunker hewn out of Mafeking’s red soil, the walls decorated with African spears from the Matabele War and a huge Union Jack. Lady Sarah was a survivor; no one seems to have been concerned about her. Winston was worried about Jack, however. He felt responsible for him, and almost immediately his fears were justified. In action for the first time on Hussar Hill, Jack was wounded in the calf. To Atkins, “It seemed as though he had paid his brother’s debts.” Winston thought it “an instance of Fortune’s caprice.” Jack, he wrote Pamela, had been “lying down. I was walking about without any cover—I who have tempted fortune so often. Jack was hit.” To his mother he wrote: “It is a coincidence that one of the first patients on board the Maine should be your own son… but you may be glad with me that he is out of harm’s way for a month. There will be a great battle in a few days and his presence—though I would not lift a finger to prevent him—adds much to my anxiety when there is fighting.”153
The great battle, for Vaal Krantz, was fought and succeeded by another, and then another. Slowly the weight of British numbers began to tell. Kimberley, 240 miles to the west, was relieved by Major General John French, while here in Natal, Botha fell back on Hlangwane Hill, then in further retreats on Inskilling Hill, Pieters Plateau, Railway Hill, and Hart’s Hill. Churchill was in action almost every day, and on the historic evening of February 28, the one hundred eighteenth day of Ladysmith’s investment, he rode with the first two squadrons to enter the beleaguered town, galloping “across the scrub-dotted plain, fired at only by a couple of Boer guns. Suddenly,” he wrote, “from the brushwood up rose gaunt figures waving hands of welcome. On we pressed, and at the head of a battered street of tin-roofed houses met Sir George White on horseback, faultlessly attired…. It was a thrilling moment.” That night he dined with White and Ian Hamilton on champagne and a roast from the garrison’s last trek-ox, saved for this occasion. But “better than feast or couch” was the reward, “which was all the more splendid since it had been so long delayed—victory.”154
Churchill remained in Ladysmith over a month, feverishly writing a new book, London to Ladysmith via Pretoria. His escape had fueled sales of his earlier works—8,000 copies of Savrola, 3,000 of the two-volume River War at 36 shillings ($9), and 600 of the Malakand Field Force—bringing him about £1,500 in royalties. This, with the checks from Borthwick, went into his political war chest. Already Tories in Southport had invited him to run in their constituency, but he wanted vindication in Oldham. When Joe Chamberlain sent him a long letter, inviting a discussion of public affairs, he cannily replied that, while he hoped “to find a seat before the dissolution, as I should like to record a vote on many points,” he could not return to England “until the end of the war or at least until the Transvaal is in our hands.” His Oldham defeat had taught him the need for planning. He meant to build a financial base, at the same time cultivating readers with his vivid prose—“Winston’s graphic tongue,” as Jennie called it. Yet he could never be a cautious politician. With casualty lists lengthening, the last thing his readers wanted from him was a plea for magnanimity toward the enemy. Nevertheless, he wrote: “Peace and happiness can only come to South Africa through the fusion and concord of the Dutch and British races, who must forever live side by side,” and “I earnestly hope, expect and urge that a generous and forgiving policy will be followed.” Angry subscribers disagreed, and his own paper ran an editorial demanding punishment of the Boers. Hely-Hutchinson wrote him that Boers who sought to return to Natal “shd be tried & punished…. You must remember that the Natal Dutch have been treated with special consideration in the past, and that if what we hear from many sources is true they have been the ringleaders in the looting & destruction that has been going on in Natal.” What looting? Winston asked. What destruction? It appeared to him that this was based on unconfirmed rumors. He refused to retract; indeed, with each Boer defeat his appeals for mercy and compassion grew stronger.155
As a suitor, on the other hand, he continued to be both indecisive and inept. He wrote his mother: “I think a great deal of Pamela; she loves me vy dearly.” Yet a considerate young man would have spared his beloved the grisly details of his brushes with death. Winston kept Pamela fully informed on every bullet, every shell fragment that came his way, reminding her over and over that each breath might be his last, that even as she read this he might already be a decomposing cadaver. “I was very nearly killed two hours ago by a shrapnel,” he wrote her in a typical missive, and, on the eve of a battle, “I pray to God that I may have no thoughts of myself when the time comes—but for you my darling always.” Unquestionably he missed her. Indeed, when Jennie had arrived he wrote Pamela: “Oh why did you not come out as secretary? Why did you not come out in the Maine so that I should be going to meet you now.” Then, as after her refusal to campaign in Oldham, he backed off: “Perhaps you are wise.” He didn’t understand women; he compared them with his eccentric mother and was puzzled by the variance. When Pamela, like Joe Chamberlain, hinted that he had done his part and ought to come home now, he bridled. “I do not know whether I shall see the end or not,” he replied, raising that specter again, “but I am quite certain that I will not leave Africa till the matter is settled. I should forfeit my self-respect forever if I tried to shield myself behind an easily obtained reputation for courage. No possible advantage politically could compensate—beside believe me none would result.” That was the nub of it. He was convinced he was making political capital down there and was therefore content. The possibility that he might make better time with her by leaving the front seems never to have occurred to him.156
The limelight, which he craved more than any woman’s company, now faded from Natal and shone down upon the Cape Colony, where England’s shortest and most popular soldier was preparing to move through the Orange Free State and into the Transvaal. Kipling understood the popularity of the dimin
utive Field Marshal Lord Roberts, KCB, GCB:
What ’e does not know o’ war,
Gen’real Bobs,
You can arst the shop next door—
can’t they, Bobs?
O ’e’s little but ’e’s wise,
’E’s a terror for ’is size,
An’—’e—does—not advertise
Do yer, Bobs?
Churchill, forgetting his earlier bitterness, described him as “this wonderful little man.” Bobs, however, did not reciprocate. Kitchener, bitter over Winston’s criticisms at Omdurman, had deepened the field marshal’s distrust of this impudent subaltern who presumed to pass judgment on his commanding officers. Moreover, Bobs had been outraged by a Churchillian critique of a church parade on the eve of the assault on Vaal Krantz. Over five thousand men had assembled, awaiting inspiration. “The bridegroom Opportunity had come,” Winston had written. “But the Church had her lamp untrimmed.” Instead of a rousing sermon, the chaplain “with a raucous voice” had preached dully on Jericho, freezing the soldiers “into apathy.” Bobs was sensitive to criticism of army chaplains, who had come to South Africa in response to a War Office call for volunteers. But Hamilton and Sir William Nicholson, another of Winston’s friends from India, interceded on his behalf, and on April 11 a colonel wrote Churchill from Bloemfontein, the Orange capital: “Lord Roberts desires me to say that he is willing to permit you to accompany this force as a correspondent—for your father’s sake.”157