Hero of the Empire

In the late nineteenth century, the British Empire stretched across a fifth of the world's land surface. Candice Millard's narrative nonfiction account traces one young man's determination to make his mark on that empire, following Winston Churchill through a defining episode of the Second Boer War (1899–1902), a conflict fought in southern Africa between Britain and the Boer republics, independent states founded by descendants of Dutch, German, and Huguenot settlers.

From childhood, Churchill dreamed of gallantry in battle. After graduating from the Royal Military College at Sandhurst in 1894, he used family connections, including those of his mother, Jennie Jerome Churchill, to secure combat assignments in Cuba, British India, and the Sudan, surviving each engagement and publishing accounts that earned him both fame and a reputation as a shameless self-promoter. He resigned his commission in early 1899, believing military service was a stepping-stone to political power, and lost a bid for Parliament in Oldham that summer. A war with the Boers, he believed, would give him the distinction he needed.

The roots of that conflict ran deep. Diamonds and gold had been discovered in the Transvaal, one of two Boer republics, drawing tens of thousands of British prospectors who demanded political rights. Tensions had been escalating since the First Boer War (1880–81). On October 9, 1899, Transvaal President Paul Kruger issued an ultimatum demanding British troop withdrawal. Britain let the deadline pass, and war began.

Three days later, Churchill boarded the steamer Dunottar Castle as a war correspondent for the Morning Post. Sir Redvers Buller, the newly appointed British commander in chief, was also aboard and oddly unhurried. The Boers, however, were far better prepared than the British imagined, having stockpiled modern German Mauser rifles and mobilized expert marksmen. Among their commanders was Louis Botha, a thirty-seven-year-old member of the Volksraad, the Transvaal parliament. Though Botha had voted against the ultimatum, he fought vigorously once war was declared. The Boers surged into the British colony of Natal, and within weeks the garrison at Ladysmith was surrounded under Botha's command.

Churchill raced ahead of Buller's army to the front at Estcourt, forty miles south of Ladysmith. There he encountered Captain Aylmer Haldane, an old friend he had believed dead. On the night of November 14, Haldane was ordered to take an armored reconnaissance train out the next morning, a mission widely considered suicidal. Churchill accepted Haldane's invitation to ride along.

The ambush on November 15 unfolded exactly as Botha had planned. His men had piled rocks on a steep curve, and when the train crested a hill under shellfire, the lead car flipped and two more derailed, blocking the engine. For over an hour under constant fire, Churchill rallied soldiers and directed the effort to clear the wreckage. The engine broke free with wounded men piled aboard, but Churchill jumped off to go back for the others, only to find they had surrendered. Cornered by a mounted Boer, he reached for his pistol and discovered he had left it on the engine. Unarmed, he raised his hands.

The prisoners were transported to Pretoria and imprisoned in the Staats Model School, a teachers college converted into a POW compound. Churchill demanded his release, arguing he had acted solely as a correspondent, but Commandant General Joubert had read newspaper accounts of Churchill's battlefield heroics and ordered him held for the duration of the war.

Meanwhile, the war went catastrophically for the British. During "Black Week" in mid-December, the British lost three major battles. At Colenso, Botha's entrenched forces destroyed two brigades in hours. Mohandas Gandhi, a thirty-year-old Indian lawyer living in South Africa, led a corps of stretcher bearers across the battlefield under fire. Buller retreated, and the War Office relieved him of overall command. England was desperate for a hero.

Inside the prison, Churchill's final appeal for release was rejected. Haldane and Adam Brockie, a resourceful Irish sergeant major, had developed a simple escape plan: climb the iron fence at the back of the yard when a sentry's back was turned, then travel roughly three hundred miles east to neutral Portuguese East Africa (modern-day Mozambique). Churchill insisted on joining. Brockie objected, but Haldane, feeling guilty for having invited Churchill onto the armored train, agreed.

On the evening of December 12, after an aborted attempt the previous night, Churchill slipped into a lavatory near the fence. When both sentries momentarily turned their backs, he scrambled over the wall alone, without waiting for his companions. On the other side, he waited, but they never came; a guard had spotted Haldane. Through the fence, Haldane whispered that they could not get out. Churchill told him he would go on alone.

Walking east through Pretoria unchallenged, Churchill leaped onto a freight train and burrowed into coal sacks. He jumped from the moving train hours later and hid through a blistering day. That night, no trains came; the Boers had shut down nighttime rail service. Forced to walk, exhausted and starving, he spotted distant fires and stumbled toward them, finding not a village but a coal mine. He knocked on the door of a nearby house.

By extraordinary luck, the man who answered was John Howard, the British mine manager of the Transvaal and Delagoa Bay Colliery, one of the few Englishmen in the Transvaal. Howard told Churchill it was "the only house for twenty miles" where he would not have been turned over (248). With help from four other Englishmen, including Dan Dewsnap, an engineer from Oldham who told Churchill, "They'll all vote for you next time" (252), Howard hid the fugitive ninety feet underground in a disused stable. Churchill spent days in near-total darkness while Howard fed him covertly and devised an escape plan.

The mine's storekeeper, Charles Burnham, shipped wool to the coast by rail. Churchill was hidden in a hollow space among the bales. On December 19, the train began its journey east. Over nearly two days, Burnham bribed guards at every station to keep the trucks uninspected. When the train crossed into Portuguese territory and Churchill spotted the station name "Ressano Garcia" through a crack in the wall, he fired a revolver into the air and shouted with joy. He made his way to the British consulate in Lourenço Marques, where his escape was confirmed.

Churchill received a rapturous welcome in Durban on December 23. He persuaded Buller to grant him a commission in the South African Light Horse, a mounted cavalry unit, while continuing as a correspondent. He fought at Spion Kop in January 1900, rode into Ladysmith with the relief column in February, and on June 5 entered Pretoria, personally liberating the POW compound where he had been held. Haldane, Brockie, and another officer had escaped three months earlier and followed Churchill's route to freedom with help from Howard and Burnham.

Churchill returned to England as a national hero and in October 1900 won his first seat in Parliament from Oldham. The war ground on for two more years, ending after Lord Kitchener, the British commander directing the war's final phase, implemented a scorched-earth campaign and established concentration camps in which more than twenty-six thousand Boer civilians, mostly children, and roughly twenty thousand Africans died. The Treaty of Vereeniging (1902) annexed the Boer republics but planted the seeds of racial segregation that led to apartheid and the decades-long struggle culminating in Nelson Mandela's release in 1990. Churchill sent gold watches to Howard and the men who sheltered him. He and Botha developed a lasting friendship. At the 1907 Imperial Conference in London, Botha encountered Jennie Churchill and acknowledged the bond between himself and Winston: "He and I have been out in all weathers" (318).