Читать книгу Winston Churchill, A Biography - Rene Kraus - Страница 9

Table of Contents

President Kruger had missed the bus. At the outbreak of war Chamberlain was convinced of it. It was Chamberlain père, and the war was the Boer War—but still the similarity with our own days is positively uncanny.

General Sir Redvers Buller was, it is true, sent to South Africa with a British Expeditionary Force. Chamberlain believed that he might well come too late. Sir George White, who was already down yonder with sixteen thousand men, might have settled the whole thing before the troops from home even had a chance to come under fire. Smiling superciliously, the Olympian expounded this theory to young Churchill while the two were rattling in a hansom cab from Chamberlain’s house at Prince’s Garden to his desk at the Colonial Office.

Churchill had come to take his leave, and probably also for a few introductions to take along. Obviously he was already on his way to South Africa. The Boer ultimatum had been known in London for less than an hour when he put in his pocket a contract with Mr. Borthwick, proprietor of the Morning Post. The young correspondent was to get two hundred and fifty pounds a month—a record for the time—with four months’ guarantee even if the Boers collapsed in four days; all expenses paid; and full discretion as to movements and opinions. For Churchill it was a victory before the battle.

For England there was to be a long period of battles without victories. Chamberlain could not conceive of it. He was sure the war would be quick and painless. In reply to an objection from Churchill he admitted that Mafeking might perhaps be besieged. “But if they cannot hold out for a few weeks, what is one to expect?” He pulled luxuriously at a black cigar. Young Churchill, even then a celebrated connoisseur of cigars, could not quite enjoy the weed that day.

“Of course I have to base myself on the War Office opinion,” Chamberlain added somewhat more cautiously. But he had full confidence in the War Office. To say nothing of the leader of the Expedition, General Sir Redvers Buller.

The War Office at that time was the result of three generations of economy and disdain. The best-functioning of all the departments was the Military Intelligence, which was pretty well independent, even being housed in its own building. Its chief, Sir John Ardagh, sent General Buller a two-volume work that was later submitted to Parliament, a comprehensive survey of the excellently defended Boer Republics. The report referred to the large quantities of munitions that the Boers had obtained from Holland and particularly from Germany. It called attention to the new form of heavy Maxim, firing one-inch shells soon to obtain a sanguinary fame as “pompoms.” It came to the conclusion that the South African war would require at least two hundred thousand men.

General Buller sent the two-volume work back to the Intelligence an hour after receiving it. With it he sent the message, Thank you, he knows everything about South Africa.

Sir Redvers Buller committed one blunder after another, and stumbled from one disaster to the next. Still the confidence of the Government and of the country in him remained unshaken. Under Lord Rosebery’s rule he had once shown liberal tendencies. As this was unusual in a general, he was considered an independent thinker and a strategical genius.

Though the phrase was not yet invented, everyone in England was sure that it would be a lightning war. According to the best estimates it would last three months and cost ten million pounds. In actual fact the Boer War lasted three years, and devoured two hundred million pounds.

Churchill never forgot this lesson. Twenty years later he implored his country: “Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realise that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events. Antiquated War Offices, weak, incompetent or arrogant commanders, untrustworthy allies, hostile neutrals, malignant fortune, ugly surprises, awful miscalculations—all take their seats at the Council Board on the morrow of a declaration of war.”

A farewell dinner united forty gentlemen in high good spirits at the Carlton Hotel. Churchill could not quite understand the universal jollity. Still, he was always impressed anew by the sovereign independence of London society. The host was Sir Ernest Cassel, the Jewish banker who had begun as an errand-boy in the City. The Prince of Wales was among the guests.

On October 11, precisely at the hour when the Boer ultimatum expired, the Dunottar Castle put to sea with the commander of the Expeditionary Force, Sir Redvers Buller, his entire staff, and the correspondent of the Morning Post. During the whole voyage Churchill suffered the tortures of the damned from seasickness.

Even worse than seasickness was the uncertainty about what might be happening in South Africa while the Dunottar Castle was at sea without news. Certainly the armies must already have established contact. Finally, close to the African coast, she met a tramp steamer. The crew, some twenty ragged and tattered figures, held up a blackboard on her deck so that the passengers of the English vessel could read it: Boers defeated.

Churchill timidly suggested that they should stop the tramp, ask for details, and perhaps even get hold of a Cape Town paper.

The mule of English officialdom balked. Possibly there might be a claim for damages against the Government if they were to stop a foreign vessel. Besides, Sir Redvers Buller was not at all uneasy for news, although it might be useful if he could have a general view of the situation when he landed in Cape Town. “It is the weakness of youth to be impatient,” the General decided in reply to Churchill’s suggestion. Anyway, as he gave the young man plainly to understand, the habit of questioning superior officers was unfortunate even for a war correspondent, particularly if the latter had but recently worn the red tunic himself.

It was a mere trifling incident, but one that was to be repeated for decades in every possible form. In the holy war for England’s destiny, to which Winston Churchill devoted himself first by temperament and natural inclination, later from the consciousness of his mission, he was to spend the greater part of his energies fighting the inadequacy, the apathy, the bloodlessness that ruled England.

The Dunottar Castle came in on October 31. That day General White suffered a disastrous defeat in the vicinity of Ladysmith, the British stronghold, and had to withdraw his troops into the city. It was to be encircled almost immediately. Churchill of course was determined to get into the fighting in time. By a local train he sped at about ten miles an hour to East London, the end of the line. There he took ship for Durban. It was a wretched little coasting steamer of about a hundred and fifty tons burthen, and she rocked like a nut-shell in the fearful Antarctic gale that she sailed into. Seasickness was not the word. Churchill was practically in his death agonies.

At Eastcourt, whither the railroad brought him from Durban—the last station not yet occupied by the Boers on the road to Ladysmith—he found no sympathy for his suffering, but merely a grinning face. Leopold Amery, the correspondent of the Times who received him here, now felt revenged for his plunge into the Harrow pool.

Even Eastcourt was under enemy fire. Ten, twelve thousand Boer horsemen occupied the terrain around the little British garrison. Ten or twelve Hussars daily swarmed into the field to spy out the enemy’s movements. On the fourteenth of November the commanding general had a novel idea: he would send out an armored train for perhaps fifteen miles, or however far he could get, along the stretch where traffic had been stopped, to reconnoiter the terrain. Captain Haldane was put in command. So many accidents happened, however, that the real commander would be the civilian Churchill.

The disaster was inevitable. An armored train of six trucks, three before the engine, three behind, might indeed seem to the eyes of the time an extremely formidable weapon. But as a matter of fact the enemy had merely to blow up a bridge or even simply to tear up the tracks to block the monster’s retreat, and the train would be immobile, helplessly at the mercy of any attack.

And this was exactly what happened after the armored train, manned by a company of Dublin Fusiliers and a company of Durban Light Infantry, had passed Chieveley station, fourteen miles from Eastcourt. The Boers lay in wait for the train. Suddenly it was deluged with the pompom shells of whose existence Sir Redvers Buller had been unwilling to learn. The engineer speeded up. The train roared along at forty miles an hour. Suddenly there was a tremendous shock. Captain Haldane, Churchill, the soldiers all rubbed broken heads, bouncing around on the floor of the truck. The engineer had hit a curve at his tremendous pace; the train was derailed.

The engine, thank God, was still on the rails. The front truck was somewhere to one side. The next two blocked the track. The three attached behind were unharmed.

In the rain of Boer bullets a splinter hit the engineer. He, a civilian, could not see why he should expose himself to bombshells for his pitiful wages. He was about to make off. In that case of course the train was lost. The infantry might hold off the attack for an hour, perhaps for two. Not more.

Churchill grabbed the engineer by the shoulders: “Man!” he shouted. “Lucky dog! You have got off with a scratch! Didn’t you know a man can never be wounded twice on the same day?”

The engineer was reassured. Very well, he would stay and try to push the two front trucks, which blocked the tracks, out of the way with his engine.

Meanwhile the two companies of infantry kept the superior enemy force at a distance from their trucks. A few men had to get out in the midst of the pompom fire because Churchill, who of course resolutely stayed outside, needed their shoulders to push the trucks one last bit out of the way. The Major of the Durban Light Infantry was the first to leave cover and jump from the train. Nine volunteers followed. As a matter of course they took orders from the civilian, who was a born leader. Churchill knew he must keep his men’s spirits up. He cheered them on with the exhortation: “That will make excellent copy for my paper!”

The difficulties of putting a half-derailed train back into service under enemy fire were beyond description. Churchill was Figaro-ci, Figaro-là. He was everywhere at once. His revolver belt got in his way as he worked. He carelessly flung the weapon away. But Providence must have noticed that little motion.

Everybody had to lend a hand in pushing the train back the first few yards. Naturally they ceased firing for the moment. The Boer horsemen did not let the opportunity escape them. They swarmed up at a gallop. But the engine was just starting to move. Churchill shouted to the engineer to take the wounded, forty tattered and bleeding soldiers, back across the bridge, and to wait beyond the Blue Krantz river for the Dublin Fusiliers, who would be covering the retreat meanwhile. There was not a second to be lost. The shells hit the engine crash upon crash. The locomotive panted; the train started to move. Churchill jumped off into the rain of bullets. Of course he would stay with the Fusiliers. But his companions were now two hundred yards away, and two Boer fighters seemed to grow out of the ground directly in front of him. Slowly, with true Dutch calm, they aimed their rifles at him. Churchill jumped into the ditch for cover. Then a horseman galloped furiously up, a tall dark figure, holding a rifle in his hand.

Churchill reached for his revolver belt. So far, as correspondent and civilian, he had kept strictly out of the fighting. But his neck was at stake now. And now too he had time to look around and hunt for his companions at a distance. Not a man in sight. The infantry under Captain Haldane were already captured. Finally Winston Churchill raised his hands. It was the most painful moment of his life.

“Come on!” said the horseman. And he brought his captive back to his own column. Two or three hundred horsemen received the young Englishman. They had bearded faces, brand-new muskets, excellent horses. They were sheltering from the steaming tropical downpour under umbrellas.

Churchill’s capture on the fifteenth of November, 1899, had an epilogue. Six years later, when he was Under-Secretary in the Colonial Office, a group of South African statesmen came to him to seek a loan for their devastated country. He agreed with pleasure. He had the pleasantest of personal memories of the Boer War.

For that matter, his fellow-soldiers too remembered Churchill’s feat of heroism. One of them wrote to his mother: “If it had not been for Churchill, not one of us would have escaped.” And the Inspector of the Natal Government Railway, Mr. J. Campbell, wrote to the General Manager of the Railway on the very evening of Churchill’s capture: “The railwaymen who accompanied the armored train this morning ask me to convey to you their admiration for the courage displayed by Mr. Winston Churchill, to whose efforts, backed up by those of the driver, Wagner, the fact is due that the armored engine and tender were brought successfully out, and that it became possible to bring the wounded in here. The whole of our men are loud in their praise of Mr. Churchill, who, I regret to say, is a prisoner. I respectfully ask you to convey their admiration to a brave man.”

Churchill told his South African visitors with amusement how a Boer rider had once fetched him out of a ditch and taken him prisoner. General Botha, the leader of the delegation, listened attentively. Then he asked: “Do you recognize me?” Churchill shook his head. “I was the horseman,” said the general, who of course looked like a different man in his evening dress.

When Louis Botha became Prime Minister of South Africa, and relations between the Dominion and the Mother country became increasingly close, Churchill was altogether delighted that he had once been careless enough to drop his revolver. Indeed the two statesmen became the best of friends. In 1913 Botha, coming back from a stay at the German baths, called on Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty. “Mind you are ready,” he warned his former prisoner after a cordial handshake. “Do not trust those people in Germany. They are very dangerous. They mean mischief. I hear things you would not hear. Mind you have all your ships ready. I can feel that there is danger in the air. I am going to be ready, too. When they attack you, I am going to attack German South West Africa and clear them out once and for all. I will be there to do my duty when the time comes. But you, with the Navy, mind you are not caught by surprise.”

The honest general from the African bush felt obliged to give this emphatic warning because even shortly before the outbreak of the first world war Churchill was considered an especially warm friend of Germany. And it was quite true that he had urged conciliation again and again. But though Botha did not know it, and Kaiser Wilhelm did not know it, and nobody knew it, he had had his fleet ready for war since 1911.