Hero of the Empire by Candice Millard

How strongly I recommend this book: 9 / 10

Date read: April 29, 2023

Get this book on Amazon

Thoughts

A very well-written and engaging book on Churchill that deep-dives into his formative years. Started as a journalist and threw himself into the Boer war with the self belief that one day he will lead the nation. Great book!

Favorite Quotes and Chapter Notes

I went through my notes and captured key quotes from all chapters below.

P.S. – Highly recommend Readwise if you want to get the most out of your reading.

Highlights and Notes

Chapter 1: Death by Inches

• From earliest childhood, Churchill had been fascinated by war, and dreamed of gallantry in battle.“There is no ambition I cherish so keenly,” he had confided to his younger brother, Jack,“as to gain a reputation for personal courage.”

• Churchill knew that the surest and quickest route to recognition, success and perhaps, if he was lucky, fame was a military medal. It was“the swift road to promotion and advancement in every arm,” he wrote,“the glittering gateway to distinction.” Distinction, in turn, could be parlayed into political clout, opening a door onto the kind of public life that he longed for, and which he believed was his destiny. So while the military was not, for Churchill, an end in itself, it was certainly a very useful means to an end. What he needed was a battle, a serious battle, one that would be talked about, would be remembered, and, with a good dose of courage and a little showmanship on his part, might propel him to the forefront of the military stage. For that, he was willing to risk anything, even his life.

• As Blood divided his thousand men into three columns, Churchill quickly attached himself to the center column, a squadron of Bengal Lancers that was headed deep into the valley on a mission of destruction guaranteed to provoke the Pashtun, and to give Churchill plenty of opportunity for conspicuous bravery. The squadron, however, also appealed to him for another reason: It was part of a cavalry regiment, which allowed him to do something that, although it stunned every man in the brigade, would guarantee that he, at least, would not be forgotten.

• Churchill had acquired the pony on his way to Malakand, at the same auction in which he had bought his blanket from the effects of a young soldier killed in battle. His plan, he would later tell his brother, was to ride“about trying to attract attention when things looked a little dangerous,” hoping that his“good grey pony” would catch someone’s eye. Although it was much more likely to catch the eye of a Pashtun tribesman who would kill him before anyone had an opportunity to admire his courage, Churchill was willing to take that chance.“The boy seemed to look out for danger,” an article in Harper’s magazine would later marvel.“He rode on a white pony, the most conspicuous of all marks, and all the prayers of his friends could not make him give it up for a safer beast.” Churchill understood that he could very easily be killed in the battle that lay before him, but he did not for a moment believe that he would be.“I have faith in my star,” he had written to his mother just days earlier.“That I am intended to do something in the world.” In fact, soon after arriving in India, he had told a fellow officer that not only did he plan to leave the military soon for a seat in Parliament but he expected to be prime minister one day.

• “Bullets—to a philosopher my dear Mamma—are not worth considering,” he would assure his mother in a pencil-written letter from Bangalore two months later, after the siege of Malakand had been lifted and the Pashtun forced to retreat.“I do not believe the Gods would create so potent a being as myself for so prosaic an ending.”

Chapter 3: The Scion

• For Churchill, few things in life could compete with the thrill of climbing onto a stage, stepping behind a podium and commanding the attention of every man in the room. As much as he loved public speaking, it did not come naturally to him. To begin with, he had a speech impediment that had plagued him since childhood. Unable to pronounce the letter s, he had practiced over and over the sibilant sentence“The Spanish ships I cannot see for they are not in sight.” Before leaving for India, he had turned for help to a family friend, Sir Felix Semon, who was a renowned throat specialist. Semon had assured him that he did not have a physical deformation and should be able to overcome the problem with“practice and perseverance.”

• Unlike his father, who was famous for his long, witheringly eloquent extemporaneous speeches, Winston spent hours preparing for every formal lecture or even brief remarks, and would do so throughout his life. His close friend Frederick Edwin Smith, 1st Earl of Birkenhead, would later joke that“Winston has spent the best years of his life composing his impromptu speeches.”

• Not only was he a uniquely talented orator, but even at just twenty-three years of age it was clear to him that he had the potential to become a great one, perhaps one of the greatest.“I improve every time,” he would write to a friend just before the election, strikingly aware of what the future might hold.“At each meeting I am conscious of growing powers.”

Chapter 4: Blowing the Trumpet

• Churchill had always believed that Blenheim—its history, its grandeur, its power to awe—had molded him, creating the foundation for the great man he was destined to become.“We shape our buildings,” he would later write,“and then our buildings shape us.”

Chapter 5: “Send Her Victorious”

• His writing, moreover, had already been hailed as“exceedingly brilliant,” and praised by everyone from the prime minister to Arthur Conan Doyle. Conan Doyle, in fact, would later refer to Churchill as“the greatest living master of English prose.”

• “Some of our best officers were on board,” Churchill wrote,“and they simply could not conceive how ‘irregular amateur’ forces like the Boers could make any impression against disciplined professional soldiers.” So certain were they that Buller would flatten the Boers they had nicknamed him the Steamroller.

Chapter 6: “We Have Now Gone Far Enough”

• By the time the British began making their own claims on the Cape at the end of the century, the Dutch and the Huguenots, along with an infusion of German immigrants, had already transformed themselves from rogue splinter groups into an entirely new ethnic group—neither European nor African, but Boer.“In their manner of life, their habits…even in their character,” a journalist for The Times would write,“they had undergone a profound change.” The Boers even developed their own language, Afrikaans, which mixes Dutch with everything from French and Portuguese to KhoiKhoi. The word boer itself, which means“farmer,” is Dutch, but the Boers quickly developed new words as they needed them, from kopje(hill) and veld(grassland) to Voortrekker.

Chapter 8: Land of Stone and Scrub

• More than changing how the Zulu fought, Shaka changed who they were. Fear was his principal weapon, and he used it not just against his enemies, but against his own people. He trained his warriors in brutality, forcing them to dance barefoot over thorns, drill from dawn to dusk until they literally dropped from exhaustion, and walk more than fifty miles in a single day. On a whim, he would bury entire regiments alive or order them to march, one by one, over a cliff simply to prove their loyalty. He ordered men to be executed because they had sneezed in front of him or because he didn’t like the way they looked.

• Shaka was finally assassinated in 1828, stabbed to death by his half brothers who used iKlwas, the weapon of his own creation, to put an end to his reign of terror. Although he had ruled the Zulu for only twelve years, the mark Shaka left on the tribe was as indelible as those of history’s most legendary leaders, from Genghis Khan to Napoleon to, one day, Churchill himself. For the Boers, as for anyone who clashed with the Zulu, Shaka’s impact on the tribe could be felt long after his death.

• Through their bloody altercations with the Zulu, the Boers’ military tactics had been forged in fire. They had learned how to fight like no other Europeans, and they were going to use everything Shaka had taught them to rid themselves of the British once and for all.

Chapter 9: The Death Trap

• “When the prospects of a career like that of his father, Lord Randolph, excited him, then such a gleam shot from him that he was almost transfigured,” Atkins would later write.“I had not before encountered this sort of ambition, unabashed, frankly egotistical, communicating its excitement, and extorting sympathy.”

• Occasionally, they were even forced to resort to something called Johnston’s Fluid Beef, which they squeezed out of metal or waxed fiberboard tubes. So far removed was this processed paste from actual fresh beef that the leftovers would be given to British soldiers serving in World War I, twenty years later.

Chapter 10: A Pity and a Blunder

• Finally, unable to endure Long’s nervous indecision any longer, Churchill broke in. Addressing the colonel, Atkins would later write,“with an unblushing assurance, which I partly envied and partly deprecated,” he gave him the benefit of his opinion. The fact that he was much younger and much less experienced than Long, and that he was not even a member of the military, did not give Churchill a moment’s hesitation.“He had small respect for authority,” Atkins wrote. He had“no reverence for his seniors as such, and talked to them as though they were of his own age, or younger.”

Chapter 11: Into the Lion’s Jaws

• Unlike the Boers, who had been sharpshooters nearly all their lives, this was an entirely new world to the British. So alien was the concept of a man who shot from a distance and in hiding, rather than in a highly visible battlefield formation, that even the word“sniper” was new to them. It had originated in India, where riflemen skilled enough to shoot a snipe, a small bird with a notoriously erratic flight pattern, were referred to as snipers. Churchill himself had used the word in print for the first time just a few years earlier, in his book The Story of the Malakand Field Force, and so foreign did it seem to him that every time he wrote it, he put it in quotation marks.

• For the British, war was about romance and gallantry. They liked nothing more than a carefully pressed uniform, a parade ground and a razor-sharp fighting line. At most, British soldiers spent two months of the year actually training to fight. The other ten were devoted to parading, attending to their uniforms and waiting on their officers, for whom they were expected to serve as cook, valet, porter and gardener.“The actual conditions of warfare were studiously disregarded,” Amery wrote.“Nowhere was there any definite preparation for war, nowhere any clear conception that war was the one end and object for which armies exist. In their place reigned a…hazy confidence that British good fortune and British courage would always come successfully out of any war that the inscrutable mysteries of foreign policy might bring about.” What took the place of actual training was an emphasis on character and courage so extreme it left room for little else. British

• Whether they liked it or not, however, battle by battle the British were learning from the Boers. They were beginning to see the advantages of blending into their surroundings, being quiet and quick, and even ducking.“When this siege is over this force ought to be the best fighting men in the world,” George Warrington Steevens wrote from Ladysmith.“We are learning lessons every day from the Boer. We are getting to know his game, and learning to play it ourselves….Nothing but being shot at will ever teach men the art of using cover.”

Chapter 12: Grim Sullen Death

• Although Churchill had been called many things—opportunist, braggart, blowhard—no one had ever questioned his bravery.“Winston is like a strong wire that, stretched, always springs back. He prospers under attack, enmity and disparagement,” Atkins would later write of him.“He lives on excitement….The more he scents frustration the more he has to fight for; the greater the obstacles, the greater the triumph.”

• he later wrote,“with only four inches of twisted iron work to make the difference between danger, captivity, and shame on the one hand—safety, freedom, and triumph on the other.” Although,

• The thought of surrender sickened him, but in this moment of fury, frustration and despair, the words of Napoleon, whom he had long studied and admired, came to him:“When one is alone and unarmed, a surrender may be pardoned.” Standing before the man who was now his captor, Churchill raised his hands in the air.

Chapter 15: A City of the Dead

• There was one man among them, however, with whom even the most over-bred, meticulously educated Briton could not hope to compete. He was, in the words of Leo Amery, a“lean, fair-haired young man with angry blue eyes,” and his name was Jan Smuts, the Transvaal state attorney. Smuts had been raised to be a cattle herd on his father’s farm in Cape Colony, but his life had taken a dramatic turn when he was twelve years old and his older brother died. Because it was the Boer custom to educate only the oldest son, the death of Smuts’s brother meant that he could go to school, a sudden turn of the hand of fate that eventually led him to Victoria College, just east of Cape Town, and then, after winning a scholarship, to Christ’s College, Cambridge. Years later, the master of Christ’s College, the Nobel Prize–winning chemist Alexander Todd, would say that in the college’s five-hundred-year history only three of its students had been truly outstanding, a rarefied group that included John Milton, Charles Darwin and Jan Smuts. Even Albert Einstein had been impressed, insisting that only a few men in the world understood the theory of relativity, and Smuts was one of them.

• The prison was warm, dry, safe and clean, with plenty of food and even little luxuries, but Churchill would have traded it in a heartbeat for the heat, rain, filth and death of the battlefield.“The war is going on,” he wrote angrily, restlessly,“great events are in progress, fine opportunities for action and adventure are slipping away.” Time was passing, and, even as a young man, Churchill could feel his life slipping away.“I am 25 today,” he wrote to Bourke Cockran, an American politician who was an old friend of Churchill’s mother, on November 30.“It is terrible to think how little time remains.” So much did Churchill loathe his imprisonment that the experience would stay with him for the rest of his life.“Looking back on those days I have always felt the keenest pity for prisoners and captives,” he would write years later.“What it must mean for any man, especially an educated man, to be confined for years in a modern convict prison strains my imagination. Each day exactly like the one before, with the barren ashes of wasted life behind, and all the long years of bondage stretching out ahead.” When, just ten years after his own imprisonment, he was made home secretary and put in charge of the British prison system, Churchill would be exceptionally compassionate to prisoners, especially those with life sentences, which he believed to be a far worse fate than a sentence of death. He made sure they had access to books, exercise and even occasional entertainment,“to mitigate as far as is reasonable,” he wrote,“the hard lot which, if they have deserved, they must none the less endure.”

Chapter 16: Black Week

Chapter 17: A Scheme of Desperate and Magnificent Audacity

• Twenty years after Churchill traced his restless path around the Staats Model School, a Swiss surgeon named Adolf Vischer would write a small book titled Barbed Wire Disease: A Psychological Study of the Prisoner of War. In it, Vischer, who had visited POW camps during World War I to study the psychological impact of captivity, would make the argument that almost without exception men exposed to long-term incarceration develop what he termed“barbed wire disease.”“They find intense difficulty in concentrating on one particular object; their mode of life becomes unstable, and there is restlessness in all their actions,” Vischer wrote.“All in common have a dismal outlook and a pessimistic view of events….Many are inordinately suspicious.” Although the men affected most severely were those who had been imprisoned for months or years, to some degree all POWs were prey to the disease. Unlike“the criminal who knows to the day and hour the length of his imprisonment and can tick off each day,” Vischer wrote,“the prisoner of war remains in complete uncertainty.”

• Churchill shared his plan with a few of the officers, and had little difficulty persuading them to join him. Although he was one of the youngest men in the prison, and the only civilian, he was an extraordinarily persuasive speaker.“He talks brilliantly,” a journalist would write of Churchill just a few months later,“in a full clear voice, and with great assurance.” Even to the point of stirring rebellion at the racecourse, the men were willing to follow his lead. Beyond

• As long as he was married to her, however, Haldane could never rise within the hierarchy of the British military, a situation that, to Churchill, was not only appalling but quite possibly worthy of drastic actions.“I questioned him about her health,” he wrote with the pity of a pragmatist.“Excellent. I am afraid I could suggest nothing better than Murder—and there are objections to that of course.”

Chapter 18: “I Shall Go On Alone”

• Churchill tried with little luck to while away the hours until dinner, when they planned to make their escape. He played chess and was“hopelessly beaten.” He attempted to read one of his favorite authors, W. E. H. Lecky, an Irish historian who had written about everything from Jonathan Swift to the moral history of Europe. Churchill had somehow obtained a volume of Lecky’s History of England in the Eighteenth Century, but even it couldn’t claim his attention.“For the first time in my life,” he wrote,“that wise writer wearied me.”

• Churchill, Menzies believed, was even more determined than either the king or the spider. There was no limit to how many times he would try. He would never give up.“Unlike Robert the Bruce, Winston has nothing to learn from spiders in the way of perseverance,” she wrote.“The spider in that case tried seven times, but I say unto you that Churchill will try seventy times seven, so it saves trouble to give into him at once.”

Chapter 19: Toujours de l’Audace

• As he contemplated the hopelessness of his situation, his feet dangling over the Apies, Churchill looked up and caught sight of an old friend in the night sky: Orion. A year earlier in Egypt, he had become separated from his unit and lost his way in the desert. Growing more and more desperate for water, he had found Orion, one of the brightest constellations in the northern sky, and followed it to the Nile. Now, in southern Africa rather than northern, he again looked to Orion for help.“He had given me water,” he wrote.“Now he should lead me to freedom. I could not endure the want of either.”

Chapter 20: “To Take My Leave”

• Churchill’s next visitor, however, was not so easily discouraged. While at the Staats Model School, Churchill had not only made purchases, from clothing to alcohol, he had arranged for services from local vendors. For the past month, he had been receiving regular haircuts and shaves from a Boer barber. In the excitement of his escape, he had forgotten that he had an appointment for the morning of December 13. One of the many reasons Haldane and Brockie had not wanted to take Churchill with them was that he was well known within the prison not just for his aristocratic background but for his aristocratic tastes. Whether

• Although Churchill would later admit that he had taken“great pleasure” in writing the letter, it did not have the effect he had imagined it would. Far from being charmed by his cleverness or mollified by his compliments and wishes for a speedy end to this“grievous and unhappy war,” the Boers were outraged. The idea of being humiliated by the son of Lord Randolph Churchill was simply too much to bear. They were determined that nothing, not even the war, would prevent them from finding Winston Churchill. In fact, the Transvaal government was so shocked and infuriated by Churchill’s escape that tracking him down suddenly became the first order of business.“So

• Beyond just giving a basic description of Churchill, his height, complexion, hair color, the poster included details that were clearly calculated to humiliate the arrogant young Briton. Churchill had a“stooping gait,” the poster read,“almost invisible moustache, speaks through his nose, cannot give full expression to the letter ‘s,’ and does not know a word of Dutch.” An earlier description, in a telegram sent by the commandant general’s department the day after the escape, had also mentioned that Churchill“occasionally makes a rattling noise in his throat.”

• For most Boer generals, it was a daily struggle to persuade the fiercely independent burghers to follow orders, or even to stay with their regiment rather than simply riding off on their own horses, returning by the hundreds to their families and farms. For Botha, they stayed. Although, at thirty-seven years of age, he seemed to most Boers to be extraordinarily, even ridiculously, young to be leading a regiment, let alone the entire southern force, it was apparent to all who met him that he was a natural leader. His men, both those he led and those he was supposed to follow, loved him. Jan Smuts, the brilliant young Transvaal state attorney, wrote of Botha that he had a natural sympathy that made it possible for him to“get extremely close to others and to read their minds and divine their characters with marvellous accuracy. It gave him an intuitive power of understanding and appreciating men which was very rare.” Botha also had a quality that would have been extremely rare if not unheard of in a British general: genuine modesty. Everyone,

Chapter 21: Alone

• Nearly twenty years later, Lord Randolph’s son had come to the same conclusion. Before reaching the Staats Model School, Churchill had had a long, spirited conversation with a Boer guard that had quickly turned into a debate about equal rights. The guard was openly disgusted by the rights Britain’s law afforded its black citizens, and astonished that the British expected the Boers to do the same.“Brother! Equal! Ugh!” he had spat.“Free! Not a bit.” Churchill believed he had finally gotten to the heart of what seemed to him to be the Boers’ bewilderingly vehement opposition to British rule.“It is the abiding fear and hatred of the movement that seeks to place the native on a level with the white man,” he

Chapter 22: “Wie Is Daar?”

• By an incredible stroke of luck, Churchill had stumbled upon one of the few places in the 110,000 square miles of the Transvaal where it was still possible to find an Englishman. Since the proclamation ordering British subjects to leave the country had been passed nearly two months earlier, thousands of men, most of whom worked in mines, had been forced to leave their homes and lives in South Africa.

• Standing in the stable with his small pile of supplies, Churchill watched as they walked away, his life having taken another sudden and completely unexpected turn, his fate now resting in the hands of men he did not know but would have to trust. He could see their lanterns bobbing as they disappeared into the mazelike tunnel, leaving him alone in the“velvety darkness of the pit.”

Chapter 23: An Invisible Enemy

• It was no secret to the British that few European countries were rooting for them to win the war. Although the governments of most of the great colonial powers were outwardly civil to England, hatred and resentment seethed just below the surface. The British Empire was the largest and most powerful in the world, and everyone was waiting for the Boers to expose even the slightest sign of vulnerability. With

• Other countries were motivated less by hatred for the British than by sympathy for the Boers. Although the president of the United States, William McKinley, had vowed to stay out of the war, many Americans saw in it glimpses of the American Revolution and their own struggle for freedom from British rule little more than a hundred years earlier. Even Theodore Roosevelt, then governor of New York, could not take his eyes off South Africa. Writing to his friend Cecil Spring Rice, later British ambassador to the United States, he admitted that he had been“absorbed in interest in the Boer War.”

• The nearer the British came to the Tugela, however, the further out of reach victory seemed to be. Standing near Buller on Naval Gun Hill, Atkins looked out over the battlefield, beyond the plain, and was stunned by what he saw on the other side.“Ridge upon ridge, top upon top, each one looking over the head of the one in front of it,” he wrote.“Simply desperate!” He knew that the Boers were somewhere in there, thousands of them hidden in trenches and behind hills. The fact that he could not see them made them all the more terrifying.

• As soon as the attack began, an unusual collection of daring men without rifles or rank began to dart across the plain, dodging bullets as best they could. These men, dressed in wide-brimmed hats and simple, loose-fitting khaki uniforms, a white band with a red cross on it wrapped around their left arms, were known to Buller’s troops as“body-snatchers,” retrieving not just bodies from the battlefield but, they hoped, young men from the jaws of death. In all, there were about eight hundred of them in Colenso that day, and they were led by one man: a thirty-year-old Indian lawyer and civil rights activist by the name of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.

• Gandhi had been living in South Africa for six years when the Boer War began, and had already begun to develop his ideas of nonviolent resistance. He had come to Africa in a desperate attempt to save his floundering law career but had been stunned by the injustices and cruelties to which the Boers subjected Indians as well as native Africans. In fact, just two years earlier he had nearly been lynched by a mob of angry Boers for his efforts to actively recruit, organize and lead the Indian community. When the war broke out, Gandhi felt strongly that, because he was demanding rights as a British citizen, it was his duty to defend the British Empire. Although his convictions would not allow him to fight, he had gathered together more than a thousand men to form a corps of stretcher bearers. When he had learned of Gandhi’s efforts, Buller had not only approved, he had asked Gandhi’s men to serve within the firing line.“General Buller sent the message that though we were not bound to take the risk,” Gandhi later wrote in his autobiography,“Government would be thankful if we would do so and fetch the wounded from the field. We had no hesitation.” Now, rushing across the veld in the midst of Botha’s devastating attack, Gandhi and his team of stretcher bearers had more wounded than they could carry. As Atkins watched them, along with the nurses and doctors who worked at their side, risking their own lives again and again, he marveled at their bravery.“Anywhere among the shell fire,” he wrote,“you could see them kneeling and performing little quick operations that required deftness and steadiness of hand.”

Chapter 24: The Light of Hope

• If there was anything Britons knew how to do, it was to show courage in the face of tragedy. Black Week required a particularly stiff upper lip. Not only were they stunned by the number of young men already killed in the war, but they could not believe that it was possible for the British Empire to lose to anyone, let alone a small, isolated republic on a faraway continent.“It is impossible to describe the feeling of dismay with which the news of Sir Redvers Buller’s defeat was received,” one London correspondent wrote.“So much had been expected of him, and so much depended on his success, that it could scarcely be credited that he had failed disastrously.”

• As soon as news of the Battle of Colenso reached England, the British army was overwhelmed with men wanting to sign up to fight the Boers.“For this far-distant war, a war of the unseen foe and of the murderous ambuscade, there were so many volunteers that the authorities were embarrassed by their numbers and their pertinacity,” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote.“It was a stimulating sight to see those long queues of top-hatted, frock-coated young men who waited their turn for the orderly room with as much desperate anxiety as if hard fare, a veld bed, and Boer bullets were all that life had that was worth the holding.” As 1899 came to a dismal close, however, what England needed most was not patriotic posters, chocolate from the queen or even thousands of additional soldiers. What it needed was a hero. The Boers had theirs. After the Battle of Colenso, Botha had risen to fame seemingly overnight. Throughout the Transvaal, he had become a figure of national pride, the face of the war that the Boers wanted to present to the world. He was young, smart, handsome and brave, and he had done something dramatic, something that had galvanized his people and strengthened their will to keep fighting.

• The only exception to the seemingly endless series of disasters that had befallen the British Empire since the beginning of the war was the escape of Winston Churchill. The story of his audacious flight from the Staats Model School had riveted both nations. He had reminded the world what it meant to be a Briton—resilient, resourceful and, even in the face of extreme danger, utterly unruffled.“I have no doubt that he knows what he is about and will turn up with an extra chapter of his book finished in a few days time,” his editor, Oliver Borthwick, had assured Churchill’s mother after his escape.

Chapter 25: The Plan

• For most of his life, Churchill had taken refuge in books. He had never liked school, finding it a grim, joyless struggle, and himself more often than not at the bottom of his class. He wasn’t well liked by the other boys, and his parents had all but abandoned him, so he was left with few places to turn for solace and friendship.“The greatest pleasure I had in those days was reading,” he later wrote. In particular, he loved poring over the pages of Treasure Island, which had been a rare gift from his father when he was only nine years old.“My teachers saw me at once backward and precocious,” he wrote,“reading books beyond my years and yet at the bottom of the Form.” Churchill had again turned to books when he was a young officer in India, hoping that they might fill in what he perceived to be the gaps in his education. Every month, he asked his mother to send him more books, books on history, philosophy, economics and evolution. He read for four or five hours every day, everything from Plato’s Republic to Aristotle’s Politics to Schopenhauer, Malthus and Darwin. In history, he began with Edward Gibbon.“Someone had told me that my father had read Gibbon with delight; that he knew whole pages of it by heart, and that it had greatly affected his style of speech and writing,” Churchill later recalled.“So without much more ado I set out upon the eight volumes of Dean Milman’s edition of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.”

• Now, in Stevenson’s Kidnapped, Churchill found something more than refuge or even knowledge. He found shared understanding. Although David Balfour, the hero of Kidnapped, was a fictional character, through him Stevenson expressed the same feelings of foreboding, powerlessness, even shame, with which Churchill was struggling as he sat alone in Howard’s office.“Those thrilling pages…awakened sensations with which I was only too familiar,” he wrote.“To be a fugitive, to be a hunted man, to be ‘wanted,’ is a mental experience by itself. The risks of the battlefield, the hazards of the bullet or the shell are one thing. Having the police after you is another. The need for concealment and deception breeds an actual sense of guilt very undermining to morale….Feeling that at any moment the officers of the law may present themselves…gnawed the structure of self-confidence.”

• As miserable as he had been, however, he had at least been free. Howard’s plan placed that freedom in imminent peril.“I was more worried about this than almost anything that had happened to me so far,” Churchill would later write.“When by extraordinary chance one has gained some great advantage or prize and actually had it in one’s possession…the idea of losing it becomes almost insupportable.”

Chapter 26: The Red and the Blue

• While at the Staats Model School, Churchill and Haldane had memorized every station along the Delagoa Bay Railway line. It had been an easy task for Churchill, who had always had a remarkable memory. When he was at Harrow, he had learned by heart twelve hundred lines of Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome. He could remember entire lectures if they interested him, and, decades after the Boer War, he would still be able to reel off the names of the Transvaal stations in order of appearance, beginning with Witbank and running west to east, from Middelburg to Bergendal, Belfast, Dalmanutha, Machadodorp, Waterval Boven, Waterval Onder, and on and on, all the way to the border town of Komatipoort.

Epilogue

• As soon as Churchill was free, he wanted to fight. It wasn’t enough to have escaped from the Boers, he wanted to help win the war for his country, and, if possible, a medal or two for himself. First,

• Everywhere he looked, there were cheering throngs and waving flags, even a band was playing.“It was not until I stepped on shore,” he wrote,“that I realised that I was myself the object of this honourable welcome.” An admiral, a general and the mayor were all there to congratulate Churchill on his escape, but they were not allowed to keep him long.“I was nearly torn to pieces by enthusiastic kindness,” Churchill wrote.“Whirled along on the shoulders of the crowd, I was carried to the steps of the town hall, where nothing would content them but a speech.”

• As soon as Churchill had his commission, having been made a lieutenant in the South African Light Horse, he wasted no time in going straight to the heart of the conflict. A month later, he was fighting in, and writing about, one of the most infamous battles of the war: Spion Kop. Played

• In fact, so horrific were the stories coming out of southern Africa that Pamela begged Churchill to come home. After news of his safe arrival in Lourenço Marques had reached her, she had telegraphed just three words to Churchill’s mother:“Thank God—Pamela.” Now, having endured his capture, his escape and his participation in one of the bloodiest battles of the war, in which a bullet had come so close to his head it severed the jaunty feather on his hat, she had had enough.

• It was certainly no accident that, for the remainder of his time in South Africa, wherever there was an opportunity for an epic battle, a heroic triumph or a great story, there was Churchill. Just a month after the Battle of Spion Kop, he rode triumphantly into Ladysmith at the head of the relief column. He would never forget watching with a mixture of pity and exaltation as heartbreakingly thin, weak men in tattered clothing raced through the streets, some laughing, some crying, all cheering the relieving troops and the end of the devastating four-month siege. It was, Churchill would later write,“one of the most happy memories of my life.”

• Suddenly out of the fog appeared not an army or even a regiment but just two men on horseback.“Then, and then only,” Burnett wrote,“we knew that our deliverance was at hand.” As soon as he saw the prison, Churchill raised his hat into the air and let out a loud cheer. Instantly, he heard it echoed within the prison walls.“Hats were flying in the air,” Burnett wrote,“and we were all shouting and cheering like madmen.” Moments

• When the three men reached the Natal port, no welcoming party with bands and cheering crowds was waiting to celebrate their escape. Haldane did, however, find a letter from Winston Churchill.“My heartiest congratulations on your wonderful exploit which will mark you as a man of daring, endurance and resource among all soldiers,” Churchill had written.“I am delighted to think you are safe. I feared they had murdered you in the veldt.”

• In command of overwhelmingly superior firepower, but frustrated by the Boers’ unrelenting guerrilla tactics, Kitchener took a route that would hasten the end of the war, at a staggering cost. To prevent Boer civilians throughout the veld from providing shelter and provisions to the elusive burghers who harassed his forces, Kitchener expanded with a vengeance a policy of farm burning that Roberts had begun. So extreme was Kitchener’s version that by the end of the war some thirty thousand Boer farms would be left in black smoldering ruins. The problem then was what to do with the homeless families, mostly women and children, who were left behind. To the horror of the Boers and, soon after, the rest of the world, the British came up with a stunning solution: concentration camps. The idea behind concentration camps was not new, but this was the first time the term had been used. More than that, it was the first time the camps had targeted a whole country and depopulated entire regions. Although the British did not intentionally kill their captives, they committed what Louis Botha called“slow murder.” The camps quickly multiplied until there were some forty-five of them scattered across southern Africa. They did not have nearly enough food for their thousands of inmates. There was little to no medical care, and the sanitary conditions were not only appalling but deadly. By the end of the war, more than twenty-six thousand Boer civilians would die in British concentration camps, some twenty-two thousand of whom were children. Those statistics, however, do not even take into account the roughly twenty thousand Africans who, having been forced to fight in a war that was not their own, subsequently died in separate black concentration camps.

• During the war, the British had promised that as soon as the Boers were defeated, life for nonwhites would change dramatically. They would, at long last, be treated as citizens, with respect, rights and, most important, suffrage. Instead, the situation grew steadily worse. With the same insular, defiant worldview that had marked their fight against the British, the Boers did not relinquish their harsh, race-based social views, but instead worked to expand and codify them. Just a few years after the Treaty of Vereeniging, the Boers began a concerted push toward segregation, forming the South African Native Affairs Commission, which proposed dividing the republic, its rural land as well as its cities, into black and white sections. By 1913, the infamous Natives Land Act was passed, forcing nonwhite Africans, who made up 67 percent of the population, to live on just 7 percent of its arable land.

• Resistance to the government’s hardening racial policies was initially spontaneous and largely peaceful, particularly in the Indian community, where Mohandas Gandhi used the combination of humanitarianism and courage that he had learned on the Boer War battlefield to define an entire new movement based on nonviolent protest. After a new law was passed in 1906 forcing Indians to register with the government, Gandhi, who had founded the Natal Indian Congress twelve years earlier, organized a mass meeting of his own to protest the law. For the next seven years, Indians in South Africa, following Gandhi’s methods of nonviolent resistance, defied prejudicial laws and suffered the consequences. Thousands were imprisoned, beaten and even killed for their defiance, but nothing changed. Finally, in the summer of 1914, after more than twenty years in South Africa, Gandhi returned to India, where his peaceful protests would, in the end, find more success. When he heard that Gandhi had left, Jan Smuts felt nothing but relief.“The saint has left our shores,” he wrote.“I sincerely hope forever.” Among South African whites, wide-scale prejudice became increasingly rationalized and institutionalized, first with Smuts’s United Party, which ruled from 1934 until 1948, and then with the National Party. Dominated by Afrikaners, the National Party implemented an official, state-run program of racial segregation that it called apartheid, Afrikaans for“apartness.” The blatant discrimination and dangerous inequalities inherent in apartheid, however, only fueled support for the ANC, which swelled with popular support despite ever-harsher government measures to suppress it. Finally, in the 1960s, under the leadership of a charismatic young lawyer named Nelson Mandela, a faction of the ANC abandoned peaceful methods and declared that it would take up armed struggle as the only realistic means of winning change. In response, the National Party banned the ANC from South Africa and imprisoned Mandela for twenty-seven years, embarking on a bitter and escalating conflict against the majority of its country’s own citizens and transforming itself into an international pariah. It was not until 1990, nearly a hundred years after the Boer War and just ten years before the beginning of another new century, that a new president, F. W. de Klerk, would lift the ban and free Mandela. Four years later, South Africans would finally win universal suffrage, and, in a moment that would stir the hearts and hopes of people of all races across the world, Nelson Mandela would become the first black president of South Africa.

• “The first time you meet Winston you see all his faults,” Pamela would explain years later to Edward Marsh, Churchill’s private secretary,“and the rest of your life you spend in discovering his virtues.”

• Churchill himself extended the hand of friendship not just to the Boers as a people but directly to the man who had personally been responsible for many of the battlefield defeats that had kept the war going for so long—Louis Botha. The two men met for the first time in 1903, not long after the end of the Boer War, when Botha visited England to ask his former enemies for help in rebuilding his country. Although Botha had been responsible for the attack on the armored train that had led to Churchill’s capture and imprisonment, the two men quickly became friends.“Few men that I have known have interested me more than Louis Botha,” Churchill would write many years later.“An acquaintance formed in strange circumstances and upon an almost unbelievable introduction ripened into a friendship which I greatly valued.” Churchill and Botha understood each other, perhaps better than anyone else they knew. Although they had had strikingly different childhoods, their young adult lives had been defined by war, and they both seemed destined to lead their nations in the new century.

• In 1907, just over seven years after he had sat astride his horse on that rain-swept hillside in Frere, watching Churchill’s train steam toward the trap he had laid, Botha was elected prime minister of the Transvaal. Now a high official of the same British Empire he had sought to defy, Botha traveled to England to take part in the Imperial Conference, a meeting of the leaders of the self-governing colonies. Churchill, then undersecretary of state for the colonies, also attended the banquet, which was held in Westminster Hall, the oldest building in the Palace of Westminster, whose six-foot-thick stone walls, vast spaces and delicate statuary were designed to overawe visitors with tangible proof of British power. Striding through the great hall to the place that had been reserved for him, the former Boer commander paused when he saw Lady Randolph Churchill, standing next to the man who was once his battlefield prisoner. With the simplicity of a burgher, and the courtesy of the international statesmen he and Churchill had both become, Botha acknowledged to Jennie the strange, intertwined history he shared with her son.“He and I,” Botha said,“have been out in all weathers.”

Acknowledgments

• As indebted as I am to Martin Gilbert and Randolph Churchill, my first introduction to Winston Churchill, decades ago, was through the work of William Manchester. I have rarely encountered a writer with the ability to describe a scene with as much dazzling detail or conjure a moment from the murky depths of history as confidently and magisterially as Manchester. His writing is absolutely irresistible, and, even more than a decade after his death, his unforgettable three-volume series, The Last Lion, which was finished with impressive skill and devotion by Paul Reid, continues to thrill loyal readers and attract new ones.