Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape and the Making of Winston Churchill
By Candice Millard, Doubleday, 400 pages, $30
“What an awful thing it will be if I don’t come off,” wrote a 24-year-old aristocrat, journalist and soldier named Winston Churchill to his mother at the beginning of 1899. “It will break my heart for I have nothing else but ambition to cling to.” The Victorian era’s last battle, the Second Boer War of 1899-1902, would be the making of Churchill as a hero and a celebrity, the biographer Candice Millard argues in this gripping tale of his greatest youthful adventure. “Hero of the Empire” draws out three strands of Churchill’s personality: the imperialist, the adventurer and the mommy’s boy.
The defeat of the British Empire in the First Boer War had been a bitter pill that young imperialists such as Churchill refused to swallow. “It is not yet too late to recover our vanished prestige in South Africa,” he wrote. “Sooner or later, in a righteous cause or a picked quarrel ... for the sake of our Empire, for the sake of our honour, for the sake of the race, we must fight the Boers.” He went to southern Africa as a war correspondent, not a soldier — though he frequently blurred that line. His immediate reaction to the place was proprietorial: “The delicious climate stimulates the vigour of the European ... All Nature smiles, and here at last is a land where white men may rule and prosper.” At last.
Churchill’s imperialism sat alongside a single-minded, almost pathological courage. It is here that the comparison with one of Millard’s previous subjects, Theodore Roosevelt, seems apt. “He can be splendidly audacious at times and, sometimes, at the wrong time,” wrote one of his comrades. Churchill had fought before. In the Sudan, he had been surrounded by “horses spouting blood, struggling on three legs, men staggering on foot ... fishhook spears stuck right through them, arms and faces cut to pieces, bowels protruding”. He fought his way out: “I destroyed those who molested me and so passed out without any disturbance of body or mind.” He could be pompous, writing to the general’s aide-de-camp that he wanted a medal: “I am possessed of a keen idea to mount the ribbon on my breast while I face the Dervishes here. It may induce them to pause.”
What a peculiarly British imperial mindset it must have taken to imagine that upon a field of mangled bodies and blood-spouting horses, a Sudanese warrior might have refrained from running Churchill through with a fishhook spear because he was wearing a special ribbon.
In southern Africa, Churchill was travelling with British forces on an armoured train when it was ambushed by the Boers. Claiming to be a journalist, he was indignant at being imprisoned, though the only reason he was able to say he was not fighting was that he had left his revolver on the train by mistake. He made an escape plan with two other men — but saw an opportunity to flee and did so, leaving his furious companions behind.
The others had all the supplies (compass, map, opium tablets, meat lozenges), so Churchill faced an 800-kilometre journey alone through unknown territory with only a biscuit and four melting bars of chocolate. Anyone with a basic grasp of history will know that he made it. Yet the tale of how he did so has lost none of its thrill in the 116 years since it happened.
Millard’s suspenseful writing is ideal for this adventure-novel material. Not too much should be given away, for the twists and turns are such fun in the reading — but there is a moment down a mine shaft worthy of a Disney cartoon, when Churchill makes friends with some albino rats.
Yet it is the story of Churchill the mommy’s boy that forms perhaps the most intriguing strand of this narrative. Jennie Jerome was a beautiful Brooklyn heiress who unhappily married the increasingly deranged Lord Randolph Churchill. “She shone for me like the Evening Star,” Winston Churchill wrote reverently of his mother. “I loved her dearly — but at a distance.” He was a contemporary of Sigmund Freud, and it is hard not to piece the tantalising details in Millard’s book together to diagnose something of an Oedipus complex. Lord Randolph had by this point expired; his widow was consorting with George Cornwallis-West, who was 20 years her junior — almost exactly the same age as Winston.
“I hate the idea of your marrying,” Churchill wrote to his mother. He hated it yet more when Cornwallis-West began “to adopt the manner of a disapproving stepfather”. Many of Churchill’s letters testifying to his own heroism were written to his mother. Cornwallis-West was also in southern Africa at the time — though he was unable to compete with Churchill’s deeds, for he quickly succumbed to sunstroke.
A few days after Churchill was taken prisoner, Lady Randolph hosted a war benefit for a hospital ship. “In my interest she left no wire unpulled,” Churchill had once said, “no stone unturned, no cutlet uncooked.” This can surely not have been literal: it is hard to imagine Lady Randolph ever cooking a cutlet. She sailed for Africa on the hospital ship in a custom boudoir, heaped with silk pillows, cut-glass decanters and potted plants, wearing an “unusually fashionable nurse’s uniform that she had designed herself, with a lace blouse and a wide belt that accentuated her slim waist”.
Her shipboard demands included that “every scrap of religious literature” should be “brought up on deck and the whole pitched overboard for the moral instruction of the fishes.” Lady Randolph did not have to save her son. Churchill freed himself, and signed up to return to the fighting as a lieutenant.
Millard has a strong sense of character and storytelling, though she is less concerned with the details that often illuminate historical writing. There is occasionally the sense that a guidebook might provide similar insights, such as when Churchill’s ship sails from Southampton: “Known as the Gateway to the Empire, Southampton had been used as a port since the Middle Ages. The Mayflower and its sister ship, the Speedwell, had set sail from there for the New World in 1620, and in just a few years the RMS Titanic would do the same.” Or there is the description of Blenheim Palace with its “marble floors ... 67-foot-high-ceiling ... arboretum, vast lake and elaborate, themed gardens — the Italian and the Rose.”
Of Churchill’s first parliamentary seat, the northern industrial constituency of Oldham, she writes: “Although the town held none of the glitter of London or the mystery of Bangalore, it was gritty and real.” This statement is impossible to dispute in any of its aspects, but perhaps could be said of almost any town in England, or anywhere.
Yet these are quibbles, for over all this is a tremendously readable and enjoyable book. The material may feel well rehearsed to Churchill buffs, but breaking new research ground is not Millard’s goal: she aims to retell the story in a thrilling, contemporary style for a new generation of readers, and in this she succeeds.
Most historians will have cause to envy her narrative ability. Her prose gallops along; her short, action-packed chapters often screech to a halt on a cliffhanger. A picture develops of Churchill as an extraordinary young man: deeply flawed yet indomitable. “Winston is like a strong wire that, stretched, always springs back,” a colleague from the “Manchester Guardian” wrote. “He prospers under attack, enmity and disparagement ... The more he scents frustration the more he has to fight for; the greater the obstacles, the greater the triumph.”
Adolf Hitler was still a schoolboy at the time — yet already embedded in Churchill was the spirit that would face him down.
–New York Times News Service
Alex von Tunzelmann’s latest book is “Blood and Sand: Suez, Hungary, and Eisenhower’s Campaign for Peace”.
