The Military Academy at Sandhurst was where Winston C. felt he could have a new start. His schooldays had been dreary and disappointing. His father still thought him a failure. He wrote: "I am surprised at your tone of exultation ....with all the advantages you had, with all the abilities which you foolishly think yourself to possess...this is the grand result, that you come up among the second rate and third rate who are only good for commission in a cavalry regiment....I am certain, that if you cannot prevent yourself from leading the idle, useless, unprofitable life you have led during your schooldays....you will become a mere social wastrel, one of hundreds of the public school failures, and you will degenerate into a shabby, unhappy and futile existence."
You can imagine Churchill was deeply depressed by this letter. Lord Randolph was becoming very "out-of-order" in his behavior; he was already in the stage of dying. his disease was destroying the nervous system and damaging his brain.
Colnel John Brabazon, commander of the cavalry regiment, the 4th Queen's Own Hussars, had his eye on winston, and so Churchill was unable to resist the invitation to become a Hussar officer, no matter what his father thought.
The training drill was strenuous and Winston almost collapsed after a half-kilometre (550 yards) run carrying full kit and rifle.
Winston's first romance did not prosper and the girl he was dating finally married another man.
by June 1894, Jennie took her ailing husband on a world tour. But by November, he was suffering delusions and could not speak. The tour was cut short to return home. Lord Randolph died early 24th January 1895.
Shortly before his father's death Churchill passed his exam, coming 20th in a class of 130. On February 20th he was gazetted second lieutenant in the 4th Hussars, a prominent light cavalry stationed at Aldershot. It was a good leisure time....often 8 hours in the saddle, two hours tending the horses in the stable, and he played polo with great enthusiasm.
CHURCHILL ON HORSES:
"HORSES WERE THE GREATEST OF MY PLEASURES at Sandhurst. I and the group in which I moved spent all of our money on hiring horses form the very excellent local livery stable .... we organized point to points and even steeplechase in the park of a friendly grandee, and bucketed gaily about the country-side .... No one ever came to grief .... by riding horses. No hour of life is lost that is spent in the saddle. Young men have often been ruined through owning horses, or through backing horses, but never through driving them; unless of course they break their necks which, taken at a gallop, is a very good death to die."
HUNGER FOR ACTION
Winston craved action and the thrill of being at the center of important events as they unfold. In 1895 the stage he wanted was way off in Cuba. The Spanish who had ruled for 500 years were now in s struggle to contain rebels who were willing to fight for independence.
Churchill was in financial straights. The answer was journalism. He persuaded a British newspaper the Daily Graphic to pay for eyewitness reports from the front in Cuba. He also agreed to provide intelligence and statistics to the army, and report on a new bullet being used in the war for the first time. He set sail on the Cunard Royal Mail steamship Etruria at the end of October 1895. He arrived at Cuba three weeks later. Churchill's first 5 reports from Cuba were published in Britain as Letters from the Front by W S C. He witnessed the hardship and sacrifice the natives were willing to pay for their freedom. He came to see the Cuban's cause was justifiable, because of the corruption in the Spanish government and punitive taxes demanded of the poverty-stricken Cubans. Winston was a very independent thinker and this would down the road cause much vexation with with political allies and often furore in Parliament.
While in cuba Churchill got to like very much Cuban cigars, something that lasted all his life.
He returned home, but was accused by a man seeking revenge on some matter Churchill had with his son, accused of "acts of gross immorality." There was no foundation to the accusations and the judge found it all spurious. The charges were withdrawn and the accuser made to pay 400 pounds damages.
Churchill longed to find another battle-field. The 4th Hussars were to go to India. He was not really interested in India, but frustrated and disappointed he sailed for India September 11th 1896. He was stationed in Bangalore in the hills west of Madras. It was relaxing but boring, an idle life which he regarded as a waste of time. He actually thought it was a land of godless snob s and bores. He thought Calcutta was "full of supremely uninteresting people."
Winston's mind moved towards politics, and viewed everything as training towards that mark. But some of his views created pious horror among his fellow officers.
Eventually Winston returned to Britain, and gave his first political speech at a meeting of the Primrose League near Bath on June 26th. He agreed that the recent Government moves to pay compensation to workmen injured in dangerous trades, was a good and right thing. And expressed the hope that one day the laborer would become a shareholder in the business in which he worked. This was radical talk and it shocked his audience.
Winston went back to Bangalore three weeks later, and started to write his first novel. Then Sir Bindon Blood, commander of a Field Force (whom Churchill had met on his recent trip to Britain), and who had promised Winston to be included in any frontier campaign, was to come to pass in August 1897. His chance for action had finally arrived.
CHURCHILL ON TRAINING WITH THE 4TH HUSSARS:
"I am all for youth being made willingly to endure austerities; and for the rest, it was a gay and lodly life .... The young officers were often permitted to ride out with their troops at exercise or on route marches .... There is a thrill and charm of its own in the glittering jungle of a cavalry squadron manoeuvring at the trot; and this deepens into joyous excitement when the same evolutions are enjoyed at a gallop. The stir of the horses, the clank of their equipment, the thrill of motion, the tossing plumes, the sense of incorporation in a living machine, the suave dignity of the uniform - all combine to make cavalry drill a fine thing in itself."
FRONTIER CAMPAIGN
Elated, Churchill left for the frontier, more than 2175 miles away, on 29th August. He was also to be to a journalist again. but political ambition was also formost in his mind. He wrote to his mother:
"I feel that the fact of having seen service with British troops while still a young man man must give me more weight politically .... and may perhaps improve my prospects of gaining popularity with the country."
Churchill was to face the the ferocious warriors, were known to cut to pieces and wounded left on the battlefield. When churchill arrived in 1986 to take part in the Malakand Campaign, some 50,000 of these British and Indian troops faced the tribesmen from across thew border.
The danger did not inhibit Winston one bit; ordered by General Blood to join the second brigade, Winston put himself in the thick of the fighting. He put himself within range of rifle fire, and when the British troops withdrew he was the last to leave. He fired at almost point blank range to kill an Afridi who was about to cut up a wounded British officer and afterwards rescued a wound Sikh from the same fate.
He remained in action for the next month. He spent hours under fire and was often involved in bloody close-hand fighting. When it was over he emerged unscathed, though shocked by the barbarities from both sides. The Afridi, he wrote, "kill and mutilate everyone they catch and we do not hesitate to finish off their wounded."
Back in Bangalore in the third week of October, he wrote, that the time on the northwest frontier had been, "the most glorious and delightful that my life has yet contained. He received a campaign medal and, for his prowess, a mention in dispatches. He wrote to his mother that he was more ambitious for a reputation for personal courage than anything else in the world, and concluded "was quite the foundation for political life."
IT SEEMS WINSTON CHURCHILL WAS A BLOODY MAN, AS GOD CALLED DAVID BY THOSE WORDS, AND BECAUSE OF IT WAS REFUSED TO BUILD THE TEMPLE TO GOD. BUT WINSTON HAD NO AMBITION TO BUILD ANY RELIGIOUS TEMPLE.
PUBLISHED AUTHOR
Churchill's first published book, The Story of the Malakand Field Force: An Episode of Frontier War, APPEARED IN LONDON IN MARCH 1998. It marked him out as a promising young writer, and helped his financial problems. By 1898 Winston had to warm his mother that her spending of clothes, entertainment and travel had cost one quarter of "our entire fortune in the world." His book earned around 400 pounds and his newspaper reports, represented some 20,000 pounds or more in today's money. But all this did not endear him to his fellow officers who considered it opportunism, and self-interests, medal-hunting and moneymaking, was considered vulgar. He was also so self-boasting about escaping death at Malakand, he wrote to his mother, "I am so conceited, I do not believe the gods would create so potent a being as myself for so prosaic an ending."
I NOT SURE IF CHURCHILL WAS BOASTING, AS MUCH AS HE FELT EVEN AT THIS YOUNG AGE, HE WAS DESTINED FOR A SPECIAL PLACE AND ASSIGNMENT YET TO COME, WHICH HE INDEED WAS.
CHURCHILL was still thirsting for action. The Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury was so impressed with his book, he arranged for him to be transfered to the 21st Lancer, who were to leave for Sudan. The situation was a long held grievances. The battleground was the fortress of Omdurman, which lay on the Nile north of Khartoum. The Anglo-Egyptian army of 26,000 men faced a force of 40,000 Dervishes. But it counted for nothing to have more men in the face of mechanized weaponry. The Dervishes were felled in a blaze of machine gun fire and small arms. Churchill wrote: "After an enormous carnage, exceeding 20,000 men who strewed the ground in heaps and swathes like snowdrifts, the whole mass of the Dervishes dissolved into fragments and into particles and streamed away into the fantastic mirages of the desert."
The account of one charging battle shows the Winston was not only as brave as anyone could be, but also it seemed had some guardian angel on his side. He recalls the event of being in command of about 25 men, "I was riding a handy sure-footed grey Arab polo pony. I saw immediately before me, and now onl;t half a length of a polo ground away, the row of crouching blue figures [Dervishes] firing frantically, wreathed in white smoke .... We were going at a fast but steady gallop .... I looked again towards the enemy. The scene seemed to be suddenly transformed. The blue-black men were still firing, but behind them now there came into view a depression like a shallow, sunken road. This was crowed and crammed with men rising up from the ground where they had hidden .... The Dervishes appeared to be ten or twelve deep, at the thickest, a great grey mass gleaming with steel." Churchill's men increased to the fasted gallop. "The collision was now very near. I saw immediately before me ... the blue men who lay in my path. They were perhaps a couple of yards apart. I rode at the interval between them. They both fired. I passed through the smoke, conscious that I was unhurt ... The trooper behind me was killed."
A few moments later, another Dervish, this time armed with a spear, suddenly jumped up and made for Churchill. weapon raised to strike. Churchill shot him dead when he was less than three yards away. The first change over, Churchill expected an order to charge again. But there was no need. The Dervishes were retreating and the battle was over. It cost the Anglo-Egyptians 500 casualties and 25,000 Dervishes were killed or injured.
Churchill goes no to give some gruesome details of the carnage to man and horses, which I will not repeat here being so terrible.
In Churchill's book The River War, he tells us atrocities were also committed on the British side - including the killing of thousands of wounded Dervishes, and the desecration of the tombs and corpse of the Mahdi, the former holy leader of the Dervishes. In military circles, Churchill was heavily criticised for these embarrassing revelations and particularly for charging General Kitchener with responsibility. Yet in spite, or because of thew revelations, the book was a considerable success.
By the time The River War was published, Winston had retired and resigned from the army. I March 1899 he departed, never to see India again.
TO CAPE TOWN
Winston felt well placed for his next step in life. He had proved himself on the battlefield, and had notoriety as a writer. He was now ready he thought to enter politics.
But he lost in a by-election at Oldham in July 1899.
But he was not at a loose end for long. Another colonial war was coming, in South Africa. A long time dispute between Britain and the Boer Republic of the Transvaal had come to a head in the fall of 1899. Rumors were going around that British workers in a goldfield were being ill-treated, but the real cause of the war was the possession of the rich region.
On 18th September the Daily Mail asked Churchill to go to South Africa as their correspondent. Winston accepted. He doubled by offering to report also for the Morning Post, with a fee of 1,000 pounds and all expenses paid.
When Churchill arrived at Cape Town on 31st of October, he did not know he was about to enter the greatest adventure of his life. the war was between the British Army and a force of nimble, skillful guerrillas. This was a new type of warfare thew British were not familiar with, and the guerrillas scored a series of victories.
CHURCHILL ON THE SOUTH AFRICAN WAR:
"AH, horrible war, amazing medley of the glorious and the squalid, the pitiful and the sublime .... Much as war attracts me and fascinates my mind with its tremendopus situations, I feel more deeply every year and can measure the feeling here in the midst of arms, what vile and wicked folly and barbarism it is."
CAPTURED
In 1899 on November 15th Winston boarded an armored train with 150 other men. The train ran into an ambush and the Boers opened fire. About 500 armed Boers were ranged along the embankment, Churchill and his fellow men were forced to surrender.
The prisoners of war were taken to camp in the Model School of Pretoria. Winston at once began to plan his escape. His first attempt failed, but the following night he was successful. He climbed a wall next to a latrine and dropped down in darkness into a garden on the other side.
Safety was about 275 miles away, at the port of Lourenco Marques in Portuguese East Africa.
Churchill headed to the railway line which he knew ran to the port from Pretoria. He did not have to wait long for train to come, he jumped into a wagon full of empty coal sacks. He left the train when daylight came and hid. He was now a marked man. His photo and description was being circulated: "An Englishman, 25 years old ... average build, walks with a slight stoop, pale appearance, red brown hair, almost invisible small moustache, speaks through the nose ... cannot speak Dutch, last seen in a brown suit of clothes." They even mentioned Churchill's inability to pronounce the letter "s".
ON THE RUN
Winston was now very hungry. He took a chance on seeing a coal mine. He knocked on the door of a house. The man answering pointed a pistol at him thinking he might be a Boer spy. Winston's risk paid off. The man was the owner of the coal mine. For 3 days churchill hid in the coal mine with the rats. On December 19th, after a week on the run, Churchill was smuggled onto a railway wagon. He hid under bales of wool. He was heading for Portuguese East Africa.
The Boers search the wagon while it lay in a siding, but they missed finding him. The train on the move once more, he waited till he saw the first station with a Portuguese name. seeing it he dumped out of the wool bales, black as coal from head to foot, shouting with all his might, and for good measure firing his revolver two or three times.
Winston lost no time in letting the press know he was free. On December 21st he sent a long telegram from Lourenco Marques to the Morning Post entitled "How I Escaped from Pretoria."
Within a few days his exploit made him famous in Britain and throughout the Empire. He arrived at Durbam, South Africa two days before Christmas of 1899, to cheering and enthusiastic crowds cramming the quayside.
At last Winston Spencer Churchill was the celebrity ha had longed to be.
..........
To be continued
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