Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape and the Making of Winston Churchill

By Candace Millard

Anchor Books (2017)

Book Review

This book charts the early career of Winston Churchill in South Africa’s Boer War in South Africa and how he deliberately used his military escapades to propel his career in Parliament.

On graduating from the Sandhurst (Britain’s royal military college), Churchill opted to follow example of his illustrious ancestor the first Duke of Marlborough (John Churchill), to propel himself into his politics.

Believing he was destined to be prime minister, he joined the Spanish Army in 1895 to suppress a revolt by Cuba’s independence movement prior to the start of the Spanish American War.

In 1896 he was assigned to the Fourth Queen’s Own Hussars in India and allowed to serve simultaneously as a cavalry officer and a war correspondent (for the Pioneer and the Daily Telegraph).

Publishing his first book in 1897 (The Story of the Malakand Field Force), he left the army in 1898 in debt and with no training for any non-military occupation. Unsuccessful in obtaining a commission to fight in Sudan, he stood for Parliament for the first time at age 23, campaigning (unsuccessfully) for the Oldham seat.

Three days after the Boers declared war on Britain for trying to annex the Boer state of Transvaal, Churchill traveled to South Africa as a war correspondent. Even before the British launched their first attack on the Boers, Churchill found himself arrested as a prisoner of war for his role (as a war corespondent) in defending a troop transport train that came under guerilla attack.

Imprisoned in a former school in Pretoria, he begged to participate in an escape plan hatched by two fellow reporters. In the end, Churchill preempted their plan, leaving them stuck in prison, while he struggled to find his way alone without food or water through 300 miles of enemy territory.

After a brief stint in the South African Light Horse Cavalry, Churchill returned home in 1900. Thanks to the massive publicity generated by his escape, he easily won the Oldham parliamentary seat the same year.

Millard perfectly captures Churchill’s personality as a conceited school bully who read  voraciously but came last in his class, was continuously shunned by his peers as self-centered and self-promoting, and who, like Theodore Roosevelt, had a driving need to prove his manhood through military valor.

I also really like her detailed summary of the multinational (Dutch, German, and French Hugenot) Boer population who settle at the southern tip of Africa after assisting the Dutch East India Company in establishing a trading station at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652. Ten years after the discovery of diamonds in the Transvaal, the British attempted to annex it. In 1895, they would lose the first Boer War, forcing the resignation of mining magnate Cecil Rhodes, the first prime minister of Britain’s Cape Colony.

Millard also brilliantly portrays the hopelessness of conventional British military tactics against the Boer guerillas – there was no way conventional British cavalry and infantry could fight an enemy they. Ultimately the only British option (which Hitler copied in Nazi Germany) was the wholesale arrest and imprisonment in concentration camps of Boer farmers who supported the guerillas. Twenty six Boer civilians (22,000 of them children) died in the 45 concentration camps – due to starvation, lack of medical care and appalling sanitary conditions.

The  book also has an interesting section on the heroic role the pacifist Mohatma Ghandi and his supporters played as battlefield stretcher bearers during the Boer War.