Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill Read Online Free Page A

nor hear them. It was not until Churchill pulled out his telescope and scanned the mountains where the watch fires had burned the night before that he could see, covering the terraced sides, long white rows of Pashtun.
    As the cavalry came closer, the tribesmen silently turned and began to scale the mountainside. Stopping at a small cemetery, the British dismounted and, unable to bear the tension any longer, opened fire. The response was immediate. Puffs of white smoke erupted on the mountain, and the sound of bullets whistling through the air filled the cemetery. While the rest of the men dived behind trees and rough tombstones, however, Churchill, sensing an opportunity and the eyes of the other officers, refused even to dismount. “I rode on my grey pony all along the front of the skirmish line where everyone else was lying down in cover,” he would later confess. “Foolish perhaps,but given an audience there is no act too daring or too noble. Without the gallery things are different.”
    The skirmish, which was relatively brief and bloodless, seemed to make the men in Churchill’s unit forget who they were fighting. Before climbing deeper into the mountains, on the trail of the Pashtun, therefore, they divided again. Reluctantly leaving his pony behind, Churchill joined a group of just ninety men who were headed toward an isolated village, which, when they reached its small collection of mud houses, they found, like all the others, completely deserted.
    On the way up, Churchill had stopped to squint through his telescope, scanning the mountains and plains for the rest of the army. Memories of his days at Sandhurst and the repeated warnings of his professors about the danger of “dispersion of forces” slipped through his mind as he searched without luck for the thousand men with whom he had left camp that morning. “Mud villages and castles here and there, the deep-cut water-courses, the gleam of reservoirs, occasional belts of cultivation, isolated groves of trees,” he wrote, “but of a British-Indian brigade, no sign.” The entire region, in fact, was unnaturally, almost eerily still, with neither friend nor enemy in sight.
    Although Churchill had spent much of his young life thinking about war, until this moment it had all been supposition. He had never been the intended target of a sword or bayonet, and he did not know what it felt like to try to kill another man. Young, eager and desperate for adventure and opportunity, it all seemed to him little more than a game. “This kind of war was full of fascinating thrills,” he would later admit. “Nobody expected to be killed.” This, at last, was a real battle, and he wanted nothing more than to charge into it, launching his own thin body, fresh from childhood, into the knives and swords, rocks and bullets of the enemies of the empire.
    As Churchill stared intently at the silent, apparently empty hills around him, it seemed as though the chance he had been waiting for might not come after all. The captain of his small unit, however, sensed something different. Realizing that he and his men were“rather in the air here,” and as such extraordinarily vulnerable, he ordered them to withdraw. Before they could even begin to retrace their steps, the mountainside, in Churchill’s words, “sprang to life.”
    “Now suddenly,” Churchill wrote, “black tragedy burst upon the scene.” Seemingly materializing from the stones of the mountain, Pashtun tribesmen descended on the tiny village from all directions. Everywhere the stunned British soldiers looked, Pashtun were leaping from cover, letting out sharp, shrill cries as they raced in a terrifying frenzy toward their enemy. “From high up on the crag, one thousand, two thousand, three thousand feet above us,” Churchill would later recall, “white or blue figures appeared, dropping down the mountainside from ledge to ledge.”
    Before Churchill could fully understand what was happening, young men, friends