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

and fellow soldiers, were dying all around him. It was a scene that, even after a long and war-strewn life, he would never forget. “One man was shot through the breast and pouring with blood, another lay on his back kicking and twisting,” he would write years later. “The British officer was spinning round just behind me, his face a mass of blood, his right eye cut out.” The war cries of the Pashtun were punctuated by the high-pitched screams of even the bravest young soldiers as they were butchered beyond recognition.
    Turning, Churchill watched in outrage and fury as a dozen Pashtun fell upon a wounded British soldier when the men who had been desperately trying to rescue him dropped him in their frantic race to cover. The man who Churchill believed was the leader of the tribesmen stood over the fallen soldier and repeatedly slashed at him with his sword. “I forgot everything else at this moment,” Churchill would write, “except a desire to kill this man.” Pulling out his revolver, he fired into the melee—again and again and again. “It was a horrible business. For there was no help for the man that went down. I felt no excitement and very little fear,” he would later write home. “I cannot be certain, but I think I hit 4 men. At any rate they fell.”
    Churchill would never know how many men he killed that day before help came in the form of a relief column, or if any had fallen by his hand, but even as he looked down on the mutilated bodies allaround him, the bodies of men he knew, men very much like him, he knew that he would not share their fate. He was meant to live, of that he was certain. More than that, he was meant to do something great with his life, and he was eager to take the next step in what he was confident would be a remarkable and dizzyingly fast ascension. “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 2
THE GRAVEN PALM
    F or Churchill, it was not enough to believe that power and fame would come eventually. As soon as the New Year, 1898, began, he set his sights on realizing not one daunting ambition but three, daring the world to ignore him.He published his first book, The Story of the Malakand Field Force , began agitating for an assignment to fight in the Sudan, and made it clear to anyone who would listen that despite his youth he was not only eager to begin his political career but eminently qualified to do so. “I am somewhat impatient of advice as to my beginning in politics,” he complained to his mother soon after returning from Malakand. “If I am not good enough—others are welcome to take my place….Of course—as you have known for some time—I believe in myself. If I did not I might perhaps take other views.”
    Convinced that another war, and another opportunity for heroism, would be of use in his political life, Churchill recruited no less than the prime minister of Great Britain to help him win an assignment in the Sudan, where the British were trying to wrest power from the Mahdists, followers of the Muslim leader Al-Mahdī. He set sail for Africa before the Indian army had even granted his leave. What he witnessed there would leave a lasting mark. He described thecampaign in The River War , the book he would publish the following year. Even years later he described a nightmarish scene of death and dismemberment, with “horses spouting blood, struggling on three legs, men staggering on foot…fish-hook spears stuck right through them, arms and faces cut to pieces, bowels protruding, men gasping, crying, collapsing, expiring.” Churchill himself shot and likely killed half a dozen men, one of whom was so close to him that the pistol itself struck the man as