‘Hero of the Empire’ review: Candice Millard on young Winston Churchill’s Boer War adventures

In her first two books, “The River of Doubt” and “Destiny of the Republic,” Candice Millard provided fresh, perceptive ways of looking at her respective protagonists, presidents Theodore Roosevelt and James Garfield. For her third, “Hero of the Empire,” Millard focuses on Winston Churchill, and the event that catapulted him to international prominence — his escape from a prison camp during the Boer War.

This is well-trodden territory, but Millard infuses it with color, excitement and life. Particularly effective is her clear-eyed view of the young Churchill as a bumptious self-promoter whose exploits in Africa were as farcical as they were courageous.

When Britain declared war against the Boers in October 1899, Churchill, then 24, had served in several previous military campaigns as a cavalry officer and war correspondent. Just a few months before the war began, he failed in his first attempt to win a seat in Parliament. Churchill “had no money, no occupation and, it appeared, no one who believed in him quite as much as he believed in himself,” Millard writes. What he needed, he thought, was another war.

His countrymen shared his war fever. For decades, the British had been vying with the Boers, descendants of early Dutch settlers in South Africa, for control of the region. When huge deposits of gold and diamonds were discovered in the Boer republic of the Transvaal, armed conflict became inevitable.

As most Britons saw it, their empire, the mightiest in the world, would crush the upstart Boers in a matter of weeks, if not days. Desperate to get to Africa before that happened, Churchill persuaded a London newspaper, the Morning Post, to make him its war correspondent. Laden with an enormous cache of provisions that included 18 bottles of 10-year-old Scotch, he arrived in Cape Town at the end of October.

Two weeks later, Churchill accompanied an armored British train on a reconnaissance mission. When a large Boer force ambushed it, he took control of the chaotic situation, helping to clear derailed cars from the tracks and loading injured soldiers onto the engine, which managed to escape. He was captured, along with some 60 British troops.

Churchill was sent to a British officers’ camp housed in a former teacher training college in Pretoria. There, prisoners were allowed to receive visitors, buy cigarettes and extra food, and even hire a barber for weekly shaves. As lenient as his confinement was, however, Churchill considered it intolerable because, as Millard notes, it denied “him the glory of battle and an opportunity for recognition and advancement.”

Determined to escape, he learned that two other prisoners had already come up with a plan. When he pressured them to include him, they initially resisted, arguing that he was physically unfit and couldn’t keep a secret. After his relentless demands wore them down, he proved the validity of their fears by informing other inmates that he was about to leave.

On Dec. 12, the night chosen for the escape, the two chief plotters decided to postpone it because of the vigilance of the Boer sentries guarding the camp’s perimeter fence. But when the sentries turned their backs for a moment, Churchill couldn’t resist. He rushed to the fence and clambered over it.

For more than a day, he followed railroad tracks that he hoped would lead across 300 miles of Boer territory to Portuguese East Africa and freedom. His resourcefulness in evading the Boers’ massive manhunt was matched by extraordinary luck, including a chance encounter with John Howard, the manager of a coal mine and one of the few Englishmen whom the Boers had allowed to remain in their territory. Howard hid Churchill in his mine, then smuggled him onto a freight train to Portuguese East Africa.

Less than two months after his arrival in Africa, Churchill found himself the celebrity he had always wanted to be. Newspapers in Britain and elsewhere had avidly covered his exploits on the ambushed train, his imprisonment and escape, and the Boers’ relentless search for him. Churchill returned to Britain in the summer of 1900 and was elected to Parliament soon thereafter. “It is clear to me from the figures,” he wrote, “that nothing but personal popularity arising out of the late South African War, carried me in.”

Forty years later, he would win lasting fame in World War II when, as British prime minister, he rallied his countrymen to stand alone against Nazi Germany. In those dark days of 1940, Churchill finally achieved the greatness he had always sought.