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

Churchill galloped by. In fact, although the British ultimately prevailed, so horrific was the campaign that even for Churchill war was finally beginning to lose a little of its gallant gleam. “You cannot gild it,” he wrote to his mother from Khartoum. “The raw comes through.”
    As sobering as Churchill had found the carnage he witnessed in the Sudan, his faith in himself and his future had not for a moment been shaken. On the contrary, he was acutely aware of the fact that once again he had forced his way into the deadliest colonial battle the British Empire had to offer, watched as men all around him were killed and horribly wounded, and emerged not just alive but whole. “Nothing touched me,” he calmly wrote just two days after the Battle of Omdurman, in which the British had lost five hundred men to death and injury and the Mahdists twenty thousand. “I destroyed those who molested me and so passed out without any disturbance of body or mind.”
    Churchill believed that, whatever had kept him alive on the battlefield, whether divine intervention or simply good fortune, his luck had been “set fair,” and he was eager to test its indulgence. “On what do these things depend,” he mused as a train carried him home. “Chance-Providence-God-the-Devil—call it what you will….Whatever it may be—I do not complain.”
    Nor did he hesitate. As 1898 came to an end, so did Churchill’s career as a soldier. Although he was in considerable debt, had not been trained for any other occupation and had been warned against leaving the army by everyone from his formidable grandmother, the Duchess of Marlborough, to the Prince of Wales, he resigned his commission in the British army early in the New Year. “I have sentmy papers in and in three months more I shall not be a soldier,” he wrote to his cousin Sunny Marlborough in the first weeks of 1899, confessing, in a rare admission of uncertainty, that he knew he was taking a very great risk. “It is not without some misgivings that I let go of my tow rope,” he wrote, “and commit myself unaided to the waves of life’s oceans, propelled only by my own machinery.” He would not have to tread water for long.

    In early April, when the spring rains lashing London’s cobblestoned streets still had the bite of winter, Churchill approached the entrance to the House of Commons, a wide, Gothic archway cut into the imposing stone face of the Palace of Westminster. Looming hundreds of feet above him, its reflection wavering in the ruffled surface of the river Thames, wasthe Clock Tower, one of the most immediately recognizable architectural structures in the world. The tower, which was only fifteen years older than Churchill himself, was famous not just for its Great Clock but for its nearly fourteen-ton bell, nicknamed Big Ben, most likely in honor of Ben Caunt, a six-foot-two-inch, two-hundred-pound bare-knuckle boxer who had been the heavyweight champion of England in 1841.
    As Churchill stepped into the shadow of Big Ben, he knew that waiting for him in the cool, hushed interior of the House of Commons was a man who could open the doors to this iconic seat of political power. One of two members of Parliament for the town of Oldham in the northwest of England, Robert Ascroft, with his graying hair, full, dark mustache, and fine features, not only looked more substantial and respectable than his young visitor but seemed to be the embodiment of old-world dignity. As he led Churchill through the dimly lit halls and down the narrow stairs to the members-only smoking room, Ascroft had a gravitas that Churchill, with his feverish ambition and blatant self-promotion, did not yet have, but that they both hoped he could do without.
    Despite Churchill’s youthful energy and awkwardness, when hestepped through the heavy doors that led into the smoking room, he easily slipped into a world that most Britons not only would never see but could not even fully imagine. Although this