Churchill Wanted Dead or Alive

5. Knight Errant

F I V E Knight Errant 'Nothing looks more formidable and impressive than an armoured train; but nothing is in fact more vulnerable and helpless . . . This situation did not seem to have occurred to our commander.' WINSTON CHURCHILL, My Early Life T H R O U G H T H E E A R L Y - M O R N I N G M I S T , clear across the stillness of the rolling veldt, came the unmistakable panting sound of an approaching railway engine. General Louis Botha stood in his stirrups , straining his eyes to penetrate the thin grey curtain drifting over the long grass. After a few minutes he was rewarded by a plume of black smoke rising from behind a hill, and then by the sight of the train itself - six trucks, with the engine in the middle. As it rattled across the trestle bridge spanning the rocky gorge of the Blaaw Kranz River, its fate was as good as sealed. Botha's cavalcade, some five hundred Boers from the Krugersdorp and Wakkerstroom commandos, had been riding south for two days in order to probe the British position at Estcourt, still fifteen miles away. Theirs was a reconnaissance in force. They had no intention of getting into a serious fight, although they would seize any plums that might drop into their laps. And here, only twenty-four hours after crossing the Tugela, they had stumbled across one waiting to fall. Botha watched the train rumble past, less than a half a mile away, on its way north. He then gave orders for boulders to be placed 44 Knight Errant across the track, deployed three field guns and a quick-firing Maxim on the hill above, and settled down to await the train on its return journey. By now it was raining heavily. The soldiers who manned the armoured train had no illusions about its limitations, and often called it 'Wilson's death trap', the identity of Wilson being lost in the mists of time. 'Hairy Mary' was another well known nickname, but this applied to a later version in which the locomotive was festooned for protection by thick rope mantling. The expedition with Captain Haldane was a more substantial reconnaissance than the one Churchill had accompanied to Colenso. At the head of the train was a flat railway truck on which was mounted a muzzle-loading seven-pounder naval gun manned by four seamen and a petty officer from HMS Tartar. Next came two armour-plated trucks, with slits through which the soldiers could fire their rifles, then the locomotive and tender. At the rear were two more armoured trucks, and finally a truck for a breakdown gang and the guard. The train made regular forays along this piece of track: five had taken place in the ten days before Haldane invited Churchill to accompany him. Designed both to reconnoitre the unoccupied country as far as Colenso and to mask the weakness of the British position at Estcourt by a display of activity and strength, a more fatuous and pointless military manoeuvre would be hard to devise. Two or three men on horseback would have been more effective at reconnaissance, while the train was no more than a hostage to fortune. A force of three officers and 117 men from the Durban Light Infantry and the Dublin Fusiliers, together with five sailors and an ancient cannon, were making routine excursions along a fixed route highly vulnerable to ambush. The size, smoke and noise of their transport precluded any possibility of surprise or concealment . That the train was certain one day to be caught in a trap was the opinion of every officer in Estcourt. The train, with Haldane and Churchill in the leading armoured truck, had left Estcourt early in the morning of 15 November. Colonel Long, the garrison commander, had instructed Haldane to reconnoitre cautiously towards Colenso, keeping out of the range 45 Churchill Wanted Dead or Alive of enemy guns - a curious instruction from an artillery man, who would have been well aware that guns could move anywhere at will, and could be concealed in such a way that they need only announce their presence when they opened fire. In a dispatch for his paper written five days after the event, Churchill recorded: 'We started at half-past five and . . . reached Frere station in about an hour. Here a small patrol of the...