Titans of History

Churchill’s father scolded him when he was a schoolboy for idling away his time at Harrow and Sandhurst, and warned him of an impending career as a “mere social wastrel, one of the hundreds of public-school failures.” He need not have worried. As a young soldier in the Sudan and as a war correspondent in southern Africa during the Anglo-Boer War, Churchill devoted himself to swashbuckling charges and escapes, journalism and self-promotion, but he also devoured the great British historians of the past, such as Macaulay and Gibbon, and adopted their elegant—sometimes portentous—style as his own.

As a young man, Churchill rode in the cavalry charge—the last of its kind by the British military—at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898, a heroic action by the 21st Lancers that earned three men the Victoria Cross and the regiment a royal cipher.

The Battle of Omdurman ended a long conflict in Sudan. In 1881 Muhammad Ahmed, who styled himself al-Mahdi, the prophesied savior of Islam, led a rebellion against British rule. The Mahdi and his successor, the Khalifa, and their army of fanatical dervishes repeatedly defeated the British forces. London sent out the ultimate Victorian Christian-military ascetic, General Charles Gordon, who became an imperial hero-martyr, killed when the Mahdi took Khartoum in 1885. This almost brought down Gladstone’s government. In 1898 Lord Salisbury dispatched an army led by the gifted but strange General Herbert Kitchener to avenge Gordon, who was Kitchener’s own hero. Kitchener, who spoke Arabic and had made his name on espionage missions into the desert dressed as a Bedouin, was an inscrutably severe soldier and a superb planner, nicknamed the Sudan Machine; he was also a connoisseur of interior decoration and an avid porcelain collector.

Churchill wrote a vivid account of the resulting battle, and the famous cavalry charge:

The trumpet jerked out a shrill note, heard faintly above the trampling of the horses and the noise of the rides. On the instant all the sixteen troops swung round and locked up into a long galloping line, and the 21st Lancers were committed to their first charge in war.

The pace was fast and the distance short. Yet, before it was half covered, the whole aspect of the affair changed. A deep crease in the ground—a dry watercourse, a khor—appeared where all had seemed smooth, level plain; and from it there sprang, with the suddenness of a pantomime effect and a high-pitched yell, a dense white mass of men nearly as long as our front and about twelve deep …

The Dervishes fought manfully. They tried to hamstring the horses. They fired their rifles, pressing the muzzles into the very bodies of their opponents. They cut reins and stirrup-leathers. They flung their throwing-spears with great dexterity. They tried every device of cool, determined men practised in war and familiar with cavalry; and, besides, they swung sharp, heavy swords which bit deep … Then the horses got into their stride again, the pace increased, and the Lancers drew out from among their antagonists. Within two minutes of the collision every living man was clear of the Dervish mass.

Churchill’s next adventure was in the Boer War when captured by the Boers. His escape from his captors was another piece of derring-do, immortalized by Churchill’s own account.