Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill by Candice Millard

moreover, had already been hailed as “exceedingly brilliant,” and praised by everyone from the prime minister to Arthur Conan Doyle. Conan Doyle, in fact, would later refer to Churchill as “the greatest living master of English prose.”
    Churchill could not, in all modesty, disagree. He had long had, as he told his mother, “faith in my pen.” The success of his books—the most recent of which the Daily Mail had called “an astonishing triumph”—had only strengthened his already substantial confidence. Churchill was no hack, and he knew it. “My literary talents,” he wrote soberly, “do not exist in my imagination alone.”
    Churchill understood that the work of a war correspondent was among the most dangerous he could find, but although he was willing to risk his life in South Africa, he could not see any point in being uncomfortable while he was there.He had gone shopping for his wartime equipment not in army supply stores or back-alley bargain bins but on Bond Street, the most famous and expensive shoppingdistrict in London. Churchill had purchased what seemed to him to be the necessities for war.At the famous optical shop W. Callaghan & Co., he had chosen a compass set in bronze and a carefully crafted saddleback leather case with a pigskin lining, spending, or pledging to spend—because it was a transaction between gentlemen, payment was to be delivered at some unspecified time in the future—£3.15.6, approximately $500 in today’s money. That bill, however, paled in comparison to his tally at Randolph Payne & Sons, where he had ordered a dizzying array of fine wines, spirits and liqueurs: six bottles each of an 1889 Vin d’Ay Sec, a light port, French vermouth and very old eau-de-vie landed 1866; eighteen bottles of St.-Émilion; another eighteen of ten-year-old scotch whiskey and a dozen of Rose’s cordial lime juice. The final order, which cost more than £27 (roughly $4,000 today), had been packed and delivered directly to the Dunottar Castle .
    Although he had little money to spare, Churchill would not even have considered traveling without his valet, Thomas Walden. Walden, who had once worked for Randolph Churchill and had enlisted in the army as a private, was to be Winston’s soldier-servant, or batman, a term that derived from the French bât , or packsaddle. Most officers had their own batman to press their uniforms and deliver their orders to subordinates, but few had highly trained professional valets who had traveled the world with a single aristocratic family, as Walden had.
    No one aboard the Dunottar Castle , however, from the cook to the commander in chief, was more serious than Churchill about the work he was there to do. Neither was he about to let rolling seas, which, just a few days into the trip, had already made him “grievously sick,” keep him from it. As soon as he was able to stagger onto deck, Churchill set out in search of General Buller.

    Buller could usually be found on the deck, wearing a dark suit and a flat cap and sitting on a fragile-looking wicker chair. The generalseemed to him to be “v[er]y amiable” and, naturally, “well disposed towards me,” Churchill wrote. At the same time, Buller was famously difficult to get to know. Taciturn to a fault, he spent more time grunting and nodding during a conversation than actually talking. He was, Churchill wrote, “a characteristic British personality. He looked stolid. He said little, and what he said was obscure.”
    Fortunately, Churchill had enough to say for both of them and, on any subject, including the war, was more willing to share his opinions than the general and all of his advisers combined. Despite the fact that they were sailing to a war that had already begun, there seemed to be no sense of urgency among Buller and his men. “The idea that time played any vital part in such a business seemed to be entirely absent,” Churchill marveled. “Absolute tranquillity lapped the peaceful