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

ship….Buller trod the deck each day with a sphinx-like calm.”
    Churchill had encountered this remarkably unhurried attitude toward the war well before he had climbed aboard the Dunottar Castle , and it was most conspicuous within the highest ranks of the British government. A few days before setting sail, he had called on Joseph Chamberlain, the secretary of state for the colonies, at his home in Prince’s Gardens. Remembering Churchill fondly after their long talk on the Thames that summer, Chamberlain had agreed to write a letter of introduction for him to use in South Africa and, offering him a cigar, had strolled through the garden with him, smoking and discussing the coming war with the Boers. Finally, he had invited his young friend to ride with him to the War Office. During their fifteen-minute cab ride, Chamberlain had confided to Churchill that he believed that, by waiting until now to leave for South Africa, Buller was taking a serious risk and might miss the war altogether. He “may well be too late,” Chamberlain warned. “He would have been wiser to have gone out earlier.”
    Chamberlain was far from alone in his belief that the war would be short-lived. Most Britons were confident that it would be over before the end of the year, in time for them to savor their victory overtheir Christmas pudding. The only surprise was that the Boers, weak and insignificant as they were, had dared to challenge the British Empire at all. When they had sent their ultimatum, it had immediately been dismissed among the British press as an “infatuated step,” an “extravagant farce.”
    The men aboard the Dunottar Castle seemed to Churchill to be almost blasé about the war that lay before them. Their only concern as they lazily watched a shoal of flying fish race the ship, or debated the merits of throwing a fancy dress ball—some arguing that it would be “healthy and amusing,” while others growled that it would be “tiresome”—was that they might miss their chance to fight. “Some of our best officers were on board,” Churchill wrote, “and they simply could not conceive how ‘irregular amateur’ forces like the Boers could make any impression against disciplined professional soldiers.”So certain were they that Buller would flatten the Boers they had nicknamed him the Steamroller.Even now, their enemy faced an entire infantry brigade, a cavalry regiment and two batteries of artillery in one region alone, not to mention the man in charge in Buller’s absence: Brigadier General William Penn Symons, one of the most decorated and experienced officers in the British army.
    Churchill was torn between fear that he would miss the war, which represented his best hope of regaining his political footing, and concern that the Boers might be more prepared, and far more capable, than the British gave them credit for. “Evidently the General expects that nothing of importance will happen until he gets there,” he wrote to his mother from the ship. “But I rather think events will have taken the bit between their teeth.”
    While the rest of the passengers of the Dunottar Castle lounged in deck chairs or competed in athletic contests, racing “violently to and fro,” Churchill often seemed to be urging the ship to go faster through sheer force of will. He was either pacing the deck in frustration, “plunging…‘with neck out-thrust,’ as Browning fancied Napoleon,” John Black Atkins, a fellow journalist who was working for the Manchester Guardian , noted with amusement, or sittingcompletely still, as if meditating. Only his hands moved, “folding and unfolding,” Atkins wrote, “not nervously but as though he were helping himself to untie mental knots.”
    Whatever Churchill might have believed about the commander in chief, however, Buller was under no illusions when it came to the Boers. Although he hoped that he would arrive before the fighting began, he was certain that when it did begin in earnest,