| General Joubert was not overly concerned about Churchill's escape. He actually offered less cash reward (27shilling) for Churchill's recapture that the British officers were paying for a bottle of Scotch. "He is just 'n klein koerant-skrywertjie", (a little bit of a newspaperman) was Joubert's opinion of the man who would later become the British Prime Minister.
Six days after his arrival at Clewer, he was hidden on a railway truck loaded with wool and bound for Mozambique. The train finally reached its destination two days later on 21 December. The British Consul was not immediately convinced of Churchill's identity. But after two days a cable reached Howard at Witbank. It read, "Goods arrived safely".
Of the Boers, Churchill was to comment, "the individual Boer, mounted, in a suitable country, is worth four or five regular soldiers. The only way of treating them is to either get men equal in character and intelligence as riflemen, or failing that, huge masses of troops"., there is plenty of work here for a quarter of a million men and South Africa is well worth the cost in blood and money. Are the gentlemen of England all out fox hunting? For the sake of our manhood, our devoted colonists and our dead soldiers, we must persevere with the war".
|
Winston Churchill,
prisoner-of-war,
before his escape
|
