The variety of circumstances and events in which he was a major participant can often bewilder. In contrast to today’s politicians, Churchill’s career is astonishing in its length. His familiar image is one of the elderly, growling, overweight military leader, brimful of whisky and rhetorical excess. To a younger generation, however, the story of Churchill fighting in South Africa is extremely remote. The story in Hero of the Empire has been told before, and there isn’t much new that Millard brings to a narrative once as familiar as the tales of Francis Drake and Horatio Nelson – thanks in part to Churchill’s own self-mythologising. “There is no ambition I cherish so keenly,” he once confided to his younger brother, Jack, “as to gain a reputation for personal courage.” He was determined to make a name for himself on the battlefield, and in doing so created a platform from which to enter politics. Later he returned to the Natal front as an officer and, as he recounted, liberated the men with whom he was imprisoned. He was captured by the Boers but managed to escape to Delagoa Bay, now Maputo Bay in Mozambique, having travelled many miles alone over enemy territory. The 24-year old Churchill arrived in South Africa in October 1899 as a correspondent for the Morning Post to report on the second Boer war.
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