MAN OF THE DAY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 27 July 1940, Page 7

MAN OF THE DAY

AIR WINSTON CHURCHILL DIAMOND Or MANY FACETS. SERVICES IN AFRICAN CAMPAIGNS. The man of the present hour, crucial for Great Britain and the world, is Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, writes Wilbur F. Spottswood in the Kansas City Star. In character and talents the new Prime Minister is a diamond —-brilliant, hard and sharp, and of many facets. Soldier, author, journalist and statesman, he runs the gamut, up and down, of those activities. He is a landscape gardener of fine taste. Witness the garden laid out by him on his handsome estate, with its artificial lakes, navigated by black swans imported from Australia. He is also a portrait painter of no small ability. Besides, he is an excellent plumber and first-rate bricklayer. His skill as bricklayer and the services which, as a statesman, he has rendered to the cause of labour, have won for him membership in the bricklayers’ union.

Men who accompanied Kitchener in his Sudan campaign, of more than fifty years ago. remember Churchill as that young fellow, in a natty uniform, who led. with brandished sabre, his British troopers, in a gallant cavalry charge against the Arabs. To the Boer War in 1899-1902, he went, not as a soldier, but as war correspondent for the Evening Post, of London. In that war he was captured by the Boers. An armoured train upon which he rode, accompanying a reconnoitring party, was partly wrecked against a rock placed on the track by the Boers, who lay in wait. When the crash came, the Boers opened a murderous fire with rifles and artillery. The civilian engineer, his face cut open by a shell splinter, would have abandoned his engine, but Churchill persuaded him to return to his post. Running to the officer in command, he induced him to order his soldiers to keep down, with their rifle fire, the enemy’s artillery fire, while he, Churchill, superintended the clearing away of the wreckage. One of the derailed cars lay partly on the track ahead of the engine, barring its passage. By herculean efforts, in which the noncombatant newspaperman was an active and strenuous participant, the track was cleared. But, alas! a corner of an overturned car still prevented the passage of the engine. For an additional seventy minutes Churchill and his assisting soldiers worked in deadly peril, deafened by the noise of exploding shells, and the crash and ring of perforated metal, the cars being of iron. At length, the engine, after futilely butting the obstruction several times, reversed its action, and pulled the overturned car out of the way. But, unfortunately, the jerk of the forward darting engine broke the coupling which linked it to the forward one of the cars that remained on the rails, and the engine sped away, leaving behind the greater part of the command and the correspondent of the ’’Evening Post.” The newspaper correspondent and the military captives were taken to the Boer prison at Pretoria, most of them to remain until the end of the war; but not so the resourceful and energetic Churchill, who had not been in custody an hour before he was pondering plans for escape. General Joubert, commander-in-chief of the Boer forces, and Mr Souza, the Boer Secretary of State, both of whom had read in the British South African newspapers, the glowing accounts of the young prisoner’s gallant conduct in the fight over the wrecked train, refused to consider his claim that he was entitled to his liberty as a non-combatant. . . The audacity which the mature Churchill displays in the greatest matters of state now came to the fore. He wrote, and arranged to have left on his bed, after his departure, a letter to Mr Souza, in which he announced his intention to leave. . . One night Churchill climbed to the top of the prison in closure at a place where, for a few feet, the fence was in shadow. Two sentries paced up and down outside the fence, atop of which he lay. The hoped-for opportunity came when the two sentries, stopping to exchahge a word or two, stood for an instant with their backs toward him. Dropping to the ground outside the inclosure, he made his way, unseen, to a place of concealment in shrubbery growing in the garden of a neighbouring villa. After vainly awaiting, for more than an hour, the arrival of an officer who . had planned to escape with him, he walked boldly past the lighted dwelling to one of the welllighted principal streets of Pretoria, down which he sauntered, without attracting any special attention on the part of the numerous pedestrians who thronged it. Tire journey of almost three hundred miles through hostile territory, every conceivable avenue of escape watched, was harrowing. Now walking, now riding freight trains, which he boarded and left, at the risk of his life, while they were in motion; often shivering in wet clothing, often baked by the sun. often hungry and thirsty, he at length reached Delagoa Bay in Portuguese territory and went thence, by steamer, to Durban, a port held by the British, and soon was with the British army. . . . When he returned to England, the voters of Oldham gladly gave him a seat (in Parliament). There he took a prominent part in reform legislation. He was given one place after another in the Cabinet. In the Agadir incident of 1911, when a German storm rumbled and passed over, the Government looked for a man to quickly prepare the navy for threatened war. Churchill was transferred to the post of First Lord of the Admiralty, in which he gave Britain a balanced fleet of swift cruisers and battleships armed with fifteen-inch guns. The failure of the Dardanelles and Antwerp expeditions conceived by him, both soundly strategic, but defectively executed by those deputed to manage them, enabled his political enemies to force him out of the Cabinet. When he lost his job there, he went to light in France. That was in 1915. By 1917. Churchill, the little dynamo, was again functioning in the post he left two years before. They couldn't do without him. Winston Churchill was called to the post of First Lord of the Admiralty for the third time at the outbreak of the present war. Now he is called to the Prime Ministership, a post for which he seemed destined by his many brilliant qualities but which he apparently was fated to miss because of his intractability, his combativeness, his independence. I