Lost Cities 19
couldn’t resist to be a part of it.11,79
Churchill arrived to the conflict zone. Controlling the
railroads was important during the war, so British armored
trains patrolled the main routes. As Churchill traveled with
one of these trains, the Boers lay in ambush. “I have had,
in the last four years, the advantage, if it be an advantage,
of many strange and varied experiences, from which the
student of realities might draw profit and instruction,”
Churchill wrote. “But nothing was so thrilling as this:
to wait and struggle among these clanging, rending iron
boxes, with the repeated explosions of the shells and the
artillery, the noise of the projectiles striking the cars, the
hiss as they passed in the air, the grunting and puffing
of the engine – poor, tortured thing, hammered by at
least a dozen shells, any one of which, by penetrating the
boiler, might have made an end of all – the expectation
of destruction as a matter of course, the realization of
powerlessness, and the alternations of hope and despair –
all this for seventy minutes by the clock with only four
inches of twisted iron work to make the difference between
danger, captivity, and shame on the one hand – safety,
freedom, and triumph on the other.”^11
Despite that Churchill worked as an unarmed civilian
reporter, the Boers captured him as a prisoner of war.
Together with the British soldiers who survived the am-
bush, he was sent to the capital of the Boers: Pretoria.
When he arrived, he became a prisoner in a school building
temporarily converted to prison for officers. The name of
the school was Staats Model School.