III.

War Correspondent

In November 1895 Churchill spent his first military leave on assignment for a London newspaper. He traveled to Cuba in order to accompany the Spanish army, which was then attempting to stop a rebellion. On his 21st birthday, which he spent in the Cuban jungle, he came under fire for the first time. Later, after his regiment was sent to India in 1896, he secured a temporary transfer to the turbulent North-West Frontier, where a tribal insurrection was under way. Churchill's dispatches to the Daily Telegraph newspaper in 1897 formed the basis for his first book, The Story of the Malakand Field Force (1898).

In 1898 Churchill went to Egypt attached to the 21st Lancers and took part in the reconquest of the Sudan. This area south of Egypt had been controlled by Egypt prior to 1885, when it fell to a rebel Muslim group. As Britain gained control of Egypt in the 1880s and 1890s, it sought to reclaim the Sudan. During the Battle of Omdurman in September 1898, Churchill participated in one of the last cavalry charges in British military history. Again his newspaper dispatches were followed by a book, The River War (1899) in two volumes, the most substantial work he wrote before entering Parliament.

Churchill resigned his army commission in 1899 and turned to journalism and politics. He ran for a seat in Parliament as a Conservative candidate but was not elected. He then went to South Africa to cover the Boer War that had just broken out between Britain and the Boers, descendants of Dutch settlers. He was captured by the Boers and imprisoned at the State Model School in Pretoria. He managed to escape from prison and then take the railroad into Portuguese East Africa, a feat that made him a national hero. He then returned to South Africa and sought another army commission. He fought and wrote about the war until he returned to London in the summer of 1900. His newspaper dispatches were promptly reprinted in two books, London to Ladysmith via Pretoria (1900) and Ian Hamilton's March (1900).