Starting with superb confidence, the 20th Century plunged vigorously forward from ambush to ambush.
Other ages may have suffered greater agonies; none suf fered greater surprises. Much that seemed for the best turned out for the worst. Germany's progress led to Sarajevo and later to Buchenwald. Japan's progress became Pearl Harbor. The overthrow of the Czar became Communist dictatorship. The greatest triumphs of capitalism fell prey to socialism and bureaucracy. Science led to Hiroshima.
Shock after shock threw civilization into confusion. As the 20th Century plunged on, long-familiar bearings were lost in the mists of change. Some of the age's great leaders called for more & more speed ahead; some tried to reverse the course. Winston Churchill had a different function: his chief contribution was to warn of rocks ahead, and to lead the rescue parties. He was not the man who designed the ship; what he did was to launch the lifeboats. That a free world survived in 1950, with a hope of more progress and less calamity, was due in large measure to his exertions. A Pardon from Napoleon. Churchill first came to public attention as the victim of an ambush and he never forgot the lesson. As a correspondent with British forces in the Boer War, he accepted an invitation to join a rash reconnaissance by armored railway train into enemy territory. The Boers waylaid the train. Churchill managed to get some wounded men to safety and started back alone toward his besieged comrades. A mounted Boer (Louis Botha, who later became Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa, and Churchill's good friend) rode up, aiming a rifle. Churchill remembers that what went through his mind then was a magnanimous statement of Napoleon: "When one is alone and unarmed, a surrender may be pardoned." Whether or not his sense of history was already that active, Churchill did surrender. But his life (and the half-century) was to be full of pleasant as well as unpleasant surprises. Within five weeks he made a hair-raising escape from the Boer prison at Pretoria, walked unnoticed through the crowded town, hid all day in a copse tenanted by a large vulture, stumbled upon the only English settlement in 20 miles, and was smuggled under a carload of wool to safety in Portuguese territory. All Britain acclaimed Churchill as a national hero. Late in 1900, the hero was elected a Tory member of the House of Commons. There, three weeks after Victoria's death had opened the new era, he rose, inwardly quaking and outwardly calm, to make his first speech. His subject: the Boer War. He favored reinforcement of the army in South Africa, but his main point was to urge civil rather than military government of conquered areas. He wanted "to make it easy and honorable for the Boers to surrender, and painful and perilous for them to continue in the field."
These Churchillian themes would recur in succeeding decades: no appeasement of the armed enemy; no revenge on the beaten enemy; no military encroachments on civilian responsibility; look ahead to what you want and remember that every action has consequences which affect the goal. In short, Churchill at 26 was already a serious politician.
One day in 1904 he entered the House, bowed to the Speaker, and turned his back upon the Conservative benches. He sat down in the front row of the Opposition, next to the