Free Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill by Candice Millard Page B

war had seemed inevitable, Churchill had received a telegram from Sir Alfred Harmsworth. Harmsworth had built Amalgamated Press, then the world’s largest periodicals empire, and was the publisher of two of the most popular newspapers in the country—the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror . He wanted Churchill to work for him as a correspondent in South Africa, and he was willing to pay him handsomely to do it.
    Churchill, however, being Churchill, believed he could do better and was not shy about taking matters into his own hands.As soon as he received Harmsworth’s telegram, he had turned around and wiredit to a man named Oliver Borthwick, who was the editor of the Morning Post . A highly respected newspaper known for its coverage of foreign affairs, the Morning Post prided itself on having the best correspondents, regardless of their background, or even their sex. Nearly twenty years earlier, Borthwick’s father, Algernon, who looked much like Father Christmas in a three-piece suit, had famously hired the first female war correspondent, Lady Florence Dixie, to cover the First Boer War.Responding immediately to Churchill’s telegram, Borthwick had promised him £1,000 (approximately $150,000 today) for just four months’ work, “shore to shore,” and another £200 per month after that. It was an offer that not only eclipsed Harmsworth’s but would make Churchill the best-paid war correspondent in England.
    The fact that newspaper publishers had been fighting over Churchill was all the more impressive considering the competition.Not only would more journalists cover this war than any before it, but among them would be some of the most famous names in literature.Edgar Wallace, who would get the last scoop of the war for the Daily Mail , would go on to write hundreds of short stories, more than a dozen plays and 175 books, many of which were so popular his publisher claimed that a quarter of all books read in England at the time were written by him.
    Rudyard Kipling, who would be covering the war for the Friend , a newspaper based in South Africa, was already a household name. He had published The Jungle Book five years earlier and, soon after, had written one of his most famous poems—“If,” which was inspired by events leading up to the Boer War and offers some of the best-known advice in the English language: “If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, /…you’ll be a Man, my son.”Kipling would also raise £250,000 (more than $30 million today) for the British troops with his poem “The Absent-Minded Beggar,” which Harmsworth, always looking for an opportunity, had commissioned. After naming a medal after the poem, and hiring Sir Arthur Sullivan to set itto music, Harmsworth sold copies for a shilling each, two pence of which went to the Daily Mail ’s Kipling Poem War Fund.
    The war had also attracted to it a rather pompous-looking physician turned writer who had created one of the most famous detectives—arguably the most famous—in literary history. Arthur Conan Doyle had published his first Sherlock Holmes story, “A Study in Scarlet,” in Beeton’s Christmas Annual twelve years earlier. The popularity of this story, along with the series of Sherlock Holmes mysteries that followed in the Strand magazine, had allowed him to give up his medical practice and begin writing full-time. He planned to go to South Africa in the capacity of a doctor, volunteering at Langman Hospital in Bloemfontein, but he would end up writing one of the best-known histories of the war: The Great Boer War .
    Although the field was crowded with not just good writers but legendary ones, Borthwick knew what he was doing in choosing Churchill. He had hired him to cover the war in the Sudan, the dispatches for which had been turned into The River War , and he knew that in his reporting Churchill was not just relentless but fearless, even to the point of recklessness. His writing,