herded with the other prisoners in a miserable
group, and about the same time I noticed that my hand was bleeding, and
it began to pour with rain.

"Two days before I had written to an officer at home: 'There has been a
great deal too much surrendering in this war, and I hope people who do
so will not be encouraged.'"

With other officers, Churchill was imprisoned in the State Model
Schools, situated in the heart of Pretoria. It was distinctly
characteristic that on the very day of his arrival he began to plan to
escape.

Toward this end his first step was to lose his campaign hat, which he
recognized was too obviously the hat of an English officer. The burgher
to whom he gave money to purchase him another innocently brought him a
Boer sombrero.

Before his chance to escape came a month elapsed, and the opportunity
that then offered was less an opportunity to escape than to get himself
shot.

The State Model Schools were surrounded by the children's playgrounds,
penned in by a high wall, and at night, while they were used as a
prison, brilliantly lighted by electric lights. After many nights of
observation, Churchill discovered that while the sentries were pacing
their beats there was a moment when to them a certain portion of the
wall was in darkness. This was due to cross-shadows cast by the electric
lights. On the other side of this wall there was a private house set in
a garden filled with bushes. Beyond this was the open street.

To scale the wall was not difficult; the real danger lay in the fact
that at no time were the sentries farther away than fifteen yards, and
the chance of being shot by one or both of them was excellent. To a
brother officer Churchill confided his purpose, and together they agreed
that some night when the sentries had turned from the dark spot on the
wall they would scale it and drop among the bushes in the garden. After
they reached the garden, should they reach it alive, what they were to
do they did not know. How they were to proceed through the streets
and out of the city, how they were to pass unchallenged under its many
electric lights and before the illuminated shop windows, how to dodge
patrols, and how to find their way through two hundred and eighty
miles of a South African wilderness, through an utterly unfamiliar,
unfriendly, and sparsely settled country into Portuguese territory and
the coast, they left to chance. But with luck they hoped to cover the
distance in a fort