Young Winston's Wars: The Original Despatches of Winston S. Churchill War Correspondent, 1897-1900

Few people realize that Winston Churchill's fame began with the name he made for himself as a war correspondent during the years of Britain's last imperial wars. Beginning 1897 and continuing for about 3 years thereafter, he sent electrifying and unusual despatches to two London morning papers from the front lines of battle at the Northwest Frontier in India, where he had found service with the Bengal Lancers; from General Kitchener's campaign to resubjugate the "whirling" Dervishes in the Sudan; and from the height of the Boer War in South Africa. Churchill's brilliant and fluent writing, infused with immediacy and the genuine excitement of a soldier at the front, earned him a place beside the most famous correspondents of the era. But he never forgot his political ambitions. Time and again he intruded on his own reports with comments which went far beyond the normal scope of war correspondence, the rolling Churchillian perorations ringing sonorously from the tightly packed columns of type. Aided by an unexpected journalist bonus provided by his capture and subsequent escape from the Boers, Churchill returned to England the most glamorous national figure of the day and won a seat in the House of Commons at the age of 25. In YOUNG WINSTON'S WARS Frederick Woods has brought together the raw material from which the hero and legend grew. Churchill's original despatches from India and the Sudan, which he used as the basis for two of his earliest books, THE MALAKAND FIELD FORCE and THE RIVER WAR, have never been reprinted until now; those from the Boer War, which Mr. Woods cites as "a major landmark in the field of war journalism", have long been unavailable. They tell of a type of warfare now extinct - including the use of cavalry - and contain Churchill's account of the charge of the 21st Lancers. They also tell a good deal about young Winston himself and project an especially vivid picture of ware from the soldier's point of view.