The year was 1899, and for Winston Churchill, it was a busy one. In that year he was twenty-four, experienced from Lord Kitchener’s campaign in the Sudan, and looking forward to a burgeoning political career.
Early in the summer, Churchill ran for Parliament as the Conservative candidate for Oldham. It was a close thing, but he lost the election. Churchill was deflated, but not discouraged. He went back to his writing, and was soon immersed in The River War, an account of his adventures in the Sudan. Having cut his ties with the army some time before, Churchill could freely condemn Kitchener’s methods of dealing with the enemy.
These had already been brought under question, and Churchill was able to point as many fingers as he liked at Kitchener’s actions: desecration of tombs, taking heads as trophies, and treating enemy wounded in atrocious fashion. But in October, Churchill left his accounting of the past war and began looking to the one that seemed likely to erupt in the Transvaal, South Africa.
The Boers, the Dutch farmers who lived in the Republic of Transvaal, were making another bid for independence. The Boers had tried to become independent nineteen years earlier, after the British annexing of the Orange Free State; as this had been unsuccessful they now tried again. Churchill, determined to be in the thick of it where the excitement was, immediately accepted an offer made him by the Morning Post to be their principal war-correspondent, and on the 11th of October, he took passage on the steamer Dunottar Castle to Cape Town. From there he went onto Durban - being horribly seasick during the journey - and eventually arrived at Estcourt, a tiny town with a few hundred inhabitants. It was at Estcourt that Churchill ran into Captain Haldane, a former acquaintance who had managed to get him a position on a former expedition.
On the 15th of November, Churchill accompanied Haldane on a journey to take reinforcements out to reconnoitre. The journey was made by an armoured train of six trucks, and Haldane was the officer in charge of the operation. The journey was interrupted after fourteen miles by Boers attacking the train, and several trucks were derailed, blocking the train line. Haldane and Churchill conferred together. The Boers - excellent shots - were bombarding the train, and Haldane decided to stay in the rear truck with the naval gun they had been delivering and some of the reinforcements to try to keep down enemy fire.
Churchill, meanwhile, went to see what had happened to the train and how badly the line was blocked. Dodging flying shrapnel, Churchill reached the engine; the engine-driver, his face cut by shrapnel splinters, refused to stay and get shot at, and ran for any shelter offered by the overturned trucks. Churchill saw that the driver was still needed: he needed to work the engine, so he persuaded him to return again, promising him a medal if he continued to do his duty.
It was more than a decade later that Churchill managed to reward the man as he had promised, but in 1910, Churchill’s position enabled him to award both the driver and the fireman the Albert Medal, the highest reward for gallantry for civilians.
Thus pacified, the driver obeyed, and Churchill ordered him to ram the two trucks obstructing the line, so pushing them off and clearing the way, as the line itself was not damaged. This, and the help of the soldiers, enabled the train to continue, bearing the many wounded, and acting as a shield to the rest of the soldiers who were on foot. The engine, however, did not co-operate and began going too fast; this, coupled with the engine driver’s reluctance to stop in such danger, meant that by the time the engine was eventually halted, the soldiers were far behind.
Churchill decided to run back and find Haldane and his soldiers, instructing the driver to wait for him. He ran back down the line, and nearly into the arms of two Boers. They began to fire at him, and Churchill ran back down the way he had come, climbing up the bank on either side of the tracks. Here, however was another Boer, also armed. Churchill was prepared to shoot the man, until he found he had left his pistol safely behind on the train.
The words of Napoleon came into his head: ‘When one is alone and unarmed, a surrender may be pardoned’, so Churchill held up his hands and surrendered. Captain Haldane and his soldiers had also been captured, and with them, Churchill was taken to Pretoria as a prisoner of war.
He later wrote that he ‘certainly hated every minute of [his] captivity more than [he had] hated any other period in [his] whole life.’ So he eagerly fell in with escape plans from the prison, which was a school converted for the purpose. Together with Haldane and Lieutenant Brockie, a trooper who spoke Dutch fluently, Churchill planned an escape.
On the evening of December 12th, he waited by the wall where the attempt was to be made. He waited until the sentries’’ backs were turned, thought, ‘Now or never!’ and climbed over the wall into some bushes and waited for Haldane and Brockie. They did not come; the sentry was suspicious and they were unable to join him. The wall was too high to climb back over, his companions had the maps, compasses and knowledge essential for success. Without them, Churchill’s chances of reaching safety looked very slim. But, ‘when hope had departed, fear had gone as well.’
Churchill put his hat on his head, and humming a tune, strolled blithely past the sentries and down the road away from the school.
Once in the suburbs, Churchill made for the railway line, and managed, in the dark, to climb aboard a goods train bearing empty coal sacks. He burrowed himself among them and slept a little. He woke before morning, and realised that he had best leave the train before he was seen. He leaped off, landed safely, and for the rest of the day sheltered in a little wood, which did not help to shield him from the violent heat of the day. His only food was slabs of chocolate, which made him even more thirsty. He hoped to board another train at nightfall, but there were none running.
Churchill set off towards some lights he saw in the distance, which turned out to be a small town near a coal-mine. Churchill stopped at one of the houses, knocked on the door, and was very perturbed to be hailed by a string of Dutch from an upper window. He yelled up that he wanted help, he had fallen off a train. The man upstairs came down and let him in; and in English, demanded to know more. Churchill, eyeing his host’s revolver, took a chance, and told him the truth. The man, John Howard, was English, and promised to help him reach the frontier.
First, Howard hid Churchill in the rat-infested mine-shaft, then, when the hue and cry concerning his escape had died down somewhat, moved him back to the surface.
On the 19th December, Howard smuggled Churchill on board a train taking bales of wool to the coast. For several days, Churchill remained hidden in the wool, then, after a long delay, they crossed the border. Taken up with joy at his freedom, as soon as it was safe, Churchill got out on top of the train and ‘sang and shouted and crowed at the top of [his] voice.’ The train took Churchill to Maputo (then, Lourenco Marques), and from there he took a steamer back to British territory where he received a hero’s welcome, and the resulting fame made him the highest paid war correspondent of his day. ‘Youth seeks Adventure’, Churchill wrote later. ‘Journalism requires Advertisement. Certainly I had found both.’
Another thing I wrote for my English GCSE. Young Winston was a help, and also his biography My Early Life. All quotes are from the latter. I've tried to break this up into paragraphs, and comments and helpful abuse are welcomed with open arms.
A lot of the actual action writing was helped a lot by the film 
I dunno why, but I like wording sentances in the ways that said were too wordy. The ways you suggested just set every brain cell protesting, "No! Put something else in! Don't make it plain!" Ah, well, *shrugs* maalesh.
Paragraphs and myself don't get along very well together.