States Model Schools Prison:  December 10, 1899.

Sir,—­I have the honour to inform you that as I do not consider that your Government have any right to detain me as a military prisoner, I have decided to escape from your custody.  I have every confidence in the arrangements I have made with my friends outside, and I do not therefore expect to have another opportunity of seeing you.  I therefore take this occasion to observe that I consider your treatment of prisoners is correct and humane, and that I see no grounds for complaint.  When I return to the British lines I will make a public statement to this effect.  I have also to thank you personally for your civility to me, and to express the hope that we may meet again at Pretoria before very long, and under different circumstances.  Regretting that I am unable to bid you a more ceremonious or a personal farewell,

     I have the honour, to be, Sir,
     Your most obedient servant,
     WINSTON CHURCHILL.

     To Mr. de Souza,
     Secretary of War, South African Republic.

I arranged that this letter, which I took great pleasure in writing, should be left on my bed, and discovered so soon as my flight was known.

It only remained now to find a hat.  Luckily for me Mr. Adrian Hofmeyr, a Dutch clergyman and pastor of Zeerust, had ventured before the war to express opinions contrary to those which the Boers thought befitting for a Dutchman to hold.  They had therefore seized him on the outbreak of hostilities, and after much ill-treatment and many indignities on the Western border, brought him to the States Schools.  He knew most of the officials, and could, I think, easily have obtained his liberty had he pretended to be in sympathy with the Republics.  He was, however, a true man, and after the clergyman of the Church of England, who was rather a poor creature, omitted to read the prayer for the Queen one Sunday, it was to Hofmeyr’s evening services alone that most of the officers would go.  I borrowed his hat.

CHAPTER XI

I ESCAPE FROM THE BOERS

Lourenco Marques:  December 22, 1899,

How unhappy is that poor man who loses his liberty!  What can the wide world give him in exchange?  No degree of material comfort, no consciousness of correct behaviour, can balance the hateful degradation of imprisonment.  Before I had been an hour in captivity, as the previous pages evidence, I resolved to escape.  Many plans suggested themselves, were examined, and rejected.  For a month I thought of nothing else.  But the peril and difficulty restrained action.  I think that it was the report of the British defeat at Stormberg that clinched the matter.  All the news we heard in Pretoria was derived from Boer sources, and was hideously exaggerated and distorted.  Every day we read in the ’Volksstem’—­probably the most astounding tissue of lies ever presented