Churchill’s Youthful Manliness: A Review of Hero of the Empire by Candice Millard

Boers captured the young Winston Churchill just days before his twenty-fifth birthday. The hardy Afrikaners were waging successful warfare against Britain’s imperial armies, and the capture of this ambitious aristocrat was a small but significant psychological victory. Churchill had already come under fire during the Cuban War for Independence. He had engaged the Pashtun on the Indian frontier. He had even joined the last great British cavalry charge in Sudan. But Churchill’s escapade during the Second Boer War was to be his greatest adventure yet.