And the The early morning hours of December 13th, 1899 at the Stats Model School in Pretoria, South Africa,

started out pretty normal.

There was no great alarm being sounded.

There were no soldiers rushing around frantically, throwing open doors and cabinets and tearing

apart the beds. Everything was serene almost.

Almost. But that would all change soon enough.

Winston Churchill had been gone about 12 hours by the time the first soldier entered the tiny

room where Churchill's bed was.

According to author Candice Millard, quote, the soldier's servant stepped into their room

that morning carrying a cup of coffee.

He spoke to what he believed was Churchill, still wrapped motionless in blankets in his bed.

When there was no answer, he simply set the coffee on the chair and walked away."

End quote.

Well, the reason Churchill didn't respond to the soldier in his room with a cup of

coffee that morning was because Churchill wasn't in the room that morning.

Just like something straight out of a movie, the soldier was talking to a dummy made up of pillows and blankets that was made to look like a person who is still in bed.

Now, like I said, we've all seen this in a movie before and some of us have actually done this ourselves and I think most of us will attest that it does work like a charm.

And it was Hal Dane and Brockie that had scrambled at the last minute

to put this dummy together to buy Churchill some more time. But the distraction that this dummy provided didn't last very long, and it was

Churchill's own fault. For Churchill, forever the pampered aristocrat, he had forgotten to cancel the appointment that he had made with his barber for that very morning.

So when his barber showed up at 8 a.m. for what had become Churchill's regiment of a shave and a haircut,

Churchill was nowhere to be found.

...