by Celia Sandys
Sounds of the battle woke Churchill in his tent at Chieveley, eighteen miles to the south: ‘Boom. Thud, thud. Boom. Boom. Thud – Thud thud – thud thud thud thud – Boom. A long suecession of queer moaning vibrations broke the stillness of the sleeping camp.’ So his London readers were graphically introduced to the battle by his dispatch two days later.
Churchill’s dispatch to the Morning Port of 8 January 1900. (Brenthurst library, Johannesburg)
Communication between Ladysmith and General Buller’s headquarters at Frere, five miles south of Chieveley, was by heliograph and searchlight. At the very moment in the late afternoon that the Boers were abandoning their assault, a violent thunderstorm rendered the heliograph useless, while flickering Morse code messages after dark were confused by a Boer searchlight. Thus it was not until the following day that Churchill learned the outcome of the battle. As usual, his dispatch was upbeat: ‘by night the Boers were repulsed at every point . . . Their first experience of assaulting. Encore!’ He did not know that the final counter-attack by the Devonshire Regiment had cost them all their remaining officers but one.
It had been a near-run thing. Next time, given better cooperation between the various Boer elements, the outcome might easily go the other way. A greater urgency now attended Buller’s operations to relieve Ladysmith. Metaphors came easily to Churchill: ‘The warning bell has rung. Take your seats, ladies and gentlemen. The curtain is about to rise.’ So London was appraised of the strategic situation. “‘High time, too,” say the impatient audience, and with this I must agree.’
* A comparison between Churchill’s memoirs and his dispatches reveals other small discrepancies. It seems safer – except where his dispatches dissemble deliberately, for example in his omission of some details of his escape – to rely on the contemporaneous accounts rather than on My Early Life, which was published more than thirty years later.
TWELVE
A General on Spion Kop
‘Ah, horrible war, amazing medley of the glorious and the squalid, the pitiful and the sublime, if modern men of light and leading saw your face closer, simple folk would see it hardly ever.’
WINSTON CHURCHILL,
dispatch to the Morning Post, 22 January 1900
CHURCHILL’S EXPERIENCES OVER THE NEXT few weeks would probably influence his attitude to war more even than his time in the trenches fifteen years later. From his first taste of battle in Cuba on his twenty-first birthday to his days as wartime Prime Minister, he was always drawn towards the sound of gunfire, exhilarated by personal danger and relishing excitement. But it was during the advance on Ladysmith that, for the first time, he weighed the tragic aspects of war along with the heroic.
Acknowledging that the Tugela River was too well defended at Colenso to force a crossing there, Buller abandoned his plan for a direct advance on Ladysmith along the railway. Having assembled nineteen thousand infantry, three thousand cavalry and sixty guns, he now intended to turn the Boer right flank by crossing the Tugela some twenty-five miles upstream from Colenso. On 11 January the South African Light Horse seized a crossing at Potgieter’s Drift and the ford a further five miles upstream at Trichardt’s Drift.
At Potgieter’s a bend in the river enabled an unopposed crossing, but blocking the way two miles to the north the Boer defences presented a formidable obstacle, hinged as they were on Spion Kop – ‘Spy Hill’. It had been aptly named by the Boers during the Great Trek, as it commanded the country for miles around. On the other hand, the enemy covering Trichardt’s Drift were estimated by Buller’s intelligence to number only about six hundred. Buller therefore decided that his main attack, with two thirds of his force, would be west of Spion Kop, at Trichardt’s Drift. He himself would attack at Potgieter’s when the Boers had been outflanked at Trichardt’s; the two prongs of the attack would then unite and advance on Ladysmith.
Trichardt’s Drift and the course of the river are today submerged beneath the Spion Kop reservoir, but not much else has changed. When one stands beneath the awesome feature of the Kop, Buller’s plan seems perfectly sound. Unfortunately for him, no plan can be expected to succeed unless it is competently executed.
The outflanking movement was entrusted to Lieutenant-General Sir Charles Warren. It was a curious choice. Warren was fifty-nine, and old for his years. He had commanded an expedition in Bechuanaland in 1884, and had then been seconded from the army to be Chief Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. Recalled to an active command, he had only recently arrived in South Africa, and was quite untried in the newly evolving tactics of the war. Buller defended his choice of Warren several years later by explaining that he considered Warren had a comparatively easy task at Trichardt’s, and that he reserved for himself the more difficult operation at Potgieter’s.
In his dispatch of 13 January 1900 Churchill had noted the enormous baggage train of Buller’s forces: ‘I have never before seen even officers accommodated with tents on service . . . but here today, within striking distance of a mobile enemy whom we wish to circumvent, every private soldier has canvas shelter . . . all rapidity of movement is out of the question.’ The fact that Buller’s popularity with his troops survived so many reversals was, no doubt, due in part to his concern for their welfare. However, the longer it took Buller’s men to reach their positions, the more complete would be the Boer defences, and the greater the cost of overcoming them. The Morning Post readers were left in no doubt of their young correspondent’s views when he continued: ‘It is a poor economy to let a soldier live well for three days at the price of killing him on the fourth.’
Churchill’s criticism was more than justified. It was not until daybreak on 18 January, a whole week after the South African Light Horse, that Warren had most of his troops across the river. His leisurely and ponderous moves were easily covered by the more agile Boers, who were given ample time to extend their defences westwards along the heights of Tabanyama, which commanded the northern bank of the river. They were thus never in danger of being outflanked.
Lord Dundonald’s cavalry brigade had no baggage train and, living largely off the land, was able to ride at will over wide areas of Natal. How widely they ranged can be seen from the spread of the beautiful pink cosmos flower, which, a native plant of Argentina, was imported into South Africa with the cavalry’s horse fodder. Just as one can see the places where soldiers fell by the cairns on the battlefields, so one can mark their route by the pink swathes of cosmos. As I stopped to pick these lovely flowers I wondered if the seeds that had produced that very bunch had germinated in the belly of my grandfather’s horse as he had ridden over that same ground.
I learned that no one was more adept at living off the country than Lieutenant Churchill of the Cockyolibirds. The young officer, with the long plume of feathers from the tail of a sakabulu bird in his hat, became well known among the farms and villages of Natal.
My favourite story of his foraging is the tale of the chicken at Springfield, now called Winterton. I went there with Churchill’s description, in his dispatch of 13 January 1900, fresh in my mind: ‘three houses, half a dozen farms with their tin roofs and tree clumps seen in the neighbourhood’. I soon found the stone foundations of what, a century ago, was a tin-roofed store with a backyard fenced off from the open country beyond. It was easy to imagine how the shop would have looked back then, its wooden counter and shelving stacked with the everyday needs of the local inhabitants.
I did not need to use my imagination to picture the scene on the day that the cavalry rode through shortly before the battle of Spion Kop, as Mrs Lette Bennet recounted the story exactly as she had heard it from her mother: ‘My mother, Anna Beyers, was in my grandfather’s farm shop at Springfield and remembered the day she served Winston Churchill. He trotted up the dusty lane and tethered his horse outside the shop. He bought candlesticks and sardines. My mother told me how she could never forget the way he lisped when he asked her for the sardines.’ Mrs Bennet continued, chuckling: ‘My mother then would tell
the part she liked best. Mr Churchill then looked around and spotted the chickens in the yard. He asked if he could buy one, to which my mother replied, “Yes, if you can catch it.”’
A young man who had been through so much was not going to be defeated by a chicken, and a few minutes later he rode off with his purchases – ‘candlesticks, sardines and a chicken’. Future customers were treated to a hilarious account of Churchill chasing the chicken around the yard, thus spreading the story, which is told to this day.
A few yards from the ruined shop is the grave of Driver Linton, Royal Artillery. The first casualty in Warren’s operations, he was crushed by the wheel of an ox wagon while crossing Tritchard’s Drift, and drowned on 17 January 1900. Fifteen years later Andries Beyers, Anna Beyers’ father and the owner of the farm, was buried beside him.
On 20 and 21 January Warren finally attacked the Boer defences. His infantry made some progress up the gullies leading to the crest of Tabanyama, but although they were well supported by artillery, which fired almost six thousand shells, they were halted in exposed positions well short of their main objective, and began to suffer considerable casualties. When Churchill arrived at the position of the Dublin Fusiliers, he found they had lost about half their number. As usual, his dispatch included some telling touches. He recounts a conversation with the Fusiliers’ commanding officer: ‘Very few of us left now,’ said the Colonel. ‘About 450 out of nine hundred.’ He came across a young soldier whose trouser leg was soaked in blood. He was stoically munching a biscuit. When Churchill asked if he was wounded he replied, ‘No sir; it’s only blood from an officer’s head,’ and carried on eating.
Dundonald’s cavalry, which had the task of protecting Warren’s left flank, moved further westwards, where they successfully defeated a small force of two hundred Boers in the area of Acton Homes. For the young Churchill, this small, short but sharp engagement ‘aroused the most painful emotions’. He had campaigned on three continents, and was no stranger to the gruesome aftermath of battle. He had seen thousands killed at Omdurman, and scores elsewhere. But never had he been so affected by the sight of a battle’s victims.
Churchill’s dispatch of 22 January captures exactly the British mood during the battle and in its aftermath: The desire to kill was gone. The desire to comfort replaced it.’ He describes one bright-eyed and excited young officer crying ‘Bag the lot!’ as he galloped under fire towards the Boer position. Within a few minutes his exhilaration had given way to sadness, and he was saying of one of the fallen enemy: ‘There’s a poor boy dying up there – only a boy, and so cold – who’s got a blanket?’
The Morning Post’s readers, safe and comfortable at their breakfast tables eight thousand miles away, were reminded that grief has little to do with the scale of events. The man dying of wounds or the woman left a widow experience the same pain and grief whether the cause is a brief skirmish or Armageddon itself.
Churchill’s dispatch told of the Boer Field Comet Mentz, greyhaired and more than sixty, who continued to load and fire his Mauser until he bled to death from a wound which could have been staunched had he surrendered. He was found holding a letter from his wife. ‘The stony face was grimly calm, but it bore the stamp of unalterable resolve; the look of a man who had thought it all out, and was quite certain his cause was just.’ Beside him was the body of a boy of seventeen, shot through the heart. Further on were two British riflemen, ‘and I suppose they had mothers or wives far away at the end of deep-sea cables’.
Major Childe, ‘a serene old gentleman’, was among the British casualties. Years before, he had served in the Blues, since when he had been active and well liked in English racing circles. ‘Old and grey as he was, the call to arms had drawn him from home, and wife, and comfort.’ His gravestone, which stands close to where he fell in an action during which he earned ‘the admiration of thousands of the infantry’, carries the epitaph which he had chosen in advance, ‘Is it well with the child? It is well!’
Beyond the scene of the engagement at Acton Homes lay open country and an easy route to Ladysmith. The cavalry, and in particular the experienced colonials among them, thought that a wider flanking movement through Acton Homes would be a better approach to Ladysmith than the one on which General Warren was presently bogged down. A Marlborough or a Napoleon would no doubt have agreed, but to Buller, whose forces moved so ponderously, it was hardly a feasible option.
By 23 January his patience was exhausted. Warren’s men were badly positioned and continually exposed to enemy fire, with nothing to show for it. Buller ordered him to attack or have his force withdrawn. Warren decided his objective would be Spion Kop, the nub of the whole Boer position. Its commanding situation and precipitous slopes made it the hardest nut of all to crack, but if the Boer defences could be broken there, his route to Ladysmith would be open.
Churchill did not enter the fray on Spion Kop until late in the battle, but to appreciate his actions when he did join in, it is necessary to understand what went before. At 8.30 p.m. on 24 January Warren’s assaulting troops gathered below his headquarters on Three Tree Hill, some six miles from the summit of Spion Kop. (It was, incidentally, the fifth anniversary of Churchill’s father’s death. 24 January would also be, as he prophesied, the date on which he died sixty-five years later.) In command was Major-General Woodgate, with two thousand men of his own Lancashire Brigade and two hundred from Colonel Thorneycroft’s mounted infantry. Thorneycroft, a huge, imposing man, led the way at the head of his men. He had been one of ten special service officers sent to South Africa before the war to provide local intelligence, and on its outbreak he had raised and paid for from his own pocket a mounted infantry regiment of colonials and Uitlanders. Behind them Woodgate followed at the head of his two thousand men. An amazing omission from the equipment they carried was sufficient picks and shovels to dig defences once the objective was captured. Only one of each was taken for every hundred men in the force.
After about nine hours of hard going, Thorneycroft approached the summit of Spion Kop and deployed his men across the hillside to await the arrival of Woodgate, who, having lagged a good way behind, did not catch up until day was beginning to break. Under cover of the dense mist which now surrounded them, Thorneycroft’s men stormed the crest and captured it at the cost of no more than ten men wounded. The prearranged signal of three cheers from his troops was heard by the waiting staff below, relayed to Warren on Three Tree Hill and signalled to Buller. The way to Ladysmith was open. It was evidently a British triumph and a Boer disaster.
But in battle things are seldom as good as they seem, and almost never as bad. For those who had created the good news, the mist which was covering their movements was also misleading them. The trenches they marked out for their defence did not cover the Boer approaches. Equally disastrously, Woodgate ignored Conical Hill and Aloe Knoll, two vital features from which rifle fire could sweep the summit of Spion Kop. Half a mile to the north and a quarter of a mile to the east respectively, their importance is obvious to anyone visiting this eerie battleground, and Woodgate, though hampered by the mist and an indifferent map, should have ensured that they were occupied. They would automatically have been included in his defensive perimeter had it been pushed out by the proper deployment of all the men at his disposal. As it was, he confined his defence to a small area of hilltop to be held from behind whatever protection twenty picks and shovels could scrape out.
General Botha took the bad news in his stride. He believed the situation could still be saved, providing the British were prevented from bringing their artillery up Spion Kop. His own artillery covered the summit from several directions, while effective rifle fire could be maintained from Conical Hill and Aloe Knoll.
The Battle of Spion Kop
Botha’s counter-attack was launched soon after daybreak. Several hundred men from the Carolina and Pretoria Commandos, supported by Mauser fire from Conical Hill, started up the northern slope of the Kop. On reaching the crest line they wer
e met by a volley of fire from behind the boulders thrown up around the crescent-shaped trench less than two hundred yards ahead. There they went to ground, dead or alive. Some eased back and worked their way up to Aloe Knoll, from where they could fire into the British trench.
The British artillery was not suitably deployed to respond to the Boer guns which now poured shells into the British position. Woodgate was mortally wounded by a shell fragment, and his Brigade Major was killed. Among the other casualties were many of the officers to whom the men looked for leadership, so the defence soon lacked cohesion, and was often based on groups of intermingled survivors from different regiments acting independently. The senior officer left, Colonel Crofton, sent a panicky message to Warren that without reinforcements all would be lost. Only Thorneycroft attempted to take control of the situation. He rushed hither and thither inspiring, ordering, and on one occasion intervening between Boers and some British troops who were attempting to surrender.
The Boers, however, did not know the full extent of the plight of the British. The burning sun, a lack of water, the sight of the Kop littered with corpses which were now attracting swarms of flies, all began to sap their morale, so that by midday many of those who had so bravely advanced had begun to creep away down the hill. Nevertheless, supported as they were by artillery, enough determined burghers remained to hold their position.
Through a powerful telescope, Buller had been watching the struggle from his headquarters four miles away on Mount Alice, south of the Tugela. His personal staff officer attached to Woodgate’s brigade, Colonel Charles a Court, had returned from the summit and reported the parlous state of the defences there. Buller realised, as Warren did not, that Spion Kop would be lost if a strong and determined commander did not immediately take control of the scene. At his suggestion Warren appointed Thorneycroft to supersede Crofton. The message was passed by heliograph to the summit, but because the runner there was shot dead as he reached Thorneycroft, it was some time before the man who had been the only effective commander on the scene for some hours heard of his official appointment.
