The Boer War

by Thomas Pakenham

  The ground in front of me was literally rising in dust from the bullets, and the din echoing between the hill and the wood below and among the rocks from the incessant fire of the Mausers seemed to blend with every other sound into a long drawn-out hideous roar. Halfway over the terrace I looked round over my shoulder and I confess I was rather horrified at what I saw. S— was close beside me, and a few men here and there, but the whole ground we had already covered was strewn with bodies, and no more men were coming from over the wall. At that moment I was hit the first time…. I was hit through the knee. The actual shock was as if someone had hit me with their whole strength with a club. I spun round and fell, my pistol flying one way and helmet another…. [Then] I began to pull myself up by holding on to the rocks and bushes and long grass … I was hit a second time by a shot from above; the bullet hit me on the back above my right hip and came out in front of my thigh.42

  Despite a third wound, where a bullet had struck his spine, Nugent crawled to the crest of the hill, which he found deserted by the Boers. His account continued:

  I was just beginning to bandage my leg, when a shrapnel shell burst overhead. We both, W[ortley] and I, stared in astonishment. We could see our artillery on the plain below us 1500 yards off … It seemed impossible that they should not have seen our advance from the wall … presently I saw another flash from a gun and then with a scream and a crash a shrapnel shell burst just behind us…. I felt rather beat then…. It seemed so hard, after escaping the Boers to be killed by our own people. W[ortley] and I lay as close as we could under the rock, and below me on the terrace I watched the wretched fellows who were wounded trying to drag themselves to the wall for shelter. Presently a shrapnel burst right over our heads, and the bullets struck the ground all round us.43

  At last the artillery stopped. And fortunately for Yule’s men, the Boers did not attempt to exploit the artillery’s error. They crept away down the reverse side of the hill, where their ponies were tethered, and rode away.44

  The hill had been won. But what a sight greeted the victors. Colonel Gunning of the 6oth lay there, shot through the heart; he had stood up close to the crest, shouting ‘Stop that firing!’ to the British artillery. Colonel Sherston, Yule’s Brigade Major, was kicking and groaning on the ground. Captain Connor, the giant of the Fusiliers, was mortally wounded in the stomach. Lieutenant Hambro had lost both legs, smashed by the British shrapnel.45 Each battalion had lost half a dozen officers killed and wounded; the total loss to the British amounted to 51 dead or dying, 203 wounded.46 And if the hill had been won, what else had been won with it?

  Beyond the ridge, the men of Lucas Meyer’s commando were streaming across the veld towards the Buffalo River. It was the moment for Act Three of the Aldershot set-piece: the rout of the enemy. But Möller and the British cavalry had taken Symons at his word and vanished behind Impati – mysteriously vanished – hours earlier. (In fact the disastrous news of their surrender was not to reach Yule for a couple of days.)47 Still, the enemy were well within artillery range. After some hesitation, the gunners were ordered up the road between the crests of Talana and Lennox Hill. Here the twelve gun crews of the two batteries unlimbered – and waited. Later, people said that the artillery commander, Colonel Pickwoad, had seen a white flag raised by the Boers.48 There was another reason for inaction: in the mist and drizzle they mistook the fleeing Boers, dressed in capes, for the 18th Hussars. In the 13th Battery, Gunner Netley could see they were the Boers, and cursed the stupidity of their commander.49 At any rate, both batteries were ordered not to fire. And in a matter of minutes, General Meyer and his commando of three thousand rode swiftly out of sight beyond the curtain of rain.50

  CHAPTER 12

  White Flag, Arme Blanche

  Elandslaagte, near Ladysmith, Natal,

  21 October 1899

  ‘We … finished just as darkness fell over the field, & then the reactions came, I calmed down, I felt sick at the sight of the dead and dying, horrible sight, awful in their gastleness [sic], blood to meet the eyes, groans to meet the ears, and among this we had to sleep … but strange as it may seem I am eager to be in battle again now …’

  Private Prosper Paris, 1st Manchester Regiment, in a letter to Gerty, 24 October 1899

  ‘Get dressed quick, C Company. We have to be out in the veld in an hour’s time. The enemy are there.’ The Gordon Highlanders were off duty at Ladysmith camp, forty miles south of Dundee, as Captain Buchanan ran down the lines of the white bell-tents shouting these strange words of command.1 It was just before one o’clock on the day after the action at Talana – thundery, but not too hot, so it seemed to troops recently arrived from India. These Jocks, off duty, were busy enough.2 There were kilts to be patched and mended, khaki covers to be sewn over the hairy black and white sporrans, and the usual mixture of brown paint and cow-dung to be painted over the white webbing.3

  After the Captain had gone, the Jocks burst out laughing. They had just heard of the victory the previous day at Talana. How could the enemy now be close to Ladysmith? And the idea of going into action within an hour. It seemed like a leg-pull.4

  Yet, an hour later, the battalion was marching, with swinging kilts, down to Ladysmith station. They were five companies strong: 20 officers and 483 men, led by their Commanding Officer, Lieutenant-Colonel William Dick-Cunyngham, the officers inconspicuous except for their claymores, and the drum-major carrying a rifle instead of a drum. At the station they piled into a train, their Highland dress half-hidden by all that battle equipment: twin cartridge pouches on the chest, balancing, under the criss-crossed webbing, the neatly rolled greatcoat, and the water-bottle; Lee Metford rifle; bulging haversack, a hundred extra rounds, field dressings and the rest.5

  In a few minutes they were off, riding in open cattle trucks, drawn by two engines, as they had come up from Durban. Ahead of them were seven companies of the 1st Devons, riding in another train; and also ahead of them had gone, earlier that day, some of the Natal Mounted Rifles and Natal Artillery and four companies of the 1st Manchesters, led by the armoured train. The mounted troops – a squadron each of the 5th Lancers and the 5th Dragoon Guards, and five squadrons of the Imperial Light Horse – rode along to keep pace with the train. Two batteries of field artillery – twelve of the usual 15-pounders – had been galloped out from Ladysmith with double teams of horses.6 Battle or no battle, it was an inspiring sight; engines steaming into war like battle-cruisers, led by the armoured train, its slate-coloured funnel and boiler encased in half-inch steel plates, like the funnel of a dreadnought.

  Just beyond Modderspruit, twelve miles north of Ladysmith on the line to Dundee, the procession clanked to a halt and the order was given to detrain.7 Beside the track were two red-tabbed generals and a major of the ILH. They stood, booted and spurred, discussing tactics.

  The shorter of the two Generals was not a man you could mistake. With his heavy-jowled face, bow legs and bull neck, he looked every inch the cavalry man. At forty-seven, Major-General John French was the white hope of the British cavalry. If this military arm were to prove itself in South Africa – the traditional arme blanche of the sword and the lance against modern magazine rifles – it was up to French. Despite his cavalry swagger, French was clever.8 Cleverer still, people said, was his chief staff officer, Major Douglas Haig. The two men had been rushed out to Natal a week after Sir George White, and had arrived hot-foot from Durban the previous morning.9

  The second general was tall and somewhat effete – Ian Hamilton, the chief member of Roberts’s Ring, sent out with White. Still only officially a colonel by rank (though he had distinguished himself as acting brigadier in the Tirah campaign on the North-West Frontier of India), Hamilton had been given the command of the infantry brigade by White. This was an emotional moment for Hamilton. His own regiment was the 2nd Battalion of the Gordons (that is, the old 92nd), which had been, with the 60th Rifles, one of the chief victims of the First Boer War. Hamilton himself had been captured and seriously wound
ed at Majuba – hence his crippled left wrist. Today the Gordons were one of the three battalions in his brigade.10

  The major of the ILH, Aubrey Woolls-Sampson, had the sun-dried looks and the steel and whipcord manner of the colonial, in contrast to Hamilton’s. Yet he, too, had been wounded in the First Boer War; there was a scar the size of a shilling that covered his jugular vein. He also bore the psychological scars, like most of the ILH, of the fiasco of the Raid.11 Ahead of him was the commando that the Uitlanders regarded as their personal enemies: the Johannesburg Commando, led by Commandant Ben Viljoen. Now was the moment to avenge both those two white flags: at Majuba and Doornkop.

  The previous evening White had learnt of Symons’s tactical victory at Talana, end of part of its heavy cost: Symons’s mortal wound. (The British had yet to learn of the surrender of Möller’s cavalry.) He was still understandably alarmed by the strategic threat of superior numbers against his divided forces. That morning he had sent out French to make a cavalry reconnaissance before dawn. French was told: proceed to Elandslaagte, where the enemy are reported to have cut the railway and telegraph lines leading to Dundee; cover the engineers who will restore these communications. French had discovered that the enemy had occupied the station at Elandslaagte in strength of a sort. It turned out that this was the Johannesburg Commando, under the overall command of General Kock, with the addition of two hundred German and Hollander volunteers. They had bypassed Symons’s garrison at Dundee and ridden boldly down over the Biggarsberg towards Ladysmith (ignoring Joubert’s careful plans) with about a thousand men.12 Hence there was a heaven-sent opportunity for French to destroy this weak commando while it was on its own. There was also the need to restore the links with Dundee. Consequently, French had despatched a sudden telephone message to White, asking for substantial reinforcements of infantry. This was the message that sent the Gordons and the Devons scrambling into their battle kit and steaming down the line.13

  From the point where the men detrained, the railway line continued more or less level two miles farther to the station at Elandslaagte. On the left of the line was the colliery, marked by black smoke and pit mouths. On the right of the line rose a stony, biscuit-coloured ridge. This looped round in a second ridge to form a horseshoe, and beyond the farther and steeper ridge, about a mile south-east of the station, half hidden among four kopjes, could be seen the white tents and wagons of Commandant Kock’s laager. How to attack this natural strong-point: that was the tactical problem. The hill was only three hundred feet high, half the height of Lucas Meyer’s position on the crest of Talana. Yet here there was no wood, there were no walls; in fact, there was no cover except the stones and ant-hills strewn across the rolling veld.14 And here at Elandslaagte, just as at Talana, the Boers had three 75-mm field-guns, whose shells, with their longer burning fuses, enabled them to outrange the British 15-pounders by a thousand yards.15

  In numbers of men and guns, however, French vastly outnumbered Kock, owing to Kock’s folly in advancing prematurely: he had 1,630 infantry, 1,314 cavalry and 552 gunners with 18 guns, to Kock’s 1,000 men and 3 guns.16 And by now French had hammered out a plan of attack with Hamilton. It was to be, like Talana, the conventional Aldershot set-piece. Yet there were important differences between French’s and Hamilton’s tactics and those of the unfortunate Symons. French believed in the cavalry textbook. He had no intention of letting loose the cavalry till after the infantry had succeeded. By contrast, Hamilton had his doubts about conventional infantry tactics for use against the magazine rifle. He had noticed the success in North-West India of a few Afridi tribesmen, armed with stolen British rifles, against British troops in the conventional shoulder-to-shoulder formation. He now told his infantry colonels: keep exceptionally open order. The Devons were to have a front of a thousand yards, three yards for each man; their seven companies were to be deployed at such broad intervals that the distance from front to rear would be nearly a mile.17

  By three o’clock the horses of French’s cavalry, who had been out since early morning, had been watered, and the last of the four trains had spilt their loads on to the veld beside the railway line. Hamilton explained his plan. The Devons were to have the honour of making the frontal attack, directly across the inside of the horseshoe. The other two infantry battalions – the Gordons and the Manchesters – with the ILH (dismounted), were to work round by the toe of the horseshoe, and take the enemy’s left flank. Men from each regiment cheered and waved their helmets. ‘We’ll do it! We’ll do it, Sir!’ At 3.30 p.m. the long, regular lines of khaki began to inscribe themselves on the blank surface of the veld. Beyond them, a melodramatic back-drop, the great anvil-shaped cloud of an approaching thunderstorm.18

  Among the anxious watchers who stood there on the first ridge were the Press corps from four London newspapers, which Monypenny had scooped when he set off for Talana. This distinguished band had ridden out from Ladysmith that morning, on ponies and in Cape carts. Henry Nevinson, of The Chronicle was a critic and a socialist, a champion of women’s emancipation as well as a part-time soldier. Steevens of The Mail and Bennet Burleigh of The Telegraph were the leading war correspondents of their day. Melton Prior of The Illustrated London News was the leading war artist. It was men like these who had made the small wars of the late Victorian era familiar to their generation. With pen and brush, they had brought battle into every Victorian drawing-room: Gordon’s Last Stand; Gordon’s Avenging; and all those countless other battles in outlandish parts of the world which were thought to have added lustre to the Empire. Not that any of these war correspondents were the crude kind of jingo. Each had drawn war as he saw it: a matter-of-fact business, in Prior’s and Burleigh’s eyes; a battle poem in Steevens’s.19 But all these men (except perhaps Nevinson) had made the vicarious war a familiar and acceptable part of the Victorian experience.

  First to go over the ridge were the Devons – nine hundred anonymous brown dots merging into the veld. Except for the extended order, it was exactly like a field-day: company commanders blowing whistles, the men firing together in volleys. They rested, they doubled forward in regular lines, they fired again, all at regular intervals of time and space.20 As a soldier himself, Nevinson admired the performance: better than they go ‘in the bottoms of the Old Fox Hill at Aldershot’, he remarked.

  Through his high-powered field-glasses, Nevinson could also see the Devons’ opponents a mile and a half from where he was standing. ‘One man in black,’ he later wrote, ‘I watched for what seemed a very long time. He was standing right against the skyline, sometimes waving his arms apparently to give directions. Shells burst over his head, and bullets must have been thick about him. Once or twice he fell, as though slipping on the rocks, till at last shrapnel exploded right in his face, and he sank altogether like a rag doll.21

  But down in the valley, now concealed from Nevinson, the Devons, too, were wilting under the storm of magazine rifle fire. As the range reduced, the acting CO, Major Park, gave new orders: independent fire. He told the company commanders that Hamilton had instructed him not to press home the frontal attack until the Manchesters, the Gordons and the ILH had worked round the flank. Thankfully, the leading three companies of Devons threw themselves down behind the stones and ant heaps about nine hundred yards from the enemy’s position facing them: a small kopje shaped like a sugar-loaf.22 It was a surprise to the men that they had had so few casualties: ‘only Hant heaps to cover us,’ as Drummer Boulden of D Company later wrote home, ‘and then we had to lay down flat and the Bullits came round us quite thick and we hadvanced in such a splendid order they said they were sirprised to see it and said we hadvanced just like a stone wall, and so we did …’23

  Meanwhile, the main battle was raging to the right of the Devons, where the Manchesters had run up against the forward position of Kock’s mounted riflemen. The Manchesters were in three lines at the time, and the Colonel gave the order: lie down, and commence volley firing. The invisible Boers responded with a perfect storm of Ma
user fire.24 Captain Newbigging, the Adjutant, could find absolutely no cover on the grassy slope. He lay flat, like his men, as the bullets slapped into the veld, kicking earth over him. On his right, a man was hit in the stomach and began to make the most pitiful noises. At long last the front line of Boers, hidden in the rocks ahead of them, withdrew to the main position on the hog’s-back ridge to the right of the sugar-loaf. Newbigging ran forward to tell the firing line to advance. And so the Manchesters pushed round the corner of the horseshoe, with the Gordons and the ILH wheeling round to the right of them. As the companies doubled forward, Newbigging looked at his watch. It was 3.47 p.m. So far the battle had only lasted seventeen minutes.25

  It was now the turn of the Gordons, the old 92nd. As the Colonel, Dick-Cunyngham, led his men forward in a kind of zig-zag formation, Sir George White cantered past on his charger. The General had just arrived from Ladysmith – not to take over the tactical command from French, but simply to be present as a spectator.26 (The convention was accepted in small wars of the period.) Sir George waved to some of the officers he knew. ‘Look at my boys … I was in that regiment once.’27 He had last seen the 92nd in action when he commanded it in the Afghan War. He looked pleased – pleased and proud.

  But the gallant old 92nd was soon in still worse trouble than either the Devons or the Manchesters. Despite those attempts to camouflage themselves with khaki and cow-dung, the Highlanders were natural targets. Their dark green kilts stood out against the grey-brown veld; and the bull’s eye, so to speak, was the place where the black and white sporran hung below the Highlander’s belt. As soon as the men reached the skyline at the southern end of the horseshoe, they were caught by a monsoon rain of rifle fire. To add to their difficulties, a barbed wire fence happened to run along the crest of the main ridge they had to cross. By various means they cut gaps in the wire. One of the officers, Lord George Murray, had a pair of pliers. A private snapped a piece of the wire by sheer strength. Mauser bullets completed the work. But the battalion was now losing officers fast. Dick-Cunyngham was hit a hundred yards beyond the fence; his arm was broken. He rose and ran a few paces, shouting, ‘On men, I’m coming!’ Then he fainted. Men pushed forward in rushes, firing independently. ‘Advance – cease-fire – advance!’ The whistles blew. The bullets splashed round them. Men groped and stumbled over their fallen comrades. At long last, the front companies of the Gordons found themselves in the lee of a stony hollow below the hog’s-back ridge.28