The rain had hardly ceased all day. Indeed, but for the rain and the mist, the garrison would have suffered more from the attentions of the Creusot Long Tom. The night was intensely dark, but fortunately the rain ceased as the column laboriously formed up by sections, the men groping and stumbling over the rocks. Only the officers knew that a retreat had been ordered. The men still believed they were going to encamp on Talana and the townspeople of Dundee were equally left in ignorance.17 At about 10 p.m. the column moved off. The men marched, as Gunner Netley noted, with no lights, and no talking. Each man took only what he could carry. The officers had to abandon their kits, including the coloured jackets they wore in the mess, and the bandsmen their drums and trumpets. As it was, the column, including the artillery wagons drawn by spans of mules and oxen, uncoiled over four miles, and the men were dog-tired before they began. It was past midnight before the tail of the shuffling, stumbling procession finally cleared the town, passing within less than a mile of the enemy’s position, and guided by officers who had tied white handkerchiefs round their waists. Dawn found them astride the south-east shoulder of the Biggarsberg. Soon after, the column was ordered to rest. They had covered twelve miles from the town, fourteen from their camp. No one could doubt they were retreating now. Officers and men threw themselves down beside the road, sleeping in the mud, just as they were.18
The Biggarsberg is a carpet of downland, smooth and green at this time of year: more like hills than mountains, despite the romantic names, Dundee and Glencoe, given them by the early Scottish settlers. But there was one six-mile-long pass called Van Tonders Nek, on this south-easterly road from Dundee. It was a rugged, narrow defile. Given a determined leader, it was the place where a few men could lay ambush to an army. Hence Yule’s anxieties as the column approached Van Tonders Nek. By ten o’clock on Monday they had resumed the march, led by the Royal Irish Fusiliers. Yule changed his mind after a couple of hours. The men found the sun, blazing down on the treeless downs, almost as trying as the rain of the previous days. Better to halt until darkness. There were also intelligence reports that the Boers lay in wait ahead of them.19
At about 11.00 p.m., the march was resumed. The moon rose as they approached Van Tonders. The column must have sounded like a funeral procession, with the silence magnifying the rumble of the wagons, the clank of metal horseshoes on stone, and the jingle of the gun-carriages. It was the music of defeat. Yet, when dawn came on Tuesday morning, the column had emerged from the pass. They were safe. Ahead the dusty road ran down to the Waschbank River and the plains by Elandslaagte. As the column rested by the track, a visible change came over the soldiers. No more jim-jams. Baked by the sun, drenched by the rain, puttees encasing their legs like tubes of clay, hollow-eyed after four nights without sleep, hollow-bellied after four days on bully beef and biscuits. Yet somebody sat on a rock and began to sing a music-hall song. Someone else began to kick a football around. And soon afterwards, to welcome the ‘imperturbable’ Tommy Atkins, who never lost his British phlegm, the first war correspondent rode out from Ladysmith and hailed the column.20
In fact, the column had never been in any real danger. After it had left Dundee the Boer generals – with characteristic caution – had decided to content themselves with capturing the town and camp from the medical officers and wounded men whom Yule had abandoned there. There was no opposition, although the pack store sergeant in Major Kerin’s hospital dramatically enquired if he was to call out the Hospital Guard to repel the enemy’s attack. The Hospital Guard consisted of a lance-corporal and three men, and the sergeant was told not to be such a fool.21 They had problems enough. The two senior RAMC officers – Majors Kerin and Donegan – had only learnt late the previous night that they and their hospitals were to be abandoned. Yule had sent a staff officer with the astonishing message: the retreat had been ordered by Sir George White, and Kerin and Donegan must make the best arrangements they could with the enemy. After spending a hard night supervising the removal of stores from the military camp (the hospitals themselves had been left without even a water cart), the two majors waited for capture.
However, despite the Red Cross flag, at 10.30 a.m. shells once again plumped into the hospital tents from the Long Tom on Mount Impati, and caused panic among both the staff and the patients. The stampede only halted when Donegan threatened to shoot the next man who left his tent.22 It was now apparent to Donegan and Kerin that they must surrender Dundee in the interests of their patients, even if the surrender would reveal the secret of Yule’s escape to the Boers. Accordingly, a white flag was hoisted over the hospitals, and an RAMC captain rode up the stony track to the Boers’ camp, carrying a second white flag. A long, anxious silence. Then, about half past twelve, two Boers, field cornets in ordinary civilian clothes, rode down the track to Dundee.
They asked Donegan and Kerin this question: was it true that British soldiers had tied wounded Boer prisoners to their gun-carriages and dragged them round the field after the battle?23 Having received a formal denial of these atrocities and an agreement by the British to hand over all their arms, the Boers accepted the surrender of the town and camp. Donegan’s sword, revolver, field-glasses and horse were taken from him; otherwise, he was treated civilly by Boer officers.24 Yet the scenes that followed were painful enough to British officers, brought up in a military tradition in which surrender was supposed to be a fate worse than death.
Thousands of Boers rode down into the camp, where they found the tents laid out in neat lines, just as they had been left by the British battalions the previous morning. After taking whatever they chose, they reached the hospitals. By this time, some of them had begun to celebrate their victory. A drunken soldier with a loaded rifle lurched into the tent where Major Kerin stood, and kept repeating, ‘I want to shoot the British officers.’ He then struck one of the Boer field comets, hitting him in the mouth with the butt end of his rifle. The field cornet took to his heels. There seemed to be no discipline of any sort among them. Over in Donegan’s hospital, two other drunken Boers with rifles appeared at the tent door and Donegan found it understandably trying to have them chasing each other backwards and forwards, trying to shoot each other, through the tents full of wounded men. Later in the evening, the hospital staff heard the Boers who had looted the town of Dundee riding past their tents, singing and shouting from exhilaration and drink. Apart from the vast quantity of stores they had looted – forty days’ supplies for five thousand men – they carried off as trophies the regimental candlesticks, the brass trumpets of the bands and the elaborate coloured uniforms that officers wore in the mess. They also discovered something else of value: Symons’s code-books and his other papers, including his copy of the War Office’s secret handbook, Military Notes.25
If the senior British army officers, Kerin and Donegan, could do nothing to restrain the victors’ exuberance, they tried at least to keep their own men from misbehaving. That afternoon, after the two drunken Boers had left Donegan’s hospital, a formal little ceremony took place there. Four of the Indian medical orderlies had been found to have left the tents without permission and were accused of looting stuff from the Boers. Donegan sentenced one of them to death (it was later commuted) and had the other three publicly flogged. The public flogging, he found, had an ‘excellent moral effect’ on the rest of the natives. It was a relief for Donegan, among all those bewildering scenes, to be able to keep up British standards in such exemplary fashion.26
That same Monday afternoon, while the Boers looted the tents around him, General Sir Penn Symons finally expired. Despite morphia injections, he had suffered a good deal of pain from the bullet wound in his stomach. He was sick frequently. Added to this was the anguish of hearing that Yule had decided to abandon him to the enemy. He was conscious, but very weak when Kerin came to visit him just before he died. The pain had lessened. He kept saying, ‘Tell everyone I died facing the enemy, tell everyone I died facing the enemy,’ and he left Kerin in no doubt that he regarded Yule’s retrea
t as a betrayal. ‘I would never have done it.’27
Next morning the camp was calm. General Erasmus, the Boer commander, visited the hospital to express his condolences on Symons’s death. Would it be too presumptuous, he said, if he asked to see the face of the dead General? He had always heard he was so brave. Kerin took him to the general’s tent and raised the sheet. ‘It is a pity – this war,’ said Erasmus with his blunt sincerity. The body was sewn into a Union Jack and taken in procession to the Church of England cemetery. All the hospital staff stood to attention, and so did the wounded, those who could stand. The Boers raised their hats as the cortège passed, and many of them attended the funeral. The cemetery was on the east side of the town, below the splintered eucalyptus wood and the shell-shattered hill of Talana where Symons had won his hollow victory.28
Less edifying was the ceremony to dispose of the mangled or bullet-riddled bodies of seven officers and twenty-eight NCOs and men, the victims of Friday’s battle. In the haste of his departure, Yule had forgotten to give orders for their burial. Six Kohar hospital sweepers, Donegan’s men from India, now carried the bodies, much decomposed, to be identified. It was barely possible to distinguish the officers from the men, but two RAMC captains did their best. The bodies were buried in four graves, according to estimated rank. A few days later, Kerin and thirty slightly wounded men were sent north as prisoners to Pretoria, while Donegan and the more seriously wounded were sent back towards the British lines – back to their comrades at Ladysmith, but not to safety.29
* * * * * *
Meanwhile, Yule and the Dundee column had themselves joined hands with White’s scouts and marched, or rather staggered, into Ladysmith. That Wednesday’s and Thursday’s march, during the night of 25–26 October, was described in his characteristically jaunty style by Gunner Netley:
The General came in with an escort of lancers and told us that his force was … 8 miles further ahead, and of course that bucked us up a bit. He left orders for us to joine him, so we moved off amid a drenching rain, and we had not got far before the column was reported broken (in two), which ment another hower’s waiting in the Natal April shower. It is also very dark, and what with the roads being about 6 inches deep in mud, it is beautiful. We can’t move along sharp because the waggons, which would if not taken in hand properly, probably fall into a donga [ravine] and then something would happen you could bet. At 12 midnight that April shower is still showering and the drenched column is sticking it like Britons, and at 4 am we passed the other column in camp, thank God. It would have done your eye good to see the difference in Tommy that morning, and see the same man at home…. Worn out, wet through, covered in mud from head to foot…. A Kodak would have been useful on the scene then especially when the drying clothes business came off. Fancy taking off everything and while it is drying to keep yourself to yourself by running around like a Kaffir. When the clothes were on again, we proceeded again with the column towards Ladysmith and reached it all correct, properly worn out … the march was a verry long one. Indeed some think it beats Roberts’ [march to Kandahar].30
Whatever the achievements of Yule and his men – and the chief credit for their escape must go to Joubert, who had decided against pursuit – the Dundee column found the Ladysmith garrison too preoccupied to give them much of a welcome. True, the Dublins were given a special dinner by the Devonshires. But it was no time for celebrations, and anyway, the men of the Dundee column fell asleep as they ate; a man, his chin covered with a week’s growth of beard, would take his canteen and be sound asleep before he could put bread and cheese to his lips. When the Dublins’ acting CO, Major Bird, rode into the town to report personally to White’s headquarters, it was noticed that he was fast asleep in the saddle.31
Sir George White had set up his headquarters in the local convent, a pleasant, tin-roofed, red-brick bungalow built on a wooded terrace about a hundred feet above the town. From below, the dust rose in clouds. Ladysmith was the third largest town in the colony and an unpretentious place, as it remains today – a town of two parallel streets, lined with tin-roofed houses and mud-and-wattle shanties for the Africans. If there is a public monument, it is the Town Hall, crowned with a baroque clock tower. If it has a heart, it lies in the wooden-canopied railway station. It was the railway junction that gave life to Ladysmith.32 Into this dusty outpost of the Empire, White had then crammed thirteen thousand troops, with all the sinews of war. Everywhere there were bell-tents, literally thousands of them, pitched wherever there was a flat piece of ground. Every hour trains steamed into the station carrying new stores: crates of ammunition, boxes of beef, sacks of flour, blankets, tents and medical supplies; bales of compressed forage for the three thousand horses, mealies for the African drivers and grooms. All these stores had to be trundled through the streets on mule-carts or sixteen-span teams of ox wagons. Churches and schools were requisitioned as supply dumps. Here the crates were unloaded – enough to supply the whole Natal army for a siege of three months.33
Yet to allow himself to be besieged at Ladysmith was the very last thing White had in mind, that Thursday, 26 October, as the Dundee column staggered into the town. He had only to look out of the windows of the convent to see that Ladysmith was a most unsuitable town, set in a most unsuitable piece of country, in which to let his thirteen thousand men be locked up. Ladysmith straddled the north-west edge of a sandy plain. It was a hot, dusty, disease-ridden, claustrophobic town, walled in on every side by a circle of ridges and hills.34
British soldiers had given several of these hills the familiar names of the country around Aldershot: the wooded table-land to the south-west was dubbed ‘Wagon Hill’ and ‘Caesar’s camp’. They were not ill-chosen names. Since 1897, Ladysmith had been made into the principal British supply base and training ground in the colony. It was the ‘Aldershot of Natal’.35 There was no question of it being a suitable place for fortification and garrisoning in the time of war. Dominated by those hills, it would have been an absurdity. What British general, retreating before French or German invaders, would have dreamt of trying to take shelter within the walls of Aldershot?
Moreover, the terrain around Ladysmith compounded the disadvantages of choosing it as a place to defend. If White’s army was besieged there, a second force would have to be sent to relieve it. The relief force would have to march through that tangle of kopjes and ravines that White had seen from the train: the tangle that made the north bank of the Tugela a natural fortress for the besiegers. Yet only fifteen miles south of Ladysmith, at Colenso on the south bank of the Tugela, one returned to the veld, the familiar landscape of South Africa. It was to these smooth plains, watered by a series of rivers flowing down from the Drakensberg, that White could now retreat in safety. If the enemy proved too strong, he could then retreat, by stages, farther down the railway line.36 At all costs, as Buller had repeated over and over again, he must not let himself be besieged. ‘Do not go north of the Tugela.’37 Once locked up in Ladysmith, he would become a strategic liability. He had been given two strategic objectives as the commander of the Natal Field Force: to defend Natal, and to prepare the way for Buller’s invasion force. If he lost the initiative, he would sabotage Buller’s whole plan of campaign. He would also endanger the lives of his own men if he let them be shut up in a garrison town best known for its typhoid.38
Such was the case, both tactical and strategic, against acquiescing in a siege. White not only acknowledged this line of reasoning; he accepted that it was on balance overwhelmingly strong. The case against garrisoning Ladysmith was basically the case against garrisoning Dundee: it was the forward strategy that had proved so disastrous.39 Those political counter-arguments pressed by the Governor of Natal had already been proved to be exaggerated. Symons’s garrison had been sent packing from Dundee without precipitating a rising of either Afrikaners or Zulus. The military arguments for occupying Dundee had been buried with Symons in the graveyard below Talana. His death had proved the correctness of the conventional s
trategic textbooks: if a field force is to remain a field force and not become a helpless garrison, it must either destroy its opponents, or at least be able to keep open its lines of communication. If neither is possible, it must retreat.40 White knew that his force at Ladysmith, like Symons’s at Dundee, was stretched too thin to defend the railway line to the south. Why, then, not retreat, at least south of the Tugela? Those trains carrying mountains of beef and flour and ammunition into Ladysmith – why were they not now steaming back down the railway line towards Colenso?
Moreover, the political arguments that had tipped the balance, in White’s mind, in favour of the forward policy had now been transferred to the other end of the scales. Hely-Hutchinson, the Governor of Natal, had suddenly become extremely alarmed for the safety of Maritzburg, the capital. By concentrating his forces at Ladysmith, White had reduced the Maritzburg garrison to a handful of volunteers. ‘We are practically defenceless here and in Durban’, cabled the Governor, begging for reinforcements. There were unconfirmed reports that Joubert was planning to bypass Ladysmith, push through Zululand and strike for the coast.41 The Governor’s cri de coeur made one thing obvious. He would not have objected if White left Ladysmith. So why ever did White stay?
The answer was simple. White hoped there would be no question of a siege. He gambled on being strong enough, though outnumbered, to destroy Joubert by a ‘knock-down blow’.42
It may seem odd that White, of all men, was prepared to risk everything on this bold gamble. From the first, as we saw, he had felt demoralized. His fears for Dundee – momentarily allayed by the victories at Talana and Elandslaagte, then confirmed by Yule’s retreat – left him sleepless and mentally exhausted.43 In fact, the most sanguine commander would have felt anxious about the position of the Natal Field Force. Throughout that week, evidence of its weakness had accumulated. The intelligence officers reported that there were 24,800 Boers with forty guns (actually an overestimate) opposed to his own force of thirteen thousand and fifty odd guns. The Boer guns included the devastating Long Toms. True, the British had won their two victories. But these had only restored the strategic status quo; they merely redeemed the strategic errors of Symons. Moreover, neither was an unqualified tactical success. Talana had been marred by five hundred casualties, including the loss of Möller’s cavalry. A numerically superior British force had won the battle, but had suffered twice as many casualties as the enemy. At Elandslaagte, too, the British forces had had the advantage of numbers. What if General Kock had fought General French on equal terms, or just suppose the numbers had been reversed?44
The Boer War Page 24
