The Boer War

by Thomas Pakenham

  To underline this weakness, it emerged on that Tuesday, 24 October, that four of White’s battalions of infantry, supported by artillery and mounted troops, could not make much headway against a party of Boers dug into some hills at Rietfontein, eight miles north of Ladysmith. White had sent the brigade there to prevent the Free State Boers joining hands with the Transvaal Boers, and so cutting the line of Yule’s retreat. He had achieved this limited object, but the Boers held their ridge of hills and suffered little. The British on the contrary, lost 114 killed and wounded, including the CO of the Gloucesters, Colonel Wilford, who inexplicably broke cover at the height of the action and led forward to destruction one company and the battalion Maxim gun.45 Wilford was the third CO to die since the war had begun and the Natal Field Force had now lost seventy-three officers – proportionately twice as many as the men – a token of what The Times called ‘personal leadership at all risk’.46

  Such was the accumulated evidence of the first fortnight’s fighting. It only confirmed Buller’s original advice not to advance beyond the Tugela. Yet White still clung to the hope of dealing that knock-down blow. It was an error of judgement that was to have the most fatal consequences: the greatest strategic mistake of the entire war. Why, then, did White make it?

  To some extent, he was merely expressing the conventional British general’s ignorance of the realities of large-scale war. For half a century Britain had fought small wars against the disunited and ill-armed tribesmen of India and Africa. Often these wars had begun with shattering reverses; small bodies of men, surrounded by savages who gave no quarter, had fought to the last cartridge. In due course, the main British army would come on the scene and inflict a crushing and permanent defeat on the enemy. There was little strategic, or even tactical, manoeuvring, by European standards. To transport and supply his men in desert or jungle – that was the chief problem of the British general. The actual fighting was usually simple by comparison. So it had been for Roberts in Afghanistan, Wolseley in Egypt and Kitchener at Omdurman. The campaign might take months, but the decisive battle could be fought in a matter of hours. War was a one-day event, as practised on Salisbury Plain. Hence it was as natural for White to try to deal a knock-down blow to Joubert, as for Symons to try to deal one against Lucas Meyer.47

  But there was more to White’s error than inexperience of war. He was also a weak man. He knew that his force was inferior in many ways to Joubert’s. He believed that if he failed to beat Joubert in the field and he was locked up in Ladysmith, nothing could save Natal. Yet he lacked the moral strength to follow the logic of this and make a fighting retreat. Weak and vacillating and dominated by a fear of appearing so, he was now to stake everything on a single reckless throw.48

  On Thursday 26 October, White was still looking for a chance to strike out. The enemy was everywhere – and nowhere. The Africans reported them ‘like locusts on the land’. He realized he had failed to prevent the Free State forces joining those of the Transvaal. On Friday White learnt that the vanguard of the main Boer army had reached a position about four miles east of Ladysmith. He sent out French to reconnoitre, but recalled him when other Boer commandos, approaching from the north, seemed likely to outflank him.49 Meanwhile, Ian Hamilton’s scouts had reported that the enemy’s main laager was almost undefended. He asked for permission to launch a night attack on it with four battalions: the Royal Irish Fusiliers and his own battalion, the Gordons, to lead the attack, which was to begin at 1.00 a.m. White gave permission. Then his nerve failed him. Only two hours before the attack was to begin, Hamilton was informed, to his own bitter disappointment, that White had cancelled the operation because of the risks.50

  On Saturday, White’s forces lay low in Ladysmith, except for part of French’s cavalry, who made a desultory reconnaissance. On Sunday, White’s spirits recovered again – so it seemed. He cabled to Hely-Hutchinson, ‘Hope I have located a sufficiently strong force of the enemy with guns to make a good objective. Move out tonight with a view to attacking early tomorrow.’51 In fact, White’s new plan was of so wild a nature that almost all his staff-including Ian Hamilton – opposed it. ‘Let us wait until the enemy is nearer,’ they told him, ‘and then let us strike.’ But White was afraid this might be their last chance of striking out. Already the Boers had cut off the Ladysmith water supply. He insisted on fighting.52

  The Boers were reported to be holding a position centred on Pepworth Hill, the large conical hill on the Ladysmith side of Rietfontein, about four miles north-east of the town. That day, Sunday, the Boers could be seen building a gun platform there, presumably for one of the Long Toms. White accepted the challenge. He proposed to send his two infantry brigades to storm Pepworth. Now that Yule had reported sick, Colonel Geoffrey Grimwood, the senior colonel, was to take the first brigade, consisting of the men who had marched back to Ladysmith with Yule – that is, the Leicesters, the Dublins, and the 1st Battalion of the 6oth – plus the 2nd 60th and the Liverpools. Hamilton was to take the second brigade, consisting of the three battalions he had led to victory at Elandslaagte – the Devons, the Manchesters and the Gordons. Each brigade was to be supported by cavalry and artillery. The plan of attack was based on the success at Elandslaagte: first there would be an artillery barrage to soften the ground; then a flank attack would be launched on Pepworth by way of the hill to the east, capturing the enemy’s guns; finally, the cavalry would roll up the fleeing Boers, pursuing them over the plain to the north.53

  This was the basic plan-a rigid example of the old field-day formula. Its basic weakness was – that, as White himself had put it, he ‘hoped he had located a sufficiently strong force of the enemy with guns to make a good objective’.64 What if the Boers, all mounted and hence exceptionally mobile, decided not to provide the objective in the place he hoped? His plan did not allow any flexibility. It was like a series of chess moves devised without any regard for the moves of an opponent. And if the plan failed them, two British brigades would be forced to improvise one. They would be thrown back on to their own resources – a situation for which neither officers nor men had yet shown any great aptitude.

  Yet this was not the feature of White’s plan that alarmed his staff officers most. What gave it an air of absolute recklessness was that White proposed to send a second column on a night march through the enemy lines and station it at Nicholson’s Nek, four miles to the rear of Pepworth. In some respects, the scheme was like Symons’s reckless handling of his cavalry. Symons had merely given Möller and the 18th Hussars the option to act independently in the rear, and at least Möller’s force was a mobile one. Lieutenant-Colonel Carleton, the CO of the Royal Irish Fusiliers, selected by White to lead the expedition to Nicholson’s Nek, had been given no mounted troops of any sort. He had two battalions of infantry and the smallest of guns – a battery of mountain guns carried on mules. What Carleton was supposed to do was not entirely clear, certainly not to Carleton.55 But White himself had two broad objectives in mind. First, Carleton was to protect the west flank of the infantry brigades as they stormed Pepworth. Second, he was to block the enemy’s line of retreat as the cavalry pursued them across the plain.56 The man who had actually proposed the scheme was one of White’s Intelligence Officers, Major Adye. White had been greatly impressed. He was a ‘capital officer’, Major Adye, who knew ‘every inch of the ground’. He assured White that he could seize the position if they made a night march, and, despite the weakness of the column, they could hold it for two days at all events.57

  At 11 o’clock on Sunday night, Carleton’s column marched off on the track that led northwards to Nicholson’s Nek, silent except for the thud-thud of boots and the rattle of the two hundred pack mules that carried the mountain guns and the ammunition. Soon after midnight, like an endless roll of drums, Grimwood’s brigade, six miles of men and horses and guns and carts, trundled off along the Helpmakaar road to the east. Grimwood’s brigade was followed by Hamilton’s, led by Sir George White himself.58 He had been woken at 3.00
a.m. and rode out to command the force in person. He would be leading his own regiment, the ‘dear old 92nd’. As his staff officer, Colonel Rawlinson, passed the railway level-crossing, the first ominous reports reached them. Rawlinson met a ‘scared-looking soldier belonging to the Gloucester Regiment’. It turned out that Carleton’s column had already suffered a mishap; some pack mules had stampeded and vanished, carrying off the guns and spare ammunition.

  White made no change in his plans. Just as dawn broke, he and his staff reached – ‘Limit Hill’, a low ridge facing Pepworth.59 In a few moments Grimwood’s guns would open up from the folds of ground on their right, already silhouetted against the delicate tints of the eastern sky. It was going to be a perfect spring day.

  Now for the knock-down blow.

  A beaten army is not a pretty sight, except to the victors. There were no Boers to enjoy the sight of the British army in full retreat that morning. The Boers were still hidden beyond the hills. The witnesses were the British war correspondents. ‘What shame!’ wrote Steevens in a kind of paroxysm. ‘What bitter shame for all the camp. All ashamed for England! Not of her – never that! – but for her. Once more she was a source of laughter to her enemies.’60 The other war correspondents did not elaborate, except for Nevinson. He, too, was overwhelmed by the sight. ‘Imperturbable Tommy Atkins’: it was hardly the phrase that morning. Yet Nevinson had the courage to record what he saw: ‘They came back slowly, tired and disheartened and sick with useless losses … as soon as they were out of range the men wandered away in groups to the town, sick and angry but longing above all things for water and sleep.’61

  It was not only the fact of the retreat but the way that it was conducted that alarmed onlookers. The men’s nerve had broken. That was the plain truth of it. The iron bonds of regimental tradition – the acts of self-sacrifice over the years – had snapped after four hours’ shelling. Someone had blundered. The men knew that. And they did not do or die. They wandered back to the town.62

  Understandably, the regiments who had suffered most in the earlier actions were the first to crack. The Leicesters and the 60th, the men who four days before had staggered back down the road from Dundee with Yule’s column – now they were just parties of mud-stained men looking for water. The Gordons, the heroes of Elandslaagte, were a ‘rabble’ in kilts – so the officers said. There was only one bright spot to relieve this Battle of Ladysmith, alias ‘Mournful Monday’, the day a historian later called ‘one of the gloomiest days in the history of the British Army’.63 The British artillery, although outgunned by their Boer counterparts, covered the retreat. For a quarter of an hour one battery (the 13th – that is, Gunner Netley’s battery) received the weight of the Boer attack. (‘We are serving them up like Nelson did,’ wrote Gunner Netley afterwards, ‘only instead of hot potatoes it is “cough-no-more” remedies.’)64 The army gunners were joined by naval gunners using 12-pounders on improvised gun-carriages. These were men of a naval brigade landed from HMS Powerful, who had only reached Ladysmith on the morning of the battle. But nothing could redeem the abject state of the infantry. Even French’s cavalry came back in disorder. ‘A seething mass of clubbed and broken cavalry,’ according to one account, ‘streamed southwards into the open plain.65

  Among the civilians in Ladysmith the army’s retreat created consternation. All the morning they had watched the large yellow wagons, blazoned with a Red Cross, unload their gruesome loads at the Town Hall. ‘Number, rank, name and corps,’ the medical sergeant would call out, as the covers were lifted from the wagons. Sometimes there was no reply; the men had died of their wounds. About midday, when the army had begun to stream back into the town, the enemy’s shelling grew hotter. As 94-pounder shells, fired from the Creusot Long Tom on Pepworth, thumped into the town, consternation turned to panic. There was a stampede at the railway station.66

  In his headquarters on Convent Hill Sir George White waited as the reports came in. He had ridden back ahead of the main body, leaving two of his staff – Major-General Hunter and Colonel Rawlinson – to extricate the stragglers. He was shattered by what he had seen. Nothing had gone right for him. The main attack by Grimwood’s brigade had spent itself against air. The Boers had changed their positions during the night and worked round Grimwood’s flank.67 He had planned to roll up the Boers from the right. Instead, he had himself been rolled back into Ladysmith. The humiliation seemed total. It was the first time in the war that two large bodies of troops had met on apparently equal terms. Man for man, general for general, the British were no match for the Boers.

  Even now, White had not heard the worst. After Colonel Rawlinson had returned from bringing in the stragglers, he rode out again to see Colonel William Knox, left in charge of the reserve. Knox told him that earlier that day he had heard the sound of rifle fire in the direction of Nicholson’s Nek. At about 2.00 p.m. the heavy firing ceased, and Knox thought he heard the sound of a bugle call. With a sinking heart, Rawlinson rode back to report to his chief.68

  Later that evening, a Boer came in under flag of truce with a personal message from Joubert to White. After a brisk fight, Carleton’s column had hoisted the white flag. Both regiments and the gunners of the battery – 954 officers and men – had surrendered. This brought the casualties that day to a total of 1,272.69 It was the most humiliating day in British military history since Majuba.

  The ‘knock-down blow’ had fallen – on White himself, as he put it. He sent a brief cable to the War Office: ‘It was my plan and I take full responsibility.’70 Then he wrote a long, abject letter to his wife. At sixty-four he was too old for soldiering. His troops had lost confidence in him. He would be superseded – and rightly.71

  By Tuesday, Ladysmith was still not cut off. Yet White was so broken by the disaster that he would not consider the next strategic step: whether to abandon the town, burn the surplus stores and make a fighting retreat south of the Tugela. Probably it was now too late.72 The troops might have refused to obey orders.

  Two days later, the Boers cut the railway line to the south, and at 2.30 p.m. the telegraph line went dead. The siege had begun.73

  CHAPTER 14

  The Whale and the Fish

  SS Dunottar Castle and the Cape,

  14 October – 26 November 1899

  ‘My dear, the crisis – it’s almost too much to be borne —how that marvellous Milner bears up I can’t imagine, but he does and keeps his sense of humour that is much needed just now, until the troops come …’

  Lady Edward (Violet) Cecil to Lady Cranborne from Cape Town, autumn 1899

  The voyage proved as monotonous as everyone had expected.1 The Dunottar Castle had sailed from Southampton on the Saturday (14 October) after Kruger’s reckless ultimatum, amid those wild scenes of rejoicing and wild rumours of battles.2 Now here the passengers sat in basket chairs on the promenade deck, cut off from the world, the very picture of frustration. The special artist of The Illustrated London News sketched the scene: the General, Buller, his massive head under a yachting cap, talking to his ADC, Algy Trotter, who wore a striped blazer; behind them, also in a yachting cap, the boyish war correspondent of The Morning Post, trying to pick the brains of Buller’s staff.3 He was young Winston Churchill, and Churchill was finding the voyage ‘odious’. ‘Fourteen days is a long time in war,’ he wrote to his mother, ‘especially at the beginning.’4 Suppose the Dunottar Castle arrived at Cape Town to find the fighting over, as many soldiers feared.5

  This was not actually Churchill’s own forecast. He did not think the Boers would cave in after the first defeat. He believed (and he had heard it ‘on the best possible authority’) that Buller’s Army Corps would not begin the campaign till Christmas Day, and not reach Pretoria, by way of Bloemfontein, before the end of February. So he did not himself expect to be back home before the spring. Still, he should be in good time for the Derby!6

  At Madeira the Dunottar Castle – like her sister ship, the Tantallon Castle, on which Sir George White had sailed thr
ee weeks earlier – stopped to take on coal and land passengers. There were also war cables from England: the Boers had launched an invasion of both colonies. In Natal they had driven south towards Dundee. In the Cape Colony they had cut off Cecil Rhodes at Kimberley. The news was not unexpected. Buller himself seemed calm and detached.7

  To Tory politicians, accredited war correspondents and even Buller’s own headquarters staff on the ship – the so-called ‘brains of the army’ – the General’s aloofness seemed almost like arrogance.8 It was a flaw in his character – though common enough as a form of shyness – and a flaw that tended to make him enemies in high places. Perhaps what especially irritated such people was that towards strangers, and especially to ordinary working folk, he showed no such reserve. ‘You can catch me if you can, but I won’t pose for you,’ he playfully told the man with the ‘mutograph’ (a prototype of ciné-camera), sent to cover the expedition for the new Biograph film company. Then he let the man ‘catch’ him several times over: strolling across the deck in his bow-tie and straw hat on the way to the barber’s shop, and cheerfully shoving the white-whiskered captain of the ship, Captain Rigby, into the path of the camera so that he too, could have his turn. ‘The General is a gentleman, sir,’ the barber told the cameraman afterwards. ‘Just think how easily he talked to me, yes, he did all the time he was having his hair cut, and when a man came in for a pipe, and I told him to come later, the General up and said, “Why, give him his pipe, I am in no hurry.” ’9