The Boer War

by Thomas Pakenham

  Wauchope’s staff woke him about midnight. It was a night of Shakespearean tempest: moonless, with a furious wind from the north-west, and the distant rumble and flash of an African thunderstorm. ‘Quarter column!’ The four battalions lined up in the most compact formation in the drill-book: 3,500 men, 30 companies, 90 files, all compressed into a column 45 yards wide and about 160 yards long. Even so, it was almost impossible for the files to keep in touch. The Black Watch and the Argylls used long ropes, knotted every ten feet, held by the left-hand man of every file; the Seaforths and the HLI groped their way along as best they could. At the left-hand of the leading file of A company, Black Watch–that is, at the front left-hand corner of the great stumbling, heaving mass – marched Wauchope with his claymore. Beside him were his ADC and Major Benson, a staff officer carrying a compass in each hand.23

  A night march by compass bearing is a delicate and dangerous manoeuvre. It is one thing in Egypt, marching over a carpet of sand under a starlit sky – as Wauchope had marched, the night before the Battle of Omdurman. How different in this plain under the shadow of Magersfontein, strewn with rock holes and ant-heaps and thorn-bushes, on the night of a tempest! Yet despite everything, despite the lightning that flashed blue on the rocks and the rain that deluged the compass, Major Benson kept his head. He tacked and veered, but he led the brigade to very nearly the spot Methuen had indicated. As the sky began to lighten, the brigade found itself about a thousand yards from the ridge.24 The storm had blown itself out, and on the papery sky ahead was printed the prow-shaped silhouette of Magersfontein Kopje.

  There were many reasons for the disaster that now loomed over the British infantry. Dominating everything was Methuen’s ignorance of the enemy’s position. For this Methuen cannot be altogether exonerated. One more day at Modder River, and he could have arranged an aerial reconnaissance – launched the war balloon Buller had sent up the railway on the eve of the battle, and tried to spy out the enemy’s line of trenches.25 As it was, he had ordered the Highland Brigade blithely into the trap De la Rey had set up at Magersfontein, just as he had sent his army into the trap set for them on the Modder. But Wauchope, too, displayed a recklessness that was to compound Methuen’s mistakes. His brigade was now within a thousand yards of the kopje he thought the enemy held – nine hundred yards from the line of trenches that was their actual position. Benson halted and turned to Wauchope.

  ‘This is as far as it is safe to go, Sir, in mass.’

  ‘I’m afraid my men will lose direction. I think we will go a little further,’ Wauchope replied.26

  What Wauchope meant by ‘losing direction’ is impossible to guess. The sky was lightening. Because of the storm, they were already late – as much as an hour later than planned. To extend the ninety lines of men, marching shoulder to shoulder, to three lines of men extended at five yards would take at least ten minutes. Now was the time: when the men could already see well enough to carry out the manoeuvre, and before the enemy could see well enough to open fire. This was not only Benson’s view, but that of at least two of the battalion commanders. The column marched on in mass, Wauchope and his ADC alone at its head.27

  The Boers waited in their hidden trench line till the leading files – A and B companies of the Black Watch – were about four hundred yards away. Perhaps they heard the belated command: ‘Open order, march!’ Perhaps they saw the flicker of the bayonets. A single shot from the kopje.28 Then a river of flame from the trenches, that made one sergeant of the Argylls later say it was as though ‘someone had pressed a button and turned on a million electric lights’. And there was a ‘great roaring in the ears’, as though a dam had burst its walls.29

  Even now, the battle was not lost for Methuen. The war correspondents, still asleep in their camp when the battle opened,30 or waking to hear the fusillade in the half-light of dawn, as faint as the noise of rain drumming on a window-pane, wrote later of the battle being lost in the first wild moments of that fusillade.31

  But it was not like that. Most of the Boers’ first shots went high. In the British column there was a moment of paralysis – of nightmare, prolonged, people thought, for minutes, though actually lasting only a few seconds. Then a babel of orders: advance, retire, left, right – anything: and some joined a stampede to the rear.32 After this spasm, discipline reasserted itself. Wauchope stood, calmly saying to his ADC, his cousin, Lieutenant A. G. Wauchope, ‘This is fighting, A.G.’ He told the. Black Watch to extend to the right. Their colonel fell, shot dead. But most of A, B and C companies began to crawl forward; then scraped themselves some cover behind rocks and ant-hills. The Argylls also lost their colonel, but they, too, managed to deploy. The Seaforths were hopelessly confused with the Argylls, but they had few casualties at this stage. The CO of the Highland Light Infantry was trampled in the stampede, but his battalion regrouped.33

  What followed for the next nine hours was a duel on the same pattern as the preceding battle. Methuen had tried to play Belmont tactics on Cronje and De la Rey; they had succeeded in playing Modder tactics on him. The sun rose to find the Highlanders pegged down here on the plain, just as the Guards had been pegged down in front of the Riet River.34

  A movement of a hand, the flash of a canteen tin, even the twitch of an ankle attacked by ants – the price was paid in Mauser bullets.35 Once again, it was the British artillery that saved the British infantry. The gunners brought their field-guns well within rifle range – within 1,400 yards – of the enemy. That morning they met no opposition from the Boers’ own guns, except for three pom-poms.36 Blessed by their absence, and the calm sunny weather, Methuen launched his aerial reconnaissance force: the captive balloons, manned by Captain Jones and some engineers, and connected to Methuen’s field HQ by cable and telephone. In fact, Cronje had somehow left a gap about 1,500 yards wide in the eastern part of the Boers’ line – that is, between the end of the great trench at the foot of Magersfontein Kopje and the beginning of the defences on the ridges running down to the river.37

  People have argued that, even now, Methuen and his army could have blundered into victory. Almost anything is possible in the war of might-have-beens. Methuen should have rushed his reserves into the gap; in other words, the Guards should have punched a hole in the Boers’ left, just as Pole-Carew’s brigade had broken their right at Modder River. So runs the scenario of the sand-tables.38 But Methuen had to fight a real battle. He could not have known the size of the gap. And at Magersfontein he had many handicaps. First, Prinsloo was no longer commanding the Free Staters, and they held their ground. Second, the Transvaalers had mustered over six thousand riflemen – not two thousand, as at the Modder.39 Finally, though Methuen now had three brigades instead of two, he felt that the third must be held ready to parry a blow against his camp. This left only the Gordons and the Guards Brigade free to try to slip through the gap. And, if Methuen failed to seize the chance, the balloon confirmed that the chance was short-lived. Before many of the Guards could have been thrown forward, Captain Jones spotted some Boers (who had arrived there by accident) galloping across to seal off the gap.40

  As it was, Methuen remained almost like a spectator of the day’s humiliations. He sat on a cart in the shadow of the balloon on Headquarter Hill. He had never envisaged what he would do if the Highlanders’ attack failed. To prevent them being driven back – that was now his only concern. In this he very nearly succeeded. He sent some Gordons forwards to reinforce the centre;41 the Guards were used to block the Boers on the east. Casualties they had, but less than twenty were killed. Lieutenant-Colonel Alfred Codrington, CO of the Coldstream Guards, was hit in the right ankle; he called, ‘Outer, right low.’42 Britain’s premier Marquis, Major Lord Winchester, was shot dead; it was said he had turned his back on the enemy to watch the captive balloon.43 But Cronje, like Methuen, was cautious about seizing his opportunities.44 The shadows shortened.45 Disaster passed into stalemate. Men fell asleep over their rifles. Terror gave way once more to boredom.46

  And
then, like a frayed steel cable, the nerve of the Highlanders suddenly failed.

  Up to this moment, most of them had withstood their ordeal with stoicism. About two hundred men of the Black Watch and the Seaforths had even reached the east face of the Magersfontein Kopje, where they had been captured or shot, or killed by their own artillery. (By chance, some parties had trickled through the actual gap in the Boer line, when they stumbled on seven Boers, led by Cronje himself, who had lost his way in the storm. ‘Skiet, kerels, skiet hulle!’ – ‘Shoot, fellows, shoot them!’ – roared Cronje, and the Highlanders were rounded up.)47’ Now, after nine hours of terror and boredom, nine hours without water in that scorching sun, the Highlanders could take no more.

  About one o’clock Lieutenant-Colonel James Hughes-Hallett, the Seaforths’ CO, found some Boers working round his right flank, and ordered two companies to trickle back a few hundred yards.48 Lieutenant-Colonel George Downman, the Gordons’ CO, gave similar orders.49 But the trickle became a flood, and the flood an avalanche. One of the officers described it: ‘I saw a sight I hope I may never see again: men of the Highland Brigade running for all they were worth, others cowering under bushes, behind the guns, some lying under their blankets, officers running about with revolvers in their hands threatening to shoot them, urging on some, kicking on others; staff officers galloping about giving incoherent and impracticable orders.’50

  The pipes skirled, the officers cursed. The men, obedient to their instincts, melted away into the veld. When the ambulance men went out next day to collect the dead and wounded – 902 on the British side, 236 on the Boer side – they found Wauchope dead, within two hundred yards of Cronje’s trenches.51 But most of his brigade died with their backs to the enemy.

  From Headquarter Hill, Methuen impassively watched the destruction of the Highlanders. Perhaps his own dreams of military glory died with Wauchope. He was bitter, yet stoical. Only bad luck, he believed – and Wauchope – had cost him the victory. Now ‘there must be a scapegoat,’ he wrote, ‘so I must bear my fate like a man, holding my tongue’.52

  Even now there was a sliver of hope: the Boers might retreat during the night, as they had retreated after the Modder.

  Soon after dawn next day, the balloon rose, its huge membrane flushing pink and gold as it climbed out of the line of shadow. Captain Jones’s telephoned report dispelled Methuen’s last illusions. The Boers, masters of the new warfare of the western front, were holding fast in their trenches.53

  CHAPTER 19

  ‘Where are the Boers?’

  Tugela River, near Ladysmith, Natal,

  11–15 December 1899

  ‘I think with luck that we shall give the Boers a good hiding this side as we have a strong force in all arms …’

  Lt Algy Trotter, Buller’s ADC, to his mother, Frere, 11 December 1899

  ‘God zal voor u strijden … En als kop behouden blijft, dood of levend, dan behoudt gij alles.’

  (‘God shall thus fight for you … If you hold the hill, dead or alive, you hold everything.’)

  President Kruger to Botha,

  13 December 1899, telegram no. 39

  ‘Now where are the Boers?’ asked the distinguished-looking staff officer on the kopje at Frere. It was 11 December. Still unaware of Methuen’s repulse, the other half of Buller’s army, under his own personal command, were facing Colenso, twelve miles to the north.1 In the extraordinarily clear light you could not miss the Colenso position, where Botha, the opposing general, apparently had his laager. There were tier on tier of rust-coloured kopjes, sweeping up from the tree-lined bed of the Tugela River to culminate in the peak of Bulwana. Beyond Bulwana was Ladysmith.2 Its heliograph flashed occasionally, plaintive, inscrutable.3 But where were the Boers?

  ‘I’ll show you, sir,’ said the captain of the picket. Sitting beside them were the usual mixed bag of Boer-watchers: a naval officer off-duty; some war correspondents (including John Atkins, of The Manchester Guardian, who recorded the scene). There was also a team of heliographists with a tripod. The Boer-watchers picked up their field-glasses, like race-goers studying a distant fence.4

  ‘The biggest camp is under Grobler’s Kloof among those trees.’ ‘I don’t see it.’

  ‘They’re pretty well hidden, sir; they’re devils for hiding themselves.’

  ‘You see this kraal?’

  ‘The far one?’ ‘No, just below this hill.’ ‘Yes.’

  ‘Very well. Look over that, and you see a white road winding up to the left. Got that, sir?’

  ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, look over the left tree, and you’ll see a reddish low hill.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, there’s the camp to the left of it. Quite plain. I can see with the naked eye now.’

  There was an embarrassed silence, as it became clear that the staff officer was looking in the wrong direction. Not that the right direction held much more to see.

  ‘I believe they’ve bolted,’ said the staff officer after a pause. Under his breath one of the privates added, ‘I ain’t seen nothing. ’Ope they ’aven’t gone. We’ll ’ammer you, Kroojer, my son.’5

  The scene that John Atkins saw from the kopje above Frere had one feature in common with the scene Julian Ralph had witnessed a month earlier at the kopje by Orange River. They were fighting shadows. How many Boers were lying in wait beyond the tree-lined banks of the Tugela? Five thousand? Ten thousand? Or had they melted away at the heavy tread of Buller’s army? The Field Intelligence Department (FID) put the enemy’s numbers on the Tugela at about seven thousand.6 It was anybody’s guess. And how were they disposed? Reconnoitring the enemy’s position here at the Tugela was just as difficult as at the Modder. Neither proper reconnaissance nor an accurate survey of the terrain was possible, though later Buller was to be severely blamed for his ignorance of the enemy’s position.7

  All that week, while the Boer-watchers scanned the scene through their field-glasses, Major Elliot and an armed party of gunners, twenty-five strong, had tried to make a trigonometric survey of the line of the Tugela, and the Boers had hunted them like game.8 Hence Buller had to rely on the FID survey of the area prepared in Maritzburg. This was an inch-to-the-mile map reproduced as a blueprint, and based on railway and farm surveys, and on a micro-filmed map sent by carrier-pigeon from Ladysmith. Like an explorer’s map, the blueprint bore the bold legend: ‘Vacant spaces indicate that data… is wanting rather than that the ground is flat.’9 With the FID map, as with choice of generals, the lack of mounted troops and the strategy of the campaign itself, Buller had to make the best of a bad job.10

  Now he had decided to try to force the passage of the Tugela at Potgieters Drift, a ford fifteen miles higher upriver. The Boer-watchers still thronged the kopje at Frere, as the heliographists beside them began to work the morse key, attached to the mirror on the tripod. ‘Clear line. No 72. Cipher nth December … I propose to march with three brigades, two regiments of cavalry, 1,000 volunteers, five batteries of field artillery, and six naval guns to Springfield on the 13th … I may be disappointed….’11

  Poor Buller. It was to be the understatement of the war.

  In the last fortnight, Frere had presented an extraordinary spectacle. It was hardly a village, just a station-master’s house, a hotel and three other buildings on the railway line from Durban to Ladysmith and beyond. Southwards, lay the meandering wagon road that led to Estcourt, and the crisp arc of the railway line; to the north, the ramparts of kopjes along the Tugela; far to the north-west, the jagged mountain walls of the Drakensberg, over eleven thousand feet at the peak, flushing gold at dawn and wrapped in the smoke of grass fires at sunset, like the bloom on a black grape. Otherwise, Frere had been a speck of corrugated iron in an ocean of sunburnt grass.12

  That was the old Frere, the Frere that the colonists had named in honour of Sir Bartle and his forward policy. Now it was a speck of corrugated iron in a city of white tents. Four infantry brigades (sixteen battalions), with two regiments of cavalry and other mounted troops – about nineteen thousa
nd men – had tramped its dusty main street since Buller’s Army Corps had come steaming up from Durban. The trains still kept coming: a seven-car hospital train, with a distinguished doctor in charge, Dr Treves, the Queen’s personal surgeon;13 a train-load of sailors, with a naval searchlight which could flash a message in morse code sixty miles by way of the clouds;14 trains full of terrified horses, half dead after the journey up from the coast; trains full of strange-looking bales and crates, spare parts for the 4.7-inch naval guns, sections of pontoon bridges, drums of telephone cable.15

  To the roar and whistle of the trains, and the calls of the camp bugles, were added other more exotic sounds. Down in the bed of the Blaauw Krantz River lay the iron structure of the railway bridge, twisted and slashed like a jungle creeper. Botha’s men had sliced it up with dynamite during their retreat from their raid on south Natal. Now you could hear the chant of the African labourers building the ‘deviation’ – a temporary railway line laid across wooden trestles. Then there were the yells of the African drivers of the trek oxen – hoarse cries, like parrot calls.16 ‘Ai, Ai, beauty!’ cried the drivers in Zulu, flicking their bamboo whips over the animals’ backs with a double crack like a Mauser shot. Then the sixteen-span ox wagons would grind forward again, like some monstrous insect, over the desert of rutted tracks and dried-up watercourses.17

  To the ordinary British privates, the halt at Frere provided a welcome relief. They were dazed by the heat. (At 102°F in the shade, it seemed hot even to some of the colonists.)18 They were dazed by their surroundings. They had been travelling ever since the Army Corps had been mobilized in October: two months in which they had been shipped out in overcrowded troop ships,19 packed into cattle trucks and pitched out in the heat of an African midsummer. Few, if any, could be said to be in fighting trim, as there had been no room on the boat for proper exercise. About half were reservists, white-faced men who had come straight from jobs in offices or (like the miners of the Durham Light Infantry) from jobs underground.20 Yet morale was high enough, and rose higher when Buller himself reached Frere on 6 December. ‘Buller’s arrival was almost everything,’ wrote John Atkins, a veteran of the Spanish-American War. ‘I have never seen troops re-tempered like this by one man since I saw the extraordinary change which came over the American army on the sudden arrival of General Miles before Santiago.’21 Probably few of the English privates could have explained what they felt about Buller. But he was their General, and they believed in him. To beat ‘Mr Kroojer’ should be easy enough for a great man like Buller.22