The Boer War

by Thomas Pakenham

  This was Buller’s strategic justification for his own change of plans. Given the ‘unholy terror’ of the High Commissioner, and Methuen’s fear that he might have to retreat all the way to Orange River,75 it cannot be dismissed out of hand. There was also the tactical advantage that at Colenso he ‘was closer to the point’ where he could join hands with White. Amery later castigated Buller, both for the decision to abandon what Amery called the ‘safer and better plan’ to go to Potgieters, and for the method Buller chose to attack Colenso.76 However, it must be said, on Amery’s side, that he had to write this volume of his history while the war was still in progress, and before Buller was able to give his own version of events.77

  Buller, at any rate, was ready to move on Thursday 14 December. He had already heliographed to Sir George White, ‘I have been forced to change my plans. Am coming through via Colenso and Onderbrook Spruit.’78 He posted a long, anxious despatch to Lansdowne and the War Office, explaining some of the reasons for the change of plan, notably the danger of his own force being cut off, though he tactfully avoided mention of Milner. ‘From my point of view,’ he said, ‘it will be better to lose Ladysmith altogether than to throw open Natal to the enemy.’79 In a cable to Lansdowne, he struck a slightly more confident note: ‘Today I am advancing to the attack and trying to force the direct road. I fully expect to be successful but probably at heavy cost.’80 He then called his commanding officers to the headquarters tent and briefed them, that Thursday evening, for the attack next day. No doubt they had all climbed the kopje and seen the enemy’s position through their glasses and telescopes. They had also the two maps at their disposal: Captain Herbert’s blueprint map, and Major Elliot’s sketch-map. Buller explained the plan to storm the river, and establish a ‘lodgement’ – we would say ‘bridgehead’ – where Botha’s men were at present dug in, to the river bank.81

  Despite Buller’s ignorance of certain details, one of which (as we shall see) was to play some part in his misfortunes, he knew the basic facts of the topography of Colenso, and the broad lines of Botha’s defence. This is shown not only by his own private and public letters and despatches, but by reference to the two maps themselves, both of which I have succeeded in tracing.82 In essence, Botha held a triangle of predominantly flat ground across the river, north of the village and railway station of Colenso. The triangle was formed on the south and east sides by the Tugela, which swung through ninety degrees after forming a quarter-circle north of the village; the hypotenuse was formed by the first tier of hills to the north-west, the whole triangle comprising about eight square miles. It was in this spot, relatively safe from artillery fire, that Buller hoped to make his lodgement.83 (See map on page 226.)

  But how could they cross the Tugela? The blueprint map showed three drifts (fords) facing the triangle of plain that Botha occupied. The first (the Old Wagon Drift, marked ‘1’ on the map) was close beside the wagon bridge. The second (marked ‘2’ and called Punt Drift) was inside a long, thin loop of the river, cutting obliquely into the plain; the third, (Bridle Drift, marked ‘3’ and on the course of a track) was about a mile to the west of the western end of the loop. There were also two bridges: the railway bridge (now dynamited) and the wagon bridge (called the Iron Bridge on the sketch-map – still intact, but probably laid with charges). Hence Buller believed – reasonably enough – that the best chance of crossing was to ford the river by the two southernmost (and hence safest) drifts shown on the maps upstream of the bridge: drifts 1 and 3.84 But this two-pronged attack presented grave difficulties.

  First, no one could say for certain that the river was fordable at these two drifts. The Tugela was not a gentle, muddy river like the Orange or the Modder. It came roaring down from the Drakensberg, a creature of sudden storms high in the mountains. Even during the present heat-wave, it might be just too deep for the soldiers to wade through.85 And though Buller had a string of pontoons ready to bridge the river, these could not be erected under fire. Second, it was obvious to Buller where Botha would put his strongest defence line: opposite the drifts. This was what made a river crossing such an agonizing undertaking: one’s inability to choose one’s own points of attack.86 Third, there was a chain of low kopjes immediately north of the dynamited railway bridge. These commanded much of the plain, though barely within rifle range of the two crossings. If his lodgement were to be successful, the kopjes would have to be stormed at heavy cost.87

  Such were the difficulties. Though Buller had greatly underestimated the skill with which Botha had dug his trenches, his general appreciation of the tactical problems does not seem too wide of the mark.

  But was there really no way round? With hindsight, people later were to point out a weak link in Botha’s chain of defences: a hill called Hlangwane, a hill on the south side of the Tugela, from which Botha’s position could be enfiladed by artillery. Why was Buller such a fool as to miss this chance of avoiding a frontal assault? Buller did not miss the tactical importance of Hlangwane. Nor did he – rightly – expect Botha to have missed it. He assumed that Botha would have extended his line of defences across the Tugela, to include Hlangwane. To seize it would thus be a difficult and complicated business. For Hlangwane was not an isolated hill. It was itself commanded by ridges of scrub-covered hills extending over six miles.88

  Why not then make the capture of Hlangwane the sole objective of the first day’s battle? Buller was, in fact, tempted. But he decided that the ‘bush-fighting’ it would involve – fighting in thick scrub – would be too difficult for his raw troops. Instead, he would seize Hlangwane after his lodgement was made. Botha would then be forced to evacuate it. For the present, he must trust to luck at Colenso – luck and the overwhelming weight of his fourteen thousand infantry, his two thousand, seven hundred mounted men and the weight of his forty-four guns.89

  In the headquarters tent Buller read out his orders to his commanding officers and explained the positions allotted to each unit. Burn-Murdoch, with the two regular cavalry regiments, was to protect the left flank of the infantry; Colonel Lord Dundonald with the mounted infantry and mounted irregulars, the right flank, as far as Hlangwane. Hildyard and his brigade would launch the main attack, storming the Old Wagon drift half a mile above the road bridge. Hart and the Irish Brigade would storm the smaller Bridle Drift three and a half miles higher up the river. The two other infantry brigades would be held in reserve: Lyttelton’s between the Irish Brigade and Hildyard’s; Barton’s between Hildyard’s and Dundonald’s mounted men. The artillery would, of course, begin the battle.90 Buller went up to Colonel Long – so he later gave evidence – and put his finger on the precise place on the blueprint map where he wanted Long to come into action. He was to take twelve field-guns and eight naval guns and prepare the ground for Hildyard’s attack. The rest of the artillery was divided: Lieutenant-Colonel L. W. Parsons was to prepare the ground for Hart’s brigade; the longer-range naval guns were to bombard the position from the rear.91

  Did these officers question these orders? There is a story that one was heard to murmur, ‘And may the Lord have mercy on our souls.’92 But no evidence exists, as far as I know, to corroborate this. On the contrary, as Lyttelton put it, ‘with anything like equality of numbers, we can drive them out of any position, however strong.’93 Buller’s generals accepted Buller’s line of reasoning. Colenso would be a hard nut to crack. But crack it they must, if they wanted to join hands with White and help him to extricate himself from Ladysmith.

  It was about 4.00 a.m. on Friday 15 December. John Atkins, the Manchester Guardian correspondent, woke to the sound of men and horses tramping and the cries of the African drivers to their mules. A cool, windless night, the prelude to a scorching day. Outside his tent, still not a spark of light. Atkins heard, rather than saw, Dundonald’s mounted column wind past his tent, the men chaffing each other about how they would like the ‘fun’ ahead, the horses throwing down their heads and coughing. There was ‘a steady, continuous, sweeping noise which resemble
d silence’.94 In other words, the hum of Buller’s war machine.

  At about 4.30 a.m. the sky paled. Atkins saw the field moving before his eyes: massed columns of infantry, still too vague for recognition, coiling and uncoiling until they found their places. The dust from their feet floated up ‘like an ethereal powder’, through which the column waded, the men waist-deep, the horses up to their bellies in this ‘white level tide’.95 Atkins was a poet of war, and ahead of his time. War, in his eyes, was more full of ironies than of heroes.

  One little incident struck him with especial force at this solemn moment. A Zulu driver in the column lashed out at his mule train with his right hand and his left hand dropped the concertina that he, like many Africans, carried on the march. The Zulu gave a sort of cry of despair, but he could not stop to retrieve it. A shout from the mounted infantry company behind: ‘Mind that concertina! Pass the word!’ The line of mounted infantry swerved. The next company followed suit: ‘Look out, mind the concertina! Mind the wind-jammer!’ The dancing sea of legs and hooves divided as each came to the precious object. The whole brigade passed, ‘hurrying on to use all the latest and most civilized means for killing men and destroying property’, tenderly leaving the concertina – an African’s concertina – unscratched on the veld.96

  On the hill beside the pair of 4.7-inch naval guns, Buller and Clery and their staffs were ready for the bombardment to begin another kind of music. No one had had much sleep that night. The formal battle orders, drafted by Buller and signed by Clery, had not been ready to distribute till 10 p.m.97 At 2.00 a.m. they had struck camp; a cup of tea and a hunk of bread, then they had ridden up to Naval Gun Hill, as the low rise was now christened.98 Behind them the oxen with the heavy baggage-tents, and the pontoon sections, ready to move forward when the lodgement was made. Buller, wearing a peaked cap and riding breeches, presented a striking and dominant figure. Four-square, a man in whom everybody, from private to brigadier, could trust almost blindly.99 He kept his misgivings even from his staff. Only to his wife did he reveal in a farewell letter – for bullets could carry a long way in a modern battle – his own wretched conclusion that to take a run at Colenso, the best chance they had, was itself a ‘forlorn hope’.100

  At 5.30 a.m. the 4.7-inch naval guns opened the bombardment. For more than an hour the guns raged across the kopjes beyond the broken railway bridge, sending red-brown columns of soil spurting high in the air. The lighter 12-pounders joined in. No reply from the Boers. Had they bolted?

  Then, about 6.30 a.m., the Irish Brigade, led by General Hart in close column, like troops on a field-day, tramped off towards the Bridle Drift, and the men heard for the first time a new sound, like the sound of rain beating on a tin roof, the sound Methuen had heard at Magersfontein: a tremendous roar of Mauser fire.101

  The ‘fun’ had started.

  Meanwhile, Louis Botha, wearing a small Transvaal cockade on his bush hat and a bandolier slung over his jacket, stood watching Buller’s majestic advance. At thirty-seven, Botha looked ridiculously young to command a whole Boer army, a stripling among the grey-bearded generals. He stood there calmly beside the 5-inch Krupp howitzer. He had spent the night there on the ridge, 250 feet above the plain, and two miles back from the Tugela, snatching a few hours’ sleep on the sandbags of the gun emplacement. Then, about one o’clock, they had woken him. There were lights moving to and fro in the camp far to the south: the Khakis; the British attack at last. The news spread rapidly along the Boers’ line, a thin line of slit-trenches and gun emplacements zig-zagging across hill and plain. Botha gave his final orders. They must hold their fire till the enemy reached the river bank. He would give the signal with a shot from the great howitzer.102

  About 4.30 a.m. the sky paled beyond Hlangwane; the darkness drained off the valley below. From the ridge they could see that ghostly dust cloud at Chieveley which John Atkins had seen from his tent door. And out of the dust came Buller’s army. One of Botha’s companions trained his telescope and saw ‘a long, wide, brown strip’, marching towards the river, as though marching on a parade ground.103 It was a sight that would have struck any professional soldier in the world with awe: sixteen battalions of infantry, supported by cavalry and heavy guns – the biggest British army to march into battle since the Battle of Alma, half a century earlier. Botha did not flinch. With the help of God, and the Tugela, they would smite the British. David in a bush hat against Goliath in khaki. Not that Botha would have compared himself to a biblical hero. He was a modest man.

  What a contrast between the styles of the two Commanders-in-Chief. A British C-in-C was a grand seigneur, withdrawn behind a ring of ADCs, isolated even from his brigadiers. Botha’s tent was open to the humblest burgher. It was an ordinary bell-tent, captured from Symons’s camp at Dundee and furnished with a packing-case and a stretcher chair.104 When an elderly burgher entered, Botha would give up the chair to him and sit on the ground. There he sat, as a procession of visitors tramped through the tent. He ate, drank, slept and wrote his official despatches under their gaze. It won everybody’s heart. Botha valued his privacy, but valued the confidence of his burghers still more. He took trouble with everything and everybody. He trusted in God – which of the Boers did not? – but left nothing to chance.105

  It was God, ably assisted by President Kruger, who had already helped Botha to emerge victorious from a serious crisis that week. In late November, as we saw earlier, he and Joubert and their three thousand burghers had retreated to the Tugela. Botha had then proposed at a council of war that they should fortify the line of the river itself. Other officers wanted to fall back to what seemed a stronger position four miles behind the river – the line of hills from Rooikop to Pieter’s Hill.106 The fact was that, as Buller had spotted (and contrary to the writings of many British journalists and historians in later years), the Tugela crossing at Colenso did not represent an impregnable position. Not by nature at any rate. Its main strength was the strength of the river.

  There were three weaknesses. First, there was the great length of the line that would have to be held at Colenso, owing to the series of drifts, at roughly two-mile intervals, by which the river could be forded. Second, there were the meanderings of the river southwards into the plain at this point; the southern part – in fact, the place where Buller intended to push his main attack – was barely within rifle range of the Colenso kopjes. Third, and most crucial, the eastern end of the Boer line would have to be extended across the river in order to retain control of Hlangwane.107

  So there was a case for retreating to a more conventional position on the hills farther back. It was much the same argument that De la Rey had found at Modder River and Magersfontein. Botha had dealt with it in the same way. The Boers had a secret weapon: the spade. Dig trenches in the tall grass along the river banks. Camouflage the trenches with stones. Scatter the soil behind, where it would be invisible. Dig dummy trenches on the skyline, where the British would expect them. Arm them with dummy guns, made of tree-trunks and corrugated iron. Dig away the stones in the river to destroy (or conceal) the drifts. This was the way to deal with the rooineks (red-necks) and their great General.

  Dig a trap for General Rooibull, ‘Red Heifer’. Bait it with a bridge – the iron road bridge that had been left intact, after the demolition of the railway bridge. This was the plan proposed by Botha, seconded by Joubert (before he had been forced by ill-health to retire to Volksrust) and patiently carried out by the burghers, the last fortnight, with the help of fifteen hundred reinforcements from Ladysmith, and a second army of commandeered African labourers.108

  Then, on Wednesday 13th, two days before the actual British attack, the blow had fallen on Botha. Buller’s troops marched forward to Chieveley and his naval guns began their artillery ‘preparation’. Botha would have welcomed this: the shells screamed harmlessly overhead, proof of Buller’s ignorance of their actual defence lines and a useful warning of the impending attack. But the mere noise of the bombardment, and the mere sig
ht of so many British troops, sent a shock wave through the burghers. Botha had despatched two commandos, eight hundred men, to defend Hlangwane (Bosch Kop – ‘Bush Hill’ – as the Boers called it). On Wednesday afternoon, most of these men – all the Zoutpansberg including their commandant, and part of the Boksburg Commando – rode back across the iron wagon bridge over the river and announced that the kop was untenable. Hlangwane, tactical key to the Boers’ defence, was now itself virtually defenceless.109

  It was a crisis like this that displayed both the weakness and the strength of the Boers’ citizen army. Military indiscipline of this sort – desertion by officers and men in the face of the enemy – was inconceivable in the British army. So was the telegraphic remedy. Botha at once despatched two telegrams: the first to the Boer lines outside Ladysmith, appealing for the help of the acting Commandant-General, Schalk Burger; the second to President Kruger at Pretoria. Burger was, like Joubert, somewhat ineffective. He sent Botha a cautious message of agreement. He could not come himself, as things were ‘also very dangerous’ at Ladysmith, and he sent Botha an ex-commandant, called Christian Fourie, to be his right-hand man. Fourie proved nothing but a handicap. It was Kruger, of course, who rose to the occasion. ‘God will fight for you,’ he reassured Botha. ‘So give up position under no circumstances You will keep all if you keep hold of kop, dead or alive. Kop can be almost strongest of all positions.’110