Armed with these telegrams, Botha called a council of war that Wednesday evening. The position demanded both tact and subtlety. Many of the officers were openly in favour of abandoning the entire river line. Botha believed that the commandant of the part of the Boksburg Commando still left on Hlangwane could not be trusted. So he agreed on a temporary compromise: the Boksburgers should abandon Hlangwane, but the Tugela should be held. Meanwhile, the telegraph lines to Pretoria, that two-hundred-mile-long thread on which everything depended, hummed far into the night.111
Next morning, a second thunderbolt arrived from Oom Paul:
Gentlemen, I have received report that you gave up position. Understand please, if you give up position there, you give up the whole land to the enemy. Please stand fast, dead or alive, each man at his place, and fight in the name of the Lord. The Kop on the other side of the river must not be given up because then is all hope gone with it…. And fear not the enemy but fear God…. If you give up position, and surrender country to England, where will you go then?112
What an opportunity now existed for Buller, had his scouts realized that Hlangwane had been evacuated; or if, by luck, he had timed his attack to follow one day’s bombardment instead of two. As it was, Botha called a second council of war on Thursday, while the shells from the second day’s bombardment threw up red and grey plumes of earth from the empty kopjes above his trench lines. Botha read out Kruger’s telegram to the officers. ‘Fear God not the enemy.’113 And not only fear God – fear Oom Paul. ‘Where will you go then?’ This was the cri de coeur of the volk, the voice of the trekkers echoing across the century. It was the philosophy of the Last Stand, Afrikaner-style, the ultimate appeal to put their backs to the wall, even if the wall was actually a hill more than a hundred miles inside British territory.
The council of war reversed its decision. The commandants drew lots. After sunset eight hundred men of the Wakkerstroom and Standerton Commandos were sent across the wagon bridge to reoccupy the kop.114
Although exhausted by thirty-eight hours without sleep (‘half dead with my troubles,’ he said himself), Botha found time to send an exultant telegram to Kruger. It was written in the style Kruger expected: ‘The hand of the Lord,’ said Botha, ‘has protected us.’
The British guns were trying to draw their fire in order to locate their positions. He had ordered their own guns not to fire until the enemy came within easy rifle range. He believed he knew where the main attack would be made: on the wagon bridge. ‘With all their wagons and cannons they cannot come anywhere but over the bridge’.115
In general, Botha’s plan of defence was a rough-and-ready affair (like Buller’s plan of attack). He had had to extend his four thousand, five hundred men to cover all the main crossing points: a third of them – the Free Staters, and the Middelburg and Johannesburg Commandos – on the edge of the plain opposite Robinson’s Drift, a fourth drift eight miles upstream from Colenso; the Ermelo Commando in flat ground opposite the Bridle Drift (this was, in fact, to be Buller’s second point of attack); the Zoutpansberg and Swaziland Commandos to cover the Punt Drift at the end of the great western loop; the Heidelberg, Vryheid and Krugersdorp Commandos in the kopjes and along the river bank covering the central loop, the one to the north of Colenso itself; and the Wakkerstroom and Standerton Commandos completing the line on the bushy slopes of Hlangwane, four and a half miles east of Colenso. It was an excellent plan of defence, given Botha’s great inferiority in numbers of men and artillery, though Botha was especially weak at the old Wagon Drift (the one which Buller was, in fact, making the first point of attack). No doubt Botha was relying on the trouble his men had taken to destroy or, at any rate, conceal the drifts.116
However, the plan was not, as it appeared, merely a plan of defence. One of the reasons for putting fifteen hundred men at Robinson’s Drift was to enable them to counter-attack by crossing the river. In fact, Botha’s overall plan was exceptionally daring. He was not content to let the Khakis knock their heads against a wall of Mausers, as Cronje had been content at Magersfontein. He hoped to lure the leading battalions across the river at the wagon bridge. Then his two wings – his right at Robinson’s Drift and his left on Hlangwane – would counter-attack, and the trap would snap shut.117
It was about 5.20 a.m. on Friday when the British naval guns began their bombardment. For the third day in succession, Botha watched the shells searching the kopjes above his trench lines. Originally, he had put one of his 3-inch Krupp field-guns on the kopje nearest the river – at Fort Wylie. But after the previous days’ bombardment of that kopje, and because of a report that one of the men there had defected to the British, he moved the field-gun down from the top of this kopje, and the Krugersdorpers to a trench line in front. Now the British shells broke over the hill in cascades of red rock and earth, far away from the nearest burgher.118 Meanwhile, Botha’s telegraph director kept Pretoria informed with a blow-by-blow account of events: ‘5.20 a.m. De vyand hebben een paar schoten met kanon geschieten…. The enemy has fired a few shots with cannons…. 6.00 a.m. Heavy cannon fire now takes place. Our cannon still keeps dead silent.’119
But just then something occurred that no one – least of all Botha – had expected. And Botha realized that the moment for silence had passed. The long, wide brown strip of attackers had divided into three columns. The central column — actually Hildyard’s brigade – began to march forwards in the direction of the wagon bridge. But it was not the infantry who led it. Riding out at least a mile ahead of them were the gunners of Buller’s artillery: twelve field-guns in front and six naval guns behind.
Botha stared in amazement. He did not know much about conventional warfare. But he knew that artillery was designed to support the forward line of infantry from the rear, not the other way round. The twelve field-guns halted about a thousand yards from the Tugela, facing the trenches where the Krugersdorp Commando were hidden in the river bank below Fort Wylie. Botha weighed the chances. Once his men showed themselves, goodbye to the hope of luring the infantry across the wagon bridge. But if the British field-guns opened fire at such close range, they could smash his thin defence lines. The burghers begged Botha to give the signal. Surely the Khakis were close enough now.120
A moment later, the British gunners – they were the batteries commanded by that fire-eater, Colonel Long – unhooked the leading twelve guns from the limbers. A final arabesque, as the drivers, in parallel arcs, took the limbers to the rear. ‘Battery fire 15 seconds … fuse 20!’ The orders floated quietly across the plain towards the river, as though the batteries were on field-day by the Thames.
It was enough for Botha. The great Krupp howitzer boomed out high on the ridge, and an answering wave of Mauser fire – the most violent fire-storm of the war, even more violent than at the Modder and Magersfontein – swept over Long and his doomed gunners.121
CHAPTER 20
‘A Devil of a Mess’
Colenso, Natal,
15 December 1899
‘My own plan is that about the 15th December we shall have in South Africa a nice little Army & all the materials for a respectable war except the enemy.’
Moberly Bell, manager of The Times, to L. S. Amery, 13 October 1899
In the great camp at Frere, ten miles to the south, there was hardly a soldier left, except the staff of the field hospitals. They, too, were now leaving for the front, glad to see the last of sweltering Frere. Gone were the squares and boulevards of white tents. In their place, printed on the bald earth, like a photographic negative, were the tent lines, dotted with empty bully-beef and biscuit tins.
In No. 4 Field Hospital the staff were in especially good humour. Today was the day. They were going up to the front line at last. Their orders were to pitch camp at Colenso, on the banks of the Tugela. Already they could hear the rumble of Buller’s naval guns, the prelude to the advance – the ‘walk-over’, as everyone spoke of it. The men began to pack the medical equipment into sacks, boxes and panniers.1
/> Dr Treves, the Queen’s surgeon, suddenly transported from Harley Street to the front line, was the doctor in charge of No. 4 Field Hospital. Treves watched a fatigue party of grave-diggers, the symbols of death, march jauntily past the door of his tent. It struck him that this devil-may-care attitude was characteristic of the private soldiers’ attitude to death. They had learnt now to hide their feelings behind the screen of tobacco smoke and the gallows humour. Treves was a gentle and percipient man. He recognized that the cheerfulness of No. 4 Field Hospital was not all that it seemed either. With the red cross on their arm-bands, they, too, carried the symbols of death.2
Ahead of the field hospitals marched a strange procession, two thousand volunteer stretcher-bearers, who were also political symbols. Buller had raked them up from any source at hand. The War Office ambulances were notoriously unsuited to the stony veld, so Buller had cut through the red tape, and recruited these ‘body-snatchers’. The majority were Uitlander refugees from Johannesburg, who had failed to find places in any of the various irregular corps but still wished to do their bit. About eight hundred were members of Natal’s Indian community, led by a twenty-eight-year-old barrister, whose name would one day be known to more men than either Kruger’s or Chamberlain’s: his name was Mohandas Gandhi. Gandhi had announced in Durban that the Indian community wished to give active expression to their loyalty to the Empire; unable to fight, they would serve as stretcher-bearers.3 Years later, men might wonder why Mahatma Gandhi, the anti-imperialist and the arch-pacifist, had served as a non-combatant in an imperial war. At the time, it seemed natural enough to the British. Here was one of the ‘subject peoples’ showing the solidarity of the coloured races in the ‘white man’s war’.
Dr Treves’s hospital staff had embarked on the train that was supposed to bring them to Colenso. They had already heard rumours that the Boers had fled, and that ‘no living thing was to be seen on the heights beyond the river’. But Treves was puzzled by the sounds of battle, as they steamed towards Colenso, past the wrecked armoured train, and up the incline to Chieveley. All that artillery and rifle fire, and the barking of the pom-pom: was it really a walkover?
Outside Chieveley station, the train was met by a galloper with orders for Dr Treves to go at once to Naval Gun Hill. Things were not going too well.4 There was trouble with Long’s guns. And, over on the left, the Irish Brigade had got itself into a devil of a mess.
It was still dark when the Irish Brigade had paraded under their commander, Major-General Hart. Hart had excelled himself that morning. First, he gave the brigade half-an-hour’s drill, as though it were an ordinary parade on the barrack square at Aldershot. Then he marched off the battalions in close order, as though they were on Salisbury Plain. He himself rode ahead, accompanied by an African and a Natal colonist, to help him find the ford described in their orders as ‘the Bridle Drift’. Next came the 2nd Dublin Fusiliers, advancing in fours by the right. The three other battalions – 1st Inniskillings, 1st Connaught Rangers and Border Regiment – marched in mass of quarter-columns. It was a drill-block advance and, like Wauchope’s advance at Magersfontein, it seemed to several of Hart’s officers to be asking for trouble. Colonel C. D. Cooper, the Dublins’ CO, tried to open out the battalion to twice the parade-ground interval: about twenty yards. Hart countermanded the order. He liked to keep the men ‘well in hand’ – that is, in the old Balaclava-style formations – and saw no reason for funk. Indeed, as the brigade marched along over the flat veld, everything seemed extraordinarily peaceful.5
It was a beautiful morning, like a June morning in England. The men marched at ease. They carried little, apart from rifles and ammunition pouches, as they had left their greatcoats and canteens on the wagons. There was the usual bantering in the ranks: Where was Johnny Boer? Where was old Kroojer?
Across the river, the sun threw into relief tier after tier of kopjes, culminating in the bulk of Grobelaar’s Kloof, about a thousand feet above the river. Nothing stirred over there, except a few black specks. Boer scouts, no doubt. At about 5.30 a.m. the British naval guns began the preliminary bombardment. Still no reply from the Boers, although by now one of the Inniskilling officers had pointed out a Boer field gun half-hidden in an emplacement high on a kopje. Hart rode on, and behind him the men tramped through the long grass, wet with dew. Overhead, the 4.7-inch shells boomed like Big Ben, and continued to splosh into the apparently deserted ridges north of the long, sprawling loop of the river on their right.6
By this time, patrols of the cavalry regiment sent by Buller to protect Hart’s left flank – the Royal Dragoons, under Colonel Burn-Murdoch – had already ridden down to the river bank. They were told by an African they met there that the Boers were dug into trenches and ‘sangars’ (walls of stones thrown up to protect riflemen); the African had himself crossed the river that morning after supplying the Boers with milk. By now the cavalry could actually see large bodies of Boers moving across the river ahead of Hart’s column and to the left. They sent three gallopers in succession to warn Hart of the danger. Hart replied that he did not intend to take any notice of the Boers unless they attacked him in force. The Royals must protect his left flank. He intended to cross, as ordered, by the Bridle Drift ahead.7
About 6.15 a.m. Hart reached a patch of mealie plough about 300 yards from the beginning of the loop. He could see the river clearly now. The red, crumbling banks were about 360 feet apart, 15 to 20 feet deep, and lined with dusty green bushes. Between them, swollen with Wednesday’s rain, ran the Tugela: brown, and unruffled by shallows. Where was the ford?
At this moment the African guide did something that caused Hart intense disquiet and annoyance. The official Field Intelligence Department blueprint map and the gunners’ sketch-map both put the Bridle Drift well to the west of the beginning of the loop – about a mile to Hart’s left along the track to the left that Hart was following. The African guide pointed into the loop itself, a mile ahead and to the right. It was up there, the drift, the interpreter explained, and it was the only drift.8
Now Hart knew enough about war to know that there are few more dangerous places to send men on a battlefield than into a salient – the open end of a loop. To march into a well-defended salient is like putting your head into a noose. There were many other choices open to him. The best, in the light of events, would have been to push forward patrols to try both crossing points, meanwhile halting the column, and sending a galloper to tell Buller of his problem. But Hart was not the man to halt, nor to share his problems with Buller. In fact, the maps were correct: the Bridle Drift was a mile to the west. He got it into his head that both his official orders, and the two maps prepared by teams of intelligence staff and gunners, had misplaced the Bridle Drift by several miles. There was no evidence for this, except the word of the African guide, who spoke no English.
Hart did not hesitate. He put himself in the hands of the African guide, and put his head in the noose.9
For at this moment, Botha, three miles farther east, had just given the signal from the great Krupp howitzer. The first Creusot shell pitched into the ground ahead of the Dublins; the second shell passed over the whole brigade; the third fell just ahead of the Connaught Rangers; the fourth splashed into the centre of the Connaughts. They were followed by a storm of Mauser fire from somewhere beyond the river bank.10
Even now, Hart could have avoided disaster to his brigade. His men, once they deployed, would not have suffered too heavy casualties – although pinned down by an invisible enemy, like Methuen’s brigades at Modder River. Some of the Dublins in fact lay down and began to return the enemy’s fire. Hart ordered them forwards. The African guide had vanished at the first burst of firing. Hart could see that there was an African kraal at the end of the loop about a mile ahead. He gathered from the interpreter that this was the place where the Africans’ ford lay. And on he led his men into the loop, commanded on three sides by an invisible enemy, firing into his men at a range of a few hundred yards.11
T
he advance that followed did not conform to any of the neat manoeuvres so dear to Hart. Apart from the extremely close order – Hart was trying to crowd the whole brigade of four thousand men into a loop only a thousand yards wide – there was nothing to recall the parade ground. The Dublins were told to advance, with the Border Regiment on their right, and the other two battalions on their left. Of course, the battalions became mixed at once, and so did the companies. ‘Come on, the Irish Brigade!’ shouted the officers, and that was about as far as the orders went. There was no control, no cohesion, no system by which groups could alternately advance and provide covering fire for their neighbours. Small bodies of men, led by officers, would jump up, dash forward fifty or a hundred yards and then fling themselves flat again.12 One of the Inniskillings described the advance somewhat poetically as ‘like the waves of the sea without anyone guiding it’.13 Captain Romer, of the 1st Dublins, put it more bluntly: ‘Nobody knew where the drift was. Nobody had a clear idea of what was happening. All pushed forward blindly, animated by the sole idea of reaching the river bank.’14
Hart himself acted with great, if not reckless, personal courage. Disdaining to take cover, he walked calmly about among the flying bullets and shrapnel, shouting and cheering his men on. The advance was too slow for his liking, and many men simply refused to budge. They were shaken by the Boers’ rifle fire, whose sudden onset gave it almost the force of an ambush. And the Creusot shells, though not very effective, made an appalling din as they exploded, sending columns of dust and stones high in the air. There was no panic. The men simply lay flat and seemed deaf to the words of command.
‘If I give you a lead, if your General gives you a lead – will you come on?’
‘We will, sir,’ came the reply, in the thick Irish brogues.
The Boer War Page 36
