The Boer War

by Thomas Pakenham

  At other times, Long Tom proved a real cricket-playing gentleman. On the day of the great match referred to by Netley (it was between the Devons and some gunners), everyone was very jumpy: they expected the Boers to spot the players through their telescopes. Sure enough, a salvo was signalled. The batsman ran forward, as though to play the shell. It dropped, spinning into the earth, a few feet ahead of his bat, but did not explode.31

  In general, these Boer 6-inch guns did not prove very effective as military weapons: that is, if their direct job was to kill and destroy. At the long range required – six thousand to twelve thousand yards – they could not fire time-fused shrapnel, the kind of shells needed if they were to cause heavy casualties. They had to fire percussion shells, which did not in fact burst if they hit soft ground; so (statistically) it took several hundred shells to kill each British soldier.32 On the other hand, by pinning down the garrison, they transformed the siege. Without the two Long Toms, there would have been cricket and polo every day; soldiers could have camped in the healthiest parts of the plain, instead of being stuck in insanitary dugouts for half the day; and with better food supplies – much of it was cattle on the hoof – they would not have starved so soon.33 In short, morale would have been transformed. Fortunately, there was an antidote to the psychological effects of the Long Toms, in the shape of Lady Anne and her twin sister, the other naval 4.7-inch gun, ‘Princess Victoria’. They could not prevent the Long Toms from firing – let alone kill any Boers; and by Christmas they were down to their last couple of hundred rounds. But it made a reassuring noise when the jolly blue jackets banged away at Cove Redoubt and Junction Hill. At least the garrison was not completely helpless.34

  It was the inertia and apathy of the defenders, coupled with the increasing toll of disease, that most worried the more intelligent officers.35 This was at the root of their bitter feelings towards Sir George and his staff. Why, oh why, asked Captain Gough, are we not allowed to raid the enemy’s lines? ‘God knows we need a success.’36 It was a question that was echoed by many of the Natal refugees inside Ladysmith. They had embarked on the siege, it must be said, feeling bitter resentment towards the imperial authorities; Milner’s splendid promise to defend Natal – ‘with the whole might of the Empire’ – contrasted with the absurdly small number of troops sent by Joseph Chamberlain to Natal on the outbreak of war. The Ladysmith Bombshell, the Lyre’s twin sister, which reflected colonial opinion, exploded in these lines:

  The hard times we have had to bear

  We’ll slate Great Britain right and left

  We’ll curse the British Parliament

  Of friends and property bereft

  We’ll show to all the world we meant

  To demonstrate the sad delay

  That’s caused our misery today.

  Confound J-C37

  One of these Natal refugees, a farmer called Willis, was the man who owned the land at Bulwana on which the Boers had installed Bulwana Tom. Willis had made dugouts for his large family in the bank of Klip River, and there he stayed, like many other civilians, during most of the daylight hours. On 6 December, his wife was delivered of a strapping boy, loyally christened Harry Buller Siege Willis. But, towards Sir George White, Willis felt less loyal. ‘I could forgive many mistakes,’ he wrote later, ‘but one… in allowing the Boers to occupy and mount big siege guns on Umbolwan [Bulwana] Hill. It was a grievous military blunder fruitful in damage, loss of life, and property, and accountable for most of the sickness and distress which followed.’ In early December, Willis pressed the authorities to try a raid on Bulwana to silence the guns. A few days later a poster, fiercely worded, appeared in the town, denouncing White’s pusillanimity.38

  In a way, the attitude of the civilians trapped in Ladysmith was the reverse of those trapped inside Kimberley. At Kimberley, Cecil Rhodes and his cronies had threatened to surrender the town unless relief came. Here at Ladysmith, it was the civilians who were most eager for an active defence. One reason, no doubt, was the presence of that contingent of Imperial Light Horse – the Uitlander volunteers from Johannesburg. On the other hand, there were also three notable (if not notorious) civilians in Ladysmith who seemed to have played a most feeble part in the siege: Dr Jameson, Sir John Willoughby, and Cecil Rhodes’s brother, Frank. As we saw, these three heroes of the Raid had pushed their way into Ladysmith in order to be first with the Uitlander flag in the triumphant march to Pretoria. Now they were condemned, once more, to be prisoners. Frankie Rhodes, it must be said, did occasionally make himself useful. He supplied strategic war materials, like champagne, to a select group of officers, including Colonel Ian Hamilton. But the realities of war were too much for Dr Jim. His health broke down as it had broken down after Doornkop. He took to his bed, stricken with typhoid.39

  When civilians like Willis, or regimental officers like Gough, denounced the cowardice of Sir George White’s strategy, they may not have guessed how warmly their feelings were shared by the two ablest men on White’s staff, Major-General Sir Archibald Hunter and Colonel Sir Henry Rawlinson, later to be famous as ‘Rawly’, Chief of the Imperial General Staff.

  But neither of these was a typical member of White’s team. Most of the red-tabbed officers were red-tape men of the old school, obsessed with peacetime rules and regulations. The cavalry brigadier, Brocklehurst (known ironically as ‘Pogglehurst’), had neither ‘the dash nor the brains’ to command cavalry. So said Rawlinson.40 No one could get on with the CRE (commander of the sappers); he was too obstinate. He refused to allow mine-fields to be laid in front of the British perimeter; it was not in the book of rules.41 He also refused permission for the corrugated iron huts, used in the peacetime Ladysmith camp, to be dismantled and their pieces reused to reinforce the bomb shelters. 42 The CRA (commander of the gunners) had bungled all the ‘unparalleled opportunities’ presented him by the Boers; it was his failure to give continuous covering fire to the Gordons at Elandslaagte that had cost them such losses in the charge.43 Finally, the Principal Medical Officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Richard Exham, on whom the health of the sick and wounded depended, was ‘not able to rise to the occasion’, to put it mildly.44 It was Exham’s insistence on keeping the wounded in the Town Hall, supposedly protected by a small Red Cross flag, that had led to the disaster of the 18th Field Hospital.45

  All these criticisms were Rawlinson’s own, written confidentially for the eyes of his powerful patrons, Lord Roberts and Lord Kitchener. On Sir George White’s strategy, Rawlinson’s strictures were still more damning. They had food to last them till January, perhaps early February. And yet, putting it as tactfully as possible, ‘we might have done more than we have’.46‘… Sir George does not intend to stir out until we know that a relieving column is at hand,’ he wrote in the fourth week of the siege.

  It is not pleasant neither is it good for the morale of the troops which has to some extent been shaken. We want some small success just to put new life into them…. I would have bothered the Boers constantly by night with small parties of say ½ companies or sections – they could have stalked the Boer pickets which are at no great distance … anyway they would have given the Boer no peace – then I should have allowed officers to go out and endeavour to destroy some of the guns which might be done at night without much difficulty for they are very slackly guarded – I volunteered myself to try and get at one of the big guns and many others have done the same but not once have we in any way bothered the investing force but allowed them to go on pounding us daily …47

  Such were Rawlinson’s damning criticisms. What he did not mention, and perhaps personal loyalty precluded it, was the slack and apathetic way in which the British had fortified their own defence lines. To make Ladysmith a ‘Plevna’ (the Turkish fortress which held out against the Russians for months in 1877), that was the declared aim. But only on the northern side of the perimeter was this seriously attempted. Here, at ‘A’ sector, in a naturally weak part of the line, deep trenches and large forts had been construc
ted. The commander, Colonel William Knox, had himself studied the Plevna defences.48 At ‘C’ sector, an even weaker part of the line was undefended except by only a few small forts and sangars (stone shelters). This was the Caesar’s Camp-Wagon Hill ridge (‘Platrand’, to the Boers), the recognized key to the whole southern defences of Ladysmith. The officer in charge was Colonel Ian Hamilton, Lord Roberts’s speech-writer and protegé, White’s friend, the veteran of Majuba, the victor of Elandslaagte. Hamilton was a poet and wit, debonair, excitable and brilliant, if somewhat effete. No doubt he found the job of digging trenches a dull one. He was rarely to be seen in ‘C’ sector; he messed in the comfortable house in the town where Colonel Rhodes dispensed champagne.49 Perhaps he, too, echoed that phrase used by Gunner Netley – ‘No such luck’ – and wished the Boers would try again to attack Caesar’s Camp.50

  Meanwhile, in the week before Colenso, Rawlinson’s campaign to prod his chief into action was at last successful.

  White’s own moods changed frequently, but were never cheerful. Fortunately, perhaps, for the garrison, he rarely showed his face outside his HQ. He sat in his small room, hour after hour, the picture of despondency. ‘One can understand’, one of the others commented, ‘what General Gordon must have gone through, with no one to talk to….’51 The shame of Mournful Monday had burnt into his soul: those white flags. Well, he had expected to be relieved – that is, to be relieved of his command. And he believed he deserved it. Instead, the siege had saved him for a more refined kind of torture. Now his mind oscillated between the various contingency plans of Rawlinson’s and the staff’s: to break out to the south; to break out to the north; to attack the Long Toms. With Buller expected within ten days, he was finally persuaded to authorize an attack on the guns.52

  In the small hours of 8 December, after a peaceful day watching Botha’s wagons on the Tugela by telescope, Rawlinson walked up to the Convent Ridge and took his stand facing the dim silhouette of Lombard’s Kop, four miles away to the east. It was a dry, moonless night, ideal for attack. Six hundred men of the garrison – appropriately, the Uitlanders of the Imperial Light Horse and the colonials of the Natal Carbineers, led by imperial officers – had been sent out to raid the two Boer guns on Gun Hill, the forward slope of Lombard’s Kop. For some time, Rawlinson could see Boer lights moving about on the slopes of the mountain. Then, at 3.17 a.m., came the rumble of three explosions.53

  All had gone exactly as Rawlinson had planned. There were two big guns on the lower slope – a 4.5-inch howitzer and one of the Creusot Long Toms, protected by a 31-foot-thick emplacement of sandbags. The British had left their horses and crept forward, led by General Hunter and African guides. They found the hill almost unguarded. One Boer picket challenged them. Major Karri Davies, the commander of the detachment, bellowed out: ‘Fix bayonets and charge the [bugger]s!’ In fact, the ILH, mounted or dismounted, never used bayonets. But it was enough for the Boers. They bolted. The raiding party were back inside the lines by dawn, after disabling both guns with a pair of gun-cotton charges for each barrel. They brought back as trophies the breech blocks of both guns, the sponges, and the Long Tom’s gun-sight, set for up to eight miles.54 Only one thing marred this triumph. The same morning White sent out the cavalry brigade on patrol towards Nicholson’s Nek, and old Pogglehurst, by some characteristic piece of bungling, lost twenty-four men.55

  A triumph for Hunter and the Uitlanders of the ILH. Three nights later, it was the turn of the regulars to raid the Boer guns. The target was the 4.5-inch howitzer on Surprise Hill, and the raiders were five companies of the Rifle Brigade, including Captain John Gough’s. Rawlinson went up King’s Post, on the northern line of the perimeter, to watch the show. The Boers had installed a searchlight close to this point; its beam searched the hillside, but did not detect the raiding party. The howitzer was duly blown up. However, the gun-cotton misfired the first time. Meanwhile, a party of Boers blocked the raiders’ retreat, and they had to cut their way out with the bayonet, killing at least thirty Boers (they believed) and themselves losing nine killed and fifty-two wounded.56 Gough, who lost twenty-four men from his own company, described the action: ‘Colonel shouted out “Fix swords and charge” and in we went…. When gun blown up we retired from the left…. the enemy had got right up all round us, never was in such a hot place in my life…. I am so glad that the R.B. have had a chance at last.’57

  Rawlinson, too, was satisfied. Their own losses were heavy, but the moral effect ‘would not be lost on the Boers’.58

  A further week passed, full of conflicting plans for offensives. Poor White could still not reach any firm conclusion how best to help Buller. ‘All this ought to have been settled days ago,’ wrote Rawlinson wearily on 15 December.59 It was then the day of Colenso. Came the news of Buller’s reverse, with its shattering moral effect on the Ladysmith garrison. The garrison relapsed into apparent helplessness.60 Above all, there were the nagging fears of what the British public thought of them. As Lieutenant ‘Dodo’ Jelf, of the 60th, wrote home, ‘Are we rotters or heroes?’61

  One of the uncertainties, at least, was settled on Saturday 6 January. It was once again a moonless night – the night the Boer leaders had agreed with Kruger to make that decisive stroke against the Platrand.

  Something was up. So Rawlinson had decided the evening before. An eerie silence prevailed in the Boer lines.62 About midnight, some of the outposts on Wagon Hill heard the sound of hymns float up from the bush below. Strange: hymns at midnight. Rawlinson himself believed that all the Boers, except the gunners and the pickets, might have trekked off south. If so, they must have gone to help Botha block Buller’s second attempt to force his way across the Tugela, shortly to be launched. Rawlinson begged White to send out cavalry patrols. Hamilton begged White to let him occupy a farmhouse in the valley beyond Caesar’s Camp. White refused both requests.63 He still could not make up his mind how or when to help Buller. But he had decided to relocate two 12-pounder naval guns and the 4.7-inch Lady Anne on Wagon Hill, ready in case he should summon up courage for the long-delayed plan to break out to the south.64

  At 2.40 a.m., on that cool, star-studded night, a party of thirteen naval gunners, assisted by twenty-five sappers, with an escort of seventy Gordons, were in the act of lowering Lady Anne’s wooden gun platform into the stone emplacement at Wagon Point, the extreme south-west point of Wagon Hill. Lady Anne herself was still lying in the ox wagon at the bottom of the hill, while two other wagons, with the great platform beams and the sappers’ tools, had been dragged up to the summit.65

  In the chiaroscuro cast by the sappers’ lanterns came the usual cheery sounds that accompanied Lady Anne on her progress: the grating of the wagons, the similar eloquence of the British NCOs, the grousing of the men, Africans calling their oxen ‘damned Dutchmen’. Suddenly, a new sound. Flip, flop, flip, flop: the sound of rifle bullets splashing on the stones around them.66 One of the sappers later described it. ‘What the hell? A report of rifles. We kicked the lamps out and dashed for our rifles. Into the sangar we went. Some poor devils panicked – they couldn’t find their rifles and began to run. Young Digby Jones jumped on to a rock … drew his revolver and said [to the stampeding sappers] “The first man that passes me I’ll shoot him dead.67”’

  Wagon Hill was now a confused mass of shouting men, and criss-crossed by rifle bullets, striking sparks as they bounced off the rocks. The pickets supposed to protect this vital crest line were less than a hundred men of the Imperial Light Horse. They wore the same slouch hats as the Boers, which added to the confusion. Against the glare of a Boer searchlight, somehow brought into action, several hundred Free Staters poured on to the ridge, beating down the pickets. Fortunately for the garrison, the ILH had built one small ‘fort’: a loop-holed ring of stones, about twenty feet around.68 This was the sangar into which rushed Lieutenant Digby-Jones and some of the sappers. Others took refuge in the gun emplacement prepared for one of the 12-pounders. Here the naval gunner, Gunner Sims, added
to the incongruity of the scene by numbering the men as though on parade. Perhaps it steadied them.

  One, twa, three, vower, voive, [he shouted, in his best fo’c’stle bellow]. ‘Nos. 1 to 8 will be the right half-section; Nos. 9 to 15 will be the left half section Now then, men, are you ready? Right half-section, ready, present fire!

  The bullets flew, men groaned and screamed, and, final incongruity, the teams of oxen, abandoned by their drivers, stood on the flat hilltop, patiently munching the dewy grass.69

  Meanwhile, two and a half miles away, at the extreme eastern edge of the same double ridge, other wild scenes were taking place. Here, at Caesar’s Camp, the picket lines had a quarter of an hour’s warning before a force of Transvaalers stormed over the ridge. But, owing to the extreme feebleness of Hamilton’s defences at ‘C’ sector, there was no real obstacle here to the Boers’ seizing the vital crest line. In fact, Hamilton had based his plan on a line of stone ‘forts’ set back on the inner side of the plateau. There were no accompanying trenches. There were no forts commanding the eastern face of the hill. Above all, Hamilton had failed to insist on the removal of the scrub that gave perfect cover to the attackers. Hence, the Transvaalers not only established a foothold on the crest. They also took the picket line of the Manchesters in the rear, and cut them down in swathes.70