When dawn came up, Colonel Royston’s colonial troops in the valley to the east could see the whole hillside swarming with Boers, from the crest line to the river-bed.71
Two miles away to the north, at Convent Ridge, Rawlinson and Hunter, the Chief of Staff, were woken by the sound of firing. The HQ was connected to each section of the defences by the telephone on the veranda of the house. Before long, astonishing messages reached them. Discarding conventional Boer tactics, the Boers were storming all sides of the perimeter, under the cover of a bombardment from every gun they had.72 The men in Colonel Knox’s miniature Plevna at ‘A’ section were in no danger. There was a more determined attack on Colonel Francis Howard’s ‘B’ section at Observation Hill. But this, too, was beaten off almost without loss to the defenders, though the Boers left twenty bodies on the hillside. It was the situation at Wagon Hill and Caesar’s Camp that was critical. And that morning poor White was hardly able to stir from his house. He was weak with fever. Hunter deputed a party of Natal Police to try to cut a way out of the town for him, if the main garrison was forced to surrender.73 It was on Hunter’s shoulders, and Rawlinson’s, that the main burden of saving Ladysmith depended that day.
The first step was to send field-guns to attack from below what a properly sited fort would have prevented the Boers ever establishing: a position on the scrubby, rock-covered south-east slopes of Caesar’s Camp. In the early morning sunshine, the six gun teams of Major Abdy’s battery, the 53rd, trotted out towards Intombi Camp (the hospital camp beyond the defence lines) and then unlimbered in the unaccustomed shelter of some scrub. A plume of smoke and a rumble from Bulwana Tom. Some 94-pound shells straddled the battery. Princess Victoria, in her turn, tossed some of her precious 4.7-inch shells at Bulwana Tom, and Abdy’s six field-guns began to splash the south-east slopes of Caesar’s Camp with shrapnel, each gun firing over twenty rounds in rapid succession. Soon after 6.00 a.m., these slopes were cleared of the enemy, except for dead and wounded.74 But the field-guns could not reach the southern crest line, nor the slopes beyond. To drive the enemy back from these positions, infantry was needed. About 8.00 a.m., six companies of the Rifle Brigade reached the scene, more than doubling the strength of the garrison there, composed of Manchesters and Gordons. One of the company commanders was Captain Gough.75 He wrote later in his diary:
When we got there, we could not find anyone in command and no one knew in the least what was going on…. Sydney Mills was first shoved forward to re-inforce no 5 Piquet. He did not know where it was and no one could tell us whether the Boers were on the ridge or not…. Sydney was knocked over and a good many men…. D Coy came up on the left and all three officers were knocked over at once…. B Coy then came up on their left and worked round the flank, Stephens getting knocked over, George Thesiger in trying to get up to this Coy got shot through the neck…. After Thesiger was hit I found myself the senior RB officer under fire, and I could get no orders as to what the authorities were doing on our right, a very nasty position….76
The man responsible for this confusion, for the crippling losses of the Rifle Brigade, and, indeed, for the whole débâcle, was Ian Hamilton. He had galloped off to Wagon Hill as soon as he was woken by the firing, leaving no one in command at Caesar’s Camp. However, he now did his best to redeem himself by personal gallantry. The situation at Wagon Hill was equally confused, but much more critical, as the ‘forts’ were still flimsier here, and no help could be given by field-guns firing from the flank. Soon after dawn, the first reinforcements reached the hilltop. The remainder of the ILH, who galloped up, dismounted and flung themselves down in the firing-line. At the same moment, two reserve companies of Gordons, under Major Miller-Wallnut, marched round from their camping ground a mile to the north. At seven o’clock, eight companies of the 1st and 2nd 60th, led by Major Campbell, joined them. There were now two thousand men lying flat in the firing-line – 250 Free Staters, invisible between rocks on the south-western edge of the hill, and eight times that number of British infantry. In places, the combatants were separated by only a few yards of grassy hillside. And never was the fire power of the new magazine rifle – and the inability of British officers to recognize it – better displayed. Three times a small party of men, led by an officer, charged across towards the hidden enemy, and each time they were annihilated (the gallant officers included Major Robert Bowen, of the 60th). At last, Hamilton ordered these suicidal counter-attacks to be stopped. Brother Boer could be dealt with in due course. And, miraculously, the firing melted away as the Boers vanished into dead ground. By 11.00 a.m., Hamilton felt confident enough to order some men to return down the hill. It was fiercely hot, and it was time for lunch.77
It was about one o’clock when, for the second time on this astonishing day, the Boers broke all the rules of Boer tactics. Lieutenant Digby-Jones and Major Miller-Wallnut were sitting under an awning close to Lady Anne’s gun emplacement at Wagon Point; Ian Hamilton had just joined them. Unseen by them, a party of Boers (led, as it proved, by two gallant Free State field cornets, De Villiers and De Jagers) stormed over the crest line, sending the British line streaming back in a panic. The first that Hamilton knew of this was when one of the sappers in the gun emplacement fell dead beside him, shot from a rifle thrust over the sandbags. Digby-Jones sprang up and shot De Villiers with his revolver. Someone else shot De Jagers from inside the emplacement.78 Lower down the slope, Gunner Sims heard the shots and the yelling, as the mass of men rushed helter-skelter towards him. ‘Naval Brigade,’ he roared, ‘extend in skirmishing order … forward-d-d!’ Once again, it was Gunner Sims and Digby-Jones who saved the day. The thirteen gunners charged back with the bayonet. On the top of the crest they found Ian Hamilton, pointing his revolver at a grey-bearded Boer. ‘Come back, men!’ he shouted. ‘It’s all right. Send up the reserves.’ The panic subsided, and the handful of Boers who had followed the heroic field cornets were shot down or driven off, although both the brave Digby-Jones and Miller-Wallnut lost their lives in the mêlée.79
All this time, the news of the fighting in ‘C’ sector had been continuously reported to the HQ by telephone. They were nerve-racking hours for everyone. Sir George White sent a half-despairing telegram to Buller, begging him to create a diversion at Colenso.80 Virtually all the reserves had been committed. Hunter and Rawlinson kept calm.
At 2.00 p.m., after De Villiers’s and De Jagers’s attack on Wagon Point had been beaten off, Rawlinson himself wrote in his diary: ‘Position much the same…. Boers in large numbers … advancing down the spruit…. I fancy the Flagstone spruit lot are trying to cut our communications with Wagon Hill which lie across the open plain….’81 An hour or so later, he received from Ian Hamilton a gallant little note in pencil:
My dear Rawley. Wot [sic] a day we are having…. Probably the first time on record the Boers have been outBoered in this way…. I hope you are all fit and cheery…. Thine Ian H.82
By 4.00 p.m., it was obvious to Hamilton that both Boer attacks had failed. He believed that the Boers clinging to their toeholds on the crest line were only waiting for darkness to make their getaway. And for once, Hamilton was absolutely correct. At this moment, however, Sir George White intervened, overreacting violently, as only weak men can. The Boers must be driven off the crest line before darkness. That was his decision. The final reserves of the infantry, three companies of Devons, must drive them off with the bayonet. Hamilton told the CO of the Devons, Lieutenant-Colonel Park, the cheerful news. Could he storm the crest line? ‘We will try,’ Park replied laconically.83
All day, the Natal sun had burnished the hilltop, grilling the stones, where both sides sheltered. But now – just as at Elandslaagte, when the Gordons made their charge – the sky turned indigo and a furious thunderstorm burst over the ground.84 At the HQ, Hunter and Rawlinson were deafened by the storm and had to cut off all the telephones for fear of being electrocuted.85 Thirty miles away, Buller’s signallers watched the flash of heliograph fade in the blackness:
‘Attack renewed, very hard pressed….’ So the message ended, leaving Buller (and the British public) in suspense for more than a day.86
At Wagon Hill, the storm was already passing, when Colonel Park gave the word to the bugler. ‘Advance!’ The rattle of three lines of bayonets, and a wild cheer. Then across that 130-yard-wide strip of grass, which had already been wet and slippery before the rain came. An answering crash of Mausers from the crest line. Three of the officers were down already. The Devons hardly faltered. They reached the crest line. But there was no chance to use the bayonets after all. The Boers had merely taken a new position among some rocks, and fired back from below the crest line. So the fight went on till darkness, as confused and bloody as it had begun.87
Next morning, there was an armistice to collect up the dead and wounded. The search proved unusually macabre. The Boer dead on the south-east of Caesar’s Camp were so mangled by shrapnel that many had to be buried there and then. On the flat top of the hill, Captain Gough counted fifty-two dead Boers.88 His Regimental Sergeant-Major laid them out, bearded old men in rough clothes, arranged at last in the parade ground order the RSM could understand: heads and feet in parallel lines. The total number of Boer dead was believed to be a good deal higher.89
On the British side, the losses were known precisely: 424. Seventeen officers were dead or dying, 28 were wounded; 158 men had been killed (more than at Colenso); 221 were wounded. The brunt was borne by the Manchesters, the ILH and the Devons, whose gallant charge had lost them every officer except for the Colonel.90 Rawlinson, who went up to have a look at the hillside next day, came back aghast. He had been with Kitchener at Omdurman, where fifteen thousand Dervishes lay dead in the sand after the battle, but somehow this was different. ‘White corpses are … far more repulsive than black,’ he noted.91 Captain Steavenson looked at the horrors and wrote in his diary, ‘Civilized war is awful.’92
CHAPTER 24
The Tugela Line
Natal,
6–24 January 1900
‘It is now the 23rd [January], we have been fighting for twelve hours a day for four days and are no forwarder, I really cannot say how it will end…. We don’t … gain ground as I should like, all the rot they have been writing in the papers about frontal attacks and now half our officers have an idea that you can take a position without fighting….’
General Sir Redvers Buller to his wife, from Mount Alice, 23 January 1900
The pickets at Chieveley were just standing to arms on 6 January when they heard a single distant cannon-shot come thundering through the still air to the north. It was an hour before dawn. Lieutenant Maurice Grant, an excitable young officer serving with the 2nd Devonshires, whose first battalion was trapped at Ladysmith, recorded the eerie sounds: ‘A pause, then another dull boom, then a dozen together, far away, muffled and ominous.’ As soon as it was light, there appeared puffs of white smoke ‘bellying from the great, dim summit of Bulwana’, and between the rumble of artillery the ‘low and continuous growl of musketry’.1
‘Boom. Thud, thud. Boom. Boom.’ Young Winston Churchill, The Morning Post correspondent, back at the front after a daring escape from Pretoria gaol, was woken in his tent by these ‘queer moaning vibrations’. He lay and listened. What was happening eighteen miles away over the hills? Another bayonet attack by the garrison? Or perhaps a general sortie? Or perhaps (though, if this were true, it would be the end of one more cherished illusion about them) the Boers themselves were attacking. An officer came to Churchill’s tent and asked him what he thought was going on. ‘Something big happening at Ladysmith – hell of a cannonade – never heard anything like it.’ For once, Churchill was without an opinion.2
The first heliogram from White did not reach Buller’s HQ at Frere, five miles farther south, till eleven o’clock. ‘Enemy attacked Caesar’s Camp at 2.45 a.m. this morning in considerable force. Enemy everywhere repulsed, but fighting continues.’3 Buller immediately signalled to General Clery, commanding the forward base at Chieveley, to advance on Colenso as a ‘demonstration’, and himself sent up the line all troops available.4 At four o’clock came a more reassuring message from White: ‘At present I have beaten off enemy, but great numbers are still around me especially to the south, and it appears very probable they will renew the attack.’5 Then the sun, the only medium of communication, was swallowed by a storm-cloud – the storm in which the Devons were preparing to make their gallant charge at Wagon Hill. There were no more heliograms that day.6
At Colenso, Clery’s naval guns were answered only by the roar of thunder; as usual, Brother Boer lay low. But a serious attack on Colenso was out of the question. For one thing, the Tugela was high – for another, Buller believed (and events were to prove him right) that only a few hundred Boers had trekked north to help storm Ladysmith; the rest still manned the trenches.7 Yet it was galling for the officers, standing outside their tents with field-glasses and telescopes, anxiously watching and listening, and especially for the people whose twin battalions were besieged. ‘In Heaven’s name are we to do nothing?’ Lieutenant Maurice Grant was to write, recalling the agonizing moment. ‘Where was the general? Was he a general? If Ladysmith has fallen this day he must be so no longer!’ And Grant told of ‘something like a groan’ that ran through the ‘idle mob on the Knolls’ as the cri de coeur from White – ‘very hard pressed’ – came over the heliograph.8
In fact, this was one of Grant’s more imaginative pieces of writing. White’s message did not reach Chieveley till next day, by which time Chieveley knew of White’s victory9 (though Grant’s articles on the war, written anonymously, won him a huge public, and helped get him the post as co-author of the Official History).10 At the time, no one south of the Tugela knew how great was the danger to Ladysmith. Hence the war correspondents, who rode out to watch Clery’s naval guns firing, took the situation calmly. Atkins, The Manchester Guardian correspondent, was sharing a tent with Churchill. Both men were greatly impressed by the Boers’ self-discipline in not replying to Clery’s ‘demonstration’. Atkins marvelled at the ‘wonderful intelligence in the individual’ Boer that ‘plays the part of a cultivated discipline’.11 Churchill remarked dryly, ‘It needs a patient man to beat a Dutchman at waiting. So about seven o’clock we gave up trying.’12 Churchill’s own mood, since his return from Pretoria, was a strangely vulnerable one. He blurted out to Major-General Hildyard a damning account of the armoured train disaster, which has the ring of truth and differs from later accounts Churchill gave. ‘They ran confidently on to within range of the Boers, being unaware they had guns with them, and hoping to give them a lesson.’13 He blurted out to Atkins how the Boers had rounded up British soldiers – ‘like cattle! The greatest indignity of my life!’ He had heard a sound after the armoured train disaster which was worse, even, than the sound of shells: the sound of Boers singing psalms. ‘It struck the fear of God into me. What sort of men are we fighting? They have the better cause – and the cause is everything – at least, I mean to them it is the better cause.’14
Buller remained at Chieveley, as solid and reassuring as a heavy gun or a deep entrenchment.15 In fact, he himself had never doubted the danger of the Boers attacking Ladysmith. Now their near-success made it all the more urgent for him to resume operations. Besides, Lord Roberts was expected at Cape Town on 11 January.16 Despite a cable from Roberts, urging caution,17 Buller had no wish to stay on the defensive a day longer than necessary. Warren’s division, the 5th, was now at Estcourt. In a couple of days the extra horse artillery would have arrived. On the 10th, the day before Roberts superseded him as GOC, South Africa, the army at Frere would leave the railway and set off on a flank march to Ladysmith by way of Springfield, twenty-five miles to the west.18
‘Was there no way round?’ the American attaché had asked at Colenso.19 Well, Buller now believed he had found a way round. Despite all his handicaps – the drought and the floods, the men who could not learn how to defend themselves, the generals who knew o
nly how to attack each other – he hoped it would carry him across those ‘beastly mountains’ to Ladysmith.
At Frere, that week, the long drought had broken, and broken with a vengeance. ‘Day after day,’ wrote John Atkins,
a storm, with the blackness of night in its eye, swept across the camp and blotted it out. You could see it coming like a high, forbidding wall, and when it arrived you could not see from one tent to another. It tore and scoured through the camp; cattle and horses turned their backs to it and dropped their heads, or else drifted abjectly before it…. But when the rain came it performed a miracle; it simply washed away the old, dry, withered, khaki-coloured face of the country, as though it had swept it out with a stroke of a clean, wet brush.20
John Atkins was a newspaperman and a poet. His namesake, Tommy Atkins, took a more prosaic view, as the 5th Division splashed into Frere on 10 January, sliding, sucking, pumping and gurgling through the mud.21 The Blaauw Kranz River was in spate. Only a few days before, it had been perilously low; the shortage of drinking water had bid fair to force a retreat.22 Now the river seemed to bar all progress, engulfing the fifteen-mile-long centipede of mule carts and ox wagons.23 Fortunately, one of Buller’s technical innovations, the steam traction engine, came to the rescue, plucking out of the river a great string of broken-down ox wagons. But the cold rain continued, turning all the roads to rivers.24
Even to winter-hardened British soldiers (and Warren’s division were fresh from an English November), those two nights’ march were an ordeal. ‘We all dropped down in the road, water and mud and all it made no difference,’ wrote Lance-Corporal Bradley of the 1st South Lancashires, ‘we were done up and wet through so down we got, slept just as comfortable as if we were in feather beds until the early morning.’25 ‘We had to bivouac,’ said Arthur Galley, an NCO in the Army Service Corps, ‘that meant lie down on the wet ground with your wet clothing on and to add to our comfort we had a good old thunderstorm so you may guess the happy plight we were in, it was without doubt the roughest time I’ve ever experienced.’26 Next morning, the troops had to make do with a breakfast of bully beef and biscuits, Bradley recorded, and the ‘sun poured down his glorious rays upon us, but the heat was so terrible, after us being wet through for almost two days and nights, that it nearly flattened us out, as we could not get any water’.27
The Boer War Page 44
