The Boer War

by Thomas Pakenham

  By 8.30 p.m. the troops had gathered at the rendezvous, a gully below Three Tree Hill, about six miles to the south-west of Spion Kop. Nightfall comes swiftly in Natal, and that night it came early, too, as a leaden, sodden evening melted into blackness. Colonel à Court could not see his hand held up to his face. There was the usual orderly confusion: nailed boots and iron-shod hooves grinding on the rocks, sharp African voices and broad Lancashire brogues, laughter and swearing as the men checked over their kit (water-bottle and one day’s field rations, rifle, and 150 rounds). Then the order: no smoking, no talking. General Woodgate led the way, lame enough66 (despite Buller’s comment that he had two good legs, and no head)67 to need a helping hand over the rocks. They marched in fours, and Woodgate carried a rifle, like his men, to avoid being conspicuous to Boer marksmen. He was proud of these Lancashire lads – proud to have been colonel of one of the regiments, the 2nd Lancasters, the old ‘King’s Own’, a few years earlier. But the place of honour in front of the column he gave to the two hundred colonials and Uitlanders, Thorneycroft’s men.

  After a few minutes, the men changed to marching in file, and Thorneycroft led the column.68 He had already made quite a name for himself. One of those ten special service officers sent out by Wolseley in the July before the outbreak of war, Lieutenant-Colonel Alec Thorneycroft had raised a MI regiment of five hundred irregulars, mainly Uitlander refugees, in Natal, where they had done good work as scouts, accompanied by a group of Zulu guides, paid for out of Thorneycroft’s own pocket.69 In daylight, he looked like a Punch cartoon of a MFH, a great, red-faced barrel of a man: twenty stone, he said proudly, including map and wire-clippers; yet he had energy to match.70 Now he groped his way forward over the rocks, having earlier imprinted on his mind each of the landmarks up the long spur from the south-west: the kraal of African huts, the ledge of steep rocks, the clump of yellow mimosa bushes just below the summit.71

  The great danger of a night attack is that the guides lose their way, or the attack is so delayed (as at Magersfontein) that it is the enemy who surprise the attackers. Here, at Spion Kop, progress was alarmingly slow. The Lancashire men were already done-up before they started, after seven days’ fighting in Major-General Talbot Coke’s brigade. The head of the column kept losing touch with the double companies behind; the men would flop down on the wet grass and fall asleep whenever they halted. It was not till nearly midnight that they began the ascent itself. Occasionally, there were glimpses of stars through gaps in the clouds; and the glimmer of fires down in the valley. There was a moment’s alarm when Thorneycroft thought he saw a Boer picket ahead. He threw himself flat. It was only some rocks. The men tramped on in silence. A second alarm when – ultimate incongruity – a large white spaniel, apparently the lost mascot of some regiment, loomed up ahead of Thorneycroft. One yelp would give everyone away. There seemed to be nothing for it except to strangle the wretched animal. But then someone made a lead out of a rifle’s pull-through, and a boy bugler took the white spaniel safely back down the hill.72

  About three o’clock, after passing the final landmark, the mimosa bushes, they found the going easier, and Thorneycroft told his men to line out over the hillside. They had to wait for the rest of the column; these took an age to come up. By then, the darkness was leaving them, but fortunately a dense mist covered the hilltop. The column reached the crest line in safety.73

  ‘Werda?’ (‘Who goes there?’ in German.)

  Suddenly out of the mist the challenge. ‘Waterloo,’ shouted one of the officers. Then everyone flung themselves flat. A zig-zag line of rifles’ flashes. Thorneycroft waited till the rattle of bolts showed that the Mauser magazines were empty, then gave the order: fix bayonets and charge. With a hoarse yell of ‘Majuba!’, Thorneycroft’s men charged into the mist and vanished. When the staff officers came up, they found the remains of the small Boer picket: one man, some said an African, bayoneted by an officer of the Fusiliers, and the boots of the Boers and German volunteers who had fled. At a cost of ten men wounded, the hill was theirs.74

  It was just after 4.00 a.m. Major Massey, one of the sappers, began methodically to tape out a curved, three-hundred-yard line of trenches on what seemed, in the mist, to be the forward crest of the summit. There was the ring of pick-axe and spade striking the hard rock just below the surface, and perhaps the men talked, as they munched their biscuits and drank from the small spring of drinking water someone had found in the hollow on the south side. Some of the officers fell asleep. Woodgate had set up his HQ at the highest point of the hill, by some rocks behind the main trench line. A Court handed round boxes of extra ammunition to distribute in the trenches, and had a cup of tea with Woodgate.

  The mist had given the column three hours’ grace to establish themselves. After the tensions of the night, Woodgate seemed relaxed. The sappers began to cut a ramp in the hillside up which to move heavy guns. Everything had gone according to plan, despite the delays – except that the army gunners were dubious about being able to bring up any of their 15-pounders. Well, the blue jackets, the naval gunners, would go anywhere. It was too misty to heliograph. Woodgate decided to send à Court back down the hill to ask for naval guns, and to brief Warren and Buller.75 He pencilled a curt note for Warren: ‘Dear Sir Charles, We got up about four o’clock, and rushed the position…. We have entrenched…. and are, I hope, secure; but fog is too thick to see…. Thorneycroft’s men attacked in fine style. I had a noise made later to let you know that we had got in.’76

  Already that noise, the three cheers, had reached the watchers more than one thousand feet below, and the word had gone out, signalled by a star-shell to Warren’s HQ at Three Tree Hill, and to Buller at Mount Alice, and heliographed to White at Ladysmith, and then telegraphed, in ever-widening circles, to the Press at Maritzburg, to Roberts at Cape Town, to Lansdowne in Pall Mall, to Queen Victoria at Windsor.77 Spion Kop, the key to Ladysmith, was ready to turn in the lock.

  CHAPTER 25

  Acre of Massacre

  Spion Kop, Natal,

  24–5 January 1900

  ‘We waded through the Tugela, up to our breasts like, to get across, and we climbed up this ‘ere hill – cor, God it was a climb – you climbed up so far and you came to a big flat rock and you had to go all the way round … cor it was stinkin’ ‘ot it was … and we laid out there firing at one another, us and the Boers – the Boers was up above us, see – they’d got us in a trap like … I couldn’t see all round but I could ‘ear blokes shoutin’ you know, blokes that was getting ‘it and all that…’

  Pte Joe Packer, 2nd Middlesex, describing the Battle of Spion Kop to the author in June 1970

  The Boer picket – about a dozen men from the Vryheid Commando – had fled helter-skelter down the other side of the hill, and some of them reached Botha’s tent, a mile and a quarter to the north, before it was fully light. They were out of breath and confused – and they had lost their boots. Botha sat calmly in his tent, with a candle burning. He did not flinch at the news. The Khakis had taken the Kop. Well, the burghers must take the Kop back. He made it sound as simple as that.1

  Meanwhile, other fugitives from the Vryheid Commando, and some German volunteers, had reached the laager of General Schalk Burger, roughly two miles away, behind the twin eastern summits of Spion Kop.2 Schalk Burger was nominally Botha’s superior, and Joubert’s second-in-command; in effect, Botha and he jointly commanded this sector of the line; and Botha, much the stronger character, called the tune. Together, they now fixed the plans for the counterattack. Its essence was speed.

  Provided that the British could not drag heavy guns up to the main peak, the situation was dangerous, but not desperate. The fire of their own heavy guns could be brought to converge on the hub of the hilltop like the spokes of a wheel: from their right, on the north side of the Tabanyama plateau – that is, from the heavy guns facing Warren’s line on the south side of the same ridge; from Botha’s HQ on a knoll at the centre; from the twin eastern peaks of Spion Ko
p on their left. None of these gun positions was more than two miles away, and though, at best, several hundred feet lower than the main peak of Spion Kop, the field-guns’ trajectory gave them effective command of it. Closer in, along the same spokes of the wheel, were perfect positions for riflemen: at Green Hill, the knucklebone of Tabanyama, a mile from the west face of Spion Kop across the great gorge holding the main road from Trichardt’s Drift to Ladysmith. And on Spion Kop itself there were three excellent positions still unoccupied by the British: at Conical Hill, eight hundred yards north of the British position, and only a hundred feet lower; at the aloe-covered knoll, four hundred yards to the east; and on the nearer of the twin eastern peaks – a mile beyond, but still within long-range rifle fire. Such were the opportunities, if the burghers, scattered over ten miles of the Tugela ramparts, could only seize them in time.3

  Botha sent orderlies to gallop off to his artillery commanders and order them to bring three Krupp field-guns and two pom-poms into action at close range from left, right and centre. He also directed the gunners of two Creusots at the north-west of Warren’s line, guarding the Acton Homes road, to give supporting fire at about three miles’ range. But there was no question of knocking the British off the hill, from a safe distance, simply by the weight of five field-guns and two pom-poms. If only they had had, like the British, fifty-eight heavy guns. Or, indeed, if only Joubert had not failed to get the extra guns from Creusot before the war. To drive the British off the Kop meant that the burghers would have to storm it.4 And that, in turn, demanded the kind of heroism shown by the men who had stormed the Platrand (Wagon Hill and Caesar’s Camp) three weeks before. How many of the burghers had that kind of courage to spare? Botha had watched with overwhelming bitterness that heroic band at the Platrand; of the four thousand men ordered to storm the hill, only a few hundred had obeyed.5 Would it be the same now at Spion Kop: shirkers crowding the safety of the rocks well behind the firing-line, leaving their comrades to their fate?

  One Boer leader, at any rate, thirty-eight-year-old Henrik Prinsloo, Commandant of the Carolina Commando, rose immediately to the occasion. His men’s laager was only a couple of miles to the east. Before the mist had cleared, the Carolina men rode up to Botha’s side of the hill. ‘Burghers,’ said Prinsloo, calling them around him, ‘we’re now going in to attack the enemy and we shan’t all be coming back. Do your duty and trust in the Lord.’6 Then the Carolina men, barely ninety strong, began to climb up the hill through the mist, fanning out towards the two kopjes – Conical Hill and Aloe Knoll – like hunters stalking their prey.7 Botha had called up all the reinforcements he could spare from the rest of the line: some of the Pretoria men and the Krugersdorpers who were holding Tabanyama shut tight against Warren, some of the Standerton and Ermelo men, and Johannesburgers holding the Brakfontein-Vaal Kranz ridge shut against Lyttelton and Buller. In all, Botha had ordered up less than one thousand men out of his force of four thousand.8 But would they respond to his call? And, meanwhile, could the Carolina Commando hold out alone? If the British struck vigorously at Conical Hill and Aloe Knoll, the whole of Spion Kop would soon be theirs.

  Botha’s private feelings at this moment can well be imagined. Outwardly, he was like Buller, quite unflustered in battle: an imposing figure, too, with his neatly clipped beard and moustache, his brown suit and shiny riding-boots; his rifle, embossed with the motto of the republic, slung over the shoulder of his African servant.9 But the last six weeks had been intensely depressing for Botha. He believed passionately that the republic must adopt an offensive strategy against the British. For nearly a month – from the battle of Colenso to the attack on the Platrand – he had had to watch his men idling away the hours beside the Tugela (bathing in the river, fishing for trout, attacking the flies that settled on everything),10 but otherwise leaving the war to Buller. Botha had then set his heart on the attempt to capture Ladysmith by way of the Platrand, though he was not himself allowed to take part. Its failure, due to the mismanagement of Joubert and Schalk Burger, put paid to all his hopes of wresting back the initiative from Buller. Since then, with Roberts and Kitchener already at Cape Town, and Buller reinforced with Warren’s division, he had been forced back to the blocking strategy he despised.11 To cap it all, there was talk of his having to hand back his command to General Lucas Meyer.12

  Botha had kept his command, but the last ten days had been a far more severe ordeal than Colenso. He had to anticipate and parry Buller’s second attack. A new assault on Colenso, this time by night? A wide flanking movement by way of Acton Homes? An assault by one or more of the dozen drifts along the twenty-five miles of river between? Buller’s movements, that seemed so ponderous to his critics south of the river, so childishly obvious in their intentions, were not by any means obvious to Botha, the most brilliant of the Boer commanders. Hence it was true that, as Buller believed, if Warren had carried out the plan to strike hard and swiftly, he might have cut his way through Tabanyama (Rangeworthy Hills) on 17 January. As it was, Botha and his staff had worn themselves out in repeated manoeuvring: galloping backwards and forwards to plug gaps in the line, dragging heavy guns onto hilltops and down again, exhorting the men, telegraphing to Pretoria, and again exhorting the men. Botha was so physically exhausted that he fell asleep while he dictated his despatches.13

  Yet now, at the supreme moment, Botha found new reserves of moral and physical strength. He saw his chance and seized it.

  About eight o’clock on 24 January the mist cleared from the peaks; it was the forerunner of a cloudless, hot morning. Botha himself left only a dry account of the battle.14 It was seventeen-year-old Deneys Reitz, fighting with the Pretoria Commando, who described, almost too graphically, that terrible day.

  Reitz had returned, two days before, from a trip to Pretoria. His father, ex-President of the Free State and now Transvaal State Secretary, had told him to take the train immediately back to Natal, as Buller’s new attack was expected hourly. So back came young Reitz after only a day’s leave. He had reached Ladysmith on the 22nd, and was enrolled among fifty men of the Pretoria Commando who volunteered to help Botha’s men down at the Tugela.15 All that day, he watched Warren’s bombardment of the Tabanyama ridge to the west of Spion Kop. He could see the flashes from the British guns on the wooded slopes across the river, and the puff-balls of shrapnel hanging in the air. This shelling was a new ordeal for the commandos, dispersed as they were. There had been no time to fortify the line properly by building the deep, shell-proof dugouts that had made Colenso an almost bloodless victory. The men hastily dug their own trenches, or took cover behind rocks. Reitz himself saw several men fearfully mutilated, including a father and son of the Frankfort Commando torn to pieces by a howitzer shell, and their rifles sent spinning down the slope behind them. Apart from the shelling, and the horrible casualties it caused, there was the continuous strain of waiting for the British infantry to attack on Tabanyama. The men were short of ammunition and hopelessly outnumbered. It was assumed that the bombardment was a prelude to Warren’s supreme effort in this direction.16

  During the night, Reitz was woken by the sputter of gunfire on Spion Kop, but could not make out what was happening. At daybreak, the British began to pound the Tabanyama ridge once more, and Reitz sipped his coffee, sheltering from spent bullets in the lee of the wagon. Then someone galloped up with orders: Khakis on Spion Kop. They must take it back. Now. Their African drivers saddled up the horses, as Reitz and his friends filled up their bandoliers from a box on the wagon. Shells arched overhead, as they galloped off, reaching the northern foot of Spion Kop in less than fifteen minutes. Hundreds of saddled horses stood there in long rows. And above them was an arresting sight, one of the most arresting of the entire war.17

  Botha’s counter-attack had begun. Three or four hundred men – mainly from the Carolina and Pretoria Commandos – were clambering up the grassy slope. Spion Kop, though steep, is much lower on this northern side, and the ascent itself was not difficult for men carryi
ng only rifles and bandoliers. But the British manned the crest line. Many burghers dropped, shot by invisible marksmen. Others reached the crest line, and Reitz saw the British soldiers suddenly rise up from behind the rocks to meet the rush. There was a moment or two of confusion. Then the struggling figures surged over the rim of the plateau and were lost to view. Reitz dismounted, tied up his horse with the rest, and started to clamber up the slope in search of his comrades.18

  He found them all along the way up the hill: John Malherbe, with a bullet between his eyes; his own tent mate, Robert Reinecke, shot through the head; De Villiers dead – he was another member of the original corporalship, as was Tottie Krige, Jan Smuts’s brother-in-law, shot through both lungs, but still alive; and Walter de Vos, another tent mate, hit in the chest, but somehow smiling bravely.19 The counter-attack had been led by the Carolina Commando, and the rocks on the crest line were strewn with their dead. Reitz found that the burghers had succeeded in seizing this northern edge of the summit, supported by Mauser fire from Conical Hill behind them, and from Green Hill, across the gorge on the right. It was marvellous how far they had got in the frontal assault on such a strong position. The main British line was that long, shallow, crescent-shaped trench dug in the misty morning. The main Boer line was the rocky rim of the plateau one to two hundred yards behind.20