Some of the Pretoria men had been ordered to work their way round the left flank of the trench. They took up a position four hundred yards beyond it at Aloe Knoll. Reitz tried to follow, and was met by volleys of Lee Metford fire. Ahead of him, he saw the body of Charles Jeppe, the last of his tent mates, huddled out there in the open. He dived behind the rocks, and crawled back to the main firing-line. By nine o’clock, the enemy’s rifle fire began to slacken, as the Krupp and Creusot shrapnel shells started to crash into the tableland ahead. But the sun was growing hotter, and the burghers had neither food nor water. Have we killed many of the enemy? Reitz wondered. Nothing could be seen of them. The British trench was screened by a breastwork of rocks, and by the spouts of earth thrown up by the shells. Their own casualties lay there, hideously evident: stiffening corpses covered with flies, the men who had drunk coffee with him beside the wagon only an hour before.21
As the sun rose higher, the few hundred burghers on the crest line became increasingly demoralized. Events were taking the same form as at the Platrand. At a terrible cost, their attack had only half succeeded. Large bodies of horsemen could now be seen collected in the plain below them. They shirked the battle. The leaders – Opperman, the Pretoria Commandant, and Prinsloo, the Carolina Commandant – tried promises, tried threats. On the crest line a sense of betrayal, anger and hopelessness began to sweep over the burghers. Hunger and thirst and indiscipline did their work – and a belief that the British were easily holding their own. By midday, the burghers were beginning to melt away like the mist of that morning, stealthily abandoning the crest line they had seized with such heroism such a short while before.22
How different that long, shallow, crescent-shaped trench appeared from the other side of the hill, twenty yards away: the British side. Facing the Boers, a blank wall, impervious, unshakeable, the stiff upper lip embodied in a line of stone. Facing the British, a scene from a butcher’s shop.
In two senses, Spion Kop was a gruesome anachronism: a relic from the past, a portent for the future. The new-style war – an invisible enemy firing from a distant hilltop, death signified only by the small blue hole in the forehead or the dark patch on the khaki uniform – had seemed like a gentleman’s war. It was the fulfilment of every officer’s dream: to die in battle as one would die on the hunting-field, with the bugle in one’s ears, after a victorious run. And so it had seemed, no doubt, to some of the officers who had died gallantly on the hillsides of Elandslaagte and Talana. It was only in the hospitals and dressing-stations that war had re-emerged in its old brutality.23 But here at Spion Kop, concentrated into an acre of trampled grass, was the old-style ‘soldier’s battle’ of pulped faces, of headless trunks, of men fighting like animals.24 It was the precursor, too, of course, this Armageddon in the trenches under the African sun, of a greater one, fifteen years later, in the mud of Flanders.
Woodgate was dead, so it seemed; actually, he was mortally wounded, by a shell splinter. Soon after 8.30 a.m., when the mist had finally cleared, Colonel Blomfield, CO of the Lancashire Fusiliers, had pointed out to him some Boers creeping up the path towards Aloe Knoll. Woodgate went to have a look, and a splinter struck his head above the right eye. He was carried back to a dressingstation.25 Soon after, Blomfield himself fell, severely injured, and was pulled back under cover; Major Massey, the sappers’ commanding officer, the man who had taped out the trenches, fell dead, and so did Captain Vertue, Wood-gate’s Brigade Major.26 With their deaths, the column suddenly lost its leaders, such as they were.
The next senior officer was now Colonel Malby Crofton, CO of the Royal Lancasters. He was appalled by the situation. Woodgate had made a series of blunders in preparing the summit as a strong-point. In fact, it was not altogether Woodgate’s fault: the mist, Warren’s failure to brief him carefully, the inadequacy of Herbert’s inch-to-the-mile blueprint map – all these played their part in Woodgate’s disastrous ignorance of the ground. But the fact was that the defensive perimeter was too small, and the trenches were in the wrong place and too shallow.27
To seize Conical Hill, eight hundred yards ahead, and hold that position, would have been difficult; but, if held, it would have been a master-stroke. To seize Aloe Knoll, four hundred yards away on the right, was absolutely essential and would have been perfectly easy, had Woodgate realized its importance before the mist cleared. As it was, the main British trench should have been two hundred yards farther forwards, on the tactical crest line that commanded the valley below. In the mist, Major Massey had taped out the trench on a false crest line. When the mist began to clear, the sappers tried to dig a new trench on the right place. But by then it was too late. After the Boers had seized Conical Hill and Aloe Knoll, they were able to enfilade the east side of the main trench. Moreover, the trench itself was too shallow to shield the head from rifle fire properly, let alone to protect the body from shrapnel and pom-pom shells. It had been dug by that half-company of sappers, using the twenty picks and shovels, while over a thousand soldiers lay idle, sleeping or smoking or collecting up the enemy’s boots as trophies.28 Officers and men, the British had still not understood the power of the Boers’ secret weapon, the spade. This was the new rule of war – dig your own trench now, or they’ll dig you a grave later.29
Lieutenant Lionel Charlton, in the Lancashire Fusiliers on the right, had been half-asleep when he heard Colonel Blomfield’s sharp voice ordering forward the company next in line. He looked up numbly. The air was full of those whip-like cracks and that shrill, hissing noise.30 He flattened himself on the ground. His company commander scurried forwards to get his orders. It was now his own company’s turn. How was he to launch himself into that stream of sleeting bullets? For a moment, Charlton’s heart failed him, then he saw the eyes of the men were on him. He sprang up. He forgot the weight of his equipment: rifle in hand, water-bottle, haversack swinging from the leather straps. He plunged forwards, half-crouching, looking neither to left nor right, and flung himself down behind the boulders close to the crest line. Then, beyond all that storm of bullets, far away across the distant plain, he saw a sight like an oasis in a dream: a mass of tall trees and greenery; it was Ladysmith.31
To Corporal Will McCarthy, the battle was more like nightmare. ‘I got into the Trenches,’ he later told one of his pals, ‘and laid down at the side of Bodies with heads, legs, or Arms, it was terrible I can tell you and it was enough to completley [sic] unnerve the bravest of men. But we had to stick it. I had been laying there I think about half an hour when Bang went a shell at my back wounding me…. I thought my back was blown in….’32
For the first time in this war, the Boers’ gunners had a nice, old-fashioned target, like the British gunners in Kitchener’s war on the Nile: the enemy in massed ranks. And, like the Dervishes then, the British could not reply to the guns. ‘The most awful scene of carnage,’ wrote one of Thorneycroft’s Uitlanders. ‘We had no guns, and the enemy’s Long Toms swept the Hill. Shells rained in among us. The most hideous sights were exhibited. Men blown to atoms, joints torn asunder. Headless bodies, trunks of bodies. Awful. Awful. You dared not lift your head above the Rock or you were shot dead at once. Everything was confusion, officers were killed or mixed up in other regiments, the men had no one to rally them and became demoralized…. ’33
Demoralization and confusion: above all, confusion. Already, by nine o’clock, Colonel Crofton had decided, understandably, that they needed reinforcements. But where to dispose them? And how to co-ordinate with the British gunners below? Accurate information of the situation on the summit, and of the location of the Boers, was absolutely essential. Crofton, however, was an ordinary, unimaginative regimental officer. He could not find the heliographists. He should have written a proper report to be taken by hand to Warren’s HQ, only an hour away for an orderly with a horse. Instead, he merely dictated a brief SOS to an officer, who was signalling with a flag. Crofton then himself retired from the scene.34
It was Colonel Thorneycroft, huge, red-faced, b
ull-headed Thorneycroft, who did most to rally the men. By ten o’clock, the battle, ebbing and flowing between the main trench and the forward trench on the crest line, had reached a crisis. One of his young officers, Lieutenant Sargeant, dashed out with twenty men towards some rocks on the right front. A private pushed his rifle over a boulder, felt something soft, and inadvertently pulled the trigger. It was the waistcoat of a Boer, who was thus shot dead just before he could fire his rifle. But Sargeant’s party was soon beaten back to the main trench, losing half their men.35
Then Thorneycroft himself led a charge of forty men, half his own, half the Fusiliers. He found three officers, Captain Knox-Gore, Lieutenant Ellis and Lieutenant Newnham, surrounded by the bodies of their men – wounded, dying, dead. Newnham himself was bleeding to death from two wounds; he had propped himself up against a rock, and was still firing; a third bullet killed him. Knox-Gore stood up and shouted something to Thorneycroft; he pointed to the right; his shouts were lost in the uproar; he fell dead. Ellis died too. Thorneycroft himself was only saved by the fact that he tripped and crashed down on the ground. Almost all the forty men were shot down. Three officers of the Royal Lancasters tried to lead further charges, and were felled too: Lieutenant Wade, Lieutenant Nixon, Major Ross, the latter so ill with dysentery that he had been left behind the night before, but had somehow struggled to the firing line that morning.36
Thorneycroft lay on the stony ground, under the grid-mesh of bullets. His own injury was nothing worse than a twisted ankle. How long would it take Warren to send reinforcements, he wondered? And how long would it be before his own men, exposed to this inferno, would stick it no longer, and run?37
At his HQ, three miles away at Three Tree Hill, just before 9.50 a.m., Warren received a message that struck him as very strange. Warren, the man who ‘knew the Boer’, had been absolutely unprepared for the speed and ferocity of Botha’s counter-attack. Now this message came from Crofton: ‘Reinforce at once or all is lost. General dead.’ He forwarded copies to Buller and Lyttelton, then replied brusquely to Crofton: ‘I am sending two battalions, and the Imperial Light Infantry are on their way up. You must hold on to the last. No surrender.’38
In fact, Warren had already concluded, from the distant rumble of the guns, that the column needed reinforcements, and had told General Coke to take up there the Imperial Light Infantry (the infantry counterpart of the ILH), the 2nd Middlesex and the 2nd Dorsets. But he simply could not understand this panicky message of Crofton’s. Colonel à Court had just ridden up with Wood-gate’s note, written only two hours earlier: the note that said, ‘We have entrenched… and are, I hope, secure.’ Warren, however, now bestirred himself to send some of the vital equipment Woodgate had left behind; some missing sandbags were brought up by the Middlesex and Dorsets. And he agreed with à Court: it was vital to get heavy guns on the summit as soon as possible.39 He also sent an officer to find out what had become of the small guns of the mountain battery (they had been delayed at Frere through a mistake by one of Buller’s staff). What about a diversion at Tabanyama on the left? General Hart and many officers of his Irish Brigade were keener than ever to launch this long-delayed attack, now it was evident that the burghers had thinned down this section of their line in order to reinforce Spion Kop. Warren remained unshakeable. His tactic remained to force the enemy to attack them at Spion Kop, to make the Boer break his head on that steel wedge hammered into his stone wall.40
One new idea did occur to Warren, however, which was to have a dramatic effect on events, though not in the way he anticipated. At 9.53 a.m., immediately after receiving Crofton’s despairing note, he heliographed to Lyttelton, whose brigade was dug in north of the river at Potgieters, five miles to the east. ‘Give every assistance you can on your side; this side is clear, but the enemy are too strong on your side, and Crofton telegraphs that if assistance is not given at once all is lost.’41
‘This side is clear.’ It was a strange way to describe the state of the beleaguered garrison on Spion Kop. The fact was that, though the mist had now cleared completely, Warren had only the haziest idea of what was going on. The grassy slope between Conical Hill and the main summit of Spion Kop he could see clearly, and Parsons’ gunners plastered it with shrapnel. But Botha’s gun positions were all masked by the wooded flanks of Tabanyama. So was the northern crest line, where Prinsloo and Opperman’s men had made their heroic charge. And, most important of all, so was Aloe Knoll. The result was a confused optimism in Warren’s own mind about the extent and strength of the British position. He sent off his weakest brigade commander, poor, lame Coke, to lead the reinforcements. Still more disastrous, he stopped Lyttelton’s long-range guns, which had begun to shell Aloe Knoll from the east, for Warren apparently thought Aloe Knoll was part of the British position.42
At Mount Alice, on the forward ledge of Buller’s camp at Spearman’s, it was impossible to have the illusion that the battle was going well.
Here, beside the two 4.7-inch guns, the HQ staff and the war correspondents took turns to look through the naval telescopes. The ridge opposite, three miles away over the shadowy gorge of the Tugela, quivered in the glare of the sun. John Atkins wrote:
I shall always have it in my memory – that acre of massacre, that complete shambles, at the top of a rich green gully with cool granite walls (a way fit to lead to heaven) which reached up the western flank of the mountain. To me it seemed that our men were all in a small square patch; there were brown men and browner trenches, the whole like an over-ripe barley-field…. I saw three shells strike a certain trench within a minute; each struck it full in the face, and the brown dust rose and drifted away with the white smoke. The trench was toothed against the sky like a saw – made, I supposed, of sharp rocks built into a rampart. Another shell struck it, and then – heavens! – the trench rose up and moved forward. The trench was men; the teeth against the sky were men. They ran forward bending their bodies into a curve – they looked like a cornfield with a heavy wind sweeping over it from behind.43
Buller stood watching the scene, as impassive-looking as Xerxes on the hill above Salamis. In fact, he was burning with resentment. If the Boers, unknown to him, were reminded of their disastrous attack on the Platrand, Buller himself was reminded of Colenso. Once again, he thought, trying to suppress his rage at Warren, a good plan had been thrown away by subordinates. He had been sold by ‘a damned gunner’ at Colenso. Now he had been sold by a damned sapper. Warren had failed to strike at Tabanyama on the 17th, when it was almost undefended. Warren had funked attacking it on the 21st, when to attack needed courage, yet was practicable.44 Today, Warren’s obstinacy had wrecked Buller’s own two-pronged plan of attack.
The point was, a point that cannot be overemphasized, that Buller had not only authorized Warren to attack Spion Kop. The plan was that the moment Warren made the break-through there, Buller would himself launch the right-flank attack, north of Potgieters. And now this right-flank attack was in jeopardy, if not impossible.45 For, as we saw, before ten o’clock that morning Warren had heliographed to Lyttelton to send reinforcements, instead of drawing on the eleven battalions – nearly ten thousand infantry – he had on his left flank. Without consulting Buller, Lyttelton had responded by sending two infantry battalions, and most of his scanty mounted troops.46 When Buller discovered this, the men had already left for Spion Kop, and it was too late either to recall them, or to divert men from the left flank.47
When Buller had learnt of Hart’s and Long’s blunders at Colenso, he had immediately decided that the whole operation had to be called off. Now, on the Upper Tugela, the frustration of his plans only stiffened his determination to press on. He had already heard from à Court, who had galloped off to his HQ after reporting to Warren some of the deficiencies of Woodgate’s defences: above all, the need to get naval guns onto the main summit. Buller arranged for two naval guns to be sent up at once. Equally vital, he sent up his own Intelligence Officer, Colonel Sandbach, to report back to him person
ally on the situation on the summit.48 How he would later reproach himself for not taking back the three brigades from Warren. Weakly, he still shrank from this step, afraid to humiliate Warren in front of the army.49 And perhaps he still hoped to launch the attack beyond Potgieters when Lyttelton’s troops returned.
That morning, he only made one further intervention, though it was to be of crucial importance. Crofton appeared to have lost his head. Well, he had heard from à Court that Thorneycroft had been the life and soul of the column during the night march.50 And he could now see Thorneycroft, literally a tower of strength among the brown figures in that acre of massacre visible through the telescope. At 11.40 a.m. he sent a wire to Warren: ‘Unless you put some really good hard fighting man in command on the top you will lose the hill. I suggest Thorneycroft.’ Warren agreed. Ten minutes later, the heliographists on the south-west lip of Spion Kop, crouching in the storm of Mauser fire and shrapnel, received a curt message. Thorneycroft had superseded Crofton in command.51
It was well after midday before Thorneycroft himself heard of his promotion. He was in the main trench, where he had been dragged back under cover, after the failure of his gallant attempt to recapture the crest line. Someone ran up with the message and, before he could speak, collapsed across Thorneycroft, shot in the head. Later, a lieutenant crawled forward and shouted the news above the uproar: ‘You are a general!’
The situation was more critical than ever. Apart from his left, where some of the men were still holding out among the rocks, somewhat protected by a fold in the ground, the main trench was now the forward line. Thorneycroft himself was the only officer in this part of the firing-line. Unknown to his men, the reinforcements sent by Warren and led by General Coke – the Middlesex and the Imperial Light Infantry – were now hurrying up the hill, a string of brown figures, bayonets flashing like diamonds, mixed with the dark blobs of the ammunition mules. But in the firing-line, five hours without food and water had brought the men to the limit of endurance – and beyond.
The Boer War Page 47
