The Boer War

by Thomas Pakenham

  Soon after one o’clock, Thorneycroft heard a commotion in the main trench on his right. Some men, chiefly Lancashire Fusiliers, dropped their rifles and put up their hands. Three or four Boers came out and signalled to their comrades to come forward. They were greeted by a burst of ineffective fire – in the confusion – and then by a line of handkerchiefs fluttering above the trench.52

  ‘Majuba!’ the British had shouted exultantly when they had seized Spion Kop in the mist of dawn. Indeed, they seemed to have a Majuba now. De Kock, one of the Transvaalers, described the next moment: ‘The English were about to surrender, and we were all coming up, when a great big, angry, red-faced soldier ran out of the trench on our right and shouted, “I’m the Commandant here; take your men back to hell, sir! I allow no surrenders.” ’53

  The great, big, angry, red-faced soldier was, of course, Thorneycroft, hobbling forward with the help of a stick. He shouted to his men to follow him to a line of rocks behind the trench, from which they opened fire at De Kock and the others. Some of the Boers flung themselves flat, others managed to hustle back the prisoners they had already seized (nearly 170 Khakis, according to their accounts).54 There was deafening fire at a range of a few yards.

  At this desperate moment, Thorneycroft looked back across the rocks and saw, at long last, the reinforcements. A company of the Middlesex was advancing with fixed bayonets. Thorneycroft ordered them to charge. The sudden reversal knocked the Boers off balance. They fled back to the crest line, dragging their exhausted prisoners with them. Thorneycroft’s men reoccupied the main trench, and pushed forward once more to within yards of the crest. The Boers’ artillery began to pound the hill again, but in the next hour fresh British troops continued to stream on to the summit. Thorneycroft reinforced the battered Royal Lancasters on the left with those new Uitlander volunteers, the Imperial Light Infantry; the remnants of his own Uitlanders still held the forward line; on the right, he pushed the Middlesex forward, despite heavy casualties, to plug the gaps left by the Fusiliers. He then crawled back to the rocks at the highest point of the plateau, and scribbled a note, which he gave to a newly arrived staff officer, Colonel Sandbach, to take down to Warren. The mirrors of the heliograph had long since been smashed by a shell.55

  It was 2.30 p.m. For the first time since dawn, Thorneycroft had a respite, of a sort, from that inferno in the trenches. The note read:

  Hung on till last extremity with old force. Some of the Middlesex here now, and I hear Dorsets coming up, but force really inadequate to hold such a large perimeter…. What reinforcements can you send to hold the hill tonight? We are badly in need of water. There are many killed and wounded.

  Alex Thorneycroft.

  [PS] If you wish to make a certainty of hill for night, you must send more Infantry and attack enemy’s guns.56

  The confusion in Warren’s own mind about the situation on Spion Kop was not dispelled by this brief, somewhat desperate note of Thorneycroft’s, which reached him at about four o’clock. Perhaps he imagined that Thorneycroft, like Crofton before him, was losing his head. Warren was only partly to blame for the optimism he felt. Soon after Thorneycroft had written the note, it had passed through the hands of Major-General Coke, his immediate superior. Now it was Coke’s job to take overall charge of the defence of the summit: to reassure Thorneycroft and relieve him, if necessary, of the crushing strain, physical and mental, of command. Warren was not to know that Coke had not even reached the plateau, but contented himself with reassuring Warren about the situation from the safety of the track below. He endorsed Thorneycroft’s message with this addition: ‘Spion Kop – 3 p.m. – I have seen the above, and have ordered the Scottish Rifles and King’s Royal Rifles to reinforce…. We appear to be holding our own.’57 The sun was hot. According to one report, General Coke then took a nap in the shade of the mimosa-trees.58

  Warren himself was by no means asleep, even if his preparations, as usual, appeared to critical observers to be somewhat ponderous. One thing was clear. To protect Thorneycroft’s men, Spion Kop must be made secure against artillery. They must drag up the mountain guns and naval guns to the summit. They must deepen and improve the British trenches.59 Why did he not go there himself? Warren was a man who liked to work with his hands – a sapper general, an expert on trenches, military and archaeological; he had involved himself so closely in laying pontoons for his men to cross the river that they had taken him for a junior officer.60 The foot of Spion Kop was less than an hour’s ride from his HQ at Three Tree Hill. Why did he not take his horse and go?

  Unknown to Warren, Major-General Lyttelton had meanwhile taken a decisive step to relieve the pressure on Thorneycroft’s force, and was in the process of succeeding, better than Lyttelton had ever thought possible.

  There are times in a battle when to send direct reinforcements is much less effective than to make a diversion elsewhere. Arguably, Warren’s overriding error that day was his failure to make a diversion to the west. He could have sent Hart’s, Hildyard’s or Dundonald’s brigade to strike at Tabanyama. His failure to do so will remain one of the great might-have-beens of the battle. What is certain is that where Lyttelton did make a diversion – to the east – it had the most dramatic effect on the minds of the Boers and their commander.61

  The eastern ridge of Spion Kop is marked by twin, crinkly peaks, two thousand yards and three thousand yards respectively from the main summit and tableland to the west. From Mount Alice, these Twin Peaks give the illusion of being higher than the main summit, though actually lower by a couple of hundred feet.62 It is, at any rate, a formidable defensive position; the approach from the south, across the Tugela and then up the sheer, rocky face of the mountain, is more arduous than the approach by the track to the main summit. Still more formidable would it be as an offensive position for the British. Once they were firmly astride this eastern ridge, they would have the Ladysmith plain at their feet. They would command not only Aloe Knoll, but the two Boer gun positions – the pom-poms and the Krupps – and the white tents of General Schalk Burger and the Carolina Commando, immediately beyond.

  Imagine, then, the feelings of Schalk Burger when it was reported late that day that the Khakis were storming the ‘Drielingkoppe’ (‘Triplets’), as the Twin Peaks were called by the Boers. In fact, Lyttelton’s reinforcements had been visible since midday: the long, khaki snake winding across Kaffir Drift, a small intermediate drift between Trikhardt’s and Potgieters, and twisting up the hillside. The snake had then divided: the head (actually the Scottish Rifles) trailing away to the west, to reinforce Thorneycroft’s men directly; the tail (the 60th Rifles) striking due north, up towards the peaks. To the watching Boers, the sight must have seemed as arresting as their own men’s ascent of Spion Kop that morning had seemed to Deneys Reitz. There were hardly more than seven hundred men, split into two groups, each group tackling one of the peaks. Yet so thin was the burghers’ line stretched – most of the Carolina Commando were, of course, fighting for their lives more than a mile away on Spion Kop itself – that the burghers could not hold back the Khakis. Casualties they inflicted in plenty. They were firing downwards at the British, who were clambering up on hands and knees over the rocks and scree. By 5.00 p.m. they had been forced to evacuate their hastily dug trenches.63 About sunset, Schalk Burger must have heard the grim news. The Khakis were astride – precariously, perhaps, yet astride – the Drielingkoppe. It was too late to affect the battle for the main summit that day. But next morning the burghers would have a simple choice. Either to storm the Drielingkoppe, or to gallop back to Ladysmith.64

  Schalk Burger was, like Joubert, first and foremost a politician – not a particularly successful politician at that.65 He was now utterly demoralized.66

  The situation on the burghers’ side of the main summit was in fact desperate. At seven, darkness came at last: the crash of the heavy guns, beating like surf on the stones and rocks of the summit, the boiling, grinding waves of sound had faded into silence. There were odd
bursts of rifle fire. Otherwise, the sounds of the night were the ghastly sounds of Elandslaagte, where so many burghers had died: the scuffling and moaning of the wounded, delirious men crying out in the dark, as though the sun still shone and the battle still raged.67

  Deneys Reitz found himself with hardly two dozen men left to defend the crest line. By ten o’clock, even his own leader, Commandant Opperman, had to admit defeat – at least, he decided they must abandon the position for the time being. They scrambled down to the foot of the hill, where they found the long lines of horses tethered there earlier had gone, apart from their own; there were mealies, sacks of coffee and boxes of ammunition strewn everywhere in the circles of light around the camp-fires.

  Just as the first wagons were leaving, someone galloped up and shouted to the burghers to halt. Reitz could not see the man’s face in the shadows, but people said it was Botha. Addressing them from the saddle, he told them to think of the shame of deserting their posts in the hour of danger. Some, at any rate, answered his appeal, and returned to their positions east and west of Spion Kop. But no one returned to the abandoned positions on the main summit.68

  If ever Botha’s extraordinary optimism was needed, it was at this moment. The main summit abandoned, a second gap – at the Drielingkoppe – knocked in the line. What hope now of avoiding utter rout? Yet Botha sent reassuring reports to Kruger and Joubert. ‘The bravery and courage of our burghers I cannot praise too highly…. The artillery has worked beautifully and if the enemy does not retreat during the night, the fight will be continued tomorrow. The enemy’s force is so great and if we look at the small number of [our] men… we cannot be sufficiently thankful to the merciful Father for vouchsafing us protection in this grievous struggle….’69 So wrote Botha, in the special biblical style of telegram that he knew Kruger expected. To his colleague and senior general, Schalk Burger, he wrote more bluntly and desperately: ‘Let us struggle and die together. But, brother, let us not give way an inch more to the English.’ He promised to send reinforcements as soon as the moon rose. Meanwhile, Burger must take one hundred Free Staters from his own left wing to reinforce the line behind the Drielingkoppe. Botha added that he knew the English. They were so ‘kopschuw’ (bone-headed) ‘that if we only have faith and confidence and do not retreat, the enemy will give in’.70

  Botha’s appeal fell on deaf ears. About midnight, his messenger reached the site of Burger’s camp behind the Drielingkoppe, and found the tents had vanished. In a panic, Burger had taken part of the Carolina and Lydenburg Commandos, complete with their Krupp field-gun and pom-pom, and fled northwards to Ladysmith.71

  The sky paled, and the dew settled on the trampled grass beside the handful of burghers who remained – brave men like Opperman, gallant boys like Deneys Reitz. They looked up at the skyline, waiting and watching for the inevitable. Nothing, and no one – so it seemed – could now prevent the British from streaming through the two breaches in their position, and rolling up the whole of their line along the Tugela.72

  But one man had this power, the power to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, and that was poor, plodding General Warren.

  Napoleon once said that victory goes to the general who makes fewest mistakes: in other words, that war is, at bottom, a contest in blunders. The saying has never been illustrated in a more stylized way than in the Battle of Spion Kop. Here was a battlefield hardly bigger than the floor of a large theatre. Here were two armies, separated by a gap across which you could have thrown a biscuit as easily as you could have thrown it across a stage. And all the protagonists-all except Botha – stumbled about the stage as though they were blindfold.

  It was inevitable that the British should know almost nothing of what was happening on the other side of the hill: it was a central paradox of the new, smokeless warfare that ignorance hung over the battlefield, ignorance deeper than any battle smoke; and now that darkness itself had followed, who can blame Thorneycroft for not recognizing his unseen victory? But why on earth was Thorneycroft equally ignorant of Warren’s own plans? It was this ignorance, for which only Warren can be blamed, which lay at the root of the extraordinary blunder which now brought tragedy to the verge of farce.

  All around Spion Kop, the work of preparing to exploit the advantage they had gained was, at long last, being taken in hand by the British.

  On the face of it, it must be said, Lyttelton had taken a step that might appear to have the opposite effect. At 2.30 p.m. he had received a message from one of his staff, who was on the main summit of Spion Kop: ‘Do not think that the King’s Royal Rifles [the 3rd/60th] can get up on right; it is held by Boers. We are only holding up to your left of saddle.’73 Lyttelton immediately ordered the recall of this battalion, the one then storming the Twin Peaks; he had misgivings that there was a dangerous gap between their position and the main summit.74 Fortunately, however, for the British, a series of urgent messages from Lyttelton, sent at 3.00 p.m., 3.30 p.m., and 4.50 p.m., produced no effect: apparently the CO of the 60th, Lieutenant-Colonel Riddell, turned a Nelson eye to these orders recalling him. Hence the successful capture of the Twin Peaks. Despite the death of the Colonel, who fell dead with the crumpled orders still in his pocket – and despite the battalion’s loss of one hundred men – it was a brilliant tactical feat, the only brilliant feat of the day.75 After 7.00 p.m., Lyttelton’s orders were finally obeyed, and the battalion withdrew under cover of darkness. But they had achieved, as we have seen, far more than Lyttelton could have guessed, even if he had known they had reached the summit. Indeed, the fact that they had withdrawn from the Twin Peaks made little difference to events. The thought of them being there was enough to send Schalk Burger scurrying back across the plain to Ladysmith, leaving that second great breach in the Boers’ line wide open for Buller and Lyttelton to exploit next day.76

  Meanwhile, Warren was hastening slowly – very slowly – to send relief to Thorneycroft. One thing must be said in Warren’s defence. Even more than Buller’s own force, Warren’s force was handicapped by the defects in the War Office’s preparations. He was short of properly qualified staff officers; he needed batteries of long-range guns; flimsy heliographs and oil-lamps were no substitute for proper field telegraph lines, designed to be run up close to the firing-line.77

  Yet what were Warren’s handicaps compared to Botha’s? Where was the ‘mad and manly fury’, the quality that had carried British generals in the past to victory in the teeth of every obstacle? Warren’s ponderous time-table, that appalled Buller, cannot seriously be defended. It was not until 9.00 p.m. – two hours after darkness – that he even ordered Lieutenant-Colonel Sim, the sappers’ commander, to proceed to Spion Kop with a fatigue party of fourteen hundred men. These were to help dig the huge (twenty-three-foot diameter) emplacements for the two long-range naval guns, and the smaller emplacements for the mountain battery, as well as perform the all-important job of digging proper trenches for Thorneycroft and his men.78 Nor did the rest of Warren’s preparations reflect any greater sense of urgency. Stretcher-bearers, water, ammunition, fresh troops, above all, heavy guns – these were the crucial deficiencies that had racked Thorneycroft’s brain. Now it had been dark for five hours, and they were still missing.79

  Still, perhaps it was not Warren’s failure to remedy these deficiencies that proved his worst error. It was his failure to tell Thorneycroft of his plans to do so. Astonishing as it may seem, he had sent no direct instructions to Thorneycroft since the heliogram apppointing him a general at midday. He had left it to Coke to reassure Thorneycroft, although (by another astonishing blunder) Warren had never actually told Coke that he had put Thorneycroft in charge. Then, to compound all these blunders, at 9.00 p.m. Warren had ordered Coke to return to the HQ for consultation, leaving Thorneycroft alone among the horrors on the summit.80

  Midnight. The scales still quivered in the balance, each army weighed down with the sense of disaster. There are battles enough in history after which both sides have claimed victory.
Here both commanders (though not Botha) claimed defeat.

  Then, out of the darkness and confusion, appeared one man, one self-appointed messenger who might have turned the balance in favour of the British. It was young Winston Churchill, not content with his double job as Morning Post correspondent and lieutenant in the South African Light Horse, instinctively taking over the role of general.81

  Churchill’s troop of the SALH, in keeping with Warren’s distrust of his cavalry, had been confined that day to camp. It drove them all mad. They had to stand idly by as the Boer shells plumped, seven to a minute, into the summit of Spion Kop; to hear the pom-poms lacerating the hillsides with chains of smoke and dust; to see the village of ambulances accumulate at the foot of the mountain. At four o’clock, Churchill could bear it no more. Without permission, he and a companion rode off the few miles to Spion Kop to see for himself, left his horse by the village of ambulances, and began to climb the narrow track to the summit.82 ‘Streams of wounded met us and obstructed our path,’ he wrote later.

  Men were staggering along alone, or supported by comrades, or crawling on hands and knees, or carried on stretchers. Corpses lay here and there…. The splinters and fragments of shell had torn and mutilated in the most ghastly manner. I passed about two hundred while I was climbing up. There was, moreover, a small but steady leakage of unwounded men of all corps. Some of these cursed and swore. Others were utterly exhausted and fell on the hillside in stupor. Others again seemed drunk, though they had had no liquor. Scores were sleeping heavily. Fighting was still proceeding….83

  Churchill had seen fighting in Tirah and at Omdurman, but what he saw here, well behind the firing-line, profoundly shocked him. He went no further to the summit. He rode back to Warren’s HQ and told him what he had seen. The General listened to Churchill’s story ‘with great patience and attention’, according to Churchill. (Warren’s ADC later gave a different version.) At any rate, the crucial debate was still in progress: how to drag the heavy naval guns to the summit. When this had finally been settled, darkness had fallen. Churchill volunteered to take a note to Thorneycroft and to take him the news – that the guns and the fourteen hundred men of the working party were on their way.