Churchill’s second visit to Spion Kop was, if less macabre, more unnerving than before. The stony track was still crowded with ambulances, stragglers and wounded. The darkness, which hid the horrors, had also doubled the confusion. Only one solid battalion now remained, the Dorsets, the one that Coke had kept in reserve. The others were all intermingled: the remnants of the seventeen hundred – that is, Thorneycroft’s MI, the three Lancashire battalions, and what was left of the two thousand-odd men sent to reinforce them, the Imperial Light Infantry, the Middlesex and (sent by Lyttelton) the 2nd Scottish Rifles. As regiments they had ceased to exist. In their place were isolated groups of men, clustered around individual officers, cool and cheerful; some of the men were even eager to fight. ‘But the darkness and the broken ground,’ Churchill said, ‘paralysed everyone.’84
On the summit he found Thorneycroft sitting on the ground, surrounded by the remnants of the regiment he had raised. Churchill gave him Warren’s note and told him the good news. The navy was coming – so were the sappers. Thorneycroft was in a state of shock, of complete physical and moral breakdown. Twelve hours in the firing-line had finished him. No messages from the General, no time to write any himself, he mumbled. Fighting too hot, too close to attend to anything else. Must retire. Had already decided it. ‘Better six good battalions safely down the hill than a bloody mop-up in the morning.’85
Even now, withdrawal – and disaster – were not inevitable. Thorneycroft had called a brief council of war, before making his decision. Two of the COs agreed, somewhat hesitantly. But Lieutenant-Colonel Hill, the CO of the Middlesex, had insisted he was senior to Thorneycroft; he refused to believe Thorneycroft’s story that he was now a brigadier, and Coke (not having been told by Warren) upheld Hill’s claim to be senior. This farcical, Gilbertian argument was now renewed. Hill appeared out of the darkness, and challenged Thornycroft’s right to order the withdrawal. No one listened to Hill.86
As Thorneycroft led the rear-guard down the track, leaving the dead, and many seriously wounded, alone on the summit, they were met by another obstacle. When he had been recalled to see Warren, earlier that evening, Coke had left his staff officer, Captain Phillips, at his HQ on the shelf half-way up the hillside. Phillips was woken by the sound of tramping feet. He woke too late to challenge Thorneycroft. But he wrote a formal memorandum – a remarkable feat, considering the darkness and confusion – addressed to all commanding officers. ‘This withdrawal is absolutely without the authority of either Major-General Coke or Sir Charles Warren…. Were the General here he would order an instant reoccupation of the heights.’87
If only Phillips could have signalled to Warren’s HQ. But, of course, there was no oil in the signalling lamp. The battle was lost for want of a pennyworth of oil. No one listened to Phillips. The withdrawal continued. Churchill advised Thorneycroft to do what he thought best.88
Near the foot of the hill, Thorneycroft met his final obstacle: Colonel Sim and the rescue party, the van of the company of sappers, gunners and the fourteen hundred infantry. Sim gave Thorneycroft Warren’s second note, urging him to hold the hill at all costs. It was too late. ‘I have done all I can,’ said Thorneycroft, ‘and I am not going back.’ Sim and the gunners retired somewhat sheepishly, like the principal actors of a play whose arrival on the stage has been delayed till the end of the final act.89
Spion Kop was left to the dead and the dying of both armies: on the British side, 243 had died; bodies were piled three-deep in the scanty shelter of the main trench. The moon rose.90
It was 2.00 a.m. before Lieutenant Churchill reported back to Warren’s tent at Three Tree Hill. The General was asleep. Churchill put his hand on his shoulder. ‘Colonel Thorneycroft is here, sir.’ Warren took it all very calmly, according to Churchill. What a charming old gentleman. Churchill felt genuinely sorry for him. He also felt sorry for Warren’s army.91
Soon after dawn, the small party of burghers with Reitz and Opperman looked up at Spion Kop and saw an amazing, unbelievable sight. Two figures stood on the summit, triumphantly waving their rifles and their bush hats. Burghers. The hill was theirs. The Khakis were kopschuw. Botha’s extraordinary optimism had been proved correct.92
Buller was woken by the news, sent by telegraph, and rode immediately to Three Tree Hill, arriving soon after dawn. He was spared the knowledge of the ultimate irony: that Schalk Burger and his Boers had, for seven hours, abandoned their positions. As it was, the news proved a bitter disappointment, yet not, after all, a surprise. He did not blame Thorneycroft, who had exercised ‘a wise discretion’. He blamed Warren. ‘If at sundown the defence of the summit had been taken regularly in hand, entrenchments laid out, gun emplacements prepared, the dead removed, the wounded collected, and in fact the whole place brought under regular military command… the hills would have been held I am sure.’93
Buller also blamed himself. He should have obeyed his instincts and superseded Warren six days earlier.94 Both Buller’s verdicts on the disaster-especially his verdict on Buller – were to be echoed by Roberts. And they can hardly be challenged.95
Belatedly, Buller was now again the commander of his own army. High on the summit, Botha exchanged condolences with the British medical officers, and that fatally shallow main trench was made deep enough to serve as a satisfactory grave. The burial parties could see the army had begun their retreat across the river below. But the Boers had lost 335 men in the fighting. Though their line was now reinforced, they were too exhausted to follow up their success.96
All that day and the next, the immense coil of wagons, stores on mule wagons, the thirty-six heavy guns in ox wagons, over one thousand wounded in the ambulance wagons and on stretchers, wound its way across the pontoon bridge at Trichardt’s. Buller took charge in person, calm, stolid, inscrutable as ever, Buller riding hither and thither with an exhausted staff and a huge notebook, Buller at last ‘gripping the whole business’, as Churchill wrote with relief, ‘in his strong hands’.97
That night, the majestic retreat continued: back to the white tents and the relative comforts of Buller’s camp behind the flanks of Mount Alice. It was an appalling night — pitch-dark, with driving rain – a worse experience even than the night march of a fortnight before. But the retreat was accomplished without the loss of a man or a pound of stores. As the engineers pulled up the last of the pontoons, a single shell – a parting gift from Botha – sploshed into the Tugela behind them.98
They had lost fifteen hundred men killed, wounded or captured, and after ten days were back where they started.99
Had they also lost confidence in Buller? It would have been odd if there had not been recriminations. Sacrifices and hardships they had been led to expect. But humiliation was still a novelty. And, anyway, what had gone wrong? No one knew about the failure of the signal lamp. They wondered why Buller had ever given Warren command of his army? Why had they retreated? Officers were baffled – as well they might be.100 Among the more senior generals, that whispering campaign against Buller, led by Lyttelton, gathered momentum. People began to talk of ‘Sir Reverse’ Buller, and ‘The Ferryman of the Tugela’.101 The Times correspondent, Buller’s cousin, wrote home, ‘The worst of it all is that everyone is beginning to lose confidence in Redvers.’102 Even the NCOs, who had previously shown blind faith in old Buller, began to grumble about their great General. ‘Everyone is very downhearted,’ wrote Sergeant-Major Galley of the Army Service Corps, ‘they can’t understand why they have to take these places at such great cost only to vacate them afterwards, I think it’s a laundery Gen. Buller should be manager of and let Mrs Buller come out here and see what she can do….’103
On the south bank of the Tugela, Buller himself addressed his army, praising their courage, and thanking them ‘from the bottom of his heart’ for their great sacrifices. There was something about the way he did it – the ill-suppressed emotion – that disarmed most opposition.104 Buller told the men that they had given him ‘the key to Ladysmith’, and promised
them that they would be there within a week.105
Buller’s superiors did not, however, share his optimism. The news of the abandonment of Spion Kop caused more heart-searching even than the news of Colenso. Roberts, at Cape Town, reacted by proposing that Buller should temporarily abandon Ladysmith by acting, for the time being, on the defensive.106 Wolseley and the War Office went much further. They actually suggested – a suggestion later sheepishly withdrawn – that Buller should permanently abandon Ladysmith. White and the fittest of the garrison might be ordered to cut their way out. The rest would have to blow up their stores and surrender.107
Both suggestions surprised Buller. Strange to say, there was no return, after Spion Kop, to the black mood of rage and resentment Buller had felt after Colenso. He did not tell White of Wolseley’s surrender telegram.108
‘We were fighting all last week,’ he wrote to his wife cheerfully, ‘but old Warren is a duffer and lost me a good chance. However, if I have the least luck I think I have at last found out how to get through these beastly mountains.’109 He had ‘the key’.
Poor Buller, he was doomed, ten days after he had written this, to be retreating yet again across the river: the Ferryman of the Tugela, General Charon, with a new load of dead and dying, 333 casualties suffered at the Battle of Vaal Krantz.110 Yet, in a sense, as he said, Spion Kop had given him the key to Ladysmith. Victory was not to be only a question of geography: a suitable drift, a commanding hill, the right position for the guns. It was a question of method. From their mistakes, humiliating as they were, Buller’s nineteenth-century army – GOC, generals, officers and men – were all learning how to fight a twentieth-century war.111
PART III
Roberts’s Advance
What ’e does not know o’ war,
Gen’ral Bobs,
You can arst the shop next door –
can’t they, Bobs?
Oh ’e’s little but ’e’s wise,
’E’s a terror for ’is size,
An’ – ’e – does – not – advertise
Do yer, Bobs?
Rudyard Kipling, ‘Bobs’, 1898
“WHO SAID ‘BOBS’?”
CHAPTER 26
The Steam-Roller
The Western Front,
11–15 February 1900
‘It was the worst run war ever – no transport, no grub, nothing…’
One of Roberts’s old soldiers describing Roberts’s great flank march to the author in June 1970
Rimington’s Guides – the van of Roberts’s great army of forty thousand – clattered into Ramdam about ten o’clock on the morning of Sunday 11 February. They were about one hundred strong. Behind them, they left a trail of dust hanging in the fiery blue sky. When they rode on, they left their name, ‘Tigers’, scrawled in letters of chalk over the farmhouse doorway. They met no opposition.1
It had never been much of a place, Ramdam: one square, whitewashed, tin-roofed farmhouse astride a low ridge in the almost featureless veld; a few weeping willows; across the farmyard, some outhouses for the plough oxen, the donkeys and the Africans; and below the ridge, key to the whole place, the dam, or glorified horse-pond, fed by the summer rains.2
This was Ramdam, one among a hundred other Dutch homesteads in the endless plains to the south of the Modder and the Riet Rivers. It was still less of a place after Rimington’s Tigers had made their bivouac there. You would not have needed their signature to tell you they had passed that way. The square whitewashed hall, the four smaller rooms, the Africans’ quarters – all smashed and stripped and gutted as efficiently as those British settlers’ homes had been smashed and stripped and gutted in Natal. The Tigers were Uitlanders and colonials. Judged as scouts and fighting men, they were the élite of the army, but ‘not [the] men I should invite to bivouac on my estate’, as one of Roberts’s generals dryly observed.3 They did not talk rhetoric about wiping something off a slate. They looted as quietly and thoroughly as they fought and scouted.4
For this was enemy country. Ramdam was the first halting-place within the borders of the Free State. The counter invasion had begun.
Roberts’s advance on Bloemfontein, launched that day, had some of the majestic momentum of Kitchener’s march to Omdurman eighteen months before. Here at long last was the imperial steam-roller: a whole army corps in motion across the sand, under the canopies of dust and amid the yells of the African drivers, the wheep of the long whips, the squealing of the mules.5 Here, too, was the Sirdar in person, for Kitchener was the Chief of Staff to the Field-Marshal, Lord Roberts. There might be less glamour about this great army than its predecessors in imperial history. There were no flags or drums as the men pushed their way through the strands of barbed wire that marked the Free State frontier. True to the new style of warfare, the officers carried rifles instead of swords, and Kitchener himself had not even a medal ribbon on his broad chest.
It was the sheer scale of this army that took away one’s breath. Roberts and Kitchener had five divisions – about forty thousand men, with one hundred guns, including a whole division of cavalry commanded by Lieutenant-General John French.6
It was French’s cavalry that, on the heels of the Tigers, led the army into Ramdam. For the first time in the war, a real flying column was available – five thousand cavalry and MI, horsemen enough to out-Boer the Boers. Before they left their base camp at Modder River, Kitchener summoned French and his staff officer, young Douglas Haig. It was their job to relieve Kimberley. They must outflank Cronje’s line at Magersfontein. Everything depended on ‘surprise’. Kitchener added, somewhat ominously, ‘If it fails neither I nor the Field Marshal can tell what the result on the Empire may be.’ He stressed that word ‘Empire’.7
No doubt French understood the nuances. Cecil Rhodes, the man who was in a sense the Empire made flesh, was locked up in Kimberley; and the flesh was weak. There was food enough in Kimberley, yet Rhodes had given Roberts a characteristically reckless ultimatum: make the relief of this town your first priority or I shall surrender it to the Boers.8
So this was the cavalry’s task: to ride like the wind to Kimberley, to save the town from the Boers and Rhodes from his own worst enemy, himself.
What did General French make of the task? He knew that transport would be the key to success in this war. And he had serious misgivings about Roberts’s and Kitchener’s transport arrangements. Since Bobs and K had arrived at the Cape they had turned on its head the regimental system of transport and supply by taking it under their own central control. Perhaps they would be proved right by events. French did not think so. He had dug in his heels and kept his own cavalry division’s transport safe from Kitchener’s grasp.9
Now Rhodes’s SOS had made a difficult situation worse. To ride like the wind to Kimberley would exact a heavy price from the cavalry: half-rations for the men, horses dropping dead with hunger, heat and exhaustion. This would be the case assuming that the cavalry were ready for the campaign. But his six regular cavalry regiments were not ready. Some of the horses were green after a long voyage from abroad. All of them had suffered a gruelling train journey from Colesberg (where French had been based since November) or from the ports.10 The state of the irregular horse was still more alarming. Some British regulars had been turned by Roberts into makeshift MI, and they would have been excellent, if only they had had time to learn to ride. The new colonial corps raised at the Cape by Bobs and K was a ‘Scallywag Corps’, a lot of ruffians. (This did not include Rimington’s Tigers, who had been raised much earlier.) ‘They disappear the moment a shot is fired or there is a prospect of a fight.’ So Major Haig confided to his sister.11 And, assuming they arrived in time to save Kimberley, what would be the price of success? Would that solitary searchlight beam flashing its SOS from the beleaguered town have wrecked the new phase of the campaign that had just opened, the long-delayed march to Bloemfontein?
Yet failure to break through the enemy’s line was hardly possible. French was part of an army that outnumbered
the Boers by four to one. Methuen had attacked the line at Magersfontein and nearly broken through. Methuen had had three brigades; Roberts had five divisions.
The steam-roller rolled into Ramdam-thirty-four thousand white troops supported by four thousand African drivers – and out across the veld. After French’s cavalry plodded Major-General Charles Tucker’s 7th Infantry Division. Next came Lieutenant-General Thomas Kelly-Kenny’s 6th Division. These were the two new infantry divisions ordered out to the Cape as a result of Black Week. Finally, there was a newly constituted 9th Division, commanded by Major-General Sir Henry Colvile. It consisted of the newly landed 19th Brigade, led by a young brigadier called Smith-Dorrien, and of the original Highland Brigade that had ‘caught pepper’ at Magersfontein. (The balance of Roberts’s forty thousand was left to guard the rear including the Guards stuck with Methuen at the Modder.)12
Of all the cheerful men in Roberts’s army, the Highlanders were probably the cheeriest. They had had enough of the Modder. Nine weeks of flies and dust and muddy water; too hot in the day, too cold at night; and always Magersfontein Kopje, there across the plain. They had had their fill of Methuen, too. After Wauchope’s death, Major-General Hector MacDonald (‘Fighting Mac’) had taken over the brigade. He reported to Roberts the extraordinary, burning hatred for Methuen. Methuen did not need to be told. He wrote to his wife, ‘They will never agree to serve under me again.’13
The Boer War Page 49
