Unfortunately for Buller’s reputation, modern writers have dismissed this view of his difficulties, and the fact that, of any British general in the war, it was he who had the hardest task. Modern writers follow the lead of Leo Amery’s The Times History of the War, weighty, brilliant, but partisan. Amery was an army reformer, a propagandist by his own admission, who had chosen Buller to serve in his narrative as the symbol of all that was most absurd in the unreformed Victorian army. He wrote of Buller’s difficulties at the Tugela, ‘Almost any reasonably planned attack anywhere along the Tugela would have succeeded if pushed with the least promptitude and resolution’ – a breathtaking judgement from a twenty-eight-year-old reporter, who never even witnessed one of Buller’s battles, let alone had to take any responsibility in war.16
There are few short cuts in war. What was needed now by the British on the Tugela was an answer to the novel and complicated problems posed by Botha’s brilliant defensive tactics and strategy. And Buller, grope and fumble as he did, was beginning to find the answer.
Buller was quite cheerful that day, 12 February, as he installed himself again in the station-master’s house at Frere, now surrounded by sandbags and equipped with steel plates to screen the windows and stoep.17 His emotions after Vaal Krantz, like his emotions after Colenso, had swiftly run their course. He had cabled Roberts, as we saw, to ask for reinforcements.18 Roberts had rebuffed him: ‘I must therefore request that while maintaining a bold front you will act strictly on the defensive. … The repeated loss of men on the Tugela river without satisfactory result is that which our small army cannot aim at.’19 Perhaps the rebuff served as a tonic. At any rate, Buller believed – with reason – that to ‘act strictly on the defensive’ could be fatal for the Ladysmith garrison. He decided to press on with his fourth attempt by way of Hlangwane, the Boer-held ridge commanding Colenso from the British side of the river.
The new plan sounded simple enough.20 In fact, it represented a venture, both in terms of geography and tactics, into largely unmapped territory.
The true key to Ladysmith was a new system of offensive warfare: the offensive counterpart to Boer defensive tactics. Buller realized that the old three-act, one-day battle of the past had been killed stone-dead by the combination of the trench and the magazine rifle. To win a modern battle, troops would have to endure a series of interlocking engagements, spread not only over a great number of miles, but over a great number of days, even weeks. New infantry tactics had begun to emerge: better use of ground, more individual initiative, much more skill in taking cover. The artillery’s role was being revolutionized; instead of merely supplying the first act in the three-act drama, the gunners would be in demand, day after day, throwing a creeping barrage ahead of the advancing infantry. Buller was not alone in recognizing the significance of these dramatic innovations in offensive tactics. Hildyard (the Staff College expert), Warren (the sapper), and, above all, the younger artillery commanders like Colonel Parsons, shared Buller’s views; indeed, they complained of Buller’s caution in putting them into practice. What they all agreed was that the real ‘key’ to Ladysmith was the tenacity of the British infantry.21
In the simple geographical sense, there was not so much a ‘key’ as a double combination lock, whose first sequence of positions centred on a hill nicknamed ‘Monte Cristo’, a hill on the British side of the Tugela.
The fact that the river cut a six-mile-long gorge through the hills to the east of Colenso, and so isolated the Boers’ left flank on the south bank of the river, had long seemed to offer tempting possibilities. Hlangwane, the first hill south of this gorge, had been attacked, somewhat feebly, by Dundonald’s mounted brigade at the Battle of Colenso. Buller had originally rejected the idea of making a serious attack on-Hlangwane for two main reasons. First, the country here to the east was quite unlike the open hills to the west: Hlangwane was pitted with ravines and hidden in a maze of mimosa thorns. Second, it was only five hundred feet high, and was itself commanded by a series of tangled, wooded ridges to the east, culminating in the thousand-foot ridge at Monte Cristo.22
Then why not attack these eastern ridges in turn?
With hindsight, people later claimed that this had always been the obvious course. The fact was that no one – not even clever young men like Winston Churchill, nor Bron Herbert, nor experienced generals like Lyttelton – pinned much hope on the possibility at the time. It was known that, since the Battle of Colenso, the Boers had greatly strengthened and extended their trench lines here on the east. Lyttelton wrote pessimistically to his wife on the 9th, ‘What will be done next? … Probably an attack from Chieveley on Hlangwane which will be carried but will lead to nothing.’23
Buller’s answer was: what other choice was left? They had tried the frontal attack at Colenso. They had tried two flank marches to the west. A flank attack from the east was the final ‘forlorn hope’, if they were to arrive at Ladysmith before it fell.
They must trust to their immense superiority in heavy guns, and to the new tactical skills of both gunners and infantry, hammering and squeezing out the Boers, step by step, hill by hill; crumpling their line from Hussar Hill to Cingolo, from Cingolo to Monte Cristo, from Monte Cristo to Hlangwane.
It was a ponderous style of fighting – to be made more ponderous by mistakes in the way the plan was executed. But the style itself was indisputably correct: the painful prototype of modern warfare.24
Hussar Hill was a brown, grassy wave in the veld, about four miles north of Chieveley; it was named after some of the 13th Hussars who had been surprised there six weeks before, and had lost two men killed.25 The first step now was an armed reconnaissance. Despite the great improvement in his field intelligence, supplied by Lieutenant-Colonel Arthur Sandbach (‘Sandbags’) and forty well-paid African agents, Buller was hesitant about the best line of advance.26 At eight o’clock on Monday 12 February, he sent a group of Dundonald’s irregulars, including Lieutenant-Colonel Julian Byng’s South African Light Horse, to seize Hussar Hill. He followed himself at midday, stolidly surveyed the country through his telescope, then ordered the whole force back to Chieveley.27
These Cape Town volunteers (the Cockyolibirds, alias ‘Bingo’s Own’) included that intrepid young soldier-cum-reporter, Lieutenant Winston Churchill. He rode back in the rearguard with the Colonel, the ground behind them alive with jumping dust; the Mauser bullets fell short. Then Winston saw that the handful of casualties included his own younger brother, Lieutenant John Churchill, who, in a flush of patriotism, had taken ship to South Africa and arrived at the front that morning.28 (‘It seemed as though he had paid his brother’s debts,’ was John Atkins’ comment.29) Fortunately, Jack had suffered only a slight wound in the foot. Relieved to have him safely out of harm’s way, Winston had him packed off down the line to Durban, where their mother, Lady Randolph had just sailed into the harbour, opportunely enough, in her American-sponsored hospital ship, Maine.30
During the next seven days, the advance resumed, faltered, resumed. The men gave a ringing cheer at the news, announced on the 16th, that French had relieved Kimberley.31 The delays were mainly caused by the lack of water and the exceptional heat – 100° in the shade.32 The men grumbled about the heat, the officers about the delays. Buller, as usual, seemed deaf to his critics: he was going to go at his own pace.33 On Wednesday 14 February, Hussar Hill was reoccupied after a race to the summit by Dundonald’s men. On Thursday, Buller threw his right: pushing up Lyttelton’s division crabwise into ‘Green Hill’, the ridge linking Hussar Hill and Cingolo. Heavy guns were dragged on to Hussar Hill, and soon the white globes of smoke marked the infantry’s way forwards, probing the scrub and thorns. There were thirty-four guns on that one small hill, including two new 5-inch Royal Garrison Artillery guns rushed out from England. In all, Buller had fifty heavy guns and field-guns concentrated at the Tugela, compared to the Boers’ eight.34 To give the Boers a sporting chance, one British gunner officer, Major Callwell, took up his seat in a deck-c
hair beside one of the 5-inch guns.35 General Warren took a bath out in the open during a Boer bombardment; he emerged, with a towel round his waist, to receive a visit from Buller.36 The men must have enjoyed seeing these antics. At any rate, by Saturday, the original fingerhold on Hussar Hill had become a firm grip on four miles of tangled ridges east of Colenso: ‘a gigantic right arm’, in Churchill’s phrase, ‘its elbow on Hussar Hill, its hand on Cingolo, its fingers, the Irregular Cavalry Brigade, actually behind Cingolo’.37 Now to grasp Monte Cristo.
Success is comparatively dull, Atkins observed. The struggle for Monte Cristo, on Sunday the 18th, displayed none of the impotent heroism of Colenso or Spion Kop (nor, indeed, of the suicidal attack at Paardeberg that Kitchener was launching the same day, three hundred miles away to the west). Atkins observed the battle from the rear. He heard the hated pom-pom. He saw the ‘sky-line thickly toothed’ with men. It was Hildyard’s 2nd Brigade – the West Yorks, the East Surrey and the Queen’s. On the opposite ridge, Green Hill, Barton’s (6th) Fusilier Brigade picked their way over the scarred and pockmarked ground, to the skirl of the pipes of the Scots Fusiliers. There was a thin cheer, answered by the men on Monte Cristo. The hill was theirs.38
On Monte Cristo itself, success was more eventful. Lieutenant Crossman, in command of H Company of the leading battalion, the West Yorks, had celebrated his twenty-third birthday that day:
The hill was awfully steep and the top at the centre for about 40 or 50 yards was sheer cliff. When we were nearing the foot of the hill, Kitchener [the Sirdar’s young brother, now commanding the 5th Brigade in Natal] caught me and said: There are two of our companies almost at the top. You have got to catch them up … or the Boers will knock ’em off. … It was an awful climb. Huge boulders all the way & phit! phit! of bullets & whizzz-bang-burr as a shell would go over you & down would go a man, till at last thank God we neared the top. Just as I got up there poor old Berney was shot clean through the head, & Porch was hit in the head. There we lay for some time blazing away at the Boers footing it in the distance…. Then I moved on to the spot where I got Gretton & bound him up. … The shell that scratched his beak knocked us both head over heels as I was shaking his paw & congratulating him on getting safe to the top. Poor old Snakeface! He was wild at being hit and used the most appalling language…. On the way down I stopped to see the last of poor old Berney as they put him in his grave.39
Two days later, Buller himself stood on the summit of that hill, stolidly surveying tier on tier of hills through his telescope. The capture of these ridges, culminating in Monte Cristo, had made him master of the south bank of the Tugela, giving him the whole six-mile arc of ground east of Colenso. Overnight, the Boers had fled across the river, leaving lock, stock and barrel behind them: pom-pom shells, sacks of flour, Dutch Bibles. The capture of Monte Cristo on the 18th had turned the trench lines at Hlangwane; the capture of Hlangwane, on the 19th, and the installation of heavy guns on its summit, opened the way to Colenso. It was a sound tactical victory – even if Buller, perhaps mistakenly, did not risk sending his forward troops to cut off the fleeing Boers.40 Morale soared. Churchill cabled The Morning Post that ‘now at last success was a distinct possibility’.41 Buller heliographed White. Fifteen battalions of infantry, covered in dirt, their khaki in tatters, loaded with kettles and firewood for their bivouacs, surged forward, insect-like, over the maze of hills and valleys that had baffled them so long. It was like a dream.42 The first part of that combination lock had sprung open with a clang.
The problem was how to open the second part of the combination lock – between the Tugela and Ladysmith. On Monday morning 19 February, two infantry companies marched into Colenso village unopposed, and next day Thorneycroft’s Uitlanders splashed across the Tugela and occupied the kopjes at Fort Wylie. That evening, the station at Colenso was puffing with trains again.43 It was nine weeks since the day of the battle there. The skeletons of Colonel Long’s artillery horses, harnessed together in a danse macabre, lay eight hundred yards from the river-bank. People pointed out the shallow donga, marked by the thorn-tree, where Freddy Roberts had been dragged, mortally wounded.44 Of the Boers there was now no sign, except for the occasional ineffective outburst of shelling. But if they intended to block further advance, both roads from Colenso to Ladysmith – the new road to the north-west, the old road to the north-east alongside the railway line – were heaven-made for the job. They were dominated by high hills which presented tier on tier of natural defence lines. It was for this reason that Buller had blurted out to his wife after the Battle of Colenso, ‘I think quite between you and me that I was lucky in not getting in, as if I had, I would not have known what next to do.’46
Why then double back to Colenso, to enter what John Atkins called a ‘shell-trap’?46 Buller’s plan, when he left Chieveley on the 14th, was to try to bypass Colenso.47 From the summit of Monte Cristo, five miles to the north-east, he could, at long last, see Ladysmith beckoning to him: it was the patch of gum-trees and tin roofs just to the left of Bulwana.48 Colonel à Court, one of his staff officers, urged Buller to press on northwards: either by swinging round to the north-east of Monte Cristo or by cutting a way through the great gorge to the north-west.49 No one could have been more eager to follow one or other of these routes than Buller. But Colonel Sandbach, Buller’s Intelligence Officer, and an engineer by training, reconnoitred them and reported both of them to be out of the question.50 Buller saw no choice but to double back to Colenso.
On the 21st, the sappers floated out the pontoon bridge – the same wood-and-canvas bridge that had already carried the army four times across the river – and anchored it across the swift current where the Tugela turned north to avoid Hlangwane. On the 22nd, the advance resumed. Major-General Arthur Wynne was ordered to take the Lancashire (11th) Brigade and seize the kopjes three miles north of Colenso, and a mile above the falls. The main Boer position was reported by White to be at Pieters Hill, two miles farther north, and beyond Pieters it was downhill all the way to Ladysmith.51
Colonel à Court remained unconvinced. ‘Three days’ more bloody fighting in a hole,’ he told Sandbach’s subordinate. To Winston Churchill, hunting for a story for The Morning Post, he confided the cheerful news: ‘It will be like being in the Coliseum and shot at by every row of seats.’52
But most people believed that Buller, assisted by Roberts’s sweeping success in the Free State, had at last got Botha on the run. Roberts himself cabled to say that ‘lots of special trains’ were taking the burghers from Natal to the Free State and other parts of the western front.53 White’s staff claimed that all the Free State burghers had now left. Hence Sandbach’s confident prediction on the 22nd: ‘Many men have left the besieging force around Ladysmith; & the Boers have consequently been forced to draw in… we shall have one more big battle before we get to Ladysmith.’54
One more big battle. Even that had seemed too pessimistic to Buller, as he heliographed cheerfully to White the previous day: ‘I am now engaged in pushing my way through by Pieters. I think there is only a rearguard in front of me. The large Boer laager under Bulwana was removed last night. I hope to be with you tomorrow night.’55
Relief by tomorrow night. It seemed an impossible dream to the men of the Ladysmith garrison. Despite the series of encouraging heliograms which had reached them from both fronts since mid-February – including copies of Roberts’s reports that he had relieved Kimberley and had hemmed in Cronje – there was a stagnant, exhausted air about the garrison. At its heart lay the low spirits of the GOC, Sir George White – ‘invisible White’, he had been nicknamed, because he kept himself hidden away at Convent Ridge.56
‘The siege has now lasted longer than the siege of Paris … fast approaching Troy,’ wrote one of the officers. A fortnight earlier, they had celebrated the siege’s hundredth day. Next day a Boer heliographer, clearly a cricket fan, signalled from Bulwana: ‘101 not out.’ And back came the signaller of the Manchesters, ‘Ladysmith still batting,’
quick as the flash of the heliograph.57
But most jokes had worn thin, like the garrison itself; the emotions had been rubbed as raw as the backs of the starved horses and mules. For four months they had lived a ‘pendulum existence’ (to borrow a phrase used by Violet Cecil),58 swinging from hope to disappointment and back again during each of Buller’s attempts to rescue them. ‘Buller is a myth,’ wrote one man in his diary.59 ‘If he doesn’t come soon, there’ll be no one to relieve,’ wrote several others. Gone were the days when people found the men writing jaunty letters home. ‘We have had a very hard time of it,’ were the blunt words of Private Steinberg of the 60th, ‘very near starving…. And hardly any boots or clothes on and what we had was lousy.’60 Gunner Netley had ceased to fill his notebook with stories about his ‘old friend Long Tom’. His diary was now as drab as the life: ‘day passed without events’ … ‘stood to arms at 3.30 a.m…. all well’.61 Few of the other men could rise to that. ‘The troops are not so cheerful,’ said Colonel Rawlinson on 8 February, ‘it gives me pain to see their woe-begone faces pinched by want of food…. ’62
The officers, many of whom could afford to supplement the meat and bread ration with expensive luxuries like eggs and potatoes, had only recently begun to feel the pangs of hunger. But they had long felt the pangs of humiliation. Towards Buller, and Buller’s army, there was a corresponding bitterness that ebbed and flowed with each of his reverses. ‘Most foul news,’ wrote Captain Gough of the Rifle Brigade after Spion Kop, ‘how on earth men who call themselves Englishmen could allow themselves to be turned off a hill by a pack of Dutch peasants.’63 ‘It is just too absolutely sickening to think of,’ said ‘Dodo’ Jelf of the 60th, ‘that all that loss of life and splendid work should have been absolutely chucked away simply because some filthy funking Regt. get the blue panic and runs away. I should think by now their CO has probably been court-martialled and I hope shot for cowardice….’64
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