The Boer War

by Thomas Pakenham

  Hart had been unable to control his impatience. Those wretched delays, beyond his control, had hamstrung his brigade. The shadows lengthened before the Inniskillings, the first of the six battalions Buller had given him, reached the hollow below the hill. The next two battalions – Connaughts and Dublins – were still strung out along the valley. The last two, sent along from the 4th Brigade, were hours behind. At the very least, he should have waited for his first three battalions. Hart did not hesitate. He sent up the Inniskillings. After that, he flung the men, company after company, into the firing line, just as they arrived. The result was, of course, a weak attack on a narrow front, and it was now too late for proper artillery support. Instead, Hart offered his own cheerful brand of encouragement, the same kind as at Colenso.8

  He stood up on one of the hummocks at the foot of the hill, shouting and waving at the battalions. The buglers sounded ‘Advance!’ – not once, but again and again. To some of the Inniskillings, winded after the stiff climb, it seemed he was taunting them. Then over the skyline they charged. They were four companies. The Boers stood up and fired. They were standing in trenches on the real crestline, 250 yards away across an open grassy plateau, as flat and storm-swept as the summit of Spion Kop.9

  Jourdain’s company reached the skyline just as darkness fell. The second charge was over. Hart apparently insisted that the Inniskillings, with two companies of Connaughts and two companies of Dublins, should try again. It was all the same. The attackers strewed the summit, several hundred dead and wounded in the space of a couple of tennis courts. Jourdain wrote,

  We lay down about 5 yards from the crest [the false crest] but few slept. They were parched with thirst, they had no water and no food … the bullets kept splashing on the stones around, and exploding in the darkness with small sparks like fireworks. The wounded men in front of the plateau were left to their fate, and many a man got wounded even as much as 6 times during the night. There was a major and a subaltern and two men of the 27th [Inniskillings] in front of me who were badly wounded but we were powerless to give them water, or to take them away, so badly were they wounded. The shrieks of the wounded during the night were awful To add to this a Zulu, who had been wounded early in the afternoon, kept up a yell all the night….

  Almost more macabre, other people heard Dutch hymns floating across no-man’s-land. Once again, the burghers were celebrating their deliverance.10

  Next morning, the Irish Brigade drifted back to the valley, dazed and humiliated. Some of the men had fled, abandoning their officers. All the wounded were left to their fate on the plateau. The battle had cost them mainly five hundred casualties in less than twenty-four hours; the colonels of both the Dublins and the Inniskillings were dead. In all, the Inniskillings had lost seventy-two per cent of their officers and twenty-seven per cent of their men: the highest proportion of any regiment in the war so far.11 ‘My brave Irish,’ said Queen Victoria when she read the war telegrams.12 And when the telegrams reached London, the wounded still lay, untended, out on the hillside.

  Tactically, however, Hart’s Hill did not prove a dead-end like Spion Kop. Hart’s two missing battalions – the Durham Light Infantry and the Rifle Brigade – turned up in the morning, just in time to prevent a rout. The fresh battalions dug in along the lower ridges.13 Perhaps Hart’s Brigade were only holding on by their eyelids, as à Court said.14 But they were holding on.

  Hart’s aim was, predictably, to keep battering on down the corridor. Bullet and Warren were convinced there must be a way round. Colonel ‘Sandbags’, Buller’s Chief Intelligence Officer, was sent to take a second look at the beginning of the gorge of the Tugela a mile downstream from the Falls, where ‘crossing-point’ was marked on the FID blueprint map. Sandbach returned with the advice that he thought the pontoon bridge could be relayed there and a track for the guns hacked out along the line of a narrow African path. At last, the topography had turned pro-British. The shelter of the deep gorge could be used to push up new brigades to the end of the corridor, without running the gauntlet of the Boers’ camp located on their ramparts.15

  By the 27th, Buller’s arrangements were complete. The plan was an ingenious, two-handed manoeuvre. (Botha, at any rate, had no inkling at all of what was intended.) The left hand, Lyttelton’s division, would maintain its grip on the hills at the lower part of the corridor, pinning the main part of Botha’s men to their trenches along this line. The right hand, Warren’s division of three brigades, under Barton, would make a three-pronged attack on the upper part of the corridor, protected by the resited artillery. The three hills commanding the upper part of the corridor – Hart’s Hill, Railway Hill, and Pieters Hill – were now to be attacked in reverse order, and from the east, thus outflanking the Boer line.16

  Meanwhile, on Sunday 25th, a six-hour armistice had at last put an end to the nightmare of the wounded British soldiers trapped in no-man’s-land on the flat plateaux above the corridor. On Wynne’s Hill they had been lying there for three nights and two days without food or water; on Hart’s Hill, for two nights and a day. On Saturday, it rained and perhaps it was as well it did. But when the sun came out again, it was British artillery searching for Boers, not British stretcher-bearers searching for wounded, that had combed the brown hillsides. When help came, many were beyond it.17

  From his eyrie by Naval Hill, John Atkins had watched some of the luckier ones: men who had fallen on the nearer hillsides. He wondered which of those limp, yellow heaps were dead men and which alive. Then one of the heaps began to crawl, urging itself on its back with hands and feet, towards the valley below. It took the man from morning to night to do it.18 Winston Churchill, nearby with the SALH, saw similar scenes. They reminded him of the wounded after Kitchener’s triumph at Omdurman, when thousands of Sudanese had been left untended, wriggling and kicking in the sand.19

  To abandon white men to such a fate went against the grain for both Boers and British. On the night of the 24th, Buller had first learnt of the men’s plight, and had arranged an armistice with Botha.20 Up there on Wynne’s Hill and Hart’s Hill, a strange silence prevailed, the first kind of peace for five days and nights. Then, about eleven o’clock, the white flags rose shakily above both lines of trenches, and an eerie day of fraternization began.

  No one could remember anything like it. Nearly half a century of ‘uncivilized wars’ (Omdurman and all its bitter little colonial predecessors) had intervened since a British army, at the Crimea, had last enjoyed such civilities, reaching out into no-man’s-land to shake the enemy’s hand. And this time, the experience had an extra depth. Who were these men who had beaten back the cream of the British infantry? For four months, the British had been fighting an enemy so invisible that many had never yet seen a Boer, alive or dead.

  Lieutenant-Colonel E. O. F. Hamilton, CO of the Queen’s, now led the procession from the British side, halting in the precise centre of no-man’s-land under his white flag. The officers of the Queen’s and Devonshires behind him tried to look nonchalant. (Lieutenant Grant wrote later, ‘From the airy and easy demeanour that dreadful plateau might have been a London club.’21) The privates stood awkwardly in a neat row, folding their arms across their chests and staring across the grassy plateau, dominated by the great whale-back of Grobelaar’s Kloof. The dead stared back: uncouth, angular, bloated, tumbled about the rocks, bodies twisted, faces blackened by sun and rain.

  Johnny Boer at last – Brother Boer. Out of the shell-torn earth the burghers came, straightening their backs (Grant: ‘Like a gamekeeper straightening his back from the cramp of setting his traps in a weasel run’) and glancing warily from side to side.22 To Lieutenant Claud Lafone, they looked a ‘rum-looking lot’. There were old men with flowing, tobacco-stained beards, middle-aged men with beards burnt black by sun and sweat, clean-shaven young men with homely Dutch features, the broad nose and the strong chin. Their clothes, too, comprised the homely muddle of a peasant’s wardrobe – tweeds of all sizes and colours, homespun and ‘shoddy�
�. By contrast, their leader (it was actually Commandant Trichardt) dressed like a dandy and talked like a gentleman. He wore a kind of uniform – a khaki suit, studded with silver buttons and silver stars – and bewailed, with comic exaggeration, the loss of his boots and hairbrushes when the British had overrun Monte Cristo.23

  The other Boers at first maintained a sullen reserve. Then Grant managed to strike up a conversation with one old oak-tree of a man:

  Grant: Good morning! Oak-tree: Gumorghen.

  Grant (after a pause): Surely we can be friends for five minutes?

  Oak-tree (with sudden beaming smile): Why not indeed! Why not, officer! Have you any tobacco?

  It was Grant’s magic pouch of Goldflake – for the Boers a shortage of tobacco was a kind of famine — that loosened the Boers’ tongues. They crowded round Grant, as he distributed a fill for half-a-dozen pipes. Soon the scene became animated. Characteristically, the British officers felt it was natural for them to play the part of hosts. Lafone took out his camera, and four of the Boers self-consciously posed for a snapshot. A young Boer insisted on shaking hands, although he spoke no English. Grant at length popped the overwhelming question: ‘Aren’t you fellows sick of this?’ Bluntly came the reply: ‘Of course, we don’t like it any more than you do, but three years, yes! three years we will stay out and fight!’24

  Meanwhile, the mutilated bodies of about eighty dead, and three survivors, were carried off on stretchers. Also the tall figure of Lyttelton, the divisional general in command of this sector, had appeared on the hillside. It was a Boer who put to Lyttelton the same question that Grant had asked.

  Boer: How long do you think the war will last?

  Lyttelton: That depends on you. We’ll go on for as long as you like. In fact, I think it’ll be a long business. (Jokingly) I’m sending for my wife and children.

  Boer (gloomily – he did not realize Lyttelton was joking): I thought it was nearly over. Lyttelton: It’s only just beginning. We don’t care how long it goes on. Fighting is our business. We’ve nothing else to do. But it’s rather rough on you. Boer (with feeling): Yes, it’s rather rough on us.25

  Tobacco exchanged. A handshake across the gulf. But no meeting of minds.

  The armistice ended at sunset. At first, each side felt an instinctive diffidence about resuming hostilities. There were no shots till about 10.00 p.m. Then, as Lafone put it, ‘we were blazing away at each other like fun’ – fun that was to last until Majuba Day.26

  Majuba Day, and the supreme effort. Victory. It was hard to believe – not least for Buller. ‘My dearest,’ Buller wrote four days later to his wife,

  It has all seemed to me like a dream. Every day some new complications to meet and every day the same roar of guns and rattle of musketry, with alas, every day the long list of killed and wounded, which is what I cannot bear. However I thought that if I got in it would cost me 3000 men, and I hope I have done it under 2000 which is something…. I must say the men were grand, they meant to do it and it was a real pleasure to command them…. I wish you could have seen my fight of the 27th. It was intensely interesting and it is only a country like this that you can stand 3000 yds off & see a whole battle. There was a moment that I thought it was touch and go, but it was only a moment.

  Dearest from your rather pleased R.27

  Buller’s uneasy moment must have been about 2 p.m. on the 27th when Barton’s Fusilier Brigade – the first of the three brigades ordered to attack in turn from east to west – seemed to falter astride the spiky walls of the Pieters plateau. Earlier, he had watched them tramp off across the pontoon bridge and vanish down the great gorge to the right, among the jungle growth of aloes and the towering red cliffs and the splintered boulders jostling in the Tugela. Soon after midday, they reappeared as black dots two miles away on the first kopje of the Pieters plateau.28

  As at Cingolo and Monte Cristo, he had outmanoeuvred Botha, who had left his flank at Pieters hardly defended, apparently because he thought the country was too rugged for Buller to attempt to cross the Tugela and turn his flank.29 Moreover, from a long, high, bony platform across the river, Buller’s artillery could cover the attack with converging fire. For the first time, Colonel Parsons’s gunners could fully exploit Buller’s revolutionary new tactic for co-ordinating artillery and infantry: to send, skimming over the heads of the creeping infantry, a creeping curtain of shell fire. Only a hundred yards ahead of them, the hillside foamed and thundered with rocks and earth and flying steel. While, on their side of the curtain, the sun still shone and the butterflies glittered on the rocks.30

  But once Barton’s brigade were actually astride Pieters plateau, Parsons’s gunners were too far away and too low to cover them. The Boers began to recover themselves. Botha, recognizing the danger to the whole line if the British turned his flank at Pieters, had in fact desperately thrown reinforcements into the breach.31 At 2.30 p.m., Barton sent forward a company of Scots Fusiliers and part of his reserve battalion – two companies of the Dublins – to storm the Boer strong-point on the northern kopje of Pieters. They were beaten back into the rocks, with severe casualties. Meanwhile, the Boers on the next hill, a mile away to the west – Railway Hill, the third hill along the railway corridor – poured a violent cross-fire into them with impunity.32

  But not for long. At about three o’clock, small brown dots began to emerge on the rocks and scree of Railway Hill. It was Walter Kitchener’s brigade – and the turning-point. Four days earlier, when Hart’s brigade had tried to storm Hart’s Hill from the west, Railway Hill had proved impregnable. Now Walter Kitchener’s men, the West Yorkshires and South Lancashires (previously commanded by General Wynne), attacking from the Pieters side, gradually squirmed and wriggled their way up the series of terraces. To John Atkins, watching from below, it seemed the critical moment. How were they to cross that ghastly open hillside? ‘And then came the most extraordinary revolution, sudden, astounding, brilliant, almost incomprehensible. Across the railway the South Lancashires suddenly rose up out of the ground, stones rose up too, and turned out to be infantrymen… and all began to run, not in stiff lines, but with the graceful spreading of a bird’s wings straight up the hill…. I watched, stricken with admiration and suspense.’33

  Closer to, it was a stabbing, jabbing, flailing bayonet charge that won the nek of ground between Railway Hill and Hart’s Hill to the west.34 It also made the novel acquisition of some Boer prisoners: forty men, the first real bag of enemy prisoners since Elandslaagte four months earlier. Some had been wounded by bayonet thrusts. They came tumbling out of their trenches, waving white flags, anything – a shirt or a towel. Atkins met one of the captors, who answered, when asked if he had hurt the man, ‘Oh, no. I bayoneted him as gently as I could. And I gave him water, too; he had more than I did. Ah, I told him he was a lucky man to fall across me.’35

  Winston Churchill, with the SALH, was waiting impatiently for the order for the mounted troops to charge. He saw the glorious moment when Kitchener’s three infantry battalions – West Yorkshires, Royal Lancasters and so on – spilt over the whole grassy summit with cheer after cheer. Then he saw the prisoners come past. ‘Only forty-eight, sir,’ said a private soldier, ‘and there wouldn’t have been so many if the officers hadn’t stopped us from giving them the bayonet. I never saw such cowards in my life; shoot at you till you come up to them, and then beg for mercy. I’d teach ’em.’ But the Tommy, having got this off his chest, felt generous. He fed his prisoners with bully beef, and took his own water-bottle to give them all a good drink.

  Churchill was puzzled by the contrast between the violent words and the generous acts. Then he himself looked at the prisoners: forty-eight – about the same number as the British prisoners at the time of the armoured train disaster – and such ordinary men. What a puzzling contrast between these men, chattering and grinning like loafers outside a public house, and the terrible foe they had represented in the trenches an hour or two before.36

  Meanwhile, Norcott’
s 4th Brigade had fanned out in the third and final phase of the attack. The eastern positions in the Boer line – the trenches in the front of Pieters and Railway Hills – had fallen in turn like skittles. Now for the storming of Hart’s Hill. From their grandstand seats across the river, the HQ staff and correspondents saw the last gallant moments of Botha’s four-month-long defence of his trench lines. The 4.7-inch naval guns had redoubled their efforts.37 ‘The shell bursts seemed almost continuous,’ wrote Captain Limpus, of HMS Terrible, ‘lyddite and shrapnel throwing up earth and stones at each trench. The bombardment was now terrible, especially at a little mischievous entrenched kopje near the top of the nek; several times the Boers had to be brought back by a determined man who seemed to be in charge, until at last he himself disappeared in a great Lyddite shell-burst – and that trench was silenced.’38

  Other parties of Boers were deliberately spared by the British guns – but not for long. Major Weldon, Wolseley’s ADC, who had somehow wangled his way out to South Africa, described the scene in a letter to Wolseley’s daughter:

  The enemy made a most gallant ‘Last Stand’. A large number had gone into a deep trench running right across this valley & had lined a big stone wall which they had erected & which ran over the sharp summit of the hill. They could not well get-out of these trenches without exposing themselves to a merciless fire from our guns – so our gunners left them alone till our attack was beginning to develop in order to get as many as possible into the ‘hot corner’ (as a keeper drives his pheasants up to the edge of a wood before flushing them)…. Our men … were near enough to advance by rushes & then the real grim fighting began… the Lyddite played on the doomed trenches with fearful effect – No one could live under such a fire but still some of the enemy kept on firing. At last a tremendous cheer rose up as our men ran forward with bayonets at the charge….39