The Boer War

by Martin Bossenbroek

  Judging by Buller’s vigorous response to the fighting at Platrand, it looked as if he had recovered from Colenso. Indeed he had, in any event sufficiently to risk crossing the Tugela again. The new commander-inchief, Lord Roberts, was due to arrive from Cape Town a few days later and Buller had regained his confidence. Another division had been added to his expeditionary army and with a total of more than 25,000 men he was sure he could confront the formidable Boer force on the opposite bank.

  He was less happy with the commander of the reinforcements. Officially, Lieutenant-General Sir Charles Warren was his second-incharge, they were roughly the same age, but there was no love lost between them. Warren had been thrust upon him from London by the commander-in-chief of the forces, Field Marshal Lord Wolseley, to replace him if things went wrong, as Buller—rightly—suspected. Warren’s appointment had surprised him, and others as well. Warren had experience of South Africa—Kruger and Leyds had come to know him as a tough negotiator in the talks on Bechuanaland in January 188556—but that had been the end of his active military career. Since then he had held only administrative positions. Some of them had been challenging enough—he had been chief commissioner of Scotland Yard at the time of the Jack the Ripper murders—but that didn’t make him a commanding officer. The proof came soon after his arrival in Natal.

  Buller had devised a new plan of campaign and, in spite of their difficult relationship, he entrusted Warren with the command of his main force. Some considered this incomprehensible and unwise. Others wondered whether it was a deliberate ploy to trip Warren up. When it was all over, Buller insisted that the assignment really hadn’t been all that difficult. The plan was basically to outflank the Boer positions to the west, about 25 kilometres from the railway line and Colenso, in other words upstream. He had selected two points where they could cross the Tugela. There, the British expeditionary force—22,000 men strong (the remaining 3000 were to stay behind at the base camp between Frere and Chieveley)—would form two separate detachments. Buller and a third of his troops would cross the river at Potgieter’s Drift and take positions on the heights on the north bank, opposite the Boer positions. Warren and the main force were to cross at Trichardt’s Drift, five kilometres to the west. From there they would advance to the north-west, working their way around the Tabanyama hills. This would enable them to pass the Boers unnoticed and attack them from the rear. At that stage, Buller would also come into action, so they would be attacking the Boers from two sides.

  The plan might have worked if it had been carried out quickly and efficiently. But this wasn’t the case. It took a week, from 11 to 17 January, just to get the expeditionary force to Potgieter’s Drift and Trichardt’s Drift. The cumbersome supplies they were lugging along with them had held them up. Better safe than sorry, Buller and Warren agreed—they were as one when it came to provisions and equipment. As a result, Churchill, along with the rest of the South African Light Horse assigned to Colonel Lord Dundonald’s cavalry brigade, looked on in amazement as an ‘almost interminable procession’ passed by. How on earth did they expect to take the Boers by surprise? They had brought tents for each and every soldier! Churchill had never seen anything like this in British India or Sudan. There, even officers made do without. And in the meantime, they had given the Boers ample opportunity to strengthen their positions. It was one thing for Buller to look after his soldiers, but, he noted prophetically, ‘it is a poor economy to let a soldier live well for three days at the price of killing him on the fourth’.57

  Lord Dundonald’s mounted force showed them how things were done. On 17 January they took their ponies and horses and crossed the Tugela, not over the pontoon bridge that had been built at Trichardt’s Drift for the rest of Warren’s troops, but a little further on, at Wagon Drift, which was more difficult to ford. The following day, they pressed on to the north-west—the infantry and artillery remained behind—to find out how far the Boers’ defence line extended. Their haste paid off. Early that afternoon they reached the western spurs of the Tabanyama range. There, they discovered a group of about 200 Boers heading for the next hilltop, near the Acton Homes farm, to reinforce their right flank. They intercepted them, arrived at the hill first, and opened fire. The ambush caught the Boers off guard. They scattered, took cover or fled. Heavy fighting ensued, which put 57 Boers out of action: ten were killed, 23 wounded and 24 captured, compared with two dead and two wounded on the British side. Their tactical gain was even more important. The ridge they now occupied commanded the route around the Tabanyama hills to the rear of the Boers’ defence line. In other words, the way to Ladysmith lay open.

  But this wasn’t how Warren saw it. He wasn’t pleased but furious on receiving the news from Dundonald that evening and the following morning. It was all wrong, according to the manuals on warfare. In Warren’s opinion, the cavalry should have remained close to the main force to protect the convoy. Dundonald shouldn’t have been indulging in ‘semi-independent antics’. And to crown it all he wanted more guns and infantry. Warren had little faith in his plan to take the route around Acton Homes. He felt it was too great a distance for his heavily laden ammunition and supply wagons, and without them he wouldn’t dream of sending an infantry division anywhere at all. To prevent Dundonald from pressing on alone, he ordered the wagons made specially for the cavalry to turn back. ‘If I let them go, Lord Dundonald will try and go on to Ladysmith.’ Warren seems not to have realised just how incongruous that remark was. Be that as it may, he knowingly threw away a perfect opportunity to complete the flanking movement that Buller had planned. Instead of taking the route around the perimeter of the Tabanyama hills, from 20 January he did everything in his power to cut straight across. For four full days he made his men charge ahead, for nothing, culminating in the seizure of Spion Kop on the night of 23 January.

  The encounter at Acton Homes made a lasting impression on Churchill. He hadn’t fought there but he had witnessed the final stage from a distance, and helped tend the wounded Boers. It was that kind of war. To his own surprise, he was deeply distressed. He confided this to the readers of the Morning Post. ‘I have often seen dead men, killed in war—thousands at Omdurman—scores elsewhere, black and white, but the Boer dead aroused the most painful emotions.’ He couldn’t say why. Was it that old field cornet from Heilbron—his name was Mentz, the Boer prisoners had told him—a man with grey hair and sharp features set in an expression of unyielding conviction? A bullet had shattered his left leg. They said he had refused to surrender; he just lay there and kept firing his rifle. He was ashen, he had bled to death. That’s how they had found him, with a letter from his wife crumpled in his hand. Or was it the boy beside him, not more than 17, with a bullet through his heart? Or there, further along, ‘our own two poor riflemen with their heads smashed like eggshells?’ Churchill wasn’t easily shaken, but what he saw moved him to a rare lament about the dignity and the horrors of war. ‘Ah, horrible war, amazing medley of the glorious and the squalid, the pitiful and the sublime, if modern men of light and leading saw your face closer, simple folk would see it hardly ever.’58

  At Acton Homes it was the small, personal tragedies that had distressed him. On Spion Kop he was shocked by the sheer scale of the carnage. Late in the afternoon of 24 January he and Captain Brooke arrived at the foot of the hill. A whole village of ambulance tents and wagons had sprung up. Stretcher-bearers from the Natal Indian Ambulance Corps—the bodysnatchers, as the soldiers called them—scurried back and forth. Churchill and Brooke tethered their ponies and began to climb. Wounded men came towards them in droves, limping down on their own, leaning on four, maybe five comrades, lying on stretchers, crawling on their knees. Bodies lay everywhere, mutilated by shrapnel. Churchill counted 200 on the way up. They also saw soldiers, shell-shocked and dazed, stumbling blindly downhill. Some cursed and raged, others fell to the ground, numb and exhausted, and fell asleep on the spot. The higher they climbed, the fiercer the rifle and artillery fire. Nearing the crest, they came
across the Dorset Regiment, the only battalion still functioning as a combat unit, which had been sent uphill in the course of the day to provide reinforcement.

  One of the officers told them what had happened. He described the successful night attack by the Lancashire Brigade under Major-General Edward Woodgate, together with Lieutenant-Colonel Alexander Thorneycroft’s Mounted Infantry; the hard rocky surface, in which they had only managed to dig shallow trenches for cover; the alarm early the next morning, when the mist lifted and they discovered they hadn’t reached the summit but were instead on a plateau beneath it. There had been no time to correct their mistake. Firing from all sides, the Boers had advanced on them over the northern slope. Woodgate was fatally wounded right at the start. For a while it was unclear who was to assume command. Major-General Talbot Coke was the highest-ranking officer, but he was somewhere uphill. From his headquarters Warren had decided, on Buller’s advice, to put Thorneycroft in command, with the provisional rank of brigade general. In the heat of the battle, the message had failed to reach the commanding officers in time, if at all. Some refused to accept Thorneycroft’s authority, awed though they were by his bravery. As the catastrophe on the plateau unfolded—Churchill’s fellow journalist John Atkins described it later as an ‘acre of massacre’—it was Thorneycroft who singlehandedly kept up the fight. Early in the afternoon the first white handkerchiefs appeared over one of the British positions, signalling surrender. The Boers had already started taking prisoners, when Thorneycroft leapt forward, limping on a sprained ankle but roaring like a lion, ‘I’m commandant here; take your men back to hell, sir! There’s no surrender.’

  The troops on the plateau were still holding their ground, Churchill and Brooke were told, but the situation was critical. Hunger, thirst, hellfire from all sides, wounded men whimpering in agony, soldiers taking cover behind the mutilated bodies of their slain comrades. If they could hold out until dark, they still had a chance. Get a large team of sappers up the hill with equipment to dig trenches and build fortifications, weapons to counter the Boer artillery, fresh troops to relieve the exhausted survivors: that’s what was needed. Churchill and Brooke had seen and heard enough. It was too dangerous to continue up to the plateau. They decided to report back to Warren.59

  They returned to Three Tree Hill, distraught by what they had seen on Spion Kop. Churchill’s report in the Morning Post a few days later suggested that Warren had been interested and listened to them attentively. But there is a different and more plausible version of the story. According to Warren’s staff officer, Captain C.B. Levita, Churchill had flown off the handle as soon as he got there, protesting about the lack of support for Thorneycroft and his men. ‘For God’s sake, Levita, don’t let this be a second Majuba Hill.’ Levita had sent him on to Warren, to whom he repeated his story in basically the same words. In response, Warren bellowed to Levita, ‘Who is this man? Take him away, put him in arrest.’ It was then that Levita had heard him out and calmed him down. He had given Churchill to understand that they were indeed intending to send reinforcements under cover of darkness, at least new infantry battalions, a large team of engineers and perhaps some naval guns as well. They just wanted to know what Thorneycroft thought about it. Could Churchill go and find out? He didn’t have to think about it for long. But he wanted the request in black and white. He got it, and at half past eight that evening he set off for Spion Kop again with an official dispatch for Thorneycroft.

  This time it was in the dark, which didn’t make the ascent any easier. The rifle and artillery fire had almost completely died down, but he kept stumbling over wounded men, some on stretchers, some on the bare ground, and some wandering aimlessly, alone or in small groups. Here and there, officers or adjutants had gathered men together to form units ready to fight, but there was nothing they could do in the dark.

  Churchill found Thorneycroft where he had expected, on the plateau just beneath the summit. He was slumped on the ground, sapped of all his strength. Around him were the miserable tatters of the proud regiment he had scraped together only the day before. ‘My poor boys . . . my poor boys,’ he murmured over and over again. The ordeal of a full day under devastating fire had taken its toll. An awe-inspiring figure in normal circumstances, a formidable commander all day, Thorneycroft was now completely crushed. Churchill’s reassuring words didn’t get through to him. What do you mean, reinforcements? All day he had been hoping Warren or Buller would launch a strong offensive against the Boers and ease the pressure on his own positions, but nothing had come, no word, no news. And now it was too late. He no longer believed in it. Half an hour earlier he had resolved to clear Spion Kop and he wasn’t going to change his mind. ‘Better six good battalions safely down the hill than a mop-up in the morning.’

  Thorneycroft and Churchill descended together. At the foot of the hill they ran into the reinforcements—a long row of sappers with shovels and pickaxes. Their commander had a message for Thorneycroft: the infantry battalions were on their way. By morning they would be entrenched. Thorneycroft waved his cane. He would have none of it. Orders overruled, about turn, march. Churchill accompanied him to Warren’s headquarters. The general was asleep when they arrived. Churchill woke him up. Warren took the news calmly. Churchill resigned himself to it, with a touch of subtle sarcasm. ‘He was a charming old gentleman. I was genuinely sorry for him. I was also sorry for the army.’60

  The most painful discovery was still to come. In the fading light it was decided to retreat not only from Spion Kop but also from Twin Peaks, the most north-easterly of the chain of hills. There, towards the end of the afternoon, after a fierce bayonet encounter, a battalion of the King’s Royal Rifles had managed to flush the Boers from their positions. Major-General Lyttelton had initiated the action to relieve the pressure on Spion Kop—at the cost of heavy casualties. It was a success, or at least, it would have been had anyone at Warren’s headquarters realised just how much Lyttelton’s unsolicited assistance had achieved. But no one did. To their great frustration the battered but victorious Royal Rifles were recalled.

  By cruel coincidence for the British, many of the Boers began to leave their positions on and around Spion Kop at almost the same time: some from fatigue, to quench their thirst and still their hunger, but most because they believed they had lost the battle. General Schalk Burger was so disheartened by the British success on Twin Peaks that he had started making his way to Ladysmith with his entire commando and all his weapons. It was only the determination of commanding officers like Daniel Opperman and, most importantly, Louis Botha that prevented a complete exodus from the Boer positions.

  They were soon rewarded. Boer scouts who were sent to appraise the damage on the crest of Spion Kop at the crack of dawn the following morning couldn’t believe their eyes. The only Britons they found there were dead, wounded or dazed beyond consciousness. They were appalled at the sight of the largest trench, filled to the brim with corpses, but the truth gradually dawned and their horror gave way to jubilation. The British had fled, they had won!

  The bizarre ending of the Battle of Spion Kop was an appropriate finale to a 14-day campaign full of blunders, misjudgments and misunderstandings. Buller’s plan to skirt the hills via the Upper Tugela wasn’t bad in itself, but for tactical, operational and logistical reasons it hadn’t been implemented successfully. The problems were largely due to delays and poor coordination, not to mention antipathy, primarily between Buller and Warren. Or, as Churchill put it in the Morning Post, with ironic understatement, ‘It is an event which . . . redounds to the honour of the soldiers, though not greatly to that of the generals.’

  He was more outspoken in another publication. On 25 January Buller decided to call off the campaign and retreat with troops and all, back across the Tugela. This in itself was an onerous, two-day undertaking. To Churchill’s astonishment, the Boers made no attempt to stop them. The retreat turned out to be the most efficiently organised part of the entire operation. At the end of it Buller noted wi
th satisfaction that it had all been completed ‘without the loss of a man or a pound of stores’. Churchill’s conclusion was scathing. ‘That was all there was to show for the operations of a whole army corps for sixteen days at a cost of about eighteen hundred casualties.’

  The figure he cited came from the official British source and was far lower than the enemy’s estimate. According to the Boers, the British casualties on 24 January alone came to some 2000 dead and wounded, the vast majority of them on Spion Kop. That was ten times their own losses. Buller’s campaign along the Tugela claimed another 500 to 700 casualties.

  By either estimate, the Boer or the British, in terms of casualties Spion Kop was one of the British army’s most disastrous defeats in the Boer War. But Churchill was affected more by personal tragedy than nameless numbers. In this case, it was the loss of an old friend from his student days in Harrow, someone he had glimpsed near the pontoon bridge, only the day before. Churchill couldn’t remember his name, but he had just arrived and was hoping ‘to get a job’. The day after the encounter Churchill heard there was a body at the top of Spion Kop that no one had been able to identify. All there was to go by was a pair of field glasses clenched in his hand, inscribed with the name ‘M’Corquodale’. Churchill knew at once. It was him, that was his name, that boy from Harrow. He must have managed to get a place in Thorneycroft’s Mounted Infantry. ‘Poor gallant young Englishman . . . joined in the evening, shot at dawn.’61

  Breakthrough

  Monte Cristo, 18 February 1900

  What a magnificent, sobering sight, one he had never seen here before—Boers in droves, running as if the devil were at their heels. Churchill could picture the scene. They had seen Lyttelton’s entire infantry division storming towards them; Dundonald’s cavalry brigade was attacking their flank; and behind them was a deep, fast-running river. Even so, he was baffled. In the past few weeks he had got to know the Boers as fearless combatants, entrenched and invisible in unassailable positions. Yet here they were, fleeing en masse, with no sign of any rearguard action, running for their lives. It was a strange sight. ‘When the Dutchman makes up his mind to go, he throws all dignity to the winds.’