It was more than two months since Colenso, three and a half weeks since Spion Kop, Sunday 18 February. And it looked as if Buller had truly found the secret combination to break through the Boers’ defence line on the Tugela. In the meantime, he had made a third attempt, at Vaal Krantz, between Colenso and Spion Kop. It had ended exactly as on the first two occasions, with heavy losses and another mortifying return across the Tugela. Behind his back his officers called him the Ferryman of the Tugela, General Charon, Sir Reverse.
Yet interestingly enough, Buller still had the trust of his men. Of course they complained, endlessly, about their wasted effort and their comrades who had fallen for nothing. But they also knew that Buller cared about what happened to them, and that the gaps in their ranks would be filled. The expeditionary force had kept up its strength of 25,000 men and even gained firepower when heavy naval guns were added to its artillery. This inspired confidence, as did the words of their commander, who still had faith in himself—unlike after Colenso—and kept repeating that this time he had the key in his hands. The relief of Ladysmith had become a personal matter for Buller, especially now that Roberts had begun his campaign, some 500 kilometres to the west. Buller had to succeed and he would make sure he did. His men were more than willing to believe him. What the foot soldiers wanted most of all was a chance to take on their elusive, unseen enemy in an all-out bayonet attack.
Right from the start, the key Buller was talking about had been there for the taking. The weak spot in the Tugela line was the Boers’ left flank, at the point, just past Colenso, where the river took two right-angled turns, first to the north, then to the east. Because of this Louis Botha had had to extend his defence line up to the south-east bank (Kruger, an old hand at the game, had also insisted on this all the way from Pretoria),62 first to Hlangwane Hill and from there further east to Green Hill and the linked summits of Monte Cristo and Cingolo. There were not particularly many Boers on the defence line, about 2000 men, but their positions were sufficiently fortified to withstand a British artillery and infantry attack. What Botha hadn’t counted on was an unconventional manoeuvre by the British mounted forces.
The cavalry played a crucial part in Buller’s new plan of attack. From 12 February Lord Dundonald and his horsemen, among them Churchill and the rest of the South African Light Horse, led a reconnaissance of the terrain east of Colenso. The rest of Buller’s army followed two days later, advancing from the base camp between Frere and Chieveley. The infantry took positions opposite Hlangwane, Green Hill and Cingolo; the artillery was mounted on Hussar Hill. But Dundonald’s cavalry continued further east, circling around the Boers’ left flank. The route was barely passable. The ground was rocky and overgrown with tall grass and dense bush, forcing the men to keep dismounting to cut their way through. This was the natural barrier Botha had been depending on. He was sure the ever-predictable Buller wouldn’t risk it. As a result, the Boers up on Cingolo—the furthest outpost of the line, with no more than 100 men—were caught off guard when they were suddenly attacked from the southeast, by Dundonald’s mounted troops operating on foot. At the same time, British infantry units were approaching from the south-west. The Boers weren’t prepared for an attack from two sides. They abandoned Cingolo and regrouped on the adjacent crest of Monte Cristo.
These events had taken place on 17 February, and the British were ready for more. This was the kind of campaign Churchill loved: the great outdoors, spartan conditions, trotting through the pristine, verdant hills of Natal, reconnoitring, spying, stalking, sniping and being sniped at, sleeping under the stars, rising at the first light of dawn. Water on the fire for coffee—how many mugs would be left undrunk this morning? Perhaps it would be his turn today. Live for the day. ‘Existence is never so sweet as when it is at hazard.’
It was easy for Churchill to say this. His luck on the battlefield was legendary. The experience of his brother Jack, a youngster of 19, who had arrived a week earlier, showed how differently things could turn out. Churchill had arranged for him to join the Cockyolibirds as a lieutenant, like himself, in spite of his misgivings both before and afterwards. Nor were they unfounded, as it transpired during the reconnaissance of Hussar Hill on 12 February. The mission had ended in an exchange of fire with the Boers, whose positions were dispersed over the slopes. Both Churchills took part. Winston had often been in combat before, but this was Jack’s first time under fire. It was also his last on the battlefield. He took a flesh wound to the leg right at the start. Nothing life-threatening, but it meant a month in the sick bay, his elder brother noted, secretly relieved that he wouldn’t need to worry about him for the time being. But it made him reflect on ‘the strange caprice which strikes down one man in his first skirmish and protects another time after time’. A fellow journalist, John Atkins, proposed an explanation to make sense of the younger Churchill’s misfortune. ‘It seemed as though he had paid his brother’s debts.’
Almost a week had passed since then. It was now Sunday 18 February and it seemed to be only a matter of time before they broke through the Tugela line. The assault on Monte Cristo had followed the same course as that on Cingolo. Dundonald’s cavalry had skirted around the Boer positions and attacked them from the east, their unprotected side. At the same time, the Boers were getting the full blast of the artillery on Hussar Hill and the onslaught of the infantry advancing over a broad front. There was no way they could hold out. They retreated, and by midday Churchill was standing on the summit of Monte Cristo. The panic was still palpable. The Boers had left everything behind in a desperate bid to escape—weapons, supplies, tents. The British soldiers were delighted and shared out the tents, though they balked at the stench inside them. But what did it matter? The sight that met their eyes made up for it all. Boers fleeing down the slopes and in the distance, 12 or 13 kilometres away, Ladysmith, there for the taking. The end was in sight.63
A British general who defied the rules of the military manual. This came as a nasty surprise, also to Adjutant-General Piet Cronjé, the Boer commander on the western front. The British outnumbered them even more than in Natal: the army advancing on him from 11 February comprised at least 50,000 men, ten times more than he could raise. But this wasn’t the main problem. Most of Cronjé’s men were safely entrenched at Magersfontein, where they had resisted a British general with a powerful army once before: Lord Methuen on 11 December. Cronjé was sure this would happen again, that the British infantry would launch its usual attack, with the same result. This time, however, the British general did something completely different. He outflanked the Boer positions, just as Buller was doing in Natal at the same time. First he sent out the cavalry. It was a complete mounted division of 13,000 cavalrymen and mounted infantry, which blazed a trail between the Boer trenches at Magersfontein and the commandos under Christiaan de Wet, about 30 kilometres further along. Before Cronjé realised what was happening, the British had crossed the Modder River. His positions, which had grown into a veritable stronghold, were in danger of being surrounded. Cronjé had to get clear of Magersfontein and find a new defence line as quickly as possible.
The British officer responsible for this unexpected manoeuvre was a field marshal, Lord Roberts of Kandahar, the new commander-in-chief of the British troops in South Africa. He was a small man, known as Bobs, but at 67 one of Britain’s most decorated military commanders. Roberts had earned his spurs in British India, starting with the Victoria Cross in 1858. Since then, honours had come pouring in. He had been in South Africa once before, in 1881, after Majuba, then too coming as a saviour in time of need, but by the time he landed the hostilities were over and the opportunity to win more distinctions had passed.
This time it was different, even though his second chance as commander-in-chief in South Africa had started out under an unlucky star. On the day of his appointment, 17 December 1899, he heard that his son had been killed in the Battle of Colenso, but he threw himself into his new mission all the same. He arrived in Cape Town on 10 January
1900. There was no longer a shortage of manpower. Troops had been brought in by the thousand from Britain, the colonies and the dominions, more than enough to reinforce all fronts. For himself, Roberts formed an expeditionary army of 50,000 men, ensuring that he achieved the right balance of forces. Things had to change, he concluded after studying the lost battles. Transport and supplies needed to be organised centrally and more efficiently. Intelligence work had to be improved and, most important of all, they needed many more horses. These were rustled up wherever they could be found, in Europe, America, anywhere in the world. Cavalry and mounted infantry, that was the answer, he believed. They would be mobile and give the Boers the surprise of their lives. Major-General French was instructed to raise a full mounted division.
The preparations were completed in early February 1900. Roberts’s plan was not to march through the centre, along the railway line from Cape Town to Bloemfontein, as Buller had initially intended to do and as most of the Boers were expecting, but instead to take the west route, via Kimberley. Cronjé was one of the few to have thought of this. But what he hadn’t anticipated was that Roberts would suddenly veer off to the east and invade the Orange Free State. French’s overwhelming cavalry advance guard charged north at such speed that Christiaan de Wet and his commandos were too late to stop them. On 15 February French was on the opposite bank of the Modder River and ready to complete his mission, the relief of Kimberley, 20 kilometres to the north. He decided on an oldfashioned cavalry charge. The Boer contingent that Cronjé had hastily dispatched to intercept him at Roodekalkfontein was sent scurrying in all directions. The British pressed on at breakneck speed, hitting Kimberley like a sandstorm. But French had driven his cavalrymen beyond endurance and hundreds of their horses, not yet acclimatised and unaccustomed to the hard ground, collapsed from exhaustion. The triumphant procession reached its destination leaving a trail of death on the highveld.64
Even so, Kimberley gave them a warm welcome. After a siege of 123 days the cavalry had arrived at last. The first men rode into town at four in the afternoon of Thursday 15 February, sweating, exhausted and covered in dust. But nothing could stop the prim ladies of Kimberley from dragging them off their horses and hugging them. The official welcome was magnificent. Rhodes entertained French and his staff at a private party at the Sanatorium Hotel, where he brought out his stash of champagne and delicacies. French was won over. He promptly took Rhodes’s side in a heated dispute with Kekewich. The garrison commander was dismissed and replaced by one of French’s officers.
It was a cruel blow for Kekewich. For months he had led the town’s defence and organised the distribution of its steadily dwindling food supplies. Rhodes had been cooperative and obstructive by turns. He had given him access, for instance, to De Beers equipment and labour to build fortifications. And one of his employees, an American mining engineer called George Labram, had amazed everyone with his inventions: a 50-metre observation tower, a gigantic cold-box to preserve meat, a device to supply water from one of the mines, and, best of all, as from 19 January, they had the benefit of a homemade long-range gun, which was christened Long Cecil as a token of thanks to Rhodes.
But Rhodes had also worked against Kekewich, often acting without Kekewich’s knowledge or consent, and had sent bulletins that sowed panic in the outside world. More than once he had incited unrest in Kimberley itself. On 7 February the Boers had mounted a Long Tom to counter Long Cecil. It was Silent Susan, the gun that had previously been in Ladysmith, where the British had put it out of action. In the meantime it had been repaired at the workshop of the Netherlands-South African Railway Company in Pretoria and made a comeback in Kimberley, renamed the Jew because of its shortened barrel. The discharges from the heavy ninetypounder guns caused more alarm among the town’s inhabitants than the rifle fire they had been experiencing for months. It also claimed more victims including, ironically, Long Cecil’s designer, George Labram.
Rhodes retaliated in his usual style, with a theatrical solo action. Without telling Kekewich, he put up posters on 11 February announcing that he was opening the De Beers mines to serve as shelters. The response was huge. That evening 3000—white—women and children took refuge hundreds of metres underground, huddled together, an eyewitness said, like seagulls on the pinnacle of a rock. And there they remained until the town was liberated four days later. By then, conditions were dangerously unsanitary, but virtually everyone survived. The ordeals they were spared in their underground hideout are reflected in the death toll during the siege of Kimberley: 135 men died in the garrison, 21 civilians as a result of bombardments and far more, around 1500, from malnutrition and disease, mostly in the African and coloured communities.65
With Kimberley liberated, Roberts had already achieved his first victory. Now for Buller. After his successes on 17 and 18 February, Ladysmith was there for the taking. The following day it transpired that the Boers had retreated from the south-east bank of the Tugela. The next step was obvious. Deploy the artillery—by this time Buller had over 75 guns—on the occupied hilltops and from there launch an offensive on the Boers’ fragmented left flank.
Yet strangely enough, this isn’t what Buller did. As if trying to prove that his original plan would work—up from Colenso and straight through the Boer defence line—he brought his troops back from the south-east bank and prepared to attack the crests of Rooikop, Horseshoe Hill and Wynne’s Hill to the north and north-west of Colenso.
The Boers perked up. Their disappointment after losing their positions on the south-east bank had prompted Louis Botha to suggest abandoning the Tugela line and, with it, the siege of Ladysmith. They were already discouraged, because their last desperate attempt to bring Ladysmith to its knees seemed likely to fail. The idea had been to build a dam in the Klip River to create a lake, which would eventually overflow and inundate the town below. It was an innovative plan, which they believed could be accomplished with about 30,000 sandbags, to be filled and transported by 500 black labourers. The project got off to a good start in January, but it gradually began to look over-ambitious. On reviewing their calculations, it turned out that they would need far more sandbags, at least 160,000, and that there was too little rain to fill the dam in the foreseeable future. And now Buller was at the Tugela, ready to deliver the final blow.66
To their amazement, however, he had abandoned his successful new strategy and was apparently going to make another attempt to squeeze his army through a narrow mountain pass. As Churchill said, quoting a staff officer who wisely chose to remain nameless, ‘It will be like being in the Coliseum and shot at by every row of seats.’ He was absolutely right. The Boers realised immediately that the obstinate Buller was giving them another chance and took up their positions again. The battle, which started on 21 February and lasted for four days, was a repeat performance. Death-defying British infantry units captured a hill, incurring heavy losses along the way, only to find themselves isolated at the top and under even fiercer fire from the adjacent hill. The sequence was repeated again and again, in different places, each ‘a frantic scene of blood and fury’. The battle on Hart’s Hill was the most horrendous. A no man’s land strewn with dead and wounded men separated the warring parties. The wounded were left untended for days, directly in the line of fire, without food, water or protection from the elements. Looking on from a distance, Churchill was distressed by ‘these poor fellows moving about feebly and trying to wiggle themselves into some position of safety’. They reminded him of the wounded Mahdi fighters at Omdurman, ‘only these were our own countrymen’.
On Sunday 25 February, Buller decided enough was enough. He proposed a ceasefire to bury the dead and rescue the wounded. Botha formally turned down his request but agreed to a de facto ceasefire. The stretcher-bearers spent the morning doing their work. After days of neglect, the wounded were in a pitiful state. Churchill was shocked at the sight of the dead, ‘swollen, blackened, and torn by the terrible wounds of the expansive bullets, now so generally used by the enemy�
��. Buller took the opportunity to reposition his troops. After all, it wasn’t an official ceasefire. The Boers made no attempt to stop him. They watched detachments of the British force withdraw across the Tugela again—they had lost count of the number of times this had happened—and thought they had taught Buller another lesson.
This was true, but Buller had also learned something from all those futile attacks. The key really did lie in the positions they had previously captured and subsequently abandoned on the south-east bank. He had his heavy artillery reinstalled on Hlangwane and Monte Cristo. ‘The big guns were getting back on to the big hills,’ Churchill noted with satisfaction. The pontoon bridge for the aborted attack was dismantled and then reassembled a few kilometres downstream, closer to the new target, the left flank of the Boer positions at Pietershoogte. All the infantry brigades were clustered around it. There was also an assignment for the Cockyolibirds and the rest of Dundonald’s mounted troops, they heard on 26 February. They were to take positions early the next morning on Monte Cristo and Hlangwane, as close to the Tugela as they could get, and from there maintain a constant barrage of fire on the Boer positions across the river, using rifles, Maxim machine guns, field guns, everything they possessed. At long last—his fifth attempt to break through—Buller was finally preparing to engage his complete force: artillery, infantry and cavalry, and all of them simultaneously.
Everything and everyone would be in action. Churchill was looking forward to it. The following day would be the moment of truth on the Tugela: it was now or never. In any event the date, 27 February, was well chosen. Majuba Day. Exactly 19 years earlier the Boers had shattered Britain’s military pride. It was time to settle the score.67
The Boer War Page 30
