1999 - Ladysmith (32 page)

In his notebook, the correspondent marked the expletive down as a double dash.

That night, dashes were to the point, and points also: the searchlights at Buller’s camp and in the invested town again communicated by flashing Morse on the clouds. This time a Boer searchlight joined the party, its beam flickering over the signals, trying to confuse them. The news got through, however—how the Boers had tried to rush the pickets on the outskirts of the town, but had been pushed back. Unsurprisingly, however, the details—who had died, who had survived—were missing from the account. None the less, the news heartened the relief column, and as he sat in his tent watching Long Tom puff his pipe on Bulwan Hill, spitting down sheaves of orange flame on Ladysmith for the seventy-second day of siege, Churchill reckoned that the curtain was about to rise. The relief of Ladysmith was imminent.

The signs were everywhere, as each hour brought new reinforcements and supplies into camp, including more volunteer stretcher-bearers to join Gandhi’s corps.

“They are sons of Empire, after all,” muttered Churchill, watching them line up for their lentils at lunchtime.

A few days later, at dawn, General Buller gave the order to march. The column was to force the Tugela at Potgieter’s Drift. Kit and correspondent, Biograph and stretcher-bearer, mule and machine, amid line upon line of khaki-clad soldiers—infantry, cavalry, gunners, sapper and service corps, all manner of uniforms. At least ten miles long, the column wound its way west through the hills. The place where the proposed crossing was to be made lay in an arabesque of river; over on the other side, the slopes and plains bristled with the ant-like figures of Boer gunners and horsemen. Among them, were he to be spied by some greater magnifying machine than Winston Churchill’s spyglass, was the Boer doctor, Felix Sterkx.

The impending collision was inevitable, the tragedy set to unwind like clockwork. Still it did not happen. Battle tomorrow, thought Churchill, but never battle today. And then the day did come. Sappers began fixing pontoons in the river at various points. Slowly, with halts and hindrances, various contingents tried to cross. It was raining heavily, and mules and oxen bogged down in the quagmire. The Boers held their ground in any case, and back and forth the bullets whistled. This was not the place, after all; this was not the time. Except to die, for each attempt added to an ever-increasing casualty list. So far, Buller’s efforts to relieve Ladysmith had cost the lives of some two thousand men. Was the bargain worth its price?

Buller climbed Mount Alice, a thousand feet above the river, and considered the Boer defences on the other side. Another plan was needed. He decided to send General Warren westward with twelve battalions and thirty-six guns, to cross the Tugela five miles upstream, while another commander was directed to make a diversionary attack there at Potgieter’s Drift, thus splitting the Boer defences. The plan worked. From his new camp at Three Tree Hill, Warren was to throw his battalions forward, attempting to secure the small mountain known as Spion Kop. Forced to meet this turning movement in the British attack, the Boers had had to extend their line. Churchill reported it so: “Their whole position was, therefore, shaped like a note of interrogation laid on its side.”

Soon enough, that question would be answered. Positively, it was believed. The Biographer had moved his cart forward to take a snapshot of Warren’s men as they crossed, up to their breasts in the silvery water; the sun was setting, the Cape doves were cooing, and the omens seemed good. Now he was back near Buller’s HQ on Mount Alice, on the south side of the river. He set up the camera between two big 4.7-inch guns, retired to his cart, and laid his head down to sleep. In the morning, he was woken by Biograph, his pet kitten, climbing over his face. As he was dressing, he heard the shout of one of the gunners outside one of the tents.

“Get up, for we shall be firing soon.”

And fire they did. The earth shook beneath the camera, such were the vibrations from the guns, and the Biographer suspected the image would prove unsatisfactory. Once again, its panorama offered just one slice of the action, cut out of time; unable to record, for instance, how for seven hours of the previous night, a column of Warren’s men under Woodgate, Crofton and Thorneycroft had climbed their way up the gullies, ridges and boulder-strewn flanks of Spion Kop. On reaching the top they had successfully driven the Boers off with musketry and the bayonet. The force then tried to dig themselves in as reinforcements moved up. But their entrenching tools proved next to useless in the stony ground and, fumbling about in the darkness, they had to resort to piling up into low breastworks such boulders and rubble as they found on the summit.

Still, it was a victory of sorts, and cheerful signals were sent by starshell to Warren over at Three Tree Hill, and Buller at Mount Alice. And from there in code to Ladysmith.

The cheer did not last long. When the morning mist lifted, Warren’s men—Perry Barnes among them—found themselves on something like a
tafelkop
, as the Dutch would have it: a semi-circular tabletop, on which had been scored the miserly, boomerang-shaped trench into which they were now packed.

“Like stockfish in a barrel,” Barnes said, to no one in particular.

And then the killing began. From positions in front and high above on either side, Boer rifles began to rake them. Crossfire. The cracking of whips in the air. Underneath, the burden of the guns: six field pieces and two pom-poms. A formula for slaughter. Behind the low walls of that pitiful trench the casualties piled up. General Woodgate was mortally wounded, Colonel Thorneycroft rallied the men, Colonel Crofton—well, some were to say he dilly-dallied.

By mid-morning, the heads of Boer sharpshooters appeared over the edge of the tabletop opposite Perry Barnes and his companions. Far beyond, showing between the burghers’ broad-brimmed hats and the muzzles of their rifles, a green smudge on the plain, supposed oasis: Ladysmith. Crofton sent a message down to Warren: “Help us, Woodgate dead.” The Boers came on; soon they were only thirty feet away. The message came back: “Hold on to the last, no surrender.” Confusion. Now it was hand to hand, and bloody as a butcher’s slab…Among the soldiers there was a move to surrender, but this idea Thorneycroft firmly quashed, his large, red-faced figure standing oblivious to the Boers’ fire.

He made his point to them too, shouting loudly enough for his words to be heard across the lines: “You may go to hell. I command this hill and allow no surrender. Go on with your firing!”

They did, and faced with the onslaught Perry Barnes and anyone else who survived the terrible riposte to Thorneycroft’s challenge, jumped out of the trench and fell back two hundred yards, scattering. Again the Colonel rallied them. Still the fire came. But spurred on by Thorneycroft, the British inched forward, recovered their lost ground at bayonet point. Sitting down in their trenches again, they made a long spiny hedgehog of bloodied blades and waited.

So it went on. Noon came, and with it more death. All day long the noise of battle rolled. Men like Perry Barnes, men who were there, saw what they saw, did what they did. Farther away, others saw nothing, or saw something obscured. For all of it, every human thrust and counter-thrust, was shut off to the likes of the Biographer, back there on Mount Alice with Buller. His hand on the shutter switch, in the lens some milky panorama of hills, drifts and more hills; but not the truth. Vague impressionist puff of battle; the men in the trenches rising and falling, but they were too far away. Only a telescope (Buller had one, Churchill had one) could catch them, and even then the images were questionable. In this context, thought the Biographer, gauziness and dubiety were utterly inappropriate: truth only was excellent, and a far-off dream it seemed, too.

For Churchill, watching the picture show or otherwise simply sitting around in Buller’s camp was a good deal less than satisfactory. It was against his nature and his character. He had, in any case, had himself re-commissioned, so he could be soldier again as well as journalist. At around four, he rode up the hill to see what was going on. It shocked even him, veteran of the Sudan and the Frontier, to see the stream of mutilated men coming down the slope in front of him. He got as near as he dared to the top, and watched the Boer Maxims lay waste to the British ranks.

Buller, too, through his muddy little disc of glass watched men cut to pieces. A shambles, in the old sense of the word: even the mushrooms of dust could not hide it. The Boers were winning. The messages had come in from the summit, forwarded from Warren: “Reinforce at once or all is lost. General dead.” If he had received this message, why hadn’t Warren committed more troops already? He was a sapper, that was the reason; a defensive man with a yen for trenches and fortifications, when what was needed up there was a fighter, not a hole-digger. If only Warren had been in Ladysmith…So Woodgate was gone. Through the glass, Buller saw Thorneycroft’s large figure as he strove to rally the men. He sent an order to Warren to the effect that Thorneycroft was to take over command on Spion Kop from Crofton, with immediate local promotion to brigadier-general. Then he applied himself to the eyepiece again, sweeping his glass over the Boer positions…

In the early hours of that terrible day, Doctor Sterkx had been woken by the rattle of small arms. At daybreak he had heard that the British had taken the crest of Spion Kop. The bastion was theirs. This morning the counter-attack would begin. Sterkx had been ordered to go with it as medical officer. In the midst of a body of men, three or four hundred, he had climbed the grassy hill, struggling with his heavy surgical bag in one hand, grasping at the slippery tussocks with the other. Fire had been poured into them from the British trench; all around him men fell, and fell, and fell. Shot through the lungs, shot through the chest, shot through the forehead. There was mist everywhere, morning mist and blood mist.

Now it was afternoon. As Buller watched, Sterkx found a little hollow in which to do his work of cutting and binding. All around him the ground was blood-spattered. Still the fire came. From either side, the big guns pounded an acre of grass. A tremendous din. The mist dispersed, and the sun came out, and still the fire came. Point-blank fire. The crash of Lee-Metfords, incessant, and the British hidden by mounds of tumbled earth and the rough
schanses
of boulder and rubble they had scrabbled around them. Perhaps only a hundred Boers were left now, facing the narrow belt of rocks that comprised the British trenches on the crest. Surely this was a British victory. Sterkx watched men slip away beside him, dispirited, thirsty, burned by hot sun and hot bullets.

Others went over the rim, and fought hand to hand with the
rooineks
. Few of those came back to his dressing station: shot, disembowelled, torn by shells, they lay on the grass. This was the end. He spotted Janssen there, and van Zyl, one shot in the throat, the other bayoneted. He saw Spijkers with an eye put out by a shell splinter, holding his hand to the gushing socket. This was the end.

Another thought so too. Sickened, Churchill had watched it, had watched it all until dusk fell. He resolved that Warren, waiting for the outcome down at the bottom, had to be told how bad it was. Heavy guns would have to be brought up, or better cover found for the poor men on the summit. But Warren, like Crofton, was in dilatory mood. Churchill was sent up the stony track once more, this time in darkness, to find out what Thorneycroft thought. On the way up, his path obstructed by a stream of wounded men and stretcher-bearers, he nearly collided with two Indians carrying the body of General Woodgate.

“I have seen some service,” he said to them, looking down at the dead man’s pallid, moonlit face. It seemed as if it were made from wax. “But nothing like this.”

“We are in the grip of elemental forces,” intoned one of the Indians, much to Churchill’s surprise. “Only when we look into our hearts and prevent the violence surging in them will you no longer see sights like this.”

“Buck up, man,” said Churchill. “We’ve got a battle to win.” On the other side of the plateau, among the burghers, everyone thought that the British were indeed winning. The hours had gone by. Six, seven, eight o’clock…The bodies had piled up. Surely before morning the British would sweep through, roll up the Boer line; they could be in Ladysmith by daybreak. It was clear the position would have to be abandoned. Sterkx felt his nerve go; he gathered up his instruments and bag and slithered down the hill. At the bottom, he found more wounded, and spent the rest of the night tending to them by lamplight.

Nine, ten, eleven…Perry Barnes thought of his brother, shut up in Ladysmith. Before night had fallen, it had been possible, just, to see the town beyond the ridge of the last hill. Now it was nearly midnight and they had been here—what? Sixteen hours?—on this Spion Kop, pinned down by rifle fire, and swept by Long Toms. Oh Tom, what a beast of a weapon you have given your name to. Carnage here: men blown to pieces, heads torn off, holes in the middle of torsos. Just limbs left. He had watched a headless man get up and stagger three paces before falling. They say they are getting some heavy guns to us; but when? The CO, Thorn-eycroft, was beside himself, sitting on the ground and shaking uncontrollably. At least Perry thought he was the CO: he had been arguing with Lieutenant-Colonel Hill and General Coke, who disputed his promotion. What a load of idiots: around Perry, the bodies were three deep. He tried to make himself as small a target as possible.

Great confusion. Lieutenant Churchill, the one who made that famous escape, was up here with a message from Warren. Reinforcements were finally coming, he said, and guns. At last. But Thorneycroft says they are to go down, what’s left of them. So that’s what they did, Perry and his comrades, dragging wounded men under the very moon by whose light, the night before, they had climbed the blasted hill. On the way down, they met the party sent to rescue them. God, what a mess.

It was past two in the morning. All night long, the Biographer had listened to the guns; watched Gandhi and his Indians come and go under flare and torchlight; watched the barrels smoking and spurting orange flame as the gunners continued to rain death on the Boer positions beyond Spion Kop; watched the men smoking as they lay on the stretchers, pulling furiously on pipes to ease their pain. It was as if, he thought, the shells were going off inside them. Terrible slaughter. He tried to sleep, but it brought no respite: the distorted faces of those smokers haunted him like ghosts, and in his dreams the ambulance wagons became wagonloads of human hams.