Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill (40 page)

Across the river, a few hours earlier, a messenger had stepped into Louis Botha’s small tent with news that the enemy was stirring. Within minutes, having given orders to put the laager on alert, the young Boer commander was standing on a ridge, field glass to his eye, scanning the opposite bank of the Tugela.

What Botha saw as the sun began to rise was a vast enemy army, some sixteen thousand men, laid out before him like a military pageant from a picture book. The northern side of the river, where the Boers were encamped, was broken and bulging with ravines, hills and, in the distance, the dark, looming Drakensberg Mountains. The southern side, however, was flat, open veld interrupted by only a few low, solitary hills. Stretched out over this plain, impossible to miss despite their khaki uniforms, was line after line of British soldiers and officers, forming a front that was two miles wide and a mile deep.

Although in the past week alone they had already lost two battles to an invisible and devastatingly effective enemy, the British army had continued to fight in line formation. Even Atkins marveled at the lines’ uncompromising precision. “
Each man [was] the appointed distance from his neighbour,” he wrote, “and each row the appointed distance from the next.” For the Boers, the sight was utterly bewildering, bearing no resemblance to their battles with the Zulu, from whom they had learned how to hide.

Mesmerized by the scene unfolding before them, the Boers watched as the most revered and reviled army in the world slowly advanced across the veld. Now more than three times larger than Botha’s force, Buller’s army seemed to be “
sweeping on in majestic
motion, like a resistless flood, over the resounding veldt,” the Irish journalist Michael Davitt, who was traveling with the Boers, wrote. “It was war in all its spectacular glory, as seen from where the little force of warrior farmers and beardless boys behind the Tugela gazed with fascinated but fearless eyes.”

Despite the impressive show of force, the Boers made no move to respond in kind, or even reveal themselves. Botha had made it clear that not a shot would be fired until he had given the signal—a single, reverberating blast from the howitzer that stood, sandbagged and ready, beside him. Until then, they would have to wait for the enemy to come to them.

Suddenly a low, rumbling sound rolled across the hills. It was coming not from the British field guns, which they could clearly see behind the lines of soldiers, but from within the Boers’ own camp. A group of burghers, who had spent most of their lives fighting a formidable enemy, had begun to sing their morning hymn, an “
invocation of Divine help” for the battle before them. Deep and stirring, it stole across the river and over the plains below like a heavy mist. It seemed to be an “echoing response to some chant of giants from mountain tops behind,” Davitt wrote, “and then [it] died away, leaving a more deathlike stillness in the morning air.”

To gain a sweeping view of the coming battle, Buller had climbed to the top of Naval Gun Hill, a low, sloping promontory that was one of the few elevated spots on his side of the river, and was peering back at the Boers. As carefully as he scanned the northern stretches, however, he could see nothing. There was no sign of life, not a helmet, not a horse. “What a conspiracy of invisibility!” Atkins wrote.

As they had been throughout the war, the Boers now surrounding Colenso were as invisible as their enemy was conspicuous. Not only did they have the topographical advantage, but they knew instinctively how to fade away into the dusty landscape. Everything was camouflaged. They had dug their trenches in the long grass near
the river, carefully scattering the excavated soil so that there were no obvious mounds.
Unlike the British, whose twinkling lights had telegraphed their intentions across the Tugela well before the sun rose, the Boers had been strictly forbidden to make fires, or even smoke a cigarette, after the sun went down. They even used dummy gun barrels that were made of corrugated iron or tree trunks, propped on hilltops and pointed south so that the British would have no way of knowing where the gunfire was really coming from when the fighting began.

Not only did Buller not know where Botha and his men were, but he had done very little to find out. While Botha had scouts scattered across the veld, on both sides of the Tugela, reporting to him day and night on the enemy’s movements, Buller, who did not even have a reliable map of the area, had shown little interest in reconnaissance. “
Practically no attempt was made to find out anything about the river itself or what lay behind,” Leo Amery, Churchill’s old schoolmate from Harrow and the correspondent for the London
Times
, wrote, “though there were dozens of young officers who would have given a quarter’s pay to be allowed to swim the Tugela at night and crawl over the Boer positions.”

Buller did have a plan, but it was based on centuries-old military strategy rather than any understanding of the land, the river or the enemy. As Botha had expected, the British commander in chief had decided on a frontal attack. Led by General Henry Hildyard, it was to be supported by several flanking brigades, to the left and the right, overhead and behind. Although any British general would have thoroughly approved of the strategy, it had one devastating stumbling block: The highly decorated officers Buller was sending into battle had no idea where the enemy was. “
Buller’s plan of attack resembled the wild swings of a blindfolded pugilist in the general direction of his opponent,” a later historian of the war would write. “Of the river in front of him and the burghers who guarded it, he had only the vaguest notion.”

As the sun revealed the plains below, Buller could see that it was going to be an achingly beautiful day. There was not a cloud in the
sky or a breath of wind sweeping across the veld. His men seemed to be moving not through an actual scene but through a painting of a perfect day. Most of them had left their greatcoats in the wagons that trundled slowly behind them, and, with their bandoliers slung over their shoulders and their ammunition pouches bouncing from their belt hooks, they marched at an easy pace, as though they had no cares in the world.

While Buller’s men were at ease, confident in their innate superiority and their commander’s wisdom, Buller himself was tense as he watched them make their way toward the seemingly empty hills. After a week of devastating losses, he was still no closer to Ladysmith, and he knew that every move he made, every miscalculation, every slip of the tongue or sword, was being watched not only by the Boers and the British but by most of the Western world.

It was no secret to the British that few European countries were rooting for them to win the war. Although the governments of most of the great colonial powers were outwardly civil to England, hatred and resentment seethed just below the surface. The British Empire was the largest and most powerful in the world, and everyone was waiting for the Boers to expose even the slightest sign of vulnerability. With Black Week, they had gotten far more than they had hoped for. “
The tidings of British reverses were received everywhere with a fierce clamour of exultation,” Amery wrote. “The imminent dissolution of the British Empire, the pricking of the great bubble which had so long imposed upon the world by its appearance of solidity and strength, was everywhere proclaimed.”

Other countries were motivated less by hatred for the British than by sympathy for the Boers. Although the president of the United States, William McKinley, had vowed to stay out of the war, many Americans saw in it glimpses of the American Revolution and their own struggle for freedom from British rule little more than a hundred years earlier. Even Theodore Roosevelt, then governor of New
York, could not take his eyes off South Africa. Writing to his friend Cecil Spring Rice, later British ambassador to the United States, he admitted that he had been “
absorbed in interest in the Boer War.”

Although both the British and the Boers would have liked to have American help, the national opinion that mattered to them most was Germany’s. The Boers had not only acquired many of their weapons from Germany but openly and actively sought out the Germans’ help just days before the first battle had begun. Dr.
Willem Johannes Leyds, then state secretary of the Transvaal, had traveled to Berlin in mid-October to ask the German government to intervene in the war on the Boers’ behalf. Although Kaiser Wilhelm II, son of Queen Victoria’s oldest daughter, had refused the Boers’ request, after watching the British lose battle after battle, he had sent his grandmother a personal message. “
I cannot sit on the safety valve for ever,” he warned her. “My people demand intervention. You must get a victory.”

The nearer the British came to the Tugela, however, the further out of reach victory seemed to be. Standing near Buller on Naval Gun Hill, Atkins looked out over the battlefield, beyond the plain, and was stunned by what he saw on the other side. “
Ridge upon ridge, top upon top, each one looking over the head of the one in front of it,” he wrote. “Simply desperate!” He knew that the Boers were somewhere in there, thousands of them hidden in trenches and behind hills. The fact that he could not see them made them all the more terrifying.

With his columns mobilized and his plan in place, there was little for Buller to do but begin the battle, with or without a visible enemy.
At 5:30 a.m., when they had come within three miles of the river, his men abruptly stopped. The field guns pulled up behind them and, with little fanfare, opened fire. Instantly, the hills across the Tugela erupted like a roaring volcano, alive with sprays of red dust, a column of gray smoke rising hundreds of feet into the air, and
a greenish plume of lyddite, the explosive used in British shells. “
The cry of the shell through the air; the upheaval of smoke and earth and dust,” Atkins wrote. “These are the things that clamp your soul and will be the visions afterwards of wakeful nights.”

If the British had believed that the fury and grandeur of their opening bombardment would bring out the Boers at last, they were mistaken. “
No guns opened in reply,” Amery wrote. “Not a sign showed whether the pall of smoke covered torn and mangled bodies or a bare, untenanted hump of earth and rocks.” To Buller, the silence was inexplicable.
He had used even more explosives than had been employed at Magersfontein, a battle that the Boers had won just four days earlier, but at the cost of hundreds of lives. How could Botha’s men fail to respond? Perhaps, he thought, they had already fled.

On the plain below him, Buller’s plan continued to unfold. Although he had several brigades in action, like long, splayed fingers reaching for the river, he quickly found himself training his field glasses, in horror, on just two. The first was led by Major General Arthur Fitzroy Hart, who had been ordered to force his way across a broad ford and move down the river’s left bank. The second was led by none other than Colonel Charles Long, the man who, just a month earlier, had been censured for sending his armored train from Estcourt into the arms of the Boers.

Buller, who would later say in a court of inquiry that blame for the armored train disaster lay “
entirely on Colonel Long,” had given Long very clear orders in Colenso. Placed in charge of the artillery, he was to take five hundred men and eighteen guns and follow to the right of the frontal attack, keeping well away from the river. Anticipating very little action on the part of Long and his men, Buller assumed there would be even less risk.