The Making Of The British Army (44 page)

Fearing that Ladysmith would soon be attacked, the general officer commanding in Natal, Sir George White, who had earned his own VC in the Second Afghan War,
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now recalled all outlying troops including the garrison at Dundee for the defence of the crucial railway-junction town. The Boers soon obliged him by famously laying siege to it – and to Mafeking, an altogether less important place strategically, and also Kimberley, a far bigger undertaking just across the Orange Free State border in Cape Colony. It was a terrible mistake. In tying down the better part of their field armies in sieges, the Boers surrendered their most potent weapon – mobility. For as long as the besieged garrisons could hold out, reinforcements could be mustered from both Britain and India.

The sieges had another, unexpected effect too. The British public could identify with them, not least because a siege was easier for war correspondents to describe. It also played to the perceived strengths of
the national character – fortitude and dogged courage, the island spirit. The sieges of Gibraltar in the eighteenth century had been similarly lauded as heroic episodes at home, as the sieges of Tobruk and Malta would be in the Second World War.

And so at Ladysmith, Mafeking and Kimberley the army was once again feted by a nation fed on rousing despatches by the correspondents of every newspaper in London – soon to include Winston Churchill, by now a civilian, for the
Morning Post –
aided and abetted by shrewd propagandists like Colonel Robert Baden-Powell at Mafeking. The British public had become thoroughly bloodthirsty after Omdurman and now, imbued with all the ill-informed fervour of jingoism, cheered the army with genuine enthusiasm. Volunteers in the militia and yeomanry could not wait to join them.

Another VC was sent from England to take overall command, General Sir Redvers Buller, one of Wolseley’s protégés; and with him came 47,000 reinforcements. Buller’s original intention was to concentrate his force in an advance on Bloemfontein, the Free State capital; but the precarious situation in Natal now seemed to have priority. He therefore sent Lieutenant-General the Lord Methuen with the 1st Division, 10,000 men, to relieve Kimberley, and ordered Major-General Gatacre, of Sudan fame, to remain on the defensive with a much smaller force just south of the Orange River, covering any Boer advance from Bloemfontein into the Cape. Buller himself would take most of the remainder, about 20,000, to Natal to relieve Ladysmith and Mafeking.

It was a classic example of division instead of concentration of force, and it failed dramatically. First, Gatacre exceeded his orders by trying to capture the important railway junction at Stormberg in the north-east of Cape Colony, where he was repulsed with heavy losses. The following day, 11 December, having forced a crossing of the Modder River, Methuen was defeated at Magersfontein, losing more than a quarter of his assault force. Four days later Buller, with four infantry brigades and one of cavalry, plus six batteries of artillery, attempted to cross the Tugela River at Colenso 20 miles south of Ladysmith. With no room to manœuvre, and with Boers led by the able General Louis Botha on high ground commanding the drifts, the attack was defeated. Buller’s losses were high: several hundred men taken prisoner and 1,000 casualties, 150 of them fatal. Among the dead was Field Marshal Lord Roberts’s only son.
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It rapidly became known as ‘Black Week’, though some honour was salvaged at Ladysmith by Sir George White who, on receiving Buller’s message that he could not break through and should surrender, chose to ignore it. In London, however, the government was already taking steps to relieve Buller, sending for the commander-in-chief in Ireland, 68-year-old Lord Roberts of Kandahar. ‘Bobs’, as he was known to every soldier in the army, accepted the appointment on the day he learned of his son’s death. Six days later he sailed from Southampton, putting in at Gibraltar to pick up Kitchener, who was to be his chief of staff, and reaching Cape Town on 10 January.

Here he learned that Buller intended going on to the offensive again in Natal, so he sent instructions that all troops should remain on the defensive until he could assess the situation for himself. But Buller signalled back that the Boers had just made an unsuccessful attempt to take Ladysmith and would therefore be ripe for counter-attack. Reluctantly, Roberts allowed him to go ahead. The result was the murderous battle of Spion Kop, with a loss of almost 2,000 men, and a further defeat at Vaal Kranz a fortnight later.

Spion Kop was perhaps the nadir of the regular British army, for it had neither the technical means nor the tactics to cope with long-range artillery and magazine-rifle fire, though these had been in service for over a decade. Smoke rounds had not yet been developed, and at Spion Kop – just as at Talana Hill – use of ground was unimaginative and there was little coordination of fire and movement. Reconnaissance was also perfunctory, and communications not up to the demands of a fluid battle in the open (the heliograph and semaphore flags proving hopelessly inadequate), so that commanders had only the most tenuous grip on the action. What was more, at Spion Kop junior leadership – the boast of the army – failed when the situation became confused.

The battle came about as Buller attempted to cross the Tugela to relieve Ladysmith. He had a much stronger force than at Colenso, Lieutenant-General Sir Charles Warren’s 5th Division having arrived from Britain, and this time he had chosen to attack further west opposite the Rangeworthy Hills, of which Spion Kop was one. There is still dispute as to which of the two main forces engaged was the diversion and which was the force intended to break through to Ladysmith 20 miles or so to the north. Major-General Neville Lyttelton, who had commanded a brigade at Omdurman and would be appointed
first Chief of the General Staff in the post-war reorganization of the army, was to cross the Tugela with his brigade of rifle regiments
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at Potgeiter’s (sometimes Potgieter) Drift to the east of the main attack where a loop in the river protected the crossing from enfilade fire. To divert Boer attention, Warren’s division (13,000 men and 36 guns) was to cross further west at Trikhardt’s Drift and advance on to the Rangeworthy Hills, while Buller, with the reserve of 8,000 men and 22 guns, would then cross at Potgeiter’s Drift and follow up Lyttelton, who would push north for Ladysmith. However, the alternative suggestion is that Lyttelton’s force was to be the diversion, and that Buller expected Warren’s division to break through the Boer defence line and drive on for Ladysmith.

Warren’s appointment to command was controversial, almost worthy of the Crimea. He was a sapper primarily interested in survey, a veteran of many a mapping and archaeological expedition. From 1886 to 1888 (during the ‘Jack the Ripper’ murders) he was Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, and he had not heard a shot fired in anger since a native war in the Transkei in 1878. In 1898, after command in Singapore and the Thames District, he retired, but was recalled to the colours at the age of 59 when war broke out the following year, possibly on account of his topographical knowledge of South Africa. It could not have been for his experience of command in the field, nor for the want of other capable commanders, and it has led to suggestions of masonic influence.

He began crossing the Tugela on 17 January, and two days later was still bringing his column across the river while his artillery bombarded the ridge opposite Trikhardt’s Drift. But General Botha, who had thrown back Buller’s first attempt to cross the Tugela at Colenso the previous month, saw the threat to his extreme right flank and brought up reinforcements and guns to the hills commanding the drift. On 23 January, losing patience with Warren’s lack of urgency, Buller rode forward and ordered him to begin the attack.

Warren saw Spion Kop as key to the Rangeworthy position and ordered the 44-year-old Major-General Edward Woodgate, who had fought in the Abyssinia campaign and the Ashanti and Zulu wars, to take it with his Lancastrian Brigade,
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reinforced by an unhorsed
company of MI under Lieutenant-Colonel Alexander Thorneycroft and a company of sappers to dig trenches at the peak. The brigade climbed the steep sides of the Kop that night, arriving at dawn at what in the mist they mistook for the top. Accordingly the sappers began to entrench – with great difficulty, for the ground was rocky – while the rest of the brigade lay down (in an area not much more than an acre). Why they did not all put their backs into building
sangars
has never been adequately explained,
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though the infantrymen had left their picks and shovels behind since these would have made for a noisy climb, and they believed that at the peak they were beyond the reach of Boer marksmen (though not beyond the reach of the Boer guns).

In fact, as they had been approaching the false crest the Boer picket had abandoned the hillside and rushed to warn Botha. The Lancastrians had not been long at their ease when every Boer gun in the area began to fire on them. And as the mist lifted, they saw to their horror that the true summit was several hundred yards off and in the possession of Boer marksmen – who now poured deadly accurate fire into what would become known as ‘the murderous acre’. What few entrenchments the sappers had been able to dig were too shallow to give shelter or allow return of fire. Woodgate was soon dead, and Lieutenant-Colonel Malby Crofton, commanding officer of the general’s former regiment, the King’s Own, took temporary command and signalled that they were in trouble and needed reinforcements.
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Warren now ordered Major-General John Talbot Coke’s 10th Brigade (2nd Dorsets and 2nd Middlesex) to reinforce the Lancastrians, though Coke himself had a severe leg injury and could not reach
the top. Convinced, too, that Crofton was being defeatist, Warren sent a message promoting Lieutenant-Colonel Thorneycroft of the MI to local brigadier-general. Thorneycroft’s first job would be to stop the Lancashire Fusiliers from surrendering: they had already taken many casualties, their ammunition and water were running low, and no one could see a way out of their predicament (yet fifteen years later this same regiment would win six VCs in a morning during the Gallipoli landings).

Lyttelton’s brigade of rifle regiments, which had crossed at Potgeiter’s Drift without difficulty, now launched a supporting attack: the 2nd Scottish Rifles (the Cameronians) were ordered to climb Spion Kop to join Thorneycroft’s troops while 1st Battalion the Rifle Brigade made a demonstration before the ‘Twin Peaks’ to the east, which helped the 60th Rifles to fight their way up the precipitous hillside of the Twin Peaks and take the summit of the ridge. But the fiercely hot day came to a close with Spion Kop still under artillery fire and Thorneycroft and his men at the end of their tether: Warren had sent him no further orders during the day, and failed to tell him that substantial reinforcements were on their way.

As darkness fell, the Boers at the summit of Spion Kop, dismayed by the abandonment of Twin Peaks, began slipping away too. But Thorneycroft did not realize this; so, instead of following up the retreating enemy, he resolved to withdraw with the demoralized remnants of the Lancastrian Brigade, the Middlesex Regiment and the Scottish Rifles. As he did so the reinforcements began arriving in the crowded acre and a vigorous dispute followed, their commanding officer insisting that the hill be held, Thorneycroft – acting brigadier general – adamant that it could not. Down the hillside scrambled the unhappy force, and at dawn next day the astonished Boers reoccupied the peak.

Warren now recrossed the Tugela with his tail between his legs; Buller’s second attempt to force his way through to Ladysmith had failed abysmally. Warren was sent back to England, and Buller was sidelined (a VC could not be humiliated entirely). Thorneycroft rejoined his MI, which he commanded during the later operations in the Eastern Transvaal, and was promoted colonel and appointed a Companion of the Bath. The scapegoating had for once found the right level.

One of Buller’s ‘gallopers’ that day had been Winston Churchill, by
now back in uniform with the hastily raised South Africa Light Horse. He made several ascents of Spion Kop carrying messages, writing afterwards in his report: ‘Corpses lay here and there. Many of the wounds were of a horrible nature. The splinters and fragments of the shells had torn and mutilated them. The shallow trenches were choked with dead and wounded.’

It had indeed been a terrible drubbing, a stark and brutal reminder that, in Kipling’s words, to the bullet ‘All flesh is grass’. But after Spion Kop the steel began to re-enter the army’s soul – as if the hill were a sort of watershed. The army carried the magazine rifle and wore khaki, but still at heart too many of them carried the musket and wore red. The sheer killing power of the rifle and artillery and the futility of close- order movement had been demonstrated once and for all. The British soldier and his officers knew now that what the bullet and the shell dealt to the dervish it would deal also to them. When the reckoning came after the war, Spion Kop – and the battles of ‘Black Week’ – would stand as an irrefutable pointer to the way ahead.

The army had seen it, the nation had seen it, the whole world had seen it. ‘The vast majority of German military experts believe that the South African war will end with a complete defeat of the English,’ wrote Count von Bülow, the German foreign minister, gleefully after Black Week. ‘Nobody here believes that the English will ever reach Pretoria.’ But news of Buller’s further reverses did not dull Lord Roberts’s determination to recover the initiative. And Boer jitters would soon work in his favour, for despite the British setbacks in Natal, the Free Staters were expecting a heavy offensive towards Bloemfontein from Colesberg, which the newly promoted Major-General John French and the cavalry division had all but taken back from a Boer commando the month before. Roberts now concentrated some 37,000 men plus 12,000 horses and twice as many more transport animals south of Kimberley while keeping up a pretence of advancing along the Colesberg axis. Within a month he had lifted the siege of Kimberley, and by a broad flanking movement and some spirited action by the cavalry division he outmanœuvred General Cronje (commanding in the west), bringing him to battle at Paardeberg on 18 February and forcing his complete surrender a week later.