by Celia Sandys
Churchill loved the open air, and he commended to his readers the delights of galloping across the veldt in bright, sunlit days, and sleeping under a wagon, shoulder to shoulder for warmth and shelter from the cool night showers. He conjured up the atmosphere of camp life, describing the surrounding hills taking shape in the gathering light while the kettle boiled over the fire. Another day begun, ‘free from all cares’. His readers were then lightly returned to the business in hand: ‘All cares – for who can be worried about the little matters of humdrum life when he may be dead before the night?’
Meanwhile, the garrison in Ladysmith was in dire straits, and the relieving army had returned to its tented lines south of the Tugela. There, in sight of the rusting remains of Churchill’s armoured train, Buller addressed his troops, welcomed the reinforcements which more than made up for his recent losses, and planned the next attempt to reach Ladysmith.
Taken together, Churchill’s dispatches reflect dismay at Buller’s plodding leadership; but when they are read singly, as they were written, the faults are excused. The only criticism Churchill permitted himself on 4 February was to wonder why Buller had entrusted recent operations to subordinates, and waited so long before gathering the reins firmly to himself. ‘Probably’, he suggested disingenuously, because of ‘some pedantic principle of military etiquette’.
That Churchill’s muted criticism was in the interests of public morale, and was not intended to ingratiate himself with the military hierarchy, is demonstrated by the last quarter of this dispatch. He had just attended a church parade at which five thousand men formed up in a hollow square, with Buller and the chaplain in the centre. Here were men who had recently faced death, and who would do so again very shortly. In spite of the sunshine, life seemed precarious. This was an occasion at which the preacher should have given comfort and strength. Scathingly, Churchill describes how, in the face of a raucous chaplain, the soldiers ‘froze into apathy, and after a while the formal perfunctory service reached its formal conclusion’: ‘The bridegroom Opportunity had come. But the Church had her lamp untrimmed.’
Continuing his criticism, Churchill reported a fellow officer musing on the fact that the medical profession had sent its best men to tend men’s physical wounds, while their souls were left to the care of ‘a village practitioner’. Churchill reflected on previous campaigns where he had also found the established Church wanting. He remembered ‘the venerable figure and noble character of Father Brindle in the River War, and wondered whether Rome was again seizing the opportunity which Canterbury disdained – the opportunity of telling the glad tidings to men who were about to die’.
When the new Commander-in-Chief, Lord Roberts, read this dispatch, he considered it a slight on army chaplains. His feathers were further ruffled when, as a result of it, clergymen from all over Britain began to volunteer for service in South Africa. Churchill’s few telling words had done some good, but he was now in Roberts’s bad books. This would soon prove to his disadvantage.
At the end of January Churchill snatched a few days’ leave in order to meet his mother and his younger brother Jack in Durban. Lady Randolph had been the moving force behind a committee of American women in London who, as a gesture of Anglo-American solidarity in opposition to the American government’s sympathy for the Boers, had raised £45,000 to provide a hospital ship. Named the Maine, it had sailed in December 1899, with Lady Randolph on board to manage its nursing services.
On 28 January Churchill wrote to Pamela Plowden: ‘My Mother and Jack arrive today at Durban in the Maine: Oh why did you not come out as secretary.’ The long letter continues with snippets of news and comment, and includes the oft-repeated sentiment, ‘I have a good belief that I am to be of some use and therefore to be spared,’ and the statement: ‘I am fairly satisfied with what has happened to me here. That is sufficient if you agree.’ It ends: ‘Why did you not come out on the Maine so I should be going to meet you now. Perhaps you are wise. Ever your loving and devoted Winston S. Churchill.’
What an adventure Pamela could have had, and what a wonderful escape it would have been from the constrictions of Victorian society – quite apart from the opportunity to see the man who was courting her, albeit in a rather half-hearted fashion. If she was more committed to Winston than he was to her, how galling it must have been to be asked why she had not accompanied his mother when he had never suggested it, and then for him to make matters worse by adding, ‘Perhaps you are wise.’
It seems strange that Lady Randolph, herself unfettered by any maidenly inhibitions, and never one to conform, did not invite Pamela to fulfil some suitable role on the Maine and thereby promote the marriage which she clearly desired for her son.
Hard on Lady Randolph’s heels had been her younger son, for whom Churchill had obtained a commission in the South African Light Horse. Jack, who had sailed on a faster ship, joined her on the Maine when it sailed on to Durban. She and her two sons enjoyed a precious twenty-four hours together in the foothills of the Drakensberg Mountains, staying at Government House in Pietermaritzburg, before Winston took Jack off to war.
Lady Randolph had transported eight army reserve nursing sisters from Cape Town to Durban. Their entourage reflected the philosophy of General Buller’s baggage train – each had brought her own lady’s maid. ‘I did not envy the hospitals which were to benefit from their services,’ commented Lady Randolph.
On 5 February Buller made another attempt to relieve Ladysmith. On that day Churchill, mindful of the possible effect on morale at home of the army’s recent reverses, wrote to his cousin Hugh Frewen: ‘You must not: allow your mother and friends to be despondent about this war . . . We are going to make a general attack . . . and I hope and pray you may soon have good news of victory.’
But the good news was still elusive. After three days spent attempting to cross the Tugela a few miles east of Spion Kop, Buller was again forced to acknowledge defeat. Once more the weary troops withdrew to the south bank, after three consecutive costly failures: Colenso, Spion Kop, and now what became known as Vaal Krantz, after the ridge which had been the infantry’s objective.
In the years ahead there would be many critics of Buller. Foremost among them was Leo Amery, who had shared Churchill’s tent at Estcourt and who would edit The Times History of the War in South Africa. It was a weighty work, running to seven volumes, in which Amery portrays Buller as symbolising all that was undoubtedly wrong with the British military hierarchy of 1900. Amery suggested that any well-planned attack would have succeeded in opening the way to Ladysmith where Buller had failed. This was an extraordinary oversimplification by a young reporter with no military expertise who had not been present, even as an observer, at the battles of which he wrote.
Churchill, on the other hand, had been in the thick of every action, and, being an instinctive soldier, had a better understanding of events. He pointed out to his Morning Post readers that the superior mobility of the Boers allowed them to concentrate their forces at any point where they were attacked, that the carefully prepared Boer reserve positions were out of range of British artillery, and that the ground was too broken for night operations. In excusing Buller, he glossed over the fact that the solution to the problems of British mobility lay in their own hands – but readers who were following the campaign carefully would remember that in a previous dispatch he had criticised the force’s huge baggage train.
Fortunately, the army was still solidly behind its Commander-in-Chief, and even Major-General Lyttelton, who covertly criticised his commander to the press, believed that twice the number of troops available would be needed to remove the Boers from their well-prepared entrenchments which barred the way to Ladysmith.
Buller had tried everywhere along the Tugela from Colenso as far westwards as he, though not the cavalry, had thought feasible. For his fourth attempt he looked at the ground east of Colenso, where the Tugela turns northwards towards Ladysmith, isolating the Boer left flank before flowing behind their def
ences. This seems such an obvious line of attack that historians have criticised Buller for not attempting it earlier. Thirty years later, Churchill’s simple but damning explanation was that ‘Buller had not happened to think of it before.’ And at the time no one else had suggested it either, not even the clever young correspondent. Nevertheless, Churchill’s criticism is warranted. Buller, with his vast experience, should have considered this route as one of his initial options, and not waited to be driven to it.
Unsure of the best line of attack, Buller ordered a reconnaissance in force. On 12 February a composite force was ordered to secure a feature known as Hussar Hill. Taking part was the South African Light Horse, which cantered out at 8 a.m. ‘We never get up early in this war,’ wrote Churchill in his dispatch three days later. Was this a comment on the lack of urgency which characterised British operations, or a light-hearted quip to show that English gentlemen set whatever pace they themselves decided? Probably the former, though most London readers would have taken it as a typical example of British sang-froid.
At midday Buller arrived and ‘made a prolonged reconnaissance of the ground with his telescope’. The reconnaissance complete, he left an hour later, and the force which had secured the hill began the difficult task of withdrawing under enemy fire.
Once again the breakfast tables in London were treated to a visual account. As Churchill rode away, ‘the ground two hundred yards further back was all alive with jumping dust’. The Boer marksmen were shooting short. On reaching a ridge the regiment dismounted and, the horses having been led to the rear, the men dropped down and began to pick off the enemy: ‘Not less than four hundred men on either side were firing as fast as modern rifles will allow.’ Fortunately, the distance between the opposing forces prevented this becoming the bloody sort of duel seen on Spion Kop, but it was an entirely new experience for young Jack Churchill, in action for the very first time.
As Winston Churchill, walking along the line of prone riflemen, approached his brother, he ‘saw him start in the quick, peculiar manner of a stricken man’. Jack had been hit in the leg. Writing to Pamela nine days later, Churchill reported: ‘Here is an example of Fortune’s caprice . . . There was very hot fire – bullets . . . in dozens. I was walking about without any cover - I who have tempted fortune so often. Jack was hit. I am glad he is out of harms way honourably for a month.’ Jack was sent back to Durban to be treated on the Maine, one of his mother’s first patients.
Churchill was not alone in thinking he had sublime protection. John Atkins, the Manchester Guardian correspondent who had shared Churchill’s tent in Estcourt, writing of Jack’s wound, commented: ‘It seemed as though he had paid his brother’s debts.’
As a result of his reconnaissance and, no doubt, the intelligence reports he received, Buller decided to outflank the Boer defences east of Colenso by capturing a thousand-foot feature called Monte Cristo which dominated the whole Boer defensive position. The South African Light Horse was to play a major role in this operation. As usual, Buller moved methodically. On 14 February Hussar Hill was reoccupied after a short, sharp skirmish in which the South African Light Horse lost only a few horses and men. Covering the next four miles took three days, but on the seventeenth the regiment chased away some hundred Boers barring the final approach to Monte Cristo, leaving the British in possession of the tangled ridges at the foot of the mountain. The following morning the infantry secured the whole feature. From the peak of Monte Cristo, Ladysmith was plainly visible.
Churchill telegraphed the Morning Post two days later that ‘now at last success was a distinct possibility’. Keen to see for himself, he followed close on the heels of the infantry: ‘Only eight miles away stood the poor little persecuted town,’ he wrote. The victory of Monte Cristo had ‘revolutionised the situation in Natal’, and ‘laid open a practicable road to Ladysmith’.
It was to be a fortnight – the longest interval ever between his instalments – before Churchill wrote his next dispatch, from the Maine, on board which he was taking a few days’ rest. To his readers he explained: ‘We have passed through a period of ceaseless struggle . . . I could not pause to record anything.’ Buller’s caution had prevailed, and he had concluded that the country was too broken for a further advance from Monte Cristo. Encouraged by the sight of so many fleeing Boers fearing that they had been outflanked, he decided to abandon the newly captured high ground and to revert to his original choice of approach, which had failed in December: an advance from Colenso. The little town was occupied without resistance on 19 February, and a pontoon bridge thrown across the Tugela a mile to the north. So far, so good. But many of the Boers who had streamed north now returned, and Buller was faced once more with a determined and well-organised enemy positioned on a series of hills ideally situated for defence. It was not until the twenty-second that the first two of these, Horseshoe and Wynne Hills, were in British hands.
Churchill’s second dispatch from the Maine described in detail the attack on Hart’s Hill the following day. Under Major-General Hart, it was headed by three Irish regiments which are now only names in history: the Inniskilling Fusiliers, the Connaught Rangers and Churchill’s old friends the Dublin Fusiliers. ‘It was a frantic scene of blood and fury . . .’ wrote Churchill. ‘The greater part of the front line was shot down.’ Once again, though, his own guardian angel seems to have been working overtime. A shrapnel shell burst directly over his head, but he was unscathed. He turned to his companion, Captain Brooke, and ‘was about to elaborate my theory that shrapnel is comparatively harmless, when I saw some stir and turmoil and no less than eight men were picked up killed or wounded’. He mentioned the incident to Pamela in a letter which ended: ‘My nerves were never better and I think I care less for bullets every day.’ We can only wonder about the state of Pamela’s nerves – although we can say with certainty that Churchill was as careless of them as he was of bullets.
The repulse of the attack was complete. Out of 1,200 officers and men of the two leading battalions, both colonels, three majors, twenty other officers and six hundred men had been killed or wounded. ‘The dead and wounded lay thickly scattered, the dead mixed with the living, the wounded unattended . . . and harassed by the fire from both sides and from our artillery.’
On 25 February an armistice was arranged for both sides to collect their wounded and bury the dead. Churchill wrote: ‘The neglect and exposure for forty-eight hours had much aggravated the case of the former, and the bodies of the dead, swollen, blackened and torn by the terrible wounds of the expansive bullets, now so generally used by the enemy, were ugly things to see.’
Buller moved his artillery back to Monte Cristo and repositioned the pontoon bridge two miles downstream, planning to resume his outflanking movement and bypass Hart’s Hill in order to attack Railway and Pieter’s Hills, the last obstacles before Ladysmith. A day was spent in final preparations for the attacks, which began early in the morning of 27 February: ‘We arose – all had slept in their boots and had no need to dress – drank some coffee and rejoiced that the day promised to be cool.’ That would be welcomed by the infantry, on whom all depended. Failure on this day might well seal the fate of Ladysmith. Churchill, with his instinct for history, noted that it was Majuba Day, the anniversary of the British defeat in 1881 which had ended the First Anglo-Boer War. It was also to be the day on which Majuba was at last avenged.
The Breakthrough to Ladysmith
By late afternoon the infantry had been successful. The way to Ladysmith was indisputably open. The South African Light Horse, which had been providing long-range supporting fire from the northern end of Hlangwane Hill, galloped down to the pontoon bridge in order to pursue the retreating enemy. But Buller would not allow them to cross. Churchill was left to chafe and fume over the General’s words, which he reported as: ‘Damn pursuit! Better leave them alone now they are going off.’ Perhaps Buller was afraid of releasing the cavalry in the dark, but it was a timid decision, which caused Churchill to comment, �
��Damn the prize which eases future struggles!’
The first intimation the defenders of Ladysmith had of their imminent relief was the sight the following morning of an apparently endless wagon train winding its way north, accompanied by groups of horsemen. There was nothing the garrison could do to impede the retreating Boers. The cavalry who might have galloped out to intercept the wagon train had no horses – they had long since been eaten.
Then came a message from Buller, announcing that his cavalry were on the way. With the cavalry, of course, was Churchill. He was not, however, positioned quite where he would have liked to be, in the van, but was riding some way back, with the cavalry brigade commander, Lord Dundonald. He was not therefore, as his dispatch was to imply, present at the dramatic meeting between the garrison’s commander Sir George White and Colonel Hubert Gough, the leading cavalry regimental commander, as the sun went down on 28 February. Nevertheless, his imagination enabled him to provide his Morning Post readers with an account exciting enough to match the event:
The evening was deliciously cool. My horse was strong and fresh for I had changed him at midday . . . Beyond the next ridge was Ladysmith . . . the centre of the world’s attraction . . . within our reach at last. The excitement of the moment was increased by the exhilaration of the gallop . . . We raced through the thorn bushes by Intombi Spruit . . . Presently we arranged ourselves in military order . . . so that there might be no question about precedence, and with Gough, the youngest regimental commander in the army, and one of the best, at the head of the column, we forded the Klip River and rode into the town.