That Buller did not see the importance of Hlangwane is inexplicable; that his brigade commanders and Clery, the expert on minor tactics, all failed to grasp the tactical significance of this commanding height can be attributed only to their awe of Buller’s reputation. Although Hlangwane’s importance became obvious to all later—nine weeks and 3,205 casualties later—it would seem that none of these generals offered any objections when Buller explained his battle plans at the 14 December meeting: no one pointed out the absolute necessity of securing Hlangwane, and no one questioned the wisdom of sending a thousand horsemen and a battery to attack it. There may have been some less senior officers with doubts, however, for at the conclusion of the meeting one staff officer was heard to murmur, “And may the Lord have mercy on our souls.”
Louis Botha (his name pronounced as in French) was born near Greytown in Natal in 1862, the seventh of thirteen children, and was taken by his parents to the Orange Free State when he was five. He had little formal education, perhaps no more than three years, plus what could be acquired from itinerant Dutch tutors who travelled the veld in this era. He was twenty-one when, after the death of his father, he and a younger brother set off with an ox wagon for northern Natal. There he attached himself to Lucas Meyer, who in the tradition of the voortrekkers, established De Nieuw Republiek (The New Republic).
In 1886, at the age of twenty-four, he married Annie Emmet, a schoolteacher of Irish descent who spoke little Afrikaans; Botha spoke little English. Perhaps they communicated through music, for she was said to be a fine musician and he played the accordian. Botha was a good farmer and he prospered, eventually owning 16,000 acres spread over several farms. The New Republic soon became part of the Transvaal, and in 1898 he was elected to its volksraad, representing Vryheid. In the vote on going to war, he abstained.
Louis Botha was a natural politician, happiest with people around him. Although he possessed a brilliant mind, the Bible and a biography of Abraham Lincoln were the only books he is known to have read. People, not books, interested him, and with consummate tact, patience, courtesy, and charm he managed them, for his personal magnetism was hard to resist. Jan Smuts said that he had “an intuitive power of understanding and appreciating men which was very rare.”5 He had feelings that were easily wounded, he could not stand criticism, and he felt deeply; tears came easily to his eyes.
Tielman Johannes de Villiers Roos (1875-1935), who was acting as a correspondent for Reuters (which maintained correspondents on both sides of the lines), was at Colenso and described Botha’s headquarters and the conditions in which he (and most Boer generals) worked:
General Botha’s tent at Colenso was an ordinary bell affair captured at Dundee. In this there was a convertible stretcher and chair, generally occupied by the general. In front of this was a packing case serving as a table.... Botha being a young man with a becoming reverence for age, always rises when a white haired burgher enters and gives him the stretcher chair, while he literally sits at his feet on the ground.... Burghers drop into the tent all day long to hear the news or bring reports. The general has no private life. He eats, drinks and sleeps before a coming and going procession. Reports are received and dispatches dictated in the presence of a dozen chance visitors.6
Botha was to prove himself a master strategist and a fine tactician, but at Colenso he was preparing to fight his first battle as a general, and he discovered that he needed all of his political and social skills to carry the day. It was fortunate for the Boer cause that he possessed these skills to such a high degree.
Inexperienced as he was, Botha had quickly understood that Hlangwane was the hinge to the Boer positions and must be held at all costs, but the burghers were reluctant to occupy it. A commando had been on the hill for a time, but the men were uneasy, having no safe line of retreat; after the bombardment by the naval guns they had climbed down and recrossed the river, leaving this vital height undefended.
On 14 December, at about the same time that Buller was meeting with his senior officers, Botha called a krygsraad to settle the problem. The commandants attended, but they were stubborn, almost all were older than Botha, and he probably would not have been able to budge them if he had not had the foresight to appeal to President Kruger. Oom Paul, after consulting with Joubert and Lucas Meyer, sent a telegram adjuring them to hold Hlangwane at all cost. Armed with this, Botha pleaded and cajoled, finally bringing the commandants around. Still, no one wanted to go there himself. In the end lots were drawn and the task fell to the brave and able Jozua Joubert of the Wakkerstroom Commando, who accepted his fate calmly: “The choice of the lot is the choice of God,” he said.
Jozua Joubert and his 600-man commando occupied Hlangwane only a few hours before Buller launched his attack. Had Buller directed a major assault on the hill it would surely have fallen, held as it was by such a slender force, but Botha was content to have a single commando there, for he was confident that Buller’s main force would march straight down the railway tracks. The Times History noted: “Nothing indeed, at this stage of the war, is more astonishing than the contempt the Boer generals showed for their opponents, except the fact that that contempt was almost invariably justified by the event.”
Many of Botha’s burghers did not share his confidence in Buller’s ineptitude; the older ones remembered the reputation he had earned in the Zulu War twenty years earlier and they were apprehensive. Botha moved about, breathing confidence, giving encouragement and stressing over and over again the importance of holding their fire until the British were very close; he hoped that some of the troops would have crossed the river before he would be forced to disclose his positions.
Buller made no effort at all to conceal his dispositions or his intern-tions ; feints and deceptions such as Garnet Wolseley had planned in his campaigns were beyond him. On the night before the battle the British camp was spread out on the plain only 4 miles from the kopjes where the silent Boers waited and watched.
16
COLENSO
Dawn at Colenso on 15 December 1899 found Buller’s brigades in motion across the open rolling veld under a clear blue, cloudless sky. There was not a breath of wind; it was the beginning of a fiery hot summer’s day. Across the plain they marched towards the Tugela, their feet churning up dust which in the still air lay in a low cloud below their waists so that the marching columns appeared to be wading through it. Ahead they could see the waves of hills that stretched beyond the river in the direction of Ladysmith. At 5:30 A.M. the silence of the morning was broken by the naval guns which began to shell the Colenso kopjes at 5,000 yards.
In their trenches and shelters the Boers waited. Willie Pohl was nervous as he peered out at the columns of British infantry moving so purposefully towards them. Beside him in the trench an old burgher from time to time calmly bit off a chunk of tobacco, stroked his long beard, and worked the bolt of his Mauser. “Trust in God,” he said, “lie low, and don’t waste ammunition.”
The battle began with an unforeseen action on the part of Buller’s artillery commanded by Colonel Charles Long, a fire-eater who had arrived on the scene only the day before. Long had served much of his career in India, where he became famous as a pig sticker, having once killed fifty boars in one day. He had served in the Afghan War of 1879-1880 and had recently distinguished himself by his handling of the artillery at the battle of Omdurman in the Sudan.
Under the protection of Barton’s infantry Long moved forward on the right of the railway with the 14th and 66th batteries (twelve guns) and six naval guns. His orders were to support the attack on the centre by Hildyard’s brigade, which was to launch itself straight down the railway to Colenso. Buller had told Long that he would probably have to rely solely on his naval guns in the beginning of the battle, for it would be too dangerous to push forward his field pieces, adding that he would be quite content to have the fire of the naval guns alone. Long, however, had his own ideas as to how field guns should be employed: his theory was that they should be shoved
well forward and worked rapidly at close range—or, as he put it, “The only way to smash those beggars is to rush in at ’em.”
Long and his guns started out marching as ordered with Barton’s brigade, but about six o’clock in the morning, while still 3 miles from the river, he ordered his guns to move smartly forward. Guns, caissons, and limbers went jingling and clattering past the infantry. Barton, taken unawares by this manoeuvre, sent the first of several messages to Long asking him to wait for his infantry, but Long and his guns galloped recklessly on. They were only 700 yards from the river and more than a mile ahead of the infantry when he swung his guns into position. He later admitted that “the light was deceptive, and I got a bit closer than I intended.”1 No sooner had the gunners prepared for action than a single gun from the Colenso kopjes banged out a signal and the Boer riflemen opened fire.
Long said later: “In spite of the sudden and rather unexpected fire that was opened, the field batteries came up perfectly steady and were brought into action in an excellent line.” The value of guns brought into a perfect line on a battlefield was nonexistent, and doing so under fire was preposterous, but Long’s guns were smartly unlimbered and drawn up as though on parade; all was neat and even, a beautiful line of twelve guns, none equipped with shields, on the open, unprotected plain. Until the infantry came up, they were the Boers’ only target, and more than a thousand Mausers were aimed at them. Two artillery officers were killed and four wounded in the first few minutes. The Boer artillery also opened fire, and soon Long himself was down with a shrapnel ball through his liver. He liked later to say that his liver had always been rather sluggish until the Boers tickled it up a bit.
The disciplined British gunners fought their guns bravely and well, and even managed to beat down the enemy’s fire somewhat, but they took severe losses. Twelve gunners had been killed and 29 were wounded when, after less than an hour’s firing, their ammunition was exhausted and the order was given to retire to the shelter of a donga. Even then they fell back in good order, carrying their wounded with them. Long refused all medical attention until his men had been given aid. When someone suggested that perhaps the guns would have to be abandoned, he protested : “Abandon be damned! We never abandon guns!” Captain Percy Herbert rode back to hurry forward the ammunition wagons, still some 3 miles in the rear.
The naval guns were also hurrying forward, but, being pulled by oxen, were further behind; their Coloured and Bantu drivers fled at the first shot—it was, as the white men said, their war. Two of the big guns stuck in a small donga and the rest were scattered, but the naval oflicers managed to get them all into action, even if they were not in a neat line.
Buller intended to leave the actual conduct of the battle to Clery while he stationed himself on a low kopje in the rear to watch. His attention was first directed to the action taking place on his left where Hart’s brigade, led by the 2nd Dublin Fusiliers, was moving to the attack —or at least towards the river. Hart, who was called “General No Bobs” because he had never been known to duck when under fire, had been in the army for thirty-five years and was a veteran of four previous wars, but in this age of smokeless powder and magazine-fed rifles he harboured some antiquated notions about fighting.
Balize of COLENSO 15 December 1899
It was Buller’s misfortune to have commanders who, while not plenty-fully endowed with brains, had possessed themselves of tactical theories to which they clung with ferocious tenacity. Long believed in pushing guns well forward; Hart believed in keeping infantry “well in hand.” That is, in close formation. None of this new nonsense about open order for him; resolute men shoulder to shoulder could push through regardless of losses. Except for his leading battalion, which was extended, Hart’s entire brigade marched in broad daylight across open country in sight of the Boer lines in masses of quarter columns.
“A general who is courageous and stupid is a calamity”; Hart was now to prove the wisdom of this Chinese proverb. His brigade was only a short distance from the river, following a well-defined track that led directly to it, when the guides for inexplicable reasons insisted that the drift was off to the right. It was one of the curiosities of the war that British commanders more than once failed to grasp the idea that if a well-used track led directly toward a river there might conceivably be a ford where track and river met. Three hundred yards more along the track he was following would have brought Hart to the drift, but he followed the implausible advice of his guides, veered off to the right, and marched his brigade into a peninsularlike space created by a great loop in the sinuous Tugela. It was a death trap.
Colonel Charles Murdock with the 1st Dragoons on the extreme left flank could see, as Hart could not, the Boer trenches. He sent several messages to Hart warning him that the Boers were in strength and entrenched immediately in front of him. Hart ignored the information, and the brigade marched on further into the loop. The Boers, watching patiently, adjusting their sights, were now arched around him across the river. Botha had urged his burghers to hold their fire and they had, but these dense masses of the enemy now so close were an irresistible target. They opened fire.
At the first shot the guides disappeared, never to be seen again. In a rising crescendo of musketry the Boers pumped their bullets into Hart’s Irishmen; several Boer guns also opened fire on the helpless brigade. The battalion commanders tried to deploy their men into a more open formation, but Hart would have none of that, and he dashed about on his horse ordering them to get their men back into close order again. The Dublin Fusiliers reached the river but found no ford. Lieutenant Colonel Charles Cooper, their commanding officer, started to lead some of his men upstream in search of a drift, but Hart ordered him back and the brigade marched on, each step taking them closer to the unseen marksmen who were slaughtering them. The leading ranks had no idea of where they were going; Hart had none either. The guides, before they bolted, had vaguely indicated the end of the loop; Hart had not sent scouts ahead to discover whether or not a drift actually existed there (none did), but marched his entire brigade, less one battalion left to line the riverbank, towards an unfordable spot on the river. It ended in disaster.
The ranks crumpled and men began to throw themselves on the ground and to seek such scanty cover as there was. Several isolated groups in front made valiant efforts to go forward: a colour sergeant was heard to cry, “Fix bayonets, men, and let’s make a name for ourselves!” before he fell. One small party reached a kraal near the end of the loop; others found some low scrub near the river and looked in vain for a drift. Among these was John Dunn, a handsome fourteen-year-old bugler of the Dublin Fusiliers. He had been ordered to the rear but had remained with his company instead. Now, without orders, he lifted his bugle to his lips and sounded the advance. A number of men fixed bayonets and charged into the Tugela, which at this point was about 10 feet deep. Some drowned, some managed to swim across but were shot down by the Boers, and some, having crossed, saw they were too few to go further and swam back. Bugler Dunn himself was wounded in the arm and chest and lost his bugle.e
Buller, who had watched Hart’s disaster, was unable to remain any longer a passive spectator and came riding down to the salient, having told Lyttelton: “Hart has got into a devil of a mess down there. Get him out of it as best you can.” Lyttelton moved up two battalions and threw them across the open end of the loop, and Hart was ordered to withdraw his men through them. The entire affair—it can hardly be called an attack —was begun and finished in an hour and a half. Hart’s brigade suffered 532 casualties; 216 of them were Dublin Fusiliers.
The retirement of Hart’s brigade began just as Long’s guns fell silent, while on the right flank Dundonald was trying to storm Hlangwane with the 13th Hussars, one battery, and about 600 mounted infantry, mostly colonials who had never before seen action—and he nearly succeeded.
Handsome and gay, Douglas Mackinnon Baillie Hamilton Cochrane, twelfth Earl of Dundonald (1852-1935), was a remarkable man with an inventive min
d. He was a type of Briton whom the Victorians usually admired, frequently had need of, produced in profusion, and generally neglected. He had invented a light machine gun, a light and comfortable ambulance, a gun carriage of hickory and steel that could be pulled by a single horse, and a waterproof bag capable of supporting a man crossing a river. All of these devices might have been useful in South Africa, but the army had refused to adopt any of them. He also had some novel ideas about using smoke to screen the movement of troops or ships.
Dundonald was commissioned and gazetted to the 2nd Life Guards at the age of eighteen and rose to be the commanding officer of that elegant regiment twenty-five years later. He remained active all his life, and thirty-five years after the battle of Colenso, at the age of seventy-seven, he sailed a 14-ton boat across the Atlantic to South America. An intelligent and imaginative man, he was not much admired in the army, which placed little value on these qualities; some of his men called him “Dundoodle,” and one of his officers, Captain Hubert Gough, described him as being “another of Buller’s weaker subordinates.... hesitating, vacillating and vain.”2 Gough also charged that Dundonald took credit that properly belonged to his subordinates.
At 7:15 A.M. Dundonald dismounted his men in the bed of a spruit about a mile from Hlangwane and threw his colonials across bare mealie fields in a loose attack formation. They encountered heavy fire but reached the scrub and loose rocks at the foot of the hill, and the South African Light Horse, led by Julian (later Lord) Byng, a future field marshal, made some progress up the slope while the mounted infantry were sent down the valley to the east in an attempt to outflank the Boer positions. Dundonald used all the force available to him—the only commander to do so this day-but the Boers tenaciously resisted. On the crest of Hlangwane Jozua Joubert walked about calmly, making jokes and encouraging his men, until he was hit by a shell fragment just below the knee.
Great Boer War Page 19