Great Boer War

by Farwell, Byron,,

  When the attack slowed down Dundonald called on Barton for reinforcements: one battalion of infantry was all he needed, he believed. According to the orders of the day, Barton’s brigade was to supply support for Dundonald and Hildyard, but Barton had just received orders from Buller not to commit his troops. Some initiative on Barton’s part, a willingness to go beyond the letter of his orders, would probably have enabled Dundonald to take Hlangwane, but Barton refused to give his support. Perhaps he had rightly interpreted his chiefs thinking, for Buller, in an extraordinary piece of logic, had explained to Lansdowne earlier that “if I took it [Hlangwane] and then failed at Colenso I should eventually have to evacuate it.” Dundonald’s men were thus left clinging to the slopes of the hill, pinned down by the plunging fire of the Boers.

  Dundonald might have made a personal appeal to Buller if he had been able to find him, but Buller, commander-in-chief of all the British forces in South Africa, was now busy acting as a battery commander. After seeing that Hart’s brigade was being extricated from the loop, he gave no thought to renewing the attack in that quarter and decided that all his efforts must be thrown behind Hildyard’s attack on the centre, just now getting under way.

  Henry Hildyard had seen very little active service during his thirty-two years in the army, but he had had the opportunity while at Aldershot to train the brigade he was now leading, and he had trained it well. Unlike Hart, Hildyard ordered his men—Devons, Queen’s, East Surreys, and West Yorks—to advance swiftly in extended order and in lines. But they walked erect, and Bennett Burleigh of the Daily Telegraph was lost in admiration as he watched them: “With death filling the air and tearing the ground, onward they went, the most superb spectacle of invincible manhood.”3

  Hildyard’s brigade advanced under heavy fire but with light losses on the left of the railway and pushed on into Colenso itself. Some of the Queen’s even managed to get on the iron road bridge across the Tugela. From houses, sheds, and over walls in the village they poured such an effective fire into the Boer positions that the burghers left their trenches on the opposite bank for others higher up behind them. The naval guns had been ably supporting this attack, but they lost sight of the Queen’s and Devons when they entered the village. As the swarm of Boers left their trenches and scampered up the sides of the kopjes the muzzle of every gun was leveled at them; then someone shouted, “They’re our men!” The gunners held their fire and missed the best target presented to them all day.

  Hildyard’s leading battalions were nearing Colenso when Buller with Clery and some staff officers rode across to oversee the operation. On the way they encountered Captain Herbert, who had been sent to hurry up the ammunition for Long’s guns, and from him Buller learned that the two field batteries were out of action. This was bad news indeed; first the failure of Hart’s attack, now this misfortune. The news was particularly distressing because Herbert gave the impression that the naval guns were also out of action. Buller and his party at once cantered towards the guns, drawing considerable fire from the Boers as they rode.

  It was just half past nine in the morning when Buller reached the donga where the artillerymen had taken refuge and stared out at the twelve field guns sitting unattended in their parade ground formation. Around him in the donga were the wounded and the remains of the gun crews. Long was delirious and raving about his poor brave gunners. The fear of losing his guns now seemed to dominate Buller’s thoughts to the exclusion of all else—the fate of Dundonald’s brigade on his right or the success or failure of Hildyard’s attack on his immediate left or anything else.

  Buller had eight battalions at hand that had seen little or no action; he had dozens of other guns; ammunition was available; the situation was not hopeless. Hildyard and Dundonald, if supported, had every chance of success, and the best way for Buller to save those wretched guns was to defeat the Boers, but he was no longer capable of seeing the unfolding of the entire battle.

  Whatever the private soldier may think, and however inspiring it may be to have the general commanding in a battle in the front lines, there are advantages to having him cool and comfortable in the rear, away from the hurly-burly of the front-line action, for it is on his judgement that his men’s lives as well as victory or defeat depend, and that judgement ought to be exercised in surroundings conducive to clear thinking. Buller had been pounding about the battlefield all morning and hearing only bad news; the sun was hot and he was portly and no longer young; he was fighting the first battle which he himself had arranged and for which he alone was responsible. Being a brave man who loved action but feared responsibility for the lives of others, it was tempting for him to lose himself in the details of the action, but in succumbing to this temptation he lost control of the battle itself.

  THE BATTLE OF COLENSO.

  Standing now amid the wounded in the donga, bullets flying about him, shells bursting near him, Long’s guns standing reproachfully in front of him, he was in no condition to be objective and far-seeing. His mental and emotional state was not improved when his staff surgeon was killed beside him and he himself was struck in the side and badly bruised by a spent shell fragment. Through it all he appeared to others to be as stolid, upright, and impassive as ever, unaffected by the tragedies around him, in control of his destiny and theirs.

  With Long out of action, Major A. C. Bailward was left in charge of the guns, but Buller turned to one of his aides-de-camp, Captain Harry Schofield of the Royal Horse Artillery, and told him to try to get the guns away. Schofield called for volunteers, and two limber teams of the 66th Battery came forward; so too did two other staff officers: Captain Walter Congreve and Lieutenant the Honourable Frederick S. Roberts, only son of Field Marshal Lord Roberts of Kandahar, who was serving as one of Clery’s aides-de-camp.

  Schofield organized teams of horses, and with them and his volunteers he dashed out to rescue the guns. Lieutenant George Salt of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers witnessed the attempt and tried to describe it in a letter home:

  I was on a rise of a hill to the right, and could see every inch of the ground from start to finish. One could see the bullets striking all around them, and it seemed a marvel that they were not hit. When they were about half way across, one team came to grief, and had to lie where they were under a hot fire. Another was struck, and became a struggling mass before they reached the guns. Three got to the guns, hooked on their teams, and started to gallop back. A shell, as far as I could see, struck one of the guns, and it turned right over, but the other two got safely back. It was an awful sight, but fearfully exciting.4

  Young Lieutenant Roberts, exhilarated, had dashed out laughing and twirling his stick like a jockey. He had not gone 30 yards before he was shot from his saddle. Captain Congreve lived to describe his experience:

  I have never seen, even at field firing, bullets fly thicker. All one could see was little tufts of dust all over the ground, and one heard a whistling noise and a phut where they hit and an unceasing rattle of musketry somewhere in front. My first bullet went through my left sleeve and just made the point of my elbow bleed; next a clod of earth caught me no end of a smack on the other arm; then my horse got one; then my right leg one; my horse another and that settled us, for he plunged and I fell off about a hundred yards short of the gun we were going to.5

  Although horseless and wounded, Congreve crawled to the aid of Roberts. Major William Babtie of the Royal Army Medical Corps also crawled out to Roberts, wounded now in three places, and the two officers managed to drag him into a sheltered spot.

  Schofield himself came through untouched, although he had six bullet holes in his uniform. “I can’t believe it even now,” he said later to John Atkins of the Manchester Guardian, “that we got through so well.” He paid tribute to the coolness of the soldiers with him and indirectly to the result that years of strict, repetitive gun drill can achieve: “I’ll show you how cool those drivers were. While I was hooking on one of the guns, one of the drivers said, ‘Elevate the muzzle, sir�
��—that’s a precaution for galloping in rough country. But I shouldn’t have thought of it—not just then.”6

  The next attempt to save the guns was made by Captain Hamilton Reed of the 7th Battery, who with a group of volunteers dashed out with three wagon teams. He never reached them. Thirteen out of twenty-two horses and seven out of thirteen men were shot down; Reed was wounded in the leg. In the kopjes across the river Louis Botha watched through his glasses the executions by his riflemen and later told a friend: “I was sick with horror that such bravery should have been so useless.”7 Seven Victoria Crosses were won in these mad attempts; Roberts, who died the following day, became the first to receive the medal posthumously.

  For Buller it was a terrible thing to stand and watch these men die trying to save his guns. He had not the fortitude to endure the sufferings of others, to stand sweating in the sun and watch these young men shot from their saddles and lie writhing in agony in the dust. He must have wished that he was again a junior officer, thirty or forty years younger and thirty or forty pounds lighter, and without the weight of a general’s insignia on his shoulders. When he saw Reed and his men go down in a bloody tangle of horses, harnesses, and limbers he called a halt. He could stand no more. Without considering other alternatives, he abandoned the guns.

  Months later, testifying before a royal commission, Long said indignantly, “The idea of abandoning the guns never entered my head, nor did it occur to any of the battery officers.... I consider the guns, were deserted of support.”8 But Buller said categorically: “I do not believe any living man could have got those guns away.” Perhaps not, but he might have considered a plan for removing the guns under cover of darkness; he might have ordered men to crawl out and remove the breech blocks; he might even—had he been capable of forgetting the wounded around them—have ordered his heavy naval guns to destroy them with shell fire. But he did none of these things. His abandonment of these ten guns was complete. More than that, he gave up the battle as well.

  To the commander of the naval guns he said, “Out of this, please,” and with some difficulty the big guns were moved further to the rear: the Bantu drivers could not be found, and thirty-two of the oxen had been shot.

  It was only eleven o’clock in the morning, but Buller was later to tell a royal commission that by this time his men were already exhausted and that if he had continued the fight they would have been “utterly prostrated” by the end of the day. If then, as he feared, the Boers had crossed the river and attacked “we should have had a rough and tumble on the bank in which I fully believe we would have been worsted.” Buller was describing his own condition rather than that of his men. He was finished. He wanted to be done with this battle. Ignorant of Hildyard’s success and Dundonald’s situation, he sent orders for Hildyard to withdraw his men at once and then mounted and rode out of the donga to recall Dundonald.

  The Times History said: “Bad in its conception, worse in its execution, Colenso was worst of all in its abandonment.” The dismounted Mounted Brigade was extricated from its scattered positions on the sides of Hlangwane with the greatest difficulty. It would certainly have been easier and less costly to have thrown in more men and taken the hill than to have attempted to bring back the men on the hillsides in broad daylight, but Buller wanted them back. The process took three hours, and Dundonald lost more men in the retirement than he had in the attack.

  Withdrawing Hildyard’s brigade was not easy either. The Boers had telegraph lines connecting their main positions, but Buller’s communications were no better than Wellington’s had been at Waterloo. It was well past noon before the order to retreat reached the Devons; still, most of Hildyard’s brigade managed to retire in good order, and by the middle of the afternoon they were back in camp pitching the tents they had struck early that morning.

  On the south side of the river where the slaughter had taken place the area was dotted with dead and wounded British soldiers lying in the still hot sun of the late afternoon. Ambulance men began to move among them. The Boers crossed over at several points, among them Field Cornet Cheere Emmet, Botha’s English-speaking brother-in-law, who came with oxen and some volunteers to carry off the guns. There were others too who wandered about the shambles.

  Mr. W. K.-L. Dickson, the motion picture man from the American Biograph Company, went out to see the battlefield. Although apparently too horrified to take any pictures, he described what he saw in a letter:

  It was the most harrowing thing I ever witnessed. Khaki uniformed men lying about everywhere, deluged in blood, faces horribly distorted and swollen and black. A piece of shell had caught one in the head and opened up his brain. I was inexpressibly affected by the sight, and after covering up as many faces as we could, turned away.9

  There were on the battlefield still a number of stray soldiers who had not yet received the order to retire and did not quite realize that the battle was over or who forgot that the battlefield belongs to the victor. Major Nathanial Barton of the Connaught Rangers, part of Hart’s brigade, found himself alone with the wounded when he was surprised by a troop of mounted Boers. The leading burgher raised his rifle, but Barton called out, “Don’t be a damned fool! I can make no resistance.” The rifle was lowered and the two men talked. In a letter to his wife, Ellen, Barton wrote: “After a lot of questioning, etc., he was very civil and let me go —on giving my parole. To explain how I came to be there you must know that the brigade retired at eleven, and we were never let know.”10

  Among those who never received the order to retire was Lieutenant Colonel George Bullock, commanding the 2nd Battalion of the Devonshire Regiment, who with three other officers and 33 men was ensconced in a small donga not far from Long’s guns. When Emmet and his burghers appeared, Bullock and his Devons opened fire. Instead of answering fire with fire, Emmet commandeered a British ambulance orderly and under the protection of the red cross walked up to Bullock’s position and told him the battle was over and that he should surrender. Bullock refused. He demanded that Emmet and his men go back and fight it out. Burghers and soldiers stood about watching and listening while their officers argued. It ended when one exasperated burgher, shouting, “Surrender, you brave idiot!” clubbed Bullock on the head with his rifle.

  In still another place fighting switched from bullets to words on this extraordinary battlefield. Over on the British left, stranded in the bushes by the river in the retreat of Hart’s brigade, was Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Thackery, commanding officer of the 1st Battalion of the Inniskilling Fusiliers, and a small group of his men. Late in the afternoon, about the same time that Emmet was crossing over to get the guns, another commando crossed the Tugela and demanded that the Inniskillings surrender. Thackery refused, and he and the Boer commandant, each with armed and uncertain men at their backs, stood on the battlefield arguing it out. Thackery won and triumphantly marched his men back to their camp. Lieutenant George Warren with a half company of the Border Regiment had a similar experience. Other scattered groups, faced with less generous or more stubborn captors, were rounded up and made prisoner.

  It had been a strange day. Although all accounts spoke of the din of guns and musketry, there were from time to time unaccountable lulls in the firing; Bennett Burleigh noticed that in these curiously silent moments he could hear birds singing and crickets chirruping.

  It was said, although it was not true, that Buller was “the first British general for nearly a century to incur the stigma of losing guns.”11 To lose one gun was a disgrace. To lose ten of them—and without a single one of the enemy ever actually touching them until they hauled them away—was unthinkable. Yet it had happened. Nearly two years later Buller gave a speech in which he spoke of the battle: “I attacked Colenso on December 15. I was unsuccessful; it was a very trying day; I was thirty-six hours at work; I was fourteen hours in the saddle. It was the hottest day we had the whole of the time I was out there, and I had rank bad luck. . . .”12

  Yes, Buller had had bad luck, but it would have t
aken extraordinary good luck to have made up for such bad generalship. John Atkins watched Buller and his staff return to camp: “The General climbed down limply and wearily from his horse like an old, old man.”

  Lyttelton was later to say that Colenso was “one of the most unfortunate battles in which a British army has ever been engaged and in none has there been a more deplorable tactical display.”13 It was more than unfortunate and deplorable: it was sheer madness, all of it. Buller was to tell a royal commission: “I never attacked on the 15th at all.... I made no attack. I stopped at the very earliest moment in the morning every general from moving.”14 A Dublin Fusilier agreed: “Fight? Och, it was no fight at all, at all.” In a sense Buller and the Fusilier were right. There was no real attack, only men led up to the Boer lines to be shot down as though they were tin soldiers at a shooting gallery. Total British casualties were 1,139 officers and men, of whom 143 were killed: heavy casualties for a battle in which neither side attacked.

  Military men everywhere heard the story with bewildered wonderment: a brigade led in a dense mass into a loop made by an unfordable river surrounded on three sides by a concealed and sheltered enemy; guns and their crews thrown miles ahead of the infantry and put in parade ground order in a completely exposed position and then abandoned; an inadequate force of mounted men sent to take a precipitous hill; armed men, foes, facing each other and quarrelling like children over the rules of the game. It did not make sense, not any of it.