Not all the burghers took fright or had to be driven to battle. Commandant Hendrik Prinsloo, the thirty-eight-year-old leader of the Carolina Commando, was a veteran of the First Anglo-Boer War and of several Kaffir wars; leading 88 men from his commando, he was the first to move to the attack. It was seven o’clock in the morning before they reached the foot of the hill. They left their horses and like stalking hunters advanced from rock to rock up the northern side of Spion Kop. They encountered no resistance, for although it was daylight the top of the hill was still covered with a thick mist. Meanwhile, Botha was hastening forward more men and ordering his guns to shell the British as soon as their exact position could be determined.
At eight thirty in the morning the dissolving mist, a parting curtain on this hilltop stage, revealed to the actors the setting for the tragedy to be enacted. Only now could the British see that their too shallow trenches were located in the wrong place. They were in a death trap. Prinsloo’s men had already occupied Aloe Knoll, and as soon as the mist cleared enough for them to sight their rifles they poured an enfilading fire into the Lancashire Fusiliers on the right flank of the British position. Many soldiers never knew where the fire was coming from. Some 70 of the dead were found to have been shot through the right side of the head.
Prinsloo had carried up a heliograph and it flashed away, relaying fire control data to the Boer gunners, who soon began to lay down an accurate and deadly fire. Woodgate tried to signal for artillery support, but his one heliograph was knocked out of action and his flag signallers had a hard time making their signals understood. Besides, the Boers were familiar with the peculiar configuration of Spion Kop and the British were not. Although the British had nearly ten times as many guns as the Boers, the soldiers on Spion Kop received practically no help from their own artillery.
At eight forty-five Woodgate with his brigade major, Captain Naunton Vertue, was standing to the left of the main trench talking with Lieutenant Colonel Charles Bloomfield of the Lancashire Fusiliers, who was pointing out the Boer reinforcements which could be seen coming up below Aloe Knoll. These were mainly men from the Pretoria Commando under “Red Daniel” Opperman. Suddenly and silently Woodgate crumpled with a Mauser bullet lodged in his head. Bloomfield and Vertue knelt over him; he was still alive but quite obviously no longer able to function. Lieutenant Colonel Malby Crofton of the Royal Lancasters, the next senior officer, now assumed command.
The Boers, too, were taking losses. Berend Badenhorst, field cornet from Vryheid, was standing behind a large rock shooting. Suddenly he swung on his heel and with a groan sank to a sitting position, his back against the rock. Although hit between the eyes, he was still alive. Two Americans fighting with the Boers, Alan Hiley and John Hassell, wrote a description of his death:
Hour after hour he sat with wide open eyes. His death certain, no one moved him.... Men with spare ammunition hurrying past would give this well known man a glance of pity.... The noise of the battle and the passing men had no apparent effect on the deadened brain or staring gaze, but sitting erect until noon, suddenly, with a gutteral she-e-e-t (shoot) a stream of blood poured from the hole in his forehead and the bravest man we ever knew sank dead and limp to the earth.3
Young Deneys Reitz had followed behind the Pretoria men when red-bearded Daniel Opperman led them up Spion Kop:
Dead and dying men lay all along the way, and there was proof that the Pretoria men had gone by for I soon came upon the body of John Malherbe, our Corporal’s brother, with a bullet between his eyes; a few paces further lay two more dead men of our commando. Further on I found my tent-mate, poor Robert Reinecke, shot through the head, and not far off L. de Villiers of our corporalship lay dead. Higher up was Krige, another of Isaac’s men, with a bullet through both lungs, still alive, and beyond him Walter de Vos of my tent shot through the chest, but smiling cheerfully as we passed. Apart from the Pretoria men there were many dead and wounded, mostly Carolina burghers from the eastern Transvaal . . .
Half-way across lay the huddled body of a dead man and now that I had time to look more carefully at him I recognized Charles Jeppe, the last of my tent-mates. His death affected me keenly for we had been particularly good friends. ... The English troops lay so near that one could have tossed a biscuit tin among them, and whilst the losses which they were causing us were only too evident, we on our side did not know that we were inflicting even greater damage upon them. Our own casualties lay hideously among us, but theirs were screened from view behind the breastwork, so that the comfort of knowing that we were giving worse than we received was denied us.4
Cramped on the top of Spion Kop, excited and fearful but without rancour, Britons and Boers slaughtered each other. Without the comfort of bitterness or hatred, weapons were aimed and fired into the faces beneath slouch hats and pith helmets. The Times History noted that “rarely has a war been carried on with less personal hatred on both sides,” and of Spion Kop it is remarkable that in not a single one of the many accounts of this desperate fight between soldiers and burghers is there one expression of hatred for the enemy.
Each man had an arduous role to play. The Transvaal farmers and their sons, the Lancashire plough boys, and the sweeps of city slums—all were to face on this hot summer’s day an ordeal beyond any of their imagining, for the concentrated hell that Spion Kop became was beyond any man’s experience. Compressed on the hill in the heat and smoke and din was all the courage and endurance that some 2,500 men could muster. Some found courage but could not sustain it; some found they could endure but not endure enough; and some found that they were without either courage or endurance. To retreat, to flee down the hill, was not difficult. It was not fear of punishment that held those who stayed and endured. A sense of duty, a fear of shame greater than physical fear, a sentiment that a man must not desert his comrades—these held most through the long hours of the morning.
Neither Boer nor Briton had considered Spion Kop of great importance, yet now it had become the whole battle; indeed, on this day it became the entire war. Hundreds of miles away Methuen sat listlessly on the Modder and Cronjé in his trenches at Magersfontein; Gatacre, De Wet, Roberts, and De la Rey were all inactive. Boers and Britons in and around Ladysmith, Mafeking, and Kimberley, besiegers and besieged, were quiet while on this triangular piece of ground, roughly 400 yards on a side, war raged with an insane fury. Even the remainder of the two armies facing each other for miles along the Tugela, burghers and soldiers, were spectators, watching and waiting and wondering. For miles around, on all sides of Spion Kop, the sounds of the battle could be heard. Soldiers and civilians in Ladysmith could see “little white balls of smoke breaking over the summit” and hear the distant roar of cannon and musketry. The Boers in their laagers and trenches on Tabanyama watched and listened too, and the Bantu wagon drivers on both sides and the locals in their scattered kraals watched in fear and wonder the fury of the white men. It was as though each side had sent its champions to this high hilltop to decide the fate of them all. But no one had selected them as the bravest and best; only destiny had chosen them; on each side the men were representative of their respective armies; it was a fair sample that each sent.
The Boer guns took a heavy toll of the Lancashire boys, but for the most part it was a primitive fight with rifles and bayonets. There was no cavalry; there were no machine guns, no grenades, no elaborate fortifications. Men came to battle on this treeless, boulder-strewn hilltop almost barehanded, without water or food or medical comforts—at least not nearly enough.
At Warren’s headquarters on Three Tree Hill the first definite news from Spion Kop had been received when à Court arrived with his description of the easy conquest of the hilltop. When shortly after the naval officers, seeing through their telescopes Boers moving among the rocks on Aloe Knoll, opened fire with their 4.7-inch naval guns, Warren sent them an urgent message: “We occupy the whole summit and I fear you are shelling us seriously. Cannot you turn your guns on the enemy’s guns?” The na
val guns shifted their fire. The Boers were spared a bombardment of heavy shells and the British on Spion Kop were deprived of artillery support.
The next news to reach Warren was a frantic message sent by signal flags: “Colonel Crofton to G.O.C. Force. Reinforce at once or all lost. General dead.” Warren was not too disturbed. He had just sent off two more battalions—the Middlesex and the Scottish Rifles (Cameronians)—and so he signalled Crofton that reinforcements were on the way, concluding his message with: “Hold on to the last. No surrender.” He then relayed Crofton’s message to Lyttelton, asking him what he could do on the right, and he sent Coke up to replace Woodgate, giving him as parting words: “Mind, no surrender.” It was shortly after eleven o’clock in the morning when Coke with his bad leg began to climb. Coke thought a machine gun might be useful, so he ordered one to be brought along with him, but as he explained later, “unfortunately it overturned.”
Buller was following the action, and he could see more from his headquarters on Spearman’s Hill than could Warren on Three Tree Hill, but instead of taking command he simply continued to criticise and to make suggestions. At eleven forty-five he sent Warren the following message: “Now Woodgate is dead I think you must put a strong commander on top; I recommend you put Thorneycroft in command.”
Warren at once signalled to Crofton that Thorneycroft was in charge with the rank of brigadier general. Crofton felt aggrieved; as he said later, he was “hurt most deeply being superseded during an engagement by an officer so much my junior.” Warren did not tell Buller that he had already appointed Coke, who, still climbing up the arête, was not informed that he had been superseded before he had even arrived.
On the summit a signals officer went off to inform Thorneycroft of his appointment, but he stopped to lead forward a rush of men to a section where reinforcements were urgently needed, then he became caught up in the fighting, lost the message (it was later picked up by the Boers), and it was hours before he found Thorneycroft. Another messenger found Thorneycroft but was shot dead at his feet, his message undelivered. Eventually a lieutenant tracked him down and shouted to him above the noise of the musketry and the crashing shells: “Sir C. Warren has heliographed that you are in command. You are a general.”
When Coke arrived on the summit early in the afternoon he found what he described with some understatement as a “scene of considerable confusion.” Throughout the morning there had been a bitter struggle for the crest. The British had pushed out from their main trenches and established themselves in positions on the true crest, but the Boers had at once begun to drive them back. Beginning on the right of the line they attacked a section of Thorneycroft’s Mounted Infantry and wiped them out. Then, creeping around to the right rear, they wiped out another section. The British mounted two attacks to regain their lost ground, one led by Thorneycroft himself, but the men were swept away by the fury of the Boer musketry. The main trenches became their front line, and these were clogged with dead and wounded. The two forces were so close at some points that the Boers could hear the shouts of the British officers and the British could hear the encouraging calls in Afrikaans of the Boer leaders—and all could hear the piteous cries of the wounded.
Accounts of the battle written by participants, Boer and British, fail to give a clear picture of what actually happened on Spion Kop this day. Although the length of the battlefield was not much more than 400 yards, the actors in the drama, including the leaders on both sides, appear to have been completely absorbed in what was taking place in their immediate neighbourhood.
The sun was a ball of fire overhead, and there was no water for anyone on the firing line on either side; heat and thirst added their torments to the confusion, fear, and pain of the struggling men. What the survivors seem to remember most clearly was the intermingling of the living and the dead, the wounded and the fit, and the individual acts of courage. Captain Charles Muriel of the Middlesex Regiment was shot through the cheek, but he continued to lead his company until a bullet lodged in his brain. Major William Scott-Moncrieff of the same regiment was wounded three times but kept to his post until a fourth bullet felled him. Captain Fergus Murray, adjutant of the Cameronians, with five dripping wounds, continued to stagger about among his men and even led a charge before he was killed. An officer of the Middlesex later described how he was wounded:
I fired at one Boer, and then another passed. We were fighting hand to hand. I shot the Boer and he dropped, clinging, however, to his rifle as he fell, and covering me most carefully. He fired, and I fell like a rabbit, the bullet going in just over and grazing the left lung. I lay where I fell until midnight.5
Two soldiers were seen burning, shells having set fire to their clothes. One soldier, his arm blown off close to the shoulder by a shell, picked up his shorn arm and screamed, “My arm! My arm! Oh, God, where’s my arm?” Churchill’s description was perhaps not overpainted: “The dead and injured, smashed and broken by the shells, littered the summit till it was a bloody, reeking shambles.”6
It was too much for some men. A few days after the battle Benjamin Walker, a trooper in Thorneycroft’s Mounted Infantry, wrote to his father:
Now that I am writing a private letter which will never go out of our circle I must tell you how we were deserted by the regulars. Their conduct was disgraceful. Twice they bolted and were rallied by our Colonel. Three of us were alone in the midst of a crowd of Lancashires who lay with their heads rolled up in their arms, laying flat on the ground not daring to lift their guns to shoot, shaking and trembling with fear. It was horrible.7
About one o’clock in the afternoon some Lancashire Fusiliers on the far right of the British position, hard pressed by Opperman’s burghers, discovered that all their officers had been shot away. “Where are the bosses?” one Fusilier cried. Leaderless and demoralised, men began to wave white handkerchiefs over their heads. The Boers ceased firing, and some, thinking the battle over, stood up. They were immediately shot down by those on the British side who either did not see the white flags or refused to recognize them. Someone shouted for those who wanted to surrender to come out. No one moved. Then Jan Celliers of the Pretoria Commando boldly ran forward, leaped over the parapet, and called out, “Who is your officer?” There were no officers, only a group of frightened soldiers who stood up and raised their hands. Other Boers, waving handkerchiefs, then ran over to join Celliers.
At this critical moment a sergeant from Thorneycroft’s Mounted Infantry came up. A private tore the rifle from his hands and told him, “You’re a prisoner.”
“No, no,” the sergeant protested. “They’re surrendering to us. The reinforcements have come.” Then, seeing all around him soldiers with their hands over their heads, he bolted and ran to find his colonel.
Thorneycroft had badly twisted his knee, but when told of this disaster he called to the men around him to follow as he limpingly ran to the right of the line. The Boers were rounding up their prisoners when this huge, angry-faced man came hopping and limping up to them shouting, “I’m in command here! Take your men back to hell, sir! I allow no surrender!”
Then there occurred another of those battlefield arguments. It was short and furious, but Thorneycroft lost. The thoroughly demoralised Lancashire men, 167 of them, tamely went off with their Boer captors and Thorneycroft retreated to the shelter of some rocks. At that moment a company of the Middlesex Regiment which had just arrived on Spion Kop appeared on the scene. Thorneycroft took these men and his own and led them in a charge that drove the Boers off that section of the crest.
The Boers lost eleven men killed during the capture of the Lancashires. One of the dead was elderly Marthinus Wessels of Kroonstad, father of nine children and a cousin of President Steyn. Because of his age Steyn had tried to persuade him to go home, but the old man had replied that he wanted to take part in just one battle.
A half hour after the surrender incident the morale of the soldiers in the centre of the line crumbled and they deserted their trenches in
batches and made for the rear. Crofton rushed forward, had his bugler sound the “Advance,” and rallied some of them. Again, just in time, another company of the Middlesex arrived and swept forward through the panic-stricken Lancashires to reoccupy the trenches. Croften, Thorneycroft, and the Middlesex had narrowly averted another Majuba.
The morale of the Boers was weakening as well. Deneys Reitz described the situation on the Boer side:
The sun became hotter and we had neither food nor water. Around us lay scores of dead and wounded men, a depressing sight, and by mid-day a feeling of discouragement had gained ground that was only kept in check by Commandant Opperman’s forceful personality and vigorous language to any man who seemed wavering. Had it not been for him the majority would have gone far sooner than they did, for the belief spread that we were being left in the lurch....
As the hours dragged on a trickle of men slipped down the hill, and in spite of his watchful eye this gradual wastage so depleted our strength that long before nightfall we were holding the blood-spattered ledge with a mere handful of rifles. I wanted to go too, but the thought of Isaac and my other friends saved me from deserting....
The hours went by; we kept watch, peering over and firing whenever a helmet showed itself, and in reply the soldiers volleyed unremittingly. We were hungry, thirsty and tired; around us were the dead men covered with swarms of flies attracted by the smell of blood. We did not know the cruel losses that the English were suffering, and we believed that they were easily holding their own, so discouragement spread as the shadows lengthened.
Great Boer War Page 25