It was not until two o’clock in the morning that Coke finally found Warren. The headquarters on Three Tree Hill had received some unwelcome attention from the Boer guns during the day, so Warren had shifted his headquarters a short distance away; he had not thought to tell poor Coke, who, ever stumbling about in the dark with his bad leg, again got lost and went limping about for two hours after he reached the site of Warren’s original headquarters. At almost the same time that Coke found Warren, Thorneycroft’s message, sent eight hours earlier, also reached Warren, who perhaps had not told his signallers of his change of headquarters either. In a few minutes Thorneycroft himself appeared. It was only then that Coke and Thorneycroft discovered to their amazement that each had thought himself in sole command on Spion Kop. It was at this time, too, that Captain Phillips finally found some oil and sent off a signal to Warren saying that an unauthorized withdrawal had taken place but that some troops still held the lower slopes.
The time had now arrived for Sir Charles Warren to display what, if anything, lay behind his monocle; what, if anything he possessed of military ability, moral courage, and resolution; and what, if anything, supported the jaunty self-confidence he had always displayed. There were still some 1,600 troops, delayed by Phillips, on the slopes below the summit; the mountain battery and the naval guns were at the foot of Spion Kop, ready and willing to climb and fight; he had machine guns, supplies, and a dozen fresh battalions in hand. As for his theories: in the past twenty-four hours soldier and burgher had been truly and intimately “introduced” to each other. He had only to act with energy and resolution, to throw his men and guns back onto that hilltop, to rally his officers and men and infuse in them a sense of urgency, and the hill would have been his. More. The demoralised Boers would have fled from all their positions on the Tugela in confusion before his pounding guns and advancing bayonets, and Ladysmith would have been speedily relieved. But Warren looked into the glum face of Coke and the bloodshot eyes of Thorneycroft and resigned himself to defeat. He sent a pleading message to Buller: “Can you come at once and decide what to do?”
Blame for the British defeat must rest with the generals, but the inadequacies of the suffering soldiers was also pointed to, and Bron Herbert, writing in The Times History, passed a harsh and not entirely justified judgement on them: “Neither in skill with the rifle, nor in individual intelligence and moral endurance, was the British soldier equal to the terribly exacting demands of modern warfare.... Spion Kop might have been held by 500 men, but not by 500 ordinary British soldiers, nor by 5,000.”14
In the first light of dawn some burghers at the northern foot of Spion Kop looked up and saw Boers on the summit waving their hats. The men on the crest were said to be some of Jan Kemp’s Krugersdorpers or perhaps some burghers who had climbed back up to look for fallen comrades. In any case, those below grasped their message and dashed up to claim the battlefield. The British were gone. The Boers had, after all, won the battle. After such a victory who could blame them for believing that God had given them another miracle?
21
AFTER SPION KOP: VAAL KRANTZ
“Very bad news from Buller, my dear child,” Wolseley wrote to his wife. “I am in despair at all our misfortunes. God seems to be with the Boers and against us.” Queen Victoria wrote to Lansdowne: “I am horrified at the terrible list of casualties, twenty-two officers killed and twenty-one wounded.... Would it be possible to warn young officers not to expose themselves more than is absolutely necessary?” Doubtless she would have been more horrified had she known the true casualty figures. Even today no one knows the exact numbers and there appears to have been an understandable tendency on both sides to minimize their losses; even The Times History gives two sets of figures for the British, neither of which corresponds with the official casualty figures. Botha ordered Commandant William Prinsloo of Heidelberg to count the British corpses on the summit, but Prinsloo does not appear to have made an exact count: he reported 600 dead and 350 seriously wounded. However, those numbers which appear most plausible give the total as 1,740 British casualties, of which 383 were killed, 1,054 wounded, and 303 prisoners or missing (including the wounded left on the hill, many of whom were severely wounded and beyond recovery). This butcher’s bill seems trifling when compared to the casualty figures in the European wars that followed in the next half century, but it seemed frightful at the time, and, considering the number engaged, it was indeed dreadful, being about half of the force involved.
The Boers gave their casualties as 58 dead and 140 wounded, but there were certainly more. A monument on Spion Kop today gives the names of 106 burghers who died there. At least 60 bodies were carried down and buried elsewhere.
Botha inspected the shambles of the battlefield and was appalled by the “gruesome, sickening, hideous picture.” After speaking briefly with a British chaplain and arguing with Major Robert Wright, RAMC, about his right to remove the wounded (which Botha claimed were his prisoners), he climbed down to send off a report to Kruger:
Battle over and by the grace of God a magnificent victory for us. The enemy driven out of their positions and their losses are great.... The battlefield therefore is ours.... It breaks my heart to say that so many of our gallant heroes have also been killed or wounded. It is incredible that such a small handful of men, with the help of the Most High, could fight and withstand the mighty Britain.1
All who viewed the battlefield were awed by the sight. Hendrik Prinsloo said, “It seems a pity that we, belonging to two God fearing nations, should kill one another like that.”2 One old burgher, murmuring, “Poor lads, poor lads,” shed tears as he walked among the piles of dead. Pieter Viljoen found the body of his son Henning when he came up with Botha, and he buried him where he and his comrades had fought and fallen. The correspondent for the Standard and Diggers News of Johannesburg wrote: “The field of battle was horrible. Men were literally blown to pieces by shells. I counted thirteen heads blown from bodies, some wholly, others from the ears upwards, and so on. It was a sight never to be forgotten. ... I also saw a red hawk, so swift of wing, lying dead beside a dead soldier.3
Some souvenir hunters cut off the buttons and insignia of British officers. Rifles and equipment of the soldiers were gathered up, and it was in the course of doing this that Spion Kop saw its final casualty. Stiffened in death, one British soldier lay with his finger still curled around the trigger of his rifle. It took only the tug given by a young Boer collecting weapons to discharge it. He died of the stomach wound it inflicted.
The British were much blamed for not properly burying their dead. A. D. W. Wolmarans, a member of the Transvaal Executive Council, visited Spion Kop five days after the battle and telegraphed a report to Kruger: “Parts of the bodies of the enemy dead, interred on the summit, still stick out of the ground. Three are quite unburied. It is high time that the famous cultured English nation were told that their way of burying the dead is worse than that of barbaric savages.”4
It would appear, however, that blame lay not with the British but the Boers. In a dispatch to Kruger Botha said: “The enemy has asked me to remove their wounded and bury their dead, to which I have agreed.”5 Although disciplined soldiers can be made to bury putrid corpses, Botha’s officers had difficulty convincing their burghers that they should, and those who did made a bad job of it. The stench was so bad that burghers even refused to stay on the hill to defend it. Thus the British soldiers achieved with their dead and decomposing bodies what they were unable to do when quick with life with weapons in their hands: they drove the Boers from the hill. And Spion Kop, which had seemed so important on that hot January day, was abandoned almost as soon as the fight for it ended, deserted by all except the vultures and the bodies of those who had died to possess it.
On the day after the battle there came to the top of Spion Kop long lines of Indians with stretchers, members of the South African Indian Ambulance Corps, which had been organized in Natal by a thirty-year-old Indian lawyer, Mohandas Kar
amchand Gandhi, later called the Mahatma. There were more Indians than Europeans in Natal, and although forbidden by the white-man’s-war concept from taking up arms, they were eager to prove their loyalty to the Empire. In addition to Gandhi’s unit there was also an ambulance corps formed by the Natal Public Works Department from indentured Indian coolies. Gandhi and his 1,100 Indian volunteers spent six weeks with the army on the Tugela, carrying off the mangled soldiers from Buller’s battlefields. It was this corps which carried young Lieutenant Roberts from the field at Colenso and, as Gandhi later wrote, “Amongst the wounded we had the honour of carrying soldiers like General Woodgate.” Woodgate, carried from the field pleading, “Let me alone. Let me alone,” lived on in great agony before death mercifully came to him. He was the third major general killed by the Boers.
F. Treves, a distinguished surgeon, told one of the most poignant stories of the battle’s aftermath:
One poor fellow had been shot in the face by a piece of shell, which had carried away his left eye, the upper jaw with the corresponding part of the cheek, and had left a hideous cavity at the bottom of which his tongue was exposed. He had been lying hours on the hill. He was unable to speak, and as soon as he was landed at the hospital he made signs that he wanted to write. Pencil and paper were given him, and it was supposed he wished to ask for something, but he merely wrote, “Did we win?” No one had the heart to tell him the truth.6
Some of the wounded who survived exposure on Spion Kop, the jolting journey down on a stretcher, the ride in the springless ambulances, and their treatment in the field hospitals were sent by train to Durban and taken on board a hospital ship called Maine. The government had chartered two ships from the Union Castle Line and had fitted them out in spartan fashion as hospital ships, but the Maine, lavishly equipped, was a private American charitable venture.
The idea of Americans providing a hospital ship had been conceived by the American wife of a South African mining executive who interested Lady Randolph Churchill in the project; Bernard N. Baker, founder of the Atlantic Transport Company of Baltimore, donated on behalf of his company an old cattle boat of 3,000 tons and agreed to maintain it at his company’s expense. Lady Randolph Churchill formed a committee of American women in London and rallied her friends among the great and near-great to raise funds for refurbishing and equipping the vessel. In two months she and her committee raised £41,000. Lady Randolph explained the purpose of the enterprise:
The Maine is to be essentially an American ship. We are not only to aid the wounded, but we are to show the world that American women can do the work better than anyone else can do it.... It is especially the province of American women to promote this cause, but it is a woman’s function to foster and nourish the suffering. American women are more adept at it, we believe, than any others.7
The Maine was anchored in the Thames, refurbished, and fitted out with the latest that medical science could offer. According to The Nursing Record and Hospital World, it was “the most complete and comfortable hospital ship that has ever been constructed.”8 It provided accommodation for 218 patients in four large wards and one small isolation ward; it contained X-ray equipment and an operating room that boasted an enamelled iron operating table with a plate glass top.
The ship flew both the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes—it was believed to be the first ship to sail under these two flags—and it also flew the flag of the Red Cross. When the Maine arrived in Durban one of the first patients to be taken on board was Lady Randolph Churchill’s, nineteen-year-old son Jack, a lieutenant in the South African Light Horse, who had received a leg wound in his first skirmish.
After Spion Kop Buller withdrew all of Warren’s force behind the Tugela again. Henry Wilson wrote in his diary: “We stand where we did 10 days ago, with a licking thrown in.” Hart in a private letter wrote: “The net result is that we have once more to chronicle a complete defeat.” Behind his back Sir Redvers was called “Sir Reverse,” and Lyttelton wrote home: “I have lost all confidence in Buller as a general and am sure he has himself.” From Ladysmith Ian Hamilton smuggled out a letter to Spencer Wilkinson: “Buller is no use.... It is a question of life or death of ourselves here as well as the empire in general, and I write to beg you to use all your influence to get the man recalled before he does more mischief.”9
But the rank and file retained their confidence in him. They had a simple, touching, pathetic faith in their blundering, incompetent commander who led them time after time to death and defeat. Throughout the war they remained loyal and grateful to the general who cared for them, who thought of them as human beings and knew their wants and needs. No matter that he led them from one tactical absurdity to another and that they suffered needless casualties, Buller thought about them, gave them hot meals, fresh bread, tents, and they, sensing instinctively his innate humaneness, loved him as they did no other general.
Even among those maimed as a result of his blunders, Buller was admired. In England a newspaper correspondent who went daily to the hospital reported that he had not encountered a single man who did not speak “in very warm tones indeed” of General Buller. Captain Blake Knox, a doctor in Buller’s army, wrote:
They had followed their leader, General Buller, never questioning, never doubting, even through the dark, dark days of Colenso and Spion Kop, and they were prepared to follow him anywhere and at any time. Never was a general more confidently looked up to through adversity than was our Natal chief.10
When the Majestic arrived in Southampton with 350 wounded, among them five amputees and one or two blind, a reporter noted: “The men ... say they would have gone anywhere and done anything for Buller.” Private H. Easterbrook of the 2nd Devons was indignant that anyone should criticize Buller, and he wrote home: “There is not a man here who would not follow Sir Redvers.”
Although there was criticism of Buller in military and political circles at the highest levels and some in the press, the general public, like the soldiers, maintained their confidence in him, even in South Africa. At an entertainment in Cape Town where motion pictures taken by the cinematograph were shown, the audience cheered the various British leaders as they appeared, but, said one observer, “When the picture of General Buller appeared on the screen the audience went frantic.” It was undoubtedly this popularity, which Buller neither sought nor encouraged, that prevented the politicians and Lord Roberts from removing him from his command.
After Spion Kop there were, of course, the usual military dispatches. The first news of the debacle that reached Roberts was a brief telegram from Buller saying that “Warren’s garrison” had abandoned Spion Kop and adding some critical comments on Warren’s abilities. Several days later Buller wrote three dispatches in which he maintained that he himself had not actually been present but said he thought “Colonel Thorneycroft exercised a wise decision.” While he confessed that he ought to have assumed command himself, he threw all the blame for the disaster on Warren: “We had really lost our chance by Sir C. Warren’s slowness. He seems to me a man who can do well what he can do himself, but he cannot command, as he can neither use his Staff nor subordinates. I can never employ him again on an independent command.”11
Warren in his dispatch threw the blame on Thorneycroft. Roberts wrote a dispatch critical of all three—Buller, Warren, and Thorneycroft —and he bluntly told Buller: “Though portions of the force were engaged in different localities under subordinate commanders, you were present during the operations and in Chief command.” In his confidential dispatch to Lansdowne he said:
But whatever faults Sir Charles Warren may have committed, the failure must also be ascribed to the disinclination of the officer in supreme command to assert his authority, and to see that what he thought best was done, and also to the unwarrantable and needless assumption of responsibility by a subordinate officer.12
He praised Thorneycroft’s gallantry but added: “Colonel Thorneycroft issued an order, without reference to superior authority, which upset t
he whole plan of operations, and rendered unavailing the sacrifices which had already been made to carry it into effect.”13
Lansdowne, to the surprise and indignation of both Salisbury and the Queen, published all the dispatches. Parliament and some of the newspapers were also indignant, for it was felt that this evidence of disagreement among the generals would shake the public’s confidence in the army and its leaders. But the war was still young, most people were enthusiastic about it, and confidence in the army was not easily shaken. Perhaps many agreed with Churchill, who wrote at this time:
But when all that will be written about this has been written, and all the bitter words have been said by the people who will never do anything themselves, the wise and just citizen will remember that these same generals are, after all, brave, capable, noble English gentlemen, trying their best to carry through a task which may prove impossible.14
After Spion Kop Botha decided that he needed a rest; besides, he had some family affairs to attend to, so he went home for a while. Schalk Burger, A. P. Cronjé, and Joubert were unwell, and they, too, left the front. Many of the burghers drifted back to their farms. Between Buller’s army and Ladysmith there were now probably not more than 4,000 Boers.
Great Boer War Page 27