It was at this moment – about 4.30 p.m. – that Steevens and the other war correspondents saw the sky darken, and a full-blooded African thunderstorm swept across the veld. At first, the enemy’s position on the skyline was illuminated in eerie detail, each balloon of white shrapnel brilliant against the black sky. Then the air was filled with a hissing sound. Horses trembled and turned their backs to the storm. The dusty veld turned to mud. The battlefield vanished behind a curtain of swooping water.29
For the British infantry waiting below the hog’s-back ridge, the storm was the moment. The Gordons slowly began to climb the steep hillside, covered in broken stones. On their left, the Manchesters were going at the hill in great style; the men had their blood up.30 On their right, the Imperial Light Horse had left their horses in shelter and were strung out across the hillside, led by Colonel John Scott Chisholme, waving a Lancer’s red scarf (his old regiment’s) tied to a walking-stick.31
Even now the attack might have faltered, had not the Brigadier, Ian Hamilton, ridden up and pushed his way forwards to the firing-line. He gave the order: ‘Fix bayonets. Charge!’ Drum-Major Lawrence of the Gordons rushed into the open to play the call. The men gave a tremendous cheer. It was answered by the sound of the Devons’ bugler floating up from the valley below. The Devons had resumed their frontal attack.32
As Hamilton groped his way upwards behind the ILH he could see Colonel Chisholme’s red silk scarf leading the race for the summit. It was a splendid sight, he later wrote, to see Jabber Chisholme’s ‘little red rag going on and on’.33 At last the inevitable happened: poor Chisholme fell, shot through legs, lung and head. Woolls-Sampson, the second-in-command, was shot in the thigh. Half the ILH was down. But the swirling, panting, stumbling line of infantry pressed on, fixing their bayonets as they ran.34
The first of the attackers to breast the ridge was the Adjutant of the Manchesters, Captain Newbigging. He jumped over a roughly built stone wall, used as a defence line. The Boers had not waited for the bayonets but were firing from a new position two hundred yards away. At first Newbigging’s men lay down themselves. ‘Our men were so pumped,’ he said later, ‘they had to return their fire for a few minutes. Then we charged again and they again hooked it and took up another position, which we cleared them out of.’ Newbigging now saw one of the Boers’ field-guns straight ahead of him, lying abandoned. ‘I went for the gun, as hard as ever I could split, and had a great race with a sergeant-drummer of the Gordons, whom I beat by a short head. I then sat on the gun and waited for some of our men to come and take possession.’35
It was 5.55 p.m. and victory was assured – so it appeared. Down below the hog’s-back of Kock’s laager in the gathering twilight, Boers could be seen saddling their ponies and galloping off. Somebody had hoisted a white flag. Hamilton, who had now joined Newbigging on the crest of the ridge, gave the order, ‘Cease fire, and let the cavalry in!’ Already, true to the field-day principle of stopping when the objective was gained, the troops had grounded their rifles.36
But the white flag suddenly vanished. A Boer counter-attack from the rocks below (actually led by General Kock himself) sent the British reeling back forty yards. Newbigging himself had stepped forward to take a prisoner, and had his back to the Boer camp when the storm of firing burst out. He was knocked ten yards by the blast, and lay on the ground with a great gash in his back.37 Beside him, Lieutenant Danks was mortally wounded. The Gordons and ILH suffered as heavily. The small group of Boers, led by Kock, in a frock-coat and a black top-hat, emptied their magazines into them at fifty yards’ range. At Hamilton’s side, Major Denne was shot dead. In the confusion, the British line began to recoil from the top of the hill, the soldiers from different units all mixed up. And some Boer gunners emerged again from the rocks to fire a wild round or two.38
But the confusion was only momentary. Staff officers ran up, waving their swords. Imploring and cursing, they shoved the men back into the line. Hamilton himself was conspicuous in the front. The pipes began to skirl. Drummer May of the Gordons sounded the advance. And in a moment the heaving mass of kilts poured back across the crest line. The Boers’ firing stopped abruptly. The whole affair had only lasted a few minutes. At the same time, the front companies of the Devons had at last cleared the crest of the position by the sugarloaf.39 One of the war correspondents who had come up to the firing-line saw the moment of triumph: ‘Then wildly cheering, raising their helmets on their bayonets, while line after line of khaki figures, like hounds through a gap, came pouring into position, shouting fiercely: “Majuba, Majuba”.’40
The infantry had triumphed. Now for the cavalry charge.
In recent years the arme blanche of the British army had been something of a disappointment on the battlefield. In the broken country of India’s North-West Frontier, regular cavalry were almost useless in attack. At Omdurman the 9th Lancers had made their famous charge – and paid dearly for it. At Talana Möller’s cavalry had ridden away – into the arms of the enemy.41 But here on the veld, as flat as Salisbury Plain, facing a defeated army, here was the chance for cavalry to show what they were made of.
This final act in the battle did not receive the full attention of the war correspondents. They had a long ride back to Ladysmith to cable home their stories. ‘Triumph for British arms … Majuba in Reverse.’42 And anyway, there were certain pungent features of the cavalry charge which were decidedly unacceptable in the Victorian drawing-room. Steevens wrote a brief peroration: ‘There also – thank Heaven, thank Heaven! – were squadrons of Lancers and Dragoon Guards storming in among them, shouting, spearing, stamping them into the ground. Cease fire.’43 Only Nevinson gave any hint of the reality of the charge, which now turned the veld into half a mile of butcher’s shop.44
The charge of four hundred horsemen galloping across a plain is designed to be an irresistible force. It does not stop simply because the enemy would like to surrender. ‘Draw sabres – lances!’ In neat lines, the Dragoons and Lancers began to thunder across the plain. It was now six o’clock and twilight was turning fast to darkness. Half a mile away, the Boers, unaware of their danger, had saddled up their ponies and begun to jog back the way they had come. The charging line of horsemen caught them broadside, like the steel prow of a destroyer smashing into the side of a wooden boat. People heard the crunch of the impact – steel against leather and bone and muscle – and saw the flash of the officers’ revolvers, and heard the screams of the Boers trying to give themselves up. The Lancers and Dragoons swept on, leaving dozens of Boers, and some of their African retainers, spiked and slashed on the ground. Back came the cavalry for a second charge.45 (‘Most excellent pig-sticking … for about ten minutes, the bag being about sixty,’ said one of the officers later.)46 Again the shouts and the screams. The Boers fell off their horses and rolled among the rocks, calling for mercy – calling to be shot, anything to escape the stab of the lances. But a story had got round that the Boers had abused a flag of truce and, anyway, the order was: no prisoners.47
A third charge, but this time the charge lacked the original demonic momentum. Even the most eager troopers found the fight had lost some of its exhilaration. One of them later wrote, ‘We went along sticking our lances through them – it was a terrible thing, but you have to do it… .’48 Nevinson himself talked to a corporal of the Dragoons, who told him, ‘We just gave them a good dig as they lay.’ And most of the lances were bloody after the battle.49
By now it was 6.30 and night had fallen, a swift African night, accompanied by a Scotch drizzle. The Indian stretcher-bearers tramped backwards and forwards collecting up the wounded in doolies. The unwounded British soldiers took refuge from the rain in the station at Elandslaagte. General Hamilton himself had to climb under a wagon to find shelter.50 There were no proper lights. Somebody found a lantern and candles. The Tommies began to boast about their experiences. For one of the officers this was the worst part of the whole battle.51
Out on the rocky hillside, the wounded o
f both nationalities lay in the mud and the cold. Sir George White had sent out only one doctor from Ladysmith. Many of the wounded had to lie there on the hillside all night.52 Woolls-Sampson was helpless, with his broken thigh; he marked the position of the gallant charge of the ILH.53 Despite the wound, Woolls-Sampson was content enough. The Boers had lost even more men than the British. Commandant Viljoen had fled. Dr Coster (the ex-State Attorney), Van Leggelo (the State Prosecutor) and about sixty others were dead. General Kock was dying, shot in the side. His nephew, Philip Kock, was wounded. It was his son, the twenty-six-year-old judge, who had driven the Uitlanders to a frenzy by his verdict in the Edgar case.54
Next day the survivors of Kock’s commandos were marched through the streets of Ladysmith past crowds of Africans, many of whom were ex-miners from the Rad. ‘Upi pass, upi pass?’ (‘Where’s your pass, where’s your pass?’) the Africans shouted derisively.
To Woolls-Sampson and the ILH it was a victory of a still more personal sort. The slate had been wiped clean at last. The Johannesburg Commando had been annihilated. There would be no more talk of those two white flags.
CHAPTER 13
The Knock-down Blow
Dundee and Ladysmith,
22 October – 2 November 1899
‘Long before this reaches you most important events will have taken place and I shall be either a man or a mouse.’
Lieutenant-General Sir George White to his brother, 27 October 1899
‘In the dead of night we are on the move,’ wrote Gunner Netley in the diary he kept in his haversack. ‘Strict orders against striking matches, and no talking aloud. I would not have minded the talking part of the business being stopped, but to have to go without a smoke puts my pipe properly out. Of course it was the correct thing to do as a light would have shown the Bores what we are up to.’1
What we are up to. What indeed? It was a question to which Netley’s own officers, and Major-General James Yule himself, Symons’s replacement as commander of the Dundee garrison, would have dearly liked an answer. It was Sunday night, the third night after the victory at Talana, and Yule’s four infantry battalions looked anything but victors. There they lay, not even daring to light a fire; no tents, not even blankets or groundsheets for some, on the stony hillside, south of the town of Dundee. Officers as well as men, were huddled up in greatcoats against the freezing rain.2 And invisible above them in the mist of Mount Impati, commanding every movement they made on their own side of the valley, tossing a 6-inch shell from time to time across the intervening four miles of space, was a thirty-foot long steel prodigy, one of Joubert’s new Creusot siege guns, a Long Tom.’3
A few people tried to see the humour in their predicament. Netley wrote, ‘We have not got wonderful mutch ammunition to waste at preasant.’ He added, cheerfully, that they were now cut off and short of food as well as ammunition.4 Netley actually possessed many of the admirable qualities that the British public expected of British privates. He was a farm-worker’s son from Pulborough, Sussex. He and his four brothers had joined the colours after being sacked by the local farmer (‘that fellow,’ he would tell his mates, ‘he was the best recruiting sergeant the British army ever had’), and in due course he had found life as a soldier on a shilling a day preferable to life on sixpence a day as a shepherd. If any British war correspondents had seen him, Netley would have seemed the very incarnation of Tommy Atkins. He had that ‘unmistakable’ imperturbability that was considered the hallmark of the common soldier. Yet, as he later admitted, these days trapped at Dundee were some of the worst of his life.5
Netley’s mates – in fact, most of the Dundee garrison – did not look, or even try to look, imperturbable. They had been bowled over by the rush of events. Two days before, they had won a drill-book victory at Talana. Lucas Meyer’s commando had been driven back across the Transvaal frontier. But Joubert refused to play by the rules and acknowledge his defeat. His forces had now occupied Mount Impati in overwhelming strength. On Saturday, the day after Talana, they began to shell the Dundee camp with the first of their Long Toms, the Krupp 40-pounder that far outranged the British 13-pounders.6 According to the book of rules (including the War Office’s own secret handbook, Military Notes on the Dutch Republics), it should have been out of the question to remove a Long Tom from the forts at Pretoria and take it into the field, let alone install it on the top of a mountain.7
As the first of the 5-inch shells began to plump into the valley, killing an officer (he was a young subaltern of the Leicesters, called Hanna, who had volunteered to come out ‘for the fun of it’), a state bordering on panic began to seize the British garrison.8 The world of the field-day – the cosy Aldershot world of umpires and flags and whistles and drill-books – had collapsed into nightmare. That was the message of Joubert’s great gun, as it tolled like a bell, in the mist above their heads.
Despite the twelve-foot-high Red Cross flag – the internationally accepted flag of the newly signed Geneva Convention – shells crashed into the field hospitals beside the military camp. A stampede ensued. Major Kerin, the CO of the 26th Field Hospital, found it a ‘cruel sight’ to see heavily bandaged men crawling out of the hospital tents, some dragging broken legs, to try to escape the shelling. Major Donegan, who commanded the 18th Field Hospital, found most of his medical staff, including one of the army doctors who had been drunk and incapable throughout Friday’s battle, had abandoned their posts and fled to the town.9
Yule’s fighting men did not show such indiscipline; they were not exposed to such danger as the wounded or medical staff. Yule’s men had moved to a new camp under the lee of a kopje. Yet that second night after the battle seemed an ‘awful night’ to Lieutenant Trench, of the 69th Battery. ‘Everyone seemed very jumpy and frightened,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘being under the impression that we were surrounded by the enemy. The batteries formed three sides of a square, and were prepared for case [shot], on the chance of their trying a night rush. We stood to till 2 a.m. in pouring rain…. Every now and then some infantry sentry got the jim-jams and fired off his gun into the dark at nothing…. People became very despondent now as General Yule seemed unable to issue any orders.’10
It was not only the sentries who had got the jim-jams. Symons’s wild optimism had placed Yule in a predicament that would have tested the most talented and experienced general. Poor Yule was neither. He was an elderly regimental officer, the Devonshires’ old CO from India, suddenly promoted by events to the rank of major-general. Already his health was giving way.11 The strains of victory at Talana seem to have unnerved him and that victory had been marred by the disappearance of Colonel Möller and half his cavalry, whose capture had just been confirmed. Now, with the prospect of his own capture, Yule had become prey to a sort of reckless inertia.
On Saturday – that is, the morning of the Battle of Elandslaagte – Yule signalled to General White begging for reinforcements. White’s Chief Staff Officer replied that none could be spared.12 On Sunday morning, Yule’s men heard a burst of cheering from the signallers who had caught the flash of White’s heliograph: White had won the Battle of Elandslaagte, and the Boers were believed to be in full retreat. This news was confirmed by a wire from White to Yule, sent by way of Helpmakaar, along a telegraph line the Boers had left uncut. Momentarily Yule recovered his nerve. He ordered the Dundee garrison to march westwards along the valley towards the main road at Glencoe, where it was reported they might be able to intercept the Boers fleeing northwards. But after a day’s marching and counter-marching, and the mysterious loss of still more of Yule’s few remaining cavalry, it became clear that, like other reports of the elusive Boers, these intelligence reports were fables. Joubert’s men, hovering round them in the mist, had sealed off the valley on at least three sides.13
On Sunday afternoon Yule still dithered. White would not help him. Well, he would dig in on the top of Talana Hill and try to sit things out. At this point several of his senior officers explained the realities: they were su
rrounded by ten thousand men, they were short of artillery ammunition, their guns were outranged, and they had no defensible water supply. Their only hope was to try and break out of the valley by the Helpmakaar road. Yule gloomily agreed.14 An hour or so later a wire arrived from Sir George White endorsing Yule’s decision. ‘I cannot reinforce you without sacrificing Ladysmith and the Colony behind – You must try and fall back on Ladysmith.’5 If Yule was relieved at White’s taking the responsibility, the decision to retreat was still intensely humiliating. Since the days of the Peninsular War, there was hardly a precedent for this. Moreover, only a fortnight before, White had decided that the political risks of peacefully withdrawing Symons’s force from Dundee were too great to balance the military advantages. Now, throwing those political arguments to the wind, White was ordering Yule to leave to the enemy not only the town of Dundee, but the garrison’s two months’ supply of food and stores, and also to abandon their own wounded officers and men, including Symons.16
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