So the men wrote about the flank march in their diaries and letters to England, no doubt trying to put a brave face on the ordeal, for the sake of their families at home. Morale remained relatively high. And in Buller – ‘old Buller’, as they called him, the man who seemed to epitomize their own best qualities, especially endurance – in Buller they still had a faith that was to astonish everyone.28
If only the same could have been said about Buller’s generals. It was Major-General Neville Lyttelton who was beginning to emerge as the leader of a whispering campaign against his Commander-in-Chief. He told his wife that Buller’s ‘lack of enterprise’ since Colenso was ‘deplorable’.29 He took under his wing the young, impressionable correspondent of The Times, Bron Herbert, and told him, off the record, of course, that Buller had lost his nerve.30 Not that Lyttelton had many good words to say about anybody or anything in Natal. He was sick of the place, sick of the ‘beastly Tugela’, sick of the fighting in these ‘beastly’ mountains.31 How he must have yearned for the clean, clear-cut battle in the desert, where he had led that brigade to victory at Omdurman. His fellow brigade commanders now filled him with despondency. Barton, Coke, Wood-gate – he found them as ‘incapable’ as the senior generals like Clery; Lord Dundonald was ‘Lord Dundoodle’.32 As for Major-General Hart (‘Coeur-de-Lion’, the officers called him ironically), Lyttelton thought he should have been sent straight back to base after his performance leading the Irish Brigade at Colenso. ‘I am beginning to think Hart is mad,’ he wrote home to his wife.33 Major-General Hildyard expressed the same view less charitably.34
But how to cross the Tugela? Later, the impression would be given by Buller’s critics that every man in the British army, except its Commander-in-Chief, knew exactly how to relieve Ladysmith. Actually, Lyttelton, one of Buller’s more intelligent critics, confessed himself baffled by the ‘knotty problem’.35 It was ‘ten thousand pities’ that White had not stayed behind the Tugela, instead of entombing himself at Ladysmith.36 Of course, they were tantalizingly close. They could see the actual shells fired from the Ladysmith garrison (shells that had crossed the path of their own shells, the ‘messengers of hope’, fired in the opposite direction). White’s shells seemed to Lyttelton like ‘signals of distress’. But the endless rain only added to the difficulties of crossing the Tugela. ‘Our prospects here do not mend,’ wrote Lyttelton before leaving Frere on the great flank march, ‘rain is still falling and I don’t see how we are to force the Tugela. However we must do our best, but you need not be surprised if Ladysmith falls. I don’t like croaking and whatever you do don’t quote me, but I am bound to say that I think it will.’37
‘What are we waiting ‘ere for? Why don’t we go on.’
‘Don’t yer know?’
‘No.’
‘To give the Boers time to build up their trenches and fetch up their guns. Fair – ain’t it?’
The scene was Mount Alice, overlooking the Tugela at Potgieters Drift, nearly nine days after the troops had set off from Frere in that torrential downpour. The speakers were two British privates, overheard by John Atkins.38 To Buller, too, the delay was the source of intense frustration.39 It was all the more galling because everything, at first, had gone better than Buller had dared hope.
They had crossed the Tugela. This was the exhilarating news on 16 January. Paradoxically, thunderstorms had made the crossing easier. On the 11th, the advance guard of Buller’s army, Dundonald’s mounted brigade, had found that the enemy, apparently afraid of being cut off by the rain, had evacuated the south bank, and six of Dundonald’s men stripped and swam across and seized Potgieters ferry on the north bank.40 Five days later, when the river had fallen, Lyttelton’s brigade attempted the crossing at Potgieters Drift. There, at the foot of Mount Alice, was the familiar khaki centipede of troops, its head crawling forwards onto the north bank, while the tail withdrew from the south; the watchers, including John Atkins, waited breathless for a second Colenso – and none came. The men waded across, holding onto each other’s rifles, up to their necks in the turbulent river. That night there were British camp-fires on both sides of the river, as Buller’s men dried out their clothes and celebrated the first victory they had won, a victory without a shot.41
Still, Buller had only flung one arm, so to speak, across the Tugela. He was now convinced that to attack Potgieters directly would indeed invite another Colenso. He must throw a second, and stronger, arm across at Trichardt’s Drift, five miles higher up river,42 west of a strange, hog-backed hill that would soon be famous in a sombre fashion. This was ‘Look-out Hill’, the place from which voortrekkers had first looked out on the promised land of North Natal. In Dutch, Spion Kop. (See map on page 289.)
The plan that Buller had in mind when he left Frere was in essence a return to the original plan for a flank march, discarded in favour of the attempt to storm the river at Colenso. The pros and cons of such a direct strike had been, as we saw earlier, finely balanced with those of the flank march. What had, in December, tilted the balance in favour of the Colenso action were the strategic risks of making the flank march, in the light of Methuen’s precarious position at the Modder, and Milner’s unholy terror of a Cape rising; and, a tactical attraction, Colenso was within a few miles of the place where White had offered to join hands with the relief column.43 Of course, none of these three arguments now applied. On 10 January, a day earlier than expected, Lord Roberts had sailed into Cape Town and taken over as GOC.44 And there was one crucial result of the Boers’ near-success in storming Ladysmith on 6 January. This was a heliograph message from White to say that his force was now too weakened by casualties to be able to offer any co-operation with Buller in future.45
There were two main advantages, as Buller had known all along, in the Potgieters route. The river crossing itself was at the apex of a great south-facing loop of the river: a safe re-entrant to Buller, a dangerous salient to the Boers. Hence the relative ease with which Lyttelton’s brigade had established a foothold on the north bank. Second, instead of ten miles of tangled gorges that separated the Tugela at Colenso from Ladysmith, there were twelve miles of grassy plain, running downhill to Ladysmith, once he was across the river and astride a single chain of jagged hills that lay two to three miles beyond. However, it was in this chain of jagged hills that lay the overwhelming difficulty.46
Hence the need for two bridgeheads. At Potgieters, the enemy had been digging themselves into these hills since December, and their positions on the Brakfontein-Vaal Krantz ridge completely blocked the farther side of the south-facing loop. At Trikhardts, by contrast, the Intelligence Department reported fewer Boers, and weaker trenches: only six hundred Boers out of the seven thousand reported to be holding the whole line of the river. So Buller’s modified plan was this. He had decided to send to Trikhardts roughly two-thirds of his army. The job of this independent force was to form the second bridgehead there, and then break through the chain of hills three miles to the north, just to the west of Spion Kop. The moment they were on the plain, threatening to outflank Potgieters – that would be the moment for he himself to attack Potgieters with the remainder of the army. Once both forces were across the hills, they could join hands again, and march together across the plain to Ladysmith.47
It was a bold, two-pronged plan, demanding a high degree of co-ordination between two separate commands, attacking in sequence. The most risky feature was undoubtedly its complexity. That two-pronged attack at Colenso had represented two simultaneous attempts to jump the river, of which Buller had hoped at least one would achieve success. It had been a crude enough plan, but at least it had the merit of keeping both attacking brigades more or less under the eye of their master; when things went wrong, as of course they did at Colenso, Buller could intervene immediately and take command himself. In this intricate new plan, the scale of time, distance and numbers was dramatically larger. For several days, and probably several battles, the two forces would be isolated, at the mercy of the heliograph and th
e signal lamp. For Buller to keep in contact with the two forces, about seven miles apart, would be hard enough. To retain control of them both at the same time would, he believed, be impossible. Hence he had decided to give his senior subordinate, the commander of the newly arrived 5th Division, Lieutenant-General Sir Charles Warren, an independent command. Warren was to take 10,600 infantry, 2,200 mounted troops and 36 guns, and try to breach the Boers’ line west of Spion Kop. Buller himself would follow with 7,200 infantry, 400 mounted troops, and 22 guns, when it was time to try to storm the hills beyond Potgieters.48
Why give Warren – a general who was quite untried in the conditions of the new warfare, and a man with whom Buller found personal relations so painful – why give him the bigger army and the bulk of the work? It was a question that Buller never publicly answered, nor have historians offered an explanation. In fact, Buller had an answer, such as it was; he gave it to a friend several years later. ‘Warren had an easy task, merely to shoulder the Boers off his left; but I reserved to myself the difficult task, viz that of thrusting in my best [Lyttelton’s] Brigade when Warren’s operations had caused a gap in the enemy’s line.’49 An easy task? At any rate, not impossible, as Buller believed (and most historians have agreed), provided always that Warren attacked the enemy’s line with speed and decisiveness. But it was precisely in these qualities that Warren now seemed to Buller – and seems to us in retrospect – most dismally lacking.50
From the crest of Mount Alice, the view across the Tugela is one of the most theatrical in the whole of Northern Natal. At dawn, it is like the scene from John Martin’s Fields of Paradise. Range after range of oyster-coloured hills, framed on the left by the pink battlements of the Drakensberg; the swirling silver loops of the Tugela at Potgieters, six hundred feet below; and, on Mount Alice itself, in the jungle of mimosa thorn and aloes and cassia, the murmur of doves, and the whirr of partridges, as though this were an English woodland.51
Up here, to see the sights, and a sight themselves, puffing and blowing, came the war correspondents: Bennet Burleigh, complaining bitterly of the Press censorship; Dickson, dragging his enormous ciné-camera;52 Churchill, now wearing the Boer hat and the ‘ cockyolibird’ feather of the South African Light Horse (Buller had allowed him to enrol as a nominal member of this Uitlander regiment);53 Atkins, overwhelmed by the vast scale of this landscape, which could swallow up thirty or forty thousand men and make nothing of them. Here at Mount Alice, thought Atkins, was a hill ‘fit for Xerxes to watch from’.54 One of the gunners said, ‘We ought to have the Queen up here, in her little donkey carriage.’ ‘Ah, we’d do it all right then,’ replied his mate. No, said Churchill to himself, not the Queen. He could not help thinking of the scenes of horror he expected soon to burst upon those peaceful hills beyond the river.55
Strange to say, there is one hill that makes little impression on the eye, seen from Mount Alice across the five-mile-wide gorge of the Tugela, and this is Spion Kop. At 1,470 feet above the river, its summit crowns the ridge, and its sheer, south-facing slopes are scarred with rocks and rock falls; but the long range of hills seems to assimilate it so easily that it half loses its identity among its neighbours, the Rangeworthy Hills (Tabanyama), the Twin Peaks, Brakfontein and Vaal Krantz to the right.56
The topography of the impending battle was certainly more complicated than it looked. Yet to Buller, equipped with the blue one-inch map prepared by his Field Intelligence Department, the salient features were clear enough. Warren’s job was to break a hole in the Rangeworthy line and strike for the plain at Clydesdale Farm.57 The question was not where to attack. It was: where’s Warren?
Ever since 15 January, when he had given Warren secret instructions to cross at Trikhardts Drift and swing round the hub of Spion Kop from the left, Buller had watched Warren’s ponderous movement with mounting alarm. It took Warren two days to cover the ten miles from Spearman’s Camp to Trikhardts and to cross by pontoon bridge. It took him two more days to bring over his baggage wagons and establish a bridgehead in the foothills across the river. Instead of striking straight ahead, he spent two more days in indecisive movements on the left; meanwhile, Dundonald’s brigade began to roll up the Boer outposts on the extreme left, but were then ordered by Warren to halt. On the 20th, Warren launched the first infantry assault on his real target: Rangeworthy Hills, to the west of Spion Kop. The attack was successful, as far as it went. The eight infantry battalions – Hildyard’s ‘English’ brigade (the 2nd) and Hart’s Irish Brigade (the 5th) – forced their way on to the southern crest line of the western plateau. Warren was assisted by a ‘demonstration’ (a feint) at Potgieters. Casualties in both sectors were reasonably light: one officer and thirty other ranks killed, twenty officers and 280 other ranks wounded, out of both divisions. But after the 20th, Warren’s advance petered out. He said he needed heavier artillery than his thirty-six field-guns. Buller agreed to send him four howitzers; he was keeping the ten long-range naval guns for his own advance. Warren crawled. When he had crossed at Trikhardts Drift on the 17th, the enemy had numbered only six hundred men, according to Buller’s intelligence. Now there were reportedly (actually an exaggeration) seven thousand west of Spion Kop, out of fifteen thousand guarding the line of the Tugela.58
By the 23rd, Buller could bear it no longer. He would later – rightly – reproach himself for his own weakness: he should have been man enough to take command of Warren’s flank attack on the 19th. But just as Warren flinched from attacking Rangeworthy Hills, Buller flinched from sacking Warren. Who was to be in charge of the attack on the horseshoe north of Potgieters? And how could he avoid discrediting Warren in front of the troops: Warren, whom the War Office had sent out with secret instructions to succeed Buller if Buller was shot? So Buller, against his own better judgement, left Warren his independent – or, at least, semi-independent – command. He rode over to Warren on the 23rd and put the position with characteristic bluntness.59 Either Warren must attack or he would withdraw Warren’s force. For four days now, Warren had his men ‘continuously exposed to shell and rifle fire’, perched on the edge of the plateau; the supporting troops were massed in ‘indefensible formations’, and a panic or sudden charge ‘might send the whole lot down the hill at any moment’. His own advice, Buller reiterated, was to swing round to the left of Spion Kop, and try to break through the Rangeworthy Hills. At which Warren explained that, despite his howitzers, he could still not establish an artillery position and so make progress on this western side. Warren had now decided that there was only one practicable place to attack: Spion Kop, the hub and natural strong-point of the whole range.60
Warren’s plan to try to crack the nut at the hardest point was perhaps perverse, but not stupid. Spion Kop was so precipitous that it was the last place the Boers would expect the British to attack. It commanded the wagon road which Warren needed to use if he was to march north with his supply wagons. If it could be seized, if it could be held, if heavy guns could be installed there – all three very big ‘ifs’ – it would send the Boers scurrying back to the plain.61
There are few excitements like a night attack.
Lieutenant-Colonel Charles à Court, Buller’s staff officer attached to Major-General Woodgate’s column – young, brilliant, erratic Charles à Court – had had the good luck to serve with Kitchener in the night attack on Mahmud and his Dervishes. The Atbara, Good Friday 1898, the night after the full moon; sixteen thousand British and Egyptian infantry marching in mass of brigade squares across the vast, crunchy desert, guided by the Dervish watch-fires; a scene from Verdi; dawn, and they were facing the parapets of the great dem near the Atbara, six hundred yards away from the enemy; still not a sound from the Dervishes; then Charles Long – the same dare-devil Colonel Long who had lost Buller’s batteries at Colenso – had ridden out with his guns in front of Kitchener’s army, and the massacre had begun. Total victory in twenty-eight minutes. The enemy ‘squashed as flat’, said à Court, ‘as though a gigantic roller had been dragg
ed over his trenches.’62
No chance of getting that steam-roller up Spion Kop tonight. A Court’s thoughts went back gloomily to another, still more famous, night attack: the night in South Africa, eighteen years before, when General Colley had tried to outflank the enemy by seizing Majuba Hill. A Court spoke of his premonition to Lieutenant-Colonel Arthur Sandbach, Buller’s Intelligence Officer: they were going to attack Spion Kop; it was another Majuba; they must do their best to avoid repeating Colley’s mistakes.63 But what could one of Buller’s staff officers do to improve a plan about which their own chief himself had such doubts? A Court made an arrangement with the gunners’ commander, Colonel Parsons, to give supporting fire to the column as soon as they signalled that they had gained the summit. The signal would be a burst of British cheering.64 Woodgate would lead the column of two thousand men – men from three battalions of his own Lancashire Brigade, plus two hundred of Thorneycroft’s Mounted Infantry, and half a company of engineers. There would be a few mules, carrying oilskin sheets full of water, and boxes of spare ammunition. But they would not be accompanied by the mountain battery (which was supposed to follow in the morning), and there were no arrangements for heavier guns, although to dig in such guns on the peak was the best argument for seizing Spion Kop. There were no orders to General Clery to make anything more than a ‘demonstration’ on the left during the next day, when (or rather if) they had succeeded in taking Spion Kop. And there were only twenty picks and twenty shovels, carried up in stretchers, to dig the trenches for two thousand men.65
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