It would be hard to beat this extraordinary note of Kitchener’s either for its callous tone or for its reckless misstatement of facts. Kelly-Kenny had, of course, refused to renew the attack. Nor had any of the Brigadiers – Stephenson, MacDonald, Knox, Smith-Dorrien, or their replacements – been ‘warned that the laager must be rushed at all costs’. In the event, the note read like the orders of a madman, and it was in this spirit that Colonel Hannay received it. He assumed that he had not time to co-ordinate with General Stephenson, whom he knew to be two miles away. He sent away his staff on various pretexts; then gathered a handful of men – perhaps fifty at most – and they mounted the horses of the MI in the firing-line ahead. ‘We are going to charge the laager,’ he said quite simply. Then he mounted and galloped forward. For some time he survived the storm of Mauser fire, though many of his men were struck down behind him. His horse fell. Somehow he staggered on, till he, too, fell at last, far out ahead of the firing line, two hundred yards short of the Boer trenches. The left hook had failed, and Hannay had died just as he intended: as a supreme act of protest against the way Kitchener sacrificed his army.40
Three miles away, on the north-west side of the laager, Smith-Dorrien, the commander of the 19th Brigade, heard the drumming beat of Mauser fire, in which Hannay cast away his life. It was just before 3.30 p.m. Ever since early that morning, when his brigade had waded waist-high across the Modder at Paardeberg, Smith-Dorrien had been waiting for orders from Kitchener or his staff. No orders came. ‘I was in a complete fog as to what was happening,’ he later wrote, ‘and knew nothing of the situation, either of our own troops or of the Boers, beyond what I could see and infer myself.’ Apart from the half-battalion of Cornwalls, under Lieutenant-Colonel Aldworth, left behind to guard the baggage on the south bank of the river, his 19th Brigade had been extended along the north bank as far as a kopje, christened Gun Hill, commanding the laager. From this kopje, the 82nd Field Battery had a perfect field of fire into the lines of wagons and trenches a mile and a half away. Smith-Dorrien found it a ‘thrilling sight’. No matter that the brigade was hungry, dirty and unshaven after the ordeal of the last few days, and the Modder was in flood, so that they could get no food or supplies across the river. He made a solemn vow, and the men were told: the General wouldn’t shave his beard until they had captured the laager.41
At 5.15 p.m. Smith-Dorrien was amazed to see the troops on the right of his line rise up and charge forward, with a ringing cheer, towards the Boer trenches. He knew nothing at the time of Kitchener’s orders to Colvile to send the half-battalion of Cornwalls across the river. All he could see was that his battalion of the 1st Royal Canadians had suddenly advanced without his orders. He had not time to try to recall them – nor to co-ordinate the attack with the Shropshires (another of his battalions) and the 82nd Battery at Gun Hill. The wave of attackers rolled forward. Then, like all the attacks all day, the line wavered, paused and vanished. Colonel Aldworth was killed. The gallant charge was gallantly led, Smith-Dorrien noted, but its futility was clear: the right hook had failed, without anyone getting within three hundred yards of the Boer trenches.42
It was now an hour from sunset, and even to Kitchener the battle seemed to be over. It was the most severe reverse, judged by the British losses, of any day in the entire war. Casualties totalled 1,270: 24 officers and 279 men killed, 59 officers and 847 men wounded, and 2 officers and 59 men missing.43 Characteristically, Kitchener reported the reverse to Roberts as though it was a minor victory. ‘We did not succeed in getting into the enemy’s convoy, though we drove the Boers back a considerable distance along the river bed. The troops are maintaining their position and I hope tomorrow we shall be able to do something more definite. …’44
But was the battle over? Among the bitter wrangles between Kitchener and Kelly-Kenny was the matter of how to defend the kopje immediately south of the Modder – ‘Kitchener’s Kopje’. It was to this vital kopje, stripped of troops by Kitchener’s own orders, that De Wet, with an uncanny instinct for an enemy’s weakness, launched his own attack shortly after five o’clock. The timing proved perfect. Kitchener’s own attention was concentrated on trying – and failing – to co-ordinate the left hook and the right hook. A handful of irregulars, about one hundred Uitlanders of Kitchener’s horse, were holding both the kopje and the farm buildings nearby. They were quite unprepared for an attack. Their horses were stampeded. They themselves surrendered to De Wet with hardly any opposition.45
Before dusk, De Wet had completed his extraordinary mission. With only three hundred of his own men, and Commandant Steyn’s even smaller detachment, he had snatched the whole south-east ridge line from under the noses of a British force totalling about fifteen thousand. The kopje itself was the tactical key to Paardeberg. Not only could it make the British position on the south of the river untenable. It could also provide a rescue ladder for Cronje. Try as he would, with artillery and infantry, Kitchener could not force De Wet to release his grip on the kopje.46
Darkness came, and with it a scene of utter exhaustion and confusion on the British side. Kitchener decided that the men should entrench where they were. Few units received these orders, and, anyway, the men were desperate after twenty-four hours without food or water. They trickled back to camp.47 Kelly-Kenny watched the ineffective attempt to recapture Kitchener’s Kopje. He had told Kitchener not to remove that half-battalion. This was the result. In the confusion, Kelly-Kenny could not find his own camp, and spent hours wandering on the veld. It was, as he said, an ‘awful night’, and the worst of it was that it was now open to Cronje to escape.48
The night was even more awful for Cronje and his men. Of the four thousand who had taken shelter there in the river bed, comparatively few had been killed or injured by the waves of attacking infantry or the day-long artillery bombardment: the official casualty figures for this whole period were only 100 killed and 250 wounded, although these figures may be too low.49 The great majority of Cronje’s men had been protected by the canyon walls of the Modder, into which they had dug a honeycomb of trenches. Still, the moral destruction was devastating. To stand all day in a fox-hole, while the air screamed and the earth shook with lyddite shells: this was no new experience for them. They had withstood Methuen’s bombardment two months before at the Modder and at Magersfontein, like their comrades who had faced Buller at Colenso. But the ordeal had proved far worse at Paardeberg. They had been retreating for three days, hunted down and encircled by a vastly superior force. They were exhausted and demoralized before the battle began. The bombardment had now smashed and burnt their covered wagons – and with them all that many burghers possessed. Worst of all, Kitchener’s guns had cut the life-line on which the Boers’ fighting strength depended: their horses. Paardeberg, ‘Horse Hill’ (alias Stinkfontein), had proved the graveyard for most of Cronje’s horses, as the river bed, deep as it was, had proved too small to give many of them shelter.50
Perhaps it was the sight of the horses, the symbol of their mobility, lying bloated and putrefying on the veld beside the burnt-out wreckage of the wagons, that filled many burghers with despair. Or perhaps they were numbed by the sight of the women – about fifty or so of the Boer vrouws, including Cronje’s wife, had followed their menfolk on the retreat, but could clearly go no further.
The supreme irony was that, for the menfolk at any rate, De Wet had now restored their life-line. That Sunday night, his guns on Kitchener’s Kopje flashed out a message of hope. Here was the escape ladder, a miraculous hand held out by De Wet to Cronje; fresh horses to enable them to ride away and vanish once again into the veld.
But all that Sunday night, and all Monday, De Wet’s guns flashed and De Wet’s heliograph winked from Kitchener’s Kopje, and less than a hundred burghers seized the chance of safety.51 The rest of the four thousand stayed with Cronje amid the stench of the battlefield. Cronje asked the British for a truce to bury the dead. It was refused. Cronje sent a final message of defiance: ‘If you are so unchari
table as to refuse me a truce as requested, then you may do as you please. I shall not surrender alive. Therefore bombard as you please.’52
The resoluteness and moral strength of Lord Roberts have been contrasted, countless admirers of his, writing in the last seventy years, with the weakness and vacillation of Sir Redvers Buller.53 The characters of the two generals were indeed very different. Yet in the agony of the moment, Roberts, too, could give way to impulses he was later to regret. The cock was to crow for him after Paardeberg, as it had crowed for Buller after Colenso.
After resting at Jacobsdal, he reached the scene of the battlefield at ten o’clock on the morning of Monday 19 February. His first impulse was to renew Kitchener’s infantry attack.54 Fortunately for the British, Cronje’s request for an armistice intervened; Roberts refused it because Cronje insisted that Roberts lend him British doctors, as he had none to tend his own wounded; the exchange of messages took most of that day.55 On Tuesday, Roberts decided to renew the attack, as Kitchener demanded. But the other generals, though taunted by Kitchener, were firmly opposed. After inspecting the position himself, Roberts cancelled the plan of attack.56
Roberts then swung to the opposite extreme. Perhaps he was shaken by the sight of the British wounded. It was they who had to pay the price of Roberts’s and Kitchener’s new transport system. Before leaving Cape Town, he had cut the number of regimental ambulance wagons by three-quarters, in order to save transport. So the eight hundred-odd wounded had to be sent from Paardeberg to the railway line in ordinary bullock carts, an agonizing experience.57 No doubt he was also (like Buller after Colenso) alarmed by the general strategic situation; Milner was crying woe, as usual, about the dangers of a Cape rising. In fact, a small rising had taken place at Prieska.58 There were also certain cumulative problems – the bad water, the chaos of the transport, the disorganized state of the army – that now seemed to Roberts quite overwhelming. And, of course, there was the shadow cast over everything by Kitchener’s Kopje: De Wet’s Kopje, as it had in fact become. At any rate, Roberts’s nerve failed him.
On Wednesday, he had a confidential talk with Kelly-Kenny and (as Kelly-Kenny wrote in his diary) Roberts ‘strongly urged’ retirement to Klip Kraal Drift. Kelly-Kenny opposed retirement. But Roberts told him he was to command the rearguard, and he actually went to inspect the positions.59
To beat a retreat at that moment, and to let Cronje escape: it would have been one of the great blunders of the war. Fortunately for Roberts, he was saved (as in the similar crisis when he had heard the news of the disaster to the convoy at Waterval Drift) by a sudden twist of events. He was also fortunate in having colleagues loyal enough never to reveal the existence of the plan to retreat, which has not, in fact, been published up till now.60
This time it was Cronje and De Wet who saved Roberts. For three days, Cronje’s men had stubbornly rejected the ladder outstretched to rescue them. And, for three days, Kitchener had tried to sweep De Wet off that ridge. By Wednesday, De Wet’s men could stand no more. Had De Wet guessed at Roberts’s loss of nerve, had he had a spy in the British HQ, how different would have been the course of the struggle! But even De Wet’s insights had their limits. An hour or two before Roberts was to abandon the hunt, De Wet himself abandoned the kopje.61 The British army breathed again. All talk of retirement was over.62
The following Tuesday, on the nineteenth anniversary of Majuba, General Piet Cronje, with 4,069 Transvaalers and Free Staters (including 150 wounded and 50 women), surrendered to Roberts’s overwhelmingly strong army and was led away to captivity.63 Cronje’s blunders had outmatched Kitchener’s and Roberts’s after all. It was the first great British victory of the war.
CHAPTER 29
The Key Turns
The Tugela Line and Ladysmith,
12–28 February 1900
There once was a general who said:
‘If to Ladysmith you would be led
The key’s in my pocket
The door I’ll unlock it.’
– But he went back to Chieveley instead.
From the diary of Lieutenant Alford, February 1900
Buller’s army had recrossed the Tugela. They were back to Chieveley, back to Frere – wretched, sweltering Frere. The city of tents sprang up again beside the khaki water of the Blaauw Krantz River and the wreck of the armoured train, now grown rusty in the summer rains.1
Camp life had its compensations after a fortnight of hard tack and bully beef, and of sleeping on bare ground. There had been no tents, even for the generals; and for the men not even a change of underclothes or a chance to take off their boots.2 Now there were real army rations, and Zulus did some of the fatigues, singing the slow chant, ‘oom-bang-way’ (‘too much “oom-bloody-way” about those fellows,’ said a sergeant) as they heaved logs out of ox wagons.3 Some sailors of the Naval Brigade, with time on their hands, had decorated the new armoured train, hiding it in a veil of woolly ropes from the top of the funnel to the rims of its wheels; it was christened the ‘Russian poodle’ by the officers, ‘Hairy Mary’ by the men. But that Monday, 12 February, such jokes tended to fall rather flat. Two months’ bloody fighting. And they were back at the beginning, back to square one – or worse.4
At sunset, three days earlier, a wild-looking procession had stumbled into Frere. They were nearly two thousand strong, dressed in tattered khaki tunics, and a strange assortment of hats: helmets, bowlers and tam-o’shanters. They were the ‘body-snatchers’: Uitlander refugees and Gandhi’s Indians, recruited as stretcher-bearers. They brought in the last of the wounded: 150 bad cases, covered in brown blankets, with their special belongings, boots, haversack and perhaps a pot of jam and a lump of tinned meat, carried in the hood of the stretchers. Most of the wounded were too shocked, or deeply encased in bandages, to speak. But sometimes a head would peer out of the hood to look at its neighbour. ‘Fancy you here, Tom?’ ‘Thought you were stiff.’ Many men were delirious. One shouted that he was going to ‘chuck it’, and promptly rolled off the stretcher. Another was babbling about the harvest and the great time he was having at home.5
These were the latest instalment of the 3,400 casualties the South Natal Field Force had suffered in the last three months.6 Buller had told his troops after Spion Kop that they had given him ‘the key to Ladysmith’. But where had the door led? On 5 February Buller had launched an attack on Vaal Krantz, a ridge of kopjes across the Tugela a few miles east of Spion Kop. The ridge had proved a blind alley; there was no room to drag up artillery to the crest. On the third day of the battle, Buller called a council of war. All his generals agreed that there was nothing for it except to try a new attempt elsewhere. Then Buller, ‘the Ferryman’, piloted his army for the third time back across the Tugela.7
Buller’s men would not have been human if their General had not come in for some bitter jokes as they tramped back across the worn wooden chesses of the pontoon bridge. Even at the best of times, an army cherishes its freedom to belly-ache – an army marches, so to speak, on its belly-aches. Now everyone was demoralized.8 People felt that all those sacrifices had been wasted. But losing faith in Buller did not mean losing appetite for fighting. On 12 February, Buller gave the orders to launch the fourth – and presumably final – attempt to relieve Ladysmith. The men did not need to be urged; they were still ‘romping, raving mad to finish this wretched business’, in Sergeant Galley’s words. As for Buller and the key to Ladysmith, ‘I sincerely hope he’ll find the door and use it and stop trying to get over the wall.’9
The strange bond that Buller, the Devonshire aristocrat, had built up between himself and the common soldiers may have been frayed by mishaps – and mistakes. But when the strain came, the bond still held. They were sorry for themselves; they were also sorry for him. At heart, they believed that Buller had been given a near-impossible task. ‘Buller didn’t have the men to do the job…. Lord Roberts took all the men over to the Orange River side. ’10 So the tape-recorded voices of Boer War veterans, anxious to reco
rd their loyalty to Buller more than half a century after his death. And Winston Churchill gave his sincere opinion at the time (though he changed it later): ‘A great deal is incomprehensible, but it may be safely said that if Sir Redvers cannot relieve Ladysmith with his present force we do not know of any other officer in the British service who would be likely to succeed.’11
Among the officers themselves, many disagreed. Already, after Spion Kop, Bron Herbert, The Times correspondent, had written home to his father, Buller’s cousin, to say that people were losing confidence in Redvers. ‘He’s splendidly brave and doesn’t shrink from accepting the full responsibility for his disasters when as at Colenso they were greatly due to other people. But even General Lyttelton who is looked upon as the soundest brigadier here said to me after Spion Kop: “My faith in Buller is shattered.” Don’t tell anyone this.’12
Herbert had failed to get a single proper interview with Buller and had been taken under the wing of Lyttelton, charming, ambitious, and Buller’s leading detractor. Still, Herbert believed that the task given to Buller was impossible.13 And even Lyttelton agreed that Buller would have needed twice as many troops to have a real chance.14 Lyttelton’s Brigade Major, Henry Wilson (later the famous Field-Marshal), put it this way in his diary after the retreat from Vaal Krantz: ‘Poor Sir R.B., it must be bitter work for him, and they won’t like it at home, but Buller is right. I am certain in my own mind that if we pushed on here we would probably have to lay down our arms. It’s quite impossible with 15,000 men to turn 8, 10 or 12,000 men out of lines and lines of entrenchments. We should have at least 50,000.’15
The Boer War Page 54