It was Buller’s battle for Spion Kop that had set the pendulum of hope and despair swinging most violently.65 The chief vantage points of the town – Convent Ridge, Observation Hill, Wagon Hill – commanded a tantalizing view over the shoulders of the surrounding hills, rather like the oblique view from the wings of a stage. The actors at the front of the stage, Buller and his army, were audible but invisible. ‘Hear fighting going on,’ Gunner Netley wrote on 17 January. ‘I suppose it is our relief column fighting its way through.’66 ‘Buller ought to have done great things,’ said Captain Steavenson two days later, ‘by the noise he has been making with his guns day and night.’67’ On the 23rd, Gunner Netley wrote, ‘In the evening we saw our relief column’s searchlight about 25 miles away – am every moment expecting relief.’68 Buller’s balloon, circling up from behind Zwart Kop, looked ‘hardly bigger than a vulture’, according to Nevinson, watching it against the pale blue of the Drakensberg precipices. On the 24th, Nevinson and other correspondents climbed Observation Hill, for the umpteenth time that week, to watch the bombardment of Spion Kop and the ridges on either side. They could see shells bursting among Boer tents at the foot of the hill – not only brown spouts of earth from long-range naval guns, but white puff-balls of shrapnel fire, clearly from British field-guns close behind the ridge. In the afternoon, Nevinson, who had moved to Wagon Hill, saw what he realized were British soldiers – ‘a series of black points’ in extended formation, creeping up to the summit of Spion Kop.69 Other correspondents saw still more heart-warming sights: Boers fleeing for their lives, wagon-loads of fugitives, and ambulances loaded with Boer wounded.70
Next day there was a strange calm on Spion Kop. It was misty at first; then the sun broke through, but there was no reassuring flash of the heliograph. Through telescopes, people saw those black points again, and this time they seemed to be digging trenches, unopposed. ‘We hardly know what to think,’ wrote Nevinson. By afternoon the pessimists began to gain strength. And, next day, no one could deny what it all meant. The Boers’ white tents were back on Spion Kop.71
Buller’s reverses at Spion Kop and Vaal Krantz, and White’s own pessimism, did, however, have one unexpectedly good result. White decided to abandon the pretence that Ladysmith was a ‘field force’ – a mobile striking force – and accept that it was a beleaguered garrison. It may seem odd that after a hundred days of siege, White had not accepted this somewhat obvious fact before. But sieges – and defeats – can have an odd effect on people’s psychology. White had clung to the idea that he could redeem the disasters of Mournful Monday by some great feat of arms. Hence all the underlying mistakes of the siege such as the failure to extend the perimeter to include Bulwana, and the failure to send away the cavalry. Hence, too, the blunders during the siege: above all, the extraordinary decision to go on feeding cavalry horses with mealies, that could be the largest single source of foodstuff for the garrison.72
Rawlinson himself was relieved to learn of this change of heart in his chief on 30 January, psychologically and strategically the turning-point of the whole siege. Rawlinson and General Hunter had always believed that to abandon their sick and wounded and try to cut their way out of Ladysmith would be a reckless and futile act. The chief drew Rawly aside after Buller’s third reverse and told him:
He had decided to stop the issue of mealie meal to all horses and to reserve it for the men, that he had settled in his own mind that the next attempt of Buller’s at Bulwana [the fourth attempt to relieve Ladysmith] could not be successful and that we should have to stick it out here as long as our provisions lasted – He has given up the idea of the flying column and the mobile artillery – I am very glad he has at last come to the conclusion which to my mind has been palpable from the beginning that Ladysmith must depend on her food and her defences that her garrison must stick to their sick and wounded and that to march out before our guns and Buller’s can cross their fires is courting disaster.73
White’s new policy had two immediate and dramatic effects on the garrison’s own food supply. The remaining stock of mealies – the balance of the one million pounds in stock in November – could be used for the men’s rations. And most of the horses themselves could be turned into men’s rations.74 Of course, the cavalry brigade set up an outcry: not so much at having to eat their horses as at having to fight on a level with the infantry. But who could deny the compelling arithmetic of these new arrangements? Keep the cavalry brigade, and the garrison would have had to surrender by mid-February. Dismount it, and they could hang on till at least mid-March, perhaps even April.75
The garrison munched their tough new rations with enthusiasm. ‘We get a capital horse steak every day,’ wrote Captain Gough in his diary, ‘which I tuck into like the deuce. Have not tasted vegetables of any kind for about two months.’76 Captain Steavenson actually preferred the new steaks to the previous meat ration: ‘Nothing can be as tough as old T.O.’ (trek ox).77 There was not only horse meat on the menu. In the railway workshops, Lieutenant McNalty, Army Service Corps, set up an ingenious factory for making an equestrian version of Bovril, called ‘Superior Ladysmith Chevril’. There was a picture of a train with the text ‘Iron Horse’ on the label, with the still more ominous word, ‘Resurgam’. But, pungent as it was, most people managed to keep it down.78 The mealie bread was no worse than the cast-iron biscuits that were the staple bread-stuff of the siege.
Unfortunately for the garrison, White had decided not only to sacrifice the horses and make mealies available for the men, but to cut the men’s rations. By doing so, he could spin out food supplies right into April. The new basic ration consisted of one pound of horse meat, but only half a pound of biscuits or mealie-bread, one ounce of sugar, and 1/16 ounce of tea.79 This cast a gloom on everyone. ‘They are making preparations,’ said Captain Steavenson on 30 January, ‘for the food to last 42 days more. This sounds hopeless.’80
Morale reached bottom ten days later, when White reduced the ration still further, after Buller’s failure at Vaal Krantz. ‘We expect to be here for another three weeks,’ wrote Steavenson on 10 February, ‘then Buller or starvation.’81 But, of course, there were other cheerful prospects as well as starvation: above all, death by disease.
Typhoid and dysentery, and the other traditional diseases of poor diet and worse hygiene, now did the Boers’ work for them. Every week since November, the death-toll from disease had risen, till by January it had reached the rate of ten to twenty a day at Intombi, the British-run hospital camp in no-man’s-land beyond D Section of the perimeter. Every day, the hospital trains, carrying white flags, steamed out there with new carriage-loads of victims; and the trains steamed back again empty. Civilians told alarming rumours about Intombi, rumours that it was hard to confirm or deny, as, by the original agreement with Joubert, no civilian was to return once he had left for Intombi. ‘I hear that men sleep on sacks placed on the ground. What horrors must be out there!’ wrote Gilbert, a local schoolmaster. ‘People say there’s a big trench and as fast as a person dies he is put in with a little sand sprinkled over him.’82 A Natal volunteer who had actually returned from Intombi was hardly more reassuring. ‘They sent me into a tent in the field hospital where there were forty soldiers and nearly killed me outright. The hospital had been intended for three hundred at first and there were fourteen hundred in it when I was there and fifteen nurses to look after them. Food and medicine were both very short and the sun came through the tent like a ball of fire. The place was a perfect hell on earth What it must be now [15 January] with two thousand out there I dread to think.’83
How bad, in fact, were the medical arrangements during the siege? There were three field hospitals, the 11th, 18th and 24th, inside the town of Ladysmith, in addition to the large hospital out at Intombi. The statistics, if nothing else, were excellently looked after. Together, these hospitals handled a total of 10,688 cases – out of 13,500 soldiers – during the four months between November and the end of February; 551 people died of disease
in that period.84 During these latter two months, when the typhoid epidemic raged, conditions were bound to be bad. They also proved much worse than they need have been. Intombi was deliberately starved of medicines and medical comforts. All typhoid patients were supposed to go there. No wonder any sick man who could manage it elected to stay in one of the hospitals in Ladysmith. And, to prevent the Press seeing too much for themselves, it was decided that when a journalist was struck down by fever (as Nevinson was struck down in early February), he should be allowed to stay in the town.85
Even in the hospitals inside Ladysmith, conditions were needlessly bad. At the centre of this scandal was the man in overall charge of the garrison’s health, Colonel Exham, the Principal Medical Officer. There is a very detailed account of the siege, kept by Major Donegan, in charge of the 18th Field Hospital, which fully documents the case against Exham. In January, he had verbally instructed Donegan to cut off all medical comforts to the sick men in the 18th Field Hospital: that is, to stop even the pitifully small allowances of sago and arrowroot and brandy that he had been allowed to distribute. Donegan, of course, protested. The order was fantastic. Could he have it in writing? ‘You will be removed from charge of your hospital if you ask for orders again,’ was Exham’s reply. Donegan believed Exham’s motives for deliberately starving the men were as follows: ‘All he cares about is to have some medicines and medical comforts when the relief column comes in & then pretend he made a most splendid [defence] whereas in reality he is leaving the men [to] starve at present & does not care. As can be seen … all the P.M.O. cares about is looks and appearances.’86
This was one of Exham’s odder motives: to be able to display a neat list of stores on hand when the siege ended. At the same time, by cutting off supplies to the soldiers, Exham was able to divert them to his cronies among the civilians, journalists and the more influential officers. Donegan was forced by Exham to ‘indent’ for pounds of sago and numerous bottles of brandy which were then collected by civilians, although it appeared from the official records that they had actually been used by the 18th Field Hospital.87
On 28 January, Donegan had a characteristic exchange with Exham, which he recorded in order to make a formal complaint to a senior officer:
PMO: I have been around your hospital three or four times myself and the place does not look tidy.
Donegan: It’s always clean when I go round.
PMO: It’s not tidy.
Donegan: You can’t expect the place with 40 dysentery cases to be always like a new pin.
PMO: The men’s clothes were not in bundles neatly under their beds & their boots anyhow.
Donegan: You really can’t expect otherwise.
PMO: Gen. Buller will be here in a day or two & he will look into all these things.
Donegan: He is more likely to ask the men if they get enough to eat.
PMO: They do.
Donegan: You forget, sir, that you ordered me to issue no medical comforts to patients in hospital but to give them to civilians on your chit.88
‘God almighty!’ said Donegan, after one of these interviews. ‘We have four doctors for 120 patients scattered over three churches and thirty-six tents, and the PMO only worries whether the men’s clothes are neatly folded, or if their boots are in line. Why can’t the HQ staff intervene?’89
But Sir George White did not even visit the hospitals. Instead, he blamed Hunter, the Chief of Staff, if he tried to make these inspections; he called it trying to usurp his authority. ‘Hunter has I am glad to say gone round hospitals this morning,’ wrote Rawlinson on 11 February, ‘but the chief gets so jealous of him that he hardly dare do much in this way.’90 Like the PMO, White had retreated into a world of his own during the siege, and that world grew ever more distant from reality. He was still talking of the flying column, although it was now over a month since he had agreed that the horses should be eaten. The men could barely march five miles. No matter. They would march out at the end, with flags flying. If he died, his death would help redeem the humiliations of the siege. He would never be taken prisoner.91
Each day that last week of February, Buller’s guns sounded closer. Each evening, he heliographed to confirm that, though it was slow going, he was making progress. One by one, the pessimists in the Ladysmith garrison allowed themselves to be convinced – or half-convinced – of the possibility of relief. Among the ordinary soldiers, there was a dramatic change of morale on 22 February, when White restored full rations of bread: one pound of mealie bread or biscuit.92 As the pendulum swung back for the fourth time, the woe-begone, helpless look that Rawlinson had seen in the soldiers’ eyes, began to give way to the wan smile. ‘We just lie here,’ said one of the starving typhoid patients at Intombi, ‘and think of all the good tuck ahead.’93
White remained deeply pessimistic, and continued to talk of his flying column. On 27 February – actually the day of Buller’s culminating battle – he ordered the men to be put on half-rations once again.94 He was girding on his sword, the General Gordon of Ladysmith, for the Last Stand.
CHAPTER 30
The Handshake
Across the Tugela,
27 February-15 March 1900
‘However even sinners are allowed their relaxation, and I must confess I did enjoy the getting in here [after] 15 days fighting with only one check, and 72 hours without a break was indeed excitement for a combative man, and the beauty of it was that I felt all through I had got them this time and was going to win …’
Sir Redvers Buller to Sir Arthur Bigge, 15 March 1900
It was 27 February – Majuba Day. A triumphant clear-the-line telegram from Roberts to Buller, announcing Cronje’s capture.1 Now for the double.
But how wretchedly slow was Buller’s advance. It was already five days since his brigades had tramped across the pontoon bridge east of Colenso, and begun to batter their way north-eastwards along the railway corridor between Botha’s ramparts and the Tugela. By the night of the 22nd, Wynne’s Lancashire Brigade had cut out a solid hand-hold on the first pair of green hills, now called ‘Horse-Shoe Hill’ and ‘Wynne’s Hill’. Next day, Hart’s Irish Brigade had established a precarious foothold at ‘Hart’s Hill’ in the part of the corridor a mile farther along. The Boers clung to their line of ramparts. Beyond Hart’s Hill, the last two miles of the corridor to the great Ladysmith plain were barred. It seemed only too reminiscent of Spion Kop and Vaal Krantz: days of hard pounding and a position, dearly bought, astride the apparent crest line; then, out of the mind-battering noise and confusion, one solid, irrefutable fact: the real crest line was, as usual, still in the hands of the Boers. And somehow there was never enough elbow-room to exploit the two great British advantages: their four-to-one superiority in numbers, and their ten-to-one superiority in artillery.2
Hart’s Hill had given the bloodiest lesson of this sort. The attack was from across the river, supported by long-range guns, but they were too distant to be effective. About an hour before dusk on the 23rd, John Atkins saw the thin brown line of Hart’s Irish battalions clambering up, terrace by terrace, rock by rock, to storm the ridge. Every tooth in the jagged stone trenches on the summit showed up hard and black in the garish evening light, and from behind the teeth emerged the enemy. ‘And now followed the most frantic battle-piece that I have ever seen. Night soon snatched it away, but for the time it lasted it was a frenzy, a nightmare. Boer heads and elbows shot up and down; the defenders were aiming, firing, ducking; and all the trenches danced madly against the sky….’3
Atkins, watching through field-glasses from nearly two miles away, could only imagine the frenzy and the nightmare. Lieutenant Henry Jourdain, leading D Company of the Connaught Rangers, was in the thick of it. His account fits into what else we know of the battle. Hart’s failure was not only due to the usual basic cause – topography that was unequivocally pro-Boer, and so frustrated the use of British artillery – but also to the usual unfortunate delays, and to Hart’s still more characteristic impatience.
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‘Hart is a dangerous lunatic,’ wrote Lyttelton;4 it was perhaps less of an exaggeration than most of Lyttelton’s comments. Hart had continued to play up to his nickname of ‘General No-Bobs’, refusing to duck his head when shells came over, and deliberately exposing himself to rifle fire as he rode along on his charger. Perhaps this impressed his men. What did not impress them was that, just as at Colenso, they had to march in Aldershot order – in columns of fours – in full view of the enemy’s firing-line on the hills. A single shell crashed down on sixteen men of E Company, spraying Jourdain, whose company was just behind, with mud and stones. ‘Steady, Rangers, you’ll get used to it.’ Hart ordered the men to march on with eyes front, leaving seven men smashed and dying at either side of the track.5
Jourdain’s battalion, the Connaughts, tramped on doggedly behind the Inniskillings along the shot-spattered corridor that led towards Hart’s Hill. He was suffering from dysentery, like many of the men, and had had no sleep for two nights; the sun beat down; there were endless hold-ups. The least dangerous course seemed to be to follow a winding path alongside the Tugela, although the water hissed and bubbled with long-range Mauser fire. They passed one spot by the river in which there were six dead Inniskillings, and you had to trudge knee deep in mud with the white faces of these men staring up at you, while the bullets whistled overhead.6
A few yards beyond, they had to cross a swollen stream by way of a sixty-foot-long railway bridge. The Boers had got the range exactly. There was a string of pom-pom shells, and Mauser bullets rattled against the iron latticework like the hammering of a team of riveters. Eventually, Jourdain’s company reached a sheltered hollow below Hart’s Hill itself, where they found an abandoned Boer laager. The air was rank with the smell of dead horses and mules, killed by British shell fire,’ and of two railway trucks loaded with food and (incongruously) fresh trousers for the burghers – tweed trousers made in Britain. But there was no time for food or looting. The Connaughts were late already. Ahead, the helmets of the Inniskillings flickered and vanished as the men clambered up through the slimy red rocks and jungle growth of aloe and mimosa towards the skyline.7
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