Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (7 page)

First the Boers, investing the three railway towns, pushed deep into Cape Colony, hoping that the Boers living there under British rule, the ‘Cape Dutch’, would join their cause in rebellion. The British, when they had assembled their expeditionary force, responded with two main counter-attacks: out of Natal to relieve Ladysmith, through the Orange Free State to relieve Kimberley, where
Rhodes was shut up in his own diamond fields, and Mafeking. Both these thrusts, which were meant to converge upon Pretoria, disastrously failed. After a succession of defeats which became known as Black Week, 1899, Buller was replaced as Commander-in-Chief by the aged and adored Lord Roberts of Kandahar. With him as Chief of Staff there inevitably arrived, fresh from his Governor-Generalship of the Sudan, Lord Kitchener of Khartoum, by now easily the most imperial of all the imperial soldiers.

In the New Year Roberts opened the second phase of the war with a massive and skilful offensive directly up the railway line to Pretoria itself. Bloemfontein, Johannesburg and Pretoria were all captured, the three railway towns were relieved, the two republics were officially annexed to the British Empire and Kruger fled to Europe.
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Ten thousand British soldiers sang Kipling’s
Recessional
—‘Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet!’—in a victory ceremony outside the Volksrad, the Parliament of the Transvaal.
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The war seemed to be over; but instead the Boers transformed it into a protracted guerilla campaign, in which the huge British armies, repeatedly reinforced, were harassed by roaming, self-supporting commandos, while raiding columns struck deep into Cape Colony. Kitchener, assuming the command from Roberts, beat them in the end only by ruthless and laborious methods of attrition, burning their farms, herding their women and children into detention camps, and criss-crossing the entire countryside with interconnecting blockhouses.

When at last the Boers surrendered, in May 1902, 20,000 commandos were still in the field, but both sides were exhausted and embittered. The British had suffered terribly from heat and disease: of their 22,000 deaths, two-thirds were from cholera and enteric fever. The Boer guerillas ended the war half-starved and virtually destitute, and their families were decimated by the appalling conditions of Kitchener’s detention camps: 24,000 Boers died in the war, but 20,000 of them were women and children. Before the war was over Buller’s expeditionary force of 85,000 men, sailing out so confidently to their victory by Christmas, numbered 450,000 men, the largest British Army ever sent overseas.

Such were the bare bones of it: but no military summary can do justice to this lacerating and ironic war, fought against a magnificent backdrop of veld and mountain, by enemies whose dislike was often turned to admiration, and whose hostile causes were full of paradox. The Boer War came to be called ‘the last of the gentlemen’s wars’. This is because it was fought, in its first stages anyway, to a set of conventions, based upon the Christian ethic but shaped too by the physical and historical setting. These were white men fighting, and they were watched in all their sieges and manoeuvrings by the silent black mass of the indigenes.

To the Boers, though, the war was a climax and an ultimate challenge. To the British it was only another stage in the long march of Empire. During a local armistice on the Tugela River in February, 1900, while the dead and wounded were being recovered from the battlefield, a Boer soldier engaged a British officer in conversation. ‘We’ve all been having a rough time’, he remarked. ‘Yes, I suppose so,’ replied the other, ‘but for us of course it’s nothing. This is what we’re paid for. This is the life we always lead—you understand?’

‘Great God’, simply said the Boer.

Let us peer through our field-glasses (Dollond and Aitchison, By Appointment to the Duke of Cambridge), at four of the most significant Boer War battle-grounds—each offering its own dramatic unity, each to be immortalized in legend.

Look first at Spion Kop. There it stands in our lenses now, a bulky flat-topped hill above the Tugela, in northern Natal: grander and more imposing than its neighbours along the ridge, bare, silent, and looking much higher than its 1,500 feet. On a brilliant summer day in South Africa nowhere could be more suggestive of heroic purposes—the shadows slowly moving along the flank of the Hill, the brown Tugela winding at its feet, the doves cooing gently among the shrubby trees, the scent of flowers and dry grass, the rolling mass of uplands stretching away eastward into Zululand, westward to the great massif of the Drakensberg. Here and there the beehive kraals of the black people are scattered around the landscape, but there is no sign of human life on the mountain: only the buck and the wild turkey live up there, and the bees hum among the mimosa.

General Buller, leading his southern army to the relief of Ladysmith in the last week of January, 1900, was persuaded that this hill was the key to the beleaguered town, twenty miles beyond. His reasons were vague, his plans unformulated, but handing over executive command to his subordinates, he set up his headquarters on the south side of the river, and ordered an assault. British maps of the area were rudimentary—five miles to the inch—and nobody really knew what shape the mountain was, or what lay immediately beyond it: nevertheless on the night of January 23 an assault column climbed a steep spur to the summit, and overwhelming a small Boer picket up there, raised three cheers in the darkness and dug itself in as best it could in the sloping stony plateau at the top.

A heavy mist hung around, blanketing everything in damp obscurity, but so far as they could tell the British were masters of the mountain: they settled uncomfortably in their shallow trenches to await orders and reinforcements from below. When the sun came up, though, and the mist cleared, they found to their horror that Spion Kop was not as they supposed. The small green triangle of the summit, perhaps an acre of gently sloping grass, was overlooked by two outlying knolls, and from these positions, as soon as the light broke, a terrible point-blank rifle-fire was opened upon the crouching soldiers. Boer artillery soon found the range, too, and fired pom-pom
and high-explosive shells almost without pause into the British positions. There was virtually no cover on the plateau, only the odd boulder and hummock, so the British were entirely exposed. They had taken the mountain indeed, but they were trapped upon it.

Spion Kop was one of the most cruelly confined of all battles. Some 2,000 British soldiers were packed within a perimeter about a quarter of a mile round, without water and, as the day wore on, in blazing heat. They could scarcely move at all. The moment anything stirred, a head, a hand, a rifle, a marksman’s bullet was there from the Boer positions north, east and west of them. Time and again the Boers pressed upon the plateau, at one end of the line or the other, to be beaten desperately back, but all the British could do was hang on—for them there was no hope of advance or retreat while daylight lasted.

It was like a high proscenium. Buller’s entire army, massed in the valley below, could see the smoke and the shell-bursts far above, and through binoculars could even make out the figures of soldiers, crouched or stumbling through the shell-fumes, but the performance was allowed to run its course. Buller wavered, in his command post across the river: orders were muddled, mislaid, misinterpreted; at one time three different commanders all believed themselves to be in command on the hill; when an enterprising cavalry brigadier mounted a diversionary attack along the ridge, he was testily recalled and reprimanded. Twice reinforcements were ordered up the mountain, mule-trains took ammunition up, and through the day a straggle of individual officers, war correspondents and stretcher-bearers clambered like pilgrims up the summit track, its surface scratched and scored now by the bootnails of the soldiers. But nothing essentially happened. Pinned to their ground, exhausted by desperate attacks and counter-attacks, the British on Spion Kop simply sweated and died through the long day, holding an objective that had no meaning.

Boers and Britons were only a few yards apart up there, and the battle sometimes degenerated into rough-house, the men falling upon each other with rifle-butts, bayonets, boulders and even fists. One group of Lancashire Fusiliers, holding white handkerchiefs, rose from their trench to surrender. Others scrambled demoralized
over the rim of the plateau, and wandered sheep-like in irresolute groups here and there across the mountain flanks. The rest fought gamely but helplessly on, and by evening their bodies were toppled one on another in their trenches, an obscene pile of boots, sun-helmets and khaki serge, twisted limbs and shattered faces. Half the force was killed and wounded, and the survivors fought on in a daze. When darkness fell, and the Boer fire ended, the senior surviving officer on the summit, Colonel A. W. Thorneycroft, declared that he and his men would fight no more—no argument would persuade him to spend another day on the summit: and so, trudging down again through the darkness with his long line of wounded, exhausted and appalled soldiers, on his own initiative he ended this squalid and futile engagement. The Boers had also withdrawn as the light failed, many of them too swearing that they would never go back, and it never occurred to them that the battle of Spion Kop had been won: but when in the small hours some of them climbed up again to look for a comrade’s body, they found to their astonishment that the British had gone, and the mountain, littered with its dead and debris, stood deserted once more in the mist.

For a very different battlefield, look at Magersfontein, on the western front, a low and undramatic cluster of hills which stood astride General Lord Methuen’s route to the relief of Kimberley. In December 1899 the British, pushing the Boers with difficulty across the Modder River, reached the wide flat plain before this modest redoubt. As Spion Kop was to Ladysmith, Magersfontein was to Kimberley: only a few miles beyond it lay, as the whole army knew, the beleaguered diamond town and the chance of glory. The Boers held Magersfontein in strength: but so wide was the landscape all around, so dun and featureless the plain, relieved only by the shine of water in a hollow here and there, or a bumpy tree-less kopje, that from a distance the whole veld might have been deserted. Behind, on the railway line, a plume of black smoke marked the arrival of a British supply train, following the army up from the Cape, and all around the station at Modder River was the dust and bustle of an
army on the move. In front, on the night of December 10, 1899, the veld was motionless.

One of the most famous fighting units of the British Army, the Highland Brigade, was ordered to lead the assault on Magersfontein, commanded by one of the most famous of its fighting generals—‘Andy’ Wauchope of Niddrie, Midlothian, whose gingery Scots face we last glimpsed beside the ruins of the Khartoum Residency. First, though, the ridge was heavily bombarded—two hours of shelling, by thirty-one guns, so overwhelming that Methuen himself thought nobody on Magersfontein could have lived through it. Then at midnight the kilted and bearded soldiers set out, led by the Black Watch. They were marshalled with guide ropes, and moved to a compass bearing, advancing as if blindfold, bayonets fixed, across the five miles of scrubby rough ground towards the ridge. It was a very black, wet night, with a driving rain from the north-west, thunder and flashes of lightning: in no time at all they were soaked to the skin, and the ground was turned to mud under their feet. None of the men had been told what they were going to do: they simply marched as always into the stormy night, led by Wauchope with an old claymore.

Beyond the ridge, playing on the low cloud, the violet shaft of a searchlight from Kimberley beckoned them on to battle. They moved in a dense square of ninety lines, 4,000 men in all, clutching each other’s clothing to keep contact, tripping often over boulders or ant-heaps, squelching in muddy pools, catching their kilts on thorn-bushes. Often they stopped while their guides checked their compasses: and after three hours, still in dense close order, as the storm passed and the day began to break, half a mile before them they could make out the dim shape of Magersfontein. It was time to deploy the brigade, the guiding officer whispered to Wauchope—‘this is as far as it is safe to go.’ The general disagreed. He was afraid the troops would lose themselves. ‘I think we’ll go a little further’, he said.

So a little further they went, shoulder to shoulder: and so, just as Wauchope did give the order to deploy, and the Black Watch was struggling through an especially awkward patch of mimosa thorn, the Highland Brigade was suddenly blasted by the most violent
fusillade of rifle-fire any British soldiers had ever experienced. The ground in front of them seemed ablaze with flame—‘lit up’, one Scottish sergeant said, ‘as if someone had turned on a million electric lights’. Most of the fire came not from the ridge at all, but from a continuous line of trenches concealed and unsuspected at its foot. This was something new to the British, something their traditions and disciplines did not allow for, and for a few seconds the soldiers simply stood there, stunned with shock and deafened by the noise, before throwing themselves to the ground.

Wauchope was killed almost at once, with eighteen of his officers. Some of their soldiers turned in the half-light and ran, knocking over their own officers, scrambling back through the scrub and puddles towards Modder River and safety. One group of men did find a gap in the Boer line, and began to climb the ridge, but they were caught between the Boers and their own artillery, and those who did not die were taken prisoner. The rest lay where they were: and so the morning broke, and the day wore on, with the Highland Brigade pinned helplessly to their ground before the Boer trenches, ordered only to ‘hold on till nightfall’.

The sun blazed down, and hour after hour the soldiers lay there. They had not eaten since noon the day before. Other troops went forward, and fighting continued in confusion all day. Guns were deployed, cavalry tried to turn the Boer flank, even the pipers went into action: but at last the Scottish soldiers broke, and getting to their feet spontaneously but with a strange deliberateness, almost as if they had been given an order, turned their backs on the enemy and ran—‘for all their worth,’ as an eyewitness said, ‘officers running about with revolvers in their hands threatening to shoot them, urging on some, kicking on others, staff officers galloping about giving incoherent and impracticable orders….’ By sunset it was all over, and the horse-drawn ambulances went out under a brilliant moon to pick up the wounded still left lying in the veld. The British never tried to take the ridge again, and when the time came to renew the advance, went another way.