The Covenant (125 page)

Saltwood was astonished by what happened next; it was as if a magician had waved a military wand, transforming this big, bumbling man into a tough-minded soldier. Buller stiffened, and with the riding crop he kept in his quarters, indicated a top-secret binder: “I have me orders. Before I left London the wizards planned me entire campaign. Spelled out everything I was to do.” He rapped the folder
twice, not arrogantly, but in a gesture of dismissal: “And every plan they made was wrong. It doesn’t apply, not with those damned Boers … My word, they can move fast, those Boers.”

“What are you going to do, sir?”

Buller rose, moved about his suite, then stopped and stared out the window at the confusing land he was supposed to conquer. Turning abruptly to face his new assistant, he said, “Prepare to spend a long time in the field. I’ve got to do exactly the opposite of what they order.” He shoved the War Office directives aside. “I’m splitting me troops. Half to Kimberley to rescue them up there. You and I will be going to Ladysmith.”

He made this bold move to inspire the troops, but as a member of the clique opposed to him said, “He did inspire the troops, but the wrong ones.” And in London a wag circulated the rumor that the Boer high command had issued an order: “Anyone who shoots General Buller will be court-martialed. He’s our strongest weapon.”

Frank Saltwood, watching closely every move he made, believed at first that the critics and the comics were correct. Redvers Buller was an ass.

The Tugela River is that lovely stream which marked the southern limit of King Shaka’s Zululand, and along which Piet Retief’s people had waited while he and his men marched to their death at Dingane’s Kraal. When these waiting women and children were slaughtered a few days later, their blood ran into the Tugela. Now, at a small hill far upstream, Spion Kop (Lookout Hill), General Redvers Buller was about to conduct a campaign which suggested that the German observer had been correct when he added to his first report: “When you first meet Buller you instinctively like him. A real soldier. But when you study what he actually does in battle, you shudder.”

The town of Ladysmith was still under siege. Resolute Englishmen, lacking food, medicine, fire power, horses and sleep, protected the town against encircling forces. All England, which received telegrams direct from the town, wanted these brave defenders rescued, so when General Buller joined his massive army below the Tugela, he found himself less than fifteen miles from Ladysmith, with overwhelming superiority, twenty-one thousand against forty-five hundred, and he dispatched an unfortunate heliographed message to the besieged troops: “Will rescue you within five days.”

There were two difficulties: he had to cross the river, and once that was done, his men would have to run a gauntlet through a chain of small hills. As the German observer reported later: “He might have accomplished either of these tasks if faced alone, but to require him to meet both of them at once posed a problem so complex that he seemed quite unable to grapple with it.”

Buller sat on the south side of the Tugela for five days, pondering the difficulties, finally telling Saltwood, “A frontal attack would be quite impossible. Never break through there, eh, Frank? We face a long, hard fight.”

“You said in England that it would be over before you got here.”

“Would have been, if the other chaps had done their job. Now we’ve got to mop up.”

He worked night after night, going over and over his plans, but after he had swilled most of a bottle of Trianon, his eyes, already almost touching at the corners, seemed to come together, at which times he would drift away from battlefield problems and discourse on his theories of parade-ground military combat: “Keep the shoulders touching, move forward in line, don’t fire too soon, and the ruddy bastards will never stand up against an English march.”

“With the Boers, it’s mostly cavalry, sir,” Saltwood reminded him.

“Don’t like the cavalry. Never know where the devils will be going next. Give me foot soldiers every time.”

Sometimes late at night, when he was well under, he would grow sentimental: “Worst thing ever happened to the English soldier, they put him in this damned olive-drab. Said it made him less a target. I say it killed his spirit. In Egypt you had six hundred gallant lads in bright red, marching in the sun. By gad, it struck terror, that’s what it did. It struck terror.”

He never referred to his own bravery, which had been considerable, in all theaters of war, but if someone pressed him about his V. C., he would say, “There’s a job to be done, you press forward. No need to give a man medals. That’s his job.”

After all his sound deliberations on the folly of a frontal assault on a river and a chain of hills, General Buller changed his mind on the eve of battle and elected to do precisely that. “We’ll roll back the Boers and lift the siege of Ladysmith,” he told Saltwood triumphantly, and as if the deed were done, he sent another heliogram assuring the defenders that he would be there within five days—with plenty of food.

With a shockingly inadequate map of the area and incomplete scouting sorties, he threw his men against the Boers, who stayed north of the river and picked them off in isolated batches. His fifteen-pounders, inspirited by the idea of the daring dash into the face of an enemy, rashly moved far ahead of their supporting infantry and were isolated. Rescue attempts failed and the guns were captured by the enemy, a loss of more than half the army’s field artillery. By nightfall one hundred and forty English soldiers were killed, to the Boers’ forty, and more than a thousand were wounded or missing. In dismay and confusion, General Buller ordered his first retreat from the Tugela and afterward dispatched one of the more shameful telegrams of military history.

Ordering the heliographer to his tent, he scribbled a message, which Saltwood begged him not to send: “It will dash the hopes of the Ladysmith defenders, sir.”

“They’re soldiers. They’ve got to know the worst.”

“But let it come upon them slowly, I beg you. Not from their own commander-in-chief.”

“Send the message!” Buller stormed, as if he were driven to prove himself an ass before the entire world, and it was sent, from an addled commander to a very brave man striving to defend a difficult position:

A commanding general had advised one of his bravest subordinates to surrender while there was still a fighting chance to hold on. Buller himself, after a lengthy effort to pull his troops together, tried to ford the Tugela again and wound up in a second confused retreat. In desperation he told Saltwood, “There must be a way to cross that river. I’ll think of something.”

It was imperative that he do so, for the general commanding the defenses at Ladysmith had refused to surrender, and it was obligatory that Buller try once more to rescue him. Instead, in his report to London he complained that he had been repulsed at the Tugela because
the Boers outnumbered him: “They had eighty thousand in the field against me.” To this, London replied acidly: “Suggest you check population of total Boer republics, men, women and children.”

The rebuff infuriated Buller: “Damnit, Saltwood, back there they don’t know these Boers. What I tried to tell them is that we’re not fighting an army. We’re fighting a nation. Men, women and children.”

With Buller ensnared, General de Groot sought permission to lead his commando on a wide sweep east of Ladysmith and deep into Natal: “We can chop up the English supply lines.”

Permission was refused, and some of the finest horsemen in the world were held stationary to fight as unneeded foot soldiers. At the two battles of the Tugela they had conducted themselves with dignity, fighting from trenches and behind boulders, but slowly their numbers were eroding. From the original two hundred and sixty-nine, they had lost one hundred, and the waiting so irritated those remaining that more had simply gone home, leaving the commando a mere one hundred and fifty-one. De Groot was aware that unless they soon enjoyed some kind of success, even that number must diminish, and then he would be in serious trouble.

Therefore, when Christmas came, with all Boer troops still inactive, ten more Venloo men growled, “To hell with this,” and returned home to tend their farms. De Groot was now reduced to one hundred and forty-one disconsolate men, but he was enormously encouraged when three young fellows of a different commando reported one day with the simple statement: “Our fathers fought with you at Majuba. We’d like to join you.” It would be additions like these that would keep De Groot’s commando up to strength for the major battles that lay ahead.

General Buller had been as humiliated as any general in history. His heliogram advising Ladysmith to surrender because he could think of no quick way to rescue it had been circulated to the cabinet, causing such a scandal that the War Office had to take action, and they had deprived him of the supreme command, handing it to an extraordinary man, Lord Roberts of Kandahar, approaching seventy, the hero of Afghanistan, five feet four inches tall, one hundred and twenty-three pounds in weight and blind in one eye. His chief-of-staff would be Lord Kitchener of Khartoum, and it was agreed that these two would really fight the Boers, while Good Old Buller could
be left off to one side, wrestling with the Tugela River, which he had now failed twice to cross.

To compound his problems, the War Office had given him as second in command a general whom he positively detested and to whom he preferred not to speak. For Sir Charles Warren, nearing sixty, this would have to be his last command, and unless he performed with some brilliance, he could hope for no further honors, which probably did not worry him, for he had other loves, especially archaeology and the secrets of Jerusalem. He had also made an abortive run for Parliament and a more successful one for head of the London constabulary, a post he held for three years, losing it when he failed to uncover the mystery of the century: the identity of Jack the Ripper. Quietly he moved back to the army, and when war broke out he reminded everyone that he had seen much service in South Africa, had helped solve the ticklish question of who owned the diamond mines, and “knew a thing or two about the Boers.”

Warren despised Buller, holding him to be an ass, but it was nevertheless essential that he keep close to the old general because Warren carried in his pocket a most dangerous piece of paper: it was called “a Dormant Commission,” and it stated that if anything should happen to Buller, or if he should fall apart, as seemed likely, Warren was to assume command. Consequently, it was in Warren’s interest to see that Buller did fail.

Relieved of responsibility for the other fronts in South Africa, General Buller was free to direct all his attention to the Tugela River, and as he rode back and forth along its southern shore, pondering how best to reach the northern, he began to see that his previous attempts had been doomed because he had been heading straight for Ladysmith along roads which had to be heavily defended. What he would do would be to dash far to the west, outflank the Boers, and swing into Ladysmith in a leftward charge. With Warren’s troops he again had more than twenty thousand first-class men to face a Boer force of less than eight thousand. But he had Sir Charles Warren breathing down his neck, and he still had to cross the Tugela.

A flanking movement like this required speed and deception; unfortunately, Buller surrendered both those advantages by entrusting the most important part of the campaign to the “ex-policeman,” as he contemptuously called Warren. Sending the difficult and unreliable Warren off to the left, he moved his own sybaritic tent some
twenty miles upstream, and when his feather bed and iron bathtub were in position, he astonished Saltwood and his other aides by scouting the opposite shore with his French telescope.

He did this by lying flat on his back and propping his scope on his enormous belly and toes, moving it slowly through whatever arc his position permitted, and shouting his observations to Saltwood. By now, newspapers throughout the world knew that “General Buller is once more thinking about crossing the Tugela.”

What he saw when he lay prostrate looking through his toes were three hills perched menacingly behind the north shore of the Tugela: Hill One, nearest at hand; Hill Two in the middle; Hill Three well to the west. The plan was for Warren to move far west of Hill Three and cut the Boer line, if he ever got his land-armada across the river, with his innumerable wagons and fifteen thousand trek-oxen; this incredible train was fifteen miles long and required two days to pass a spot, even when moving sharply. Buller would then make a drive for Hill One and join up with Warren, opening the pathway to Ladysmith. A tremendous amount of staff work was done to prepare the English forces for these carefully planned moves.

At Warren’s crossing point, four huge wood-fueled steam tractors had been maneuvered into position, and as they huffed and puffed, belching fire, wagons were pulled across small crevices while engineers sought low spots in the river at which pontoon bridges might be built. They isolated three such spots, and their officers chose each one in turn, abandoning it as soon as any difficulty arose. The delay was intolerable.

Saltwood had found it a memorable experience to watch these two elderly generals, Buller and Warren, go about their planning of this crucial battle, for it became apparent that in their extreme jealousy, neither was backing up the other, and each was holding his choice cards tight to his chest without permitting his colleague to see them. One of Buller’s most ambitious young assistants told Frank, “We’re going to witness three great battles. Us against the Boers. Buller against Warren. And Warren against Buller.”

“Dreadful way to run a war.”

“Ah, but the last two battles will be well matched, because our two generals are of equal intelligence, somewhat higher than a mule but markedly lower than a good bird dog.”