A commando under E.R. Grobler and Steenkamp, chiefly composed of rebels, which had been sent by Olivier on the previous day to stir up trouble in the district, was halted for the night a few miles out on the Steynsburg road. The sound of the firing quickly called it to attention, and a position which seriously threatened Gatacre's line of retreat was quickly seized. The commando, however, was handled with little judgment or energy, and was soon checked by the field guns which had been withdrawn from the detached hill near the Kissieberg ridge to cover the retreat of the infantry; and which at one time were firing trail to trail, some still engaging Olivier on Kissieberg while others were shelling Grobler.

The raid on Stormberg had manifestly failed and Gatacre ordered a retreat to Molteno. Thither the weary, dispirited column trudged all through the forenoon of December 10. A gun was abandoned on the way, and even the wagon in which the breech block had been secreted fell also into the enemy's hands. But this was a comparatively insignificant loss.

It was soon discovered that nearly a third of the infantry was absent.

When the troops were withdrawn from the attack on Kissieberg not a few of them remained in the donga or under the krantzes on the hill side, while others appear to have held on to the ridge. By some extraordinary neglect or default nearly 600 men were left to their fate. No one seems to have missed them at the time and they were made prisoners of war without an effort to extricate them.

In less than two hours all the fighting except the little affair with Grobler was over. On neither side were the casualties of killed and wounded heavy. No British officer was killed and of the eight who were wounded four had been struck by shells not fired by the enemy.

Stonmberg on December 10, followed by Magersfontein on December 13, brought about Colenso on December 15. The latter was Buller's attempt to retrieve the former mishaps.

A naturally strong position on the left bank of the Tugela had by the efforts of the Boers during the previous three weeks been almost perfectly secured. They showed, however, some hesitation with regard to Hlangwhane, a detached hill on the right bank from which the Tugela line could be enfiladed. It was a somewhat precarious position as it was accessible from the left bank only by two bridle drifts. It had been originally held by the Boers, but the garrison was withdrawn when Barton's Brigade appeared at Chieveley; and now all Botha's persistence, and even a reference to Kruger and Joubert at Pretoria, were required to induce the burghers to re-occupy it on December 15. From the south Hlangwhane, though separated from the Colenso kopjes by the river, appears to be an integral continuation of them.

[Illustration: Colenso Battlefield.]

The enemy's general idea was a defensive occupation of the Colenso position, although Botha, with characteristic spirit, proposed to send a commando across the river to face the British on the open. The initiative, always a disadvantage when attacking an enemy strongly posted and entrenched, was thus imposed upon Buller. It was not doubted that he would be compelled to make a frontal attack on Colenso and in this the Boers showed the more correct appreciation of the situation.

Botha hoped to lure Buller on and was prepared even to allow him to cross the river; and having crushed him to act upon the British flanks, an operation which the wide extension of Botha's front from Hlangwhane to Robinson's farm, a distance of seven miles, gave him a good chance of being able to carry out. If necessary, reinforcements could be drawn from the investing circle around Ladysmith, which seemed to be detaining more burghers than were necessary for the maintenance of the siege.

Buller proclaimed his intention of attacking Botha by a preliminary bombardment of the Colenso kopjes on December 13 and 14; but the burghers lay low and gave so little indication of their presence that it almost seemed that they had abandoned the line of the Tugela. The British Army was encamped near Chieveley four miles south of Colenso.

On the evening of December 14 the scheme of attack was delivered to the Brigadiers. The leading idea of it was a frontal attack to be delivered from the village of Colenso, where the Tugela is crossed by an iron railway bridge as well as by an iron wagon bridge. The latter had been left intact by the enemy, possibly in order to entice the British troops across the river. Buller appears to have been unaware how far the Boer trenches extended towards the west, and to have assumed that only the kopjes immediately opposite Colenso were occupied. Hildyard's Brigade was ordered to march in the direction of the "iron bridge,"[21] to cross at that point, and then to "seize the kopjes north of the iron bridge."

The attack on the enemy's right, which was believed to be weak, was assigned to Hart's Irish Brigade. He was instructed to cross the Tugela at a bridle drift about two miles west of Colenso and work down the left bank towards the occupied kopjes. Two infantry Brigades were retained as reserves to be used when required; and the mounted Brigade was ordered to move towards Hlangwhane and occupy it, if possible, and cover the right flank; but the weakness of the Boer position on that hill, which was cut off by the river from the main line of defence, does not seem to have been realized. A few batteries were sent with Hart, but the bulk of the artillery was ordered east of the railway to support Hildyard.

Buller's scheme has been severely criticized ever since its failure, but Clery who was in nominal command of the Natal force, and in whose name the battle orders were issued, as well as the other general officers, acquiesced in it. But in fact hardly any scheme could have been devised more likely to play into Botha's hands. Buller hoped to get a footing on the left bank and Botha hoped that he would succeed in doing so. Botha's special idea was to allure the troops of the frontal attack to his own side, where he could easily pound them from his kopjes and carry out his general idea of netting the British flanks.

Buller had not then been in action with the Boers and he probably underrated their tactical capacity; but already he seems to have contemplated the possibility of the loss of Ladysmith, for in his despatch of December 13 to Lord Lansdowne, in which he justified his sudden change of the plan of campaign, he said that "it would be better to lose Ladysmith than to leave Natal open to the enemy."

Nor did the Boers enter into the contest with much confidence. They had not yet tried Buller's mettle and his name was to them a tradition of courage handed down from the Zulu war, in which some of the older burghers now opposing him on the Tugela had served under him. The curious omission to inform White in Ladysmith that an attack on Colenso was to be made on December 15 may have arisen from Buller's doubts as to its issue, or from reluctance to heliograph a message in a cipher of which the enemy might have the key.

The story of the Battle of Colenso is mainly the narrative of the action of two important components of the Army of Natal. Each of these was led by a dangerously brave man, whose impetuosity crippled the tactical scheme and whose method of working his command was, at least, unusual.

If in Hart and Long, who commanded the Artillery, the quality of personal courage had been less prominent it is probable that Colenso would not have filled up the cup of Stormberg and Magersfontein in that dark midsummer December week.

The naval guns on the west of the railway had the honour of opening the battle, and shelled Fort Wyllie for some time without eliciting any response. Long joined Hildyard with another naval battery and two field batteries. He was not only an impetuous man but he also belonged to the short range school of artillerists;[22] and he soon outpaced his infantry escort and came into action with his field batteries in the open a little in advance of a shallow intersecting donga, and within 1,100 yards of the Boer entrenchments across the river. The naval battery had been compelled by the flight of the Kaffir ox drivers to outspan astride a deeper donga about a quarter of a mile in rear, to which Long had sent back his gun teams. A terrific rifle and shrapnel fire, which the infantry escort which soon came up was powerless to subdue, was now opened upon the guns, and for an hour the batteries were beaten on until the casualties left but four men to each gun, and ammunition was running short. Long, who was one of the first to be wounded, withdrew the dwindled gun detachments to the shallow donga and sent back for a fresh supply of ammunition, intending to resume fire as soon as the general attack developed.

All the while the batteries had been unsupported except by the escorting companies, which were not under Long's orders, and no attempt was made by Hildyard's or Barton's brigade in rear to relieve or divert the pressure on the guns, which had succeeded in silencing temporarily some of the Boer artillery and in checking the rifle fire.

Earlier in the action Buller had been informed that the guns were "all right and comfortable," but later reports gave him the impression that this cheery optimism was delusive, and that owing to loss of men and exhaustion of ammunition the artillery told off to support Hildyard was now permanently out of action. The rest of the artillery was engaged in assisting Hart, who was in trouble, and Buller came to the conclusion that the attack on the Colenso kopjes must be withdrawn.

Hart's Brigade was ordered to march "towards the Bridle Drift at the junction of the Doornkop Spruit and the Tugela, and to cross at that point." Here was yet another ambiguity. As there were two "Iron Bridges"

so also were there two "Bridle Drifts," one on each side of the isthmus of the river loop, and yet another at the head of it. The West Drift was unfordable on the morning of December 15, and a hasty sketch which had probably been filled in from hearsay evidence and which was Hart's only map, showed the Doornkop Spruit as entering the Tugela below that Drift instead of just above the East Drift.[23] The sketch also duplicated the loop.

In dense formation, although the enemy was reported to be in force on his front, Hart crossed the Doornkop Spruit without recognizing it and advanced to the West Drift guided by a Kaffir who lived close by. The native seems either to have had misgivings as to the fordability of the Drift or to have been carelessly instructed, for as the column approached the river he pointed to a Drift which was not the East Drift, but the Drift at the head of the loop near his own kraal; and Hart was induced to change direction and lead the Brigade into the loop.

At 6 a.m. against the orders of Botha, who wished to lure on his foe, the Boer guns commanding Hart's loop suddenly opened on the dense battalions, and the trenches on the left bank took up the firing. The Kaffir guide disappeared in terror. But Hart still believed that there was a drift to be found somewhere or other and pushed his Brigade, like a shoal of herrings driven into a purse net, up the loop; and some companies even reached the kraal near the head of it. Without artillery--for Hart had not brought up the field batteries assigned to him--and exposed to a concentrated fire from front, left, and right, the unhappy Irish Brigade, which suffered 400 casualties in less than three quarters of an hour, was helpless. Hart began to deploy, but Buller who from Naval Gun Hill was watching, possibly with astonishment, the entanglement in the loop ordered him to withdraw, at the same time sending two battalions to dig him out of his hole. It was not an easy task and it was made more difficult by the gallant reluctance of the Irishmen to retreat before the enemy. Thus Hart and Long, the former with his Hibernian zeal to move in the line of the greatest resistance, the latter with his rash generalization that entrenched Boers could be coerced as if they were Omdurman dervishes in the open, brought about the reverse at Colenso.

By this time it was evident to Buller that his scheme must fail. He had already arranged the extrication of Hart and now the extrication of Long called for immediate action. He therefore rode across to the deep donga east of the railway; on his way informing Hildyard, whose brigade was awaiting an opportunity to carry out its orders, that the attack was abandoned and that the brigade must cover the withdrawal of the field batteries. He ordered the naval battery to retire, and sent back the ammunition wagons, which after long delay were on their way to the field guns: and acknowledged that he was baffled.

Hildyard occupied Colenso but was unable to prevent the Boers re-opening fire from Fort Wyllie on the desolate batteries lying on the veld. No troops could move across the open; and only individual efforts could now save the guns. Not a few officers and men offered for the forlorn hope, and at the first attempt two guns were rescued. A later attempt was not successful, and at 11 a.m. Buller ordered a general retirement and the abandonment of the guns. The main naval battery remained in position west of the railway for some hours, and in its presence the Boers were afraid to cross the river and take possession of the derelict but not disabled guns; which were not captured until all the British troops had left the field except a few gunners and infantry details who had taken refuge in the deep donga and whom the order to retreat had not reached; and these were made prisoners of war.

The mounted Brigade under Lord Dundonald acting on the right flank with orders to take Hlangwhane, if possible, was too weak to support the main attack effectively. Assistance was refused at first by Barton and afterwards by Buller, who thought that Hlangwhane would be of little use to him without the possession of the Colenso kopjes; yet these could have been enfiladed from it. As the Brigade retired it passed within striking distance of the field guns and their captors; but nothing could be done as ambulances and groups of prisoners were bemingled in the throng. Dundonald seems to have been alone in his recognition of the value of the Hlangwhane position.

A retirement to Chieveley and Frere completed the triad of December disasters. Buller, of whom so much was expected, had failed in his first attempt to measure swords with the burghers. His 19,000 men and forty-two guns fighting for six hours inflicted on the enemy a loss of less than two score. His casualties exceeded 1,100, he lost ten guns, and he then returned to the place from which he came. He thought that he had fought a battle, but in reality he had only made a reconnaissance in force, a dangerous operation only justifiable by urgent necessity.[24]

Possibly if Buller, who was practically without a staff, had allowed a freer hand to Clery, that authority on Minor Tactics might have done better. It has been said that the defeat was due to insufficient reconnaissance; and this is to a certain extent true, for a more accurate knowledge of the terrain and the dispositions of the enemy would have clearly demonstrated the hopelessness of a frontal attack on the Colenso Kopjes, and the attempt would never have been made. Again, as at Magersfontein four days before, a considerable portion of the troops was not seriously engaged; and the total casualties in eight battalions were but 120.

The loss of the guns is the chief fact in the story of Colenso. What were Buller's intentions with regard to the Naval battery and the two Field batteries which he sent to "a point from which they could prepare the crossing for Hildyard's Brigade," and how did Long understand and carry out his orders.

The battle orders had been orally anticipated by Buller, who before they were issued, explained his intentions personally to Long: and, as often happens in conferences, the impression retained by one conferent differed from that intended to be conveyed by the other. Long believed that he was instructed to shell the Kopjes and entrenched positions behind Fort Wyllie, which he did not at first know was held by the enemy, and he opened at a range of a mile; and Buller's statement that he was ordered to open fire with the long-range naval guns only, the position not being within reach of the field batteries, is contradicted; while Buller complained that Long had taken up a position within 1,200 yards of a fortified hill and less than a quarter of a mile from cover occupied by the enemy. There is, indeed, a small area of low trees and scrub near the right bank of the Tugela a few hundred yards on the right front of the line of guns, but there is no evidence that the Boers had ever crossed the river to hold it.

When the field guns, after firing nearly 100 rounds each, became silent, Buller, who was already perturbed by Hart's discomfiture, jumped to the conclusion that they were exterminated, and that it would be useless to proceed with the attack without them; but the gunners were only waiting for more ammunition. Not until the following day did he know that men enough to fight the guns were still untouched. If the whole of his force had been seriously engaged he would perhaps have been justified in his decision not to hold on to Colenso with exhausted and parched troops in the burning heat of the South African midsummer in the hope of rescuing the guns at night; but several battalions had been doing little more than watching the fight during the morning, and he might have left them on the field; and it is clear from a telegram sent by Botha early in the afternoon that if the Naval battery had remained with an effective infantry support no attempt would have been made by the Boers to cross the river, and that the guns would not have been lost.

The repulse at Colenso staggered Buller's humanity. He was a brave man on the right of whose many war medals hung the Victoria Cross which he had won not far away from the field on which he was now fighting; but he was lacking in bull-dog tenacity, and in the ascetic temperament which is quickened rather than disheartened by failure. He returned to his tent, wrung his hands, and announced to those whom it might concern that all was lost. In the telegram in which he reported his defeat to Lord Lansdowne and of which the frankness, the candour, and the copious yet not egotistical use of the first personal pronoun were in curious contrast to the formal and sterilized paragraphs of an official account, he confessed that with the force at his disposal he had little hope of relieving Ladysmith and he proposed that he should let it go. He ordered the staff to select a defensive line eastward from Estcourt which his army might occupy until the end of the hot season.

His message to White in Ladysmith was still more pessimistic, and with an intention that was chivalrous but was not war he "spatchcocked"[25]

into it a suggestion that White should surrender, and even indicated how the gain to the enemy could be minimised. The magnanimity of Buller was manifest: he desired to give White the opportunity of surrendering without incurring the full responsibility for the act, but the lack of military instinct in Buller's mind was likewise manifest. To this message, which was suspected in Ladysmith to have originated in the Boer laagers, White replied that he had no intention of surrendering.

Nor did Buller's pessimism turn the Home Government from its purpose. He was ordered to hold on, and on December 17 Lord Roberts accepted the chief command in South Africa. In announcing the appointment, the War Office explained that Buller was superseded because it was advisable to relieve him of responsibility for the operations outside Natal, which he could not effectively control from his detached position on the right flank. The Vth Division under Sir C. Warren which had been ordered at his request a month before, and which he found was available for service on the Natal side, was on the point of landing in South Africa; the VIth Division was embarking at home; the components of a VIIth Division were being assembled, and he became less despondent.

The War Office thought that the Magersfontein mishap called for the supersession of Methuen, and when Warren reached Capetown with the Vth Division he found orders from home directing him to assume command of the force at Modder River. It would probably have been better for Buller if he had freely acquiesced in the idea of Pall Mall and had allowed Warren, but not necessarily the Vth Division, to operate in a country with which he had become acquainted twenty years before in the Bechuanaland Expedition, but he could not foresee Spion Kop; and Warren while moving towards the Orange was suddenly recalled to Capetown and ordered to reinforce the Army of Natal with the Vth Division; and Methuen was allowed to retain his command at Modder River.

The transfer of the Vth Division to Natal was undoubtedly called for; but the position in the districts of Cape Colony bordering on the Free State was alarming. A belt extending from Barkly East near the Basuto border westwards and northwards as far as the Molopo River, and interrupted only near the Orange and Modder Rivers, had been annexed by the Boers and was more or less effectively occupied by them; and had they acted with enterprise and concurrence during the period of Lord Roberts' journey from England, the task before the new Commander-in-Chief would have been still more formidable. In rear of French and Gatacre was an indefinite area through which ran the British lines of communication, and which, if not indeed actually under arms, was ready to spring up whenever a favourable opportunity presented itself.

Of the four Generals set to stem the tide of war until the arrival of Lord Roberts, French alone did not restrict himself to restraining its flow. A policy of "worry without risk" had been recommended to him by Buller, and he carried it out with good effect. He thrust Schoeman out of Arundel and Rensburg, and occupied a commanding position outside Colesberg, which he maintained until he was summoned on January 29 to confer with Lord Roberts at Capetown, where he was confidentially informed of the plan of campaign. Clements, who a few weeks before had reinforced him with a brigade of the recently landed VIth Division under Kelly-Kenny, took over the command of the troops before Colesberg. But the force which he had to his hand had been considerably reduced by the withdrawal of the cavalry and nearly half the infantry to serve elsewhere, while Schoeman and Delarey, who had come from Magersfontein, had been strongly reinforced.

The Boers doubted not that the positions taken up by Gatacre and French indicated that the impending advance of the British Army into the Free State would be by way of Bethulie and Norval's Pont, and were accordingly disposing all their available men, one commando even being sent to Colesberg from Natal; but fortunately they were at first unaware that Clements had been almost simultaneously weakened. He soon found that he was not strong enough to hold on to the Colesberg positions and on February 14 retired to Arundel; losing on the way two companies of infantry which had been mislaid and forgotten and which after a gallant running fight of three miles were captured.

But now ominous reports of Lord Roberts' movements in the West began to come in, and the Boers realized that they had misinterpreted the signs which had been so ostentatiously displayed. They hesitated and wavered, and on February 20 hurried away from Colesberg to succour Cronje and the threatened capital of the Free State.

Notes:

[Footnote 19: Buller aroused a "now-we-shan't-be-long" feeling. He would certainly be in Pretoria by Christmas. It is said that a large number of plum-puddings intended for the soldiers' dinners on December 25 were addressed to Pretoria "to await arrival," by their good friends at home.]

[Footnote 20: The history of the war showed, however, that generally the Boers fought more strenuously and effectively when the tide was against them than when it was flowing with them.]

[Footnote 21: The two chief authorities on the events of the day are not in agreement as to which of the iron bridges was meant; and in the absence of information of what was in the mind of the staff officer who drew up the battle orders the question cannot be answered. The context and certain expressions in other paragraphs seem to show that the railway bridge was indicated. It was, indeed, broken but there were drifts used by the natives above and below it. Probably the river had not been carefully reconnoitred and the two bridges were confused, or one only was believed to exist.]

[Footnote 22: At the battle of Omdurman he had put short range principles successfully into practice against dervishes.]

[Footnote 23: The mistake in Hart's map is shown by a broken line in the sketch map. It is, curiously enough, reproduced in the Colenso map not only of the _Times_ History, but also of the German Official Report on the War.]

[Footnote 24: See _Combined Training_, 1905, p. 109.]

[Footnote 25: _Sic_ in his speech of October 10, 1901, but he probably meant "sandwiched."]

CHAPTER IV