CHAPTER 23

AN INVISIBLE ENEMY

On December 15, scarcely twenty-four hours after Churchill had knocked on John Howard’s door, John Black Atkins awoke before dawn in Colenso to the sound of men preparing for war. From his thin-walled tent, Atkins, the correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, could hear the coughing and tramping of horses, native drivers calling to their mules, and men quietly rallying each other for the day that lay ahead. “The camp was filled with a steady, continuous, sweeping noise, which resembled silence,” Atkins wrote. “This was the morning of a battle.”

As the men moved across the plain, adjusting their helmets and swinging their rifles over their shoulders, a pall of dust rose up around them. “The column at my tent door passed through [the dust] like men wading through a white level tide which reached the middle of men and the bellies of horses,” Atkins wrote. Before them, the veld sloped gently toward the winding Tugela River. Although it was neither deep nor wide near Colenso, the river was more than three hundred miles long, running west to east before emptying into the Indian Ocean. It was the only thing separating Buller from the Boers and, beyond them, Ladysmith.

Rushing to catch up, Atkins found the infantry sitting on the plain, arranged in neat rows in the order of advance. In many ways, the young men before him were indistinguishable from his friend Winston Churchill—shining with youth, excitement, confidence and, in their own minds, immortality. “Chaffing and smoking,” Atkins wrote, they propped “themselves up on their elbows to inquire when the ‘fun’ was going to begin.”

Across the river, a few hours earlier, a messenger had stepped into Louis Botha’s small tent with news that the enemy was stirring. Within minutes, having given orders to put the laager on alert, the young Boer commander was standing on a ridge, field glass to his eye, scanning the opposite bank of the Tugela.

What Botha saw as the sun began to rise was a vast enemy army, some sixteen thousand men, laid out before him like a military pageant from a picture book. The northern side of the river, where the Boers were encamped, was broken and bulging with ravines, hills and, in the distance, the dark, looming Drakensberg Mountains. The southern side, however, was flat, open veld interrupted by only a few low, solitary hills. Stretched out over this plain, impossible to miss despite their khaki uniforms, was line after line of British soldiers and officers, forming a front that was two miles wide and a mile deep.

Although in the past week alone they had already lost two battles to an invisible and devastatingly effective enemy, the British army had continued to fight in line formation. Even Atkins marveled at the lines’ uncompromising precision. “Each man [was] the appointed distance from his neighbour,” he wrote, “and each row the appointed distance from the next.” For the Boers, the sight was utterly bewildering, bearing no resemblance to their battles with the Zulu, from whom they had learned how to hide.

Mesmerized by the scene unfolding before them, the Boers watched as the most revered and reviled army in the world slowly advanced across the veld. Now more than three times larger than Botha’s force, Buller’s army seemed to be “sweeping on in majestic motion, like a resistless flood, over the resounding veldt,” the Irish journalist Michael Davitt, who was traveling with the Boers, wrote. “It was war in all its spectacular glory, as seen from where the little force of warrior farmers and beardless boys behind the Tugela gazed with fascinated but fearless eyes.”

Despite the impressive show of force, the Boers made no move to respond in kind, or even reveal themselves. Botha had made it clear that not a shot would be fired until he had given the signal—a single, reverberating blast from the howitzer that stood, sandbagged and ready, beside him. Until then, they would have to wait for the enemy to come to them.

Suddenly a low, rumbling sound rolled across the hills. It was coming not from the British field guns, which they could clearly see behind the lines of soldiers, but from within the Boers’ own camp. A group of burghers, who had spent most of their lives fighting a formidable enemy, had begun to sing their morning hymn, an “invocation of Divine help” for the battle before them. Deep and stirring, it stole across the river and over the plains below like a heavy mist. It seemed to be an “echoing response to some chant of giants from mountain tops behind,” Davitt wrote, “and then [it] died away, leaving a more deathlike stillness in the morning air.”

To gain a sweeping view of the coming battle, Buller had climbed to the top of Naval Gun Hill, a low, sloping promontory that was one of the few elevated spots on his side of the river, and was peering back at the Boers. As carefully as he scanned the northern stretches, however, he could see nothing. There was no sign of life, not a helmet, not a horse. “What a conspiracy of invisibility!” Atkins wrote.

As they had been throughout the war, the Boers now surrounding Colenso were as invisible as their enemy was conspicuous. Not only did they have the topographical advantage, but they knew instinctively how to fade away into the dusty landscape. Everything was camouflaged. They had dug their trenches in the long grass near the river, carefully scattering the excavated soil so that there were no obvious mounds. Unlike the British, whose twinkling lights had telegraphed their intentions across the Tugela well before the sun rose, the Boers had been strictly forbidden to make fires, or even smoke a cigarette, after the sun went down. They even used dummy gun barrels that were made of corrugated iron or tree trunks, propped on hilltops and pointed south so that the British would have no way of knowing where the gunfire was really coming from when the fighting began.

Not only did Buller not know where Botha and his men were, but he had done very little to find out. While Botha had scouts scattered across the veld, on both sides of the Tugela, reporting to him day and night on the enemy’s movements, Buller, who did not even have a reliable map of the area, had shown little interest in reconnaissance. “Practically no attempt was made to find out anything about the river itself or what lay behind,” Leo Amery, Churchill’s old schoolmate from Harrow and the correspondent for the London Times, wrote, “though there were dozens of young officers who would have given a quarter’s pay to be allowed to swim the Tugela at night and crawl over the Boer positions.”

Buller did have a plan, but it was based on centuries-old military strategy rather than any understanding of the land, the river or the enemy. As Botha had expected, the British commander in chief had decided on a frontal attack. Led by General Henry Hildyard, it was to be supported by several flanking brigades, to the left and the right, overhead and behind. Although any British general would have thoroughly approved of the strategy, it had one devastating stumbling block: The highly decorated officers Buller was sending into battle had no idea where the enemy was. “Buller’s plan of attack resembled the wild swings of a blindfolded pugilist in the general direction of his opponent,” a later historian of the war would write. “Of the river in front of him and the burghers who guarded it, he had only the vaguest notion.”

As the sun revealed the plains below, Buller could see that it was going to be an achingly beautiful day. There was not a cloud in the sky or a breath of wind sweeping across the veld. His men seemed to be moving not through an actual scene but through a painting of a perfect day. Most of them had left their greatcoats in the wagons that trundled slowly behind them, and, with their bandoliers slung over their shoulders and their ammunition pouches bouncing from their belt hooks, they marched at an easy pace, as though they had no cares in the world.

While Buller’s men were at ease, confident in their innate superiority and their commander’s wisdom, Buller himself was tense as he watched them make their way toward the seemingly empty hills. After a week of devastating losses, he was still no closer to Ladysmith, and he knew that every move he made, every miscalculation, every slip of the tongue or sword, was being watched not only by the Boers and the British but by most of the Western world.

It was no secret to the British that few European countries were rooting for them to win the war. Although the governments of most of the great colonial powers were outwardly civil to England, hatred and resentment seethed just below the surface. The British Empire was the largest and most powerful in the world, and everyone was waiting for the Boers to expose even the slightest sign of vulnerability. With Black Week, they had gotten far more than they had hoped for. “The tidings of British reverses were received everywhere with a fierce clamour of exultation,” Amery wrote. “The imminent dissolution of the British Empire, the pricking of the great bubble which had so long imposed upon the world by its appearance of solidity and strength, was everywhere proclaimed.”

Other countries were motivated less by hatred for the British than by sympathy for the Boers. Although the president of the United States, William McKinley, had vowed to stay out of the war, many Americans saw in it glimpses of the American Revolution and their own struggle for freedom from British rule little more than a hundred years earlier. Even Theodore Roosevelt, then governor of New York, could not take his eyes off South Africa. Writing to his friend Cecil Spring Rice, later British ambassador to the United States, he admitted that he had been “absorbed in interest in the Boer War.”

Although both the British and the Boers would have liked to have American help, the national opinion that mattered to them most was Germany’s. The Boers had not only acquired many of their weapons from Germany but openly and actively sought out the Germans’ help just days before the first battle had begun. Dr. Willem Johannes Leyds, then state secretary of the Transvaal, had traveled to Berlin in mid-October to ask the German government to intervene in the war on the Boers’ behalf. Although Kaiser Wilhelm II, son of Queen Victoria’s oldest daughter, had refused the Boers’ request, after watching the British lose battle after battle, he had sent his grandmother a personal message. “I cannot sit on the safety valve for ever,” he warned her. “My people demand intervention. You must get a victory.”

The nearer the British came to the Tugela, however, the further out of reach victory seemed to be. Standing near Buller on Naval Gun Hill, Atkins looked out over the battlefield, beyond the plain, and was stunned by what he saw on the other side. “Ridge upon ridge, top upon top, each one looking over the head of the one in front of it,” he wrote. “Simply desperate!” He knew that the Boers were somewhere in there, thousands of them hidden in trenches and behind hills. The fact that he could not see them made them all the more terrifying.

With his columns mobilized and his plan in place, there was little for Buller to do but begin the battle, with or without a visible enemy. At 5:30 a.m., when they had come within three miles of the river, his men abruptly stopped. The field guns pulled up behind them and, with little fanfare, opened fire. Instantly, the hills across the Tugela erupted like a roaring volcano, alive with sprays of red dust, a column of gray smoke rising hundreds of feet into the air, and a greenish plume of lyddite, the explosive used in British shells. “The cry of the shell through the air; the upheaval of smoke and earth and dust,” Atkins wrote. “These are the things that clamp your soul and will be the visions afterwards of wakeful nights.”

If the British had believed that the fury and grandeur of their opening bombardment would bring out the Boers at last, they were mistaken. “No guns opened in reply,” Amery wrote. “Not a sign showed whether the pall of smoke covered torn and mangled bodies or a bare, untenanted hump of earth and rocks.” To Buller, the silence was inexplicable. He had used even more explosives than had been employed at Magersfontein, a battle that the Boers had won just four days earlier, but at the cost of hundreds of lives. How could Botha’s men fail to respond? Perhaps, he thought, they had already fled.

On the plain below him, Buller’s plan continued to unfold. Although he had several brigades in action, like long, splayed fingers reaching for the river, he quickly found himself training his field glasses, in horror, on just two. The first was led by Major General Arthur Fitzroy Hart, who had been ordered to force his way across a broad ford and move down the river’s left bank. The second was led by none other than Colonel Charles Long, the man who, just a month earlier, had been censured for sending his armored train from Estcourt into the arms of the Boers.

Buller, who would later say in a court of inquiry that blame for the armored train disaster lay “entirely on Colonel Long,” had given Long very clear orders in Colenso. Placed in charge of the artillery, he was to take five hundred men and eighteen guns and follow to the right of the frontal attack, keeping well away from the river. Anticipating very little action on the part of Long and his men, Buller assumed there would be even less risk.

Unfortunately, Long had a theory. He believed that the closer he could get to the enemy, the better. Atkins, who, along with Churchill, had sailed to South Africa with Long on the Dunottar Castle, had heard Long’s theory firsthand, as had many others. “The only way to smash those beggars,” the colonel had often been heard to say, “is to rush in at ’em.”

Secure in his theory, and ignoring repeated requests from his infantry escort to wait for them to catch up, Long ordered his men to advance quickly across the plain, well beyond where Buller had told him to wait. When he was within seven hundred yards of the river, he called to his men to stop. Then, eager to put his theory to the test, he gave the order for attack.

As soon as Long issued his order, a single shot rang out from across the river. It was Botha’s signal. Seconds later, although the British could still see no sign of the enemy, they no longer wondered whether they were there. So sudden and devastating was the firestorm of shells and bullets that descended on Long’s brigade that it tore his men to pieces before they even understood what was happening. “Men and officers…seemed to melt down into the ground under some deadly sirocco,” Atkins wrote, referring to the hurricane-force wind that blasts out of the Sahara. “They were bullets at close quarters, in the full strength of life, bullets that splashed and drummed and spattered.”

Among the first wave of fallen was Long himself. Shot through the liver, he lay shouting orders and encouragement to his men over the roar of the fusillade. “Abandon be damned!” he cried when implored to fall back and leave the field guns behind. “We never abandon guns!” Even when he was being dragged to a ditch, already brimming with the wounded and dead, Long continued to cry out, as if in a delirium. “Ah my gunners!” he called. “My gunners are splendid! Look at them!”

As soon as the attack began, an unusual collection of daring men without rifles or rank began to dart across the plain, dodging bullets as best they could. These men, dressed in wide-brimmed hats and simple, loose-fitting khaki uniforms, a white band with a red cross on it wrapped around their left arms, were known to Buller’s troops as “body-snatchers,” retrieving not just bodies from the battlefield but, they hoped, young men from the jaws of death. In all, there were about eight hundred of them in Colenso that day, and they were led by one man: a thirty-year-old Indian lawyer and civil rights activist by the name of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.

Gandhi had been living in South Africa for six years when the Boer War began, and had already begun to develop his ideas of nonviolent resistance. He had come to Africa in a desperate attempt to save his floundering law career but had been stunned by the injustices and cruelties to which the Boers subjected Indians as well as native Africans. In fact, just two years earlier he had nearly been lynched by a mob of angry Boers for his efforts to actively recruit, organize and lead the Indian community.

When the war broke out, Gandhi felt strongly that, because he was demanding rights as a British citizen, it was his duty to defend the British Empire. Although his convictions would not allow him to fight, he had gathered together more than a thousand men to form a corps of stretcher bearers. When he had learned of Gandhi’s efforts, Buller had not only approved, he had asked Gandhi’s men to serve within the firing line. “General Buller sent the message that though we were not bound to take the risk,” Gandhi later wrote in his autobiography, “Government would be thankful if we would do so and fetch the wounded from the field. We had no hesitation.”

Now, rushing across the veld in the midst of Botha’s devastating attack, Gandhi and his team of stretcher bearers had more wounded than they could carry. As Atkins watched them, along with the nurses and doctors who worked at their side, risking their own lives again and again, he marveled at their bravery. “Anywhere among the shell fire,” he wrote, “you could see them kneeling and performing little quick operations that required deftness and steadiness of hand.”

Those British soldiers who survived the Boer guns, at least long enough to be carried out of range, found as much horror in the hospital tent as they had on the battlefield. Atkins watched as they were rushed in by the hundreds, carried, pulled and dragged from every direction. “Men with waxen grey faces and clotted bandages swathed about them,” he wrote, “men who smiled at their friends and instantly changed the smile for a gripping spasm; men who were clinched between life and death; men who had died on the way and were now carried hurriedly and jerkily, since it no longer mattered;…men who were mere limp, covered-up bundles, carried on stretchers through which something dark oozed and dropped.”

As crushing and instantaneous as Long’s defeat proved to be, it was not the only disaster that day. At the same time that his brigade was being bombarded on the right, General Hart’s was being slaughtered on the left. Ordered to cross the Tugela, Hart made the disastrous decision to march his men into a loop in the river. It was a baffling mistake for Hart, who had been in the army for thirty-five years and who certainly knew as well as any man that a salient, or open end of a loop, was one of the most dangerous places to be on a battlefield. “To march into a well-defended salient,” a historian of the war would later write, “is like putting your head into a noose.”

The repercussions were as immediate as they were catastrophic. It did not take long for Botha’s men to realize that Hart’s brigade was trapped. The loop was only a thousand yards wide, and Hart had four thousand men. There was no way out when the bullets and shells came raining down on them. “Nothing could have saved them from the flanking fires and the guns in front,” Atkins wrote. “At last the river bank was reached—reached by those who were left.”

Even those who were able to stagger out of the loop alive found that death was waiting for them at the river’s edge. The ford that they had expected to find was not there, having been flooded, as the British would later learn, by the Boers, who had dammed the river. The fleeing men’s only hope was to try to swim across, but they were weighed down by their heavy ammunition and weapons. Instead of fighting to the death in a heroic battle, most of them, Atkins wrote, “drowned like dogs.”

Watching this second, almost simultaneous tragedy unfold from Naval Gun Hill, Buller prepared to order a wholesale retreat. Little more than two hours had passed since he had sent his opening salvo across the river, and the battle was already lost.

If he was forced to admit defeat once again at the hands of the Boers, however, Buller was not willing to leave twelve field guns for the enemy on his way out. Despite Long’s fevered cries that he would never abandon his guns, Buller could see them now, alone on the plain, surrounded only by items that had been dropped by the men as they ran or fell, and a group of terrified and apparently abandoned horses. As Atkins looked more closely at the horses, he realized that their riders had not left them behind but had dropped, dead, from their saddles and were now being dragged, still harnessed to their horses as they galloped in frenzied circles around the guns.

Climbing on his own horse, which he had brought from England on the Dunottar Castle, Buller left Naval Gun Hill and rode in the direction of the abandoned guns. As soon as he arrived, Botha’s men, clearly recognizing the British commander in chief’s entourage, redoubled their attack. “You oughtn’t be here,” Lieutenant David Ogilvy, who was in charge of the naval guns, gasped when he saw Buller. “I’m all right, my boy,” Buller replied.

Shouting to his men, the shells and bullets pounding the ground so loudly that he could barely be heard above the din, Buller said, “Now, my lads, this is your last chance to save the guns; will any of you volunteer to fetch them?” A tense moment passed, and then one man stood up, a corporal, and with him six more. It was an incredible display of bravery, but it was not enough. There were twelve guns out there, and Buller needed more men if he was to have any hope of retrieving them.

Turning to his own staff, which had followed him from Naval Gun Hill, Buller now said, “Some of you go and help.” Three men volunteered for the extraordinarily dangerous mission, among them Lieutenant Freddy Roberts, the only son of Lord Frederick Sleigh Roberts, a renowned combat leader and one of the most respected and admired men in the British army. Just twenty-seven years old, Freddy Roberts was not known for the kind of military precision and sobersided devotion to his job that had made his father famous. He was handsome, lighthearted and charming, qualities that might not have impressed his commanders but that endeared him to his fellow officers and his men. As he set out on his horse toward the guns, Roberts looked back at the British lines, laughing as he swung his riding stick in circles, trying to persuade his horse to plunge into the barrage of bullets. “He was in the full exhilaration,” Atkins wrote, “that is to say, of a man riding to hounds.”

As they approached the guns, the men were quickly separated in the onslaught, which intensified as soon as the Boers realized what they were attempting to do. The devastation was immediate, leaving one man and twelve horses dead, with five men wounded. Freddy Roberts seemed to vanish in the tumult of beating hooves and drumming bullets, a broad smile on his face. By 3:00, the last of the men had retreated, and the sounds of war had been silenced. The men could hear the river again, rushing between the crumbling red banks that still separated the two armies. Even the birds were back, but while some brought relief from the horrors of battle, others only heightened it. “The aasvogels gathered in numbers,” Atkins wrote, referring to the hook-beaked vultures, “wheeling overhead with an eye on the horrid banquet.”

In the silence, with the full brunt of the South African sun now bearing down on the wounded and the dead, the men finally found Freddy Roberts. He was unconscious, but still alive. He had been shot three times, once in the stomach, and he was lying alone on the veld. His friends rushed out to him, dragged him to shelter, and used his coat to shade his head from the merciless sun. He would die two days later.

Even Buller himself had not been spared the Boers’ bullets. While he had been standing with his men, watching the artillery fire, a bullet had grazed his side, severely bruising his ribs. When his staff doctor, a man whom Buller loved and would watch die just minutes later, asked if there was anything he could do for him, Buller had assured him that he was fine and that the bullet had “only just taken his wind a bit.” When Atkins saw Buller return to camp, he did not know that he had been injured, because Buller had refused to tell anyone, but he was struck by the sight of him, climbing “limply and wearily from his horse like an old, old man.”

Across the river, Louis Botha quietly made his way out of the hills toward the town of Colenso. Here, he sent President Kruger a wire with news of his triumph. “The God of our fathers has to-day granted us a brilliant victory,” he wrote. “We repulsed the enemy on every side, and from three different points….The enemy’s loss must have been terrible. Their dead are lying upon each other.” Before signing off, Botha asked that a national day of prayer be proclaimed, as a sign of gratitude to “Him who gave us this victory.” Two days later, a Sunday, the day Freddy Roberts would die, a day of prayer was observed throughout the Transvaal.