Were those rocks or men in khaki up there on the side of that kopje? Rocks! No, they move ╤ they are men. They advance. General Hart, with the strongest brigade, was ahead of the others. One inferior height after another was put behind him in the series of kopjes that rise to the sky. And the Boers? They were invisible. Jagged schantzes against the sky showed where a few hundreds were. The rest had become part of the rocks and the brown grass. Soon even our own infantry became invisible from Three Tree Hill ╤ invisible unless you had the true eye for infantry, which can pick out its object, as the fisherman can in a stream, when another eye sees nothing. These are not the days in which a line four deep in men marches up to a similar line, and when both have discharged their weapons point-blank the line that remains the less thin marches through the other. Weapons, we are told today, are too terrible for wars to continue. What an ironical thing is fact! Soon, if the Boers cannot be dislodged by the long-range skirmishing imposed by modern weapons, we may really return to the practices of the terrible old days. If we attack with a sufficient number of men ╤ how many Heaven only knows! ╤ some must get through and be alive at the end of the day. Shall we emulate Grant in the American Civil War and launch a mass of men against a mass of men, and disregard losses when we call the issue of the day a victory? We may come to that. But we have not yet.
I saw one man trudging happily to the firing line with a puppy under his arm. The naif act was somehow characteristic, and I scarcely know whether to think it amusing or pathetic. I wonder how the man and the dog spent that day. Did the dog return yapping at the heels of stretcher-bearers?
On our extreme left a headland ran out from the range of hills southward into the plain. Bastion Hill it had been suitably named. ╥Go a little way up it. See what sort of place it is and who is there. If it is strongly held, come back; but if it is not, go on, take it, and hold it.╙ That was the sense of the order given to Lord Dundonald. When an officer is told to go on if he can, he finds in most cases that he can: and that is just what Lord Dundonald did that day. The South African Light Horse were told to go first. They dismounted and drew open like a fan into their line of advance. Now there was one man called Tobin, a sailor, and he sprang at the hill as though it were the familiar rigging of a ship. Up he went hand over hand, up an ascent like the slope of a bell-tent. Everyone who watched held his breath for a man to fall ╤ not from the steepness, but from a bullet. Ten minutes before all the others he reached the top. There he stood against the sky and waved his helmet on his rifle. No Boer was there, and the hill in a few minutes was ours. ╥It was splendid to watch,╙ Lord Tullibardine said the next day: ╥It was a V.C. thing, and yet, if you know what I mean, it wasn't.╙
On the evening of Tuesday, January 23, it was clear that we could get no further with the frontal attack. Sir Charles Warren had all the time had Spion Kop in his eye, as likely to be useful. If we could get on to the southern crest of it we could probably push on to the northern end, and once there we could open a flanking fire on the Boer lines which ran east and west. Spion Kop, properly used, was the key of the position, and the key that would open the door of Ladysmith. Patrols had reported that there were only a few Boers on it. Therefore Sir Charles Warren presented his scheme for capturing it, and it was accepted by Sir Redvers Buller, when it had been all but decided to bring the whole left wing back to Potgieter's. Soon after dusk on Tuesday a party set out to make a night attack on the hill. There were Thorneycroft's Mounted Infantry, the Lancashire Fusiliers, the Lancaster Regiment, two
companies of the South Lancashire Regiment, and a company of Engineers. General Woodgate commanded. It was a hand-and-knee
march up the southern face ╤ a climb over smooth rock and grass. It was necessarily slow; it is to the great credit of the party that it was steady. The force was three-quarters of the way up before it was discovered. Then a Boer sentry challenged it for the password. ╥Waterloo!╙ said an officer. The sentry turned to flee, but fell bayonetted where he turned. Thorneycroft's were on the left, the Lancashire Fusiliers on the right of the front line. ╥Fire and charge!╙ came the order. The Fusiliers went forward at the deliberate, conventional trot; Thorneycroft's, with the untrained, admirable enthusiasm of volunteers, rushed forward in a frenzy. Only a picket was behind the sentry, and it vanished. But the crest was not reached till dawn. When dawn came the party found that it was in the clouds. It could see nothing but the plateau╤400 yards across ╤on which it stood. Trenches were made, but it was difficult to determine the right place for them. The Boers were invisible; our own troops below were invisible; for three hours the party lived on a fog-bound island in the air. At last the mist lifted. The curtain rose upon the performance of a tragedy. The Boers╤need I say, on another ridge of Spion Kop?╤began to fire heavily, and our men seemed to have no sufficient protection in the trenches. The space was small; they were crowded together. I will describe the scene as I saw it from below. I shall always have it in my memory╤that acre of massacre, that complete shambles, at the top of a rich green gully, with cool granite walls (a way fit to lead to heaven), which reached up the western flank of the mountain. To me it seemed that our men were all in a small square patch; there were brown men and browner trenches, the whole like an over-ripe barley field. As I looked soon after the mist had risen, I saw three shells strike a certain trench within a minute; each struck it full in the face, and the
brown dust rose and drifted away with the white smoke. The trench was toothed against the sky like a saw╤made, I supposed, of sharp rocks built into a rampart. Another shell struck it, and then╤heavens!╤the trench rose up and moved forward. The trench was men; the
teeth against the sky were men. They ran forward bending their bodies into a curve, as men do when they run under a heavy fire; they looked like a cornfield with a heavy wind sweeping over it from behind. On the left front of the trenches they dropped into some grey rocks where they could fire. It is wonderful to see a man drop quickly for shelter when he has to; his body might be made of paste, and for the first time in his life he can splash down in an amorphous heap behind a rock. Spout after spout of dust bounced up from the brown patch. So it would go on for perhaps half an hour, when the whole patch itself bristled up from the flatness; another lot of men was making for the rocks ahead. They flickered up, fleeted rapidly and silently across the sky, and flickered down into the rocks, without the appearance of either a substantial beginning or end to the movement. The slight was as elusive as a shadow-show.
The Boers had three guns playing like hoses on our men. On the west of the hill they were firing a Maxim-Nordenfelt, in the middle a large Creuset gun, on the east of the hill another Maxim-Nordenfelt. It was a triangular fire. Our men on Spion Kop had no gun. When on earth would the artillery come? No sign of them yet, not even a sign of a mountain battery; and we who watched wriggled in our anxiety. The question now was whether enough men could live through the shelling till the guns came. Men must have felt that they had lived a long life under that fire by the end of the day, and still the guns had not come. From Three Tree Hill the gunners shelled the usual places, as well as the northern ranges of Spion Kop, where the Boer riflemen were supposed to be. Where the Boer guns were we did not know. If only they had offered a fine mark, like our own guns, we should have smashed them in five minutes. The British gunner is proud of the perfect alignment and the regular intervals which
his battery has observed under the heaviest fire; the Boer gunner would be sorry to observe any line or any intervals. He will not have a gun in the open; he is not proud, but he is safe. You might say that in this war the object of the Boer gunners is to kill an enemy who cannot see them; that of the heroic British gunners is to be
killed by an enemy whom they cannot see. The European notion of field guns is that they should be light enough to be moved about rapidly in battle and not hamper the speed of an army on the march. Now, does it not appear that the Boers will change all that for us? They have dragged heavy long-range guns about with them and put them on the tops of steep hills, and we, of all people, know that they have not hampered the speed of their army. Some dunderhead, perhaps, proposed that such guns should be taken by the army into the field╤some fellow who had never read a civilised book on gunnery. But how many fools in history have led the world?
Reinforcements were ordered to Spion Kop. The men on Spion Kop were crying out for them. I could see men running to and fro on the top, ever hunted to a fresh shelter. Some Boer riflemen crept forward, and for a few minutes fifty Boers and British heaved and swayed hand to hand. They drew apart. The shelling did not cease. The hollow rapping of the Maxim-Nordenfelts was a horrid sound; the little shells from them flapped and clacked along the ground in a long straight line like a string of
geese. But the reinforcements were coming; already a thin line corkscrewed up the southern slope. Their bayonets reflected the sun. Mules were in the column with ammunition, screwing themselves upwards, as lithe as monkeys. The Dorsets, Bethune's, the Middlesex,
the Imperial Light Infantry ╤ volunteers destined to receive a scalding baptism ╤ were on the climb. From left to right of the field, too, infantry moved. Hildyard's Brigade and the Somersets emerged from behind Three Tree Hill in open order, and moved towards the Boer line on the north and towards the west flank of Spion Kop. The Boers sniped into them. A man was down╤a shot rabbit in the grass with his legs moving. The infantry went a little way further north and east, halted and watched Spion Kop the rest of the day. General Woodgate had been hit over the left eye about ten o'clock in the morning; the command came by a natural devolution to Colonel Thorneycroft. And this big, powerful man, certainly the best mark on the hill, moved about fearlessly all day and was untouched. The reinforcements poured up the steep path which bent over suddenly on to the plateau at the top. It was ten steps from shelter to death.
#A doctor told me of the scene on Spion Kop on Thursday morning. A great proportion of the wounds had been made by shells; therefore they must not be described. A Boer doctor looked at the dead bodies of men and horses, the litter, the burnt grass where shells had set fire to it╤at the whole sad and splendid scene where the finest infantry in the world had suffered. ╥No!╙ he said, with double truth, ╥we Boers would not, could not, suffer like that.╙
