Into the Jaws of Death

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CONTENTS

Prologue: Chapter :

List of Illustrations List of Maps List of Tables Preface Author’s Note Chronology

9 13 13 15 25 27

Zululand, January 1879 The Victorian Army in an Age of Transition

35 42

The Challenge of Modernization, 1854–1899 Chapter :

‘Wounded and Left on Afghanistan’s Plains’

69

The Battle of Maiwand Chapter :

‘Floreat Etona’

147

The Battles of Laing’s Nek and Ingogo Chapter :

Hill of Doves

189

The Battle of Majuba Hill Chapter :

White Pashas

219

British Contract-Officers and the Mahdist Revolt Chapter :

Desert Column

260

The Dash for Khartoum Chapter :

‘Sold by a Damned Gunner’

327

Sir Redvers Buller and the Battle of Colenso Chapter :

‘That Complete Shambles’

366

The Battle of Spion Kop Epilogue:

School of Hard Knocks

395

Defeat in the Colonies, 1879–1900 Notes Bibliography Glossary Index

406 418 422 425

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THE VICTORIAN ARMY IN AGE OF TRANSITION

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The Challenge of Modernization, – If an officer was inclined to read, there was no one to whom he could apply for advice as to what to read; his education in the higher branches of military science was no one’s business but his own. He was even told that a knowledge of strategy – and strategy is at least one half, and the more important half, of the art of war – was required from staff officers alone; and in consonance with this extraordinary doctrine, military history was taught officially nowhere but at the Staff College.

Colonel G. F. R. Henderson, February , Essay on the British Army before the Boer War

It was always said that the Queen Empress’s German grandson had scornfully dismissed the British Expeditionary Force of 1914 as a ‘contemptible little army’. It was a memorable phrase, even if in reality it cannot be convincingly demonstrated that the Kaiser ever uttered it. But as a once avid reader of the two-volume analysis of the Boer War compiled by the German General Staff, it was the sort of thing he might have said and, for bantering British ‘Tommies’ huddled around their campfires in Flanders, that was good enough. Perhaps because it seemed to fit such a posturing braggart so very, very well, its authenticity was never in doubt. To be fair to Wilhelm II, if in sharing his thoughts with his generals he did indeed pour scorn on the size of Sir John French’s command, he was but making a perfectly sustainable point. By continental standards the BEF was a little army – British armies always were. But nothing about the Army of 1914 was contemptible, least of all the hard-case regulars in its ranks who, with the ironic sense of humour that has always characterized their kind, proudly labelled themselves ‘the Old Contemptibles’

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and began heaping scorn upon their apparently ungracious royal detractor. The Tommies proceeded to make good their point by shooting a number of attacking German divisions to pieces, demonstrating such a remarkably high standard of musketry in the process that enemy intelligence officers convinced themselves that British battalions were equipped with many more machine guns than they actually possessed. Unusually for the British, even in retreat, in accordance with the operational-level demands of the Mons campaign, the BEF’s logistic systems proved robust enough to meet a succession of demanding tactical crises. These days the received wisdom amongst military historians is that the BEF may well have been the best army ever to leave these shores.

The Make-Do-and-Mend Army But how times had changed over the preceding 60 years. We would be deluding ourselves if we imagined for one moment that no ‘contemptible’ armies have ever marched to war beneath the Union Flag. All too often in the history of the British military, assembling a field force for war went little further than appointing its senior commanders and then earmarking a random selection of regiments, battalions and batteries to do the fighting. Brigades and divisions were ad hoc groupings thrown together in the field rather than the permanently established all-arms formations of today. The expedition to the Crimea provides an excellent example of the genre. When war broke out in 1854 the Army was 140,000 strong, about a third larger than it is today. It was presided over by a civil–military bureaucracy so inherently chaotic that even the most basic planning proved tortuous in the extreme. Assembling sufficient combat-ready regiments for an expedition of any size was invariably a struggle, as the majority of units were committed to the policing of India or to an increasingly fractious Ireland. Units of the home Army seldom attained full fighting strength as they were regularly required to provide drafts for units serving overseas and, in any case, were pegged-back by unreasonably tight peacetime establishments.1 For fairly obvious reasons under-strength is virtually synonymous with poorly trained.

Whenever an unexpected crisis blew up, it was necessary to top up the deploying regiments to fighting strength with drafts from any number of similarly roled units, a convenient but ultimately harmful expedient, which when pursued as a norm guarantees a widespread lack of cohesion at precisely the least opportune moment. Expeditionary forces of greater than divisional strength ran the risk of leaving Britain all but denuded of regular troops.

Assembling a balanced force for the Egyptian intervention of 1882 was no easier for Sir Garnet Wolseley than it had been for Lord Raglan almost 30 years earlier.

It was not until 1888 that a workable plan for the generation of significant

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contingency forces was evolved. From that point on it was at least theoretically possible to mobilize two all-arms corps and an independent cavalry division.

The odds had long been stacked against Army reform. Although significant change in the governance of military affairs had been contemplated in the 1830s, the programme had faltered and had not in the end been seen through to a rational legislative conclusion. In the run-up to the Crimean War, therefore, the Army was directly answerable to two ministers, the ‘Secretary at War’, the more junior of the pair, and the ‘Secretary of State for War and the Colonies’, whose increasingly unmanageable portfolio at last provided the catalyst for change. In June 1854 the senior appointment was formally divided into its component parts, an arrangement which served only to accentuate the Army’s problems by creating a second full-time minister for military affairs. In February 1855 the situation was rationalized with the abolition of the Secretary at War. Even with the war in full swing, the constituent parts of the War Office remained scattered through a number of government buildings in the environs of Pall Mall. In all around a dozen government departments had some sort of role in military administration. For all its outward professions of concern, and despite the presence in both Houses of a considerable number of ex-officers, Parliament was no friend of the soldier. Given the choice of an effective way of resourcing a military measure, or a cheap but less effective way, the Commons would usually identify an even cheaper and almost wholly ineffective third way.

Even with ‘War’ and ‘the Colonies’ separated, operational control of the overseas garrisons remained vested in the Colonial Office. There were other anomalies. While the Commander-in-Chief controlled the cavalry, the infantry and the Guards, he did not own either the Royal Artillery (RA) or the Royal Engineers (RE), both of which answered to the Master General of the Ordnance (MGO). Responsibility for commissariat and transport matters rested with the Treasury, and in consequence they were run on a shoestring. For the time being not only did most of the major departments of state have a finger in the military pie, but the reality was that the pie itself was divided into several distinctly separate slices – there were in fact no fewer than seven semiautonomous British armies. Even the Regular Army, which ought to have been simple enough to administer, was divided between the home Army, a number of sizeable overseas garrisons, and the ‘Army in India’ – which was not the same thing as the ‘Indian Army’ – not that in reality there was any such thing as an Indian Army. Rather the expression was little more than a convenient descriptor for the armies of the Bombay, Madras and Bengal Presidencies, three quite separate military establishments which would not be merged into a single entity until as late as 1895. The sixth and seventh armies for prospective reformers to contemplate were the Militia and the Volunteers, both of which had stronger ties to the Home Office than to the War Office. Indeed control of the Militia

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rested with the lord lieutenants of the shires rather than the Secretary of State for War. The old Volunteer movement, once a bulwark against Revolutionary France but never a wholly credible military resource, had new life breathed into it in 1859 when a new cross-Channel invasion scare threatened. Many professional soldiers complained that the Volunteers consumed revenue but provided little meaningful military capacity in return. To a parsimonious House of Commons, which since Trafalgar had grown accustomed to playing fast and loose with the landward defence of the realm, large numbers of virtually untrained but sublimely inexpensive volunteers represented a grand return on a minimal investment.

The ‘Army in India’ was the informal name given to that slice of the Regular Army leased by the Crown into the service of the Honourable East India Company (HEIC). The ‘Queen’s’ regiments concerned were so remote from the control of Army headquarters at Horse Guards that each became a private army in its own right, determined above all else to stand on its dignity and to assert its superiority over its Indian Army counterparts wherever and whenever the opportunity presented itself. It remained a long-standing bone of contention that the most junior Queen’s officer counted as senior to any HEIC officer of equivalent rank. Since many of the Company officers were battle-hardened veterans, and many of the newly-arrived Queen’s officers were both foppish and inexperienced, the convention was the cause of considerable rancour.

Eventually there would be only one Commander-in-Chief India, but for the time being each of the three presidencies had its own. By virtue of his physical proximity to the governor-general (later the viceroy), C-in-C Bengal acted as the de facto chairman of the triumvirate. Throughout our period neither the Secretary of State for War nor Horse Guards was capable of exercising any meaningful central authority over Indian military affairs, as both the Army in India and the three presidency armies were funded by the Indian taxpayer and answered in the first instance to the viceroy and his council.

Up to and including the Crimean War precious little thought was ever given to the Army’s administration in the field – to its resupply, its transport arrangements, its quartering, its nourishment, its foul-weather clothing, or its medical and veterinary support. Far easier to restrict one’s objectives, utilize a small expeditionary force, stick close to the coast and rely on the infinitely better-organized Royal Navy for administrative support. Army logistic systems, such as they were, had to be improvised from scratch. For a long time British general officers had not only to master the art of war but, if they were to succeed beyond the limited environment of small-scale amphibious expeditions, had of necessity to be brilliant and instinctive logisticians too. Behind much of the battlefield success achieved by Marlborough and Wellington lay their talent for piecing together necessarily ad hoc but nonetheless sound logistic systems.

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Attempting to save the guns at Colenso.

Colenso Railway Bridge from the south bank of the Tugela.The koppie in the background is Fort Wylie.

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Lieutenant Colonel Blomfield and the officers of the ďœ˛nd Lancashire Fusiliers.

A gruesome and iconic image of the scene on Spion Kop the day after the battle.

The British dead are in the trench that would serve as their grave.

‘Forward the nd’ by Robert Gibb, a depiction of the Black Watch at the Alma.The Crimean Army’s mode of fighting was much closer to that of Waterloo, fought almost  years earlier, than to the Ashanti campaign of less than  years later.

The end of the ‘horse-and-musket era’. Lord Cardigan leads the Light Brigade to destruction. Oil by Thomas Jones Barker.

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face, the north face of Majuba was far from being a difficult climb. For the time being the sound of the occasional rifle shot from the foot of the hill was the only indication that a counter-attack was under way.

In the meantime Piet Joubert had ridden across to stiffen the resolve of the burghers dug in on the nek. As it became increasingly obvious that the British had no subsidiary offensive manoeuvre unfolding, more and more Boers rode across to participate in the counter-attack. Smit was now able to start thinking on a grander scale. Not only did a third assault group start climbing the mountain under Veldtkornets Danie Malan and Stephanus Trichard, but Smit himself was able to set off at the head of around 150 mounted men, intent on manoeuvring around the blind side of the mountain, to harass the British left flank and rear.

The Battle of Majuba Hill At 8.00 a.m. the headquarters signallers established communications with Mount Prospect and at the general’s behest flashed a short message for onwards transmission to the Secretary of State for War: ‘Occupied Majuba mountain last night. Immediately overlooking Boer position. Boers firing at us from below.’

Ninety minutes later Stewart signalled the camp to report, ‘All very comfortable.

Boers wasting ammunition. One man wounded in foot.’ If these two messages suggested that nothing very much had happened in the interim, it was because, to the officers sat idling amongst the boulders on the rocky ridge, that was just how it appeared. In reality Ferreira and Roos were now half-way up the northwest corner of the mountain, with Trichard and Malan echeloned not far to their left rear. From time to time members of the Gordons were kneeling or standing up in order to get off a decent shot, but they were having no real deterrent effect on the attack and were exposing themselves unnecessarily to the veteran marksmen below. Over the course of the next hour two more men were wounded and had to be carried away to the surgeons.

In response to the developing attack Colley conferred with Stewart and announced his intention to return to Mount Prospect. As chief of staff, Stewart would of course accompany his commander. Before leaving the summit the general would have to satisfy himself that everything was under control. It was now, at about 10.45 a.m., that he decided to order the construction of three improvised redoubts. He was standing with Stewart, Fraser and Romilly on the edge of the mountain, contemplating a potential site near the south-west angle, when Romilly looked down and observed that a Boer rifleman was aiming at them from below. Colley asked his colleagues what they thought the range might be. Lowering his binoculars, Stewart replied calmly that he thought it was about 900 yards. Just then Francis Romilly went reeling to the ground.

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Surgeon Edward Mahon RN of HMS Flora had come across from the aid post to visit his brother naval officers, Lieutenant Trower and Sub-Lieutenant Scott: I had hardly been there three minutes when I heard a bullet explode close to us. I heard the general say ‘Captain [sic] Romilly is hit,’ and turning round saw General Colley kneeling by the side of the commander, who was lying on the ground about four yards from us. I sent for a stretcher, and proceeded to dress the wound, which I found to perforate the left side of the abdomen and coming out of the loins.12

Romilly was stretchered away to the aid post in a dangerously wounded condition. If nothing else, his demise made it abundantly clear that Colley no longer had an option to return to Mount Prospect. In fact, allowing not less than an hour to get down, his last safe opportunity to do so had been as early as 6.00: the solitary Conductor Field had been shot and captured along with his mule at around 7.00 a.m.

At 11.00 a.m., by which time the sporadic firing from the lower slopes had been under way for close to five hours, Colley signalled a new situation report to the camp, again intended in due course for the Secretary of State for War. This time he noted Romilly’s injury and went on to remark that the Boers were ‘still firing heavily on hill, but have broken up laager and begun to move away’.

It was this assessment of the wider situation that lay at the heart of the general’s continuing complacency; he was misinterpreting the scenes below to see only what he wanted to see. The wagons of a few faint-hearts might well have been on the move, but as often as not a burgher’s wagon was moved around by his African servants, leaving him free to fight for days at a time from the contents of his saddlebags. For all their early morning jitters, the overwhelming majority of Joubert’s men had, in the end, kept their nerve. In broad terms there were now 300 men clawing their way uphill, 150 sniping from the low ground and 150 roaming wide with Nicholaas Smit. The remainder were watching the nek as Joubert had instructed. Colley’s 11.00 a.m. assessment was no more than wishful thinking.

Down in the low ground Captain Robertson’s companies had completed a large rectangular redoubt, with earthen walls about four feet high and two feet thick and an entrance facing back towards Mount Prospect. Not long after 11.00 a.m., in fulfilment of Commissary Elmes’s undertaking, Captain George Sulivan and a 50-strong troop of the 15th Hussars rode in with the extra rations for Thurlow’s men. A veteran of the recent operations around Kandahar, Sulivan decided to stay out in support of the infantry and dismounted his men to the rear of the already crowded redoubt. It was about now that Robertson’s command had its first sighting of Boer horsemen – once again Nicholaas Smit’s raiders were infiltrating the British lines of communication.

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Though it had yet to sink in, from mid-morning onwards Sir George Colley had in effect been invested on Majuba. It was no longer possible for the British to get up or down the mountain in daylight. Amongst many other defects in the plan, this meant that the reserve ammunition had been left in the wrong place.

The Break-In The lie of the land on the north side of the mountain drew Ferreira and Roos inexorably towards Gordons’ Knoll, at the foot of which there was an area of dead ground. In order to get safely into its cover it was necessary to leave the shelter of a nearby ravine and dash across 25 yards of open terrace. About 18 of Ian Hamilton’s men were able to fire onto this area from the rim of the mountain. The Boer commanders overcame the problem by establishing a strong firing line along the lip of the ravine and laying down heavy suppressive fire each time a score of men had assembled to make the dash. To Hamilton it felt like there were 80 riflemen firing on his position at such times. However many firers there were in reality, the 18 Gordons were heavily outgunned and obliged to keep their heads down each time one of these heavy fusillades came pouring in. As no orders had been disseminated on the availability of reserve ammunition, the highlanders were further hampered by the necessity to conserve the rounds in their pouches. Having observed a number of successive enemy rushes into the dead ground, Hamilton slipped back to the rocky ridge to advise the general that around 100 Boers had installed themselves beneath his position. Colley thanked him for his report but took no action.

The build-up beneath the knoll was so worrying to Hamilton that at intervals of roughly 15 minutes he went back to the general to make a second and then a third report, indicating the presence of 200 and then 350 Boers. Whilst these were undoubtedly inflated estimates, Colley had no way of knowing this and, t.

Tany vaguely competent battalion commander, Hamilton’s anxiety would have been indicative of a burgeoning problem. At about midday he ran back to the rocky ridge for a fourth time, only to find that the general had decided to take a nap. It is unlikely that a good soldier like Herbert Stewart declined to wake his commander, so it is probably safe to assume that he was away from the headquarters at this time, the more so since Hamilton recounts that he felt moved in the end to deliver his fourth report to Jock Hay. Having done so, he dashed back to the threatened sector and threw himself down amongst his men.13 Veldtkornet Stephanus Roos was amongst the first, if not the very first, to pop his head over the edge of Gordons’ Knoll. It was unoccupied but there was a thinly spread firing line of khaki-clad highlanders only 60 yards beyond. Roos was looking slightly uphill towards them. Their position was on a forward slope to the rest of the summit, leaving them out on a limb – none of the other

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British positions were visible to Roos, nor were they able to provide Hamilton with fire support. Roos dropped back into cover and resorted to a stratagem to get his hesitant men into all-out offensive mode. There were only about 50–60 of them in his immediate vicinity, but that was enough to achieve a localized three-to-one advantage over the handful of Scots opposite. Waving his hat over his head, Roos cried out that the British were running. The burghers nearby were sufficiently heartened to throw themselves into fire positions on top of the knoll and commence a short-range fire-fight with Hamilton and his men.

All of a sudden, about half past twelve o’clock, a tremendous fire was opened from this knoll on a part of my company immediately to my left. A space of ground sixty yards long and held by five or six of my men was covered with bullets. Two or three of the poor fellows were killed at once, one or two ran back. Where I and my men lay, seemed to be out of the direct line of fire.14

Rude Awakening The sudden fusillade to the left front, far heavier than anything which had preceded it, woke up the men snoozing gently amongst the boulders on the rocky ridge, Sir George included. It was clear that some kind of crisis had indeed developed on the Gordons’ sector. John Cameron, representing the Evening Standard and the Illustrated London News, described how Lieutenant Harry Wright of the 92nd came dashing back from the rim of the mountain shouting aloud for reinforcements. The general responded immediately by committing the reserve in support of Hamilton. While it is a common failing of generalship to refrain from committing the reserve until it is too late, it is also perfectly possible to mistime the decision by committing too soon. On this occasion Colley was probably around five or six minutes early.

Within a few seconds of their rude awakening, the mixed bag of soldiers and sailors comprising the reserve found themselves stumbling into a counter-attack.

As soon as they left the cover of the dead ground and ran onto the forward slope behind Hamilton’s hard-pressed firing line, they came under heavy fire. If the reserve task had been assigned to a single formed company and it had been kept poised, briefed and alert, then the chances are that the counter-attack would have had sufficient dash and momentum to throw the Boers back down the hillside at the point of the bayonet. In the event the reserve’s lack of cohesion caused its members to react lamely. Instead of pressing the sort of bold attack that Roos and Ferreira simply could not have beaten back with single shot breech-loaders, they threw themselves down and opened fire in the general direction of Gordons’ Knoll. Many of them could not see what they were shooting at, but in their anxiety to be seen doing something useful, loaded and