Spioenkop. The bloodiest battle of the Anglo-Boer South African War. It was little more than a skirmish, but on this dusty little stage three great statesmen of the 20th century played a role. And so did the ghost of Jack the Ripper. Gavin Foster reports
Louis Botha was there. Less than three months before, as a common soldier, he’d personally captured Winston Churchill in the armoured train incident at Chievelely. Now, at 37 the youngest general in the Boer forces, Botha commanded the Tugela front. But with just 4E500 men under his command he had to keep 13E745 soldiers penned up in Ladysmith while preventing General Sir Redvers Buller and his 23E000 soldiers from crossing the Tugela and relieving the town.
Thirty-one-year-old Mohandas Mahatma Gandhi was also there. “When war was declared my personal sympathies were with the Boers, but I believed that I had no right to enforce my individual convictions,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I felt that if I demanded rights as a British citizen, it was my duty, as such, to participate in the defence of the British Empire.”
Gandhi helped raise, and served in, the Natal Volunteer Indian Ambulance Corps. They were not supposed to serve within the firing line, but this changed at Spioenkop – Buller asked if they would fetch the wounded. “We had no hesitation,” Gandhi wrote. “During these days we had to march 25 miles [40km] a day, bearing the wounded on stretchers.”
The third and youngest of the three great statesmen at Spioenkop was Winston Churchill, then just 26. Having recently escaped from the Boers in Pretoria, Churchill was there as a journalist and an unpaid lieutenant in the South African Light Horse Brigade.
Jack the Ripper is an unexpected participant in the Spioenkop saga, but play a role he did, though not in the flesh. If he’d allowed himself to be captured in London 12 years before, things might have turned out very differently in Natal.
When Jack took to dismembering prostitutes in 1888 Sir Charles Warren was commissioner of the London metropolitan police, a position he’d held since retiring from the army two years before. Public outrage at his inability to catch the killer had already risen to dangerous levels when word got out that Warren had ordered some chalk- written graffiti, believed to implicate somebody of importance, removed from a murder scene before photographers arrived. The crowd bayed for blood, and Warren resigned on the day before Jack’s fifth and final murder. Warren, who had enjoyed a distinguished career in the Engineers, returned to the army, and ended up commanding the attack on Spioenkop.
“War is too serious a business to be left to the generals,” said Georges Clemenceau in the 19th century, and this was particularly true of the British at Spioenkop – a Boer prisoner once tongue-in- cheek told his captors that in his army the killing of a British general was a capital offence.
Buller commanded all the British forces in South Africa, but after a series of setbacks in his campaign had been demoted to command Natal alone. Confidence bruised by his defeat at Colenso, Buller handed responsibility for breaching the Tugela to his subordinate – Warren – and retired to view the battle with a telescope from afar. He nevertheless interfered constantly with Warren’s plans, and although he blamed him for the defeat that followed, there’s no doubt that Buller himself was most culpable.
On January 23 1900, 1E700 British mounted a night attack up the southern slopes of Spioenkop, and cleared the hill of the 100- odd Boers who had been posted there without much trouble before starting to dig in on the summit. They hit rock about 45cm down, but because they’d discarded most of their heavy entrenching equipment during the steep climb, they couldn’t dig deeper. Confident that the Boers wouldn’t counter-attack, they settled down in their shallow trenches for a couple of hours of sleep.
But, apart from being too shallow, their crescent-shaped line of trenches was in the wrong place. Although on the summit, it gave no field of view over the gradual northern slopes of the hill because they were too far back. This allowed the Boers to ascend Spioenkop in safety, out of sight of the men on the summit and the 22E000 strong British main force on the other side of the hill. There they could take cover behind rocks and fire upon the British at close range.
As the sun rose and the mist started to dissolve, the British learned just how precarious their position was. The northern slopes crawled with Boers, and the only way they could bring them under fire was by leaving their shallow trenches and moving forward, which at first they did.
Then, as the mist cleared, came the second blow: the whole summit of Spioenkop was exposed to fire from neighbouring kopjes that overlooked the British positions – Aloe Knoll, which jutted from the north- eastern slope of Spioenkop itself; Twin Peaks, behind Aloe Knoll; Green Hill to the north-west and Conical Hill, another kopje nearby on their western flank.
The exposed soldiers found themselves under increasing fire from snipers on the high ground, while the Boers’ artillery pieces flayed them from the north, east and west. Even in the shallow trenches there was no respite – snipers on Aloe Knoll, 400m away, could fire down the length of their main trench, and after the battle 70 corpses were found, all shot through the right sides of their heads. If the defenders could have constructed sandbag parapets for extra cover they would have done so, but the pile of empty sandbags gathered at their starting point remained uselessly at the bottom of the hill – nobody had told the men to take them along.
There were other dreadful mistakes on that day. Nobody had thought to run a telegraph cable up to the top of the mountain, and the heliograph signalling station was shelled early in the day so messages had to be sent with runners who took hours to get through. When General Woodgate, who led the attack, was fatally wounded early in the day, Warren and Buller each appointed different successors to command the troops, while the senior officer on the summit assumed that the command was his. For the whole day the men hung tenaciously on to their position under the hot African sun, while artillery and sniper fire left corpses piling up in the shallow graves they had dug for themselves. Nobody knew who was in command, but four different officers each thought they were.
Throughout this long day of fighting Buller and Warren did little to sway the battle in favour of their forces and much to hinder them.
Despite having 22E000 men in reserve, they did not order an attack along a wide front, to either draw off the Boers, who only numbered a couple of thousand, or break through to Ladysmith while the enemy was distracted. They also scotched any hope they might have had of success by interfering at crucial stages in the battle.
When British artillery opened up on the Boers on Aloe Knoll, Warren ordered them to desist as he mistakenly believed the knoll to be occupied by his own troops. Both Buller and Lyttleton, the artillery officer, knew this to be untrue but Warren’s order remained unchallenged.
Later in the day soldiers from the Kings Royal Rifles gained possession of Twin Peaks, forcing the Boers to remove the artillery that had been wreaking so much havoc in the trenches, but Buller, angered at the attack he had not ordered, demanded their immediate withdrawal.
After nightfall signallers used a signalling lamp to communicate with Warren, but nobody had checked their supply of illuminating paraffin, and this ran out within an hour or so. Finally, the man Buller had first placed in charge, Lieutenant Colonel Alex Thorneycroft, led his exhausted men down the hill under cover of darkness, meeting Churchill, who was acting as a messenger for Warren on the way.
The irony of Spioenkop is that the Boers also left the battlefield, thinking they had lost, and set off back to their farms. Louis Botha himself rode tirelessly through the night, entreating the fleeing commandos to stay and fight on, and in the morning when his men climbed to the crest they found the battlefield abandoned by all but the dead and the wounded.
Around 350 British were buried in the trenches where they died, and another 1E100 were wounded, many to die later. Boer losses amounted to 75 killed and 150 wounded. On January 25 the British retreated across the Tugela, and it was another five long weeks before they relieved Ladysmith.
Perhaps the last word should be left to Churchill, speaking of Warren after the battle. “He was a charming old gentleman, and I was genuinely sorry for him. I was also sorry for the army.”