[#] A heliograph was working on the height, but 'the signallers and their apparatus were destroyed by the heavy fire' (vide Sir Charles Warren's report).--TRANSLATOR.
His position had become most critical; a council of war was hastily called, on the decision of which the height was evacuated under cover of night.
On January 25 Sir Redvers Buller, who had hastened to Warren's camp, was informed of this catastrophe, which upset all his combinations. A general retreat was determined on, and the troops recrossed the Tugela.
After this bloody check, General Buller's report of the movement is delicious:
'The fact that we were able to withdraw our ox-waggons and mule transports over a river 85 yards broad and with a rapid current, without any interference from the enemy, is, I think, a proof that they have learnt to respect the fighting powers of our soldiers.'
The 'lesson' he had given the Boers had cost him 307 killed, thirty-one of whom were officers; 175 wounded, of whom forty-nine were officers; and 347 prisoners and missing, among them seven officers.
The Boers had 168 men killed. And, as Ricciardi has pointed out, but for the incomprehensible opposition of General Joubert, this retreat across the Tugela would have been, not a proof that the enemy had learnt to respect the fighting powers of the English, but a terrific rout. For General Louis Botha, surrounded by a dozen guns, was watching the English passing over their pontoons from the heights he had defended the night before. They were well within range, and the gunners were at their posts. It wanted but an order, the pontoons would have been destroyed, and Warren's division, hemmed in by the river, would have been massacred to a man. Why was this order not given?
In March, even before the death of the Generalissimo, a terrible word had been whispered--treason! At any rate, his inaction was highly culpable, for if the struggle seems hopeless now, there was a time when he might have turned it into victory, and made it another Majuba Hill campaign.
We know that Joubert's ignorance was almost incredible, that he could not even use a map, and that he stubbornly refused to learn. His attitude at the time of Warren's retreat and in certain other circumstances no doubt gave colour to the rumours of poisoning which followed the General's sudden death in March. It is conceivable that some Burgher, carried away by patriotic zeal, did not hesitate to commit a crime that the supreme command might pass into more faithful or bolder hands....
Later on, when I was a prisoner in the English camp, I said one day in jest to a young sub-lieutenant: