To most men, conscientiously compelled to censure in an official despatch those employed under them, the suggestion from the War Office that such censure should be confined to a confidential communication, and that some account of the operation and the cause of failure should be written for publication, would have come as a welcome relief; and had Sir Redvers Buller seen his way to comply with it and at the same time to send copies to Sir Charles Warren of the confidential despatches, he would have placed himself in an unassailable position, he would have given Sir Charles Warren an opportunity of confidentially justifying himself, if he could do so, to the Secretary of State for War and the Commander-in-Chief, he would have enabled his countrymen to know more about the operations than was otherwise possible, and the world would have been spared a very painful exhibition.
To this course, however, Sir Redvers Buller would not consent. He prided himself on his integrity in resisting such a proposal, and has been much praised for refusing to write a despatch for publication, having already written one, which was mainly an indictment of his second-in-command, on whom he threw the responsibility for the failure of the operations.
It is the custom of the Service—and a very fair and proper custom it is—that an unfavourable confidential report made upon a junior officer by his superior shall be communicated to him before it is sent forward, so that he may have an opportunity either of excusing himself or of amending his conduct, and may have no reason to complain that advantage has been taken of a confidential communication to make unfavourable reports behind his back, of which he remains in ignorance.
Sir Redvers Buller does not appear to have been mindful of this custom, when, instead of writing a simple account of what he proposed to do, and how it failed of accomplishment, he used the opportunity to criticise most unfavourably the conduct of the distinguished officer, his second-in-command, still serving under him in face of the enemy, and left him in complete ignorance of the accusations made against him. This ignorance he knew must last in any case until the despatches were published, and, if they were not published, would never be removed. But Sir Redvers Buller went beyond this, for he attached to his despatch a separate memorandum, ‘not necessarily for publication,’ in which he reiterated his complaints of the conduct of Sir Charles Warren and accused him of such incapacity as unfitted him for independent command. But not a word of this reached Sir Charles Warren, whose exertions in the field during the succeeding month under Sir Redvers Buller contributed so greatly to the victory of Pieters and the relief of Ladysmith; and it was not until he saw the despatches in the newspapers, long after this campaign was over, that he knew of the secret stab his reputation had received at the hand of his commander. Two years later the recently published omissions have informed him how seriously the attack upon his reputation as a soldier was intended.
A correspondence between Mr. Henry Norman, M.P., and the Right Hon. A. J. Balfour, First Lord of the Treasury, published on 21st February last, contains some observations by the latter very much to the point on the want of any narrative of the Spion Kop operations in Sir Redvers Buller’s despatches. Mr. Balfour points out, as was done two years before in the parliamentary debates, that the General in command, ‘in accordance with the Queen’s Regulations, with the best precedents, and with public convenience,’ should have furnished a simple narrative, unencumbered by controversy, of the operations which took place. To this Sir Redvers Buller objected, in a letter published on the 26th March last, that he was not in command, that he was not present, and that therefore it was not his duty to write such a narrative. The reply of Mr. Balfour, from which an extract is appended, will be found to be fully borne out in the pages of this book.
Extract from a letter from Mr. A. J. Balfour to Sir Redvers Buller dated 10th March 1902.
‘You say that, not being in chief command, you were not the proper person to write an account of what took place. But can this be sustained? I find that on 15th January you ordered Sir Charles Warren to cross the Tugela to the west of Spion Kop; on the 21st and 22nd you gave him personal instructions as to the disposal of his artillery; on the latter day you agreed with him, after discussion, that Spion Kop would have to be taken; on the 23rd you definitely decided upon the attack; you selected the officer who was to lead it, detailing one of your Staff to accompany him; it was by your orders that on the 24th Lieut.-Colonel Thorneycroft assumed command on the summit of Spion Kop after General Woodgate was wounded, and all heliographic messages between the officers in the fighting line and Sir Charles Warren passed through your camp, and were seen by you before they reached their destination. As you were thus in constant touch with the troops actually engaged on the top of the hill, so also you kept general control over the movements of the co-operative forces under General Lyttelton, with whom you were in communication during both the morning and the afternoon of the 24th. It is, of course, true that you were not present at the actual Spion Kop engagement. But if this was a reason for not writing an account of it, it was a reason equally applicable to Sir Charles Warren, whose headquarters, as I am informed, were very little nearer to the scene of action than were your own. It was on these grounds that I did not draw any distinction between your position during the days of Spion Kop and that of any other general conducting operations over an extended field, at every part of which he could not, from the nature of the case, be present. You were responsible for the general plan of action; you intervened frequently in its execution; you were not prevented either by distance or any other material obstacle from intervening more frequently still, had you deemed it expedient to do so. Was I wrong, then, in pointing out that it would have been in accordance both with precedent and the Queen’s Regulations for you to have supplied the Commander-in-Chief with a narrative of these important military events based on your own observations and on the reports of those of your officers who were immediately engaged with the enemy?’
We have never been able to understand why the orders given to Sir Charles Warren were not published with the despatches two years ago. True they were called secret instructions, but of course the secrecy was a temporary matter, and they ceased to be secret when the operations were over. Without them there was no way for the public to learn officially, except in the most general way, what the General in command in Natal desired to do, and probably, owing to the wording of Lord Roberts’s despatch, a misconception arose, widely entertained in the army and highly prejudicial to Sir Charles Warren.