The second fault committed on the summit was crowding line upon line to give the firing line moral support. The result was carnage. The officers commanding brigades and Colonel Thorneycroft clamoured for reinforcements to give this moral support. Major-General Coke several times checked the upward move of reinforcements, but in the end gave way to urgent messages and let them go on until by 3.30 P.M. the small summit was crowded with five battalions besides details. Sir Redvers Buller, Sir Charles Warren, Major-Generals Coke and Lyttelton, and Colonel àCourt all thought two battalions on the top sufficient.
Both these faults were due to want of proper training of both officers and men.
We shall now consider Sir Redvers Buller’s despatches and memorandum of 30th January 1900 in some detail, and make some very adverse criticisms. It is with reluctance that we do so, but it must be remembered that Sir Redvers has no one but himself to blame that these despatches are before the public. It was his own doing that they saw the light in the first instance, and it is equally his own doing that the portions omitted in the first instance have lately been published too. It is only, therefore, in justice to Sir Charles Warren, who has not been allowed to reply, that we examine these despatches critically.
It will not be forgotten that a despatch written a month earlier on the Zoutspan Drift action was perused by critics at home with amazement and perplexity. The easy insouciance with which the late Adjutant-General of the Forces, who for seven years had been primarily responsible for the training of the officers and men of the army, referred to their want of training when tried in the field, it was felt, could not easily be surpassed.
‘I suppose,’ he wrote, ‘our officers will learn the value of scouting in time, but in spite of all one can say, up to this our men seem to blunder into the middle of the enemy, and suffer accordingly.’
But his despatches of 30th January throw this one into the shade in their complete detachment from all responsibility, and recall, more than anything else, the reports of an umpire at peace manœuvres, which praise this side and blame that, with the comfortable assurance that the writer is an independent observer, on whom no one can turn the tables.
In the first of the two despatches of 30th January Sir Redvers Buller gives no indication, as we have already pointed out, of what he intended Sir Charles Warren to do when he sent him across the Tugela. He merely regrets that an expedition, which he thinks should have succeeded, failed, and refers to Sir Charles Warren’s despatch for particulars. The only comment on Sir Charles Warren’s dispositions was that he had ‘mixed up all the brigades, and the positions he held were dangerously insecure.’
In the second despatch, while maintaining the same attitude of irresponsibility, he adopts the rôle of the captious critic. He objects to Sir Charles Warren’s statement that three and a-half days’ supplies were insufficient to advance by the left through Acton Homes, because, he says, he had promised to keep—and was actually keeping—Sir Charles filled up. As if this in any way affected the amount of provisions he could carry with him when once he had cleared the position in front and moved forward and away from the Tugela.