From November 3 onwards the progress of the siege was marked by daily fighting and increasingly short rations. Each regiment was given a certain section of the circumference to defend. Time dragged on, until by the beginning of December, news came that Buller had reached Frere Camp, while, in the far distance, could be heard the booming of his guns. Later, it was borne in upon the garrison that the British force must have suffered a reverse, and that relief was probably farther away than ever.
Enteric and typhoid were thinning out the ranks, food was running short, and things began to look very hopeless when, in the first gleam of light on January 6, 1900, the enemy launched a formidable attack. The defeat of Buller had enabled the Boers to send reinforcements from Colenso. They were full of confidence, and at the initial assault carried everything before them. It very soon became a case of hand-to-hand fighting, in which the Gordons were called up with Ian Hamilton in command. The Boers were determined to capture Ladysmith, knowing the great moral effect that would be produced following upon their victory at Colenso. The Manchesters, nearly overcome at Caesar’s Camp, put up a magnificent resistance, until the Gordons came up. It was in this advance that Colonel Dick-Cunyngham was killed.
The British were determined that their positions should never be taken by the enemy while they survived, and in one place defended by sixteen of the Manchesters, at the end of the day fourteen lay killed, the remaining two out of action. Throughout that day this fierce fighting continued, until at last the Devons, with the Gordons and the Rifles, cleared the ridge of the enemy. It had been touch and go, but at the last extremity the Boers could not face the gleaming steel of the bayonet, and a few minutes later were falling back from their trenches. A fight lasting for twenty-six hours was over at last. “But the end,” says Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “was not yet. The Boer had taken a risk over this venture, and now he had to pay the stakes. Down the hill he passed, crouching, darting, but the spruits behind him were turned into swirling streams, and as he hesitated for an instant upon the brink, the relentless sleet of bullets came from behind. Many were swept away down the gorges and into the Klip River, never again to be accounted for in the lists of their field cornet. The majority splashed through, found their horses in their shelter, and galloped off across the great Bulwana Plain, as fairly beaten in as fair a fight as ever brave men were yet.”
This was the final attempt to take Ladysmith by storm, and it cost the British 13 officers and 135 men killed, with 28 officers and 244 men wounded.
Meanwhile it had been rumoured that Ladysmith was on the point of surrender, but the famous heliograph had bravely answered, “We have not come to that yet,” and, indeed, rather than hand over their arms the garrison would have fought their way towards the Tugela. Each day found things more desperate, and relief came only in time. Buller drove his way to within a few miles of the town, and in the heart of the battle sent his message, “Doing well.” It was in the night of February 28 that the Boers could be heard saddling up and leaving Pieter’s Hill, and just before dawn Lord Dundonald, accompanied by some cavalry, reached the British lines.
“Halt! Who goes there?” rang out the familiar challenge, at which the dramatic and long-prayed-for answer was returned, “The Ladysmith Relief Column.” Quickly the news spread through the town, the good tidings that after all they had passed through, their defence had not been in vain.
The sentiment that was uppermost both in the minds of the garrison and throughout the Empire was best expressed by Sir George White himself. “I thank God we have kept the flag flying,” he said in his address to the soldiers; and it is recorded that an old Kaffir woman remarked as she watched the troops entering Ladysmith, “These English can conquer all things but death.”
After the siege 2000 of the garrison, refusing to take a well-deserved and altogether necessary rest, set out upon the tracks of the retreating Boers, surely one of the most pitiful spectacles in history. “It is God’s mercy,” wrote Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “that they failed to overtake them.”
Mafeking and Bloemfontein were the only towns still to be relieved, and the former suffered from no shortage of food.
To return to the Highland Brigade, we have not dealt with the part that they took in the advance upon Kimberley. With the hope that he would distract the Boers, Roberts despatched the Black Watch, the Argyll and Sutherlands, the Seaforths, and the Highland Light Infantry, with Hector Macdonald, popularly known as ‘Fighting Mac,’ at their head. Macdonald crossed the Modder River, seized Koodoosberg, and sustained an attack from the Boers the next day. For a long time it fell to the Black Watch to resist the furious onslaught of the enemy, who were by no means satisfied to leave the situation undisputed. It was here that Lieutenant Tait—one of the most popular men in Scotland—was mortally wounded. There is an interesting letter that not only records his death, but also shows how the Highland soldiers had fallen into the manner of Boer fighting. A private writes: “I got down beside our officer, Lieutenant Tait, on his right hand. He said, ‘Now, men, we will fight them at their own game.’ That meant that each man was to get behind a rock and just pop up to fire and then down again. And we found it a good way, for we were just as good as they were at it, and we did not forget to let them know it either, for whenever one showed himself, down he went with half a dozen bullets through him. After firing for about half an hour the Boers stopped, and the order was given not to waste our shot. Lieutenant Tait’s servant came up with his dinner, and he asked me if I would like a bit, and I said I would, and thanked him very much. He gave me and another man half of his dinner between us.... Just as we finished he said, ‘I think we will advance another fifty yards, and perhaps we will see them better and be able to give it them hot.’ We all got ready again, and Lieutenant Tait shouted, ‘Now, boys! We were after him like hares. The Boers had seen us, and they gave us a hot time of it. But on we went. Just as our officer shouted to get down he was shot.”