Four Months Besieged: The Story of Ladysmith

by Henry H. S. Pearse

When Mr. Pearse spoke of the comparative calm which marked the closing days of 1899 as deceptive, he was right, and events promptly proved him so. On 6th January the Boers, as has been said, made a most determined attempt to bring the siege of Ladysmith to an end by storming the British defences. Why the enemy should have allowed so long an interval to elapse since their half-hearted effort of 9th November, is difficult to imagine. Dingaan's Day (16th December) was originally fixed for the attack, but Schalk-Burger was diverted from his purpose by the attempt made by Sir Redvers Buller to force the passage of the Tugela. The projected onslaught on the besieged town having once been abandoned, it was generally believed that the Boers would be too intent on watching the movements of the relief column to trouble about attacking Ladysmith in force. According to one report an imperative order from President Kruger precipitated matters, while another story is to the effect that a bogus despatch purporting to be from Sir George White to Sir Redvers Buller, brought about the sudden change in the enemy's tactics. This despatch, so the story runs, asked that relief might be sent at once as the ammunition was exhausted, and it was impossible for the garrison to hold out in the event of the town being attacked. The native runner, to whom the document was entrusted, was instructed to proceed in the direction of the Boer lines, and so faithfully complied with his orders that both runner and despatch fell into the hands of the enemy. If the Boers were led to attack by any such ruse they were completely disillusioned as to the capabilities of Sir George White's forces. Be it said to their credit that, whatever their hopes of an easy victory, they quitted themselves like men when they realised their tremendous mistake. The long fierce struggle is vividly described in the following letter written two days after:—

Saturday's stubborn fight was a surprise in more senses than one. Nobody here had credited the Boers with a determination to attack, unless chance should give them overwhelming superiority in all respects, and for that chance they have waited so supinely that it seemed probable the game of long bowls with heavy artillery, varied by "sniping" from behind rocks a mile off, would continue to be played day after day in the hope of starving us into subjection, before Sir Redvers Buller could bring up his relieving force. Everybody knew that issue to be well-nigh impossible, because our resources are far from starvation point yet, and it is inconceivable that eight or ten thousand British soldiers could be hemmed in by three times their number of Boers, and compelled to yield without a desperate fight in the last extremity. We were fully aware that if ever an opening offered for the Boers to creep up within shorter range, under cover, and without being seen, they would be prompt to take advantage of it, in expectation of bringing off another Majuba, and that is a danger to which our extenuated defensive lines necessarily expose us, but we trusted with justice, as events have proved, to the steadiness and discipline of well-trained troops, to hold the Boers in check wherever they might gain any temporary advantage, and drive them back at the bayonet's point. That they would even push an attack to storming point few if any among us believed, for the simple reason that rifles are of no use against cold steel when combatants come to close quarters. The Boers know that well enough. Their only hope in attack therefore rests on the chance of being able by stealth to seize an advantageous position whence they may bring a deadly rifle fire to bear on the defenders, whom they hope by this means to throw into panic.

That was the plan they tried on Saturday, being urged to it, as we have since learned, by peremptory orders and fair promises from Joubert, who is said to have watched the fight from a distance. That, however, seems improbable, if Sir Redvers Buller was at the same time threatening a movement against the Tugela Heights, though it is certain that Joubert attached great importance to this attack on Ladysmith, because he had written a letter ordering De Villiers to capture Bester's Ridge, at all costs, with his commando of Free State Boers, and promising that those who succeeded in winning that position should be released from further service. This anxiety to get hold of a range which includes Cæsar's Camp and Waggon Hill, and commands Ladysmith at a range of 5000 yards, can be easily understood, but the urgency demanding any sacrifice of life, provided that end were attained, suggests many possibilities, and gives to Saturday's fight exceptional significance as a probable turning-point in the Natal Campaign, which has hitherto gone in favour of our foes, notwithstanding the victories we have gained over them in isolated actions. Dundee and Elandslaagte, like Lord Methuen's fights on the Modder River, added lustre to our army, by showing what British soldiers can do in assaulting positions against the terrific fire from modern magazine rifles, but it cannot be said that we have profited by them while our enemies are able to keep us here cut off from all communications except by heliograph or search-light signals, and have yet force enough to interpose a formidable line of resistance between Ladysmith and Sir Redvers Buller's column.

There cannot be many Boers in any position surrounding this place, but their mobility gives them the power of concentrating quickly at any point that might be threatened, and this for all practical purposes increases their numbers threefold. As Colonel F. Rhodes put it in one of his quaintly appropriate phrases, "We are a victorious army besieged by an inferior enemy." But there are Boers in twice our own strength near at hand, if, not actually all in the investing lines. The Tugela Heights are scarcely twelve miles off as the crow flies, and this distance might be covered by a Boer commando in less than two hours, so that a thousand men or more moving from one of our enemy's columns to another, could be brought into a fight in time to turn the tide against either Ladysmith or its relieving force as occasion might prompt. For attacking a particular point this mobility would give enormous advantages if the Boers only knew how to make full use of them, and carried arms on which they could rely for hand-to-hand fighting, in the critical moment of pushing an attack home.

As it is they trust to tactics that have stood them well in previous campaigns against British soldiers and natives, their object being to gain some commanding position, whence, without being seen, they may pour a deadly fire on their astonished foes, and thus cause a panic retreat that might be turned into a disorderly rout by a sudden rush of reinforcing Boers or a terrific storm of bullets from several quarters at once. Reasoning from experience they hope to make history repeat itself in another Majuba Hill. One would have thought that the fights at Elandslaagte and Dundee would dispel delusions of that kind based on the assumption that Tommy Atkins will not stand up against rifle bullets at short range from Boers whom he cannot see if they but steal upon him and open fire where he least expects to find them.

Probably there were erroneous estimates on both sides, but at any rate it is certain that our foes were confident of being able to win by massed surprise, and their effort was made with an adroitness not less astonishing than the audacity of its conception. After this it will be ridiculous for anybody to contend that the Boers are not brave fighters, though they lack the daring by which alone fights like that of Saturday can be decided. Their tactics have changed little since the old days, and it remains true now as then that they are an offensive but not an attacking force. Having gained by stealth the positions that were supposed to command our outpost defences on Cæsar's Camp and Waggon Hill, they acted from that moment as if on the defensive, trusting for victory not to any forward movement of their own but to the belief that our men would give way, and might then be rolled back in panic upon Ladysmith by thousands of mounted Boers who awaited that turn of events to make their meditated dash. Such undoubtedly was the plan conceived by Free State and Transvaal commanders at the Krygsraad when Joubert, Prinsloo, Schalk-Burger, Viljoen, and other leaders met together in council some days ago. The manner of its execution may be conjectured by the light of subsequent events.

The attack began before daybreak with a determined attempt to capture the whole range of Bester's Ridge, which is divided officially into Cæsar's Camp and Waggon Hill, forming the southern chain of our defences, and held by the outposts of Colonel Ian Hamilton's Brigade. Seventy of the Imperial Light Horse held Waggon Hill with a small body of bluejackets and a few Engineers having charge of the 4.7 naval gun, which they had brought up overnight for mounting in that position, but it still remained on a bullock waggon. Next to them were several companies of the King's Royal Rifles under Colonel Gore-Browne, while the Manchester Regiment held Cæsar's Camp with pickets pushed forward to the southern crest and eastern shoulder. Nearly the whole length of ridge hence to Waggon Hill is a rough plateau, strong but presenting little cover from artillery fire or the rifles of any foe bold enough to scale the heights under cover of darkness. It was scarcely entrenched at all, having only a few sangars dotted about as rallying-points. The Boer movements were marked by a searchlight from Bulwaan, which played for hours in a curious way across Intombi Hospital Camp to the posts occupied by our men, intensifying the obscurity of all-surrounding blackness.

All we know absolutely is that long before dawn Free Staters were in possession of the western end of Bester's Ridge, where Waggon Hill dips steeply down from the curiously tree-fringed shoulder in bold bluffs to a lower neck, and thence on one side to the valley in which Bester's Farm lies amid trees, and on the other to broad veldt that is dominated by Blaauwbank (or Rifleman's Ridge), and enfiladed by Telegraph Hill—both Boer positions having guns of long range mounted on them; and at the same time Transvaalers, mostly Heidelberg men, had gained a footing on the eastern end of the same ridge where boulders in Titanic masses, matted together by roots of mimosa trees, rise cliff-like from the plain where Klip River, emerging from thorny thickets, bends northward to loop miles of fertile meadow-land before flowing back into the narrow gorge past Intombi Spruit Camp. How the Boers got there one can only imagine, for neither the Imperial Light Horse pickets on Waggon Hill, nor the Manchesters holding the very verge of that cliff which we call Cæsar's Camp and the Kaffirs Intombi, nor the mixed force of volunteers and police watching the scrub lower down, saw any form or heard a movement during the night. It was intensely dark for two or three hours, but in that still air a steenbok's light leap from rock to rock would have struck sharply on listening ears. Those on picket duty aver that not a Boer could have shown himself or passed through the mimosa scrub without being challenged. Yet four or five hundred of them got to the jutting crest, of Cæsar's Camp somehow, and to reach it they must either have crossed open ground or climbed with silent caution up the boulder-roughened steeps.