It must be remembered that the railway bridge had been blown up, but a footbridge still existed.
Before dawn Lord Dundonald with a mounted brigade and a battery of artillery moved to the east, while General Hart and his brigade started to try and cross Brindle Drift. The field-guns came next with cavalry—the 1st Royals and 13th Hussars—to protect either flank. Major-General Hildyard's brigade advanced to occupy the post of honour in the centre of the theatre of war. On the right were the West Surrey with the West Yorks in support. On the left marched the Devons with the East Surrey in rear. At 6 a.m. the Naval Contingent opened the proceedings. Their 12-pounders began to snort and to roar, and lyddite whizzed and shrieked over to Grobler's Hill and in the neighbourhood of Fort Wylie. But it whizzed and shrieked in vain. The Boers were "mum." They were "lying low," and had determined to keep their position masked as long as possible. They adopted the same tactics which had so confounded us at Majesfontein. The infantry now advanced, while Colonels Long and Hunt made haste—undue haste, as lamentable experience proved—to come into line with their field-batteries. At this moment, when all seemed to be going well, when Hart's, Hildyard's, and Barton's brigades were moving to their several positions, the sudden combined roar of Boer artillery and musketry was heard, coming not, as might have been supposed, from the distance, but from the immediate front, and apparently from all sides. A very cyclone of Mauser bullets swept all around, rattling and barking from the river bank, from trenches north and south of the Tugela, from Fort Wylie, and from every available point of vantage. Flame in tongues and forks belched out as from a crackling bush. The advancing infantry—the Devons and the West Surrey—found themselves almost carried off their feet; leaden hail beat the dust around, digging deep into the earth and sending up spurts of blinding dust, or whistling a warning of death to the heart of many an honest lad and true. So deadly, so awful was this fusillade, that it seemed impossible to do aught but flee. Yet the gunners stood tight to their guns, and the infantry with set faces like masks of bronze, regardless of the companions that dropped thick and fast around and upon them, stared Death straight in the face—stared at and recognised and knew him, and still maintained their ground! More—they advanced; nearer and ever nearer to the invisible enemy they came, afterwards lying down and returning the fire with interest, while the guns of Long's and Hunt's field-batteries boomed and bellowed and vomited fire like Inferno released. Fort Wylie and its neighbourhood were swept with shrapnel and almost silenced, but only for a moment. Disaster was in the air. The concealed sharpshooters of the enemy, who crowded the Boer lines, had applied themselves to making a concentrated attack on the guns, picking off horses and officers and men, and finally reducing the snorting weapons which had been galloped too quickly into action, and were within 700 yards of the enemy's trenches, to a condition of pitiable impotence. Only the third field-battery and the Naval battery could move, and these were quickly drawn off to a place of safety. Amidst this scene of tragedy and uproar the Devons and West Surrey were steadily pursuing their way with a heroism that absolutely defies description. The enemy was driven out of the platelayers' and surrounding houses, and Colenso village was cleared. What the guns failed to do the bayonet accomplished, and before the glint of the steel—the cold, stern steel they so much dread—the Boers had bolted. But all around them Krupps and Maxims and Hotchkiss guns were still working hard, spouting and shrieking, and tearing earth and men and horses, and throwing them together in one horrible, hideous heap.
Certainly the advance of Hildyard's men was a noble achievement. Their effort to capture the road bridge and hold the village of Colenso in face of a scene of carnage was an act of splendid courage and determination; but they were assailed with so deadly a storm of shot and shell that they had no choice but to retire. Though they had imagined the village to be evacuated, the place had been swarming with Boers, they evidently having expected to be attacked in this quarter. Not only were they strongly intrenched, but the guns on the surrounding hills commanded the position, and when the Boers were temporarily routed the guns still continued to sweep the whole place with such unerring accuracy and fierceness that the ground was thickly strewn with the bodies of the mangled. Until those guns could be silenced, efforts of the infantry were so much waste of valiant flesh and blood; but our power to silence them was at an end. The guns of the 14th and 66th Batteries were doomed. They had, as before said, been approached too close to the river, and thus been exposed to the unerring rifle-fire of the Boer mercenaries. The attack was immediately returned, but before long the whole party, officers, gunners, and horses, were simply mown down. As fast as more horses were brought up they were annihilated. In addition to this the gunners ran short of ammunition. To await the arrival of this, such survivors as there were doubled back to the shelter of a donga twenty yards in their rear. At that time there was no intention of abandoning the guns. Superb were the efforts made to save them. Three officers rushed forward into the open, and, with some heroic drivers and such horses as they could get, made their way very deliberately towards the two field-batteries and into the mouth of a flaming hell. These were Captain Schofield, R.A. (A.D.C. to General Buller), Captain the Hon. F. Roberts, 60th Rifles, and Captain Congreve, Rifle Brigade. This glorious bravery was almost an act of suicide, and in sheer amazement at the wondrous valour of these dauntless Britons, the Boer rifle-fire, for one instant, was suspended. In the next, shot and shell burst forth afresh and the scene became too harrowing for description. Roberts, the gallant and the beloved, dropped, wounded in five places, while his horse was blown to bits, and Congreve, his jacket riddled to ribbons, was hit several times. Schofield, by a miracle, came whole from the ordeal, and succeeded in the almost impossible task of hauling off the two guns, for which all three and many others had risked their lives. The rest of the guns were captured by the enemy, but of this anon.
THE BATTLE OF COLENSO—THE DUBLIN FUSILIERS ATTEMPT TO FORD THE TUGELA.
Drawing by Rene Bull and Enoch Ward, R.B.A.
Major-General Hart's Brigade, consisting of the Dublins, Inniskillings, Borderers, and Connaughts, fulfilled in a measure what was expected of them. Some of them actually crossed the Tugela, but, alas! to no purpose. The position near the other side was untenable. A dam had been thrown across the water to deepen it. Cascades of artillery shrapnel were so liberally poured upon them, there was no holding up a head in such a fusillade. Yet they pushed on to the river, and the enemy fell back before them or dropped under their steady determined fire. The Dutchmen were driven to the north bank of the Tugela, and the Irish Brigade gallantly plunged in, thinking the water was knee-deep or at least fordable, and it was only then that they discovered that the wire entanglements that had been spread around the trenches were also under water, and that the flood itself was unexpectedly deep, owing to the ingenious dam that had been constructed by the "slim" adversary. There were now ten feet of water instead of two, and sad was the plight of many a poor fellow of the Dublins and Connaughts, who, weighted with ammunition and accoutrements, found it impossible to swim to shore or even to return. They were drowned in the flood, while others dropped in heaps under the enemy's fire, and even under volleys of our own men, who, unluckily, mistook them for the foe. But the Irishmen's blood was up, and some, at any cost, determined to reach the other side to get one grip of the enemy, but what many of them thought to be the other bank was merely the bank of a winding spruit, which took them no farther towards the foe. The disappointment and rage was intense. Boom, boom, went the cannons roaring their dirge of death; bang, bang, bellowed the Naval battery in reply; rattling and raking came the bullets above the heads of the plunging Irishmen; splash, splash, sang the cold muddy water in their ears as they scrambled from rock to stone or swam for dear life. All that gallantry could do was done, but there was no appreciable advance with them, or indeed anywhere—ill-luck or bad management frustrated the best efforts on every hand. Men fell in heaps; horses with half their bodies blown away littered the veldt; the guns were stuck fast—useless lumber, too valuable to leave, too heavy to get away. Some say that had it not been for the action of the artillery commander in taking a whole brigade division—three batteries—up at a gallop to within 700 yards of the enemy's trenches, the day might still have been ours. The valiant Irishmen would still have pursued their risky advance. Others declared that the want of proper scouting caused the whole fiasco, and that all the pluck of the Irish Brigade was so much heroism wasted. They had no information relative to the intrenchments of the place to be attacked by them, nor any conception of the strength of the opposition they were liable to meet. No scouts appear to have discovered the position of the ford by which they were ordered to cross, or the nearness of the enemy to that point, and consequently the brigade marched in quarter-column into the very jaws of death, only deploying when shells had already begun to burst in their midst. Like the guns of the Royal Artillery, they found themselves before they were prepared in the midst of a close and deadly fusillade—the more deadly and unnerving because on the clearest of days not a whiff of smoke betrayed the quarters from whence the murderous assaults were coming.