Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill (41 page)

Unfortunately, Long had a theory. He believed that the closer he could get to the enemy, the better. Atkins, who, along with Churchill, had sailed to South Africa with Long on the
Dunottar Castle
, had heard Long’s theory firsthand, as had many others. “
The only way to smash those beggars,” the colonel had often been heard to say, “is to rush in at ’em.”

Secure in his theory, and ignoring repeated requests from his infantry escort to wait for them to catch up, Long ordered his men to advance quickly across the plain, well beyond where Buller had told him to wait. When he was within seven hundred yards of the river, he called to his men to stop. Then, eager to put his theory to the test, he gave the order for attack.

As soon as Long issued his order, a single shot rang out from across the river. It was Botha’s signal. Seconds later, although the British could still see no sign of the enemy, they no longer wondered whether they were there. So sudden and devastating was the firestorm of shells and bullets that descended on Long’s brigade that it tore his men to pieces before they even understood what was happening. “
Men and officers…seemed to melt down into the ground under some deadly sirocco,” Atkins wrote, referring to the hurricane-force wind that blasts out of the Sahara. “They were bullets at close quarters, in the full strength of life, bullets that splashed and drummed and spattered.”

Among the first wave of fallen was Long himself. Shot through the liver, he lay shouting orders and encouragement to his men over the roar of the fusillade. “
Abandon be damned!” he cried when implored to fall back and leave the field guns behind. “We never abandon guns!” Even when he was being dragged to a ditch, already brimming with the wounded and dead, Long continued to cry out, as if in a delirium. “Ah my gunners!” he called. “My gunners are splendid! Look at them!”

As soon as the attack began, an unusual collection of daring men without rifles or rank began to dart across the plain, dodging bullets as best they could. These men, dressed in wide-brimmed hats and simple, loose-fitting khaki uniforms, a white band with a red cross on it wrapped around their left arms, were known to Buller’s troops as “body-snatchers,” retrieving not just bodies from the battlefield but, they hoped, young men from the jaws of death. In all, there were
about eight hundred of them in Colenso that day, and they were led by one man: a thirty-year-old Indian lawyer and civil rights activist by the name of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.

Gandhi had been living in South Africa for six years when the Boer War began, and had already begun to develop his ideas of nonviolent resistance. He had come to Africa in a desperate attempt to save his floundering law career but had been stunned by the injustices and cruelties to which the Boers subjected Indians as well as native Africans. In fact, just two years earlier he had nearly been lynched by a mob of angry Boers for his efforts to actively recruit, organize and lead the Indian community.

When the war broke out, Gandhi felt strongly that, because he was demanding rights as a British citizen, it was his duty to defend the British Empire. Although his convictions would not allow him to fight, he had gathered together more than a thousand men to form a corps of stretcher bearers. When he had learned of Gandhi’s efforts, Buller had not only approved, he had asked Gandhi’s men to serve within the firing line. “
General Buller sent the message that though we were not bound to take the risk,” Gandhi later wrote in his autobiography, “Government would be thankful if we would do so and fetch the wounded from the field. We had no hesitation.”

Now, rushing across the veld in the midst of Botha’s devastating attack, Gandhi and his team of stretcher bearers had more wounded than they could carry. As Atkins watched them, along with the nurses and doctors who worked at their side, risking their own lives again and again, he marveled at their bravery. “
Anywhere among the shell fire,” he wrote, “you could see them kneeling and performing little quick operations that required deftness and steadiness of hand.”

Those British soldiers who survived the Boer guns, at least long enough to be carried out of range, found as much horror in the hospital tent as they had on the battlefield. Atkins watched as they were rushed in by the hundreds, carried, pulled and dragged from every direction. “Men with waxen grey faces and clotted bandages swathed about them,” he wrote, “men who smiled at their friends and instantly
changed the smile for a gripping spasm; men who were clinched between life and death; men who had died on the way and were now carried hurriedly and jerkily, since it no longer mattered;…men who were mere limp, covered-up bundles, carried on stretchers through which something dark oozed and dropped.”

As crushing and instantaneous as Long’s defeat proved to be, it was not the only disaster that day. At the same time that his brigade was being bombarded on the right, General Hart’s was being slaughtered on the left. Ordered to cross the Tugela, Hart made the disastrous decision to march his men into a loop in the river. It was a baffling mistake for Hart, who had been in the army for thirty-five years and who certainly knew as well as any man that a salient, or open end of a loop, was one of the most dangerous places to be on a battlefield. “
To march into a well-defended salient,” a historian of the war would later write, “is like putting your head into a noose.”

The repercussions were as immediate as they were catastrophic. It did not take long for Botha’s men to realize that Hart’s brigade was trapped. The loop was only a thousand yards wide, and Hart had four thousand men. There was no way out when the bullets and shells came raining down on them. “
Nothing could have saved them from the flanking fires and the guns in front,” Atkins wrote. “At last the river bank was reached—reached by those who were left.”

Even those who were able to stagger out of the loop alive found that death was waiting for them at the river’s edge. The ford that they had expected to find was not there, having been flooded, as the British would later learn, by the Boers, who had dammed the river. The fleeing men’s only hope was to try to swim across, but they were weighed down by their heavy ammunition and weapons. Instead of fighting to the death in a heroic battle, most of them, Atkins wrote, “
drowned like dogs.”

Watching this second, almost simultaneous tragedy unfold from Naval Gun Hill, Buller prepared to order a wholesale retreat. Little more than two hours had passed since he had sent his opening salvo across the river, and the battle was already lost.

If he was forced to admit defeat once again at the hands of the Boers, however, Buller was not willing to leave twelve field guns for the enemy on his way out. Despite Long’s fevered cries that he would never abandon his guns, Buller could see them now, alone on the plain, surrounded only by items that had been dropped by the men as they ran or fell, and a group of terrified and apparently abandoned horses.
As Atkins looked more closely at the horses, he realized that their riders had not left them behind but had dropped, dead, from their saddles and were now being dragged, still harnessed to their horses as they galloped in frenzied circles around the guns.

Climbing on his own horse, which he had brought from England on the
Dunottar Castle
, Buller left Naval Gun Hill and rode in the direction of the abandoned guns. As soon as he arrived, Botha’s men, clearly recognizing the British commander in chief’s entourage, redoubled their attack. “
You oughtn’t be here,” Lieutenant David Ogilvy, who was in charge of the naval guns, gasped when he saw Buller. “I’m all right, my boy,” Buller replied.

Shouting to his men, the shells and bullets pounding the ground so loudly that he could barely be heard above the din, Buller said, “Now, my lads, this is your last chance to save the guns; will any of you volunteer to fetch them?” A tense moment passed, and then one man stood up, a corporal, and with him six more. It was an incredible display of bravery, but it was not enough. There were twelve guns out there, and Buller needed more men if he was to have any hope of retrieving them.

Turning to his own staff, which had followed him from Naval Gun Hill, Buller now said, “Some of you go and help.” Three men volunteered for the extraordinarily dangerous mission, among them Lieutenant Freddy Roberts, the only son of Lord Frederick Sleigh Roberts, a renowned combat leader and one of the most respected and admired men in the British army. Just twenty-seven years old,
Freddy Roberts was not known for the kind of military precision and sobersided devotion to his job that had made his father famous. He was handsome, lighthearted and charming, qualities that might not have impressed his commanders but that endeared him to his fellow officers and his men. As he set out on his horse toward the guns, Roberts looked back at the British lines, laughing as he swung his riding stick in circles, trying to persuade his horse to plunge into the barrage of bullets. “
He was in the full exhilaration,” Atkins wrote, “that is to say, of a man riding to hounds.”

As they approached the guns, the men were quickly separated in the onslaught, which intensified as soon as the Boers realized what they were attempting to do. The devastation was immediate, leaving one man and twelve horses dead, with five men wounded. Freddy Roberts seemed to vanish in the tumult of beating hooves and drumming bullets, a broad smile on his face. By 3:00, the last of the men had retreated, and the sounds of war had been silenced. The men could hear the river again, rushing between the crumbling red banks that still separated the two armies. Even the birds were back, but while some brought relief from the horrors of battle, others only heightened it. “
The aasvogels gathered in numbers,” Atkins wrote, referring to the hook-beaked vultures, “wheeling overhead with an eye on the horrid banquet.”

In the silence, with the full brunt of the South African sun now bearing down on the wounded and the dead, the men finally found Freddy Roberts. He was unconscious, but still alive. He had been shot three times, once in the stomach, and he was lying alone on the veld. His friends rushed out to him, dragged him to shelter, and used his coat to shade his head from the merciless sun. He would die two days later.

Even Buller himself had not been spared the Boers’ bullets. While he had been standing with his men, watching the artillery fire, a bullet had grazed his side, severely bruising his ribs. When his staff doctor, a man whom Buller loved and would watch die just minutes later, asked if there was anything he could do for him, Buller had assured him that he was fine and that the bullet had “
only just
taken his wind a bit.” When Atkins saw Buller return to camp, he did not know that he had been injured, because Buller had refused to tell anyone, but he was struck by the sight of him, climbing “
limply and wearily from his horse like an old, old man.”

Across the river, Louis Botha quietly made his way out of the hills toward the town of Colenso. Here, he sent President Kruger a wire with news of his triumph. “
The God of our fathers has to-day granted us a brilliant victory,” he wrote. “We repulsed the enemy on every side, and from three different points….The enemy’s loss must have been terrible. Their dead are lying upon each other.” Before signing off, Botha asked that a national day of prayer be proclaimed, as a sign of gratitude to “Him who gave us this victory.” Two days later, a Sunday, the day Freddy Roberts would die, a day of prayer was observed throughout the Transvaal.