Sir Charles Warren and Spion Kop: A Vindication

PREFACE

It is now more than two years since the operation took place on the Tugela River in Natal, that ended in the capture and the unwarrantable abandonment the same day of the position of Spion Kop. The lapse of time since these events occurred naturally caused a loss of interest in this chapter of the history of the war in South Africa; but the recent publication of portions of the despatches omitted in the ‘Gazette’ of 1900, and also of other documents received at the time by the War Office but not disclosed, has again brought the subject into prominence, revived public interest in it, and offered an opportunity which we gladly seize to vindicate the conduct of an officer who has been condemned without being heard.

Whether Sir Charles Warren will be allowed any opportunity of defending himself against the strictures passed upon him by Sir Redvers Buller, either now or when the war is over, is doubtful; but at length, having before us all the documents received at the War Office, it is proposed to show in the following pages that, in spite of the difficult circumstances in which he found himself, Sir Charles Warren did his duty, and that, had Spion Kop not been recklessly abandoned by a subordinate, there is every reason to suppose that he would have gained a great success.

The publication of the despatches on Spion Kop in the parliamentary Easter recess of 1900 took the world by surprise—so much so, indeed, that a story was current that it was due to the mistake of a War Office clerk. It did not commend itself as either a useful or a desirable proceeding to publish to the whole world the strictures passed by the General in command in Natal upon his second-in-command, and those of the Commander-in-Chief in South Africa upon both, especially as those officers were still serving their country in the field.

The political mistake made by the Government was speedily demonstrated by the debates that took place on the reassembling of Parliament; but it now appears that a greater want of judgment was shown than was then supposed, and that having decided, however wrongly, to publish the despatches the Government would have done better to have published them in full. And this for several reasons—it would have made little difference to those censured, would have enabled the public to understand the Spion Kop operations, which could not be understood from the incomplete documents, and would have prevented a distinguished officer lying for two years under the shadow of unjust accusations.

Much capital was made by the Opposition in Parliament out of the suggestion of the Secretary of State for War that Sir Redvers Buller should rewrite his despatch, or rather should write a separate despatch for publication; but any one who has tried to get to the bottom of the business from the material available must have felt that Lord Lansdowne was perfectly right in suggesting that what was wanted was a simple statement from Sir Redvers Buller of what he intended to do, and how it was done or not done. Instead of this there were despatches giving formal cover to other despatches from Sir Charles Warren, and then criticising that officer’s actions unfavourably. No statement was to be found anywhere indicating what Sir Redvers Buller had intended to do, and as the instructions he issued were not published, the operation which Sir Charles Warren was directed to execute could only be gathered from the references he made to them in his reports. These reports were evidently written to his chief in the belief that the General commanding would write a full account of what he had proposed to do, and how far his orders had been successfully carried out, or otherwise.

To most men, conscientiously compelled to censure in an official despatch those employed under them, the suggestion from the War Office that such censure should be confined to a confidential communication, and that some account of the operation and the cause of failure should be written for publication, would have come as a welcome relief; and had Sir Redvers Buller seen his way to comply with it and at the same time to send copies to Sir Charles Warren of the confidential despatches, he would have placed himself in an unassailable position, he would have given Sir Charles Warren an opportunity of confidentially justifying himself, if he could do so, to the Secretary of State for War and the Commander-in-Chief, he would have enabled his countrymen to know more about the operations than was otherwise possible, and the world would have been spared a very painful exhibition.

To this course, however, Sir Redvers Buller would not consent. He prided himself on his integrity in resisting such a proposal, and has been much praised for refusing to write a despatch for publication, having already written one, which was mainly an indictment of his second-in-command, on whom he threw the responsibility for the failure of the operations.

It is the custom of the Service—and a very fair and proper custom it is—that an unfavourable confidential report made upon a junior officer by his superior shall be communicated to him before it is sent forward, so that he may have an opportunity either of excusing himself or of amending his conduct, and may have no reason to complain that advantage has been taken of a confidential communication to make unfavourable reports behind his back, of which he remains in ignorance.

Sir Redvers Buller does not appear to have been mindful of this custom, when, instead of writing a simple account of what he proposed to do, and how it failed of accomplishment, he used the opportunity to criticise most unfavourably the conduct of the distinguished officer, his second-in-command, still serving under him in face of the enemy, and left him in complete ignorance of the accusations made against him. This ignorance he knew must last in any case until the despatches were published, and, if they were not published, would never be removed. But Sir Redvers Buller went beyond this, for he attached to his despatch a separate memorandum, ‘not necessarily for publication,’ in which he reiterated his complaints of the conduct of Sir Charles Warren and accused him of such incapacity as unfitted him for independent command. But not a word of this reached Sir Charles Warren, whose exertions in the field during the succeeding month under Sir Redvers Buller contributed so greatly to the victory of Pieters and the relief of Ladysmith; and it was not until he saw the despatches in the newspapers, long after this campaign was over, that he knew of the secret stab his reputation had received at the hand of his commander. Two years later the recently published omissions have informed him how seriously the attack upon his reputation as a soldier was intended.

A correspondence between Mr. Henry Norman, M.P., and the Right Hon. A. J. Balfour, First Lord of the Treasury, published on 21st February last, contains some observations by the latter very much to the point on the want of any narrative of the Spion Kop operations in Sir Redvers Buller’s despatches. Mr. Balfour points out, as was done two years before in the parliamentary debates, that the General in command, ‘in accordance with the Queen’s Regulations, with the best precedents, and with public convenience,’ should have furnished a simple narrative, unencumbered by controversy, of the operations which took place. To this Sir Redvers Buller objected, in a letter published on the 26th March last, that he was not in command, that he was not present, and that therefore it was not his duty to write such a narrative. The reply of Mr. Balfour, from which an extract is appended, will be found to be fully borne out in the pages of this book.

Extract from a letter from Mr. A. J. Balfour to Sir Redvers Buller dated 10th March 1902.

‘You say that, not being in chief command, you were not the proper person to write an account of what took place. But can this be sustained? I find that on 15th January you ordered Sir Charles Warren to cross the Tugela to the west of Spion Kop; on the 21st and 22nd you gave him personal instructions as to the disposal of his artillery; on the latter day you agreed with him, after discussion, that Spion Kop would have to be taken; on the 23rd you definitely decided upon the attack; you selected the officer who was to lead it, detailing one of your Staff to accompany him; it was by your orders that on the 24th Lieut.-Colonel Thorneycroft assumed command on the summit of Spion Kop after General Woodgate was wounded, and all heliographic messages between the officers in the fighting line and Sir Charles Warren passed through your camp, and were seen by you before they reached their destination. As you were thus in constant touch with the troops actually engaged on the top of the hill, so also you kept general control over the movements of the co-operative forces under General Lyttelton, with whom you were in communication during both the morning and the afternoon of the 24th. It is, of course, true that you were not present at the actual Spion Kop engagement. But if this was a reason for not writing an account of it, it was a reason equally applicable to Sir Charles Warren, whose headquarters, as I am informed, were very little nearer to the scene of action than were your own. It was on these grounds that I did not draw any distinction between your position during the days of Spion Kop and that of any other general conducting operations over an extended field, at every part of which he could not, from the nature of the case, be present. You were responsible for the general plan of action; you intervened frequently in its execution; you were not prevented either by distance or any other material obstacle from intervening more frequently still, had you deemed it expedient to do so. Was I wrong, then, in pointing out that it would have been in accordance both with precedent and the Queen’s Regulations for you to have supplied the Commander-in-Chief with a narrative of these important military events based on your own observations and on the reports of those of your officers who were immediately engaged with the enemy?’

We have never been able to understand why the orders given to Sir Charles Warren were not published with the despatches two years ago. True they were called secret instructions, but of course the secrecy was a temporary matter, and they ceased to be secret when the operations were over. Without them there was no way for the public to learn officially, except in the most general way, what the General in command in Natal desired to do, and probably, owing to the wording of Lord Roberts’s despatch, a misconception arose, widely entertained in the army and highly prejudicial to Sir Charles Warren.

This misconception was that Sir Redvers Buller instructed Sir Charles Warren to make his turning movement by way of Acton Homes, instead of which Warren obstinately preferred the route by Groote Hoek. It was supposed that by the first of these two routes the force might have marched a long way round, but would have got into Ladysmith with little difficulty, whereas the (hypothetical) substitution by Warren of the Groote Hoek road had necessitated the capture of Spion Kop. The publication of the instructions upsets this theory. The Acton Homes road is never mentioned. The only references to the direction of the turning movement are vague—‘to the West of Spion Kop’—‘acting as circumstances require’—‘refusing your right and throwing your left forward’—and it now appears that Sir Redvers Buller intended Warren to go by the Groote Hoek route.

In vain has the Government endeavoured to shield the military reputation of Sir Redvers Buller at the expense of others. He has been consistent in his efforts to get the despatches published in full, even to the memorandum ‘not necessarily for publication’—a severe condemnation of Sir Charles Warren’s incapacity, but a more damning one of his own—and by his attitude has compelled the Government to give way. How truly applicable is an epigram of Mr. Henry Sidgwick, quoted by Sir Henry Howarth in a recent letter to the ‘Morning Post’: ‘The darkest shadows in life are those which a man makes when he stands in his own light.’

In addition to the official documents on the subject of Spion Kop much information of a very varied character has accumulated during the last two years, and besides invaluable verbal observations and descriptions gathered from conversation with officers from the front who took part in the operations, there is a whole library of books by newspaper correspondents, officers, and others, which bear upon these operations and throw light upon much that is obscure in the official papers. Among many others may be mentioned ‘My Diocese during the War,’ by Bishop Baynes of Natal; ‘The Relief of Ladysmith,’ by Mr. J. B. Atkins; ‘The Natal Campaign,’ by Mr. Bennet Burleigh; ‘London to Ladysmith via Pretoria,’ by Mr. Winston Churchill, M.P.; ‘The History of the War in South Africa,’ by Dr. Conan Doyle; ‘The Relief of Ladysmith,’ by Captain Holmes Wilson; ‘Buller’s Campaign: With the Natal Field Force of 1900,’ by Lieutenant E. Blake Knox, Royal Army Medical Corps.

Magazine articles have also appeared from time to time, some commenting on the operations themselves, others filling up gaps in the narrative, and others again incidentally referring to facts in connection with the operations. Among these last may be mentioned: (1) A series of articles contributed by Sir Charles Warren himself to the ‘National Review’ entitled ‘Some Lessons from the South African War’; (2) Mr. Oppenheim’s defence of Lieut.-Colonel Thorneycroft in the ‘Nineteenth Century’; (3) An instructive diary of Dr. Raymond Maxwell, who was serving with the Boers, in the ‘Contemporary Review’ for December 1901; and (4) ‘The Diary of a Boer Officer,’ by another of them, in the ‘United Service Magazine’ for February this year. Some reference should perhaps be made to one of a series of articles in ‘Blackwood’s Magazine’ by ‘Linesman,’ which was headed ‘Dies IrÆ,’ and dealt with Spion Kop, because these articles have attracted a good deal of attention, are cleverly written, and have since been republished in book form. They do not, however, impress the military reader as very accurate descriptions, but rather as war pictures, in which the colour is laid on with no sparing hand to obtain the highest effect, the aim being to please the sensation-loving reader. The value of the account of Spion Kop given in ‘Blackwood’ is discounted by ‘Linesman’ himself, who, having told us that ‘what the writer saw of the fight on the summit of Spion Kop was little enough’; that he had learnt ‘to describe—nay, believe nothing that one has not seen with one’s own eyes’; and that, ‘if the tongue is an unruly member, much more so is the ear’; nevertheless proceeds to describe in blood-curdling language what he did not see with his own eyes, and must have heard with ‘unruly’ ears.

The general result of all the information is to make it clear that Spion Kop was the key of the position dominating the country, and that the holders of it opened the way to Ladysmith; that no one was more astonished at its unauthorised abandonment than Sir Charles Warren, except the Boers themselves, who refused to credit the evidence of their senses, and at first believed its forsaken condition to be a trap! No longer, indeed, is it possible to regard the unwarrantable surrender of this position as a fortunate accident preventing an actual and impending disaster on the morrow, or, as Lieut.-Colonel Thorneycroft is reported to have said, ‘a mop up in the morning.’ Rather its abandonment was the blundering relinquishment of a hardly won and well assured success, only to be compared with the fatuous withdrawal in the morning of the storming parties which made the brilliant night attack and surprised the fortress of Bergen op Zoom on 8th March 1814.

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