Richard Harding Davis
WITH BOTH ARMIES

Ladysmith.

CHAPTER II
The Siege of Ladysmith

To anyone who has seen Ladysmith, the wonder grows, not only that it was ever relieved but that it was ever defended. Indeed, had the advice of General Sir George White been followed in the first place, the town would have been abandoned to the Boers. For a garrison at Ladysmith is in a strategic position not unlike that of a bear in a bear-pit at which the boys around the top of the pit are throwing shells instead of buns.

Now that the cards have been played, everyone can see that the natural defence of Natal is at the Tugela River, on the very hills from which the Boers repulsed General Buller at Colenso, at Spion Kop, and at Vaal Krantz.

The fact that the town of Ladysmith lay outside this marvellous breastwork of hills and ridges should have been treated as one of the misfortunes of war, and for the greater good of the greater number the town should have been sacrificed to the enemy, and all the residents and the garrison withdrawn for twelve miles inside the great complex mass of hills which guard the twisted course of the Tugela.

Ladysmith might have been burned, few stores would have been looted, but corrugated iron, which is the chief architectural feature of Ladysmith is cheap, and the shop-owners could not have lost much more by Boer looting than they did by Boer shells. That would have been the apparent loss; the gain would have been in the releasing of 13,000 troops for service on the Tugela and the freeing of Buller's column Of 25,000 men to go where they were needed for the more direct prosecution of the war. Hundreds of lives would have been saved, hundreds of wounded and sick would not have filled the hospitals, and 13,000 men would not have been reduced to skeletons, and need not have been laid by in idleness until they had recovered strength and health. On the other hand, the history of the British Army would have lost a glorious page which has been added by the defenders of Ladysmith, and the record of the stubborn, desperate fighting of the column coming to the rescue. For no matter who in authority may be criticised for the handling of that column, it did what it was ordered to do as well as it could have been done. That what it was ordered to do was not always what a more quick-thinking, imaginative, and brilliant leader might have deemed best, does not reflect on the men "who went and did" as they were commanded.

The chief difficulties which confronted both General Buller and General White were those of geography.

To protect Ladysmith it was necessary to fortify and guard a circle fully fourteen miles in circumference, and with a force so small that at one time only three hundred and fifty men were available to hold each mile of the ring. Had the Boers been commanded by anyone except General Joubert, had they attacked more frequently, instead of resting content with bombarding, the town would undoubtedly have fallen, for the positions were so widely separated that reinforcing one from another was a matter of the greatest difficulty, and could only have been accomplished after a most dangerous lapse of time.

General Buller for his part was confronted by probably the worst country for attack and the most admirable for defence in South Africa, or in any other continent. The fact that he was two months and fifteen days in advancing twelve miles, or from December 15th to February 28th in progressing from Colenso to Ladysmith, is the best description of the country that anyone could give.

There must have been some most powerful influence against that of General White, and some excellent reasons for the holding of Ladysmith, to overcome the obvious objections to its defence. This influence was probably that which was brought to bear by the Natal Government, and the reason it urged for holding Ladysmith was that were it deserted, the disloyal Dutch in the Colony would look upon such an act as a sign of British weakness and would be encouraged to join or to secretly assist the enemy. At least such a withdrawal would threaten the safety of the Colony by fomenting disaffection and suggesting a loss of British prestige.

So it may have been for "moral effect" that Ladysmith was defended, and in the end the plucky, undaunted conduct of the besieged garrison was no doubt of excellent moral effect, but if the English had abandoned Ladysmith and held the hills about Colenso instead of allowing the Boers to hold them, Buller's repulse there would not have taken place; and the moral effect of that upon the disloyal Dutch was most unfortunate.

In the Ladysmith Lyre and in the Bomb-shell Poems, written and printed during the siege, one obtains some very interesting side-lights on the state of mind of those who were then languishing in the "Doomed City," as was its premature epitaph.

It seems that two weeks was the limit originally set by the English for the duration of the siege, but even before that time had passed, and when the Boer guns began to increase upon the surrounding hills, a neutral camp was established four miles from Ladysmith, where the sick and wounded and non-combatants, both women and children, might withdraw and be free from shell-fire. General Joubert himself selected the location of this camp and received General White's promise that there would be no communication between it and the city except once each day, when the provision train went out with rations under the protection of the Red Cross flag. Of the two places, in spite of the shell-fire, the town would seem to have been much more desirable, for the camp was a literal camp under canvas, out on the flat windy plain, where many hundreds of colonials and natives of India were huddled together without comfort, work, or source of amusement. To the men—at least, the neutral camp must have been a place of torment at the time, and it remains a lasting reproach, ready at the hand of an enemy forever after. Indeed, so deeply did the men who remained in Ladysmith make those who had left it for the camp feel their inferiority, that after the siege an official utterance had to clear the air in their behalf, and remind the more valiant who had refused to take refuge in the camp, that those who had done so had been ordered there for the good of the community. But in spite of this, for years to come in Ladysmith the easiest brick to throw at a citizen will be the fact that during the siege he lived with the women and the children in the neutral camp. Those men who remained in the town formed a Home Guard, and the women did their part in helping to nurse the wounded. At first, before they became accustomed to the shells, large bomb-proofs were built, cellars were dug, and holes of different degrees of depth and darkness were tunnelled in the banks of the river and in the gardens of the houses. Some of these were reserved for the women, and others for the men, and in them the unhappy inhabitants would sit as long as the firing continued, playing cards by the light of a candle, or reading or sleeping.

"Tommies" Seeking Shelter from "Long Tom" at Ladysmith.

Life in Ladysmith was a little worse than being confined in a jail, for a jail has at least the advantage of being a comparatively safe and secluded habitation. The smoke of "Long Tom" on Bulwana, which was the gun of the .greatest terror to the inhabitant, could be seen for twenty-five seconds before the shell struck in the town, and, in order to warn people of its coming, sentinels were constantly on watch to look for the smoke and give the alarm. At one hotel the signal was the ringing of a bell; the Indian coolies used an iron bar swung from a rope which they beat with another iron bar, and the different regiments enjoyed the services of their buglers. So that the instant a white puff of smoke and a hot flash of fire appeared on Bulwana, there would be a thrilling toot on the bugles, a chorus of gongs, bells, and tin pans, and the sound of many scampering footsteps. It was like a village of prairie dogs diving into their underground homes. But the familiarity soon bred indifference, and after few weeks only a small number of the people sought refuge under the iron roofs and sand-bags but walked the streets as freely as though the shells weighing a hundred pounds were as innocent of harm as the dropping of the gentle dew from heaven.

Indeed, the shells were not the chief danger that walked abroad in the streets of Ladysmith; lack of food and exercise, bad water, and life underground soon bred fever, and its victims outnumbered those of Long Tom nearly ten to one. By this time the military authorities had complete control of all food, and distributed it impartially. They "commandeered" the hens, who, so it is said, refused to lay eggs as soon as they found they were worth six shillings a piece, and ordered all bread-stuffs to be sold at public auction. They seized cows and all kinds of eatables, for which they paid a fair price and which were reserved for the good of all. The whole town, without distinction, was on fixed rations, which the people drew each day at appointed places. The women and children say that the thing they most missed was not the heavy food, but milk for their tea; the men, without one dissenting voice, tell me that the loss of tobacco was their greatest hardship. During our war with Spain, I suggested that our commissariat officers made a mistake before Santiago in classing tobacco with "luxuries" and "officers' supplies," and in not hurrying it to the front with the bacon and coffee, and I was severely criticised for this and asked if I wanted people to believe that our soldiers were so effeminate as to be unhappy without such luxuries as cigarettes and eau de cologne.

As an answer, it is interesting to read in the official list of the prices brought at auction in Ladysmith, that while a tin of milk sold for $2.50, a quarter of a tin of tobacco brought $15.

Horses Being Conveyed into Town to be Made into Soup. Taken the morning Ladysmith was relieved.

In time two thousand horses were killed and served out instead of beef ; and starch, with bluing in it, originally intended for washing clothes, and bran were made into a bread.

Canary-seed was beaten up into meal, and the violet powder, which some women put on their fair faces, was made into the most delicate of rice-cakes. These deprivations, which seemed tragedies at the time, now form the humors of the siege. They are the facts which the besieged first tell you—they are the incidents to which they will always refer. They will never sit down to a good dinner when a stranger is present but that they will say, "This is a little better than corn-starch and horse-meat, isn't it?" They were saying it a day after the siege was raised—they will still be saying it to their grandchildren. These are the humors of the siege, because the siege has been lifted ; the real tragedies of the ' siege are as real tragedies to-day as they were when the bodies of Colonel Dick-Cunyngham, Lieutenant Egerton of the Powerful, the Earl of Ava, and George W. Steevens were carried each under the Union Jack to the little cemetery by the Klip River. I speak only of these out of the many tragedies, because, perhaps, they were to the public who knew them by their deeds, as well as to the friends who loved them for themselves, the men who will be missed the most and for the longest time. They were all young, able, and brave. Dick-Cunyngham gained the Victoria Cross in Afghanistan and survived his wound at Elandslaagte only to be killed at last while riding out at the head of the regiment, by a chance, spent bullet, fired by an unseen enemy, and while he himself was unseen by the hand that fired it. Egerton, whose navy guns saved the day at Lombards Kop, was struck by a shell that entered the embrasure of his own parapet and tore away both his legs. Yet so great was the courage of the young man that when his gunners raised him in their arms he looked down grimly and said, "They've done for my cricket, haven't they?" An hour later, so the officers tell me who were in the hospital when he was carried there, he was still cheerful, and smoking a cigar, and apologizing for the trouble he was giving to the jackies who carried him. An hour later he died.

The Earl of Ava

Lord Ava had already seen war as a soldier in South Africa, though it is not at the messtable of one regiment alone that he will be missed, but in widely separated parts of the world. He had been with his father in Canada, India, and Europe, and he was as well known in New York and Ottawa as in London and Paris. His was a particularly gay, lovable, manly nature, and he was brave to the edge of recklessness, always volunteering for those actions in which his own regiment was not engaged. When he died of the wounds he received at the Battle of Caesar's Camp, his body was followed to the grave by Tommies, officers, and civilians, each of whom mourned him as a personal friend. His father gave the city of Ava and all of Upper Burmah to the British Empire ; his son gave his life. And in return the empire gives him six feet of earth by the muddy waters of the Klip River. It was a fine end, but it is hard to see the meaning of it.

George W. Steevens

The death of George W. Steevens was as hard and as difficult a problem. He had but only begun a career of brilliant and helpful work. It was work peculiarly his own. He borrowed no one's point of view, but by a marvellous instinct and intuition picked out in all he saw the essential, the dramatic, the human, and the humorous, and expressed it so that others saw it for themselves. His last letter shows how the siege filled him with boredom and ennui. In one letter he says: "Come quickly to our relief or we die—not of shells, but of dullness." I do not know that I can make it clear, but it seems in some way to add to the pathos of his end that it should have come to the man who went to Khartoum with Kitchener, to Calcutta with Curzon, and to Rennes with Dreyfus—when he was longing to be up and doing, when all of those fine instincts and possibilities of perception and powers of expression were in rebellion at being kept idle, and were starving for the action, and incident, and color of which his hand was the master.

The Battle of Colenso could be heard across the hills beyond Ladysmith, and promised that relief was imminent. For was not Buller coming at last, and were not those his guns forcing back the Boers? Throughout the long hot day of December 3rd the imprisoned people listened with awe and hope to the rolling thunder of the great cannon. They surely proclaimed the end. In a week, in a day, Buller would be across the Tugela, the Boers would abandon Bulwana, at any moment might they not see Buller's cavalry galloping across the plain? The people climbed up to the top of Convent Hill for the first view of them. But instead came a story of dismay, the story of Buller's repulse, and then silence, weeks of silence, until it seemed as if the world was going on without thought of them, and they sank back like shipwrecked sailors who watch the parting sail disappearing below the horizon. But they were not in despair; at least, the garrison was not. It was too busy guarding the long line of defences to give way to any such weakness or to abuse its country. men. Of course, the civilians were indignant, or some of them were. They whined about their lost property, they vowed if they ever got out that they would be jolly well paid for their lost property—they had no doubt but that the Boers had stolen all their chickens and desecrated their farm-houses, of one-storied brick with a tin roof, by turning them into hospitals for the wounded farmers. Someone must pay the colonial for such outrages, and for their chickens, too—the British Empire must not think she can turn one of her colonies into a battle-ground and march her troops across it, unless she expects to pay for those chickens. They are unselfish, loyal people, the Natal colonials. But they are very independent, and for fear you may not notice it by their manner—they tell you so. "We colonials, they say; "we are independent." They are so independent that they charged the Tommies who had come seven thousand miles to fight for them, and who were protecting their dusty, corrugated-zinc town with their lives, a shilling each for slices of bread and molasses.

Ladysmith was not entirely cut off from the world ; Kaffir boys would for $100 carry messages through to Chieveley, and the heliograph, after losing its way and tapping many Boer wires, and being most scandalously insulted by the Boer mirrors for doing so, finally established communication with Ladysmith and talked to it whenever the sun shone by day, and by night with locomotive head-lights and search-lights. The officer who finally called up Ladysmith, is young Captain Cayser, and the story of his efforts to communicate with the besieged garrison is a most creditable and curious one. For many days he trudged up one high hill after another and flashed his mirror, but without response, except from the Boers in between. And they, when he thought he had "got" Ladysmith on the 'phone, would shock and undeceive him by some such pleasantry as "How do you like our pom-poms?" or ,Go to Hell." Not discouraged, Captain Cayser continued to climb many hills, until at last the mirror of Ladysmith winked back at him. "Who are you?" Cayser asked. "I am Walker of the Devons," came back the answer. But Captain Cayser had grown suspicious, and in order to make quite sure who it was with whom he was talking, he flashed back, "Find Captain Brooks of the Gordons and ask him the name of Captain Cayser's country-place in Scotland." A hurried search was made for Brooks of the Gordons, and the answer came back: "We are acquainted with the name of your home in Perthshire" "Then use it for the code word," Cayser commanded, and for the remainder of the siege the name of Cayser's country home was used to send every cipher message that passed out of Ladysmith over the heads of the Boers. It is further related that when the signal officers found Brooks of the Gordons and said, "Captain Cayser has just heliographed in to ask you to tell him the name of his country house," that officer remarked, "Well, I always thought Cayser was an ass, but I didn't think he'd forget the name of his own home." The picture of a gentleman heliographing violently into a besieged city to find out where he lived has certainly a humorous side.

One of the most pitiful stories of the siege concerns not human beings but their fellow sufferers, the horses. When it became evident that the garrison could no longer feed the hundreds of horses in the artillery and cavalry regiments, and that the corn must be saved for the men, a certain few of the horses were picked out to do scouting, others to be killed and eaten, and about three hundred were stampeded.

The horses had never been taught to eat grass, so after a happy morning's frolic they all came charging back at meal-time, neighing for their oats and water, and it became necessary to drive them out again and post sentries at the entrance of the streets to keep them out.

For a few days the town was filled with stampeded horses. On the second day a horse from one regiment came across his gun-mate, who had pulled the same piece of artillery with him five years before in India, and the two poor things came galloping proudly back into the lines of the old regiment and up to the very crew of their old gun. I hope the men had no such stern sense of duty as to make them turn their old comrades out again.

Two months and two weeks had passed since the siege was declared before General Buller raised the hopes of the Ladysmith. garrison by again resuming his attack. This attack continued for six weeks, the last two weeks being days and nights of unceasing battle. There was hardly an hour during his advance that it was not announced in Ladysmith that General Buller was "coming in." When he was at Spion Kop and his guns seemed almost within range of the city, everyone was rejoicing that the end had come. The troops of the garrison fought with fresh courage, people accepted their biscuit and a half per day with a better grace, feeling that starvation was to last but a few hours longer. And from the hill-tops came the camp rumors of clouds of dust raised by approaching cavalry, of British helmets seen upon the nearest ridges, of the rattle of Maxims coming from not more than three miles distant. Again and again the people flocked into the street or gathered on Convent Hill, and as often returned to their houses or tents disheartened and undeceived. The men of the garrison were becoming hopelessly weak. They could not march two miles, and eight of every thirteen soldiers had been or still were on the hospital-list. Had the Boers attacked again as they did on the famous 6th of January, when men lay for hours within forty feet of each other, each behind a rock and each waiting for the other to show even a foot or a finger, it is almost certain that the garrison would not have had the physical strength to resist, and Ladysmith would have fallen.

In the meanwhile Buller's men were fighting desperately. They had abandoned their tents and were living in the open, sleeping among the rocks and the high grass, on some day drenched for hours by heavy tropical showers and sleeping all night in uniforms as wet a sea-weed. Buller fared no better than his men and slept under the stars, sick officers lay under bushes, and the staff carried on the work of the army under wagons through which the rain poured upon their books and papers. To the man who read of Buller's slow advance in the daily despatches, who measured the distance between Colenso and Ladysmith on the map and found them only twelve miles apart, the delay of the column seemed incomprehensible.

"Twelve miles," he exclaimed; "they've been six weeks going twelve miles. Why, our troops in the Civil War used to march forty miles in one day." It is useless, unless one has seen the country through which Buller was forced to pass, to attempt to understand the task which lay before him. A general in his report who emphasizes difficulties is classed with the workman who makes his bad tools an excuse for bad work, and the public at home grow impatient. And, in consequence, much that might have been said in explanation was left unreported, and the people in Ladysmith who blamed the column and those outside of Ladysmith who could not comprehend its tardy progress, would have been more tolerant could they have seen the mountains, hills, and ridges which nature had placed at the disposal of the Boers. Bloch, the authority on modern war, believes that with the new weapons a force intrenched and on the defensive is to the attacking force in the proportion of eight men to one, so if this be correct, the Boers outnumbered the English in that proportion, and the 25,000 Of the latter were opposed to a position equal to 200,000 men on an open plain. As a matter of fact, the English outnumbered the Boers on different days from five to one up to twenty to one. Their chief difficulty was in the country, and another great difficulty was the fact that General Buller was too slow in following up an advantage. After he had taken a position he would reinforce it so leisurely that he allowed the Boers ample time in which to fortify and enfilade him from another. Also, he had suffered so heavily at Colenso in casualties that he was sensitive of losing more men, and in order to save life, attacked with forces so insufficient in numbers that many men were sacrificed for that reason. This was notably the case at the fight at Railway Hill, when the Inniskillings and a few Dublins and Connaughts were sent to take a position by frontal attack and lost six hundred ; a few days later the same position was attacked on the flank with nine regiments, and as a result the Boers abandoned it, and although there were nearly eight thousand more men engaged, the loss was only two hundred. Buller's continuous battles demonstrated that a fortified position may be shelled for half a day without the enemy being driven so far from it that he cannot return in time to meet a charge of infantry. The time which elapses between that moment when the artillery ceases firing in order to allow the infantry to mount the crest, was always sufficiently long to allow the Boers to reoccupy the trenches.

Before the Battle of Pieter's Hill, the West Yorks asked the artillery to continue to play upon the crest they were to storm up to the very last moment. The artillery obliged them so enthusiastically that several of the West Yorks were wounded ; but still, in spite of the terrific bombardment, many of the Boers were found in the trenches, and had to be taken by the bayonet.

South African War Links
		Richard Harding Davis, With Both Armies in South Africa, 1900 Chapter III: "The Relief of Ladysmith"
		Richard Harding Davis, With Both Armies in South Africa, 1900 Table of Contents
		Biography of Richard Harding Davis. "U.S. author of romantic novels and short stories and the best known reporter of his generation."
		Perspectives on the South African War. A collection of links to materials on the South African War.
		The South African War Virtual Library contains a wide selection of research data related to the South African War. This site presents an archive of easily accessible and concise material concerning the War. It is not intended to be a new historical 'front', but instead an organised amalgamation of a wide variety of available material.

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