In
The Morning The Blood-Spattered Hill-Top, With Its Piles Of Dead
And Of Wounded, Were In The Hands
Of Botha and his men, whose
valour and perseverance deserved the victory which they had won.
There is no doubt
Now that at 3 A.M. of that morning Botha, knowing
that the Rifles had carried Burger's position, regarded the affair
as hopeless, and that no one was more astonished than he when he
found, on the report of two scouts, that it was a victory and not a
defeat which had come to him.
How shall we sum up such an action save that it was a gallant
attempt, gallantly carried out, and as gallantly met? On both sides
the results of artillery fire during the war have been
disappointing, but at Spion Kop beyond all question it was the Boer
guns which won the action for them. So keen was the disappointment
at home that there was a tendency to criticise the battle with some
harshness, but it is difficult now, with the evidence at our
command, to say what was left undone which could have altered the
result. Had Thorneycroft known all that we know, he would have kept
his grip upon the hill. On the face of it one finds it difficult to
understand why so momentous a decision, upon which the whole
operations depended, should have been left entirely to the judgment
of one who in the morning had been a simple Lieutenant-Colonel.
'Where are the bosses?' cried a Fusilier, and the historian can
only repeat the question.
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