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Updated: May 12, 2025
For four hours he strayed in the Fog of War before he found Warren's Head Quarters, which had come under shell fire, and which, unknown to him, had been moved from their original position. Between 8 and 9, Warren received a letter written at 6.30 p.m. by Thorneycroft, who reported that the enemy's shell fire rendered the permanent occupation of Spion Kop impossible, and asked for instructions.
"One depressing morning I had a telegram from Bob, 'Spion Kop taken' " "So Bob," I nodded, "had it as badly as everybody else!" "Worse," declared Catherine, her eye hardening; "it was all I could do to keep him at Cambridge, though he had only just gone up. He would have given up everything and flown to the Front if I had let him."
Several European officers had been employed by the Governments of the Republics to instruct young Boers in artillery work -and their instruction was invaluable but the oft-repeated assertion that every commando was in charge of a foreign officer was as ridiculous as that of the Cape Times which stated that the British retired from Spion Kop because no water was found on its summit.
By such a spirit was the Boer animated when he achieved some of his most brilliant successes. He did not fight for honour and glory. He fought at duty's call as a patriot in a great cause. A few weeks prior to the battle of Spion Kop the Boers made their famous, though unsuccessful, attack on Platrand, known as Waggon Hill to the English, a hill situated three miles south of Ladysmith.
Squatted on the ground, crowds of bearded Boers gazing at him with fierce interest, he looked anything but comfortable, and no wonder, for the word spion was often uttered. His colour was a pale green, while his teeth chattered audibly. He was subsequently sent to Pretoria, and thence exiled to civilisation, viâ Delagoa Bay. On the same day we captured three natives bearing British despatches.
Braver men than the burghers have never lived, but they had reached the limits of human endurance, and a long experience of defeat in the field had weakened their nerve and lessened their morale. They were no longer men of the same fibre as those who had crept up to the trenches of Spion Kop, or faced the lean warriors of Ladysmith on that grim January morning at Caesar's Camp.
Almost as notable are the children whose round faces have as frequently been reflected in my Spion.
At the risk of incurring the displeasure of a great number of people by adding the following statement to my description of the battle of Vaalkrantz, I feel bound to state that Commandant-General Joubert, after our successes at Colenso, Spion Kop, and Vaalkrantz, asked the two State Presidents, Kruger and Steyn, to consider the urgency of making peace overtures to the English Government.
At six o'clock the cavalry went forward, but not far, for the morning was so misty that the artillery could not make out the Boer positions until an hour later, when a tremendous fire was opened from Mount Alice, Swartz Kop, and guns placed on a lower spur of Spion Kop. While this was going on, a bridge was thrown by the Engineers across another drift.
He was recommended, after crossing the Tugela at Trickhardt's Drift, to proceed west of Spion Kop, and to pivot his right and swing round on to the open plain in rear of the Boer position facing Potgieter's Drift. Warren, who was not of opinion that the Boer right was weak, marched out of Springfield on the evening of January 16.
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