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But, if Simmonds, who had stood on Spion Kop, refused to be browbeaten by a British earl, he certainly would not grovel before an American plutocrat. He had endured a good deal since five o'clock that morning. He told his tale honestly and fully; he even sympathized with a father's distress, though assured in his own mind that it was wholly unwarranted; he was genuinely sorry on hearing that Mr.
A few days later he was bidden by Buller to "boil all his water." From Potgieter's Drift, Buller heliographed that "somehow he thought he was going to be successful this time"; that it was "quite pleasant to see how keen the men were"; that he hoped to be "knocking at Lancer's Hill" in six days' time; but after Spion Kop it was, "we had awful luck on the 25th." Deus ex Machina, No.
Down at Gun Hill in front of the Boer position we had no fewer than five batteries, the 78th, 7th, 73rd, 63rd, and 61st howitzer, but a ridge intervened between them and the Boer guns which were shelling Spion Kop, and this ridge was strongly entrenched. The naval guns from distant Mount Alice did what they could, but the range was very long, and the position of the Boer guns uncertain.
he rarely fails to do his duty. At mid-day the situation on Spion Kop was hazardous but not hopeless. Reinforcements had arrived and were quickly absorbed in the works which they quickened with patches of new vigour, but the terrible hail of bullet and shrapnel was not abated.
It is certain that if Lyttelton had not thrown his two regiments into the fight the pressure upon the hill-top might have become unendurable; and it seems also certain that if he had only held on to the position which the Rifles had gained, the Boers would never have reoccupied Spion Kop.
Their constancy was rewarded, and when at sunrise on January 25 they once more climbed the hill, they found to their astonishment and relief that it was still held by more than 300 bodies of their fallen foes. Such in brief is the tale of Spion Kop so far as it can be disentangled from the accumulation of messages, orders, reports, dispatches, and personal accounts, which obscure the subject.
It was accessible from the British front by a slope which rises from the lower ground to another spur running S.W. from the plateau. On the morning of January 23, Buller saw Warren, and again pressed him to make an attack on the Boer right; but finding that the orders for the assault on Spion Kop had already been issued, he refrained from vetoing it.
On the evening of February 7 the British army again retired south of the Tugela, and thence returned to the camps at Chieveley, facing Colenso. In the operations about Spion Kop from January 17-24, the British losses were: killed, officers 27, men 245; wounded, officers 53, men 1,050; missing and prisoners, officers 7, men 351. Total, 87 officers, 1646 men.
But the first step was the most serious one, for right across their front lay the Boer position upon the edge of a lofty plateau, with the high peak of Spion Kop forming the left corner of it. If once that main ridge could be captured or commanded, it would carry them halfway to the goal. It was for that essential line of hills that two of the most dogged races upon earth were about to contend.
There was a sort of funereal atmosphere throughout the city, whether its residents were rejoicing over a Spion Kop or suffering from the dejection of a Paardeberg. It was the same grim throng of old men, women, and children who watched the processions of prisoners of war and attended the funerals at the quaint little Dutch church in the centre of the city.
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