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Updated: May 17, 2025
After all, he is right; the business is none of his, and why should we ask him to risk his life in our quarrel, knowing as we do that white men are not like us; they think a great deal of their lives. Farewell, Macumazahn. If I conquer and grow great you will always be welcome in Zululand, whereas if I fail perhaps you will be best over the Tugela river."
A poster in all the paraphernalia of Official authority, proclaiming the relief of Mafeking four months too soon! adorned the walls of the Town House. General Buller, we were informed, was about to unlock the door of Ladysmith "the key had been found." But evidently the lock had not, as was proven by the subsequent disastrous retreat across the Tugela.
Hart's six battalions found good cover in the gorge of the Tugela. Sir Redvers Buller now saw that his plan of filing his army round the angle of the river and across the enemy's front would, in any case, be very costly, and was perhaps impossible. He, therefore, determined to get back to the Hlangwani plateau, and try the extreme left of the enemy's position.
Not infrequently did the women accompany their husbands to the trenches along the Tugela front, and it was asserted, with every evidence of veracity, that many of them used the rifles against the enemy with even more ardour and precision than the men.
The king does mean to fight, not because he wants to, but because the regiments swear that they will wash their assegais; they who have never seen blood since that battle of the Tugela in which we two played a part, and if he will not suffer it, well, there are more of his race!
This would involve a great slaughter and a terrible risk. Secondly, to withdraw again, beyond the Tugela, and look elsewhere for a passage: a moral defeat and a further delay in the relief of Ladysmith; and thirdly, to attack by night the mountain of Spion Kop, and thence to enfilade and command the Boer entrenchments.
We seem almost to have gone out of our way to make every obstacle the glacislike approach, the river, the trenches as difficult as possible. Future operations were to prove that it was not so difficult to deceive Boer vigilance and by rapid movements to cross the Tugela.
The fortunes of the day, as the hours lengthened, were reflected in a series of telegrams which were flashed through by him to Sir Redvers Buller in his camp south of the Tugela.
Line after line of waggons with loose strings of mounted men kept moving from the direction of the Tugela heights above Colenso, steadily westward, across the top of Long Valley, past the foot of Hussar Hill, out into the main road along the Great Plain, over the Sandspruit Drift at the foot of Telegraph Hill, and so to the branching of the roads which might lead either to the Free State passes or to Pepworth Hill and the railway to the north.
The line of approach to Ladysmith was held by the enemy, and the British Army of relief, the greater part of which had crossed to the left bank of the Tugela, was entangled in the Colenso Kopjes, and the river loop. Warren's general idea for the 22nd, of which Buller approved, was to attack Wynne's Hill with the 11th Brigade, leaving Horseshoe Hill to be dealt with by the artillery.
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