Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill by Candice Millard Page A
Authors: Candice Millard
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after a night of rain so heavy the British were certain it would deter any man, even the Boers, from scaling the hills surrounding their camp, a shell suddenly rent the quiet morning air.Penn Symons was just about to sit down to his breakfast when the second shell thundered down in the midst of his tents, missing his own by only a few yards.Outraged by the Boers’ impudence, he smoked a cigarette as he began issuing orders, commanding his men to train their guns on Talana Hill.
For Botha and his commando, watching from the same hill on which Penn Symons had set his sights, the entire British brigade, racing from tent to tent, scrambling to respond to the attack, made a stunningly easy target.No man among them, however, was more conspicuous than Penn Symons himself, who insisted that his aide-de-camp ride by his side, holding a dashing scarlet pennant. Within minutes, nearly every inch of ground surrounding the camp was, in the words of one British soldier, “literally rising in dust from the bullets, and the din echoing between the hill and the wood below and among the rocks from the incessant fire of the Mausers seemed to blend with every other sound into a long drawn-out hideous roar.”
In the midst of the onslaught, Penn Symons refused to find cover or take even the slightest precaution. Angrily climbing over a lowwall that was impeding his force’s progress, he disappeared from sight, making his way over ground that was littered with the bodies of his men. Minutes later, he returned to his aide-de-camp, his face strained and pale, and tersely informed him that he had been shot in the stomach and was “severely, mortally, wounded.”
The Boers, who had only three artillery guns to Penn Symons’s eighteen, could not sustain the attack and were finally forced to retreat. But they had accomplished what they had come to do—shatter their enemy’s confidence. As Botha’s commando disappeared in the distance, a veil of rain obscuring their tracks on the muddy veld, they left behind more than five hundred British casualties, among them Penn Symons, who lay dying in a hospital tent while his second-in-command, Brigadier General James Yule, hastily ordered his brigade to pack up what they could and flee southward to Ladysmith.Two days later, a Boer commander taking possession of Dundee would find Penn Symons dead and stand watching, hat in hand, as the fallen officer’s body was sewn into a British flag and buried in the yard of a local English church.
On October 26, nearly a week after the Battle of Talana Hill, Yule and his five thousand men finally reached Ladysmith, following an exhausting and harrowing journey. They quickly learned, however, that they had hardly outmaneuvered the Boers. Not only had the British lost another three hundred men, wounded and dead, in the Battle of Elandslaagte, less than twenty miles away, but George White’s regiment was also completely surrounded. Worse, the Boer force deploying around Ladysmith was not eight thousand strong but twenty thousand.
As he had been in Dundee, Louis Botha was situated on a prominent hill overlooking Ladysmith, ready for the battle to begin. This time, however, the order to fire would come not from the commando’s leader, his old friend and mentor, Lucas Meyer, but from Botha himself. Soon after reaching Ladysmith, Meyer had fallen ill and Botha had quickly been chosen to take command, making him the youngest Boer commander in the war. “He had already won confidence all round by the clearness of his views and the intrepidity of hisactions,” the Irish journalist and activist Michael Davitt, who covered the Boers during the war, wrote of Botha, “and his promotion to the command in question became exceedingly popular, especially among the younger and more ardent Boers.”
The Battle of Ladysmith lasted only a day, but it had devastating consequences for the British. It began on the morning of October 30, and by the time it ended that night, the
For Botha and his commando, watching from the same hill on which Penn Symons had set his sights, the entire British brigade, racing from tent to tent, scrambling to respond to the attack, made a stunningly easy target.No man among them, however, was more conspicuous than Penn Symons himself, who insisted that his aide-de-camp ride by his side, holding a dashing scarlet pennant. Within minutes, nearly every inch of ground surrounding the camp was, in the words of one British soldier, “literally rising in dust from the bullets, and the din echoing between the hill and the wood below and among the rocks from the incessant fire of the Mausers seemed to blend with every other sound into a long drawn-out hideous roar.”
In the midst of the onslaught, Penn Symons refused to find cover or take even the slightest precaution. Angrily climbing over a lowwall that was impeding his force’s progress, he disappeared from sight, making his way over ground that was littered with the bodies of his men. Minutes later, he returned to his aide-de-camp, his face strained and pale, and tersely informed him that he had been shot in the stomach and was “severely, mortally, wounded.”
The Boers, who had only three artillery guns to Penn Symons’s eighteen, could not sustain the attack and were finally forced to retreat. But they had accomplished what they had come to do—shatter their enemy’s confidence. As Botha’s commando disappeared in the distance, a veil of rain obscuring their tracks on the muddy veld, they left behind more than five hundred British casualties, among them Penn Symons, who lay dying in a hospital tent while his second-in-command, Brigadier General James Yule, hastily ordered his brigade to pack up what they could and flee southward to Ladysmith.Two days later, a Boer commander taking possession of Dundee would find Penn Symons dead and stand watching, hat in hand, as the fallen officer’s body was sewn into a British flag and buried in the yard of a local English church.
On October 26, nearly a week after the Battle of Talana Hill, Yule and his five thousand men finally reached Ladysmith, following an exhausting and harrowing journey. They quickly learned, however, that they had hardly outmaneuvered the Boers. Not only had the British lost another three hundred men, wounded and dead, in the Battle of Elandslaagte, less than twenty miles away, but George White’s regiment was also completely surrounded. Worse, the Boer force deploying around Ladysmith was not eight thousand strong but twenty thousand.
As he had been in Dundee, Louis Botha was situated on a prominent hill overlooking Ladysmith, ready for the battle to begin. This time, however, the order to fire would come not from the commando’s leader, his old friend and mentor, Lucas Meyer, but from Botha himself. Soon after reaching Ladysmith, Meyer had fallen ill and Botha had quickly been chosen to take command, making him the youngest Boer commander in the war. “He had already won confidence all round by the clearness of his views and the intrepidity of hisactions,” the Irish journalist and activist Michael Davitt, who covered the Boers during the war, wrote of Botha, “and his promotion to the command in question became exceedingly popular, especially among the younger and more ardent Boers.”
The Battle of Ladysmith lasted only a day, but it had devastating consequences for the British. It began on the morning of October 30, and by the time it ended that night, the
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