Battle of Magersfontein

Background

The Second Boer War opened in October 1899 with the Boers besieging Kimberley and Mafeking and destroying the railway bridge over the Orange River. Buller's army corps was split three ways on arrival: Buller himself went to Natal, Gatacre to the Cape Midlands, and Lord Methuen's reinforced 1st Division advanced north along the railway from the Orange River to relieve Kimberley. The railway was his only reliable source of supply and water, and he had orders to bring out the town's civilians, but it made his line of approach obvious.

Methuen drove the Boers from their positions at Belmont, Graspan and the Modder River in under a week, at a cost of about a thousand men, and then halted on the Modder some twenty miles short of Kimberley. His men and horses were worn out, the railway bridge had to be replaced, and reinforcements were on their way; Kimberley signalled that it could hold out for another forty days.

The Boers used the pause better. Cronjé first fell back to the heights of Spytfontein, but De la Rey argued that if the British took the Magersfontein hills further south they could shell Spytfontein from them. President Steyn of the Free State came down to the laagers, backed De la Rey and rallied the shaken burghers, and reinforcements came in from Natal, the Basuto border and the lines round Kimberley. The new position ran for some nine miles across the railway, with Magersfontein Hill at its centre. Methuen judged a march round it too dangerous to his camp and railway, ruled out the bushy ground on the Boer left, and decided to repeat the tactics of Belmont: a bombardment, a night march and an assault on the hill at dawn.

The armies

Methuen had about 15,000 officers and men: the Guards Brigade under Colvile (Grenadiers, two battalions of Coldstream and the Scots Guards), Pole-Carew's 9th Brigade, Wauchope's Highland Brigade (Black Watch, Seaforth, Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders and Highland Light Infantry), with the Gordon Highlanders newly arrived, and Babington's cavalry and mounted infantry, including the 9th and 12th Lancers. The artillery was G Battery Royal Horse Artillery, the 18th, 62nd and 75th Field Batteries, the 65th Howitzer Battery and a naval 4.7-inch gun, with four naval 12-pounders left to guard the camp. The Highland Brigade had only just come up; for most of its men this was their first battle.

The Boers had perhaps 7,000 to 8,500 Transvaal and Free State burghers under Piet Cronjé, with De la Rey responsible for the left and Andries Cronjé for the right. They had five Krupp field guns and five pom-poms, but their strength was the Mauser rifle and the ground. On De la Rey's advice the trenches were dug not on the kopjes but on the flat, about 150 yards in front of them: narrow slits three or four feet deep, proof against shrapnel and with a grazing field of fire across open veld. On the left, the ridge running south from the hill to the Modder, there were few trenches and the burghers relied on bush and ant-heaps, and just east of the hill a gap of several hundred yards was covered only by the small Scandinavian Corps of foreign volunteers.

The battle

The bombardment (10 December, about 4.30–6.30 pm). On the afternoon of the 10th the Highland Brigade, the cavalry and the guns moved up behind Headquarter Hill, about three miles from the Boer line, while the King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry went to hold Voetpads Drift on the Modder. For up to two hours the naval gun, the howitzers and three field batteries shelled the slopes of Magersfontein Hill with shrapnel and lyddite. The burghers in the trenches below lost three men wounded. The fire's main result was to warn them that an attack was coming.

The night march (11 December, 12.30–4 am). At half past midnight Wauchope set off in pouring rain and thunder with about 3,500–4,000 men in a mass of quarter-columns: thirty companies one behind the other, the left guides holding ropes. Major Benson led by compass. At 2 am the rain clogged his compass and the column edged to the right; a patch of mimosa bush later held it up. As dawn came, still in mass, the brigade began to deploy perhaps 400 yards from trenches it did not know were there.

The volleys (about 4 am). A sudden, sustained fire from the trenches at the foot of the hill caught the brigade in the act of deploying. Wauchope, at the head of the Black Watch, was killed almost at once, and so was Colonel Goff of the Argylls. Men broke out of the mass towards the enemy, battalions intermixed, and a mixed line went to ground 200 to 300 yards from the trenches. On the right, parties got round the eastern end of the hill and destroyed the Scandinavians, and small groups of Black Watch and Seaforth started up the slope behind the trenches, only to be hit by their own shrapnel and taken in flank by Cronjé and his escort, who chanced to arrive at that moment. By about 8 am they had been driven back.

Pinned in the sun (5 am–1 pm). The British guns opened at about 4.50 am. Once they saw that the Boers were in the trenches, not on the hill, the field batteries shortened their range and pushed in to 1,400 yards, while G Battery hauled its guns on to the reverse slope of Horse Artillery Hill and enfiladed the low ridge. To the right, the dismounted 12th Lancers, the mounted infantry and then the Coldstream Guards held off Boers working round from the ridge, some of them barely 100 yards apart, and the Yorkshire Light Infantry blocked a move along the river at Moss Drift. Half the Gordons advanced through the Highlanders to within 290 paces of the trenches and stopped. The Highlanders lay all morning without food or water in the midsummer heat, unable to advance through the fire and the wire fence in front of the trenches.

The break (1–3.30 pm). At about 1 pm Boers began to work round the Highlanders' right. Colonel Hughes-Hallett of the Seaforth tried to throw back the flank; Colonel Downman of the Gordons stood to pass on the order and was mortally wounded. Many men took the signals for a retirement, and by 1.30 most of the brigade was streaming back across the open, losing heavily, to re-form behind the field batteries by 3.30. The guns were left without infantry in front of them. Methuen sent forward six companies of Scots Guards to cover them, but the Boers did not attack. Their guns, silent all day, opened on the cavalry at about 5.30 pm.

Withdrawal (12 December). The Guards and the guns stayed out overnight. At dawn the Boer trenches were found still manned, and Methuen, against Colvile's advice, ordered a retirement. After a truce to gather the wounded, his division was back at Modder River by 4 pm.

Aftermath

The Official History counts 948 British casualties: 210 killed, 675 wounded and 63 missing. The Highland Brigade lost 747 of them, the Black Watch alone 303. Wauchope's body was found within 200 yards of the trenches. Boer losses were about 250, from 236 to 275 by different counts, many of them from shellfire; the Scandinavian Corps was almost wiped out. Three Victoria Crosses were awarded: to Lieutenant Douglas of the Royal Army Medical Corps, Corporal Shaul of the Highland Light Infantry and Captain Towse of the Gordons.

It was the second defeat of Black Week, between Stormberg the day before and Colenso four days later, and in Scotland Wauchope's death was felt as a personal bereavement. Methuen sat on the Modder for two months. Kimberley was relieved only on 15 February 1900 by Roberts's larger army, and Cronjé, who stayed at Magersfontein until he was outflanked, surrendered at Paardeberg on 27 February with more than 4,500 burghers.

The argument began at once. Methuen's remarks to the brigade after the battle were taken to blame the Highlanders, who never forgave him, though Doyle insisted he had been misunderstood. Others blamed Wauchope for keeping his brigade in mass too long, or Methuen for poor reconnaissance, a bombardment that only gave warning, and a plan built on the belief that the Boers would be on the hill. Doyle thought 700 men fell in the first few minutes; Amery replied that the losses were spread over ten hours' fighting.

Wargaming it

Magersfontein works at two scales. The whole battle, a line of some nine miles across the railway to the Modder, suits a brigade-level game with battalion or company bases. The opening is better played smaller: the Highland Brigade's last few hundred yards, at company level, with the Boers hidden until they fire.

The special rules matter more than the orders of battle. The British player should not know where the trenches are; give him a dawn deployment from a dense mass, with heavy penalties for being caught in column, and let the Boers spring the ambush. British artillery needs observation rules: the guns should waste their fire on the hill until they spot the trenches, and they will hit their own men if anyone gets up the slope. Heat, thirst and the loss of officers should wear down units pinned in the open.

The interesting decisions are the British ones. Deploy early, as Benson advised, or press on in the dark? Commit the Guards to the centre or the right? Push through the undefended gap east of the hill, where the Black Watch and Seaforth briefly got behind the line? On the Boer side, does Cronjé counter-attack when the Highlanders break and the guns stand bare? A what-if worth playing is De la Rey's left attacked on the afternoon of the 10th, when Amery says it was weakly held, or a march on Brown's Drift.

Maps and pictures