THE WEEK'S GREAT DAY.

Auckland Star, Volume LXII, Issue 50, 28 February 1931, Page 8

THE WEEK'S GREAT DAY.

THE MAJUBA HILL DISASTER. (Copyrighted.) On February 27, 1881, the military prestige of Great Britain sustained a severe blow by the ignominious defeat of the British troops by the Boers at Majuba Hill, in South Africa. In 1877, when the territory of t the Transvaal Republic was annexed by Great Britain, the Boers had been promised that they would be given some form of self-government as soon as circumstances permitted, and it was the long-delayed redemption of this promise which finally provoked tlie Boers to rebellion and to proclaim their own. independence on December 16, 1880. The war which followed was a very short one, and only a few hundred troops were engaged, but during the progress of the conflict the British army suffered four humiliating disasters, of which the reverse at Majuba Hill was the last.

The small and scattered British garrisons in the Transvaal were closely besieged by the Boers, who, on December 20, annihilated a detachment of 240 troops, marching to the relief of Pretoria, at Bronkhorst Spruit; and a month later General Sir George Colley, who advanced into Natal with a relieving column of 1400 men, found the Boers in possession of the frontier pass known as Laing's. Nek. After suffering a couple of severe reverses in his endeavours to dislodge the enemy, Colley decided that his only chance of success lay in the occupation of Majuba Hill, a steep and flat-topped eminence, which rose 2000 feet above Laing's Nek and commanded the Boer position.

During the night of February 26 Colley's force, which had been reduced to about 600 men, scaled the precipitous hill, and, after an arduous climb of eight hours' duration, reached the summit, too much fatigued to undertake the construction of any defensive entrenchment. On the following morning the Boers, who quickly realised that they must either capture the hill or abandon Laing's Nek, chose the bolder course.

While the major portion of the Boer army maintained a continuous fire upon the summit from the lower slopes of the hill, several small bodies of active young Boers advanced stealthily up the hillside. The long-range firing of the Boer marksmen did but little damage to the defenders, who sheltered themselves behind the rim of a slight depression on the summit, but this cover also prevented them from observing the approach of the climbing parties until they had gained the summit.

Never has there been a better exemplification of Napoleon's dictum that moral effect is everything in warfare. The attacking party was but a mere handful compared with the 600 British soldiers, who would have been able to send the Boers headlong down the hill if they had ventured to make a bayonet charge, but their surprise was so sudden and so complete that they became panic-stricken, and utterly failed to realise that their position was by no means a hopeless one. In a few minutes the whole British force was in full flight down the hill; Colley was shot dead while attempting to rally his men, half of whom were killed and wounded, while the remainder were captured by the Boers.

The disaster at Majuba Hill miglit have been speedily retrieved in 1881, for Sir Evelyn Wood had arrived in Natal with a considerable army, and a strong expeditionary force was on its way from India under the command of Sir Frederick (afterwards Lord) Roberts, but the pacificallyinclined British Government then in power decided it was advisable to conclude a treaty of peace with the Boers, and thus the responsibility of solving the. vexed question of British or Boer supremacy in South Africa to the next generation, with the result that Britain was involved in a long and costly war at the commencement of the present century.