The battle of Spion Kop
January 24, 2024
Gandhi saw many wars during his life, and the first was the Boer War in South Africa. In October 1899, he volunteered to raise an ambulance corps for the British, and on January 24, 1900, found himself on the battlefield.
As I’ve written, the British provoked war with the Boers (Dutch farmers) for having had the audacity to discover rich veins of gold in the Transvaal. The Boers had a reputation as fierce fighters, and preemptively swept down into Natal, the province where Gandhi was based. They took control of key positions, including the hills around Ladysmith at the end of October. The siege would last for four months.
In late January, the British made an (unsuccessful) attempt to break the city’s siege through the southern hills at Spion Kop. It was the highest point in the area, and at the center of the Boer lines. On the night of January 23 (in the Southern Hemisphere, this is the middle of summer), troops succeeded in capturing a hilltop, only to discover when the sun came up that it was not the high ground after all. Whoops.
The Indian stretcher-bearers were stationed at the base of the hill, and the arrangement was that they would not be asked to work under fire. However, as the Boers began to drop shells on the exposed British position, they were asked to do so. Payne writes: “Gandhi was delighted. It showed they had high regard for the volunteers.”1 This is a possible interpretation; another might be that the British hadn’t made the agreement in good faith to begin with, because the Indians were also asked to dismantle enemy telegraph lines and gather abandoned weapons.2
Another witness to the battle was Winston Churchill. Decades later, they would be opponents, but on this day, he and Gandhi were on the same side. Young Churchill, who had recently celebrated his 25th birthday in a Boer prisoner-of-war camp before making a daring escape, was there as a war correspondent.3 He planned to build a reputation that would get him elected to Parliament. (It worked.)
Gandhi seemed to enjoy his service; a newspaperman who met him there one early morning described him as “stoical in his bearing, cheerful and confident.”4 But the battle of Spion Kop was a loss, as was Gandhi’s larger effort to demonstrate Indian value to the South African government. He was, however, awarded the War Medal; two decades later, he would return it.
When have you tried to renegotiate an agreement to your advantage?
The Life and Death of Mahatma Gandhi (Robert Payne, 1968) p. 122
Gandhi Before India (Ramachandra Guha, 2013) p. 136
Gandhi & Churchill: The Epic Rivalry That Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age (Arthur Herman, 2008) pp. 118-126
The Life of Mahatma Gandhi (Louis Fischer, 1997 paperback) p. 76