The British artillery was a powerful force in the field, underused by commanders with little training in the use of modern guns in battle. Pakenham cites Pieters as being the battle at which a British commander, surprisingly Buller, developed a modern form of battlefield tactics: heavy artillery bombardments co-ordinated to permit the infantry to advance under their protection. It was the only occasion that Buller showed any real generalship and the short inspiration quickly died.

The Royal Field Artillery fought with 15 pounder guns; the Royal Horse Artillery with 12 pounders and the Royal Garrison Artillery batteries with 5 inch howitzers. The Royal Navy provided heavy field artillery with a number of 4.7 inch naval guns mounted on field carriages devised by Captain Percy Scott of HMS Terrible.
Automatic weapons were used by the British usually mounted on special carriages accompanying the cavalry.
Winner: The British under White held out until relieved by General Buller, but without great distinction.
British Regiments:
18th Hussars: from 1922 the 13th/18th Royal Hussars and now the Light Dragoons.
19th Hussars: from 1922 the 15th/19th King’s Royal Hussars and now the Light Dragoons.
5th Lancers: from 1922 the 16th/5th Lancers.
Royal Field Artillery: 13th, 18th, 21st, 42nd, 53rd and 69th Batteries. No 10 Mountain Battery
1st King’s Liverpool Regiment: now the King’s Regiment.
1st Devonshire Regiment: now the Devon and Dorset Regiment.
1st Leicestershire Regiment: now the Royal Anglian Regiment.
1st Gloucestershire Regiment: now the Royal Gloucestershire, Berkshire and Wiltshire Regiment.
1st and 2nd King’s Royal Rifles: now the Royal Green Jackets.
1st Manchester Regiment: now the King’s Regiment.
2nd Gordon Highlanders: now the Highlanders.
1st Royal Irish Fusiliers: disbanded in 1922.
2nd Royal Dublin Fusiliers: disbanded in 1922.
Natal Volunteer Artillery:

Account:
The Boer War began on 11th October 1899 with the invasion of Natal by General Joubert’s army of 35,000 Transvaalers and Orange Free Staters.

On his appointment as commander-in-chief, Lieutenant General Sir Redvers Buller urged that no British troops should be positioned further north than the Tugela River, until he arrived with the British Army Corps. Buller knew South Africa and the Boers and that the force commanded by White was insufficient to venture across the Tugela.

After the initial British successes of Talana and Elandslaagte, Buller was proved correct. White lost the battle of Ladysmith and quickly found himself enveloped by the advancing Boers. On 2nd November 1899 the railway line was cut south of Ladysmith; on the last train out were Major General French and his chief of staff, Major Douglas Haig, lying on the carriage floor amidst a hail of bullets, escaping to command the newly arriving cavalry division.
The Boers invested Ladysmith and White’s troops.

White was an elderly general whose career had been forged in a different epoch. White had fought in the Indian Mutiny and won the Victoria Cross in the Second Afghan War. Semi-retirement beckoned with the Governorship of Gibraltar, when the South African crisis diverted him to Durban and pushed him back into the front line.

The warfare in Natal was beyond White’s capability; requiring knowledge of the country, which White did not have. Fighting the well armed Boers required active and accurate reconnaissance and intelligence. It required energy, hard work and resource, qualities White no longer possessed, and above all insight, initiative and determination.

White knew that he should not permit his force to be pinned into a useless minor township. He should have retreated precipitously to avoid being caught in Ladysmith. But he could not bring himself to abandon the stockpile of army supplies and the town.

When Buller arrived in Cape Town with the British Army Corps, the expectation of him was that he would invade the Orange Free State at a point of his choosing. The strategic pendulum would have swung firmly in Britain’s favour. White’s investment in Ladysmith, with Cecil Rhodes self-immurement in Kimberley, changed all that. Buller could not permit such a large force as White’s to fall into the hands of the Boers. He was forced to abandon any notion of invading the Free State for a slogging match across the Tugela to relieve Ladysmith.

The British in Ladysmith, and in Kimberley and Mafeking, were fortunate that the nature of the Boer commando made it an inappropriate instrument to conduct a siege. Discipline was voluntary and self-imposed. The Boer burgers had to be persuaded to adopt a course of action: they could not be ordered. The Boer was an ideal soldier for a defensive battle, which most of the main battles were for the Boer side. He was not appropriately armed for an assault, having no bayonet, which in the end was the only to capture Ladysmith and the other towns.

On 9th November 1899 the Boers stormed King’s Post on the northern perimeter and Caesar’s Camp on the southern perimeter. After heavy fighting the Boers were driven back.

The siege quickly developed a monotonous routine with artillery bombardments conducted by either side each day. Long Tom, the heavy Creusot, was the main Boer armament while the Royal Navy gunners replied with a 4.7 inch gun.

By agreement with General Cronje a camp was established at Intombi on the outer south eastern edge of the perimeter for the civilian inhabitants of the town. The camp lay on the railway and throughout the siege trains took sickening civilians to its hospital. A condition laid down by Cronje was that once there no one could return to the main town.

On 15th December 1899 General Buller attempted to force the Boer positions on the Tugela at Colenso, losing convincingly. The Ladysmith garrison listened to the distant bombardment. At first it was thought that Buller had forced the Boer positions. The next day the correct news came through to the town by way of a dispatch from Buller to White explaining that the Natal Field Force had been repelled.

As the extent of the defeat at Colenso sank in, the spirits of the Ladysmith garrison fell. Several of the senior officers were aware that with the withdrawal of many of the Boers to reinforce Joubert’s lines on the Tugela the British garrison heavily outnumbered the besiegers and yet almost nothing was done to incommode the Boers.

The Boer bombardments were conducted at no particular time, particularly by their two 6 inch guns. On 24th November 1899 Long Tom caught a company of the King’s Liverpools massed in the open, inflicting 9 casualties, 5 of them dead. On 22nd December 1899 Long Tom surprised the Gloucesters inflicting 17 casualties. A repeated target for the long range Boer guns was the main Ladysmith Hospital. On the night of 27th December 1899 Long Tom dropped a shell onto the officers’ mess of the Devons on Junction Hill, killing and wounding a number of officers of various infantry regiments. On New Year’s Day 1900 a British officer was killed by a shell landing in the middle of a cricket match; the dead officer being in the act of bowling.

The counter battery fire was conducted by the two naval 4.7 inch guns known as Lady Anne and Princess Victoria. For the garrison the sound of British guns firing back maintained morale.

General White spent most of the siege in his headquarters building in the middle of the town, surrounded by his largely inactive staff. No proper continuous system of fortification or strong points was built. Nothing was done to harass the Boer besiegers. White attempted to maintain the myth that his command was a field force, but did nothing to justify that claim.

The defence of Plevna, a town in Bulgaria, by the Turkish army under Osman Pasha during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877 attracted the admiration of Western Europe, through the determination of the Turks to withstand Russian attack. The fortifications built in Plevna engaged the interest of western armies. An account of the siege and capture of Plevna written by a young half English officer, Frederick Von Herbert, who held a junior command in the Turkish Army during the siege, was widely read in Britain and elsewhere. The Plevna fortifications were held out as a fine example of what could be achieved by a resourceful and determined force.

Colonel Knox, commanding the northern sector of the Ladysmith perimeter worked hard to fortify his sector, using his study of the Plevna fortifications. The other sectors were less well served.

On 8th December 1899 Colonel Rawlinson persuaded White to permit a raid on the Boer lines. A party of Imperial Light Horse and Natal Carabineers stormed Lombard’s Kop and destroyed two large Boer guns. On 11th December 1899 the Rifle Brigade captured Surprise Hill blowing up a Boer howitzer. This party had to fight its way out but the successes exhilarated the garrison. Denys Reitz was a member of the Boer corporalship that ambushed the retreating Rifles.

Colonel Ian Hamilton, the commander in chief in the Dardanelles in 1916, performed less well with his southern sector, containing the vital Wagon Hill and Caesar’s Camp. Hamilton seems to have had little time for his responsibilities, preferring to stay with his depressive and inactive commander in the headquarters in the centre of Ladysmith.

President Kruger constantly urged the Boer leaders around Ladysmith to take the town by storm: a course of action they finally agreed to attempt.
On 6th January 1900 the Boers launched an attack on Ladysmith designed to overwhelm the garrison before the Boers transferred a substantial part of the investing force to the Tugela to help resist Buller’s advance.

Attacks were launched around the Ladysmith perimeter. Knox beat off his assault from his fortifications with little difficulty. The main Boer attack fell on the crescent shaped hill on the southern perimeter, known as Caesar’s Camp, the western pinnacle of which was called Wagon Hill.

Due to the indolence of White and Hamilton, whose sector this was, the area was largely bereft of entrenchments. The Boers approached the brow of the hill in two columns. Finally challenged the Boers rushed the British posts.

The troops on Wagon Hill were King’s Royal Rifles, Gordon Highlanders and Imperial Light Horse with a Hotchkiss gun. A confused fight took place in the dark.

Ian Hamilton brought up reinforcements of Gordon Highlanders, Rifle Brigade and 21st and 53rd Field Batteries. Fierce fighting took place along Wagon Hill and in support of the beleaguered companies of Manchesters and Imperial Light Horse on Wagon Hill West and Caesar’s Camp. The Boers were finally driven back by a renewed attack reinforced by a dismounted squadron of 18th Hussars.

The final movement was conducted by some companies of the Devons charging the crest of the hill to drive the Boers back, which they succeeded in doing with some loss.

An old Boer was found lying on the hillside with a Martini Henry rifle marked “58th Regiment” taken from the British during the First Boer War at Laing’s Nek or Majuba Hill.

The garrison did nothing further to assist Buller’s advance to relieve Ladysmith, other than listen anxiously to the sounds of the fighting on Spion Kop.

During January 1900 supplies in Ladysmith became seriously short. The remaining cavalry horses were shot for food.

Between 20th and 27th February 1900 Buller fought his final and successful battle at Pieters, forcing the Tugela position. On 27th February 1900 the British pickets on Wagon Hill saw the Boer besiegers trek away across the veldt and Buller’s troops marched into Ladysmith. The siege was over.

Follow-up: Lieutenant General Sir George White committed a serious of disastrous mistakes culminating in being bottled up in Ladysmith with his substantial force. He compounded this error by his supine conduct of the defence of Ladysmith and his failure to provide Buller with any worthwhile assistance in his attempts to raise the siege.

The Ladysmith garrison did not know whether they were “rogues or heroes” for spending the war in the town.

References:
The Boer War is widely covered. A cross section of interesting volumes would be:
The Great Boer War by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Goodbye Dolly Gray by Rayne Kruger
The Boer War by Thomas Pakenham
South Africa and the Transvaal War by Louis Creswicke (6 highly partisan volumes)
Books solely on the fighting in Natal:
Buller’s Campaign by Julian Symons
Ladysmith by Ruari Chisholm
For a view of the fighting in Natal from the Boer perspective:
Commando by Denys Reitz.