THE IMPERIAL VISION OF HEROISM 83
becoming hopelessly entangled, others madly galloping across the plains
toward Bloemfontein.^35
The situation was scarcely better for ‘Q’ battery; one gun and two
ammunition wagons overturned in the violent maneuver and had to be
left behind. The survivors retired to the three buildings at Sanna’s Post,
roughly 1000 yards from the Korn Spruit, unlimbered, and opened a lively,
if entirely ineffectual fire on the Boer positions. The drift offered excellent
cover from the flat trajectory of the field guns at that range. The guns,
lacking splinter shields, offered no shelter from the fire of 350 Mausers.^36
The gunners of ‘Q’ battery were caught in the open by a foe who knew
their exact range. Casualties steadily mounted until the order to fall back
behind the cover of the buildings arrived. The fire was so heavy that Major
Edmund Phipps-Hornby ordered the guns run back by hand rather than
expose the horses. Assisted by troopers from the Burma Mounted Infantry
(their own numbers too depleted by this point) ‘Q’ battery managed to
withdraw four of the five guns to safety; the fifth was abandoned.^37 The day
had been an unmitigated disaster: 570 casualties, with seven guns captured
by de Wet’s partisans.^38
Amazingly, Lord Roberts conferred a provisional Victoria Cross on Major
Phipps-Hornby and directed the battery to elect three members to receive
the same decoration as their commanding officer. These three, Gunner Isaac
Lodge, Driver Horace Henry Glasock, and Sergeant Charles Edward Haydon,
were likewise given provisional VCs on the spot. Roberts also forwarded
three more candidates through regular channels for Crosses. The whole
packet was presented as afait accomplito the War Office.^39
That four provisional VCs were awarded on a single engagement raised
some eyebrows in London; that it was for a debacle such as Korn Spruit
was remarkable; that Lord Roberts further recommended another three
candidates was unbelievable. His actions resulted in near censure from the
War Office.
London realized it could do nothing about the four VCs already
granted. To deny them would undercut Roberts’s authority as theatre
commander. They could and did quash the three further recommenda-
tions. The original draft of the letter informing him of this was quite
curt, a rebuke to Roberts: ‘The Grant of four Victoria Crosses for an
affair, which, taken as a whole, was highly discreditable, is ample recog-
nition of the service rendered; to give seven would be very inexpedient.’^40
The final draft softened the phrasing somewhat to read ‘taken as a
whole was not of a nature to reflect credit on our army’ but the
message was clear: Roberts had made a grievous error. Equally clear
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