Few general officers have ever revealed in their official communications more of the workings and the moods of their minds than did Buller in Natal.  His telegrams and despatches always reflected the thoughts of the moment.  After the Colenso fight, he candidly referred to it as my “unfortunate undertaking of to-day.”  Six days before the Vaalkrantz affair he told Lord Roberts that “this time I feel fairly confident of success”; and on the eve of the attack he said that “while I have every hope of success, I am not quite certain of it.”

After the retirement, it was, “wherever I turn I come upon the enemy in superior force to my own.”  He subjected his personal and individual ideas and feelings to no restraint, and they incontinently leavened all his messages which were now confident, now diffident, and now querulous, and which read as if they were quotations from his private diary.  From Vaalkrantz he heliographed to White that the enemy was too strong for him, and that the “Bulwana big gun is here”; and could White suggest anything better than an advance by way of Hlangwhane?  In his telegrams from Chieveley to Lord Roberts, he complained of want of support, and of the feebleness of the resistance made by the Ladysmith garrison, which he professed to believe did not detain more than 2,000 men.  Yet in recording his weakness, it must in justice be said that he gained and never lost the confidence of the rank and file of the relieving force, and that under any other leader it would probably have succumbed to its misfortunes.

On February 12 the re-concentration of Buller’s Army at Chieveley was complete.  The enemy’s front had been greatly strengthened since the attack on Colenso.  The Boers saw what Buller could not be persuaded to believe, that Hlangwhane was the key of the position, and extended their line thence in a curve through Green Hill and Monte Cristo, with a detached post outside it on Cingolo.  These four hills and the ground between them Buller proposed to occupy, and then pass between Cingolo and Monte Cristo to a drift of the Tugela N.E. of Monte Cristo, cross the river and advance by the Klip Riyer on Bulwana.  The two “iron bridges” at Colenso were impassable, but the Boers had thrown a bridge across near Naval Hill by which, and also by a ferry higher up, communication was kept up with their left flank.

The initial movement on February 12 was made appropriately enough by Dundonald, who two months before had seen the value of the Hlangwhane position, and who now perhaps as he marched out, realized the truth of the proverb tout vient à ce qui sait attendre.  He occupied Hussar Hill temporarily as a reconnaissance to give Buller an opportunity of surveying the ground over which he was about to operate.  The Intelligence officers reported that the enemy was strongly posted at several points within the area and unmasked some of his slim tricks.  In order to conceal the line of the trenches, the excavated earth was piled up