Spion Kop: how to botch a battle

Spion Kop near Winterton in KwaZulu-Natal was the site of one of the most futile battles of the Anglo-Boer War. The Brits, frankly, made a bit of a hash of it. At the end of a long hot day of fighting, at least 380 people were dead but nothing much had been achieved. It’s a sad example of how to botch a battle. Imagine a skirmish in which the guy in command doesn’t even know he’s supposed to be calling the shots. Where a lot of energy goes into digging a trench at the top of a hill, only...