The Flashman Papers: The Complete 12-Book Collection

by George MacDonald Fraser

  The ravine, and the bank I had just left, looked like Dante’s Inferno; they were fleeing down it among the rock and thorn, towards the Buffalo River five miles away, and those black devils were on the far lip – “’S-jee! ’S-jee!” and the assegais flashing up and down like pistons. I looked to my right front, where the Tulwana were streaking across the track; there was still a gap between them and the ravine, and I went for it hell-for-leather, the horse slithering on the loose rocks and me clinging like grim death. She was only an artillery screw, but there must have been a hunter ancestor in her somewhere, for she outraced that Zulu pincer with a hundred yards to spare, and I was able to hold her in as we shot into the safety of the scrub, with the screams and gunshots fading into the distance behind us.

  That was how I made my strategic retreat, then, from the massacre of Isan’lwana – the greatest debacle of British arms since the Kabul retreat nearly forty years earlier.4 Oh, aye, I’d been in that, too, freezing and bleeding on that nightmare march which never reached the Khyber. But I’d been a thoughtless boy then; at Isan’lwana I was an older, much wiser soldier, and I knew I was a long way from safety yet. I couldn’t tell how many others had won clear (about fifty, in fact, against a thousand who fell under the assegais), but I could guess that the next stop along the line for Ketshwayo’s merry men would be Rorke’s Drift, eight miles away on the Buffalo. They’d gobble up the picquet there, and be over the Natal border by sundown; it behoved Flashy to bear away north, and try to cross the river well beyond the reach of the impis. The trouble was, even I didn’t know how fast Zulus can travel with the blood smell in their nostrils.5

  It was about the middle of the afternoon when I came out of the scrub and boulders, into a little kraal perhaps ten miles from Isan’lwana. I reckoned I was clear of pursuit, but my beast was tuckered out, and I could have jumped for joy at the sight of an army wagon among the huts, and a burly red-cheeked sergeant puffing his cutty while he watched the native women tending a cooking-pot close by. It was a stray ammunition cart belonging to a flying column sent out north the previous day; they’d had a brush with some Zulu scouts last evening, and there were two or three wounded on blankets laid across the ammunition boxes. The cart was taking them down to Rorke’s Drift, the sergeant said.

  “Not today you ain’t,” says I, and told him briefly what had happened to most of Chelmsford’s force. He goggled and dropped his pipe.

  “Cripes!” says he. “Why, the rest of our column was makin’ for Isan’lwana this mornin’! ’Ere, Tiger Jack’s got to ’ear about this! Major! Major, sir – come quick!”

  And that was when I got my first sight of Tiger Jack Moran. He came out of one of the huts in answer to the sergeant’s cry, and as soon as I clapped eyes on him, thinks I, this is a killing gentleman. He was perhaps forty, as big as I was, but leaner, and he walked with a smooth, pigeon-toed stride, like a great slim cat. His face was lean, too, and nut-brown, with a huge hooked nose, a bristling black moustache, and two brilliant blue eyes that were never still; they slid over you and away and back again. It was a strong face, but mean; even the rat-trap mouth had an odd lift at one side which, with the ever-shifting eyes, made it look as though he knew some secret joke about you. For the rest, he wore a faded Sapper jacket and a wide-awake hat, with a black sash round his hips; when he turned I saw he had one of the new long-barrelled Remington .44 revolvers reversed through the sash over his right rump – a gunfighter’s gun, with the foresight filed away, if you please. Well, well, thinks I, here’s one to keep an eye on.

  “Chelmsford’s wiped out, you say?” The blue eyes looked everywhere but into mine; I wouldn’t have trusted this fellow with the mess funds in a hurry. “The whole command?”

  “Half of it, anyway,” says I, guzzling away at a plate of salt and mealies the sergeant had given me. “Chelmsford himself’s off in the blue with Number 3 Column, and if he’s wise he’ll stay there. Ketshwayo’s army must be cayoodling round Rorke’s Drift by now, thousands of the brutes. There’s no hope that way – if it comes to that, I doubt if there’ll be anything white and living between Blood River and the Tugela by sunrise tomorrow.”

  “You don’t say,” says he. “And you got away, eh? You’re not Army, though?”

  “Not at the moment. I’m retired, but I imagine you’ve heard of me.” I didn’t like his manner above half, with his slippery eyes and half-smile. “My name’s –”

  “Silence!” He threw up a hand, and his head jerked round, listening. The sergeant and I held our breath, listening with him. I couldn’t hear a thing, beyond the noises of the kraal; the fire crackling, the soft shuffling of one of the nigger women, a baby crying in one of the huts. Just hot silence, in that baking sun, and then Moran says sharply to me:

  “You came on that horse – how long did it take you?”

  “Two hours, perhaps – look here –”

  “Inspan that wagon!” he barked at the sergeant. “Look alive, now! Get that damned black driver – sharp’s the word! We’ll have ’em on top of us before we know it!” And before I could protest he had swung away and was running between the huts, jumping on to a great boulder, and looking back the way I had come, shading his eyes.

  You don’t waste time arguing with a man who knows his business. I felt the hot prickle of fear down my spine as I helped the sergeant get the beasts inspanned – they were horses, thank God; bullocks would have been useless if we were going to have to cut out as fast as Moran seemed to think we must. He jumped down from the rock and came striding back towards us, his head turning left and right to scan the ridges either side of the village, his hand twitching nervously at his right hip.

  “Get those three wounded lying down! And get aboard yourselves – driver, start that rig moving!” He glanced at me, that sly grin turning the corner of his mouth. “I’d climb in, mister, if I were you. Unless my shikari’s instinct is playing me false, your black friends are closer than you think, and I don’t –”

  Then it happened, and if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes I’d not have believed it – and I knew Hickok in his prime, remember, before his eyesight went, and John Wesley Hardin, too.

  The sergeant, in the act of climbing over the tailboard, let out a hell of a shriek; I glimpsed his face, red and staring, and his arm flung out to point, and then his eyes stared horribly, and he slumped down into the dust, with a throwing assegai between his shoulders, his limbs thrashing wildly. I turned, and there, not twenty yards away beyond Moran, standing on the boulder he’d just left and poised in the act of throwing, was a Zulu warrior. I could still tell you every detail of him (that’s what shock does to you) – the great black body behind the red and white shield, the calf-skin girdle, the white cow-tail garters, the ringed head with its nodding blue plume, even the little horn snuff-box swinging from his neck. It was a nightmare figure – and now there were two more, either side of him, leaping between the huts, screaming “’S-jee!” with their assegais raised to hurl at us.

  Moran had spun on his heel at the sergeant’s scream, and I swear I never saw his right hand move. But the Remington was in his fist, and the boom-boom-boom of its triple explosion was almost like one echoing shot. The Zulu on the rock jerked upright, snatching at his face, and toppled backwards; the foremost of the two running towards us pitched headlong, with half his head blown away in a sudden bloody spray, and the third man stumbled crazily, dropping his shield and rolling over and over to finish a bare two yards from us, sprawled on his back. There was a hole where his right eye had been. And Moran’s pistol was back in his sash.

  “Twins, by the look of ’em,” says he. “Did you know the Zulus think they make the best scouts?6 Well, don’t stand gawping, old fellow – there’ll be plenty of live ones on the scene presently. Mind the step!” And he was over the back of the moving wagon, with me tumbling breathlessly after him, shocked out of my wits by the speed and terror of it all. I’d say from the moment the sergeant fell to our jumping into the wagon had been a goo
d five seconds – and in that time three men had died, thank God, and the man beside me was chuckling and pushing fresh shells into his revolver.

  He was right about the live ones arriving, too – as our wagon wheeled out of the village on to a great empty stretch of plain beyond it, we could see black figures gliding in among the huts on the far side, and by the time we were a furlong out on the plain itself, with the driver lashing like fury and the wagon rolling dangerously from side to side, they were breaking cover in pursuit. There must have been more than twenty of them, and I don’t recall a more fearful sight than that silent half-moon of racing black figures, each with his mottled red and white shield and fistful of glittering spears, their white hide kilts and garters flying as they ran.

  “Udloko, unless I’m mistook,” says Moran. “Good regiment, that. Let’s add to their battle honours, what?”

  He had got a Martini from one of the wounded men who were lying pale and silent behind us in the jolting wagon, and now he snuggled the butt into his shoulder, keeping the barrel clear of the rattling tailboard, and let off four shots as fast as he could eject and reload. He hit three more Zulus – this at a range of two hundred yards, from a wagon that was bucking like a ship at sea, and at moving targets. I tell you, I was stricken between terror and sheer admiration.7

  “Damnation!” says he, after his missed shot. “Bet he felt the wind of it, though.” He saw me staring, and grinned. “Don’t be alarmed, old boy; just pass up the cartridge packets and I’ll have our gallant foes discouraged in half a jiffy, just see if I don’t!”

  But when I applied to the wounded for more cartridges, damned if there was a round among them.

  “Well, we’re sitting on half a ton of the things,” says Moran, cool as you please, and tapped the ammunition boxes. “Let’s forage, shall we?” So we broke open a case – and it was carbine ammunition, quite unsuitable for Martinis. I swallowed my innards for about the twentieth time that day; all the boxes carried the same stamp. And there, still loping across the sun-scorched plain behind us, not apparently having lost any distance, were the twenty Zulus, looking as fit as fleas and a dam’ sight more unpleasant.

  “Now, that’s vexing,” says Moran, laying down his rifle and unlimbering his Remington again. He spun the chamber. “Six shots – hm’m. Well, let’s hope none of the horses breaks a leg, what?”

  “For God’s sake, man!” My voice came out in a dreadful squeak. “They can’t keep up this pace forever!”

  “Who – the horses, or Ketshwayo’s sporting and athletic club?” He gripped the tailboard and weighed the distance between us and our pursuers. “I think, on the whole, I’d put my money on the blacks. More staying power, don’t you know? By George, can’t they run, though!”

  “But, my God, we’re done for! They’re gaining on us, I tell you –”

  “Quite,” says he. “Better think of something, eh? Unless we want our hides stretched over some damned Udloko war-drum, that is. Let’s see, now.” He stood up in the swaying wagon, clutching a support, and peered ahead under the canvas cover, resting a hand on the shoulder of the terrified nigger driver who was rolling his eyes and letting his team rip for all it was worth. “If I remember right, this blasted plain ends in a deep gully about a mile ahead – there’s a crazy kind of bridge over it … we came across it on the way up. It took the wagon, all right – but very slowly. ’Fraid by the time we get across our friends will be calling on us – an’ six shots won’t go far among that crowd, even if I make every one tell – which I would, of course. Wait, though!” And he dropped down on one knee, pushing one of the wounded men aside and ferreting among the ammunition boxes.

  I was hardly listening to him; my eyes were fixed on that line of steadily-running black figures, coming on inexorably in our wake. They were losing distance, though, it seemed to me – yes, there must be nearly a quarter of a mile between us now – but our beasts were tiring, too; they couldn’t keep up this speed much longer, dragging a heavy wagon behind them. When we reached the bridge, would there be time for the wagon to make its careful way across, before they caught up? … I scrabbled at Moran’s arm, yammering hopefully, and he grinned as he straightened up from his search among the boxes, holding up a large packet of waxed brown paper in one hand.

  “There we are, sonny boy,” says he, chuckling. “Thought I remembered it. Blasting powder – and a darling little primer! Now, watch your Uncle Jack!”

  I don’t want to live through another five minutes like those last agonising moments while we sped across the plain, slower and slower with every yard, straining our eyes back at those distant black figures behind. Even when we reached the gully, a great rocky cleft that stretched as far as one could see on either side, like a volcanic crack, with a rickety plank bridge spanning its thirty feet, there was the time-consuming labour of getting the wounded out and across. The nigger driver and I managed it between us, and sinful hard it was, for two of ’em had to be carried the whole way. Moran, meanwhile, coaxed the team on to the swaying bridge, until the wagon was fairly in the middle of it; then we outspanned the horses and led them across, glancing back fearfully. There they came, those black fiends of the pit, a bare hundred yards away, sprinting full lick now that they saw we were halted and apparently stuck. They set up a great yell of “Suthu!” as they tore in towards the bridge, and Moran, who had been working in the wagon, jumped down and ran across to the little cluster of boulders where we had laid the wounded.

  He dropped down beside me, looking back at the wagon; it was perhaps thirty yards off, with the waxed brown packet of gunpowder sitting on top of the ammunition boxes, and the tiny white primer fixed to the side of the packet. With a rifle, I might have hit it myself; all he had was a hand-gun.

  “Well, here’s luck,” says he. “One shot’ll have to do it.”

  He was right, I realised, and my mouth was parched with fear. If he missed the primer, his shot would hit the powder packet, but that wouldn’t explode it. It would just knock it over, and the primer would go God knew where. And the first Zulu was racing on to the bridge, shield aloft in triumph, with his hideous legion shrieking at his heels.

  “Gather round, dear boys,” murmurs Moran, cocking his pistol. “Get yourselves nice and comfy round the bonfire … Christ!”

  His head jerked up, the colour draining from his face. It may have been a puff of wind, or perhaps the Zulus swarming past the wagon on that shaky bridge had disturbed it – but the front flap of the canvas cover suddenly swung across, momentarily hiding the tiny white target. It flapped again – for a split second the primer was visible – the first half-dozen Zulus were past the wagon and within three strides of the solid ground, assegais gleaming and knobkerries brandished – howling black faces – another flap of the canvas – the crash of Moran’s revolver – and with a roar of thunder the wagon, the bridge, and everything on it dissolved in a great blast of orange flame. I was hurled flat, my ears deafened and singing; a piece of timber clattered against the rock beside me. I came dizzily to my feet, to stare at the empty ravine, with a great black cloud billowing in the air above it, a few shreds of rope and timber dangling from the far lip, and on this side, lying in the dust, a single assegai.

  Moran reversed his revolver in his hand and pushed it into the back of his sash. Then he tilted his hat back and flicked his forefinger at its brim.

  “Bayete, Udloko,” says he softly. “I do like a snap shot, though. Give the gentleman a coconut.”

  That was in ’79, my first acquaintance with Tiger Jack, and it was to last only a few more feverish hours which I’ll describe at length some other day, for they don’t matter to the Tiger’s tale, which is strange enough without Rorke’s Drift to interrupt it. That was a nightmare in its own right, if you like – worse than Little Hand or Greasy Grass, for at least at those I’d been able to run. Why, at the Drift there wasn’t even room to hide, and it’ll make a ghastly chapter of its own in my African odyssey, if I can set it down before drink and sen
ility carry me off.

  Enough for the moment to say that Moran and I were driven absolutely into that beastly carnage. You see, with our wagon blown to pieces he and I lit out on two of the draught screws, leaving the wounded in a dry cave, Moran intent on fetching help for them, Flashy merely fleeing in his wake – and as dark fell we blundered slap into an impi, for the hills were full of the brutes by now. Then it was head down and heels in, nip and tuck for our lives through the Zulu-infested night with the fiends howling at our heels, and suddenly Moran was yelling and making for a burning building dead ahead, with all hell breaking loose around it, Zulus by the hundred and shots blazing, and there was nothing for it but to follow as he went careering through scrub and bushes, putting his beast to a stone wall, and then a barricade where black bodies and red coats were hacking and slashing in the fire-glare, bayonet against assegai, and my screw took the wall but baulked at the barricade, which I cleared in a frantic dive, launching myself from a pile of Zulu corpses, landing head first on the smoking veranda of what had been the post hospital, going clean through the charred floor, and being hauled half-conscious from the smouldering wreckage by a huge cove with a red beard who left off pistolling to ask me where the dooce I’d come from. I inquired, at the top of my voice, where the hell I was, and between shots he told me.

  That, briefly, is how I came to join the garrison at Rorke’s Drift – and all the world knows what happened there. A hundred Warwickshire Welshmen and a handful of invalids stopped four thousand Udloko and Tulwana Zulus in bloody shambles at the mealie-bag ramparts, hammer and tongs and no quarter through that ghastly night with the burning hospital turning the wreckage of the little outpost into a fair semblance of Hell, and Flashy seeking in vain for a quiet corner – which I thought I’d found, once, on the thatch of the commissariat store, and damned if they didn’t set fire to that, too. Eleven Victoria Crosses they won, Chard with his beard scorched, Bromhead stone-deaf, and those ragged Taffies half-dead on their feet, but not too done to fight – oh, and talk. As an unworthy holder of that Cross myself, I’ll say they earned them, and as much glory as you like, for there never was a stand like it in all the history of war. For they didn’t only stand against impossible odds, you see – they stood and won, the garrulous little buggers, and not just ’cos they had Martinis against spears and clubs and a few muskets; they beat ’em hand to hand too, steel against steel at the barricades, and John Zulu gave them best. Well, you know what I think of heroism, and I can’t abide leeks, but I wear a daffodil as my buttonhole on Davy’s Day, for Rorke’s Drift.8