by Peter Bowen
Finding Lord Chelmsford turned out to be easy. I was riding along asleep in the damned saddle, for I was fairly tired and there wasn’t anything dangerous about, unless I counted my friends and allies, which I should have, when there was a sudden flurry of hoofbeats, and my horse started dancing, and I was too groggy to act quick, and six horsemen run into me on a narrow place in the road. Three of the horsemen went down, along with me, and there was a real nice horse wreck there for a few seconds, which I got out of and two of the other men did too. The third had a horse step on his face, slashing his left cheek open to the teeth and popping out his eye like a grape. I washed off my thumb with water from my canteen and poked the eye back into the socket before he came to.
They was troopers sent on an errand to get some remounts left back at a farrier’s wagon. The undamaged ones directed me up the road. I left them to patch themselves up as best they could.
Chelmsford, it turned out, was up toward the mission station at Rorke’s Drift. He was going to command the central column in person, and I suppose that he hoped that just the fact he had invaded Zululand would cause the Zulu army to seek him out, and that then there would be a jolly set-to, with the Zulus breaking themselves on massed breech-loading firearms fired by disciplined troops. The British had been quite successful at this, except for Afghanistan.
Being single and well mounted, I could cover a lot of ground, and the track that the central column had made toward Zululand and which had caused them weeks of anguished, sweaty effort was little more than a hard day’s ride for a man alone. I galloped up to the top of the corduroy road that the Engineers had built on the bank, weaving around wagons driven by Boer contractors and once a bunch of rocket-tubes being hauled along, though for what purpose I couldn’t say. A Congreve rocket was fine for celebrating a nice holiday or such, but it was useless as a weapon. They were well thought of by the British, who thought they scared tribesmen, which seemed to me not to be the point. I have never really understood the military mind.
The leading elements of the column was strung out far ahead, across the river, and there was a lot of dust and confusion, which is to me the hallmark of armies everywhere. The British had a huge amount of gear, and I guessed that the scouts sent here didn’t report that a gully (they call ’em dongas in Africa), which a mounted man wouldn’t much notice, might mean that it would take a whole day with double teams of oxen to drag the wagons down and up.
On a good day when everything went right the central column would make ten miles, and from the track they had left—the earth was plowed up something fierce—I supposed that they were going on like the dogged Brits they were, hoping for a good day sometime. If they had only had the time, they would have made a fort out of the wagons each night. The oxen, for one thing, could pull only eight hours a day, and they needed a further sixteen hours to graze and then rest and chew their cuds. Between the thirteen hundred or so Imperial troops, and the few hundred Natal Kaffirs, and the wagons, and the limbered guns, and the spare oxen, and the bakeries on wheels, and two Gatling guns, and the rocket batteries and a couple of troops of Irregular Volunteers, and a lot of Boers hauling commissary supplies, and the hospital wagons, and the four tons of tents, and god knew what else, this whole thing looked to me like disaster coming. For one thing, all that the Zulus really had to do was wait until the troops were maybe thirty miles into Zululand, and then run off the oxen, and after the oxen were gone then the Zulus could sort of sit in a large ring around the hills and watch the English die of starvation. All while singing “God Save the Queen,” of course.
And the British, no doubt, were hoping that just the mere sight of all the troops and such would make the Zulus so mad that they would attack and obligingly die by the thousands in front of the breech-loading guns, and after that Cetshwayo would give up his savage ways and maybe take up needlepoint or something. All in all, I didn’t like any of it.
I come to Rorke’s Drift, which had about a hundred troops at it, and they obligingly took me across on one of the punts and sped me on my way, since I claimed to have vital messages from Buller for Chelmsford.
Late in the afternoon on the twentieth of January, 1879, I found Chelmsford and his staff having high tea. They was out ahead of the main force, which was strung out for several miles, and had decided on the campsite for that night. It was on a long, sloping saddle between a couple of low mountains—wind-worked mountains, like you see in Wyoming or the Southwest. He had vedettes and pickets flung out far to each side of the column, and there were a few Irregular troopers out ahead, riding in twos and threes, looking for signs of the Zulu army. You could have hid several armies in this country—it was filled with deep gullies of a huge size.
Chelmsford kept me waiting a good long time, which was fine by me as the less important I was to this enterprise the better, and I toyed with the notion of having an attack in the gallbladder and gallantly groaning back toward Helpmakaar, not wishing, of course, to add to the load of the surgeons, who were worked to a frazzle treating blisters from the heavy ammunition boots that the troopers had been stomping across East Africa in, and the normal run of dysentery, wounds caused by being kicked by animals, and the various injuries sustained moving a huge column of men across country that they knew nothing about.
When he finally had me brought in I made a quick report to the effect that Buller was riding around madly some sixty miles or so to the west and that we had seen no recent sign there of the Zulu army, and that we would keep looking.
Chelmsford looked fit and well. He gave me a glass of claret and bade me rise early on the morrow and look around out in front for a good campsite. Also the Zulu army. I said I would leave before dawn and be back as soon as I could. Why, I thought, they’ll hardly know I left as I just may not.
I was tired, so I went off and made up a modest little camp out of the way of the ox herds, the sort of place you would likely pass by, my preferred sort, after handing my horse over to a groom who said he’d rub him down and grain him good. Rather than line up for the meat, bread, and greens that the soldiers got, I ate from a loaf of veldt bread—a half-and-half mixture of meat powder and flour. I had some dried fruit, then rolled up in a blanket, and went to sleep to the sound of harness, bawling oxen, bawling sergeants, hoofbeats, shouted orders, and other loud noises.
At about two in the morning I got my horse back, after kicking the groom awake in the mannerly custom of the country, and slipped out of the camp, past the pickets, and headed generally north and east. There were clouds off to the east, moving toward me, and they were flashing a lot of lightning, so I picked a place halfway up a butte, and settled in to wait for the storm to pass. The wet ground would help with my tracking the Zulu army, and from where I was I could see ten miles or so toward the direction of Ulundi, where the Zulu army was leaving from, no matter if they attacked Chelmsford, Buller, or the column down by the coast, or just walked right between them all and went on to massacre Durban.
I set to work in the rising light, and carefully stared at the country. About ten in the morning I saw a few natives on horses far to the north, but no sign of a large party. The natives were riding west slowly, and then they disappeared into the country and I didn’t see them again. I headed back for the camp in the early afternoon.
Chelmsford was looking troubled. The camp was recovering from the effects of the storm of the night before. Lightning had stampeded some of the oxen and horses, who trampled some of the Natal Kaffirs, and there were injuries, and worse yet, two of the wagons had been struck, and the rain which hadn’t been that bad a few miles to the north had made the ground a mess and soaked the tentage to four times its dry weight.
I told Chelmsford that there weren’t any really good campsites up ahead for more distance than the central column could make in a day, and that the country got a little worse than it had been generally. Also that I had seen no sign of a large force, only scattered horsemen far to the north, and that they seemed to be heading west. Chelmsford
nodded and sighed and said that the confusion caused by the storm the night before would take the rest of the day to repair. He meant that by the time the oxen were hitched up, the wet tents dried a little, and some order brought out of the mess in camp—the ground was slick and fast turning to a mire—and everybody was on the move, it would be dark and time to make camp again. Better to rest up and get an early start the day following.
One of the Irregular cavalry officers, a great big brute of a man name of Browne, came with the news that he and a couple of his fellows had caught a young Zulu who had been spying on the camp.
“Bring him in,” said Chelmsford. “I want to question him.”
“I questioned him already,” said Browne, “and he unfortunately died.”
Chelmsford stared at Browne for a moment, the muscles in his jaw rippling. I slipped back out just as Chelmsford began dressing him down. This Browne was a bad ’un, no doubt about it. Rumor had it he had killed several of the Natal Kaffirs he had been leading, which is a poor way to get folks to follow you, if you ask me.
I got some food at one of the mess wagons and spent the rest of the light checking my horse over carefully and cadging grain for the animal, and waiting again for the night. Chelmsford sent for me again just as I was about to go off and get some sleep.
“I shall ride out with a large escort on the morrow and select the camp myself,” he said, “so please indicate where you think it would be best to look.”
I pointed out a spot on a map I thought had looked likeliest, somewhat to the east and north. Chelmsford bade me a good night and asked me to spend the morrow looking for the Zulu army, doing a picket’s work, a job I purely hate as you may well find yourself warning the main body of troops that the enemy is here by expiring spectacularly some distance away from them. Hell, Kelly, I says, let us find a good spot sort of out of the way.
I slept fairly late, and by the time I had got up and pissed and had a big cup of coffee and some bread with marmalade, it was about eight in the morning of the twenty-second day of January, 1879.
36
CHELMSFORD RODE OFF WITH an escort of about eighty men. They took the direction that I had suggested. One of the officers attached to Chelmsford was a young Navy Lieutenant, who was obviously much more used to striding the quarterdeck than sitting a horse. He made his problems worse by hauling a big brass telescope with him. A few men in the camp snickered as they watched him go, but he just ignored them and bounced out of sight, riding his horse in the manner Ol’ Liver-Eating Jack had always called “fuckin’ the pumpkin.”
Just as I was leaving camp, there was a halloo from the trail back to Rorke’s Drift, and a band of about a hundred horsemen showed up, mostly natives—unusual to see niggers riding, they rode with their big toes in little stirrups—and led by a one-armed officer I had never seen before. When he dismounted I saw that he had both arms, but one was badly withered and stuck in a pocket in the front of his tunic.
Colonel Pulleine, who was commanding the camp in Chelmsford’s absence, came out to greet the new arrival. They was standing being all jolly with one another, the way two dogs will just before all hell breaks loose, and after a few moments Pulleine waved me over and introduced me.
“This is Colonel Durnford,” he says. “I wanted you to tell what you know of the whereabouts of the Zulu army.”
Well, that didn’t take long. I said I was going to poke around to the north, and as I was finishing there was a shot up ahead of us and a few Zulus went racing across the side of the mountain, to the north and west of us. Some of the Irregulars gave chase, but it was bad terrain for horses and the Zulus were long gone. The Irregulars straggled back, with two lamed horses.
Durnford and Pulleine glared at each other for a moment, and then they talked at each other for a bit, and agreed to send some of the troops here and there out to the north and east, to screen the main encampment which was moving in orderly confusion and getting ready to move up to wherever Chelmsford decided.
Orders was passed to captains and majors, bugle signals began to squawk, and the men fell in. They were dressed and had been eating breakfast mostly. I noticed that though they had the one pouch with the loose rounds for their Martini-Henrys, the other pouch with most of the rounds was missing. I began to feel the hairs on the back of my neck prickle up, for the troops were falling in and racing on the double out away from the camp, with not much ammunition.
I slid out of the camp and went north, quartering—it was too hard to bother with trying to get out unseen. I kept squinting at the distance, trying to spot birds suddenly flushed up. The ground was damp enough not to give off dust, and the racket in the earth made by the camp was too loud and too close for me to do my ear-to-the-ground, which is a terribly overrated way of figuring out anything, anyway. So I rode on slowly north. The Natal Kaffirs was being bullied out of the camp behind me, headed for a little knuckle of land right up ahead, maybe a mile from the main camp.
A wind come up, and leaves on the bushes rattled, and there was something about the landscape in front of me that didn’t seem right. Nothing moved. Not an antelope, not a bird, nothing. I got a sort of crackling sound in my ears, and it is a sound I remember from Adobe Walls and other places, just before the Comanches and Kiowas and Cheyennes attacked. It seemed like the whole earth was waiting for something.
I quartered forward slowly, keeping well away from anything big enough to have someone hiding behind it, my head swiveling, and I was even trying to smell what was around. I saw a big black bird riding motionless in the air about a mile ahead, and moved that way, for the bird was a vulture and the vulture was looking at something.
There are places where I have been where you can ride along and suddenly the whole earth seems to fall away from in front of you. The land doesn’t give a hint about what it hides, no clearly defined rimrock, and the lines blend so perfectly you can’t see it even if you know it is there.
I was riding very slowly, rifle cocked, and the silence got so heavy that I stopped my horse and slipped forward, straining every sense. Whatever it was it was here and it was close. The bird held motionless up there. I went along the ground on my knees and one hand.
I peered through a bush and the sight I saw was so outlandish it took some time to take it in. Below me, stretching as far as my eyes could see both to left and right, sitting as orderly as you please, was the whole damn Zulu army. I stared for a moment. Some of them were standing, and they had ostrich plumes sticking up from their heads, so I figured them for officers. But most of them were squatting on their haunches, in neat rows, arranged by what appeared to be regiments—they had different colored shields and their dress was different from group to group.
That is not a mob of niggers, Kelly, I says to myself. That is an army.
At just that moment a black face stuck itself up on the other side of my bush, and we blinked at each other, and then I shot the face and raced for my horse. I swung up, and heard orders being shouted in what I guessed was Zulu, and then the first warriors came boiling over the top of the lip of the big gully. I cantered back, stopping to look from time to time.
They came up over the lip and charged to each side and took up the bull’s head formation. It took maybe twenty minutes for all of them to scramble out, and they dressed right and left and formed into regiments. The proudest and best warriors in all Africa. Some with red shields, some white and black, some ochre, and combinations of those colors in stripes. The inDunas were mounted and one raised a stick with feathers on it, and then the whole Zulu army began to trot forward, the sun flashing on their spears.
I shot one inDuna off his horse and tried for the bird who had given the order to advance, but my shot went lost when my horse shied at the flashings of the sun on the iron assegai heads. All of this had taken maybe half an hour.
Rather than get shot by folks supposedly on my side I turned and cantered back to camp, hallooing and waving my hat—not that I thought that there was a soul there who wasn�
��t absolutely fascinated by what was coming right along behind old Luther, er, Jim, but to remind all that I was definitely not a Zulu. Some of them wasn’t too bright, I knew for a fact.
The camp was stirring like a kicked-over anthill—some red-coated men was racing to each side and a few mounted men were riding toward me hell for leather. I glanced back and saw two miles breadth of Zulus headed our way. Well, they’d soon learn what the fire of packed rifles meant—hell, the slug the Brits used for arguing with natives weighed more than the one I used in my buffalo rifle. At close range it would go through three or four men before stopping in one.
I passed the troopers who had been headed toward me and pulled up just before the camp. Durnford was going off to my right, leading several companies, and the Natal Kaffirs were standing about, while their officers cursed and kicked. At last they began to move forward. They passed me and took up their positions. The Zulus were a twinkling line, maybe a mile and a half away, and coming on.
It was just about then, as I saw the troopers going to my left and to my right, that I began to get real uneasy. Some of the men were shirtless and a lot of them didn’t have their ammunition pouches on, just the little expense pouch that is sewn on to the belt. I looked over to where Durnford had gone and then I looked back. Durnford was spreading his troops out! There were weak places showing in the line. And a lot of the men were carrying only ten to twenty rounds apiece, not the sixty that they should have had.
I blame Durnford for what happened in the next half hour. There’s been a lot of books written on the subject, by folks who weren’t there, and retired Colonels (enough said). That battle was lost while the Zulus were still a mile and a half away.
