by Peter Bowen
I looked off to my right and saw a column of Zulus peel off and go around the flank of the mountain. I couldn’t figure this, it would take them two hours to come round behind us, and the battle would be decided long before that.
Usually, in situations like this, I run. I had seen enough, but there was still some time and I thought I might try to do what I could. I raced into the camp and found the Quartermaster—he was stripping the canvas off the ammunition wagons. Well, he wasn’t, but some of his men were. I pulled up and jumped off my horse—keeping a tight grip on the reins, mind you—and began to scream at him to get every man jack to work carrying ammunition to the troops in the line.
He looked at me for a moment, blinking.
“I see,” he said. “And you have a requisition?”
“I haven’t a goddamned requisition,” I yelled. “If you don’t get your arse to work running ammunition to the lines we’re all dead!”
“I really can’t even open the boxes without a receipt for noting when the screws in the lids were first taken out. Have to account for the screws.”
It ain’t often I was speechless, but I was then. There was two soldiers to a wagon, with rifles. I knew I would be shot if I tried to open one of the ammunition boxes. Well, Kelly, I says, I ain’t getting shot for that.
The camp wasn’t deserted—there were grooms and orderlies and such wandering around, and the bakers were working on the day’s bread. Business as usual. I saw Pulleine and his staff gabbing in front of his tent, then they broke up and Pulleine went in, no doubt to attend to some more paperwork.
The artillery just in front of the camp opened up, and I got to a place where I could see the battle and stood there, rubbing my horse down and graining him. I gave him just a little water.
The firing commenced, a steady aimed fire, and I saw the Zulus mowed down. There was plenty more. I watched for maybe ten minutes, looking up now and again from checking my horse’s feet. And then I heard a strange noise.
The Zulus was humming like a gigantic swarm of bees.
I rode over to the wagon where I had seen a rifle like mine, and after looking about to see if the owner was around, I rooted through the likeliest duffel and came up with another fifty rounds, and another pistol and a hundred rounds for that. I put the bullets in the pouches to the front of my saddle and swung back up. Off to my right there was a sailor standing on a pile of mealie bags, watching. He had a cutlass in his hand.
All of this time I was keeping a sharp eye for any Zulus off to either side or behind me. Nothing.
The fire began to slacken a little, not much, but then I have been in a lot of battles. It slackened, and that’s a bad sign.
The firing fell off a little more. A little antelope, what the Boers call a dik-dik, ran by me, chased by a little black and white terrier.
I suppose it was ten minutes more, I couldn’t really say. Then the Natal Kaffirs broke and raced back toward the camp, leaving a gap three hundred yards wide in the front of the line.
The Zulus began to pour through it, and then I could hear the firing rolled up side to side—the men often must have been taken in the back before they knew anything was wrong.
When the Kaffirs got to perhaps fifty yards from me I turned and made for the riverbank, picking my way carefully around anything that might damage my horse. Now was not the time to have a lame horse, so I went down the beaten road, making for the river. From a high place I looked back. The Zulus was in the camp, and the artillerymen had had time to limber up and were cutting their way through. There was two big columns of Zulus going past either side of the camp and heading straight for the river.
I went on, down to the ford, and crossed and pulled up on the far side, got off and awaited events. The first fugitive Natal Kaffirs came, and then a few conductors, and a red-coated soldier or two. None were mounted. They dove into the river and made it across and passed me. Then the Zulus plunged into the river a mile above me and a mile below. I got back up on my horse.
I saw a compact band of blacks—it was they who’d come riding in the day before—walking, not hurrying overmuch. They stopped above the drop to the ford and spread out and began to give covering fire to the soldiers in the ruck coming behind them. It seemed far off, the river hid most of the noise.
When the niggers giving covering fire on the far high bank scrambled down and swum across, I checked the sights on my rifle and began to scout for targets. Before the fellers were halfways across I had two, a Zulu chasing some poor barefoot bastard—I did take time to wonder what the hell he’d been doing—and a redcoat being chased by three Zulus. I fired at the three, figuring whatever the poor bootless bastard had been doing it hadn’t been fighting—and knocked one down with the first shot. The others drew up, so I fired at them again and then all three were down, though to be truthful two of them was crawling pretty good and the third was just limping. If you want rapid-fire head shots from atop a horse you should hire Buffalo Bill. Have him tell you about it anyway.
The barefoot feller was still making pretty good time, and his friend wasn’t closing too fast, and then I thought that I hadn’t better be mean and so I cleared his companion away—this one went down and didn’t move.
The nigger company was coming out of the water now, and while I looked for more targets and slammed more shells into the magazine, they scrambled up and formed a line in front of me and waited.
It wasn’t long in coming. There was a lot more Zulus than there was fugitives—I thought most of the Zulus had stayed to loot the camp, but there were twenty thousand, after all—and me and the company gave what covering fire we could. The Zulus was stabbing away pretty good, and the crowd kept getting thicker. A couple of big gray birds flew by low on the river.
And then suddenly there was a mass of folks, mostly Zulus in the river, and when I looked up and down I could see Zulus on my side of the bank running my way. I figured I had five minutes.
The only cannon that made it as far as the river was pulled off a low cliff by the maddened team, down to my right. Two red-coated officers reined up and then took the cliff, and the legs of their horses broke on the big rocks below. Then a wave of Zulus came over after them. The redcoats had sabers and pistols, but it was all over very soon.
“Would you have spare ammunition, sir?” said a deep voice.
I looked down. It was the sergeant from the nigger company in front of me.
“None for Martini-Henrys,” I said. Then I handed him my spare pistol and he thanked me and went back to his men.
The mess on the far bank was so close now—I couldn’t shoot for fear of hitting who it was I was trying to help—that I thought it high time to leave.
Then I saw a couple of officers upstream, and they was carrying the Queen’s colors. There was a big party of Zulus after them. One of the officers was hobbling and the other helping him. I rode up to where I was across from them and fired the full magazine at the pursuing Zulus. It slowed them down a little, but the two winded fellers with the Queen’s rag were too tired or wounded to make much time. They was caught before they was halfway down to the river. There was a big knot of Zulus around them, and a brief hacking flurry, and then that was over, too.
I jammed shells in my magazine, and turned to leave. There was several Zulus back of me now—they’d been moving up on me—and I dropped three and rode through them and got on the trail to Rorke’s Drift.
About five miles down the trail I come across some Boer conductors, and I explained as best I could that where they was headed was an unhealthy place. I could see that they was old hands in this country, for each of them had a saddled horse tied behind the ox wagon. After they got the gist of what it was I was saying they promptly pulled off the trail and commenced unspanning their oxen, and then they mounted and rode off, without so much as even thanking me.
I had been so caught in the horror behind me that I had forgotten the Zulus who had gone behind the mountain before the battle. If they had made straight fo
r the river they could be headed anywhere. I was pretty sure that they would be headed for Rorke’s Drift. As near as I could remember, there were two thousand or so.
“Kayrist, Kelly,” I screamed, “how I hate being noble. I can’t remember when I have been so happy. Shit.” I then went into a lot of curses I picked up from an old camel driver the Army had imported in some misbegotten attempt to use camels to chase Apaches or Sand Papagos—horses are so terrified of camels that they will climb trees to get away from the smell—and then the Army, being the Army, had abandoned the camel notion and old High Jolly, the Ayrab driver. Anyway there ain’t no better curses than Ayrab ones.
So I set my horse off as fast as was smart, and headed for the south.
I didn’t see a soul on the way. I clattered down to the punt, which of course was on the other side, and after a few more choice dispraises of Allah I headed across the river and emerged below the punt station. A few troopers were waiting on the bank, and they helped me haul my nag up.
I figured it was no use even talking to the men, since they wouldn’t shit without an officer told them, so I snarled that there had been a disaster to the central column and where the hell is whoever is in command? They directed me toward the mission station. I barged in on tea. I know it ain’t done, but I thought I had an excuse.
The commanding officer was a short, bearded feller name of Chard, who listened to my news, slurping his tea dainty-like the whole damn time. He was one of them slow-to-act types, the sort you could set on fire and he’d sniff for a couple of minutes wondering what in the hell was that godawful stink, and was it polite to notice it.
“Are you serious?” he finally says.
“No, not a god damn bit,” says I, ragged and dusty. “I just thought it would be great goddamn fun to ride here and tell you that the central column has been wiped out and there is two thousand Zulus headed your way. My idea of a joke, it is. Not to worry, ain’t that what you say?”
Chard stared out of the window, and I could see the air going out of him. He was an engineer, not a line soldier. But then he snapped to, and rapped out orders to assemble the officers and non-coms forthwith and in great haste.
He asked me to tell them what happened, and I did, in two sentences—I clearly believe that had it been Bill Cody there instead of me, the Zulus would have been on us before the end of the speech, so you can credit me that much for saving Rorke’s Drift.
They hemmed and hawed for a while about whether to run or to fight. I finally put a stop to that, too, saying that flight was suicide and if that was the idea I would be leaving now. They had a couple of dozen wounded and some sick, and the Zulus would overtake laden wagons and marching troops before they had got two miles, given the time that it would take to get hitched up and going.
I said I would stay to help. Me. Fool. I could have gone on to warn someone farther—much, much farther, say Cape Town—of the approaching storm, and to this day I don’t know why I stayed, except perhaps I felt bad in some fool way for what had happened at Isandhlwana.
I touched it off, shooting that Zulu full in the face. Oh, it would have happened eventually, but there it was.
37
EVERY SOLDIER REMEMBERS THE waiting before the battle. During the battle things are so confused, and what one feller can actually see amounts to so little that virtually everyone will have a different version of what happened. I well remember frantically lugging boxes of stores to form a perimeter and blistering my hands with a pick to make loopholes in the walls. There were only about seventy men in good enough health to fight, for the others, twenty or so, were in the hospital.
A few stragglers from Isandhlwana passed, but not one stayed. I couldn’t blame them. Some were two to a horse, with that dazed look that men get when things were just too much for them. Two were boys from my Natal Light Horse. They weren’t singing now.
I was counting on there being not a lot of enthusiasm for attacking the station, because though the Zulus had destroyed most of the central column, they had also taken a fearful mauling—at least three for one of ours—and though they were brave, the bravest men can go only so far. Zulus go farther. They got no sense.
We were still frantically trying to make the place defensible when the two sentries Chard had sent up to a high place came pounding down and clambered over the wall of boxes and bags running from one of the outbuildings to the station itself. Chard had listened to me long enough to make sure that every man had more ammunition than he could possibly use, and a chaplain had volunteered to carry more ammunition wherever it might be needed. He was a tall, long-jawed man in his forties, name of Smith, and even during the heat of the battle he scolded the men for cursing.
Still I stayed, and if you are wondering why, my so disliking getting mangled and all, I have a perfectly reasonable explanation. While I was bellering at Chard, some sonofabitch stole my horse. There were some casuals at Rorke’s Drift, and I had to admit that in his place I probably would have done the same.
I still hoped to kill him someday.
When the sentries came in, one of them screamed, “Here they come, boys, black as hell and thick as grass,” and it wasn’t but a few minutes until rifle fire started. A column of warriors crested the near hill, dropped into the seven-foot-high tambookie grass, and when they emerged a rippling line of fire went along the wall and many warriors went down, only to have the ones behind them leap over them. This black wave smashed into the wall, some of them grabbing for the muzzles of the rifles, to try to drag them over the wall, and a few Zulus leaped right up on top of the bags and boxes and stabbed at the defenders.
We were jammed into a fairly small place, and the smoke from the blackpowder cartridges soon made everything more than twenty feet away mostly a matter of guess work.
We fought for hours, late into the night. The Zulus had some rifles now, taken from the troops at Isandhlwana, and from time to time a shot would strike home. The man next to me leaped up on the wall to bayonet a warrior, lost his balance, and fell outside. I stuck my head up to see if I could help, and watched in horror as the warriors spread-eagled him on the ground, ripped his belly open with slashings of their spears, and then literally tore him to pieces. I shot four of them. Then the wall of boxes fell outward and me with it.
Battle is noisy. And I was always getting myself into the damnedest scrapes. Myself, I’d like to avoid them all, but my life ain’t worked out that way. While all of this was going on I was looking for a way out—kayrist, there was four thousand of them and only one of me—and then I had this cold feeling, the one that you get when someone is sticking a bayonet in your back and suggesting by eloquent gestures which way he wants you to walk. As a conversation opener there is nothing like it and it always grabs my attention. Grab yours, too, if there was a few inches of cold steel right there by your left eardrum.
I looks over and I addresses the gentleman which has the bayonet and, so to speak, is in charge of the situation. He smiles at me. I have seen some lovely grins in my time—grizzlies, politicians, Mormon missionaries, and other predacious types, but I am telling you that this grin was absolutely ferocious.
“Move,” he says, eloquently.
So, I move. I am out of the hero and brave-defender business for the moment. All hell is breaking loose behind us, and we walk like charmed men through the few yards of turf that separates this ungodly mess from the plain old earth, you know the one, the sort of place that you can plant flowers in.
Outside the ring of that ferocious violence there was calm. If I hadn’t had that bayonet three inches from my left eardrum I would have been downright bored.
The enormous nigger who had invited me along—he’d have made even Liver-Eating Jack seem downright puny. I mean, this man was so large he looked like he would eat a nice hippopotamus for dinner or some such.
“You will be treated well,” he said, in the most insufferable boarding-school English I had ever heard. And then the sonofabitch said, “Your people are a noseg
ay of arseholes. Sergeant Major Simeon Kambula of the Queen’s Own Natal Native Police, at your service. As you will be at Cetshwayo’s, if he don’t decide to have you skinned alive and crucified on an anthill. Or have a stake driven up your arsehole, or ...” Now I recognized him. He’d brought the nigger troops across the river. Last I’d seen him, I’d given him my spare pistol, the ungrateful bastard.
I was so tired and so disgusted—my horse, my horse—that I told him to go fuck himself, and several other impossibilities, which just made him smile. He had a voice like a bass organ, those low notes you can feel but not hear.
“Ulundi,” he said, “for we have need of you. There.”
Zulus can run, by God. He kept me at a trot until we came to the Buffalo River, and we swum across, with his bayonet never more than a foot from my ear. We run up the bank, we run past the mess at Isandhlwana—there was paper everywhere, and I could see Chelmsford with his escort down there. But Sergeant Major Kambula saw me thinking of hollering for help and gave me that big grin again, so we went on and trotted over the green hills of Zululand without a murmur from me, and I began to pass out from the heat and the exertion.
Some Zulu warriors come up out of nowhere, cursed me in their own tongue, tossed me on a shield, and carried me. I was borne on to Ulundi about half conscious. I did not remember the night.
38
I REMEMBER WAKING UP and seeing the most beautiful pair of eyes. They were large and so brown that they seemed black. She was holding a calabash of beer to my lips. I saw paintings of her in Egypt, once. She was so gentle and kind. I suppose I was foolish. I was also delirious.
The chanting Zulu warriors had dropped me at some encampment, and an old man come out of the main hut—he stank of grease and blood—and beat me over the head with a small club, which didn’t even hurt much. I suppose I just didn’t want to wake up, for I slept when I should have been thinking of escape.
I woke up again and there was that beautiful face, and she gave me some more beer and a kind of curdled cheese, and some halves of a fruit like apricots. A couple of thugs came in and dragged me back outside.
