Heaven’s Command

by Jan Morris

  It was war of the most bestial kind. Thousands of Zulus died in the British rifle-fire, but nothing could stop them: when they reached the lines they slashed about them indiscriminately with their assegais, while the British fought desperately back with bayonets and rifle-butts. All over the plain isolated groups of redcoats were surrounded, helplessly struggling, by masses of feathered black men. Sometimes the Zulus threw their own dead in front of them to blunt the bayonets; the British, split, shattered and disorganized, fell back in twos and threes to wagons, or tents, or hid terrified among the field kitchens, or fought to the death all alone, bayoneting and bludgeoning to the last. Some ran away out of the camp circuit, stumbling down the track towards Rorke’s Drift and safety, but when they crossed the southern ridge they found another force of Zulus waiting for them on the other side, and they were hunted down relentlessly, in and out of gulleys, across streams, crouching in scrub, hounded over cliffs or speared one by one as they fell in exhaustion beside the track.

  When Chelmsford returned stunned to Isandhlwana that night, he found the camp a silent smoking ruin—a shamble of burnt wagons, broken tents, rubbish and corpses. The British dead had been disembowelled: most of the Zulus had been dragged away over the hills. Of the Europeans Lord Chelmsford had left in the camp, only fifty-five had escaped, and were now scattered somewhere between the battlefield and the Natal border. Six companies of the 2nd Warwickshire Regiment had been entirely obliterated: in all 858 Britons had died, together with some 470 men of the native levies. It was the worst disaster to British arms since the Afghan tragedy of 1842, and the news of it, reaching England three weeks later, plunged the nation into bewildered mourning. Disraeli took to his bed with depression, and the cause of imperialism suffered a distinct if temporary setback.1

  6

  But it was already a British practice to balance disaster with triumph—losing every battle but the last, it was popularly called. As a sustainer of morale it was wonderfully successful, and as a historic device it made wars much more interesting—Henry Knollys the historian observed of one rather too successful colonial war that ‘the exploit was unaccompanied by reverse or blunder, and without these features it is in vain to hope for enthusiasm and interest’. Only a little triumph was necessary, to restore the nation’s pride, and indeed no triumph could be much smaller than the second of the Zulu War battles, the defence of Rorke’s Drift, which has gone into the language as a synonym of British heroism, and in which rather more than 100 Britons were involved (most of them Welshmen at that). As one contemporary poet wrote of this almost imperceptible success,

  Her sons in gallant story,

  Shall sound old England’s fame‚

  And by fresh deeds of glory

  Shall keep alive her name;

  And when, above her triumphs,

  The golden curtains lift—

  Be treasured long, in page and song,

  The memory of Rorke’s Drift.

  While the slaughter was proceeding at Isandhlwana, the post at Rorke’s Drift, ten miles to the rear, was held by a company of the 24th Regiment under two subalterns, Lieutenant John Chard and Lieutenant Gonville Bromhead. They heard the gunfire of the battle up the track, and learnt of the disaster when the first terrified refugees arrived at the river bank opposite the little group of buildings—a few to join the Rorke’s Drift garrison, the rest to career wildly past without stopping, back to the safety of Natal. It was plain that the impis, when they had obliterated the Isandhlwana camp, buried their dead and licked their wounds, would next fall upon the Drift, and hastily the two subalterns fortified their little command, intended only as a rear-station for Lord Chelmsford’s advance, with sandbags, sacks of mealie and biscuit boxes. The three buildings lay in the flank of a hill, the Oskarberg; the Buffalo river ran, out of sight, about 100 yards away; from a short way up the track the silhouette of Isandhlwana mountain could be seen, with a wreath of smoke now rising ominously about it. The whole defensible area was hardly more than 100 yards square, and the garrison included a chaplain, five invalids, and a contingent of African levies.

  Late in the afternoon of January 22, the same day as the Isandhlwana battle, lookouts on the Oskarberg saw impis approaching—one wing of the Isandhlwana force, perhaps 4,000 men—led by two chiefs on white horses, and moving in their fatal tireless rhythm towards the post. The Zulus had tactics but no strategy: if they had crossed into Natal they might have created havoc, but their killing instinct directed them blindly towards Rorke’s Drift, where there was blood to be drawn. ‘Here they come!’ one of the British sentries cried as he raced down the hillside—‘black as hell and thick as grass!’ At their first glimpse of this terrible sight all the African levies abandoned their posts, vaulted the barricades and vanished: the 110 Britons left behind just had time to reorganize themselves around their perimeter when a thousand Zulus appeared around the flank of the Oskarberg and attacked the back of the post, while a moment later 3,000 more charged screaming from the front.

  The action was immortalized in Britain in a painting by Elizabeth Butler, William Butler’s celebrated wife. It was called The Defence of Rorke’s Drift, and every Victorian knew it. There we see the little battle as the British public saw it, fact and legend interwoven. To the right is the burning thatched hospital, the core of the defence, through whose flimsy walls the wounded were dragged from room to room as the Zulus battered the doors down. On the left is the parapet of mealie sacks and biscuit tins, with the redcoats lunging with their bayonets into the sea of Zulus beyond, or returning the fire of the black snipers hidden on the Oskarberg above. The ground is littered with tins, helmets, assegais, scraps of material; centre-stage Lieutenant Chard draws attention to a gap in the defence; indefatigably the bearded barehead chaplain distributes comfort and ammunition to the soldiers; in the foreground a young man lies exhausted, or perhaps dead, with his topee pushed to the back of his head. The skyline is silhouetted with raised rifle-butts, bayonets, the outflung arm of a man just shot, the dim shapes of flying spears. The air, dark with gunsmoke, is speckled with sparks from the burning hospital roof. Dimly glimpsed on the left of the picture, like a black inchoate dream, are the contorted faces and brandished shields of the impis, dashing themselves wave after wave upon the post.1

  All afternoon the Zulus attacked, and late into the night. The hospital was abandoned, and the perimeter contracted until the British, illuminated by the flames, crouched within the last corner of the yard. Then, gradually, the attack tailed off. The sniping ended, the hurled assegais grew fewer, the war-cries less urgent, until by four in the morning, when the hospital fire had burnt itself out and all was dark, silence too had fallen upon Rorke’s Drift. When dawn came the British survivors, preparing themselves for their last hopeless stand, found that the impis had gone. Only a few wounded warriors were dragging themselves around the side of the mountain. All about the post the Zulu dead lay in their hundreds, some twitching still, and the area was littered with their eerie ornaments. At seven o’clock the impi briefly re-appeared, squatting beyond rifle range and taking snuff in the morning sunshine: but the Zulus had suffered terribly in the battle, and presently, rising to their feet in a body, they trotted silently in a wide circle, well away from Rorke’s Drift, down to the river and away.

  7

  Eleven heroes of Rorke’s Drift were awarded the Victoria Cross, and the action was acclaimed as having restored the honour of England and saved Natal from invasion. Still the crowning victory was to come. Opinion at home, stunned by Isandhlwana, had been further shocked by the death of the Prince Imperial Louis Bonaparte, son of Napoleon III and a popular exile in Britain, who had gone to Zululand as an observer, and had been killed in an ambush. Disraeli’s Government took the orthodox action to redress the situation, and called as if by instinct upon Sir Garnet Wolseley. The ‘Only General’ had been serving as Governor of Cyprus, recently acquired from the Turks: he was now summoned, like Cincinnatus from the plough, to proceed at once to S
outh Africa as High Commissioner in Natal. Once there he was to take over the command from Lord Chelmsford and win the war.

  Lord Chelmsford, however, was determined to win it for himself, and redeem his military reputation. He withdrew all his forces from Zululand for a fresh start, and six months later, just as Wolseley landed at Durban, a second invasion was launched, and Chelmsford was once more on his way to Ulundi. Nothing would stop him this time. His career was at stake, his blood was up, and he carefully sidestepped the instructions which pursued him sternly from the coast. ‘I am astonished at not hearing from you’, Wolseley told him peremptorily by heliograph. ‘Acknowledge receipt of this message at once and flash back your latest moves’. But it was too late. Chelmsford was already on the wide plain outside the royal kraal at Ulundi, and the culminating battle was about to start.

  This was the grand set-piece of the war, the all-British victory. The site was wide and dignified, the occasion momentous, the style of battle high-flown and traditional. Everyone was eager for a last settling of accounts—the 17th Lancers and the 1st Dragoon Guards, the 80th and 90th Regiments of Foot, the Frontier Horse, the Transvaal Rangers, the Natal Light Horse—5,000 men in all, including 900 cavalrymen, moving on to the Ulundi plain on the morning of July 4 in the classic British military formation, the hollow square. A band played the regimental marches as they moved. The regimental colours fluttered. Around the flanks the cavalrymen gleamed and jangled. It was a truly imperial spectacle.

  The Zulus arose in their thousands from the bush, and attacked the square from all sides. The British fought back in the old way, four deep with fixed bayonets, with guns and Gatlings at each corner of the square. No biscuit tin barricades here, no laagers in the Boer style, no digging in—‘they’ll only be satisfied’, Chelmsford said, thinking of armchair critics far away, ‘if we beat them fairly in the open’. It was in feet a victory of symbolic completeness. The Zulus threw themselves suicidally upon the wall of rifle-fire, not a single warrior getting within thirty yards of the redcoats, and when the fury of the impis faltered, Chelmsford let loose the cavalry. Through a gap in the square there moved at a menacing trot the 17th Lancers, pennants streaming from their lances—gradually gaining momentum, to cheers from the square behind them, from a trot to a canter, from a canter to a gallop, into a violent pounding charge, irresistibly driving the Zulus before them, impaling them with lances, savaging them with sabres or simply trampling them underfoot, until not a warrior was left alive upon the open plain, and the way was clear to the sprawling kraal of mud huts, on the rising ground overlooking the battlefield, that was Cetewayo’s capital. Lord William Beresford, 9th Lancers, who was on leave from his post as aide-de-camp to the Viceroy of India, galloped away from the field and jumped his horse clear over the surrounding barricade of thorn scrub to be the first Briton in Cetewayo’s capital. It was deserted. The soldiers hoped to find hidden treasures among its huts, but all they discovered was a single silver snuff-box, a buried iron chest full of boot-brushes, and the makeshift crown with which, only six years before, Cetewayo had been crowned by Theophilus Shepstone.1

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  Lord Wolseley presently fragmented Zululand into thirteen impotent chieftaincies, all under British suzerainty, and in theory the elimination of the Zulu power might have meant the success of Carnarvon’s plans. Except for the quiescent Orange Free State, all South Africa was now under imperial control: and when in 1880 Disraeli’s Government fell, to the consternation of the Boers and the surprise of the British electorate Mr Gladstone did nothing to liberate the Transvaal. In opposition he had thundered against annexation, in office he declared that confederation ‘eclipses and absorbs every other consideration’. By this time the British administration in Pretoria was well established, at least in its own estimation, and Wolseley had reached the conclusion that the Boers would be reconciled to British rule by the sheer power of fait accompli. He devised a new constitution for them, depriving the burghers of any direct representation, and was so confident of success that by 1880 the imperial garrison in the Transvaal consisted only of three battalions—perhaps 3,000 fighting men, in a country larger than Britain.

  But of course the more resolute of the Transvaalers were not reconciled to British rule at all. They had gone to the high veld specifically to evade it, and they were unlikely to accept it now. Pre-eminent among the dissidents was the former vice-president of the South African Republic, Paul Kruger. A man of singular power, perhaps of genius, at 55 Kruger was exceedingly ugly. He looked exactly what he was—a Dopper of the most arid kind, living by the very syllables of the Old Testament, and subscribing to all the most fundamental of fundamentalist texts. As a child he had come northward with the Great Trek, and though by now he was getting fat and slow on his legs, he had been in his day a master of all the frontier crafts. He was a great hunter, horseman, guerilla fighter—it was he who had warned Chelmsford to use the laager system in Zululand, for though he did not love the British, he preferred them to Kaffirs. He had amputated his own thumb after a shooting accident, curing the resultant gangrene by plunging his hand into the warm stomach of a goat. He was a coarse man, a man of spittoons and pipe-smoke, home-spun philosophies on the stoep, religious bigotry: but so absolute were his principles, and so profound his sense of Afrikanerness, that he moved among his people like a prophet.

  Kruger had assumed that the fell of Disraeli would mean the restoration of independence to the Transvaal. When Gladstone announced that ‘our judgement is that the Queen cannot be allowed to relinquish her sovereignty over the Transvaal’, he and his followers rebelled. The Zulu War had removed the danger of attack from Cetewayo; most of Chelmsford’s troops had returned to Britain; Wolseley had been succeeded in Pietermaritzburg by a gentler High Commissioner, George Colley, now a knight and a majorgeneral. On December 16, 1880, 4,000 burghers and their wives met at Paardekraal, some forty miles south-west of Pretoria, and ritually reconstituted the South African Republic. In the spirit of the Voortrekkers they elected Kruger and two others as governing triumvirate, and swore to live or die for independence: then one by one, in solemn ceremonial, each threw a stone upon a commemorative cairn—a mighty pile of stones which would stand in perpetual monument to their pledge.1

  ‘I don’t think‚’ Colley was told by his representative in Pretoria, ‘that we shall have to do much more than show that we are ready and sit quiet.’ The Boers were not only ‘inflated toads’, they were ‘incapable of any united action, and … mortal cowards, so anything they may do will be but a spark in the pan’. But on Dingaan’s Day, 1880, the forty-third anniversary of the Boers’ revengeful victory over Dingaan during the Great Trek, the Transvaalers rose to arms. Commandos seized the town of Heidelberg, sixty miles south of Pretoria, as a provisional capital, and besieged all the British forces, scattered as they were in seven impotent garrisons throughout the Transvaal. Four days later blood was shed. Only thirty-six miles from Pretoria a Boer force ambushed a column of the Connaught Rangers, one of the most famous of all imperial regiments. The soldiers were straggling cheerfully along a road eating peaches they had bought at the last halt, their heavy gear in ox-wagons and mule-carts, their colonel benevolent on a white horse, their band playing Kiss me Mother, kiss your darling daughter—

  Lean my head upon your breast,

  Fold your loving arms around me,

  I am weary, let me rest….

  They marched at ease, many of the soldiers having thrown their rifles into the wagons, and their four mounted scouts ambled beside them, chatting. On the morning of December 20, as they approached a watercourse called Bronkhorst Spruit (‘Watercress Creek’), a Boer horseman galloped out of a thicket and handed the colonel a note. It was an ultimatum. The Transvaal was now a Republic again, it said, and the movement of foreign troops was forbidden. If the British column did not within two minutes agree to turn back, they would be attacked. When the colonel rejected the ultimatum, and the regimental band defiantly struck up God Save The Queen,
a devastating fire was opened upon the column from the rising ground about. In a matter of moments 57 of the British were dead and more than 100 wounded, 20 of them mortally. All the officers were killed or wounded. The average number of wounds was five per man. The Boers, Kruger announced, were ‘bowed down in the dust before Almighty God who has stood by them, and with a loss of over 100 of the enemy allowed only two of ours to be killed’. The British were buried where they fell, and the peach stones in their pockets, so it was said, presently grew into a sad line of trees.

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  No retributive British victory was to rescue the imperial prestige in this, the first Boer War. It was ignominy from start to finish. The British troops in the Transvaal were unable to move out of their garrison towns, the British administrators were besieged in Pretoria, and the whole of the rest of the country was soon back in Boer hands. The Boers, who had seemed so cowardly and disunited, and who numbered only 7,000 fighting men, proved to be guerrilla fighters of disconcerting skill: the British Army, fecing its first European enemy since the Crimea, blundered on from complacency to despair, never winning a battle. The whole war lasted only three months, and its culminating episode provided one of the saddest and most evocative names of the imperial story: Majuba.