Crossing the Buffalo

by Adrian Greaves

  It is monstrous making heroes of those who saved or attempted to save their lives by bolting or of those who, shut up in buildings at Rorke’s Drift, could not bolt, and fought like rats for their lives which they could not otherwise save.30

  The announcement of the awards was also significant, coinciding as it did with the second invasion of Zululand. Morale among the second invasion force was fragile, especially among the many troops fresh and inexperienced from England – all were daunted by the Zulus’ reputation. The prospect of meeting the victorious Zulu army was mainly responsible and the widespread publicity of the award of an unprecedented number of Victoria Crosses was important to help boost the troops’ morale. The awards were also extremely popular with the British press and public and in a short time the War Office was considering further awards. In March questions were asked in Parliament as to why the ordinary soldiers at Rorke’s Drift had not been nominated or considered for their acknowledged acts of bravery. Some boldly challenged the involvement of Queen Victoria and her uncle, HRH the Duke of Cambridge, in his capacity as Commander-in-Chief of the Army. It was not long before further difficult questions were asked; on 27 March 1879 an MP, Mr Osborn Morgan, asked Colonel Stanley as Secretary of State for War why no awards had been conferred upon NCOs and private soldiers. The reply given was that such awards took a considerable time to process – but that the matter was under consideration. The press noticed that the only nominations to date were for members of the 24th Regiment, which prompted another MP, Doctor Ward, to ask on 8 May why Surgeon Reynolds had been overlooked for an award. The Secretary of State for War gave a defensive reply by stating that it was premature for him to consider what awards or honours should be given; he then added that Surgeon Reynolds had already been promoted fourteen months in advance of his seniority and had passed over the heads of sixty-four other medical officers. Nevertheless, the first to benefit from such serious lobbying was Surgeon Reynolds; in addition to his promotion to surgeon major being backdated to the date of the battle, his name was subsequently added to the medal list on 17 June 1879.

  On 16 June Mr Stacpoole MP succeeded in embarrassing the government by asking whether it was true that, in recognition of the gallantry of the NCOs and privates at Rorke’s Drift, they had been awarded one free flannel shirt and one pair of trousers. Colonel Stanley, stung by the innuendo, replied that such an order had been given to compensate the soldiers for damage to their uniforms and added, ‘Whether regard was had for gallantry or not I cannot say.’

  Dalton’s role at Rorke’s Drift was also being questioned in both England and South Africa. Dalton was undoubtedly responsible for many aspects of the successful defence; rumours that he had previously gained a military qualification in field fortifications were confirmed which prompted fresh questions both in Parliament and from the Duke of Cambridge. The matter was referred on to Lord Wolseley. By now Wolseley was becoming uneasy about the award of certain medals and wrote:

  I presented Major Chard RE with his Victoria Cross: a more uninteresting or more stupid looking fellow I never saw. Wood tells me he is a most useless officer, fit for nothing. I hear in the camp also that the man who worked hardest at Rorke’s Drift Post was the Commissariat Officer who has not been rewarded at all.31

  The matter was directed to Chard for his comment on the actions of both Dalton and Dunne but, rather surprisingly, he merely acknowledged their actions and avoided making any recommendation. But the story only grew, supported by Dunne’s and Dalton’s commissary general, Sir Edward Strickland, who was convinced that the actions of his officers in the defence of Rorke’s Drift had been deliberately overlooked. Within the week the correspondence concerning the matter was placed before the Duke of Cambridge. His decision, released on 18 October, was brief, final and, worse, inequitable.

  We are giving the VC very freely I think, but probably Mr Dalton had as good a claim as the others who have got the Cross for Rorke’s Drift Defence. I don’t think there is a case for Mr. Dunne.32

  Dalton was awarded the Victoria Cross in November 1879; it was presented by Major General H.H. Clifford during a parade at Fort Napier. Quite perversely, Dunne received nothing. Nevertheless, Dunne fared pretty well knowing that he had been recommended for the VC. He was involved in the first Boer War in 1880–81 and was present at the battle of Tel-el-Kebir, when the British defeated the Egyptian army. He transferred to the newly formed Army Service Corps as a lieutenant colonel, was awarded a CB and retired as a full colonel.

  When it was realized that another body of men, the Colonial forces, had been omitted from the medal list the reports were re-examined and on 29 November Corporal Schiess NNC was gazetted as a recipient of the Victoria Cross for his actions during the battle. When he received his medal from Lord Wolseley on 3 February 1880 Wolseley expressed the wish that Schiess might live long to wear the decoration. Sadly he was to die a pauper only three years later.

  The time-span of medal awards extended well into the following year and, apart from the politicking and scheming, each award was given the highest level of publicity by the press, for which the government was equally grateful. Even so, there were dissenters. The Broad Arrow of 23 August 1879 wrote:

  It must be confessed that the military authorities in Pall Mall have shown lavish prodigality in the distribution of the Victoria Cross, which would probably startle their contemporaries in Berlin [a reference to the profusion of Iron Cross awards]. We say there is a chance of the Victoria Cross being cheapened by a too friendly eagerness in Pall Mall to recognise acts of equivocal valour.

  It is a myth that the Reverend George Smith was offered the choice of a Victoria Cross or an army chaplaincy; he received the chaplaincy but there is no evidence or recommendation to substantiate the story that he ever had a choice.

  Gonville Bromhead received his Victoria Cross from Wolseley, a man who had let it be known that he thought the awards for the defence of Rorke’s Drift were ‘monstrous’. When Bromhead returned to England, he was invited with Chard to dine with the queen at Balmoral. Unfortunately he had gone fishing in Ireland and did not receive his invitation until the date had passed. Despite sending his apologies, he was never invited to Balmoral again. Bromhead was promoted to captain and brevet major and served in the East Indies and in the Burma campaign of 1886. He attained the rank of major in 1883 and was serving with the battalion in India when he was struck down by typhoid and died on 9 February 1891. Bromhead’s medal is currently owned by his descendants and is held at the Regimental Museum, Brecon.

  John Chard received a hero’s welcome when he arrived at Portsmouth. The Duke of Cambridge, who brought the invitation to dine with the queen, personally greeted him. In contrast to some of his critical superiors, Victoria was taken by Chard’s unassuming manner and the modest way in which he related events. She was most impressed by the battle, asking for photo portraits of the Victoria Cross recipients and commissioning Lady Butler to paint a picture of Rorke’s Drift.

  Chard continued to enjoy the royal favour and rose in rank to colonel. He was posted abroad several times but never saw action again. In 1896 he was diagnosed as having cancer of the tongue and he was forced to retire. Queen Victoria was kept informed of his condition, which deteriorated and led to his death in November 1897.

  CHAPTER 11

  Enquiry and Cover-Up

  I regret to have to report a very disastrous engagement.1

  LORD CHELMSFORD

  Within days of the two battles Chelmsford and his staff began casting about for a scapegoat on whom they could put the blame for Isandlwana. They settled on Colonel Durnford, the senior officer at the battle who had died with his men, and set about preparing a number of damning official memoranda. Lord Chelmsford’s Order Book dated Wednesday 22 January 1879 states, ‘Camp entered. No wagon laager appears to have been made. Poor Durnford’s misfortune is incomprehensible.’ Major Francis Grenfell, one of Lord Chelmsford’s staff, wrote in a letter to his father, ‘The loss of the camp was
due to [the] officer commanding, not Colonel Pulleine, but Colonel Durnford of the Engineers who took command after the action had begun and who disregarded the orders left by the General.’ Sir Bartle Frere’s communication to the colonial secretary in London dated 27 January was equally harsh: ‘In disregard of Lord Chelmsford’s instructions, the troops left to guard the camp were taken away from the defensive position they were in at the camp, with the shelter which the wagons, parked [laagered] would have afforded’, and a few days later he added, ‘It is only justice to the General to note that his orders were clearly not obeyed on that terrible day at Isandlwana Camp.’ 2

  Chelmsford convened a Court of Enquiry at Helpmekaar that commenced on 27 January 1879, just 10 miles from Rorke’s Drift. The court president was Colonel Hassard with Lieutenant Colonel Law RA and Lieutenant Colonel Harness RA as court members. Harness was a crucial witness to events but he was tactically barred from giving evidence to the enquiry by Chelmsford, who insisted on his inclusion as a court member. Colonel Glyn, another vital witness, was not called to give evidence before the court. The enquiry was tasked merely to ‘enquire into the loss of the camp’. Those officers and men who had escaped from Isandlwana had been required to tender brief written statements though the court considered only those of Major Clery and Colonel Crealock, Captains Essex and Gardner, Lieutenants Cochrane, Curling and Smith-Dorrien and NNC Captain Nourse. It was subsequently argued, within the army and the press, both in the UK and South Africa, that insufficient evidence was considered in order to divert the blame away from Chelmsford and that the final line of the report indicated the defensive nature of the enquiry:

  The duty of the Court was to sift the evidence and record what was of value: if it was simply to take down a mass of statements the court might as well have been composed of three subalterns or three clerks.3

  In reality the report served no real purpose apart from whitewashing the defeat at Isandlwana and giving Chelmsford time to prepare his explanatory speech before he returned to England to present his case before Parliament. Meanwhile Chelmsford’s staff were busy; official blame for the British defeat was about to be irretrievably laid upon the NNC and Durnford. At the enquiry, Colonel Crealock gave false evidence by stating that he had ordered Durnford, on behalf of Chelmsford, to take command of the camp; this false witness neatly exonerated Chelmsford. With regard to the NNC, the court heard confusing evidence as to their actions on the battlefield, yet it judged the issue on the evidence of Captain Essex who clearly recorded that he did not know their location. The court resolutely declined to listen to several surviving NNC officers who did know.

  Chelmsford’s staff successfully implicated Durnford in the defeat. He was not from an infantry regiment of the line and he was dead, which made him the perfect scapegoat. The court accepted Crealock’s false evidence that Durnford had been in charge, knew that there had been a defeat, and after noting Durnford’s various ‘deficiencies’ the deputy adjutant general, Colonel Bellairs, forwarded its findings to Chelmsford with the following condemnatory observation:

  From the statements made to the Court, it may be gathered that the cause of the reverse suffered at Isandhlwana was that Col. Durnford, as senior officer, overruled the orders which Lt. Col. Pulleine had received to defend the camp, and directed that the troops should be moved into the open, in support of the Native Contingent which he had brought up and which was engaging the enemy.4

  Also effectively silenced were the five surviving officers, who were in an obvious predicament; their own departure from the Isandlwana battlefield could still be the subject of some uncomfortable consequences and they all knew that Colonel Glyn had been ignominiously relieved of his column duties and transferred to the command of the outpost at Rorke’s Drift, effectively isolating him from the enquiry and its aftermath. Lieutenant Curling nevertheless gave damning evidence of the chaos and confusion at Isandlwana, both before and during the battle, in his private letters. On April 28 he wrote to his mother from the Victoria Club at Pietermaritzburg:

  I see they have published the proceedings of the Court of Inquiry: when we were examined we had no idea this would be done and took no trouble to make a readable statement, at least only one or two did so.5

  The Natal Witness astutely observed on 29 May that:

  It is notorious that certain members of Lord Chelmsford’s staff … came down to ‘Maritzburg after the disaster, prepared to make Colonel Durnford bear the whole responsibility, and that it was upon their representations that the High Commissioner’s telegram about ‘poor Durnford’s misfortune’was sent.

  Not content with damning Durnford, Chelmsford’s staff then turned their malevolent attention to Colonel Glyn, Chelmsford’s second in command, now isolated from any news at Rorke’s Drift and suffering from depression. Glyn was sent a number of official memoranda requiring him to account for his interpretation of orders relating to the camp at Isandlwana but, recognizing the developing entrapment, he returned the memoranda unanswered, but with the comment, ‘Odd the general asking me to tell him what he knows more than I do.’ Glyn maintained his dignity and position by stating that it was his duty to obey his commander’s orders. Thereafter Glyn remained silent on the matter but Mrs Glyn was highly indignant at the treatment of her husband; she robustly defended him in the coming months, forcing Chelmsford’s staff to retreat in the face of her fearless defence, and little was said beyond this point.

  Chelmsford’s staff now faced the task of finding an acceptable explanation of their unexpected defeat. The initial explanation they produced was brilliantly simple, logical and, yet again, neatly blamed the officers who fell on the battlefield rather than those who placed them there. They reasoned that the soldiers on the line had run out of ammunition and therefore the disaster was not of Chelmsford’s making. Certainly Durnford’s men had experienced an earlier ammunition supply failure when they attempted to obtain supplies from Chelmsford’s quartermaster – only to be ordered to find their own ammunition wagon, which could not be found. When the scene of the disaster was later visited, it was discovered that the Zulus had taken all the Martini-Henry rifles from the dead along with the ammunition that had remained on the ammunition carts. Most of the boxes had been smashed open and ransacked by the Zulus immediately following the battle and it was conveniently presumed by Chelmsford’s staff officers that this was evidence of frantic British attempts to obtain further supplies rather than of the reality of victorious Zulus helping themselves; and so the myth was born that the British line had been overrun because the soldiers had run out of ammunition. Other Zulus had removed the remaining ammunition from the pouches of dead soldiers; when the British subsequently buried the bodies they noticed the empty pouches, which supported the explanation that the soldiers had exhausted their available ammunition supply before being overwhelmed. Most accounts of the battle have perpetuated the myth, which still persists in uninformed circles, and so the blame was continuously deflected from those in command.

  Curiously, these accounts have overlooked the numerous survivors’ reports that confirm that extra ammunition was steadily moved out to the line both before and during the Zulu attack. Private Wilson wrote that before the battle ‘ammunition was beginning to be brought down to the companies’. Captain Essex confirmed that the quartermaster issuing ammunition to the line was actually shot dead early in the battle before it had been loaded onto a cart, but also stated that he later saw the same cart deliver ammunition to the line. Zulu accounts over the years confirm that the last survivors were still firing furiously until their ammunition became exhausted, then all perished. Perhaps the inadvertent progenitor of the myth was General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien who wrote of an ammunition box difficulty nearly fifty years after the event, having clearly forgotten that a few days after the disaster he wrote, ‘I was out with the front companies of the 24th handing them spare ammunition’.6 The myth grew to make an inexplicable defeat explicable; it also denied the enormous bravery and skill of both
the Zulus and the British and while only Curling lived to tell the tale from the firing line, several accounts survive from Zulu warriors interviewed after the battle.

  They threw down their guns, when the ammunition was done, and then commenced with their pistols, which they fired as long as their ammunition lasted;and then they formed a line, shoulder to shoulder, and back to back, and fought with their knives.7 Some covered their faces with their hands, not wishing to see death. Some ran around. Some entered into their tents. Others were indignant; although badly wounded they died where they stood, at their post.8

  One specific report clearly related to Durnford’s last stand. Mehlokazulu, one of Chief Sihayo’s sons, was present when Durnford and his men died and gave a detailed statement of events when he was later interviewed at Pietermaritzburg:

  When we closed in we came onto a mixed party of men who had evidently been stopped by the end of our horn. They made a desperate resistance, some firing with pistols and others with swords. I repeatedly heard the word ‘fire’but we proved too many for them, and killed them where they stood. When all was over I had a look at these men, and saw an officer with his arm in a sling and with a big moustache, surrounded by Carbineers, soldiers and other men I did not know.9

  On 19 August 1880 Chelmsford completed his attack against Durnford’s reputation in his speech to the House of Lords. Chelmsford stated that ‘In the final analysis, it was Durnford’s disregard of orders that had brought about its destruction.’ 10 Most historical accounts relating to Durnford’s actions at Isandlwana are, at best, uncertain of his orders, or the exact sequence of events, or they suppose that Durnford failed to assume command of the camp from the subordinate Pulleine and irresponsibly took his men off towards Chelmsford. Typical is the account of Major the Hon. Gerald French DSO who wrote in support of Chelmsford: