by Neil Oliver
His braves bellowed back that they would not allow their king to be taken while even one of them remained alive.
Cetshwayo said they must kill the red soldiers (the British infantry men wore red tunics) who had come into Zululand to take away the king and the womenfolk and the cattle. Most prophetically of all, he urged them to stay clear of those red soldiers wherever they had dug trenches or forts to protect themselves.
Find them out in the open, he said, where they have failed to build up their defenses, and: “you will be able to eat him up.”
He sent them away from him then, with instructions to the commanders—the indunas—to set a relaxed pace. They would need all possible energy for the fight ahead.
Battle-ready too were the men now marching into Zululand. Many of the British soldiers had been fighting for years in the service of the Empire. They’d grown accustomed to the conditions in the hot places of the world, their faces, necks and hands tanned by the sun, their once-white pith helmets darkened by dust and sweat to a more practical light brown. The infantry soldiers were armed with the state-of-the-art firearm of the day, the Martini-Henry rifle. It was loaded with a 0.45-caliber cartridge and delivered a lead bullet not much smaller than the last joint of a man’s little finger. One round could stop a buffalo and a hit anywhere on a man’s body above the knees was likely to cause enough damage to kill or at least permanently disable him.
The force under Chelmsford’s command was by no means all-British. Along for the fight as well were men of the Natal Native Horse (NNH), the Natal Mounted Police (NMP) and the Natal Carbineers (NC)—locals with lifelong experience of the terrain and of fighting their black neighbors. It wasn’t an all-white army either. Disaffected Zulus, together with men of other neighbors tribes, formed companies of the Natal Native Contingent (NNC) under the command of white officers. These were dressed and armed like the enemy, with spears and shields, and wore colored headbands to enable the whites to tell them apart from other Zulus in the heat of fighting.
By January 20 Chelmsford was watching his men make camp on the level ground in the shadow of the east face of Isandlwana mountain. A few days before he’d notched up a minor victory against the braves of a local Zulu chief called Sihayo—and the way the enemy had broken and run before his men deepened his conviction that no Zulu army would willingly stand before him. He didn’t order his men to dig trenches around the camp—or even to arrange the wagons in a protective ring or laager around it. He would say later that he saw no need for such defenses—demanded by the textbook in the case of fighting in enemy territory—because it was always his intention to move the camp forward within days. The ground was anyway, he said, too hard for digging.
The Zulus, looking for an enemy out in the open, would be well pleased.
As he looked out at the terrain surrounding Isandlwana, Chelmsford felt uneasy and impatient for the fight. Reports had informed him that a Zulu force had left Ulundi three days before, and the mountains between him and the Zulu capital could easily conceal a huge force. On January 21 he dispatched Major John Dartnell in command of a detachment tasked with conducting a thorough reconnaissance of the broken, mountainous terrain off to the southeast. At 1:30 the following morning, word came back from Dartnell that a large Zulu force had been detected and he was keeping his detachment out overnight in order to maintain surveillance.
This was exactly what Chelmsford had expected—the Zulus were staying out of sight in broken ground suited to guerrilla tactics. Well before dawn on January 22, Chelmsford rode out of the camp at Isandlwana accompanied by four of the six heavy guns he had brought with him and around half the available fighting men. The camp was put under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Henry Pulleine, and Chelmsford also sent orders to an officer presently waiting at Rorke’s Drift with a force of 250 mounted men. He was Brevet Colonel Anthony Durnford, of the Royal Engineers, and his orders were to move up at once to the camp at Isandlwana.
Durnford was a maverick. He was a heavy gambler and usually a heavy loser. He’d been married in haste, during a posting to Ceylon in the 1850s, to Frances Tranchell, youngest daughter of a retired lieutenant colonel of the Ceylon Rifles. The marriage had gone bad—the couple had lost two of their three children in infancy—and Frances had left her husband for another man. By the time Durnford reached southern Africa, he was a lonely man with a lot to prove, to himself and to others. He’d recently met and fallen in love with Nell Colenso, the beautiful 24-year-old second daughter of the Reverend John Colenso, the Anglican Bishop of Natal. He was 19 years older than she—but it wasn’t the age gap that made their relationship one that could never be seen in public. Even though Durnford had been wronged by his wife, divorce would have ruined his military career. Whatever love he and Nell managed to share was shared in private.
He had lived and fought in southern Africa long enough to learn to love and respect many of the black tribespeople. The mounted column he commanded at Isandlwana was composed almost entirely of black troops and they were fiercely loyal to him. Durnford, however, was a soldier fighting his way back from a disastrous military past. In 1873 he had been in command of an operation to capture a chieftain called Langalibalele, who had fallen out with the Natal authorities over the matter of some rifles obtained by his young braves. Langalibalele and his men made a run for it into the mountains, making for neighboring BaSotholand. Durnford and his party of local colonial volunteers, including men of the Natal Carbineers, caught up with the fugitives at a place called Bushman’s River Pass. The encounter was a dangerous fiasco—Langalibalele escaped and many of Durnford’s men were killed or injured. Durnford himself suffered a spear thrust through his right elbow that would leave the arm useless for the rest of his life. Back in Natal, the blame was leveled squarely on his shoulders alone.
By the time he arrived at Isandlwana on the morning of January 22, there had already been some slight excitement. Some time after dawn a large body of Zulu warriors had appeared on a ridge beyond the left of the camp and Pulleine had ordered his men to form up on the makeshift parade ground in front of the tents. Pulleine was no warrior—he was an experienced administrator and better suited to paperwork and logistics than fighting. Chelmsford knew and understood this—and the fact that he had left such a man in command shows that he never suspected any threat.
For Chelmsford, the morning was already looking like a frustrating waste of time. He had joined up with Dartnell and though there had been some lightweight skirmishes with small pockets of Zulus, any large enemy force had vanished—if it had ever existed. He would also receive sketchy reports of activity back at the camp throughout the day, but nothing that would persuade him to return there with any urgency.
As soon as Durnford arrived at Isandlwana, he met up with Pulleine to discuss how best to shape the day. In terms of rank Durnford was senior to the other man and might have been expected to take overall command. His personal orders from Chelmsford were vague, however, and he took the opportunity to retain both his own independence and that of the 250-strong force he commanded.
The Zulus who had appeared earlier had disappeared out of sight but he hadn’t liked the sound of what Pulleine had to tell him. As far as Durnford was concerned, that same large body of the enemy might now be working its way around toward Chelmsford, in his exposed position several miles out in the bush. He told Pulleine he was taking his men out into the broken terrain well beyond the front of the camp—to be in a position to drive the enemy back in the direction it had come from. He split his command in two—sending some men up on to the ridge to the left, directly toward the area where the enemy had been seen earlier. The rest he led himself, due east into territory right in front of the camp. It was just before midday.
Two Lieutenants, Raw and Roberts of the NNH, led the party sent up on to the ridge. The men were in good spirits as they trotted across the high ground. It was another beautiful day beneath blue skies and light cloud. The enemy was behaving as it should, and would doubtless c
ontinue to keep well out of their way if they knew what was good for them. Even the grass around their horses’ hooves was saying “shush, shush.”
Up ahead, a mile or so distant, they spotted some Zulu herdboys trying to drive a few head of cattle out of sight of the approaching horsemen. Rustling those animals would provide some little diversion for the men, so Raw and a handful of troopers split from the main body and trotted toward the point where they’d somehow disappeared into dead ground.
Raw reported later how the ground suddenly dropped away in front of them, so steeply and so suddenly they had to rein in their horses and bring them to a halt. This was the lip of the wide and lovely valley of the Ngwebeni Stream, and spread as far as the eye could see across the bottom of it, hunkered down beside their great war-shields, were the 24,000 braves of the Zulu army.
Here within five miles of the British camp was the greatest force ever assembled by the Zulu nation. They’d traveled the 60-odd miles from Ulundi without being detected and had spent the previous night without campfires lest the smoke give away their position at the last minute. Later the British would come across great, flattened swaths of grass scything across Zululand, wider than modern motorways, revealing the path taken by that host.
The invaders had been so completely duped it was embarrassing. Those Zulus who had led Dartnell and Chelmsford on their wild-goose chase had been followers of a local chief who had been slow in gathering his men. The fact that they were off to the southeast and still making for the rendezvous at the valley of the Ngwebeni when Dartnell ran across them was the kind of good fortune that favors the brave. Because this was where Chelmsford expected his enemy to be, it confirmed his belief in the nature of the war he faced. He had been led by hubris into the lethal mistake of dividing his force in enemy territory—behavior contrary to every military textbook of the day.
There was a final moment of silence as Lieutenant Charlie Raw and his men became the first of the invaders to fully understand the situation in which the British now found themselves. Then with admirable presence of mind they bothered to fire a volley into the massed force below them before turning tail and galloping for home. First to rise were the teenaged boys of the uKhandempemvu regiment. Enraged by the gunfire and without waiting for the commands of their elders, they jumped up with their shields and spears and ran up the slope toward the departing horsemen. The Battle of Isandlwana had begun.
Historians have argued endlessly about the significance of the date of January 22. According to some, the Zulus would have had no intention of fighting that day because it coincided with the arrival in the night sky of the new moon. For the Zulus this was the Day of the Dead Moon—a spiritually unclean time and therefore the wrong time for fighting a battle. Those writers say the Zulus would have been intending to wait until January 23 and only attacked when they did because they’d been discovered.
Others say that having gotten themselves so perfectly into position to strike at the camp—while half its defenders were chasing shadows through thorn trees and dry riverbeds a dozen miles away—the Zulu generals would not have overlooked their opportunity for any reason, spiritual or otherwise.
Greatest of those generals—and now a strong, clear voice of calm within that turbulent sea of warriors—was Ntshingwayo kaMahole. He commanded the left flank while his opposite number Mavumengwana kaNdlela had the right. Having seen the young bloods of the uKhandempemvu bolt from the starting-gate without instructions, Ntshingwayo brought the rest of the left to heel. Working with Mavumengwana, he fought for order and won. Now the regiments received their final blessings from the izinyangas before being dispatched from the valley in the formation that was to become legend—izimpondo zankomo—the horns of the buffalo. Zulu tactics dictated that the “horns” would run out and around both flanks of the enemy force while the “chest” engaged the front. Once the “horns” were around the flanks, they would encircle the rear and begin cutting their way back through the massed foe toward the “chest.” The reserve regiments would form the “loins,” waiting quietly behind the “chest” until required.
These then were the well-practiced and proven tactics, but never before Isandlwana had they been attempted on such a scale. It was the job of Ntshingwayo and Mavumengwana to choreograph this majestic deployment without any of the modern means of communication we would take for granted. Discipline and training were the only tools—and they worked.
Raw sent word to Pulleine and Durnford telling them what he’d seen. It seems Pulleine couldn’t believe what he was reading on the hastily scribbled note handed to him, back at the camp, by a breathless horseman. Still convinced Chelmsford was dealing with the main Zulu army—somewhere off out of sight toward the southeast—he decided to send a single company of men in the direction Raw had reported. Pulleine already had a company up there under a Lieutenant Charles Cavaye (he’d dispatched them soon after Durnford rode out of the camp at 11:30 a.m.) and felt sure that by doubling its strength he was doing enough to contain whatever any approaching Zulus might have planned.
As the new men, under Captain William Mostyn, arrived out on the ridge they saw Cavaye’s troopers strung out in a line and firing into a large body of Zulus that was moving across their front from right to left. For some reason those Zulus were not even bothering to acknowledge the red men picking away at their numbers. What neither Cavaye’s nor Mostyn’s men could possibly have understood at that moment was that they were watching the right horn of the buffalo moving to outflank not just them but the entire British camp.
Durnford’s experience was to be slightly different. No sooner had Raw’s messenger reached him than a large force of Zulus appeared in front of him, traveling fast. This was the left horn of the buffalo—the whole beast deploying on such a scale that soon the points of the horns would be five miles apart, moving around the British position with perfect symmetry. Durnford’s men dismounted and fired into the mass, some hundreds of yards distant, then got back on their horses to begin a fighting retreat.
Just before leaving the camp Durnford had ordered a rocket battery and a company of NNC, under the command of Major Francis Russell, Royal Artillery, to follow him out onto the escarpment in front of the camp. Finding the journey over broken, rocky ground more difficult than Durnford’s mounted men—and hampered by the apparatus of their primitive rocket launcher—they arrived on the scene just in time to encounter the full force of the Zulu advance.
Hastily they set up the trough for their rocket and managed to launch the missile in the general direction of the advancing left horn. It burst harmlessly overhead and, though briefly alarmed by the bang and flash of the thing, the Zulus quickly overtook the battery, stabbing at the men with their iklwas. Russell himself was killed in the mêlée and just a handful of British and NNC survived the clash, falling in with Durnford’s men as they continued their retreat back toward the camp.
The sounds of rifle fire could be clearly heard by the men still back among the wagons and tents of the camp—but there was no panic yet. This was the British Army! There were hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition close at hand. There were 1,300 highly trained officers and other ranks ready to face down any attack launched by men armed with spears and clubs. There should have been nothing to fear.
Pulleine ordered his two heavy guns out on to a plateau that offered a field of fire toward the ridge where the trouble had apparently started. He also sent two more companies of riflemen to support those already up on the ridge with Cavaye and Mostyn. Just on the tail of the mountain of Isandlwana itself was a company under the command of Captain Reginald Younghusband, there to cover any retreat by the soldiers further out to the north and east.
To the right of the guns, and in position out on the escarpment in front of the camp, were soldiers led by Lieutenant Charles Pope. Seeing that a firing line was now developing on terrain facing the ridge, Pope wheeled his men to the left to try to make them the right-hand anchor of the British position.
It w
as now that the battle began to enter its critical phase, when decisions taken in the heat of the moment—and mistakes made—would determine the final outcome. And it’s always tempting to see this only as a British battle. It’s easy to overlook the fact that those events were being watched by other than British eyes, movements shaped by other than British commands.
Up on the high ground, clear of the fighting, Ntshingwayo watched and waited. He was almost 70 years old and yet had jogged easily alongside the army as it made its way from Ulundi to the valley of the Ngwebeni Stream. Now, while Pope did his best to read events down on the firing line…while Pulleine played his cards one at a time…while Durnford fought to win recognition as a brave and intelligent officer…and while Cavaye, Mostyn and Younghusband spoke calming and confident words to their men…Ntshingwayo made his move.
As one, the regiments making up the chest of the buffalo stepped out into view on the top of the ridge, in plain view of the camp and the firing line for the first time. They poured down the slope like spilled oil, their numbers transfixing the riflemen who had until now only a hint of the scale of the force massed against them. Cavaye and Mostyn were already pulling away from it, back toward Younghusband and the hope of finding salvation among the tents and wagons of the camp. Roberts’s men were there too, still retreating after the initial encounter alongside Raw.
Both of the seven-pounder guns roared into action, trying to cover the partial retreat. Some say a stray shot killed Roberts himself. In any case, the red men were starting to realize how great was their peril. Perhaps the taste of fear rose into mouths here and there for the first time as they turned their backs on the enemy and began to flee.
