Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power

by Victor Davis Hanson

  Their real fear was a protracted guerrilla war of constant skirmishing and ambush, not a European-style collision of arms in broad daylight. Chelmsford also had artillery and more than 500,000 rounds of rifle ammunition in the camp at Isandhlwana. Moreover, there were crack battalions present, like the 24th Regiment, which were long experienced in putting down sustained volleys of gunfire that could kill any advancing native enemy en masse at 1,000 yards and annihilate him at 300. Or so it was thought.

  The main Zulu impi of some 20,000 warriors had been on the move for days, and had more than five miles to run before it reached the camp at Isandhlwana. Zulus, who like the Aztecs had evolved their war making from ritualized warfare, still preferred to fight during the day and in swarms—and always to approach openly to attempt their famed outflanking movement: perfect targets for disciplined ranks of British riflemen. Lord Chelmsford knew this and so had few ostensible worries. Four decades earlier in December 1838, had not Andres Pretorius with fewer than 500 Boer ranchers defeated 12,000 Zulus at the Ncome River (thereafter known as Blood River), killing more than 3,000 outright and wounding thousands more? Unlike the English, the Boers had used slowfiring, less accurate, and clumsy flintlock muskets, methodically shooting from their protected wagon laager at the masses of oncoming Zulus for more than two hours before sending out horsemen to ride down hundreds more of the wounded and fleeing.

  Other than naïveté and haughtiness, then, what precisely had gone wrong four decades later at Isandhlwana? The British had invaded Zululand in January 1879 with three unwieldy columns, whose total strength was around 17,000 men. A lengthy supply train of 725 wagons and 7,600 oxen carried rations, tents, artillery batteries, and some 2 million rounds of ammunition for an envisioned brief two- to three-month campaign—enough bullets to shoot every Zulu man, woman, and child nearly ten times over. Although the mixed force of British infantry, native auxiliaries, and colonial settlers was itself hardly a third the strength of the Zulu army—there were little more than 5,400 regular British infantrymen under his entire command—Chelmsford’s plan was to separate his forces still further to advance on the Zulu stronghold at Ulundi with three columns that would cross the two-hundred-mile border at seventy- to forty-mile intervals. That way he might systematically flush the Zulus into committing to a decisive battle, thereby precluding either a guerrilla war or a sudden major invasion into British-governed Natal.

  The absence of good roads in Zululand made it nearly impossible anyway to drive all 725 wagons of the invasion force in a single file. From the experience of various wars against other tribes in southern Africa, and a recent raid on Zulu kraals a few days earlier, the British were convinced that no native charge in Africa could withstand sustained European rifle fire. They were eventually to be proved right, but such confidence rested on a modicum of disciplined precaution.

  Chelmsford himself was attached to the center column that camped out at Isandhlwana. But then he further diluted his center force’s strength by marching out the morning of the attack with 2,500 men—far more than the number left behind at the camp—in search of rumored impis of some 20,000 Zulus. Although warned at 9:30 while he was still only twelve miles away that the British were under attack back at Isandhlwana, Chelmsford believed that Pulleine, Durnford, and their troops were merely being tested by enemy probes and in no real danger. So for the rest of the morning and early afternoon, a British force larger than that left to be annihilated at Isandhlwana would camp less than a four-hour march away and yet send no aid—despite receiving a series of messages that his men were surrounded and desperate. Apparently, Chelmsford believed that he, not Pulleine at Isandhlwana, was closer to the real Zulu main force and that the camp could deal with this sideshow on its own. He was to be proved wrong on every count. Had he marched immediately when the first message arrived from Pulleine, Chelmsford would have perhaps arrived at Isandhlwana during the heat of the battle, thus restoring the camp’s original strength—and thereby still overcoming the flawed tactics of his subordinates.

  Lieutenant Colonel Henry Pulleine, along with the reckless Durnford, deserves much of the responsibility for the subsequent catastrophe. After Chelmsford had marched out, Pulleine, who had never been in combat, much less in command of such a large battle force, made no arrangements to bring his forces into a square during the first attack. Instead, fewer than six hundred British troops were arranged to cover more than a mile of camp frontage—far too great a distance to achieve any solid line of defense. Pulleine actually ordered his scattered companies to advance toward the Zulus to form a line that might connect with Durnford’s mounted troops. The latter had foolishly ridden well beyond camp and then in retreat had posted his thin line of natives far too distant from the regular British rifle companies.

  There was also to be no reserve; the left flank was not defended but left open. From the onset the British never offered a complete circle of resistance at all, leaving the wagons and tents completely undefended. Some men had rushed from their tents without bayonets or extra cartridges. The Zulus could not have wished for a better scenario under which to attack. After an initial respite of some fifteen minutes in the fighting—the Zulus were bewildered that hundreds of their bravest warriors were blown apart at nearly 1,000 yards by the initial British volleys—Pulleine still had a second opportunity to withdraw all his units to the camp, where they could have re-formed into a square around some of the wagons, food, and ammunition boxes. Instead, due to panic, inexperience, or an inadequate appreciation of the peril his troops were in, he ordered no change in formation.

  The wagons the prior night had not been pulled into a laager and thus the camp itself extended well over three-quarters of a mile. Chelmsford, after issuing orders at the onset of the campaign that laagers were mandatory and trenches desirable, himself chose to insist on neither at Isandhlwana. He claimed that he had planned to move out from the temporary encampment at Isandhlwana the next day. He later stated that his inexperienced teamsters would have taken all night to accomplish the wagon fortifications, that the ground had been too hard to dig and entrench, and that the natural rise had ensured the high ground and thus a sure field of fire anyway in case of attack. Almost all the colonial officers in the camp who had experience with the Zulus were alarmed about the lack of preparations; only those who left the next morning with Chelmsford survived.

  Chelmsford’s own official written declarations—calling for the need for stout laagers each night, constant communications between columns, frequent cavalry patrols, and high readiness against Zulu surprise attacks—were documents of record only. In practice he operated on the erroneous belief that columns of 1,000 to 2,000 Europeans with Martini-Henry rifles could do as they pleased. And although there were a half million rounds of .45 cartridges in the camp, almost all the defenders ran out of bullets well before the final slaughter. Ammunition was stored in a central depot, in heavy wooden boxes, fastened by copper bands held down by screws in the lids, and had not been liberally distributed among the various companies. Indeed, Durnford’s native troops were soon unable to reach the arms depot. Other colonial and native companies may have been refused resupply by a quibbling quartermaster, on the grounds that they were wrongly opening boxes belonging to the 24th Regiment! Survivors’ accounts relate the confusion of desperate men trying to break open the heavy containers with their bayonets, scoop up bullets, and then frantically run off to their distant lines to resume firing. Those supply parties who found accessible cartridges often had to travel nearly half a mile to resupply the more distant riflemen. Even after the disastrous decision not to laager the camp, to send out more than half the force on a wild-goose chase on the morning of the battle, and to scatter the remaining defenders in an indefensible position, the British nevertheless might well have withstood the Zulu onslaught had plentiful ammunition been dispersed throughout the defense.

  After the individual companies of the 24th Regiment were overwhelmed, a few retreated back to the wagons to search f
or shelter and cartridges. Captain Younghusband, according to Zulu oral accounts, was among the last to die, firing from the bed of the wagon until he was shot down by the horde around him. Zulu narratives stressed the discipline of the last moments of the British defenders: “Ah, those red soldiers at Isandhlwana, how few there were, and how they fought! They fell like stones—each man in his place” (D. Clammer, The Zulu War, 86). Various witnesses attest that Durnford collected together a small circle of riflemen, yelling “Fire” at precise intervals as their limited ammunition ran out. In the last horrific minutes of spearing and shooting, no battalion of regular British riflemen broke and ran, despite being outnumbered by more than forty to one.

  So ended the slaughter at the hill of Isandhlwana, the most heralded, though not the most costly, disaster in colonial British history. While the London press would soon make much of the general incompetence that had led to the calamity, it was scarcely mentioned that 2,000 Zulus were killed outright, and another 2,000 crawled away to die or were so disabled by wounds as to be incapable of fighting. Thus, the one clear-cut British defeat of the Zulu War also took the greatest toll on the Zulu nation during the entire war. In each minute of the battle the doomed defenders had killed or wounded more than thirty Zulus! Since not more than six hundred troops in the camp were actually firing with Martini-Henry rifles, we should assume that each British infantryman killed or wounded on average between five and seven Zulus before perishing.

  King Cetshwayo, when told the news of his “victory,” remarked in sorrow, “An assegai has been thrust into the belly of the nation. There are not enough tears to mourn the dead.” The price of destroying a small British garrison was the killing or wounding of nearly a tenth of his army. Cornelius Vign, who was visiting the Zulus at the time, reported of the mass mourning among women and children that took place in the kraal of one Msundusi who was killed at Isandhlwana, a scene that must have been repeated thousands of times over for the Zulu dead in the weeks after the battle: “When they came into or close to the kraal, they kept on wailing in front of the kraals, rolling themselves on the ground and never quieting down; nay, in the night they wailed so as to cut through the heart of anyone” (C. Vign, Cetshwayo’s Dutchman, 28). In the Zulu way of war the British defeat suggested an end to hostilities altogether. After all, in an open battle, an opposing tribe had been wiped out and thus should logically cease fighting. “The King was glad when he heard that his people had gained the victory over the Whites,” wrote Vign, who served as a Dutch translator for Cetshwayo, “and thought that the war would now be at an end, supposing that the Whites had no more soldiers” (Cetshwayo’s Dutchman, 30).

  Another Zulu impi of fresh, mostly middle-aged reserves, more than 4,000 strong, was now heading toward Rorke’s Drift six miles away, against a tiny contingent of little more than a hundred British soldiers who were quietly garrisoning a supply station and hospital. Once these stragglers were finished off, the rest of the British would surely see the futility of their assault and retreat back into Natal. It would prove one of the great ironies of the British-Zulu wars that at the first notice of the attack two “unexceptional” lieutenants in command at Rorke’s Drift immediately began to fortify their position, form up into a close-knit line, distribute ammunition freely, and so in the next sixteen hours utilize the discipline of the British army to offset the vast numerical superiority and great bravery of an entirely fresh Zulu army.

  “A Worse Position Could Hardly Be Imagined”

  Unlike the high ground at Isandhlwana, everything at Rorke’s Drift favored the Zulus. The two tiny stone houses, about forty yards apart, former farmsteads turned into a missionary station, were nearly indefensible. One structure was employed by the British as a hospital. In it were thirty-five wounded or sick soldiers who somehow had to be incorporated into a makeshift defense of the camp. Thatched roofs meant that the storehouse and hospital could be torched. Worse still, the high ground on three sides of the post was soon to be held by the Zulus. There were a number of encumbrances—orchards, walls, ditches, buildings—surrounding the outpost that might impede fire and allow the running warriors to seek cover.

  The hill of Oskarberg to the south of the camp allowed enemy snipers to shoot freely at defenders all along the north rampart. Moreover, hundreds of Europe’s most modern rifles were in the hands of the Zulus, who hours earlier at Isandhlwana had also looted more than 250,000 rounds of .45-caliber ammunition. When the attack began a little past 5:00 P.M., it was getting dark, giving cover to the Zulus as they began to surround the outpost. “A worse position could hardly be imagined,” an officer remarked of the British defenses at Rorke’s Drift. The British found themselves with a contingent only 5 percent of the size of the force that had just perished at Isandhlwana—and there the high ground and terrain had favored the doomed.

  There was no experienced senior officer to be found at the compound. The tiny garrison’s commander, Brevet Major Henry Spalding, had shortly before noon ridden from Rorke’s Drift to Helpmakaar ten miles away to seek reinforcements, leaving the post in the hands of two junior officers. As he left he called to his subordinate John Chard to remind him that he was now in command—but added that there was almost no likelihood of any action during his brief absence. Most men of the garrison were disgruntled that the real chance for action and glory lay a few miles to the north in Zululand proper at Isandhlwana, where the center column was trying to flush out the Zulu impis— not at a border supply depot in Natal far behind the purported front lines.

  Lieutenant John Chard had only a few weeks earlier arrived in South Africa and was attached to the Royal Engineers; he was supervising the construction of a ferry a few hundred feet below at the drift. His cocommander was Lieutenant Gonville Bromhead, in charge of B Company, 2nd Battalion of the 24th Regiment, whose other companies were being annihilated at Isandhlwana. Neither Chard nor Bromhead, who was essentially deaf, had much battlefield experience. They certainly were not considered stellar officers by their superiors—“hopeless,” a superior of Bromhead once wrote of him. Nothing in the record of either presaged the great heroism and leadership that both would display in the desperate ten hours of continuous shooting to come. But a former master sergeant, James Dalton—over six two in height, barrel-chested, fifty years of age— in charge of the commissary had seen plenty of fighting, and he seems to have been involved in many of the key initial decisions involving the defense of the outpost.

  Besides the absence of good natural fortifications and senior experienced command, the post was vastly outnumbered. There were only 139 British soldiers, and 35 were bedridden. Excluding cooks, orderlies, and teamsters, only 80 were actual riflemen. In the minutes after the news arrived that the regiment at Isandhlwana was wiped out, and fresh impis of more than 4,000 Zulus were on their way, a disturbing number of fleeing Europeans and terrified native auxiliaries, who might have aided the trapped garrison, peeled off and rode to safety farther west into Natal. While British accounts suggest that the Zulu attack was haphazard and spontaneous, it was far more likely that tribal leaders realized that most of Chelmsford’s supplies were at Rorke’s Drift. The capture of the outpost would feed thousands of hungry Zulus and essentially wipe out the stores of the center column.

  The idea that 80 riflemen could do what nearly 2,000 could not seemed absurd. Westerners usually fought outnumbered—sometimes vastly so at Salamis, Gaugamela, Tenochtitlán, Lepanto, and Midway— but nonetheless they had armies of a few thousand with which to offer a resistance. Even Cortés in his final assault on Mexico City had hundreds, not dozens, of Europeans. Numerical inferiority, as we have seen, can be offset by superior technology, spirited troops, good infantry, plentiful supplies, and discipline, but Europeans needed the cohesiveness or firepower of hundreds to offer a semblance of resistance to thousands. Alexander the Great’s 50,000 could defeat a quarter million Persian troops; but had he only 10,000 on the morning of October 1, 331 B.C., Mazaeus would have overwhelmed Parmenio, and th
e Macedonians might well have been slaughtered to the man.

  A couple of British soldiers were dispatched to the nearby post at Helpmakaar to bring reinforcements. Then the occasional refugees that had escaped Isandhlwana—mostly remnants of the colonial Natal carbineers and mounted police—rode on by the outpost and refused to join in its defense. About one hundred colonial cavalrymen under the command of Lieutenant Vause, who had earlier ridden up from Isandhlwana and taken positions at Rorke’s Drift, suddenly bolted when they saw the size of the Zulu attacking army. Their departure took one hundred potential Martini-Henry rifles from the garrison’s meager defenses. When they fled, Captain Stephenson’s company of native African riflemen also soon fled, along with Stephenson himself and a few noncommissioned European officers. Chard’s men shot one sergeant as he galloped away.

  Besides the obvious effect on morale—in the two to three hours between the confirmation of the disaster of Isandhlwana and the attack on the garrison at Rorke’s Drift, the British defenders had witnessed a series of colonial and native troops ride in, spread tales of horror, then flee in terror—the reduction in the number of men for the perimeter defenses changed the entire plan of resistance. If Chard and Bromhead might have had 450 or so troops to man the tiny wall when the news of the impending attack reached them, they were lucky to have even a hundred men either skilled or well enough to fire a rifle—only about one shooter per every twelve feet of the makeshift rampart. Chard quickly determined that the fortifications would need additional interior walls, to serve as an inner sanctum when the thinly manned, mealie-bag outer redoubt was inevitably overwhelmed.

  The enemy was especially formidable. An army was approaching of more than 4,000 Zulus under the command of King Cetshwayo’s brother, Prince Dabulamanzi. The latter had broken his brother’s orders on two counts: he was not to enter British-ruled Natal from Zululand—Rorke’s Drift was right across the border—and he was to avoid an assault on any British troops behind ramparts. Although Dabulamanzi found himself in command of two of the older divisions of Cetshwayo’s army—the some 3,000 to 3,500 warriors of the uThulwana and uDloko regiments were mostly married men between forty-one and fifty years of age—he had 1,000 younger unmarried men in their early thirties of the inDlu-yengwe. All had served in the reserve at Isandhlwana. Before the attack on Rorke’s Drift, they had spent the past few hours killing fugitives and the wounded who were crisscrossing the plain in their desperate efforts at escape. After his Zulus were safely across the Buffalo River into Natal, Dabulamanzi quickly united the three divisions and began preparations to have the entire force assault the British outpost. A few of the warriors had had some experience in intertribal fighting of the last decade. Most important, they were relatively fresh and had not seen much action in the slaughter at Isandhlwana, in which a tenth of the Zulu nation’s manhood was wounded or killed in a single afternoon.