by Max Hennessy
Steel glittered in the sunshine and, as the guns were brought forward, the horsemen found themselves riding along the front of the square.
‘Open up, God damn you!’ a furious officer yelled.
Nobody was willing to take chances, until Chelmsford appeared. The line was reformed quickly, nervously, with almost too much haste, because the Zulus were close now. Behind them in the carts, the ammunition boxes had opened. There was to be no repetition of Isandhlwana where men had run out of cartridges because they had not been opened in time. Drummer boys stood ready with helmets and haversacks handy for the first call. Behind them, quartermasters waited by the open boxes.
The Zulus had steadied, almost as if dressing their line. They were watched in silence. The shouted orders had died away. The sides of the square, four-deep, waited quietly, the men with their ammunition pouches open, jockeying a little to get a clear field of fire. Behind them, Colby watched Chelmsford calmly waiting on his horse. This time the thing had to come off to prove that his planning had not been wrong at Isandhlwana, and that the disaster had resulted from faulty handling by the men in command there.
Though the grass had been trampled flat for a hundred yards all round, beyond it the undergrowth still hid the bulk of the advancing Zulus. Then the artillery opened with a crash. Horses snatched at bridles in the hands of troopers, and one or two whinnied with fear. Puffs of dirty white smoke, splashed with red, appeared on the edge of the grass, jabbed at by the puzzled Zulus with their assegais. As they emerged, the orders rang out and the rifles came up.
‘Fire!’
The crash of hundreds of rifles was cut across by the tearing sound of the Gatlings carving a bloody path through the massed black bodies. Regiment after regiment appeared but as the red-coated soldiers fired, the volleys crashing out one after the other in quick time, whole rows of Zulus went down. Waving plumes paused and sagged to the ground, the following waves trampling over the writhing bodies. But through the smoke more black figures appeared, eyes gleaming, mouths open, teeth like white cages.
‘Himmelherrgott!’ von Hartmann breathed. ‘They don’t lack courage!’
The steady rolling roar of firing surged louder. The Zulus couldn’t reach nearer than thirty yards from the square, and lay in piles over which the following waves struggled to climb, only to crash in mid-stride themselves under the next volley. The square was full of smoke and echoing with the hammering of the firing. Native troops cowered in terror under the wagons, their officers trying to kick them to their feet. Some of the Volunteer horsemen were yelling encouragement and one or two were even standing on their saddles to see better or to add their shots to the battle. A few of the horsemen had been hit and wounded during Buller’s retreat and, as the Zulus started firing from the grass, men in the line fell out and were carried by bandsmen to the dressing- station where the regimental surgeons worked.
‘Close up, there! Close up! Keep the line closed!’
One of the horses near Colby squealed in pain and started to plunge wildly.
‘Slap cold water and a compress on the hole,’ he heard the sergeant shout. ‘Or shoot the poor bugger and put him out of his misery.’
Just in front of where they waited a large pit had been dug and the chaplain was reading a never-ending burial service as men were lifted from bloodstained stretchers and laid inside it. Chelmsford was moving slowly round the square, followed by his staff, stopping occasionally to encourage.
‘Faster there, 13th, please! Mr Harding, take your Gatling to the opposite corner!’
As the weapon was pulled out, the officer’s leg buckled under him, pumping blood. He was dragged aside and the gun clattered across the square. The impassive Buffer, his big frame relaxed, sat motionless on his horse, watching, a cigarette in his mouth.
Nowhere had the square been broken or even reached, but now they saw the last reserve of the Zulu army waiting near the burning kraal rise to its feet. Led by a man on a horse, they formed a long line and at a shout surged forward. The guns blasted a gap in their line at once, bringing down the running warriors in screaming heaps. Only for a few moments more was the momentum sustained, and the Zulus seemed just about to break into the square when a final volley shattered the charge.
The last line of warriors crashed down almost at the feet of the red-coats and the wounded began to crawl back down the slopes, dragging themselves through the grass. One defiant man, his leg smashed by a bullet, raised his arm and the flung assegai struck a corporal in the square full in the chest. As he fell back, an officer shot the Zulu in the head. Desperate, frustrated warriors danced and yelled on the fringe of the grass, circling for an opening, but there seemed little spirit left now, as if they had all along sensed there was no hope of victory.
Chelmsford turned in the saddle to face the cavalry. Taking off his helmet, he waved in the direction of the retreating reserve.
‘Now, I think,’ he said. ‘Go at them! 94th, 21st, move aside. Let the horsemen out.’
‘Mount!’
There were the usual scufflings as unruly horses barged and shoved, and a four-year-old started a crabwise retreat from the end of the line, pursued by a sergeant swearing at the rider. As they moved forward, heads tossing, curb chains clinking, the infantry made a gap, and they moved out in columns of fours, with the mounted Volunteers behind them.
Passing round the square, the 17th cantered to the top of the slope. Moving the other way, Colby formed up the 19th above the donga. There was still a crackle of firing from the Zulus and a man fell from his saddle with a crash, then a horse thumped to the ground, lifted its head and let it fall back with a thud as it began to thrash with its forelegs. As its rider struggled free, two more men, hit by flying bullets, backed their horses out of line.
Colby turned in the saddle. ‘Form troops! Form squadron! Walk – march!’
As they moved into line abreast, the trumpeter sounded the Trot. The fluttering red and green pennons caught the sun and the lines straightened.
‘Extend!’
As they began to open out, the men began to bump up and down in the saddles. The 17th were already thundering into a charge as the 19th moved away from their own side of the square, and the firing died down as everybody stopped to watch. One of the 17th fell from his horse, hit by a spent bullet, and an officer reeled in the saddle, struck in the face. Moving aside to let the pounding horses pass, he dabbed at his features with a handkerchief before spurring after his men.
It was so easy, it was almost sickening. Without breaking formation, the cavalrymen crashed through the retreating Zulus, spitting the fleeing warriors on the points of the spears, then, with an outward flick of the wrist, clearing the point for it to swing up and forward again for the next victim. Then, just in front, an unexpected dip appeared and Colby roared for a halt. As the trumpet sounded, the forward movement stopped just in time. Several hundred warriors concealed in the grass rose, and as they poured in an erratic volley, Colby saw two men go down. The riderless mounts careered along the edge of the dip but the rest of the regiment was moving warily into the grass in a series of disconnected fights. The Zulus were standing their ground, grabbing at lances and stabbing at the horses’ bellies, and by now, most of the riders had discarded their awkward nine-foot weapons and were using their sabres, slashing, cutting and thrusting at the running figures.
Moving ahead with his men, Colby saw a new line of rifles appear and saw the flash and smoke as they fired. Something struck him in the shoulder, almost wrenching him from the saddle, and the riding whip, which was all he was carrying, dropped from his hand. As he swayed, Cornet Lord Ellesmere thudded up to him.
‘You all right, sir?’
‘Yes, yes.’
Turning, Colby was about to call out to Brosy to take over when he saw his horse go down. As it crashed to the ground, Brosy dropped his sword and, as he scrambled to his feet, stooping to pick it up, a black figure rose from the grass alongside him, thrusting viciously with an assegai.
The point entered Brosy’s body under his outstretched arm and reappeared from his neck just below his jaw.
His eyes wide with horror and fear, Brosy swung round, looking for his assailant. Unable to help with his useless arm, Colby could only kick frantically at his horse’s flanks, but young Ellesmere had launched himself forward at the same time and his sabre carved into the Zulu’s neck at the very moment that the shoulder of Colby’s horse caught him and sent him head over heels under Ellesmere’s mount. As the animal pecked, recovered and swung round, its eyes wild, Ellesmere dragged on the reins.
Twisted in the saddle with his own wound, Colby saw that Brosy had sunk to his knees, his fingers fumbling weakly at the assegai protruding near his throat. As Ellesmere slipped to the ground, Colby drew rein alongside, and Ellesmere’s head lifted, a look of agony on his face.
‘Oh, God, sir,’ he said, ‘what can we do?’
Eight
Pietermaritzburg held its breath. News had arrived that the Zulus had finally been defeated.
Anxious about Colby, Augusta was among the crowd waiting outside Government House. The people around her had the same strained look on their faces she had seen after Isandhlwana, but news was at a premium and the guards had been doubled to prevent anyone invading the governor’s residence.
There was nothing to learn and she returned to the rented house, aware of Annie Ackroyd watching her every expression and change of tone. Now that the war was over and they would be going home, she realised she had become strangely attached to the ugly little stone and corrugated-iron building. When they left it, no one would remember they had ever been there, and that fact more than any other indicated to her how true the army wives’ saying was – that they were so often on the move home was nowhere. Somehow it helped her to understand the mystique surrounding the 19th that she had so often failed to grasp.
Two days later a grave blond man appeared outside the house on a lathered horse asking for her.
‘Colonel Graf von Hartmann, Madame,’ he introduced himself. ‘I have just left your husband’s side.’
He had ridden alone across country as soon as the battle had finished, bringing only a few personal letters for relatives.
‘I came to inform you about your husband,’ he said. ‘I have known him a long time – ever since the war in your country, madame. He is a man I highly respect and I have sad news for you. He was hurt by a stray bullet in the last moments of the battle. I felt you would wish to be prepared.’
As he disappeared, she stared after him, bewildered. Colby had never mentioned von Hartmann and she wondered for a moment if he were tormenting her with some outrageous lie. Then, as panic caught her, she turned and, crying for Annie Ackroyd, began to search out linen for use as bandages.
Some days later, in an agony of apprehension, she heard that the 19th were escorting a convoy of wounded to the coast and she wondered if they had been chosen because Colby was incapable of commanding. But they could learn nothing beyond that Wolseley had finally reached the army and his favourites were taking over, only to find that things were much more difficult than they had expected. The old hands were all going home.
‘Wood’s been in the field for eight months,’ she was informed, ‘and he’s on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Buller can barely walk for saddle sores. Pearson’s sick. Colby Goff was brought down at Ulundi.’
Brought down! Did it indicate he had been mortally wounded? There seemed so much meaning behind those two simple words.
Von Hartmann reappeared and offered to ride to meet the approaching convoy to find out more for her. She was touched by his concern and his clear regard for her husband.
‘I am a Prussian, madame,’ he told her. ‘One day he and I may well find ourselves on the opposite sides of the battle lines, but there is always such a thing as honour.’
Two days later they heard the convoy was expected within a few hours, and late in the afternoon someone ran past to say they had seen lancers in the distance.
As they ran into the road, they saw the tall spears among the trees and then the wagons carrying the wounded, and as her terror rushed to her throat, choking her, she felt she was as near to fainting as she would ever be and had to grasp Annie’s hand to steady the whirling world.
It had been a murderous journey. There had been a hundred miles of trackless country with the wagons, moving at a snail’s pace, totally devoid of springs; and when the officer next to Colby, who had been shot through both thighs, started to bleed, they had had to stop to amputate one of his legs. Fortunately, Ackroyd had turned up, appearing in the 19th’s lines and resisting all attempts to send him away.
‘How bad is it?’ Colby asked as he untied the bandages.
‘Not so good, that’s a fact.’ Ackroyd managed a twisted grin. ‘But not so bad either. What ’appened?’
Colby tried to tell him. The shock of Brosy’s death remained. The agony on his face as he had been rushed to the surgeon, the startled realisation that he was already a dead man, had been clear in his eyes and in the strangled cry that had escaped his lips. There was nothing they could do, and when the assegai had been removed the blood that had gushed out had carried away his life. As he thought about it, Colby found tears prickling his eyes. Brosy had been alongside him all through his life. He had been to the same school and with him at Balaclava, had even brought him home from America. Why did it have to be kind, good-hearted Brosy, he wondered, and he remembered something Von Hartmann had said at Mars-la-Tour – ‘It is always the tallest poppies that are picked.’
Feeling miserably that he had failed his friend, he told himself again and again that death was a chance they all took and he couldn’t have done more than he had. What in God’s name will I tell Grace, he wondered.
Four days later, as they jolted south, the officer with the amputated leg died. They buried him at Landman’s Drift and a surgeon who looked and smelled like a vet wrenched off the bandages from Colby’s wound, cleaned it and strapped the arm to his chest. The prospect of another hundred miles in a wagon was more than he could bear.
‘For God’s sake, Tyas,’ he said to Ackroyd. ‘Find me some old nag that won’t throw me and shove me in a saddle.’
Seated on an old horse that looked like a hat-rack and made a noise in its throat like a German band, and stiff as a tinker with brandy to kill the pain, he was at the head of his men as they appeared outside Pietermaritzburg. Von Hartmann had turned up again, concerned but behaving as if he were Moses and had seen the tablets on the mountain.
‘I think I was wrong at Mars-la-Tour,’ he said. ‘Ulundi will justify the existence of cavalry for a few more years.’
He told Colby that Augusta had been informed of his wound and Colby couldn’t make up his mind whether to be grateful or regard it as bloody interference. His shoulder was hurting and he was still depressed by Brosy’s death. Try as he might, he couldn’t push from his mind the image of him on his knees by the river, the shaft of the assegai sticking out under his arm, the long blade protruding from his neck, the agony and fear in his eyes with the knowledge of death, and the soundless scream that was coming from his lips.
As the 19th appeared, Augusta, numb with apprehension, kept moving from one foot to the other in her nervous agitation. Her marriage had long since passed through that state when her emotions were a confusion of despair, delight, obsession and adoration, and she had entered a calmer period when she asked nothing more of life than to have her husband alongside her and her children growing up around her.
Then suddenly she saw Ackroyd, dressed in the cord of the Cape Light Horse, cantering past, and both she and Annie screamed and started to wave frantically. As he slid from the saddle he was smiling, and Augusta’s heart, which had been thudding inside her chest, calmed. Ackroyd smiling could mean only one thing.
‘My husband, Tyas?’ she managed.
‘’E’s all right, ma’am. Bit uncomfortable because ’e got ’it. You’ll see ’im in a minute.’
&n
bsp; She was aware of tears of relief in her eyes. ‘What about all the others?’
Ackroyd’s face changed. ‘Lost one or two, ma’am. Sergeant ’Arding, for one. You’ll remember ’im. I doubt if you’ll know the others. And – and–’ he paused ‘–Mr la Dell, ma’am.’
‘What happened to him, Tyas?’
‘’E’s dead, ma’am.’
‘Oh, no! Poor Grace! How?’
‘Assegai, ma’am.’
Then she knew that her dream had been broken. It hadn’t been Colby at all, as she had expected, but Grace’s Brosy.
As she moved back to the edge of the road, she saw the 19th appear beyond the trees, smudges of rifle-green and red. They looked shabbier than when she’d last seen them but were well in charge of themselves. Then she saw Colby. He was riding in front, accompanied by his trumpeter and his orderly. His right arm was strapped to his chest and he was riding a staid raw-boned horse that he wouldn’t normally have been seen dead on, but despite everything he looked remarkably fit.
As he passed her, Colby saluted gravely, and he saw the other officers also acknowledge her: Radliffe. Johnson. Morby-Smith. Young Ellesmere – so brown now there was no sign of his acne. And, as he saw her hands go to her throat, he knew she had realised they were saluting her not because she was the colonel’s wife but because she was one of them.
All round him people were cheering and hats were tumbling in salute. Then he saw Augusta’s face and shining eyes and saw that she was laughing, too – and crying and cheering all at the same time – and he had a feeling that at last she had realised why it was that old soldiers always came back whenever they could, wearing their medals, to be part of the regiment. The mystique had touched her as it had touched them, and for the first time she could see what lay behind the reverence for the regimental souvenirs; why the adoption and dedication of the regimental chapel in Ripon Cathedral was so important; why the faded colours that hung under the arches at York were embossed with names like Talavera, Salamanca, Vittoria, Waterloo and Balaclava; why Trumpeter Sparks’ instrument hung in a glass case in the hall of the officers’ mess at the depot where everybody could see it.
