the general and his staff not only did not anticipate that the enemy would venture to attack him, but if they should do so that the only thing to be apprehended was that the fire of our people would frighten them so much that they would never come near enough to suffer any serious loss. So that to take any precautions against an attack, such as entrenching, etc., such a thing was never dreamt of.54
Most generals seem cursed to fight the current campaign based on the flawed assumption that it will be a repetition of the last. Chelmsford and his staff were no exceptions to the rule and set about framing a strategy based ultimately on a dangerous underestimation of the fighting qualities of the Zulu. More immediately, Chelmsford faced several strategic constraints.
When he advanced into Zululand he would leave the borders of Natal and the Transvaal vulnerable to the Zulu raids the colonists so dreaded. The broken terrain of the Natal frontier made that colony the more susceptible of the two to surprise attack, but the colonial authorities’ contingency plans were limited to advising settlers to take refuge in the scattered government laagers. On 10 September 1878 Chelmsford persuaded the Natal government to raise a large field force of African levies and reserves to hold the countryside between the border posts garrisoned by imperial troops and colonial volunteers. In order to improve Natal’s organisation for defence, on 10 November Chelmsford divided the colony into Defensive Districts, and on 11 January 1879 placed the entire border region under military control.55
Despite these arrangements, Chelmsford knew that the borders remained vulnerable and this affected the timing of his invasion. The rivers between Natal and Zululand were generally unfordable between January and March on account of the summer rains, and so formed a natural line of defence. Chelmsford confidently expected the campaign to be over before the rivers subsided if he invaded early in the year. Chelmsford calculated that late spring rains of 1878 and the delayed harvest meant that the Zulu would find it difficult to supply their army, while, conversely, the summer grazing was plentiful for the draft animals upon which the British advance depended. Frere therefore worked with Chelmsford on the political front to ensure that the invasion was launched on the ideal date of 11 January 1879.56
A swift, decisive campaign such as Chelmsford and Frere envisaged depended upon firm logistics. Unfortunately for Chelmsford, the Anglo-Zulu War exemplified one of the fundamentals of colonial war: it was a campaign against distance and natural obstacles as much as against an enemy, and problems of supply would overshadow its entire course. Since supplies could not be obtained from the theatre of war and had to be carried, Chelmsford’s army was turned into an escort for its food, and garrisoned depots had to be established along its line of march.57 For months before the invasion Chelmsford was engrossed in collecting and organising supplies and transport. If he had established better relations with the Natal government, and in particular with Sir Henry Bulwer, the Lieutenant Governor, their cooperation would have eased his logistical problems. Unfortunately, the Natal civil authorities, already wary of the coming war and its attendant costs and risk, were further alienated by the military’s high-handed approach.58 They consequently volunteered little in the way of help, forcing Chelmsford by the end of the campaign to have hired or bought the 27,125 oxen, 4,653 mules and 748 horses necessary to draw the 1,770 wagons and 796 carts he required at exorbitant rates from colonists eager to profit from the unexpected windfall.59 He was also let down by the under-staffed Commissariat and Transport Department, the members of which were inexperienced in purchasing and in looking after its draft animals in South African conditions, which helped to drive up costs. The exasperated Chelmsford was only too aware of the Department’s inadequacies, but came up against the jealously held prerogatives of the Victorian army. Consequently, despite repeated attempts, he failed to impose a remedy on the Department’s unwilling personnel.60
Chelmsford’s dependence on slow-moving and vulnerable supply trains that only averaged 10 miles a day over the broken terrain meant that his manoeuverability would be compromised. The larger the convoy, the slower it moved, so Chelmsford decided he must send in a number of smaller columns. This made each more vulnerable to attack, and colonists, harking back to their experience in war against the Zulu in 1838, urged him to make each column form a defensive wagon-laager every time it halted in Zulu territory. But laagering was a time-consuming and complicated procedure.61 Chelmsford believed (until Isandlwana sharply taught him otherwise) that, for his well-armed columns, partial entrenchments would suffice instead.62
Chelmsford’s deployment of several columns echoed his initial, unsuccessful deployment in the Ninth Frontier War. Nevertheless, he was sure that the strategy of converging columns was appropriate for Zululand. Not only would they move with greater speed, but he calculated that invasion by a number of supporting columns would discourage Zulu counter-thrusts against Natal and the Transvaal. Moreover, the widespread British presence would force the Zulu to keep fully mobilised and present them with difficult supply problems of their own. With Zulu raids in mind, Chelmsford selected invasion routes in sectors he believed vulnerable to Zulu attack: No. 1 Column of 4,750 men under Colonel Charles Pearson would protect the Natal coastal plain; No. 3 Column of 4,709 men under Colonel Richard Glyn (reinforced by the 3,871 African troops of No. 2 Column under Brevet Colonel Anthony Durnford) central Natal; No. 4 Column of 2,278 men under Brevet Colonel Evelyn Wood the Utrecht District of the Transvaal; and No. 5 Column of 1,565 men under Colonel Hugh Rowlands would protect the volatile eastern Transvaal that abutted the unpacified Pedi, Swazi and Zulu kingdoms. The invading columns were supposed to converge on oNdini, King Cetshwayo’s capital.63 Yet, as the day of invasion approached, the prospects for successful coordination, let alone mutual support, seemed ever less likely. With reason, Chelmsford began increasingly to obsess about deficient logistical arrangements, poor staff work, unreliable maps, difficult terrain and insufficient cavalry for effective reconnaissance, and daily exhorted his commanders to coordinate operations.64
When Chelmsford invaded Zululand on 11 January, he found that the rain-sodden ground rendered a rapid, coordinated advance impossible, and he was forced to consider an alternative strategy. He decided the slowly advancing columns should send out flying columns to occupy and devastate as much of Zululand as they could, and target in particular the amakhanda (military centres) that were the nodes of the King’s authority, the rallying points for the amabutho (age-grade regiments) and the depots for Zulu supplies. Their systematic destruction was calculated to reduce Zulu ability to resist, and fatally damage the King’s authority. The problem with this strategy was that mounted troops were essential for carrying it out, and the number of horsemen Chelmsford had available was limited.65 Chelmsford forbade unauthorised excesses against the civilian population on pain of flogging,66 but he hoped that by rendering the Zulu population hungry and shelterless that he would provoke Cetshwayo’s desperate subjects into deposing him and surrendering. In this he was no different from other commanders in Queen Victoria’s ‘small wars’ who accepted civilian suffering as an unfortunate necessity for victory, though he received some criticism regarding this at the time.67 He was also heartened by intelligence of existing dissensions within the Zulu kingdom, and hoped to exploit these by encouraging disaffected chiefs to defect. He accordingly urged his commanders to enter into negotiations with Zulu notables, and to accommodate surrendered Zulu behind their lines.68
The unravelling of the Zulu kingdom, however, required prior military success that asserted British military ascendancy. At all cost Chelmsford hoped to avoid the desultory, protracted warfare he had experienced in the Eastern Cape, and intended to conclude the campaign expeditiously with a decisive battle.69 Fortunately, when fighting a people with aggressive military traditions such as the Zulu, it was very likely that they would be willing to risk all in pitched battle. Indeed, Chelmsford’s operational gambit of dividing his army into several columns can thus be seen as conventional bait
intended to entice the Zulu into attacking these small and thus deceptively vulnerable forces.70 As experience in the Ninth Frontier War had apparently demonstrated, a disciplined force of British regulars, even when deployed in extended order, was invulnerable against a mass attack of traditionally armed warriors like the Zulu.71 Isandlwana was still to administer the terrible lesson that a massed Zulu charge could break through an extended infantry line no matter how superior its armaments, and would confirm that the most effective way of concentrating fire and stemming the enemy’s rush was to place troops in prepared all-round defensive positions such as fieldworks, wagon-laagers or infantry squares. After Isandlwana it became Chelmsford’s overriding tactical concern to entice the Zulu into destroying themselves against such positions.
King Cetshwayo’s strategy was to secure a rapid victory in the field that would force the British to withdraw and allow his armies to menace the borders of Natal before the British could bring in more reinforcements. He hoped that as a consequence the British would be pressured into concluding a peace favourable to the Zulu.72 Able Zulu intelligence identified No. 3 Column that crossed into Zululand at Rorke’s Drift on 11 January as the main British force because not only was it the strongest column, but Chelmsford himself was accompanying it. Indeed, Chelmsford quickly overshadowed Glyn and assumed active command. His forces scored an easy success in a skirmish at kwaSogekle (the stronghold of Chief Sihayo kaXongo) on 12 January in which the Zulu failed to make a determined stand, and which seemed to confirm that they would make no better a showing than had the Xhosa.73 When during the skirmish Clery wished to send in some mounted men ‘rather widely to flank’, Crealock checked him in ‘a remonstrating’ way: ‘Do not do that as it will cause what actually happened in the last war – the enemy to take flight and bolt before we can get at them.’ Again, the general issued an order that the artillery was never to open fire until the enemy were within 600yd of them for fear of frightening them, and so deterring them from coming on, or making them bolt.74
Indeed, Clery was of the firm opinion that for both Chelmsford and his staff their misleading experience of warfare in the Eastern Cape would not let them admit that they were fighting with ‘anything more than a superior [perhaps?] class of kafir, who had only to be hunted’, and that ‘the easy promenade’ in the Cape made ‘all go into this business with light hearts’.75
The difficult and muddy terrain held up Chelmsford’s further advance, and on 20 January he set up camp at the eastern base of Isandlwana while he prepared to reconnoitre the way forward. The position was potentially difficult to defend because it was overlooked by a spur of the Nyoni hills to the north, and the layout of the camp was overly extended. But since Chelmsford regarded the camp as temporary, and considered no Zulu attack likely, no attempt was made to entrench it, nor to laager the wagons that were required to bring up supplies from Rorke’s Drift. In any case, it had not been the practice to laager temporary camps when on the march against the Xhosa, and Chelmsford regarded a laager as protection for oxen, rather than to be used as a redoubt.76 Two days later the Zulu overwhelmed the camp while Chelmsford and half his force were skirmishing away to the southeast.
Inevitably, the Isandlwana disaster has overshadowed all subsequent accounts of the Anglo-Zulu War and has formed the pivot for all discussions concerning Chelmsford’s problematic generalship. Gosset, who classified and annotated Chelmsford’s papers in 1906, wrote to Chelmsford’s widow that he believed the General (whose foresight, consideration and zeal he commended) had been sadly misrepresented, and that he hoped ‘justice’ would eventually be done to the memory of that ‘great & good man’.77 Gosset would have been gravely disappointed, however, by the approach adopted by most future historians. The discussion that follows concerning Chelmsford’s role in the Isandlwana disaster is based on the writer’s own research and fieldwork.
The main Zulu army of 24,000 men had begun its march on 17 January, and on 20 January bivouacked by Siphezi Hill, only 12.5 miles east of Isandlwana. Chelmsford had no inkling of the enemy’s close proximity, and believed that Chief Matshana kaMondisa was gathering a force in the broken country to the southeast of Isandlwana in order to interrupt his column’s line of supply once it advanced further into Zululand. Accordingly, on 21 January, Chelmsford sent out a reconnaissance-in-force consisting of more than half his mounted men under Major John Dartnell (150 troopers) and the bulk of the NNC under Commandant Rupert Lonsdale (about 1,600 men) to scout the area. Some 2,000 Zulu under Matshana skilfully retired eastwards before the joint force, and by evening were massed on the Magogo heights. To forestall an advance by this force on Isandlwana, Dartnell and Lonsdale bivouacked for the night on the Hlazakazi heights, westwards across the valley from Magogo.
Meanwhile, the joint Zulu commanders of the main army, Ntshingwayo kaMahole and Mavumengwana kaNdlela, who had been considering a flank march to Chelmsford’s east to cut him off from Natal, apparently decided instead to take advantage of his division of his forces. They detached men to reinforce Matshana, and on the evening of 21 January and during the next morning moved the main army to the Ngwebeni valley, concealed from Isandlwana by the Nyoni heights 9 miles to the south-west. The Zulu moved in small units, so that the British mounted patrols that sighted some of them had no idea that a whole army was on the move.
Around midnight on the night of 21/22 January there was a panic among the NNC encamped in a hollow square on Hlazakazi who groundlessly thought they were being attacked. Dartnell nevertheless sent Chelmsford a note, which the general received at 0130, urgently requesting support. Glyn, accompanied by Chelmsford, accordingly advanced at 0430 with 4 out of the 6 guns of the battery, 6 companies of the 2nd Battalion, 24th (2nd Warwickshire) Regiment, Mounted Infantry and Pioneers. Chelmsford left the camp with a garrison of 2 7-pounder guns, 5 companies of the 1/24th and one of the 2/24th, the remainder of the mounted troops and 4 companies of the 1/3rd NNC. Before he left, Chelmsford ordered up Durnford from Rorke’s Drift with the available men of No. 2 Column to reinforce the camp. Until he arrived, when the troops in camp would amount to just over 1,700 men, Brevet Lieutenant Colonel Henry Pulleine would be the senior officer left in camp. As Clery later commented, ‘nobody from the general downwards had the least suspicion that there was a chance of the camp being attacked’.78 For those left in the camp, there was absolutely no apprehension that they might be in danger, and Captain Henry Harford (a regular officer seconded to the NNC) later noted in his journal that some officers ‘were terribly disappointed at the thought of being left behind in Camp and lose [sic] the chance of a fight, and begged hard to be allowed to find substitutes’.79 Even when early the next morning a thousand or more Zulu appeared on the hills to the east of the camp no officer was disconcerted for, as Lieutenant Henry Curling, RA (one of the few officers to survive the battle) later wrote to his mother: ‘We none of us had the least idea that the Zulu contemplated attacking the camp and, having in the last war [Ninth Frontier War] often seen equally large bodies of the enemy, never dreamed they would come on.’80
Plan of the Isandlwana campaign, 1879. (With permission of the University of KwaZulu-Natal Press)
When the badly strung out relief force reached Hlazakazi at about 0600, bringing the troops operating in the area to about 2,500, the Zulu on Magogo had broken away. Some had withdrawn south-east onto the Phindo heights and others north onto Silutshana, both with the intention of ultimately pulling back northeast to Siphezi and drawing the British after them, away from the camp. Dartnell took the bait, and became involved in a heavy skirmish on Phindo. Unaware of falling into a trap, Chelmsford decided to let Dartnell get on with taking Phindo, while the relief column cleared the area around Silutshana and the Nondweni valley between Magogo and Phindo. The General would use the opportunity to select a suitable new campsite for the column when it advanced, thereby adhering to his own precept that ‘A commander must ride about and see the country for himself, or he will never be able to handle his troops pr
operly.’81 At 0930 while breakfasting near Magogo he received a message sent at 0805 by Pulleine that Zulu were advancing on the camp. No one suspected this could be the main Zulu army, and there seemed no sense of urgency in the message. Chelmsford himself, when Clery asked him what should be done, replied, ‘There is nothing to be done on that.’ His staff did not pursue the matter because he had become ‘particularly touchy about suggestions being made to him’.82 Chelmsford nevertheless sent Lieutenant A Berkeley Milne, RN of his staff to study the camp 12 miles away through a telescope from the slopes of Magogo. Milne kept watch for upwards to an hour, but saw nothing untoward. In fact, the shoulder of Silutshana cut off his view of the plain to the east of Isandlwana where the Zulu army was deploying. Since all seemed in order, between 1000 and 1100 Chelmsford sent Captain Alan Gardner with orders to Pulleine to strike camp and move up. Chelmsford and a small escort rode off between 1030 and 1230 to scout the area. His movements were consequently unpredictable, and all subsequent messages concerning the unfolding battle at Isandlwana failed to find him or his staff. Having decided on a suitable campsite just east of Hlazakazi on the Mangeni River above its spectacular horseshoe falls, Chelmsford ordered the relief column under Glyn to concentrate there.
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