Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (45 page)

Brave
and
Weak

Zulu tactics were static and thus predictable to Europeans. A fortified camp or British square could expect a double-envelopment movement from the outset as a prelude to the advance of the main “chest.” While in theory the “loins” were a mobile reserve, they were not under central command and thus were not directed to precise points of resistance or weakness in the enemy line. Often they played no role in the fighting at all and were just as likely to flee as to reinforce in cases of initial failure of the chest and horns.

Much is made of the impressive Zulu mobility, but two key factors are often ignored. The army could carry few firearms—though nearly 20,000 muskets and rifles had been entering Zululand for decades before the British invasion—due to the absence of any wheeled transport to bring along sizable reserves of cartridges. And because food was not carried in any quantity, Zulu armies required immediate victory before exhaustion and hunger set in. At Rorke’s Drift a final concerted effort at daybreak might have broken the British defenses, but by morning the Zulu besiegers had had essentially nothing to eat for over two days and were famished to the point of physical weakness.

It is easy for modern scholars to ridicule the ponderous supply trains and immobility of Chelmsford’s lugubrious columns. But the British army, not the Zulus, came to each battle well fed, well supplied, and in possession of nearly limitless ammunition and firearms. British wagons may have looked near comical—eighteen feet long, six feet wide, and more than five feet high—and required anywhere from ten to nineteen chained oxen to pull them even five miles a day in the rough terrain of Zululand. Yet they could carry an amazing 8,000 pounds of guns and ammunition, as well as plenty of fodder, food, and water. In later battles any Zulus who made their way into British camps immediately broke open captured provisions in the heat of battle—as the partly eaten food in the mouths of their corpses later attested.

The fully laden, ponderous, and sunburned British soldier in Africa has become a caricature of impracticality, ignorance, and addiction to material comfort. In fact, he was a far more lethal warrior than his lightly clad, nimble Zulu opponent. The latter has recently been nearly deified on American campuses—tragically so, in the case of the genocidal Shaka— as some sort of irresistible and deadly freedom fighter. He was neither fearsome nor freedom loving. In reality, the most deadly man in Africa was typically a pale British soldier, not much over five feet six inches in height, 150 pounds in weight, slightly malnourished, most often enrolled from the industrial ghettos of England, vastly overburdened with a ten-pound rifle and some sixty pounds of food, water, and ammunition on his belt and in his pack. Such an apparently unimpressive warrior, in fact, would himself typically shoot down three or more Zulus in almost every engagement of the war.

Most
impis
did not hit the enemy as one cohesive unit, and the absence of body armor had always ensured that Zulu spearmen had never been able to crash headlong even into the lines of their tribal enemies. Shields were used for individual defense and as weapons, not to form a vast wall of protection. Zulus practiced only a swarming method of warfare, in this regard similar to the Aztec manner of running into enemy lines to stab and hack away in small groups. If the attacker was vastly outnumbered, terrified, or in loose formation, then the Zulu charge and envelopment were inevitably successful. But against a fortified position or a defensible square of British riflemen, the entire line of assault would break and then disperse in the face of sustained volleys or subsequent bayonet charges.

Even the acquisition of firearms did not alter static Zulu tactics, as shooters on their own attempted to fire sporadically at the enemy while other warriors engaged with spears. No Zulus were taught either to charge in line or to shoot on orders. Cetshwayo never sought a comprehensive method of firearms loading and firing, despite the availability of guns in Zululand for some fifty years before the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879. Although horses had been introduced more than two centuries earlier in southern Africa, the Zulus rode only sporadically, and neither bred them in great numbers nor adopted any methodical approach to creating mounted patrols—ensuring that the British had more mobile scouts and deadly pursuers in the aftermath of battle.

The result was often a haphazard method of Zulu attack with both traditional and European weaponry, in which thousands of men more or less ran at will straight at the enemy, while others shot at random from a distance, hoping that sheer numbers, noise, and their own speed would panic or collapse the adversary. At Isandhlwana the thin British lines, gaps in the formations, and poor distribution of ammunition allowed such attackers success. In nearly all other subsequent engagements—the night fiasco at Hlobane is the notable exception—the tactics of uncoordinated charges turned out to be suicidal. When such assaults failed, there were never ordered calls for retreat, much less a fighting withdrawal or organized covering sorties. Rather, entire
impis,
as tribal Germans on the Roman frontier, collapsed and ran headlong from the enemy. Thousands in the Zulu wars were ridden down by British horsemen who lanced, shot, and hacked at will once the
impis’
charge was broken and panic set in.

British accounts record hundreds of incidents of unmatched Zulu bravery—men in their forties and fifties who charged headlong into the barrels of blazing Gatling guns, and hundreds of fighters who trampled over their own dead to wrestle with the bayonets of British riflemen at Rorke’s Drift before Martini-Henry rifles discharged their enormous bullets into their necks and faces. During the preliminary fighting before the final battle of Ulundi, Frances Colenso records, “a single warrior, chased by several Lancers, found himself run down and escape impossible. He turned and faced his enemies; spreading his arms abroad he presented his bare breast unflinchingly to the steel, and fell, face to the foe, as a brave soldier should” (
History of the Zulu War and Its Origin
, 438). In tribal warfare of southern Africa the Zulus found that for nearly a century their unmatched courage, physical prowess, speed, and enormous numbers brought decisive victory and often the slaughter of their enemies. But in a fight against disciplined ranks of trained British riflemen their prior method of success spelled national self-destruction.

Whereas the Zulus had discarded much of the traditional military rituals of southern Africa—missile warfare, staged contests, and the taking of captives for ransom—Cetshwayo still apparently envisioned the impending war with the British as a single staged event of military prowess. In his mind his army would fight “on one day only” and then come to terms with the British. If the Zulu leadership had examined both the victories and the defeats at Isandhlwana and Rorke’s Drift, they would have jettisoned the entire traditional method of attack and instigated a guerrilla war to ambush British wagon trains on the move—and, at all costs, to avoid charging entrenched positions and squares of British infantry. When the war broke out, Cetshwayo himself seemed to have sensed that the odds were all in favor of the Zulus—if they avoided entrenched British riflemen and fought the European only through surprise, during transit, or at night.

The Zulus had a much larger army, knew the terrain intimately, and had clear warning of the advance of the three British columns. Moreover, Zululand—without roads, largely unmapped, laced with rivers and streams, hilly and full of gullies and canyons—was nearly impossible to traverse by wagons full of tons of equipment that could scarcely travel more than five miles on a good day. Constant Zulu attacks on such columns might have stranded British regiments deep in Zululand without recourse to resupply, thereby dragging out a war that had no real support from either the general staff or the prime minister back in London. Instead, ritual, custom, and tradition ensured that the horns, chest, and loins of the Zulu
impis
would attack as usual—and so were to be slaughtered as usual by British riflemen.

Whereas the Zulus were famous for their obedience to royal edicts, since the reign of Shaka—who had routinely strangled those who sneezed, laughed, or simply looked at him in his presence—there was an arbitrariness surrounding punishment that tended in the long run to undermine Zulu cohesion and central command. Nearly every major Zulu leader from Dingiswayo and Shaka to Cetshwayo—who was probably poisoned after the British conquest—was murdered. Mpande, Cetshwayo’s father, reigned for more than thirty years (1840–72) and died alone in his sleep, but only by abrogating most of his power to local
impis
and in his later years to his son.

In contrast, the British army, which routinely flogged and jailed its felons, had a written code of punishment and laws. Individual troopers more or less knew what was expected of them, assumed a relatively uniform and predictable application of justice throughout the ranks, and considered their own persons sacrosanct from arbitrary execution. For the most part, they followed orders from a sense of justice rather than mere fear. No British officer or magistrate had absolute power over an underling in the manner of a Zulu or an Aztec king. The small professional army of England was far more representative of civic militarism than the thousands mustered in Cetshwayo’s
impis:
the former fought with the understanding that military life was a reflection of civilian customs and values, the latter that the society mirrored the army. In a nation of millions the British army was tiny, but even the queen could not execute a single soldier without at least a hearing or trial.

COURAGE IS NOT NECESSARILY DISCIPLINE

The
Traditions
of
the
British
Army

By 1879 there were larger and better-organized European militaries—the French and the German especially—than the British colonial army. The murderous American Civil War (1861–65) and the short but violent Franco-Prussian War (1870–71) had put an end to the common use of massed cavalry and the tactics of slow marching through ordered lines. The machine gun, new repeating rifles, and artillery shells destroyed the last aristocratic pretensions of mounted grandees and ushered in the dawn of modern industrial warfare. In contrast, the British after Waterloo (1815), with few exceptions (the disastrous Crimean War of 1854–56 is the oddity that proves the rule), fought colonial wars, against enemies that had neither modern weapons, elaborate fortifications, nor sophisticated tactics. The result was the maintenance of a peculiarly reactionary army, which increasingly found itself outside the modern Western evolution toward enormous levies of well-armed conscripts. The Victorian army— more so than the navy—mirrored the class divisions of British society. Since it was largely unchallenged by other more modern European and American forces, it saw no need until the eleventh hour either to dismantle the tactics of a bygone age or to substitute merit for birth as the chief criterion for career advancement.

Only in the decade before the Zulu War had the British undersecretary of war, Edward Cardwell, at last made any meaningful attempt at reform by eliminating purchased commissions, improving conditions for enlisted men, and urging the adoption of modern rifles, artillery, and Gatling guns. Nevertheless, by 1879 there were still only 180,000 British soldiers—far smaller than the quarter-million-man army of the Roman Empire—to defend an empire that spanned Asia, Africa, Australia, and North America and that was frequently in turmoil throughout India, Afghanistan, and southern and western Africa. Insufficient numbers and class bias were not the only problems. The army was also plagued by chronic budgetary crises—the navy still received the bulk of British defense expenditures—which led to poor pay and weapons that were often outmoded. Far too many officers in the latter nineteenth century, even after the abolition of the purchase system in which aristocrats literally bought commissions, were still ingrained with a conservative mentality that looked suspiciously upon science and the accompanying mechanical expertise that fueled an industrial society. What saved the British army and made it a deadly constabulary force in the colonial wars of the nineteenth century, despite poor generalship and inadequate funding, was its legendary discipline and training. British redcoats for the most part were better drilled and motivated than almost any other troops in the world. When formed up in their infamous squares, they were the best soldiers both in and outside Europe in laying down a continuously accurate and sustained deadly volley of rifle fire.

In the minutes before the attack on Rorke’s Drift, not a single regular British soldier fled to join the hundreds of colonials and native troops that took off before the approach of thousands of Zulus. Instead, fewer than one hundred able-bodied men continuously fired more than 20,000 rifle rounds and were at the ramparts for some sixteen hours. At the bloodbath at Isandhlwana hours earlier, nearly all the regular companies of the 24th Regiment of the British regular army were overwhelmed in situ rather than dispersed in flight. Uguku, a Zulu veteran of the slaughter, later recalled of that British final stand:

They were completely surrounded on all sides, and stood back to back, and surrounding some men who were in the centre. Their ammunition was now done, except that they had some revolvers which they fired at us at close quarters. We were quite unable to break their square until we had killed a great many of them, by throwing our
assegais
at short distances. We eventually overcame them in this way. (F. Colenso,
History of the Zulu War
and Its Origin
, 413)

At Rorke’s Drift in the moments before the Zulu arrival, Lieutenant Chard’s men shot a European sergeant who fled with Captain Stephenson’s Natal Native Contingent. Chard felt no need to mention the shooting in his report, and the British officer corps undertook no investigation into the apparently justified killing of a colonial noncommissioned officer who left his post. Sir Garnet Wolseley later even criticized Lieutenants Melville and Coghill, the valiant duo who tried to save the queen’s color at Isandhlwana. In Wolseley’s view under no circumstances were British officers
ever
to ride out of camp while their beleaguered men were alive and still fighting—despite the sanctity of the regimental banner. The few mounted troops who got away from Isandhlwana after the collapse of the infantry’s resistance naturally came under later suspicion.

After the minor disaster at the Intombi River, Lieutenant Harward was court-marshaled for riding off for help while his soldiers were still surrounded by Zulus. Although Harward was acquitted by a military court of justice, General Wolseley insisted that his own dissent be read at the head of every regiment in the army. Wolseley’s disgust at the idea of a British officer leaving his men framed his apology to the rank and file and illustrated the trust that lay at the heart of the army’s legendary discipline:

The more helpless the position in which an officer finds his men, the more it is his bound duty to stay and share their fortune, whether for good or ill. It is because the British officer has always done so that he occupies the position in which he is held in the estimation of the world, and that he possesses the influence he does in the ranks of our army. The soldier has learned to feel that, come what may, he can in the direst moment of danger look with implicit faith to his officer, knowing that he will never desert him under any possible circumstances. It is to this faith of the British soldier in his officers that we owe most of the gallant deeds recorded in our military annals; and it is because the verdict of this Court-Martial strikes at the root of this faith, that I feel it necessary to mark officially my emphatic dissent from the theory upon which the verdict has been founded. (D. Clammer,
The Zulu War,
143)

The great strength of the British army was to form in lines and squares. In the former formation each row of three or four lines of soldiers —often prone, kneeling, and standing—fired on command, reloaded, and then again shot five to ten seconds later. The exact sequence of shots from the entire company ensured a near steady curtain of fire even from single-shot Martini-Henry rifles. In a box four right angles ensured a safe center for baggage, refuge for the wounded, and reserves—the integrity of the entire square predicated on the idea that no British soldier would give way at any point along the perimeter. Often to ensure fire control, stakes were placed at one-hundred-yard intervals in the killing field to allow gunnery sergeants to hone the sequence of firing and individual riflemen to calibrate their aim.

The onslaught of a British lancer attack against the Zulus was equally frightening in its carefully disciplined stages:

The 17th Lancers—the Duke of Cambridge’s Own—were a proud regiment. “Death or Glory” was their motto, and Balaclava was amongst their battle honours. Drury-Lowe [colonel of the regiment] drew them up meticulously, as if on parade. . . . Watching the troopers on their big English horses, with their blue uniforms and white facings, they appeared a machine, so precise was their dressing. Drury-Lowe advanced his regiment at the walk in a column of troops, and, as the ground leveled, gave the orders: “Trot—Form squadrons—Form Line!” then, with the men drawn up two deep, “Gallop!” the horses leapt forward, and as the line of steel-lipped lances came to the rest, pennons streaming, “Charge!” and a cheer broke from the square. The regiment rapidly overtook the retreating Zulus, and the lances, as unsparing as the assegais, rose and fell as the troopers impaled warrior after warrior, and flicked the bodies from the points. (D. Clammer,
The Zulu War,
214)

What
Is
Western
Discipline?

The display of courage while under attack is a human trait common to fighters everywhere. All warriors can exhibit extraordinary bravery. Nor is the ancillary of courage, obedience to command, a peculiarly Western characteristic. Both tribal and civilized militaries find success from the fear, even terror, that fighters hold for their leader, general, king, or autocrat. Individual Zulus who grasped the red-hot barrels of Martini-Henry rifles on the north rampart at Rorke’s Drift were as brave as the Englishmen who calmly blew them to pieces seconds later with .45-caliber rifle slugs. They were nearly as obedient to their particular generals as well, charging on command in human wave attacks against fortified positions.

But in the end the Zulus—who could be executed on a nod from their king—not the British, ran away from Rorke’s Drift:

It seems paradoxical to us that men who were so brave in their attacks would run away in panic when their attacks eventually failed. It did not seem paradoxical to the Zulus. They expected to run away if their attacks eventually failed. . . . Once a body of men began to run away, the effect on other men was contagious, as it is in most armies. Shaka’s regiments sometimes ran away like this too. It was the traditional end to a Zulu battle. They either destroyed their enemies or ran away. (R. Edgerton,
Like Lions They
Fought,
188)

Hours earlier, after the moment of their greatest victory at Isandhlwana, most of the
impis
dispersed home with booty—far different were they in triumph from the murderous British lancers who six months later after the slaughter at Ulundi still rode down the defeated Zulus for hours on end. Why did brave and obedient Zulus in both victory and defeat lack the discipline of brave and obedient British soldiers?

From the Greeks onward, Westerners have sought to distinguish moments of individual courage and obedience to leaders from a broader, more institutionalized bravery that derives from the harmony of discipline, training, and egalitarian values among men and officers. Beginning with the Hellenic tradition, Europeans were careful to organize types of purported courage into a hierarchy, from the singular rashness of bold individual acts to the cohesive shared bravery along a battle line—insisting that the former was only occasionally critical to victory, the latter always.

Herodotus, for example, after the battle at Plataea (479 B.C.) noted that the Spartans did not bestow the award of valor to Aristodemus, who rushed out from the formation in near suicidal charges to stab away at the Persians. Instead, the Spartans gave the prize to one Posidonius, who fought alongside his fellow hoplites in the phalanx bravely but “without any wish to be killed” (9.71). Herodotus goes on to imply that Aristodemus had not fought with reason, but as a berserker to redeem his sullied reputation incurred from missing out on the glorious last stand at Thermopylae the summer before.

The Greek standard of courage is inextricably tied to training and discipline: the hoplite is to fight with cold reason, not from frenzy. He holds his own life dear, not cheap, and yet is willing to offer it for the polis. His success in battle is gauged not entirely on how many men he kills or how much personal valor he displays, but to the degree his own battleworthiness aids the advance of his comrades, the maintenance of order in defeat, or the preservation of the formation under attack.

This emphasis on the sanctity of the group was not just a Spartan ethos, but a generally held code throughout the Greek city-states. Frequently in Greek literature we hear that same theme of group cohesion among average soldiers—all citizens can be good fighters if they dedicate themselves to the defense of their peers and culture at large. In Thucydides’ second book the Athenian general Pericles reminds the Assembly during his funeral oration that truly brave men are not those berserkers who are in “evil circumstances and thus have the best excuse to be unsparing of their lives.” Such men, he says, “have no hope of better days.” Rather, the truly courageous are those “to whom it makes an enormous difference if they suffer disaster” (Thucydides 2.43.6).

We hear throughout Greek literature of the necessity of staying in rank, of rote and discipline as more important than mere strength and bravado. Men carry their shields, Plutarch wrote, “for the sake of the entire line” (
Moralia
220A). Real strength and bravery were for carrying a shield in formation, not for killing dozens of the enemy in individual combat, which was properly the stuff of epic and mythology. Xenophon reminds us that from freeholding property owners comes such group cohesion and discipline: “In fighting, just as in working the soil, it is necessary to have the help of other people” (
Oeconomicus
5.14). Punishments were given only to those who threw down their shields, broke rank, or caused panic, never to those who failed to kill enough of the enemy.

Similarly, there is nothing but disdain for gaudy tribal fighters, loud yelling, or terrifying noise if such show is not accompanied by the discipline to march and stay in rank. “Images don’t inflict wounds,” Aeschylus says (
Seven Against Thebes,
397–99). Thucydides has the Spartan general Brasidas, in his attack against Illyrian villagers, sum up the early Western contempt for tribal warfare:

They hold terror in the onset of their attack for those who have no experience with them. They are indeed dreadful looking due to their sheer numbers; the very din of their yelling is intolerable; and they create an image of terror even in their empty brandishing of their weapons. But they are not what they seem when it comes time to fighting hand-to-hand with those who can endure such threats. Since they have no regular battle order, they are not ashamed to abandon any position once they are hard pressed; and since both fleeing and attacking are thought to be equally honorable, their courage cannot ever really be tested. . . . Such mobs as these, if one will only withstand their first charge, will only make a boast of courage from afar with threats. But for those who give in to them, they pursue right on their heels, eager to display courage when the situation appears safe. (4.126.5–7)