Death on a Pale Horse (5 page)

The warriors had broken the line to the south, where Durnford's surrounded position had now been overwhelmed. The tribesmen were in among the first tents. A well-aimed spear brought Bonham from the saddle. As the captain fell into the path of the next rider, his corporal's horse reared and threw him at the feet of his killers. Only the second corporal charged his way through. The bandsmen carrying the first heavy box got no further. From the hill, it was plain that the horns of the Zulu impi had almost closed round the rear of the British position. If Pulleine was still alive, he surely knew the end had come.

Unaware of the extent of the disaster, two men in the dark tunics of quartermasters were shouting at each other. Officers joined in. Smith-Dorrien had broken open a new box. He was tipping cartridges into twenty or thirty helmets and haversacks held out for him. Bloomfield shouted from a nearby wagon, “For heaven's sake, don't take those, man! They belong to our battalion. It's all we have left!”

“Hang it all!” the young subaltern called back. “You don't want a requisition order at a time like this, do you?”

With the first breach, the line which had held against the impi's weight began to fragment. Its men now found the attackers at their backs and feared they would be cut off. The 24th Foot, with Pulleine still alive and assuming direct command, drew back in a semblance of orderly retreat. The men at either end of the line fell away first and fought to the end among the tents of the company lines. Pulleine tried to keep the main body intact, ordering them back to the lower slope of Isandhlwana. Beyond the wagons, the boulders and low ridges might afford a defensive line.

As they withdrew, the men snatched ammunition pouches from the bodies of the fallen. Ironically, now that the camp was being overrun, the survivors found cartridges enough to supply themselves. Their tactic must surely be to defend a position among the rocks of the lower slope, saving ammunition, holding this makeshift redoubt until Lord Chelmsford's return with the mounted column. Yet even that defensive line was soon being infiltrated by the warriors of the tribes.

The last stage of the battle was one of universal confusion. Infantrymen were fighting in isolated groups. Back to back, in shrinking squares, the riflemen fought on with bullets and then with rifle-butts and bayonets, falling one by one. Among the tents and wagons, the British and the Zulu warriors carried on a random struggle of individual encounters. The watching horseman saw a sailor of the Naval Brigade, wounded in the leg, fighting madly with his cutlass against the encroaching warriors, his back to a wagon-wheel. One dead tribesman lay across his feet, another at his side. A moment later, a third who had crawled under the wagon pierced him through the body from behind.

There was a glimpse of Pulleine in the chaos, looking about him for his company commanders. Captain Pope and a dozen men still contested the thrust of the advance. His men fought with fixed bayonets, clubbing with rifle-butts until an assegai stabbed Pope through the breast. Still on his feet, he tried vainly to pull the shaft from his body while the powerful arms of the advancing tribes bore him down.

On the far side of the wagon-park, Captain Younghusband and the remnants of C Company had turned one of the wagons over in preparation for a last stand behind its shelter. Younghusband was passing down the line of survivors, shaking hands with each in a solemn farewell. A moment later, the warriors had swarmed over the shattered wagon, bringing down the captain and the last of his platoons.

The time had come for the horseman to draw a little further up the col, beyond the point that any reconnaissance by the tribes might reach in the wake of their victory. He had scouted the ground two nights before and knew the path that would take him higher while keeping out of immediate view. Not that those engaged in the dreadful hand-to-hand combat below would have much time to survey the hills above them. He led the dappled mare quietly, glancing down from time to time as opportunity gave him an aerial view of what was taking place.

Durnford and a dozen or so of his troopers held out briefly at the foot of the col. Their ammunition spent, they thrust and repelled the black battalions for a while with their bayonets. Then the leaders of the Uvi and Umcijo, splendid in their head-feathers and leopard pelts, seized the bodies of their own dead and bore them like a battle-ram onto the bayonet blades. Before they could free their weapons, Durnford and his men were overwhelmed.

Pulleine again trained his field-glasses on the ridges, no doubt in a dwindling hope of seeing Chelmsford's column riding hard to the rescue. He saw nothing but a deserted horizon of rock against the blanched heat of the sky. Had the colonel known where to look, he might have glimpsed a messenger of fate standing by a dappled mare.

Pulleine was not that witness's personal enemy. Had there been means of paying tribute to a fallen foe, the hunter might have availed himself of it. As it was, the scene below confirmed that the commander of the camp knew hope was gone and that he must nerve himself for what remained. Pulleine could not see, as the watcher on the col could see, that even in the wagon-park Quartermaster Sergeant Bloomfield was dead, sprawling on the tail-board of an ammunition wagon. A drummer-boy of the 24th had been slaughtered and left dangling by his heels from a wagon shaft.

Alone among the doomed survivors, Colonel Pulleine had a purpose to fulfil. In a few hours, Chelmsford's column would return and the debris of defeat must be sifted. The past half hour had seen a disaster without equal in British imperial rule. Two thousand men, armed with the latest rifles, field-guns, a rocket battery, and Gatling guns had been wiped out by barefoot tribes with spears and shields. Pulleine must surely have sworn to himself that the world should know the reason.

As the hunter watched from his refuge, Pulleine, bareheaded and with his tunic open at the top, drew his revolver and moved cautiously towards the guard-tent. Even among death and tumult, parts of the camp were still untouched by battle as the tribes swept through. The guard-tent was one of them. The last of the subalterns, Lieutenant Teignmouth Melvill, was standing by it, distributing the final packets of cartridges to half a dozen riflemen prepared to make a dash for the river.

Pulleine would not join them, having a more important duty to perform. But first, as though Chelmsford might still appear on the ridge, the colonel used the grace allowed him to look slowly for a last time along the skyline. At some distance, the hunter now revealed himself. He mounted, edged the mare forward into full view and came to the salute. Pulleine stopped and, whatever he may have seen in his last bewildered moments, the two men looked directly at each other. The colonel handed his field glasses to the young officer beside him and gestured at the hillside.

When they had inflicted their injury upon him, it was the mark of hellfire. Now he gave them back text for text, speaking as Pulleine's field-glasses swept across the rocky slope once more. The grey mare pricked her ears up at her rider's voice.

“And I looked, and behold a pale horse, and his name that sat on him was Death. And Hell followed with him!”

In his mind, Pulleine echoed him as his adjutant handed back the glasses.

“What do you see, Mr. Melvill? What do you see, sir? Do you not see death, Mr. Melvill? Death on a pale horse!”

A moment later, he knew that Pulleine was giving the last order of a British commander defeated in battle, when hope was gone and his men lay dead about him. The regimental colours of the 24th Foot were safe at Helpmakaar, but the flag bearing the Queen's Colour and the regiment's insignia, embossed in gold on the Union Jack, was now brought from the guard-tent, still rolled and cased in its cylindrical sheath. It was the symbol of the regiment's battle honours at Talavera and in the Peninsula, Cape Town, and Chillianwallah, Wellington's wars and the Queen's imperial conquests.

Pulleine was handing the cased flag to the pale lieutenant. The watching horseman echoed in his mind the words he would have used in the colonel's place.

“Take my horse from the lines, Mr. Melvill. Save the colours, if you can. Ride out across the saddle of Isandhlwana. Make for the Buffalo River and a crossing to the camp at Rorke's Drift. God speed!”

Whatever the exchange, the two men shook hands. Melvill saluted and doubled away to untie the colonel's horse. Through the stench of death and cordite in his throat, Pulleine came unharmed to his own tent and disappeared from view. Even if he heard the feet of his pursuers, the thought of what he must do might still hold his fear in check.

When the victors had withdrawn from the camp with their booty, the horseman on the col would ride down to see for himself what had happened in that tent. In the meantime, he had only to wait. He watched from above as several of the tribesmen approached the regimental lines. Whatever Pulleine had to do would be done by now. Before his enemies could enter, he appeared briefly in the opening of the canvas flap, his revolver in his hand. The warriors hesitated at the sight of the gun. Pulleine fired and the first man sank to his knees. The others drew back behind a further tent, trusting to its shelter. But there were no more shots. Pulleine's revolver was no doubt empty and only his sword remained. The tribesmen rose and moved forward.

It was several hours before the battalions of Cetewayo withdrew.

From above and at a distance, the looted camp presented a curious sight. Here and there a red-coated figure moved about the wagon-park or in the company lines. Over the tented army the British flag on its staff stirred perceptibly in the slight breeze of the coming dusk. Everything appeared to be in good order, as if the lines were quiet but a few of the men were moving about. If Chelmsford's column had been anxious at the despatches from Pulleine or had heard the sound of cannon fire from Isandhlwana, seven or eight miles off, they would be reassured by their first distant sight. If it was Chelmsford's decision to extend his reconnaissance until twilight, he might feel vindicated.

So far as his riders could see at a distance, there would not be a Zulu anywhere near the camp. The first suggestion of disorder would probably be the sight of figures in red tunics, apparently from the native regiments, running from the tents of the officers' compound with bottles, dressing-mirrors, and ceremonial swords. There might even be an exchange of shots before the looters and their trophies disappeared into the dusk. Only when the column reached the perimeter would they have a full sight of the bodies from two armies, concealed at a distance by tall grass.

Unbelieving at first, they would see men whom they had taken leave of that morning now lying open-eyed in death. For all of them, it would be their first experience of a British defeat. What they saw around them would seem like the end of a world. On the garrison ground at the centre of the camp, a reconnaissance would reveal the heads of a dozen of Pulleine's officers set on the ground in a ritual circle, staring blindly outwards across the darkening veldt.

During his own reconnaissance, the hunter had found boxes and sacks of stores broken in the grass. Flour and biscuits, tea and sugar, oats and mealies had been scattered on the earth. The wagon-park was a tableau of confusion. Some of the vehicles had been overturned, others thrown out in all directions. Some of the horses had been killed and some of the oxen lay dead beside the carts. A few were still alive, standing upright in the yoke as if yet awaiting the commands of their drovers. The horseman who had watched the drama had no quarrel with these beasts. He unharnessed them and set them loose to take their chance.

It would be beyond the capacity of Lord Chelmsford's patrol to bury so many dead. Stone cairns must be erected over the worst horrors for decency's sake, but no more. To make even a temporary camp here would be unthinkable. Therefore, as Chelmsford knew, he could only gather as much evidence of the disaster as quickly as possible and then retire to Rorke's Drift. To search the tents of the officers' compound for papers and messages would be a priority. There might be some last signal to explain what had happened at Isandhlwana in those dreadful hours.

The hunter's reconnaissance centred on the wagon-park and the guard tent of Colonel Pulleine. Only a far greater prize would compel a man to explore the rest of the charnel-house the camp had become. In the wagon-park it was not necessary to replace every one of the useless ammunition turn-screws with the originals which he had removed during the previous night. Just enough of those originals must be found there to obscure the criminal cause of the catastrophe for the time being.

Pulleine's tent was the final scene of the hunter's revenge. A scattering of glass fragments on the carpet; a smell of gin. The colonel had fallen after a struggle in his outer tent or day-quarters, where his body lay. Having fired the last chambers of his revolver, he must have fought with his sword until he was impaled twice in the back—through the tent wall. The blows had thrown him forward across the rosewood desk.

In this case, the looters had been too preoccupied at first to attack the body. The drawers of the desk had been wrenched out and smashed. A silver locket lying on the carpet had been overlooked by the victors. It held a woman's picture, probably a woman who had been young ten years before, with a background of summer trees.

No doubt the colonel had spent his final moments at the desk, writing a last testament as his killers closed in—giving as many details of the disaster as possible for the benefit of Lord Chelmsford. Such pages lay under the desk-blotter in an envelope addressed to the Commander-in-Chief at the Cape. The looters had paid no attention to it, and the hunter found the pages intact.

It would have been imprudent to preserve such a testament in any form. At the same time, the least sign of smoke or flame might attract attention. It was enough for the hunter to tear the pages into irregular fragments, crumpling each in his hands as he rode away and, at a distance, scattering the pieces to the breeze of a warm African dusk.