Soldier of the Queen (36 page)

‘What’s that bloody idiot expecting?’ he growled. There were still twinges where the Ashanti’s bent nail had entered his back.

‘He’s to form a column. Hetty Cosgro said that when Thesiger went up to Natal, he found its defences in a terrible state.’

He frowned. ‘They are,’ he admitted. ‘If it does come to a go, the only defence is an invasion of Zululand and he’s applied for more troops and regular cavalry.’

She studied him carefully, her face troubled, her mind full of unexpected fears. ‘I still think you ought to apply for leave in England,’ she said. ‘I have a feeling. And I think you men all believe that with your smart uniforms and your guns and training, this war’s going to be easy. I have a feeling it isn’t.’

He studied her curiously. ‘What makes you think that?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe it’s because, coming from the States, I see the wood without seeing the trees. We fought Indians, and I remember what they did to Custer. It seems to me it’s going to be pretty hard to pin down people as mobile as the Zulus.’

He stared at her with amusement. ‘Where did you do your staff training?’ he grinned. ‘That’s what Thesiger thinks, too. The only way to do it is by having several columns all starting from different places.’

‘To stop the Zulus slipping into Natal?’

Colby’s smile died. ‘No. To insure they’ll attack one of them.’

‘And then what?’

‘They’ll be smashed by superior fire power.’

‘Suppose they aren’t? Suppose everybody’s rifle jams? Micah once said that at Antietam they fired so long they ended up with guns that wouldn’t work.’

‘Gussie, it won’t take that much firing to destroy savages.’

‘I expect that’s what Custer said, too’ Augusta gazed at him anxiously, close to tears. ‘I’ve met a few of those people you rely on. They’re not all as good as you.’

He frowned. ‘No,’ he agreed. ‘They’re not. Morrow’s an ass for a start. Pulleine’s inclined to be too careful. Durnford’s too hot-headed. Hamilton-Browne’s a boor. Some of the volunteer units don’t much like discipline either and the Boers are insisting that if it comes to war we’ll need to concentrate on distant scouting to locate the Zulu impis at all.’

‘I expect that’ll be you. They’ll push you out miles ahead of the army so you can get yourself killed.’ She stamped on his foot deliberately to show her anger.

Colby quietly took the cotton wool and the antiseptic from her and put them down, then he put his arms round her. ‘Shoving your off hind down on my toe don’t prove anything,’ he chided gently. ‘The war hasn’t even started yet and the frock coats are bound to come down on the side of the Zulus over the boundary, because they don’t like the Boers any more than they do the Kaffirs.’

Despite everybody’s insistence that the Zulus didn’t want trouble and had no intention of harming Natal, clearly nobody was taking any chances and the army was put on a war footing just in case.

As it began to move north, Augusta watched the local newspaper with worried eyes. Considering that everyone felt there was going to be no war, it seemed to her that they were all taking a lot of pains to be ready for one.

‘If there
is
a war,’ she asked. ‘Can I go to Durban?’

‘What on earth for?’

Colby looked at her in surprise and she felt an unkind desire to brain him. In his absorption in the movements of the army, he was showing no interest in her worries; and she was furious, because she knew he could be a help if he tried. It seemed to raise a barrier between them so that the things she wished to say had to be left unsaid and she had to content herself with snapping at him.

‘Is it so odd that I should wish to be close to my husband?’ she said sharply. ‘Durban’s only a hundred and fifty miles from the army. East London’s five hundred. I’m thinking of my family. I like ’em all together – you included.’

He gave her a quick unexpected grin. ‘Make sure you’re not letting those maternal instincts of yours come between you and common sense,’ he said. ‘Stop worrying.’

She stared at him indignantly, aware in the nervous mood that held her of a strong desire to kick him. ‘I
feel
like worrying,’ she said. ‘I’m scared.’

‘What of?’

She shook her head in a distressed way, as if trying to jolt her thoughts into some sort of order from the disorder they were in. In her unhappiness, the one fear that always lay at the back of her mind came to the surface.

‘I don’t know. Perhaps it’s because I feel I shall never be part of the regiment. Perhaps it’s because I’m American and don’t see it the same way everybody else does.’

He tried to understand her but, brought up in the regiment as he had been, he found it impossible. As he kissed her, her arms went round him.

‘Please! Let me go to Durban!’

‘All right,’ he said. ‘I see no reason why not. Headquarters’ll be at Pietermaritzburg or somewhere like that, so Durban won’t be far away and I might get down to see you.’

The threat of war didn’t die down and it began to seem even that a few of the government officials like Theophilus Shepstone and Bartle Frere were actually eager to have a fight to bump up their own reputations. Towards the end of the year Colby received orders to take the North Cape Horse to the northern corner of Natal.

As he vanished, Augusta flung herself into the business of packing and within three days her family plus the Ackroyds were on a ship heading for Durban. It wasn’t hard to find a house to rent, because the town was growing fast and, while there was an influx of officers’ wives and families, there was also an exodus of people who preferred not to be around if the Zulus invaded.

They found a house on the road to Verulam and were waiting there when Colby arrived at Port Natal. The children greeted him with delight and Augusta flung herself into his arms.

‘What’s all this for?’ he demanded.

‘Well, there
is
going to be a war, isn’t there?’

He had to admit that it looked like it. ‘But there’s nothing to worry about,’ he went on. ‘They’re a savage nation and we’ve defeated savages time and time again: India. Burma. China. The Maoris. The Abyssinians. The Ashantis. The Afghans. Why not this time?’

She lifted her face to him and he saw the unease in it. She seemed in a state of near-panic. She felt cold and stiff and twice her age because she knew he was fibbing shamelessly to bolster up her morale. For a moment she felt like weeping but she was too afraid for tears. ‘I had a dream before I left Cape Town,’ she said. ‘I had it again last night. I dreamed you were shot. Then I saw a man holding up his arm and there was a spear sticking in his side. It came out near his throat. Colby,
could
you be shot?’

‘What with?’ Colby laughed. ‘They’ve only got cheap trade flintlocks. Birmingham gas-pipes we call them.’

‘You were shot by a gas-pipe gun on the Gold Coast. You were shot by a gas-pipe gun at Kammansinga. And this time you’re not facing a few scattered tribesmen. You’re facing a whole nation. Besides–’

‘Besides what?’

She turned her face from him. Suddenly she was sagging with weariness, shadowy hollows under her eyes. ‘Nothing,’ she said.

‘Are you still afraid?’

‘Yes.’

‘What about?’

‘You’d be surprised.’ She drew a deep breath and managed a half-hearted grin at him. ‘It was nothing. It was silly, I guess. It doesn’t matter.’ She turned her face away again, her expression obscured. ‘Where would the fighting be, Colby?’

‘We’d have to burn the royal kraal and capture Cetzewayo. No other kind of defeat would be recognised by the Zulus. But we’ll have over sixteen thousand men in four or five separate columns. They reckon the Zulu army’s no more than twenty thousand.’

‘If you have four or five separate columns, it means there’d be no more than about three thousand men to each, doesn’t it?’ In her worry her eyes seemed enormous. ‘What happens if the whole Zulu army drops on them one at a time?’

It was quite a point. He couldn’t find an answer and was careful to dodge the question. ‘Perhaps there won’t be a war, after all,’ he said.

Despite the Boundary Commission’s view, however, as Colby had suspected, the political authorities were intent on fighting. When the boundary award was read out, the Zulus were satisfied because their claims were largely upheld and they were actually preparing to depart to their kraals when they were summoned back and told that their army must be disbanded and their military system broken up. It was clear at once that the ultimatum was the death knell of Zulu independence and that they would resist it.

Colby vanished into the blue a week later, after a hasty visit to Durban to say goodbye to his family. After growing used to Augusta’s courage, he was worried to find her still in a tearful mood and he could only assume she was tired or that the enervating heat of subtropical Durban was too much for her.

It was a strange army he rode with. There was not a single troop of Imperial cavalry – chiefly, he suspected, because the army in England, designed for Continental warfare, was ill adapted for native wars – and there seemed a proliferation of volunteers raised by the colonials and consisting for the most part of small outfits with grandiose names, little training and precarious discipline which might well collapse in an emergency. The native troops mostly still carried only assegais and wore nothing but their tribal dress, and they could barely form a straight line, had horses that were gun-shy and NCOs who for the most part were on horseback for the first time. Ulundi, where Cetzewayo ruled, was only seventy-five miles away across the Tugela River which bordered the colony, and a well-mounted man could ride there in a day at a pinch, but with the British government as usual willing to accept an inefficiently conducted campaign but never an expensive one, they were stuck with ox-drawn transport with which they would take all of a month and perhaps longer.

As the units moved to their assigned positions, orders came for Colby to take the North Cape Horse to Balte Spruit in the north-west corner of the colony and on the edge of the disputed tribal land, where Evelyn Wood had established a camp from which he could lead into Zululand. As he rode out of Pietermaritzburg, the 24th Foot were also marching out for Helpmakaar, their colours flying, their band playing ‘I’m Leaving Thee In Sorrow, Annie’, which he’d last heard at the Burtle House in Virginia as he’d ridden off to Yellow Tavern with Micah Love’s regiment. Volunteer cavalry and Boer burgher units were jogging along in front of him, dressed for the most part in anything that took their fancy. Astern were native cavalry and native infantry, their uniforms varying from an old jacket and trousers to a leopard skin and a couple of ostrich feathers. Batteries of little seven-pounders and the heavier guns of the 5th Artillery Brigade bounced and rattled behind their teams.

Where the road turned north-east towards the border, he was surprised to see Ackroyd waiting for him. He rode a roman-nosed grey and sat in the saddle with the erectness of a cavalry-trained rider, so that it wasn’t hard to imagine him, despite his thickening middle, still wearing the green regimentals and flat-topped schapka of the 19th.

‘What the hell are you doing here?’ Colby asked. ‘Something wrong with my wife?’

Ackroyd grinned. ‘Not on your life, sir,’ he said. ‘But she’s got my missis to look after ’er, to say nothin’ of ’alf a dozen Kaffirs. There’s also the wife of Captain Moss, of the 9th, ’oo’s with the Central Column, on one side of ’er, and on the other the wife of a naval commander from
Colossus
, what’s operatin’ from Durban docks. Under the circumstances, I could ’ardly let you go off to war on your own, could I?’

Colby stared at him for a moment, frowning, then as he spurred his horse past without speaking, Ackroyd quietly tagged on behind.

Rorke’s Drift was full of troops gathering for the advance, and Thesiger – Lord Chelmsford since the death of his father – had commandeered the old mission station with its little stone church and thatched houses as a base. The artillery came in and they formed camp on the ground below, a rash of hospital wagons, field bakeries, veterinary units and engineers, setting up their lines on the grassy slopes below the Oskarberg.

Resting the night at the Drift, the North Cape Horse rode on the next day to Bemba’s Kop where Wood had moved. He was suffering from a headache and a fever and greeted Colby gloomily.

‘Nice to see you, Coll,’ he said, though his tone of voice implied that Colby was just one more worry. ‘We’ve been asked to make a demonstration up here to hold down the northern tribes. I’m going to use Buller’s people to scout ahead and move north-east to the Umfalozi.’

The countryside was largely rolling plainland and was swarming with independent Zulu impis. Wood had his eye on a chain of hills across the route to Ulundi which were said to contain more Zulus, and as they moved towards the river late in January they became aware at once of large forces of black warriors in the vicinity of a stone kraal. Immediately, the atmosphere changed. Wood was an expert native fighter and he moved warily because the area could hide the enemy as securely as forests or mountains. A faint roll of ground was deceptive, and a whole impi could hide itself at a distance of a few hundred yards in a place that seemed at first glance as flat as a plate.

While the North Cape Horse flanked the position, Wood scrambled at dawn up on to the hills. By early afternoon, he was back and in a hurry.

‘There are four thousand of ’em drilling on the slopes of Hlobane,’ he said.

The presence of the Zulus appeared to worry him and when Buller brought in prisoners that evening, his anxiety increased.

‘Cetzewayo’s main impi left Ulundi on the 17th,’ Buller reported. ‘They mustered at Nodwengu and bivouacked on the White Umfalozi.’

‘Lord Chelmsford knows all that,’ Wood said. ‘I informed him some time ago. What else do they say?’

‘They’re heading for Isipezi Hill and ought to come down across Chelmsford’s route from the north-east about the 23rd.’

‘How many of them are there?’