The Making Of The British Army (38 page)
Read The Making Of The British Army Online
Authors: Allan Mallinson
War with the Zulu had been precipitated – intentionally or not – by the new high commissioner for South Africa, Sir Bartle Frere. The Transvaal had recently been annexed for the Crown by the Natal administration, and Frere believed the Zulu army of some 40,000 astonishingly well-disciplined warriors posed a grave threat to the security of the new British territory, for there had been constant border skirmishing between them and the predominantly Cape Dutch settlers in the Transvaal for years.
The Zulu were quite unlike any enemy that the army had faced. The individual warrior was formidably brave, not least because death awaited him at the hands of a superior if he once faltered in battle. Their
impis –
regiments – could move across country at a steady jogtrot for days on end. They attacked in ‘horns of the buffalo’ formation, fronting with a paralysing mass of spearmen – the head or breast of the
buffalo – with a horde of others sweeping round both flanks like the horns of the beast to prevent escape. To defeat them, firepower was everything. To be caught off-balance by an
impi
meant certain destruction.
The military commander in South Africa was Lieutenant-General the Lord Chelmsford, a soldier of wide experience who had recently brought yet another Cape frontier war with the Xhosa to a successful end.
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In January 1879 he marched into Zululand with 17,000 British and native troops in five columns. The centre column, 5,000 strong with Chelmsford at their head, began crossing the Buffalo River by the ponts at Rorke’s Drift on the eleventh, and by the twenty-first were encamped on the plain of Isandhlwana. Fatally, they did not dig in – a precaution that no Roman legion would have failed to take, no matter how hard the ground, and even if they too had been armed with the rapid-fire Martini – Henry rifle which had replaced the Minié and the Enfield.
At Rorke’s Drift, once all the columns had passed, Chard’s orders were ‘to select a suitable position protecting the ponts for Captain Rainsforth’s Company 1/24th to entrench itself’. And having done this, Chard decided to go and seek further orders from his sapper superior at Isandhlwana. While he was there,
An N.C.O. of the 24th Regiment lent me a field glass, which was a very good one, and I also looked with my own, and could see the enemy moving on the distant hills, and apparently in great force. Large numbers of them moving to my left, until the lion hill of Isandhlwana, on my left as I looked at them, hid them from my view. The idea struck me that they might be moving in the direction between the camp and Rorke’s Drift and prevent my getting back, and also they might be going to make a dash at the ponts.
Chard returned at once to Rorke’s Drift where the officer in command, Major Spalding of the 104th Foot, formerly the Bengal Fusiliers, instructed him to take command (for Chard, although a sapper whereas Bromhead was an infantryman, and older, was the senior in service by three years) while he went to bring reinforcements from nearby Helpmekaar: ‘Nothing will happen, and I shall be back
again early this evening,’ said Spalding encouragingly. Chard wrote:
I then went down to my tent by the river, had some lunch comfortably, and was writing a letter home when my attention was called to two horsemen galloping towards us from the direction of Isandhlwana. From their gesticulation and their shouts, when they were near enough to be heard, we saw that something was the matter, and on taking them over the river, one of them, Lieutenant Adendorff of Lonsdale’s Regiment, Natal Native Contingent, asking if I was an officer, jumped off his horse, took me on one side, and told me that the camp was in the hands of the Zulus and the army destroyed; that scarcely a man had got away to tell the tale, and that probably Lord Chelmsford and the rest of the column had shared the same fate. His companion, a Carbineer, confirmed his story. He was naturally very excited and I am afraid I did not, at first, quite believe him, and intimated that he probably had not remained to see what did occur. I had the saddle put on my horse, and while I was talking to Lieutenant Adendorff, a messenger arrived from Lieutenant Bromhead, who was with his company at his little camp near the commissariat stores, to ask me to come up at once.
Chard then gave orders for the waggons to be ‘inspanned’ – hitched up to the draught animals – and posted a serjeant and six men on high ground to cover the ponts, before galloping for the cluster of buildings at the mission station where the commissariat stores had been dumped. There he found a message from the Isandhlwana column
that the enemy were advancing in force against our post. Lieutenant Bromhead had, with the assistance of Mr. Dalton [commissary officer], Dr. Reynolds [medical officer] and the other officers present, commenced barricading and loopholing the store building and the missionary’s house, which was used as a hospital, and connecting the defence of the two buildings by walls of mealie bags, and two wagons that were on the ground. The Native Contingent, under their officer, Captain Stephenson, were working hard at this with our own men, and the walls were rapidly progressing.
Breathless fugitives continued to arrive with news from Isandhlwana, and just after four o’clock firing was heard from beyond the Oscarberg, the heights that overlooked the drift, for some of the Zulus had Brown Bess muskets acquired from traders (they had not yet, contrary to some accounts, taken up the Martini–Henrys from the
dead troops at Isandhlwana). Most of the native contingent and their white officer promptly deserted.
We seemed very few now all these people had gone, and I saw that our line of defence was too extended, and at once commenced a retrenchment of biscuit boxes, so as to get a place we could fall back upon if we could not hold the whole.
Private Hitch, 24th, was on top of the thatch roof of the commissariat store keeping a look-out. He was severely wounded early in the evening, but notwithstanding, with Corporal Allen, 24th, who was also wounded, continued to do good service, and they both when incapacitated by their wounds from using their rifles, still continued under fire serving their comrades with ammunition. We had not completed a wall two boxes high when, about 4.30 p.m., Hitch cried out that the enemy was in sight, and he saw them, apparently 500 or 600 in number, come around the hill to our south (the Oscarberg) and advance at a run against our south wall.
We opened fire on them, between five and six hundred yards, at first a little wild, but only for a short time, a chief on horseback was dropped by Private Dunbar, 24th. The men were quite steady, and the Zulus began to fall very thick. However, it did not seem to stop them at all, although they took advantage of the cover and ran stooping with their faces near the ground. It seemed as if nothing would stop them, and they rushed on in spite of their heavy loss to within 50 yards of the wall, when they were taken in flank by the fire from the end wall of the store building, and met with such a heavy direct fire from the mealie wall, and the hospital at the same time, that they were checked as if by magic.
They occupied the cook house ovens, banks and other cover, but the greater number, without stopping, moved to their left around the hospital, and made a rush at the end of the hospital, and at our north-west line of mealie bags. There was a short but desperate struggle during which Mr. Dalton shot a Zulu who was in the act of assegaing a corporal of the Army Hospital Corps, the muzzle of whose rifle he had seized, and with Lieutenant Bromhead and many of the men behaved with great gallantry. The Zulus forced us back from that part of the wall immediately in front of the hospital, but after suffering very severely in the struggle were driven back into the bush around our position.
The main body of the enemy were close behind the first force which appeared, and had lined the ledge of rocks and caves in the Oscarberg overlooking us, and about three or four hundred yards to our south, from where they kept up a constant fire. Advancing somewhat more to their left than the
first attack, they occupied the garden, hollow road, and bush in great force. The bush grew close to our wall and we had not had time to cut it down. The enemy were thus able to advance under cover close to our wall, and in this part soon held one side of the wall, while we held the other.A series of desperate assaults were made, on the hospital, and extending from the hospital, as far as the bush reached; but each was most splendidly met and repulsed by our men, with the bayonet. Each time as the attack was repulsed by us, the Zulus close to us seemed to vanish in the bush, those some little distance off keeping up a fire all the time. Then, as if moved by a single impulse, they rose up in the bush as thick as possible rushing madly up to the wall (some of them being already close to it), seizing, where they could, the muzzles of our men’s rifles, or their bayonets, and attempting to use their assegais and to get over the wall. A rapid rattle of fire from our rifles, stabs with the bayonet, and in a few moments the Zulus were driven back, disappearing in the bush as before, and keeping up their fire. A brief interval and the attack would be again made, and repulsed in the same manner. Over and over again this happened, our men behaving with the greatest coolness and gallantry …
For all that the duke of Wellington had not wanted the infantry’s rank and file to call themselves ‘riflemen’ – certain that it was volley fire that decided matters – when an enemy as numerous as the Zulus closed with the firing line it was individual weapon handling and marksmanship that counted. Otherwise it would soon come to a duel between bayonet and
iklwa
, the Zulu’s short stabbing spear – or rather, a contest between a single bayonet and a great many spears. Of the defenders’ skill at arms Chard goes on:
Our fire at the time of these rushes of the Zulus was very rapid. Mr. Dalton dropping a man each time he fired his rifle, while Bromhead and myself used our revolvers. The fire from the rocks and caves on the hill behind us was kept up all this time and took us completely in reverse, and although very badly directed, many shots came among us and caused us some loss, and at about 6.00 p.m. the enemy extending their attack further to their left, I feared seriously would get it over our wall behind the biscuit boxes. I ran back with two or three men to this part of the wall and was immediately joined by Bromhead with two or three more. The enemy stuck to this assault most tenaciously, and on their repulse, and retiring into the bush, I called all the men inside our retrenchment and the enemy immediately occupied the wall we had abandoned and used it as a breastwork to fire over.
Mr. Byrne, acting Commissariat Officer, and who had behaved with great coolness and gallantry, was killed instantaneously shortly before this by a bullet through the head, just after he had given a drink of water to a wounded man of the NNC.
All this time the enemy had been attempting to fire the hospital and had at length set fire to its roof and got in at the far end …
The garrison of the hospital defended it with the greatest gallantry, room by room, bringing out all the sick that could be moved, and breaking through some of the partitions while the Zulus were in the building with them. Privates Williams, Hook, R. Jones and W. Jones being the last to leave and holding the doorway with the bayonet, their ammunition being expended. Private Williams’s bayonet was wrenched off his rifle by a Zulu, but with the other men he still managed with the muzzle of his rifle to keep the enemy at bay. Surgeon Reynolds carried his arms full of ammunition to the hospital, a bullet striking his helmet as he did so. But we were too busily engaged outside to be able to do much, and with the hospital on fire, and no free communication, nothing could have saved it. Sergeant Maxfield 24th might have been saved, but he was delirious with fever, refused to move and resisted the attempts to move him. He was assegaid before our men’s eyes.
Seeing the hospital burning, and the attempts of the enemy to fire the roof of the store … we converted two large heaps of mealie bags into a sort of redoubt which gave a second line of fire all around, in case the store building had to be abandoned, or the enemy broke through elsewhere …
Trooper Hunter, Natal Mounted Police, escaping from the hospital, stood still for a moment, hesitating which way to go, dazed by the glare of the burning hospital, and the firing that was going on all around. He was assegaid before our eyes, the Zulu who killed him immediately afterwards falling. While firing from behind the biscuit boxes, Dalton, who had been using his rifle with deadly effect, and by his quickness and coolness had been the means of saving many men’s lives, was shot through the body. I was standing near him at the time, and he handed me his rifle so coolly that I had no idea until afterwards of how severely he was wounded. He waited quite quietly for me to take the cartridges he had left out of his pockets. We put him inside our mealie sack redoubt, building it up around him. About this time I noticed Private Dunbar 24th make some splendid shooting, seven or eight Zulus falling on the ledge of rocks in the Oscarberg to as many consecutive shots by him. I saw Corporal Lyons hit by a bullet which lodged in his spine, and fall between an opening we had left in the wall of biscuit boxes. I thought he was killed, but looking up he said, ‘Oh, Sir! You are not going to leave me here like a dog?’ We pulled him in
and laid him down behind the boxes where he was immediately looked to by Reynolds. Corporal Scamle [Scammell] of the Natal Native Contingent, who was badly wounded through the shoulder, staggered out under fire again, from the store building where he had been put, and gave me all his cartridges, which in his wounded state he could not use. While I was intently watching to get a fair shot at a Zulu who appeared to be firing rather well, Private Jenkins 24th, saying ‘Look out, Sir,’ gave my head a duck down just as a bullet whizzed over it. He had noticed a Zulu who was quite near in another direction taking a deliberate aim at me. For all the man could have known, the shot might have been directed at himself. I mention these facts to show how well the men behaved and how loyally worked together …
