Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress (54 page)

Frere was a bold and frank expansionist, and in Cape Town he enjoyed the advantages of remoteness. There was no cable from London yet, and telegrams had to come by steamer from the Cape Verde Islands, taking at least 16 days. The next move in the South African drama was accordingly all his own. Ignoring prohibitions from home, behaving as his dauntless predecessors might, long before in India, in January 1879 he carried things a stage further by ordering a British invasion of Zululand, another awkwardly independent segment in the patchwork of South African sovereignty.

The Zulus were still among the most alarming of the African peoples. Dingaan’s grandson Cetewayo was king now: he had been crowned in 1873 by Shepstone himself, as representative of the Great White Queen, with an
ad
hoc
crown like Cakobau’s in Fiji. He himself was not a very military man, but his armies remained ferocious. Their system was based upon an effective combination of universal military service and obligatory blood-lust. No Zulu was considered to be a man until he had ‘washed his spear in blood’, and warriors of the Zulu army were compulsorily celibate until they had killed or wounded an enemy, which made for warlike men and sanguinary women. With their terrible feathered panoplies, the inexorable jogtrot of their advance, the scream and eerie hiss of their war-cries, and the massed black immensity of the impis, organized by age-groups and often 20,000 strong, in which they moved shield to shield across the grand landscape of Zululand, they were among the most spectacular of all the theatrical enemies the British empire felt itself obliged to fight. They had very few guns. They relied upon their heavy assegais, and upon simple tactical manoeuvres—in particular a double encircling movement, in which an enemy found itself, half-paralysed with terror like a hypnotized chicken, swamped by the mass of the Zulu frontal force (‘the chest’) while smaller racing impis (‘the horns’) swept behind to cut off their retreat.

The Zulus were splendid of appearance and very brave, and
there were Englishmen who swore by their integrity. Bishop Colenso was the most famous of Zuluphiles, but scattered throughout Zululand were English traders and missionaries whose lives were in Cetewayo’s hands, and who found themselves treated fairly, even generously. Shepstone, who had lived much of his life among the Zulus, had a high opinion of their abilities: the English trader John Dunn had married into the Zulu royal family and become a Zulu chief himself, ruling over some 10,000 people and maintaining forty-nine wives.
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But they were inconceivably bloodthirsty. To them as to the Ashanti, or to Speke’s lion-stepping king of the Buganda, human life was scarcely sacrosanct. Death was part of the natural order, and could be hastened without degradation. Zulus who broke the kingdom’s rigid social laws were ruthlessly tortured or killed, and captured enemies too found themselves lightly chopped about with assegais. The nation was like a vast black predator lurking in its downlands, now pouncing upon the Swazis or the Basutos, now threatening the British or the Boers. Everybody was scared of the Zulus, and the British in particular were nervous that some grand Zulu washing of the spears might trigger off a native rising throughout South Africa.

Frere had early reached the decision that this ferocious people must be subdued, if South Africa was to be ordered. Carnarvon had resigned in 1878, disagreeing with Disraeli’s policies towards Russia, and his successor as patron of South Africa federation was Sir Michael Hicks Beach, a remote and ineffectual politician. Frere accordingly followed his own instincts. He used as his
casus
belli
an old Boer-Zulu frontier dispute, which had been settled in Cetewayo’s favour by a British commission of inquiry. The disputed land would only be handed over, he told the King, if the Zulus would disband their terrible armies, reform their draconian code of justice, and receive a British Resident at their capital, Ulundi. He demanded, in fact, the disbandment of the old Zulu order, and the abdication of
its military power. Such a demand was, of course, no surprise. Cetewayo must have expected it sooner or later; even Colenso recognized its inevitability, and approved the ultimatum. The Zulus were given thirty days to reply, and when no answer came, in January 1879 three columns of the British Army, 16,000 strong, crossed the northern frontier of Natal, and invaded Zululand.

Lord Chelmsford was the British commander in this, perhaps the best-known of the colonial wars, and many another military figure now familiar to us haunts the background of the drama—Butler, Buller, Colley, the ubiquitous Wolseley. Chelmsford was born Frederick Thesiger, of a family which had emigrated to England from Saxony a century before, and he had enjoyed a conventionally varied imperial career: in Canada, in India, in Ireland, in Abyssinia. He had married the daughter of an Indian Army general, had commanded at Aldershot, and was exceptional among the often choleric commanders of the day for his qualities of reticent tact and sympathy.

But tact and sympathy, alas, were the last qualities needed to crush the merciless Cetewayo, who had 50,000 men under arms, and who had once replied to a mild British protest about the frequency of executions in Zululand: ‘Do not consider that I have done anything yet in the way of killing…. I have not yet begun; I have yet to kill; it is the custom of our nation and I shall not depart from it’. The fascination of the Zulu War is its confrontation of temperamental opposites, each fighting by their own military standards a war of text-book orthodoxy. If the Ashanti campaign was like an exhibition war, this was like a war in fiction, so wonderfully apposite were its settings, and so faithfully did its shape conform to dramatic unities. There were three memorable battles: each meant something different to the British, and together they composed a pattern of action that was to become almost compulsory in the later campaigns of the British Empire—the opening tragedy, the heroic redemption, the final crushing victory.

The tragedy was Isandhlwana. Setting off into the uplands of Zululand in the glorious stimulation of a South African January, Lord
Chelmsford meant to make this a quick war of attrition. He wanted to destroy the impis wherever they were, and with all the paraphernalia of the Victorian wars, the heavy guns and the traction engines and Hale’s patent rockets, the great shire horses brought specially from England, the inescapable naval brigade, the customary cloud of locally recruited irregulars or militia-men, the worldly-wise columns of redcoats, he made straight for Ulundi, but hoped to meet and obliterate the main body of the Zulu army on the way. He himself commanded the central column of the force, entering Zululand at a crossing over the Buffalo River called Rorke’s Drift, where an Irish farmer had built a store thirty years before, and where there was now a mission house. Ten miles beyond the ford the soldiers reached a level plain among the Nqutu Hills, and there, where the track ascended northwards towards a saddle in the ridge, they pitched camp.

This was Isandhlwana. It was a place of grim magnificence. Above the plain there arose a crook-backed mountain, whose outline was unmistakable, and could be seen crouching tawnily among the low surrounding ridges from far away across the downs. The plain itself, rising gently towards the peak, was enclosed by folded hills, pierced here and there by ravines to the wider flatlands beyond. A shallow stream ran across it, but gave no sparkle to the scene, and there were few trees to be seen—only the brown and shaly ground, the shadowed ridges all around, and the ominous crooked silhouette of the mountain above. Isandhlwana looked just what it proved to be: a killing ground. The British pitched camp there without laagering or entrenching, despite advice they had been given by the Boers, who knew all about Zulu wars. Instead pickets were posted, mounted vedettes were dispatched to the surrounding heights, and a guard was set on the saddle beside the peak, with a view up the trade to the north.

There was no sign of the enemy on the night of January 20, but next day a reconnaissance force clashed with an impi to the northwest, and Chelmsford himself, hoping he might have found the main enemy force, marched off over the hill with about half his men. As a result almost all the others died: for while the general was away, on January 22, 1879, the main body of Cetewayo’s army did
indeed appear—some 20,000 warriors, pouring in a black and feathered mass over the Isandhlwana ridge, sweeping aside pickets and outposts as they advanced upon the plain. Most of the British soldiers had never seen Zulu fighting men before, and the experience was nightmarish. They were like people from another world. They wore ear-flaps of green monkey-skin, otter-skin headbands, high ostrich plumes—they carried shields covered with white hide, or red with white spots—they moved at a horrible changeless trot, rattling their assegais against their shields, hissing between their teeth, and shouting ‘
Usuthu!
Usuthu!
’—Cetewayo’s personal warcry.

It was war of the most bestial kind. Thousands of Zulus died in the British rifle-fire, but nothing could stop them: when they reached the lines they slashed about them indiscriminately with their assegais, while the British fought desperately back with bayonets and rifle-butts. All over the plain isolated groups of redcoats were surrounded, helplessly struggling, by masses of feathered black men. Sometimes the Zulus threw their own dead in front of them to blunt the bayonets; the British, split, shattered and disorganized, fell back in twos and threes to wagons, or tents, or hid terrified among the field kitchens, or fought to the death all alone, bayoneting and bludgeoning to the last. Some ran away out of the camp circuit, stumbling down the track towards Rorke’s Drift and safety, but when they crossed the southern ridge they found another force of Zulus waiting for them on the other side, and they were hunted down relentlessly, in and out of gulleys, across streams, crouching in scrub, hounded over cliffs or speared one by one as they fell in exhaustion beside the track.

When Chelmsford returned stunned to Isandhlwana that night, he found the camp a silent smoking ruin—a shamble of burnt wagons, broken tents, rubbish and corpses. The British dead had been disembowelled: most of the Zulus had been dragged away over the hills. Of the Europeans Lord Chelmsford had left in the camp, only fifty-five had escaped, and were now scattered somewhere between the battlefield and the Natal border. Six companies of the 2nd Warwickshire Regiment had been entirely obliterated: in all 858 Britons had died, together with some 470 men of the native
levies. It was the worst disaster to British arms since the Afghan tragedy of 1842, and the news of it, reaching England three weeks later, plunged the nation into bewildered mourning. Disraeli took to his bed with depression, and the cause of imperialism suffered a distinct if temporary setback.
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But it was already a British practice to balance disaster with triumph—losing every battle but the last, it was popularly called. As a sustainer of morale it was wonderfully successful, and as a historic device it made wars much more interesting—Henry Knollys the historian observed of one rather too successful colonial war that ‘the exploit was unaccompanied by reverse or blunder, and without these features it is in vain to hope for enthusiasm and interest’. Only a little triumph was necessary, to restore the nation’s pride, and indeed no triumph could be much smaller than the second of the Zulu War battles, the defence of Rorke’s Drift, which has gone into the language as a synonym of British heroism, and in which rather more than 100 Britons were involved (most of them Welshmen at that). As one contemporary poet wrote of this almost imperceptible success, 

While the slaughter was proceeding at Isandhlwana, the post at Rorke’s Drift, ten miles to the rear, was held by a company of the 24th Regiment under two subalterns, Lieutenant John Chard and Lieutenant Gonville Bromhead. They heard the gunfire of the battle up the track, and learnt of the disaster when the first terrified refugees arrived at the river bank opposite the little group of buildings—a few to join the Rorke’s Drift garrison, the rest to career wildly past without stopping, back to the safety of Natal. It was plain that the impis, when they had obliterated the Isandhlwana camp, buried their dead and licked their wounds, would next fall upon the Drift, and hastily the two subalterns fortified their little command, intended only as a rear-station for Lord Chelmsford’s advance, with sandbags, sacks of mealie and biscuit boxes. The three buildings lay in the flank of a hill, the Oskarberg; the Buffalo river ran, out of sight, about 100 yards away; from a short way up the track the silhouette of Isandhlwana mountain could be seen, with a wreath of smoke now rising ominously about it. The whole defensible area was hardly more than 100 yards square, and the garrison included a chaplain, five invalids, and a contingent of African levies.

Late in the afternoon of January 22, the same day as the Isandhlwana battle, lookouts on the Oskarberg saw impis approaching—one wing of the Isandhlwana force, perhaps 4,000 men—led by two chiefs on white horses, and moving in their fatal tireless rhythm towards the post. The Zulus had tactics but no strategy: if they had crossed into Natal they might have created havoc, but their killing instinct directed them blindly towards Rorke’s Drift, where there was blood to be drawn. ‘Here they come!’ one of the British sentries cried as he raced down the hillside—‘black as hell and thick as grass!’ At their first glimpse of this terrible sight all the African levies abandoned their posts, vaulted the barricades and vanished: the 110 Britons left behind just had time to reorganize themselves around their perimeter when a thousand Zulus appeared around the flank of the Oskarberg and attacked the back of the post, while a moment later 3,000 more charged screaming from the front.