Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (41 page)

A couple of British soldiers were dispatched to the nearby post at Helpmakaar to bring reinforcements. Then the occasional refugees that had escaped Isandhlwana—mostly remnants of the colonial Natal carbineers and mounted police—rode on by the outpost and refused to join in its defense. About one hundred colonial cavalrymen under the command of Lieutenant Vause, who had earlier ridden up from Isandhlwana and taken positions at Rorke’s Drift, suddenly bolted when they saw the size of the Zulu attacking army. Their departure took one hundred potential Martini-Henry rifles from the garrison’s meager defenses. When they fled, Captain Stephenson’s company of native African riflemen also soon fled, along with Stephenson himself and a few noncommissioned European officers. Chard’s men shot one sergeant as he galloped away.

Besides the obvious effect on morale—in the two to three hours between the confirmation of the disaster of Isandhlwana and the attack on the garrison at Rorke’s Drift, the British defenders had witnessed a series of colonial and native troops ride in, spread tales of horror, then flee in terror—the reduction in the number of men for the perimeter defenses changed the entire plan of resistance. If Chard and Bromhead might have had 450 or so troops to man the tiny wall when the news of the impending attack reached them, they were lucky to have even a hundred men either skilled or well enough to fire a rifle—only about one shooter per every twelve feet of the makeshift rampart. Chard quickly determined that the fortifications would need additional interior walls, to serve as an inner sanctum when the thinly manned, mealie-bag outer redoubt was inevitably overwhelmed.

The enemy was especially formidable. An army was approaching of more than 4,000 Zulus under the command of King Cetshwayo’s brother, Prince Dabulamanzi. The latter had broken his brother’s orders on two counts: he was not to enter British-ruled Natal from Zululand—Rorke’s Drift was right across the border—and he was to avoid an assault on any British troops behind ramparts. Although Dabulamanzi found himself in command of two of the older divisions of Cetshwayo’s army—the some 3,000 to 3,500 warriors of the uThulwana and uDloko regiments were mostly married men between forty-one and fifty years of age—he had 1,000 younger unmarried men in their early thirties of the inDlu-yengwe. All had served in the reserve at Isandhlwana. Before the attack on Rorke’s Drift, they had spent the past few hours killing fugitives and the wounded who were crisscrossing the plain in their desperate efforts at escape. After his Zulus were safely across the Buffalo River into Natal, Dabulamanzi quickly united the three divisions and began preparations to have the entire force assault the British outpost. A few of the warriors had had some experience in intertribal fighting of the last decade. Most important, they were relatively fresh and had not seen much action in the slaughter at Isandhlwana, in which a tenth of the Zulu nation’s manhood was wounded or killed in a single afternoon.

All felt they had to dip their spears before returning home, especially given the startling success of their peers at Isandhlwana in breaking the British lines. Finally, a number had their own muskets, and a smaller group had looted some of the nearly eight hundred Martini-Henry rifles and hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition found at Isandhlwana. If sharpshooters could be positioned on Oskarberg hill above the compound to provide covering fire, while the entire mass charged head-on against the weaker parts of the north wall, then the Zulus might take the compound with the first charge.

The unknown problem facing the Zulus, however, was the nature of the troops in B Company of the 24th Regiment holed up at Rorke’s Drift. Like Leonidas’s Spartans at Thermopylae, there was scarcely any chance that they would flee, despite the odds and the macabre battle to come. At least eighty were regular British riflemen and crack shots who could usually hit an individual Zulu warrior at some three hundred yards and knock down a dense mass of swarming fighters at a thousand yards. All were determined to win or die on the spot, and dying was the far more likely scenario, given the overwhelming numbers of the enemy. Why did the British choose to fight under such hopeless conditions? Theirs was a discipline that grew out of the training and regulation of the British army, the fear of and respect for their officers, and the camaraderie and loyalty to one another. Because they were behind makeshift fortifications, the Zulus could not count on outflanking movements and infiltration that had proved so successful at Isandhlwana. To take the compound, the Zulus would have to brave rifle fire and bayonet thrusts, jump over the makeshift walls, and kill all the men in the compound.

The shooting itself would go on steadily for ten hours—British redcoats methodically blasting apart Zulu bodies at close range with .45-caliber rifle fire and slicing through exposed arms, legs, and bellies with razor-sharp bayonet jabs, the Zulus less successfully trying to stab the shoulders or necks of the riflemen on the ramparts with assegai thrusts and hoping that their own snipers might somehow hit the bright redcoats from the slopes above. During the afternoon of the twenty-second and early morning of the twenty-third, Chard and Bromhead would turn their tiny garrison into a veritable firestorm that would pour lead into the bodies of hundreds of Zulu warriors, such killing all predicated on a strict adherence to formal British military practice and discipline that would keep men at the ramparts shooting continuously without respite, their shoulders, arms, and hands blue and bloody from powder burns and the enormous kick of the Martini-Henry rifles.

Sixteen
Hours
at
Rorke’s
Drift

2:30 P.M., January 22, 1879. In the minutes after receiving the news of the slaughter at Isandhlwana, Chard, Bromhead, and Dalton agreed that flight from Rorke’s Drift in slow-moving, ox-drawn wagons with the wounded was impossible. Instead, they ordered all the tents dismantled, but abandoned outside the compound as impediments to the attackers. Next, they surveyed the circumference and quickly planned a wall of defense. The depot’s plentiful supply of heavy biscuit boxes and mealie bags might allow the garrison limited protection—if they could somehow in the next hour or so be stacked chest-high into some type of rampart. Here Chard’s expertise as a Royal Engineer proved invaluable. Immediately, he, Bromhead, and Dalton organized work parties and began building a parapet to connect the two stone buildings, parked wagons, and stone kraal into an oblong circle of defense. Soldiers and the native troopers, who had not yet fled, stacked the boxes (one hundred pounds) and the mealie bags (two hundred pounds) four to five feet high to allow riflemen some protection while aiming and reloading.

The bags were a godsend, since their weight and density meant that bullets could not penetrate the British wall, while it was almost impossible to knock the heavy sacks over. Holes were gouged in the hospital’s outside wall to allow the patients to shoot at the
impis
approaching from the south. In a stunning feat of improvised labor, officers, native soldiers, the sick, and British enlisted men in little more than an hour constructed a barricade of some four hundred yards—all under the threat of imminent annihilation. Fortunately, there was a slight rise on the north side of the compound, and the mealie-bag rampart there incorporated this natural advantage, resulting in a breastwork whose outer face was often over six feet high. No Zulu could vault such a height, but would have to hoist himself over in the face of British bullets and bayonets.

3:30, January 22, 1879.
Chard, who, given his marginal seniority over Bromhead, was exercising command of the defense, returned to the river, collected his small engineering detail that was working on the ferry, brought up the water carriage and tools, and evacuated the landing. While he was now assured by a variety of messengers that thousands of Zulus, who had just massacred a force twenty times larger than his own, were headed his way, neither he nor his men showed any visible signs of panic. Instead, he and Bromhead carefully walked along the circumference of the small makeshift fort, ensuring that the wall was four feet high throughout. Then they ordered work ceased to ensure that the exhausted men could rest before the general assault.

Riflemen of the 24th Regiment were stationed at proper intervals, ammunition pouches filled and piles of additional cartridges heaped at their feet. Bayonets were fixed. The two junior officers, with hardly any experience of Africa, much less of the Zulus, in less than two hours and under the threat of sure destruction, had done the opposite of their senior and more experienced commanders at Isandhlwana—and thus given their vastly outnumbered fighters a chance of survival that the doomed at Isandhlwana never had.

4:30, January 22, 1879.
With the arrival of the Zulus and the first scattered fire, the native and colonial contingents abruptly fled, leaving behind B Company, 2nd Battalion, 24th Regiment, with its skeleton force of fewer than a hundred regular British soldiers, who then had to rearrange themselves on the weakened rampart. Chard realized that the original fortification might soon prove too large a perimeter to hold with vastly reduced forces—he had little more than a hundred able-bodied men, no longer 450—so he constructed a second wall of biscuit boxes, running north and south to connect the storehouse with the north wall, in effect providing a vastly smaller circuit should the northwestern wall be overrun.

5:30, January 22, 1879.
Firing in earnest began on the north mealie-bag wall. Here the British lines were stretched the thinnest, and there was an unfortunate series of natural obstacles—the orchard, fence, a ditch a mere thirty yards away, and some brush and the six-foot wall immediately outside the British defenses—which gave the waves of running Zulus places of cover to coordinate their attack. Meanwhile, from the slopes of Oskarberg to the south, some Zulus with the captured Martini-Henry rifles were shooting at the backs of the British defenders on the north wall and occasionally scoring hits. Crying
“Usuthu! Usuthu!,”
the thousand strong of the inDlu-yengwe sprinted against the south wall. Within minutes the entire outpost was under attack—by sniper fire from Oskarberg hill, by repeated human wave attacks against the ramparts by spearmen, and from sporadic shooting by Zulus hidden in the ditch and behind the fence, buildings, and trees right outside the British wall.

For the next hour and a half, a few dozen British soldiers on the north wall mowed down wave after wave of Zulus, most of whom soon found they could not get over the mealie bags without being shot or bayoneted. The chief problem for the British was the overheating of their rifles. When the Martini-Henry’s barrels slowly began to glow red, the soft brass casings of the cartridges began to expand upon insertion, fouling the breech and sometimes preventing firing, requiring the soldier to ram them out with a cleaning rod—thereby allowing small groups of Zulus to cluster under the bags and begin hoisting each other over the barricade. In response, Bromhead organized interior charges of selected riflemen to bayonet and blast apart Zulus that had leaped over the bags. Most of the growing number of dead and wounded British were shot from the rear by hundreds of Zulus perched on the heights of Oskarberg. Almost no riflemen were killed from Zulu assegais. Had the Zulus coordinated their rifle fire and had they been accurate shots, they could easily have picked off the entire British garrison, inasmuch as they had hundreds of shooters compared to the paltry British firing force of fewer than a hundred.

7:00, January 22, 1879.
At the onset of darkness the hospital was on fire, threatening the patients with incineration, and with its capture the collapse of the entire western rampart. For the next hour or more in a heroic escape, all but eight made it out alive—at just about the time Chard ordered the entire garrison to fall back behind the secondary north-south wall of biscuit boxes. While his reduced force was defending about a third of its original perimeter, an additional—and final—fallback position was hastily fortified. This last refuge consisted of a circular redoubt of mealie bags stacked nine feet high, allowing sanctuary for the hospital evacuees, and a secondary rampart from which to shoot over the heads of the riflemen on the shrinking wall.

Somewhere out on the plain—perhaps only a few thousands yards beyond the Zulu ring—Major Spalding at last rode up with his promised reinforcements from Helpmakaar. But once he saw the glow of the burning hospital and the Zulu throng, he turned around and took his reserves back to Helpmakaar. Apparently, he was convinced that his men and camp were already obliterated. Had Spalding continued, there is a good chance he might have fought his way in to add critical reinforcements at the climax of the battle.

10:00, January 22, 1879.
After nearly five hours of sustained firing, the battle slowly began to favor the British. Lieutenant Chard noted in his official report, “A desultory fire was kept up all night, and several assaults were attempted and repulsed, the vigor of the attack continuing until after midnight. Our men, firing with the greatest coolness, did not waste a single shot, the light afforded by the burning hospital being of great help to us” (
Narrative of Field Operations Connected with the Zulu War of 1879,
46–47).