Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (43 page)

Often initial and tiny expeditionary forces, due to European arrogance in command, overreliance on mere technology, and ignorance about the enormous size of indigenous armies, were slaughtered—the
Noche Triste
and Isandhlwana could be matched by countless other debacles in Indochina, America, central Africa, and India. The later sale of European firearms at times during the nineteenth century gave native peoples some respite, such as the slaughter of American cavalrymen at Little Big Horn (1876), the British debacle at Maiwand in Afghanistan (1880), and the Ethiopian victory over the Italians at Adwa (1896). But such European setbacks—the great majority confined to the latter nineteenth century when easily operated repeating rifles and plentiful cartridges were traded freely with indigenous peoples—were almost immediately followed by renewed attacks of wiser, better-equipped, and better-led Western armies that sought not merely more land but, as purported vengeance, the entire conquest and at times destruction of a people.

Throughout colonial fighting, the desecration of European dead after an initial defeat—the sacrificed Spaniards on the pyramids of Mexico City, the disemboweled at Isandhlwana, the decapitated British at Khartoum—was felt to be cause enough later to give no quarter and to annihilate, as long as the Europeans slaughtered in pitched battle according to their ideas of fair rules of engagement. Almost always, Europeans were outraged when they discovered the decapitated, scalped, or disemboweled corpses from their small overrun garrisons. They felt that such mutilation—outside of battle, committed against the dead, inclusive of women and children—was a far more depraved act than their blasting apart the bodies of indigenous warriors with cannon and rifle fire—acts committed in battle against the living warrior class.

Tribal leaders such as Montezuma, Crazy Horse, and Cetshwayo occasionally appear as sympathetic figures in European chronicles. Native written accounts do not exist other than in oral interviews collated by Christian missionaries and explorers. Indigenous leaders often naïvely announced that the repulse of European interlopers might mean an end to hostilities, clueless that their own temporary victory over an advance European force sealed their fate against a second wave of Westerners who welcomed the pretext of revenge to cement their plans of conquest.

Cannibalism and human sacrifice, the mutilation of the dead, murdering prisoners, idol worship, polygamy, and the absence of written law were typically cited as pretexts for European annexation of territory during their four centuries of colonialism in the Americas, Asia, and Africa. Unlike their adversaries, the French, Spanish, and British announced that they killed thousands reluctantly and as an unavoidable precursor for improving the lot of indigenous peoples through the difficult process of Westernization. Missionaries, high church officials, and intellectuals in Britain objected to the rapacity of empire building, but sought remedy through amelioration or assimilation rather than withdrawal: Zulus should be Westernized, made into civilized British subjects, and thus protected under the law from both imperial oppression and their own indigenous savagery. Few, if any, of the most liberal critics counseled that the Europeans should go home and leave the Zulus in peace—or as the case might be, free to murder and to continue tribal war among their own.

Usually, a Cortés or Chelmsford found plenty of indigenous allies to help his cause, as Europeans sought to target first the most numerous and warlike tribes of the region to be conquered, on the theory that the fall of an Aztec or a Zulu nation would end native unrest in the environs and find sympathetic allies among those who had previously been brutalized by just such warlike regimes. Providing firearms or European material goods to natives also ensured that there were always plentiful tribal contingents in the Americas or Africa who would join in on European expeditions, eager for plunder, safety from their enemies, and a continuous supply of other sundries from Western traders. Nor should we forget that many natives, victims of decades of tribal slaughter, hated the Aztecs and Zulus far more than they did the Europeans.

The fighting itself, at least in these first-generation colonial struggles, had a typical scenario which pitted technology and discipline against courage and numbers. Thus, the Zulus, like the Aztecs, did not manufacture their own firearms and did not understand Western decisive battle in which lines of soldiers sought to charge or fire in careful unison, and to do so in order and on command before, during, and after the melee. The Zulus had captured or traded for guns for decades, but the British idea of sustained and regular mass volleys—itself a result of careful training and a comprehensive system of discipline—was entirely alien to the African manner of war. Even with the use of some eight hundred modern Martini-Henry rifles and hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition taken after Isandhlwana, Zulu marksmanship remained sporadic, inaccurate, and nearly always ineffective.

In theory the Zulu nation after Isandhlwana was as well armed as the remnants of the British center column and twenty times more numerous. But just as the Ottoman harquebusiers at Lepanto never mastered the European practice of massed musketry formation and firing in unison, so Zulu sharpshooters saw firearms as simply a more effective indigenous weapon—a knobkerrie with better penetrating power or an assegai with superior range—to enhance the traditional emphasis of individual battle prowess. Zulus nearly always aimed high, on the logic that like a javelin cast, the gun’s projectile would otherwise quickly lose momentum and fall. Although they captured a number of field guns at Isandhlwana, and even dragged caissons and supply wagons off, the
impis
never employed such artillery against the British—lacking not merely the experience and knowledge of heavy gunnery but also the discipline to load, sight, and fire heavy weapons at regular intervals, not to mention the skilled teamsters to hitch draft oxen to caissons.

Ports and oceangoing ships were central to European power, bringing in an almost endless stream of manufactured firearms and supplies to the conflict. In the Zulu War, men, guns, food, and ammunition were continually shipped in from Cape Town and Durban. After the disaster at Isandhlwana, an entirely new British army—nearly 10,000 additional enlisted men and more than 400 officers—in less than fifty days began arriving in Natal from England. Usually, native armies had no conception that a Vera Cruz or Durban was a mere transit station that allowed Spanish or British conquistadors to tap whatever manpower they needed in a matter of weeks from an overcrowded and restless Europe thousands of miles—but only weeks—away.

Aztec, Islamic, or Zulu forces almost always depended on rapid envelopment and outflanking movements, which had worked so well against neighboring indigenous tribes. Without much improvisation they relied on highly trained, far more mobile, numerically superior, and courageous warriors to ambush or surprise smaller, plodding European contingents—successful enterprises in local landscapes of dense brush, forest, or jungle. Traditional battle rituals, even in the final battles with Europeans, were usually not altogether jettisoned, meaning that indigenous people were less likely to fight at night, rarely followed up their occasional military victories with unchecked pursuit, and sometimes allowed cultural (e.g., religious festivals, pre-battle dancing and eating festivities, annual fertility rites) or natural (e.g., seasonal considerations, unusual astronomical observations) phenomena to override sheer battle efficacy. After Lord Chelmsford invaded, Cetshwayo mustered his army and then had his witch doctors induce vomiting among some 20,000 frontline troops. It took three days to administer the tonic, parade each warrior before a massive vomiting pit, and have them wait fasting until the entire army was “cleansed,” severely weakening the critical stamina of the
impis.

Westerners, from the Greeks onward, also had an array of war-making rituals: pre-battle sacrifices, harangues, and music; sacred days of truce; ceremonial dress and drill. But these traditional practices were sometimes rigged, often postponed, or even abandoned altogether should military necessity determine otherwise. Predictably, most European armies did not practice pre-battle rituals of fasting, vomiting, purging, or self-mutilation that might impede the effectiveness of soldiers on the battlefield. More likely, as preparation for the fighting, European troops were to receive a rum ration, a stern exhortation, or a last-minute reminder of firing protocol. Since Greek times pre-battle sacrifices and rituals had been faked, since they served more as morale boosters than as real communication with the gods.

The Europeans were willing to fight 365 days a year, day or night, regardless of the exigencies of either their Christian faith or the natural year. Bad weather, disease, and difficult geography were seen as simple obstacles to be conquered by the appropriate technology, military discipline, and capital, rarely as expressions of divine ill will or the hostility of all-powerful spirits. Europeans often looked at temporary setbacks differently from their adversaries in Asia, America, or Africa. Defeat signaled no angry god or adverse fate, but rather a rational flaw in either tactics, logistics, or technology, one to be easily remedied on the next occasion— and there was almost always a next occasion until conquest—through careful audit and analysis. The British in Zululand, like all Western armies, and as Clausewitz saw, did envision battle as a continuation of politics by other means. Unlike the Zulus, the British army did not see war largely as an occasion for individual warriors to garner booty, women, or prestige.

Indigenous peoples more often fought alongside Europeans than did individual Europeans with natives. Cortés found help in the hundreds of thousands of Tlaxcalans in Mexico, as did the British with the so-called Kaffirs in Africa. Both the Aztecs and the Zulus found essentially no Europeans willing to fight alongside them against other white invaders. Narváez wished to destroy Cortés, not the Spanish cause, and thus after his defeat most of his men joined in to march on Tenochtitlán. John Dunn at times helped the Zulus, but in the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 he quickly rejoined the British. Not a single European fought in Cetshwayo’s ranks against the British, although nearly all Boers despised English government in Africa. In contrast, thousands of Africans joined various colonial regiments.

Trouble for Europeans occurred most often only against their own colonials; the Boers in Africa and the Americans both fought costly wars of independence against the British, employing weapons, discipline, and tactics that were in many cases the equal of or superior to those of their British overseers. The Boers, for example, killed far more Englishmen in a single week of the Boer War—nearly 1,800 at Magersfontein, Stormberg, and Colenso alone from December 11 to 16, 1899—than did the Zulus during the entire fighting of 1879!

Many scholars have been reluctant to discuss the question of European military superiority because either they confuse it with larger issues of intelligence or morality or they focus on occasional European setbacks as if they are typical and so negate the general rule of Western dominance. In fact, the European ability to conquer non-Europeans— usually far from Europe, despite enormous problems in logistics, with relatively few numbers of combatants, and in often unfamiliar and hostile terrain and climate—has nothing to do with questions of intelligence, innate morality, or religious superiority, but again illustrates the continuum of a peculiar cultural tradition, beginning with the Greeks, that brought unusual dividends to Western armies on the battlefield.

Zulu
Postmortem

The aftermath of Rorke’s Drift is a fair enough representation of the typical colonial war that was waged in the latter nineteenth century, one repeatedly acted out in the Congo, Egypt, the Sudan, Afghanistan, and the Punjab. After the victory of the garrison at Rorke’s Drift, Lord Chelmsford, with a vastly augmented army, renewed his invasion of Zululand. Besides the earlier bloody standoffs that year at Ineyzane (January 22), the River Intombi (March 11), the siege of the small garrison at Eshowe (February 6–April 3), and Hlobane (March 27–28), the British then fought three decisive battles at Kambula (March 29), Gingindhlovu (April 2), and Ulundi (July 4). In the first two of these final three engagements, British and colonial troops, in fortified camps, would have utterly annihilated the attacking Zulus had the latter pressed their near suicidal charges and human wave attacks to the bloody end.

In the last battle of the war at Ulundi, fought near King Cetshwayo’s headquarters, a British square—replete with artillery and Gatling guns— deliberately abandoned its fortified camp to march out in open challenge, thereby prompting an attack by the Zulus, who had learned of the futility of charging fortifications, but not the equal stupidity of trying to break a solid formation of European riflemen in an unobstructed plain of fire. In less than forty minutes, the British square of some 4,165 Europeans and 1,152 Africans repulsed 20,000 Zulus, killing at least 1,500 in the process and wounding twice that number, many of whom wandered off to die in hiding.

When it was all over, the British and Zulu dead were buried on the field of Ulundi; in typical Western fashion the British erected a plaque over those they had wiped out: “In Memory of the Brave Warriors who fell here in 1879 in defence of the Old Zulu Order.” The British, like the Spanish in Mexico and the Americans in the West, had not merely defeated their more numerous enemies but destroyed their autonomy and culture in the process. Books continue to be written about the handful of British redcoats who heroically held firm at Rorke’s Drift, but not more than a few dozen names remain of the several thousand courageous Zulus who were blasted apart by Martini-Henry rifles. In that regard, they tragically joined the thousands of anonymous Persians, Aztecs, and Turks who were killed en masse and remain forgotten as individuals, as real persons apart from the historian’s bloodless figures of “40,000” killed or “20,000” lost. In contrast, the engine of Western historiography—itself the dividend of the free and rationalist tradition—commemorates in detail their far fewer killers. Without a Herodotus, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, or Gianpietro Contarini, men’s bravery in battle fades with the rot of their corpses.