The Last Full Measure (27 page)

The “chosen death”—
suicide
seems too thin and mean a word—also offered at least some last vestige of the heroic to those natives who were about to be swept away on the triumphal imperial tide. By 1889 the Cheyenne had been defeated and the fleeing bands hunted down. Two young warriors, Head Chief and Heart Mule, decided to take the manner of their deaths into their own hands. An eyewitness account, reported in the
Army and Navy Journal
of September 27, 1890, described the scene.

ALTHOUGH IT IS
generally true that weapons’ superiority was a major factor in killing huge numbers of indigenous warriors, occasionally there were technical glitches that resulted in catastrophic reversals of fortune. At Isandlwana on January 22, 1879, the Martini-Henry rifles of the British defenders overheated, causing the brass-sleeved bullets to expand and jam (there may also have been some problems with ammunition supply, but this is still a matter of contention). The Martini-Henry was, on the whole, an excellent weapon that had already demonstrated its man-stopping ability against Afghans and Kaffirs, but on that January day the guns were so hot they could hardly be held and rounds cooked off prematurely; the thin-brass case of .45-caliber rounds expanded and jammed in the breeches; and men frantically tried to clear them with knives and bayonet points.

At Little Big Horn, Custer’s men may have suffered a similar problem with the ejector mechanism of their breech-loading single-shot Springfield model 1873 carbines. In later years one of the Indian participants, Rain in the Face, admittedly a bit of a blowhard, insisted that “we were better armed than the long swords. Their guns wouldn’t shoot but once—the thing wouldn’t throw out the empty cartridge shells. When we found they could
not shoot we saved our bullets by knocking the long swords over with our war clubs—it was just like killing sheep.”
²⁸
Although Cyrus Brady says that Rain in the Face’s account was corroborated by General Gibbon’s command two days after the battle, when “dozens of guns were picked up on the battle-field … with the shells still sticking in them, showing that the ejector wouldn’t work,”
²⁹
modern-day archeological investigation of the battlefield indicates a relatively low proportion of recovered shells showing signs of having been forced out of the breech.

When indigenous warriors stuck to “irregular” tactics of dispersal, of ambush and subterfuge, they not only stood a better chance of inflicting damage on the invader but also minimized damage to themselves. Sometimes, though, sheer numbers overwhelmed opposition, particularly when invaders lost the cohesion that could maximize their firepower. At Maiwand on July 27, 1880, during the Second Afghan War, Brigadier General George Burrows made some of the same mistakes as Colonel Durnford at Isandlwana. By failing to concentrate his firepower and allowing his force of about 2,500 British and Indians to be caught on open ground by approximately 25,000 Afghans, Burrows’s force was overrun. The Sixty-Sixth Regiment tried desperately to retreat in the face of overwhelming odds but lost cohesion. Whittled down to about 200 men, one element of the regiment, with its mortally wounded colonel, was eventually brought to ground around their unfurled colors. And there they died. Of Burrows’s original force, over one-third (962) were killed in the battle and during the retreat.
³⁰

Although tactically the best option for many indigenous armies was to fight in dispersed order, they too were sometimes drawn, like moths to the flame, to heroic full-on frontal assault. And when, in response, their opponents were able to take up tightly configured defensive positions that maximized the density of their firepower, the death toll among the attackers could be staggering.
The Dervish mass attack against the defensive perimeter of General Kitchener’s Anglo-Eyptian army at Omdurman on September 2, 1898, was wildly valiant and catastrophically self-destructive. Arrayed in a semicircle behind a
zariba
(a fence of thornbushes that functioned like rolls of barbed wire), Kitchener commanded 8,200 British and 17,000 Egyptian troops. At his back, gunboats mounting one hundred guns stood ready in the Nile. At dawn, a Dervish army of about 50,000 launched a frontal attack that must have been a terrifying thing to behold, but they were cut down by Kitchener’s six Maxim guns, field artillery as well as shells from the flotilla, and riflemen firing in disciplined volleys (dumdum bullets adding to the lethality). Not one attacker reached the perimeter. Somewhere in the region of 10,000 Dervish bodies (some accounts put it as high as 15,000) littered the desert: “not a battle but an execution,” as a British war correspondent described it. The 48 Anglo-Egyptian casualties sustained came mainly from the nearly disastrous charge of the Twenty-First Lancers, in which the young Winston Churchill took part—a stirring but misguided heroic flourish so beloved of Victorian Britons.

One of the keys to European dominance was the adoption on a significant scale of the breech-loading rifle in the 1860s. It was a force multiplier that closed down one of the main tactical opportunities offered to indigenous attackers—waiting for the opportunity to penetrate a defense that the fairly lengthy reloading of a rifled musket afforded (the Fetterman massacre being a good example). Almost exactly seven months after the Fetterman incident, a detachment of twenty-eight men of C Company, Twenty-Seventh Infantry under the command of Captain James Powell left Fort Phil Kearny on the last day of July 1867 to supervise civilian woodcutters on nearby Piney Island. Wagons used for hauling the wood had been partially dismantled (the boxlike containers had been taken off the wheels to allow the woodcutters to haul logs using only the running gear). Indian
attacks on woodcutting parties were common, and Powell prudently arranged fourteen of these boxes in a protective corral, filling the spaces between them with sacks of grain, logs, and anything else that might provide protection. Rifle loopholes in the wagon sides enabled the men to lie in the wagon-box beds and fire on attackers. His men were armed not with the muzzle loaders with which the Indians were familiar but with the new second Allin modification of the model 1866 Springfield (a conversion of the 1863 muzzle-loading Springfield to a breechloader firing the 1866 .50-caliber center-fire cartridge—the very latest development in self-contained metal-jacketed ammunition). Powell had enough rifles and plenty of ammunition for his men and the civilian contractors.

Within a few days of Powell’s arrival on Piney Island a large body of Indians (some estimates put it as high as three thousand) under the Sioux war chief Red Cloud had gathered in a general uprising; and of these, a substantial number were detailed to wipe out Powell’s improvised fort. The first phase was a grand mounted charge of about five hundred warriors. Against muzzle-loading muskets, the Indians had every expectation of absorbing the initial volleys and then overrunning the defenders as they reloaded. But at close range the Springfields opened up a devastating and, to the Indians’ amazement, continuous fire.

The charge having been bloodily repulsed, Red Cloud, conducting the attacks from a nearby hill, resorted to a skirmish line that poured in rifle and arrow fire. The bullets mainly hit the wagons rather than the men, and the arrows fell into the thick army blankets that had been draped over the wagon boxes. The third and final phase was a magnificent massed charge of the main Indian force. Again, Powell held fire until the range had shortened; his fusillades were of such intensity that they produced “a slaughter such as no living Indian had experienced or heard of.”
³¹
The battle was finally resolved with the arrival of US
reinforcements that drove off the now demoralized Sioux and Cheyenne. Powell had lost 5 men killed out of 32 combatants. Red Cloud, when interviewed after the war, said that he attacked Powell with 3,000 braves and lost over half. When asked if 1,500 had been killed, Red Cloud replied, tersely, “I lost them. They never fought again.”
³²

The British war against the Abyssinians in the late 1860s proved to be a highly satisfactory testing ground for breechloaders. At Fahla on April 9, 1868, the Abyssinian host streamed down the heights to attack the baggage train of an invading Anglo-Indian force commanded by General Sir Robert Napier. Using breech-loading Snider-Enfields, the invaders left 700 Abyssinian warriors dead and 1,700 wounded. Two of Napier’s men died.
^*
Two days later, on the plain of Arogi, the whole bloody scenario was reenacted. The war correspondent G. A. Henty (who later, as a prolific author of adventure books for young Victorians, did much to romanticize the idea of Empire) described the Abyssinians’ charge as as “pretty a sight as has ever been presented in modern warfare.… Upwards of 5,000 of Theodore’s [the Abyssinian emperor’s] bravest soldiers sallied out [from the royal fortress of Magdala]; scarce as many hundreds returned to the fortress. Over five hundred were killed, and our soldiers earnestly expressed the hope that it would be unnecessary to storm the fortress, for fighting with these poorly-armed natives was little short of slaughter.”
³³
Not one of Napier’s soldiers was killed.

In addition to breech-loading rifles, the 1860s saw a spurt of weapons innovation that tipped the balance of colonial warfare even more in favor of the invading colonizers. If breech-loading
rifles firing metal-jacketed rounds significantly increased the rate of fire, then repeating rifles such as the magazine-fed, seven-shot, lever-action Spencer, first introduced into the US Army in 1860,
^†
as well as the introduction of machine guns, took it to a different level. In 1862 the American Richard Gatling received a patent for a crank-operated gun capable of firing two hundred rounds per minute. “It bears the same relation to other firearms,” boasted Gatling, “that McCormack’s Reaper [the mechanical harvesting machine that had revolutionized American agriculture in the nineteenth century] does to the sickle.”
³⁴
Interestingly, Gatling viewed his brutally efficient (if sometimes stuttering) killing machine as in some way making warfare more economical of lives. In 1877 he wrote:

The efficiencies of automated killing were particularly valued in colonial warfare, where the cost of maintaining armies far from the home base was onerous. Ironically, the very success of machine guns in killing cost-effective quantities of natives tainted them when it came to European warfare, where it was felt, particularly among the officer class, that mechanization would reduce combat to a competition between meat grinders. Machine guns were simply part of that unheroic yet irresistible curve that had started when the first knight was shot out of his saddle by an arquebus. The resistance was adamant, and it would take the cataclysm of the First World War to kill off the ancient idea of heroic combat. Something of this ambiguity—the machine gun as awesome yet detestable—is plain in a British
Army and Navy Gazette
account of the 1884 battle of Tel-el-Kebir during the war in Sudan: “The naval machine gun battery, consisting of six Gatlings … reached the position assigned to it.… Having received orders to advance they came within easy reach of the Tel-el-Kebir earthworks.… Rounds whisked [from] the Gatlings, r-r-r-r-r-rum, r-r-r-r-r-rum, r-r-r-r-r-rum! That hellish note the soldier so much detests in action, not for what it has done, so much, as for what it could do, rattled out.”
³⁶

In the early 1880s Hiram Maxim, an American inventor and firearms entrepreneur, developed a machine gun that would rely for reloading on the automatic action of gas pressure rather than hand cranking. He had reviewed the weakness of the competition: