Theirs Was The Kingdom (6 page)

Copland met him on the track—Copland, the superior, bewhiskered lieutenant, who had patronised him all the way from Helpmakaar. But there was nothing patronising about the young colonist now. His mouth was open like the jaws of the village idiot at Twyforde Green, and his pale blue eyes, already prominent, seemed to project from the sockets like the eyes of a grasshopper. Bringing his horse up on its haunches, he shouted, “How many? How far off?” and Alex, without pausing in his dash for the ridge, shouted, “The whole Zulu army… thousands… right on your heels!”

He did not wait to see what Copland made of that, but galloped on, heedless of boulders, to the highest sector of the ridge that lay within a mile or so of the camp that was, he remembered, occupied by a few mounted Kaffirs under a sergeant of G Company, 2/24th Regiment. Durnford’s column must have moved and regrouped at fantastic speed, for already a mob of men had gathered there, more than half of them Europeans, with the rocket battery in their midst. He rode in with Copland hard on his heels, and as he threw himself from the saddle, dragging the pony behind a boulder as high as the pommel, he saw Colonel Durnford, pith helmet pushed back on his high, balding forehead and his soft, Dundreary whiskers giving him the aspect of a Sunday School superintendent rather than a man of action. He was saying, quietly, “Steady, there… steady, boys… hold them off… independent firing… pick your man…” and then moved on, passing slowly along the line of rocks behind which men were already kneeling or lying prone and firing into the south-facing slope of the plateau.

Alex saw then that the impi had advanced with the speed of cavalry and that the slopes were black with running, crouching men, half-hidden behind a rippling line of ox-hide, and also that the effects of the scattering fire were already showing in the occasional stumble and a general slowing-down of the onrush. Here and there the ordered ranks were dissolving into knots of men, seeking the sparse cover of the scrub across which he had just galloped, but there was no sign of a check further back towards the crestline and seemingly no end to the swarm of men scrambling over and converging on them from the plain. From here they looked like millions of ants, hedged about by a halo of winking lights centring on the broad blades of their assegais, a great wall of ants a mile deep, flowing down on to the plain in a tide that nobody could hope to stem for more than the time it took to mount a concerted rush of the kind he had witnessed when he fired his first shots. The natives among the rocks already understood this and were bolting in batches, but the Europeans and some of the N.N.C. hung on, trying, between scattered volleys, to form some kind of continuous line among the rocks and stumbling about between a swirl of riderless horses with trailing reins and lathered bits, everyone getting in one another’s way and cursing as they groped in their pouches for ammunition. And all the time Durnford walked erect, chiding and encouraging, the Sunday School teacher soothing an unruly class.

They were moving back now, two hundred yards, three hundred yards, firing as they dodged from boulder to boulder and made for the open ground at the extreme eastern edge of the camp. Somewhere out ahead, now deep in the heart of the impi it seemed, a single rocket soared before the battery was engulfed; then, clubbed into a single, struggling mass, black and white, horse and man, the shattered column spilled into the perimeter of the camp, its onrush carrying the double rank of G Company a hundred yards nearer the base of the rock, where men were already forming in lines about the waggon park, and the bark of commands cut through the din and confusion that stunned the senses and made concerted action even more difficult than it had been out on the ridge. For here everyone was impeded by tents and the tripwires of pegs and guyropes, and nobody seemed to know at which point to rally or, for that matter, which way to face. A long eddy of scarlet in the west indicated that the impi Alex had seen on the move had already encircled the mountain and were boiling through the saddle of Isandlwana.

2

So many times in his childhood he had seen himself engaged in a battle, sometimes as a front-ranker, engaging the enemy with a sword, pike and battleaxe, more often as an aloof, unruffled general, directing stolid troops from the eminence of a dappled grey as tall as his father’s. But the factors here had nothing in common with anything within his experience in the nursery or the world of books, of the kind Mr. Henty wrote. Battles were set-pieces, with infantry in the centre, cavalry on the wings and artillery, where it was present, posted between, or playing on the enemy from a safe distance. Here, ringed by thousands of humming savages, there was no order and no plan, strategic or tactical, only a vast, heaving scrimmage in an ever shrinking perimeter under the towering peak of Isandlwana.

Up to the moment of the wreck of Durnford’s column, breaking through the lines of G Company and carrying them back in their rush, the camp itself, with its neatly pitched tents, its bivouac fires and horse-lines, had represented sanctuary, but this was now seen to be a mirage. No kind of safety was available here. Everybody and everything was at odds, as though the onslaught of the impis had been a violent thunderstorm breaking over the heads of a crowd at a garden fete, and to Alexander Swann, milling about aimlessly in the midst of it, the frantic scene resolved itself into a series of unrelated cameos, like pictures flashed on the magic lantern screen his brother Giles had been given by the old Colonel on his seventh birthday. He saw G Company reform and begin steady volley-firing. He saw a huge black trying repeatedly to mount an unsaddled horse. A drummer boy ran past, carrying a cap full of cartridges, and it was the child’s stumbling passage that reminded him he had fired the last of his bandolier cartridges back on the ridge and was now humping a useless rifle. He knew where the reserve ammunition was housed in the regimental waggons across the compound and began to run there instinctively. On the way he passed Lieutenant Melville, the young regular who had lent him the binoculars forty-eight hours before, but this was no time to return them. Melville, mounted on a big horse, was encumbered with the regimental colours, a heavy pole and yards of emblazoned cloth, an impossibly clumsy burden for a mounted man, however good his horsemanship. Then Melville was obscured by a mob of hysterical Kaffirs, plunging away to the southwestern angle of the perimeter, where the track to Rorke’s Drift crossed the saddle, and he thought, fleetingly, “If they’re bolting they’ll run themselves right against a forest of assegais…” for he remembered the encircling impi that had moved round the mountain, obviously with the idea of sealing the road back to Natal. Then the bark of artillery from higher up the slope told him guns were in action, and he would have rallied on them, as the one reassuring sound in the midst of all this welter and babble, but between him and the isolated puffs of smoke were the tent lines, milling with natives, all trying to catch riderless horses. He turned away and went at a stumbling run towards the two regimental waggons, to find each of them beset by boys, cooks, and bandsmen, all clamouring for ammunition stowed in heavy wooden boxes bound with copper bands and fastened, it appeared, by any number of deepset screws. Two bearded men were at work on one box, trying to draw the screws with a single screwdriver, but even here, four hundred yards from the firing-line, they were getting in one another’s way and the screws remained motionless as they clawed and scrabbled at the half-buried heads.

Around him men began to curse and prance, like amateur firewalkers walking a trench of live coals, and all the time the sense of unreality enlarged itself so that he wondered if what he was witnessing was a purely personal experience, brought on by a touch of the sun. The illusion continued until, miraculously the lid was torn from the ammunition box and the men and boys fell upon it like starving beggars at a soup kitchen.

As a latecomer in the queue he had no hope of getting his share, so he abandoned his rifle and pulled out his revolver, turning to run back across the perimeter with some half-formed notion of rejoining what was left of Durnford’s column. But in the time it had taken him to cross the camp and watch the quartermasters wrestle with the row of screws, the scene inside the tent lines and waggon park had changed utterly. There was no longer any semblance of a defensive formation and what had been ranks of red-coated Borderers were now knots of struggling men, exchanging bayonet thrusts with five times as many Zulus, each armed with his stabbing assegai. He understood then, with a terrible certainty, that the battle was lost, that all of them would die here in a cloud of red dust raised by a hundred independent scuffles reaching all the way across the camp to the impassive, sphinx-like peak silhouetted against the cloudless sky.

The very certainty of this steadied him a little and he plunged towards an isolated waggon, against which a few N.C.O.s and privates of the 2/24th were braced, holding off a mob of blacks with their bayonets. He was no more than ten yards distant when all but one of the Europeans went down; the survivor, an extremely tall sergeant, saving himself by leaping on to the flat surface of the vehicle and standing there very coolly eyeing a ring of savages. Then, taking his time, the man began to shoot at point-blank range, and at every shot a Zulu pitched on his face or leaped spinning into the air to fall flat on his back, until the press around the waggon was eased and only the dead, black predominating, lay there in grotesque attitudes.

It was curious what a single man could achieve, Alex thought, as though he was no more than a privileged spectator to the scene; he would have remained watching until an assegai entered his own back, had not another riderless horse— saddled, bridled, and still carrying a rolled cape and empty carbine bucket— trotted slowly across his line of vision, momentarily blotting out the sergeant standing on the waggon and the sprawl of dead about its undercarriage and broad-spoked wheels.

He was never able to remember catching the horse, mounting it, and joining the thin stream of fugitives making for the steep, stony track that led down to a ravine south of the made-up road they had used two days before when they bivouacked here after marching out from Rorke’s Drift. He must have done these things instinctively, vaulting into the saddle in the fashion of old Yorker, the groom at Tryst, whose boast was that he could mount a sixteen-hands horse from a standstill although in his late fifties. The stream of horse and foot carried him along at a plunging, loping pace, and as he rode another set of pictures stamped itself, magic-lantern-like, upon his memory and were to remain there, chronologically arranged, for the rest of his life. He saw a bay horse immediately ahead carrying two Colonials, and on either side of the horse ran six-foot Zulus, thrusting up at the riders with broad-bladed assegais, so that first the pillion-rider fell and then the rider himself, the latter slipping sideways and somersaulting with two spearpoints protruding from his chest. The horse pounded on, and when Alex was aware of it again it was carrying a trooper of the N.N.C., bent low over the mare, his heels flailing the animal’s flanks.

Down at the approach to the ravine men were dismounting, shouting that it was impossible to cross on horseback, but one Colonial tried to jump from lip to lip, falling far short and crashing down the furthermost slope. A man with a face the colour of cheese clutched at Alex’s bridle, shouting a question in Afrikaans, but then he too fell away, transfixed by a flung assegai thrown from the camp side of the steep depression; a moment later Alex was down there himself and leading the horse up the far side where he saw an artilleryman sitting on a rock bandaging a great gash in his forearm that was spouting blood in a thin jet. At the crest the rout began to sort itself out, for of the mob that descended into the donga not one in ten emerged on to the winding track beyond, but a few Zulus were still keeping pace with the stampede, scrambling among the rocks in frantic efforts to get ahead of the stream of fugitives and cut them off before they could converge on the nearest river crossing. There were, he supposed, no more than thirty or forty survivors, all thundering along at a breakneck pace and sometimes loosing off revolver shots at Zulus who drew level with them. The magnitude of the disaster pressed on his temples like the copper bands that had enclosed those ammunition-boxes, preventing logical thought and relating everything he did to the struggles of an animal in a trap.

He could still see Melville up ahead, distinguished by his clumsy seat on the bay dictated by the double armful of colours he was carrying. He had shed the pole apparently, and even as he rode it struck Alex as astounding that a man should encumber himself with such an impossible burden at such a moment. Another officer about Melville’s age was with him, turning in his saddle every few seconds and keeping the tireless Zulus at bay with his revolver. Between them ran two men of the N.N.C., both unarmed, and then a string of horsemen, one carrying a bayoneted rifle like a lance.

In this way, pell-mell, and without the least semblance of order, they came to the bluff that overlooked the Buffalo River, now in spate and rushing down the gorge at a tremendous pace, the volume of water breaking on a thousand half-submerged rocks and the low hills on the further bank lying empty and grape-blue in half shadow. For the first time since he had turned away from the regimental waggons, Alex identified himself as a unit in all this chaos and with identification came hope that he might, with any amount of luck, cross over into Natal and survive this appalling catastrophe. He saw at a glance that it would be suicidal to attempt to ride down to river level, so he threw himself out of the saddle, abandoned the horse, and ran down the rocky path with men on either side of him, each jostling for elbow room, pitching, stumbling, and cursing one another; the Zulus who ran among them lunged at any uniformed man within stabbing range. In the shallows he saw a Kaffir killed with a thrust through the throat, but the man’s death meant nothing to him and he splashed past the Zulu in the act of withdrawing his assegai, as though they had all been rabbiters killing for sport on the banks of the river that ran within a few hundred yards of Tryst.