Death on a Pale Horse

by Donald Thomas

  The last stage of the battle was one of universal confusion. Infantrymen were fighting in isolated groups. Back to back, in shrinking squares, the riflemen fought on with bullets and then with rifle-butts and bayonets, falling one by one. Among the tents and wagons, the British and the Zulu warriors carried on a random struggle of individual encounters. The watching horseman saw a sailor of the Naval Brigade, wounded in the leg, fighting madly with his cutlass against the encroaching warriors, his back to a wagon-wheel. One dead tribesman lay across his feet, another at his side. A moment later, a third who had crawled under the wagon pierced him through the body from behind.

  There was a glimpse of Pulleine in the chaos, looking about him for his company commanders. Captain Pope and a dozen men still contested the thrust of the advance. His men fought with fixed bayonets, clubbing with rifle-butts until an assegai stabbed Pope through the breast. Still on his feet, he tried vainly to pull the shaft from his body while the powerful arms of the advancing tribes bore him down.

  On the far side of the wagon-park, Captain Younghusband and the remnants of C Company had turned one of the wagons over in preparation for a last stand behind its shelter. Younghusband was passing down the line of survivors, shaking hands with each in a solemn farewell. A moment later, the warriors had swarmed over the shattered wagon, bringing down the captain and the last of his platoons.

  The time had come for the horseman to draw a little further up the col, beyond the point that any reconnaissance by the tribes might reach in the wake of their victory. He had scouted the ground two nights before and knew the path that would take him higher while keeping out of immediate view. Not that those engaged in the dreadful hand-to-hand combat below would have much time to survey the hills above them. He led the dappled mare quietly, glancing down from time to time as opportunity gave him an aerial view of what was taking place.

  Durnford and a dozen or so of his troopers held out briefly at the foot of the col. Their ammunition spent, they thrust and repelled the black battalions for a while with their bayonets. Then the leaders of the Uvi and Umcijo, splendid in their head-feathers and leopard pelts, seized the bodies of their own dead and bore them like a battle-ram onto the bayonet blades. Before they could free their weapons, Durnford and his men were overwhelmed.

  Pulleine again trained his field-glasses on the ridges, no doubt in a dwindling hope of seeing Chelmsford’s column riding hard to the rescue. He saw nothing but a deserted horizon of rock against the blanched heat of the sky. Had the colonel known where to look, he might have glimpsed a messenger of fate standing by a dappled mare.

  Pulleine was not that witness’s personal enemy. Had there been means of paying tribute to a fallen foe, the hunter might have availed himself of it. As it was, the scene below confirmed that the commander of the camp knew hope was gone and that he must nerve himself for what remained. Pulleine could not see, as the watcher on the col could see, that even in the wagon-park Quartermaster Sergeant Bloomfield was dead, sprawling on the tail-board of an ammunition wagon. A drummer-boy of the 24th had been slaughtered and left dangling by his heels from a wagon shaft.

  Alone among the doomed survivors, Colonel Pulleine had a purpose to fulfil. In a few hours, Chelmsford’s column would return and the debris of defeat must be sifted. The past half hour had seen a disaster without equal in British imperial rule. Two thousand men, armed with the latest rifles, field-guns, a rocket battery, and Gatling guns had been wiped out by barefoot tribes with spears and shields. Pulleine must surely have sworn to himself that the world should know the reason.

  As the hunter watched from his refuge, Pulleine, bareheaded and with his tunic open at the top, drew his revolver and moved cautiously towards the guard-tent. Even among death and tumult, parts of the camp were still untouched by battle as the tribes swept through. The guard-tent was one of them. The last of the subalterns, Lieutenant Teignmouth Melvill, was standing by it, distributing the final packets of cartridges to half a dozen riflemen prepared to make a dash for the river.

  Pulleine would not join them, having a more important duty to perform. But first, as though Chelmsford might still appear on the ridge, the colonel used the grace allowed him to look slowly for a last time along the skyline. At some distance, the hunter now revealed himself. He mounted, edged the mare forward into full view and came to the salute. Pulleine stopped and, whatever he may have seen in his last bewildered moments, the two men looked directly at each other. The colonel handed his field glasses to the young officer beside him and gestured at the hillside.

  When they had inflicted their injury upon him, it was the mark of hellfire. Now he gave them back text for text, speaking as Pulleine’s field-glasses swept across the rocky slope once more. The grey mare pricked her ears up at her rider’s voice.

  “And I looked, and behold a pale horse, and his name that sat on him was Death. And Hell followed with him!”

  In his mind, Pulleine echoed him as his adjutant handed back the glasses.

  “What do you see, Mr. Melvill? What do you see, sir? Do you not see death, Mr. Melvill? Death on a pale horse!”

  A moment later, he knew that Pulleine was giving the last order of a British commander defeated in battle, when hope was gone and his men lay dead about him. The regimental colours of the 24th Foot were safe at Helpmakaar, but the flag bearing the Queen’s Colour and the regiment’s insignia, embossed in gold on the Union Jack, was now brought from the guard-tent, still rolled and cased in its cylindrical sheath. It was the symbol of the regiment’s battle honours at Talavera and in the Peninsula, Cape Town, and Chillianwallah, Wellington’s wars and the Queen’s imperial conquests.

  Pulleine was handing the cased flag to the pale lieutenant. The watching horseman echoed in his mind the words he would have used in the colonel’s place.

  “Take my horse from the lines, Mr. Melvill. Save the colours, if you can. Ride out across the saddle of Isandhlwana. Make for the Buffalo River and a crossing to the camp at Rorke’s Drift. God speed!”

  Whatever the exchange, the two men shook hands. Melvill saluted and doubled away to untie the colonel’s horse. Through the stench of death and cordite in his throat, Pulleine came unharmed to his own tent and disappeared from view. Even if he heard the feet of his pursuers, the thought of what he must do might still hold his fear in check.

  When the victors had withdrawn from the camp with their booty, the horseman on the col would ride down to see for himself what had happened in that tent. In the meantime, he had only to wait. He watched from above as several of the tribesmen approached the regimental lines. Whatever Pulleine had to do would be done by now. Before his enemies could enter, he appeared briefly in the opening of the canvas flap, his revolver in his hand. The warriors hesitated at the sight of the gun. Pulleine fired and the first man sank to his knees. The others drew back behind a further tent, trusting to its shelter. But there were no more shots. Pulleine’s revolver was no doubt empty and only his sword remained. The tribesmen rose and moved forward.

  It was several hours before the battalions of Cetewayo withdrew.

  From above and at a distance, the looted camp presented a curious sight. Here and there a red-coated figure moved about the wagon-park or in the company lines. Over the tented army the British flag on its staff stirred perceptibly in the slight breeze of the coming dusk. Everything appeared to be in good order, as if the lines were quiet but a few of the men were moving about. If Chelmsford’s column had been anxious at the despatches from Pulleine or had heard the sound of cannon fire from Isandhlwana, seven or eight miles off, they would be reassured by their first distant sight. If it was Chelmsford’s decision to extend his reconnaissance until twilight, he might feel vindicated.

  So far as his riders could see at a distance, there would not be a Zulu anywhere near the camp. The first suggestion of disorder would probably be the sight of figures in red tunics, apparently from the native regiments, running from the tents of the officers’ compound with bottles, dressin
g-mirrors, and ceremonial swords. There might even be an exchange of shots before the looters and their trophies disappeared into the dusk. Only when the column reached the perimeter would they have a full sight of the bodies from two armies, concealed at a distance by tall grass.

  Unbelieving at first, they would see men whom they had taken leave of that morning now lying open-eyed in death. For all of them, it would be their first experience of a British defeat. What they saw around them would seem like the end of a world. On the garrison ground at the centre of the camp, a reconnaissance would reveal the heads of a dozen of Pulleine’s officers set on the ground in a ritual circle, staring blindly outwards across the darkening veldt.

  During his own reconnaissance, the hunter had found boxes and sacks of stores broken in the grass. Flour and biscuits, tea and sugar, oats and mealies had been scattered on the earth. The wagon-park was a tableau of confusion. Some of the vehicles had been overturned, others thrown out in all directions. Some of the horses had been killed and some of the oxen lay dead beside the carts. A few were still alive, standing upright in the yoke as if yet awaiting the commands of their drovers. The horseman who had watched the drama had no quarrel with these beasts. He unharnessed them and set them loose to take their chance.

  It would be beyond the capacity of Lord Chelmsford’s patrol to bury so many dead. Stone cairns must be erected over the worst horrors for decency’s sake, but no more. To make even a temporary camp here would be unthinkable. Therefore, as Chelmsford knew, he could only gather as much evidence of the disaster as quickly as possible and then retire to Rorke’s Drift. To search the tents of the officers’ compound for papers and messages would be a priority. There might be some last signal to explain what had happened at Isandhlwana in those dreadful hours.

  The hunter’s reconnaissance centred on the wagon-park and the guard tent of Colonel Pulleine. Only a far greater prize would compel a man to explore the rest of the charnel-house the camp had become. In the wagon-park it was not necessary to replace every one of the useless ammunition turn-screws with the originals which he had removed during the previous night. Just enough of those originals must be found there to obscure the criminal cause of the catastrophe for the time being.

  Pulleine’s tent was the final scene of the hunter’s revenge. A scattering of glass fragments on the carpet; a smell of gin. The colonel had fallen after a struggle in his outer tent or day-quarters, where his body lay. Having fired the last chambers of his revolver, he must have fought with his sword until he was impaled twice in the back—through the tent wall. The blows had thrown him forward across the rosewood desk.

  In this case, the looters had been too preoccupied at first to attack the body. The drawers of the desk had been wrenched out and smashed. A silver locket lying on the carpet had been overlooked by the victors. It held a woman’s picture, probably a woman who had been young ten years before, with a background of summer trees.

  No doubt the colonel had spent his final moments at the desk, writing a last testament as his killers closed in—giving as many details of the disaster as possible for the benefit of Lord Chelmsford. Such pages lay under the desk-blotter in an envelope addressed to the Commander-in-Chief at the Cape. The looters had paid no attention to it, and the hunter found the pages intact.

  It would have been imprudent to preserve such a testament in any form. At the same time, the least sign of smoke or flame might attract attention. It was enough for the hunter to tear the pages into irregular fragments, crumpling each in his hands as he rode away and, at a distance, scattering the pieces to the breeze of a warm African dusk.

  At the ruins of the guard tent, he had also allowed one concession to vanity. Before mounting his horse, he drew a plain card from his pocket. He wrote five words upon it, as though it had been a carte de visite, and tossed it into the ruined canvas structure. It did not even matter if the words were never found, so long as they had been uttered. The author had set a title to his masterpiece of devastation. Death on a Pale Horse. Let the gods of battle decide whether it should ever be read—and what the world would make of it.

  Riding towards the eastern ridge, he dismounted on the slope where the tall grass had been flattened by his grey horse that morning. At the foot of a thorn-bush, the pale earth was scraped into a mound that might have been a substantial ant-hill. Scattering the crumbs of soil, he uncovered an object wrapped in sacking, something the size of a football or a child’s tin drum. He had been well paid and he had kept his bargain. Those who doubted him should face the dead stare of Owain Glyndwr’s one remaining eye.

  He looked around him once more. There was no sign of scavengers in the camp nor of Lord Chelmsford’s column as the sky began to cloud over. To the superstitious, it might seem curious that a night wind had begun to moan by daylight in the singing-thorn, like an anthem for the fallen warriors of two armies who lay in such numbers on every side. Yet between its gusts, the silence of the darkening veldt was so profound that it was possible to hear a single tribesman singing somewhere on the kopje, drunk on the liquor of the defeated.

  WAR DEPARTMENT RECORDS

  [PROVOST PAPERS WO/ 79/4281]

  Provost Marshal Cape Colony

  To: Major The Hon. Lord Worsley

  Adjutant to Commander-in-Chief,

  His Royal Highness the Duke of Cambridge,

  Horse Guards,

  Whitehall

  London SW

  Sir,

  I have the honour to forward for your attention the enclosed despatch form. It was found wedged and concealed within the black leather rim of the right boot, when the body of Colonel Henry Pulleine was recovered by the Provost patrol and burial party at Isandhlwana on 20 May last. The form had evidently not been discovered by the colonel’s assailants after his death.

  Colonel Pulleine was well acquainted with Zulu customs. Contrary to popular belief, the tribes are usually averse to slaughter. After the ritual of the Washing of the Spears, they believe that any further act of killing a foe in battle contaminates the spirit of a man. They are therefore required by their belief to take an item of a dead enemy’s clothes and wear this until a rite of purification has followed battle. Colonel Pulleine also knew from experience that tunics or uniforms are often taken from the dead but boots never, for the tribes go barefoot. His chosen place of concealment for this slip of paper is significant of that.

  By the time the colonel wrote his message, he must have known what his fate would be. He also knew what might happen to his body after death. Regarding the enclosed message as of the greatest importance, and being a man of supreme valour, he did all in his power to convey its contents safely. You may deduce from the appearance of the paper and from the evident haste of the writing that he had only a matter of seconds to complete and conceal it.

  In remaining your lordship’s obedient servant, I have the honour to request that His Grace will give the message from this brave gentleman the immediate consideration it deserves.

  /s/

  [Enclosure] CAMP ISANDHLWANA, 22 JANUARY 1879, 1.35pm

  WE ARE BETRAYED … FOR GOD’S SAKE LOOK AFTER OUR PEOPLE … GOD SAVE THE QUEEN …

  —Lt. Col. Henry Burmester Pulleine, Officer Commanding

  Her Majesty’s 24th Regiment of Foot

  METROPOLITAN POLICE FILE—MEPO 3

  ACC/ Personal File/Sir Melville Macnaghten

  221b Baker Street

  London W

  Sir Melville Macnaghten

  Assistant Chief Constable,

  New Scotland Yard

  London SW

  30 August 1894

  My dear Sir Melville,

  It comes a little late for me to forward to you the following details of Colonel Rawdon Moran, alias “Hunter” Moran, formerly of Her Majesty’s Indian Army. However, you may care to include the following information in your files. I suggest that it is pertinent to the dossier of his younger brother, Colonel Sebastian Moran. He it was who died this morning on the gallows at Newgate
Gaol for the “Park Lane Murder” of the Honourable Ronald Adair. I myself played some small part in the resolution of this mystery.

  Unlike his younger brother, Rawdon Moran never incurred a criminal conviction for his many crimes. He was born in 1840, elder son of Sir Augustus Moran, who had undertaken several diplomatic missions to the court of Persia and the Sublime Porte on behalf of Lord Melbourne’s administration.

  I know something of Sir Augustus Moran. He and my father, Siger Holmes, were on opposite sides of the business when Edward Oxford made his attempt against the life of the young Queen. The shots were fired on Constitution Hill in the third year of her reign. My own narrative of this affair, taken down from my father’s own words, must lie where it is a little longer.

  Sir Augustus Moran was obliged to withdraw to exile in Hanover after the attempted assassination. His elder son Rawdon remained in England. Indeed, he attended both Eton and Oxford. As a young man, he left Magdalen College before his time, following a pistol duel with another undergraduate. He subsequently acquired a noxious reputation in London’s sporting life.

  After the father’s disgrace, it was impossible the elder son should find a place in a fashionable regiment. I believe in 1863 he was refused when he tried to buy a captaincy under the Earl of Cardigan in the 11th (Prince Albert’s Own) Hussars. His father had served in that corps as a young man. Making his way to India, where his ancestry was of less interest, Rawdon Moran first served as commander of an Indian bodyguard to the Rajah of Kalore with the local rajpoot rank of “colonel.” Long after his dismissal by the Rajah, Moran habitually made civilian use of the title this rank had given him.

  He subsequently returned to direct allegiance to the British Crown and bought a place in the unfashionable corps of the 1st Bangalore Pioneers. He distinguished himself on active service in the Jowaki campaigns and was mentioned in despatches after the battle of Charasiab. Whatever his regrettable moral reputation, his personal bravery under fire cannot be questioned. When the ammunition was exhausted and the position appeared hopeless, he and his company of mercenaries defended the wounded in the field hospital by beating off the attackers with trenching tools and killing a dozen of them. In the aftermath of his recognition, he transferred to the regular Army in the 109th Regiment of Foot, subsequently known as the Albion Fusiliers.