A History of War in 100 Battles

by Richard Overy

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  No. 27 RORKE’S DRIFT

  22–23 January 1879

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  Among the many fables and legends that surround the remarkable survival of a small handful of British soldiers in the mission house at Rorke’s Drift during the Zulu Wars in southern Africa, one unassailable truth stands out: this was a victory, if victory it was, quite in defiance of the odds. A total of around 100 fit men, supported by a small number of invalids, held at bay all night an estimated 4–6,000 Zulu warriors. Even more extraordinary, all but 17 of the tiny garrison lived to tell the tale.

  The battle should never have been fought at all. It came in the early weeks of a war between a British army in southern Africa commanded by Lord Frederic Chelmsford and the Zulu kingdom ruled by the powerful Cetshwayo (Cetawayo). The war was the result of growing imperial pressure from London to secure the demobilization of the large Zulu army and to force the Zulus to acknowledge British suzerainty. Zulu leaders would have preferred to keep the kingdom and reach a peaceful accord with British representatives, but British officials in Africa were determined on a war to reduce what they saw as a permanent threat to European settlement in the region. An ultimatum was sent to Cetshwayo on 11 November 1878 calling on him to demobilize his army and accept a British resident for Zululand as a way of ensuring that the army was not later reassembled. As the British knew, this was unacceptable to Cetshwayo, for the military system was a central element in the maintenance of Zulu rule. The British sought war, and when the ultimatum was not immediately accepted, Chelmsford was ordered to begin hostilities.

  The British had 17,000 men and 20 artillery pieces. Zulu fighting quality was rated as poor against a disciplined force, and Chelmsford divided his troops into three columns, each sent across the border from the British colony of Natal into Zululand from a different direction. The British forces were supported by black auxiliaries that were in general less well-armed than white troops, who carried the Martini-Henry breech-loading rifle, a fast-firing infantry weapon first adopted in 1871. The Zulu army that gathered at the capital, Ondini (Ulundi), in early January 1879 numbered perhaps 20,000 men, armed with shields, the assegai spear, the’knobkerrie’ club and numerous older rifles, which they fired inexpertly. According to Zulu military practice, the army was divided into the shape of a buffalo: the main force in the centre (or chest) with two wings (or horns) that encircled the enemy right and left and then closed back towards the centre. A reserve force (the loins) was held behind the chest in case it was needed. This battlefield system had brought the Zulu army regular victories in open ground, but was less useful against a well-fortified position.

  On 11 January, one of Chelmsford’s three columns, commanded by Colonel Richard Glyn, set out from Rorke’s Drift, a small mission house and store on the banks of the Buffalo River. They crossed the river and set up camp at Isandlwana Hill some miles inside Zulu territory, a position invitingly in the open. A small garrison was left at Rorke’s Drift to guard the stores, under the command of Lieutenant Gonville Bromhead. On 22 January, while Chelmsford was 16–19 kilometres (10–12 miles) from Isandlwana to reconnoitre the area with the main column, the Zulu commander, Chief Ntshingwayo, attacked the camp (which was defended by 1,000 troops) with perhaps 10,000 warriors in ‘buffalo’ formation. The camp was destroyed and all but a handful of the defenders were slaughtered and ritually mutilated.

  News of the massacre arrived at Rorke’s Drift by the afternoon and frantic efforts were made to construct proper defences there, including walls built with bags of mealie, the local grain, and a fortification of biscuit tins. Two buildings, one of which was a makeshift hospital, were rapidly turned into an improvised fortress. As it became clear that a massive Zulu army was closing on the station, some of the British officers made good their escape, while 100 colonial militia camped nearby disappeared into the bush. Bromhead was joined by Lieutenant John Chard, an engineer in charge of the floating bridges over the river. They expected to be killed in turn, but rather than flee and be caught in the open they chose to stay and fight with their tiny detachment of fit men and a small quantity of ammunition.

  Cetshwayo had not expected his army to carry on as far as Rorke’s Drift. Most warriors returned laden with plunder to bring news of their victory. But Prince Dabulamanzi, one of the king’s brothers, and a commander of the reserve ‘loins’ force, was frustrated at missing out at Isandlwana. Perhaps as many as 5,000 of his men swarmed on towards the Buffalo River where Dabulamanzi ordered them to take the post at Rorke’s Drift. The first wave attacked at around 5 p.m. and was driven off by concentrated rifle fire. The whole army could have swamped the post with ease, but the Zulu army attacked in smaller waves on each side of the buildings, withdrawing after suffering from the heavy British fire, to be replaced by new units. Dabulamanzi, who was sheltering behind nearby trees, could not direct the battle clearly. As dusk fell, the Zulus continued their assault, making it more difficult for the defenders to pick out the enemy. The hospital was set ablaze, providing improvised lighting to allow more accurate rifle fire, but by now there was regular hand-to-hand fighting, bayonet against assegai, as the Zulu soldiers reached the perimeter of the crude defences.

  The few defenders in the hospital held up the Zulus who broke in with bullets and bayonets; but they were forced to retreat back through the flimsy partition walls from room to room. Those who were caught, including some of the patients who could not easily escape, were stabbed and beaten to death; the rest scurried across the yard between the two buildings and behind the biscuit-box barricade. The stone-walled kraal (enclosure) was stormed, but an interior wall and a redoubt of mealie bags some 6 metres (20 feet) high held the attackers at bay. A relief force from a nearby settlement was spotted by Zulu scouts, which may well explain why the assault on the remaining buildings petered out after 9.30 p.m., to be replaced by intermittent rifle fire from both sides. But the relief force, seeing the flames from some distance away, assumed the mission house had been captured and returned whence they had come. The Zulu losses had been high and they were reluctant to fight at nighttime. In the early dawn the tired defenders, down to their last box of bullets, saw the enemy forces marching away. Dabulamanzi arrived back to join the main Zulu army the next day, 23 January to a derisory chorus for his failure with thousands of warriors to capture a small mission post.

  This painting of the defence of Rorke’s Drift during the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 was made a year later by the French artist Alphonse de Neuville (1835–85). The scene shows the blazing hospital building and the evacuation of the ill and wounded. In the background can be seen some of the food bags that were used to build an improvised defensive barrier. When the picture was exhibited in London, 50,000 people paid to see it.

  In the morning, Chelmsford and his men arrived. They buried 351 Zulu dead lying around the buildings at Rorke’s Drift, but the troops, after seeing the slaughter and mutilation of the corpses at Isandlwana, were hard to control. An estimated 500 wounded and exhausted Zulus found in the surrounding countryside were bayoneted or clubbed to death. It was, one eyewitness recalled, ‘as deliberate a bit of butchery as I ever saw’. The defenders at Rorke’s Drift were liberally decorated with honours, including seven Victoria Crosses for non-officers. One of the recipients, Private Henry Hook, who had stubbornly defended the hospital as long as he could, ended his working life as the cloakroom attendant at the Reading Room of the British Museum Library. Chelmsford used Rorke’s Drift as cover for his incompetence at losing the camp at Isandlwana. The campaign was won after a tough struggle and Cetshwayo lost his kingdom. Rorke’s Drift lived on as an imperial legend, to be immortalized decades later in the film Zulu. Whatever mistakes the cinema version made, the courage and ingenuity of a small handful of British soldiers and officials has never been in question.

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  No. 28 BATTLE OF ADWA

  1 March 1896

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  By the mid-1890s the empire of Ethiopia, rule
d over by the Lion of Judah, the emperor Menelik, was the only region of Africa not dominated by Europeans. It was a unique state, committed to an ancient form of Christianity, ruled over by a quarrelsome elite of kings and governors (Ras) who each ruled their own principality or province under the eye of the emperor. The European states misunderstood Ethiopia, assuming that it was just another barbarous African kingdom ripe for the European ‘civilising mission’. In 1895, an Italian force commanded by General Oreste Baratieri, governor of the Italian colony of Eritrea, invaded and occupied the Ethiopian province of Tigray. Italian imperialists itched to add Ethiopia to the tiny Italian empire. No-one considered it likely that Menelik would be able to organize resistance against a modern army, equipped with the tools of modern war. Against all expectations the Ethiopian emperor not only raised a disciplined army, but imposed on Italy’s invaders a humiliating defeat, the single most important reverse against the remorseless tide of nineteenth-century European imperialism.

  Italian confidence was boosted by Menelik’s apparent failure to react to the occupation of Tigray. The appearance was deceptive. In September 1895, Menelik summoned the nation to war; but the slow pace of communication and the large area of the empire meant that months passed before the men assembled in answer to the summons. By tradition all males had an obligation to answer the emperor’s call, bringing with them shield, lance, sword and, if they had one, a rifle. Menelik left his capital, Addis Ababa, in October, a royal procession that wound its way slowly across the mountainous terrain towards Tigray, gathering as it went an army of more than 100,000 men, most on foot, but with numbers of fierce horsemen, the Oromo cavalry, alongside. The Ethiopians had artillery, bought from European suppliers, and a surprisingly large number of rifles. The army was commanded in regional units by the Ras. Tactics relied on the sheer mass of soldiers, but the Ethiopian commanders also displayed a shrewd grasp of operational realities. The Italian army underestimated Ethiopian capability and did so at its peril.

  The arrival of the vast Ethiopian army was a shock to the Italians posted as a vanguard to await developments. Expecting at most a few thousand, the 2,000 Italian and local askari troops atop the small plateau of Amba Alage watched 40,000 soldiers approach led by Ras Makonnen. They were overwhelmed and most of them slaughtered. The Italian fort at Mekele was then besieged and forced to surrender on 20 January 1896. Menelik continued his march, reclaiming much of Tigray and threatening Eritrea. He camped on one side of a large plateau at Gundapta and waited for the Italians to come to negotiate their withdrawal from Ethiopian territory. Despite the recent setbacks, Baratieri rejected any compromise and brought most of his 16,000 soldiers, the majority of them askaris, to a camp at Sauria, on the eastern edge of the Gundapta plateau, in order to protect Eritrea. The standoff frustrated the Italian prime minister and arch-imperialist, Francesco Crispi. He decided to replace Baratieri, but in the interim sent him a final telegram prodding him urgently to take action. At almost the same time, Menelik moved his camp across the mountains west of Gundapta, to the small town of Adwa (Adowa). The Italians interpreted this as a retreat and Baratieri at last planned an offensive.

  Confident that Italian firepower would keep the Ethiopians at bay, Baratieri divided his force in four. Two columns commanded by Generals Matteo Albertone and Vittorio Dabormida were to occupy the main passes between Gundapta and Adwa, while a third brigade under General Giuseppe Arimondi would hold the mountainside between them. A fourth brigade was held in reserve. Baratieri hoped that Menelik would be provoked to fight and his army destroyed by Italian guns, but he was less confident than his commanders, who eagerly expected a decisive Italian victory. The plan went disastrously wrong from the start. During the night of 25 March 1896, the askaris hurried ahead and then waited at the passes for the slower elements of the brigade to catch up. When Albertone arrived, reluctant to let the local troops tell him his job, he insisted that the pass was much further on. As dawn broke the advance guard of his brigade had in fact descended to Adwa, where it ran directly into Menelik’s camp. Alerted by gunfire, the whole Ethiopian army assembled for battle. The Italian vanguard was destroyed, its few survivors running back in panic through the Italian lines. Albertone formed a line on a shallow hill but his force was soon embattled by 40,000 Ethiopians, who surged forward against the guns. Ethiopian sharpshooters were told to kill the white officers in order to leave the askaris leaderless; out of 610 officers in the Italian force, only 258 survived. Soon Ethiopian soldiers were working up the slopes surrounding Albertone, firing on all sides.

  Baratieri saw at once what had gone wrong and ordered Dabormida to move forward from the second pass to stand at Albertone’s right, supporting his withdrawal. Instead Dabormida took the wrong fork on the path down and ended up far from Albertone, in the valley of Mariam Shavitu, surrounded by slopes on three sides. Menelik saw the mistake and sent 15,000 men into the gap between the two Italian brigades. At this point, General Arimondi finally arrived at the passes and was told to hold them to enable the Italian force to retreat. At 10.30 a.m. on 26 March, with most of his force dead or captured, Albertone ordered the withdrawal. He was wounded and caught, but those still able to flee scrambled up to the passes and through Arimondi’s brigade, ignoring all orders to stop and fight. Now there was no hope. The askaris fled through the passes to the Gundapta plain, some north towards Eritrea. Ethiopian soldiers now swarmed over the hillsides, charging the few soldiers and artillerymen still in the fight. Crazed by thirst, hunger and fear, the whole force broke and was pursued through the passes and onto the flat plateau where Oromo cavalry cut hundreds of them down. Far away, cut off from the main battle, the Dabormida brigade stood its ground, surrounded by Ethiopian soldiers. At 3.30 p.m., the remnants charged at the circling enemy and Dabormida, revolver in hand, was killed where he stood, a forlorn Italian Custer.

  The level of casualties on both sides was never calculated precisely. Some years later an Italian investigation team found the skeletal remains of 3,643 men, but hundreds remained unaccounted for. The Ethiopians who, the Italians said, ‘despised death’, embraced it in large but unknowable numbers, and almost certainly suffered considerably more dead than the enemy. On the field of battle, the Italian dead and wounded were stripped naked by soldiers keen for some semblance of booty. Some, though not all, of the Italians, dead, wounded or captured, were castrated. Condemned in Europe as a barbarous practice, it was a symbol for Ethiopians of their ‘unmanning’ of a fallen enemy, a practice that had its roots in a traditional Ethiopian reading of the Old Testament. Adwa shocked Italian opinion. Baratieri was court-martialled, while Crispi was forced to resign. Menelik insisted on a peace treaty and following its signature in October 1896, the hundreds of Italian prisoners were allowed to go home. Adwa remained a symbol of a broader African wish for independence from European rule, a victory against the loaded odds of European imperialism.

  A stylized mural painted between 1965 and 1975 depicts the moment at which the Ethiopian army of Menelik came to grips with a mixed Italian-Eritrean army near the town of Adwa in 1896. The Ethiopian army was modern by African standards and its tactics shocked the Italian colonizers.

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  No. 29 BATTLE OF OMDURMAN

  2 September 1898

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  One of the commanders of the Sudanese army at the Battle of Omdurman, Ibrahim al-Khalil, had the habit of taking two horses with him into battle. The first was always called Aim’, the second one ‘End’. If Aim was hurt, he would switch to End so he could carry on fighting. On the fateful early morning when between 50,000 and 60,000 men of the Mahdist leader, Khalifa ‘Abdullahi, advanced on a mixed British-Egyptian expeditionary force with only half the number of troops, Ibrahim led the army in a massed charge against the enemy encampment. Aim was hit by shellfire and collapsed; Ibrahim jumped onto the ill-named End and was killed by machine-gun fire a few minutes later. Thirteen years earlier, the Mahdist army had swarmed into Khartoum and famously killed General Gor
don. At Omdurman, mere numbers no longer sufficed to ensure a Mahdist victory.

  The expedition to Omdurman was only loosely connected with the British desire to avenge Gordon’s death. For years after the fall of Khartoum to the Sudanese army of the self-proclaimed Mahdi, the Islamic religious reformer Muhammad Ahmad, the British allowed the new Islamic state to survive. The Mahdi died in 1885 and his place was taken by one of his closest advisers, Khalifa ‘Abdullahi, who used a reign of terror to impose his own domination over the regions of Sudan and to enforce the strict Islamic code favoured by the Mahdi himself. As the state began to disintegrate in the late 1890s, the British once again became concerned about the region’s security, and the threat to British-occupied Egypt, while the British public was fed on horror stories of rape, torture and slavery which only European rule could expunge. In January 1898, the commander, or sirdar, of the Egyptian army, Colonel Horatio Herbert Kitchener, was sent with a force of 8,000 British and 17,000 Egyptian and Sudanese troops for the long trek to the Mahdist capital at Omdurman, on the opposite side of the River Nile from Khartoum, charged with the unpredictable task of overthrowing the Khalifa.

  The risks were considerable since disease and the dangers of river navigation were bound to eat into the small number of European soldiers dispatched for the campaign. Kitchener understood these dangers and insisted on making sure that communication by rail and telegraph would be constructed all the way south into the Sudan; he also tried to discipline his troops to drink only filtered water to prevent dysentery. The long journey for men who had in many cases never seen service in the tropics was fraught with difficulty, with temperatures rising at times to 48°C (118°F), and men and animals covered with a thick, dark dust thrown up by the march of men and horses over the sandy ground. Not until August 1898 did they arrive at the approach to Omdurman knowing that the Khalifa was gathering a large army to challenge them. The Mahdist leader chose to meet them on a broad plain north of the city with the Karari (Kerreri) hills to the north and the Jebel Surgham hills to the south, both high enough to allow his armies to gather out of sight of the enemy. The Sudanese commanders arrived with their men organized in units called rub’s, each of which comprised 800–1,200 men, most armed with swords and spears, the privileged jihadiya with firearms. After arguing whether it was better to attack by night or by day, the Khalifa finally insisted on an early morning attack. Prayers were said and the standards – Green, Dark Green and Black – were allocated to the main divisions of the Mahdist army. On 1 September, the forces moved into position.