by Peter Bowen
I saw them finally, about five o’clock. They was maybe five miles away, and they dipped out of sight as soon as I laid eyes on them. But at least now we knew which direction they was in. I rode flat out, with Harford behind me, cursing Carey for not having headed back an hour ago. It would be damn dark in an hour and there was high cloud moving in from the Indian Ocean, so there would be no light from the stars.
“Damn them,” Harford snarled, “oh, damn, damn, damn.”
We rode as hard as we could, but I knew already we were too late. That is where the Zulus were headed, and the Prince was in the lead, not Carey, as it should have been.
To go five miles across a flat and level plain is one thing, to go that far in this broken country took longer. It was more than an hour until we came to the place I had last seen them. We looked down the track and saw a disheveled trooper riding hell for leather toward us. The man had no rifle. He would have run right over the top of us if I hadn’t yelled at him to stop. He had near to blown his horse and he was shaking so bad that it was a minute or two until he found his voice.
“Are there others?” I yelled. The man calmed down and said he thought that three others of the party had got away. That left four unaccounted for.
“Get back to the camp and tell them,” I said.
The man rode off as hard as he had ridden up. And then here came our Lieutenant Carey.
“I suppose Buller would hang me if I just killed him,” I said to Harford. “Will you look at that sonofabitch. Not for him to check for his troopers.”
Carey stopped and then rode back—he was a mile away, so it wasn’t my remark that did it, and pretty soon he come on with two troopers in tow.
If you are wondering why we didn’t go down there, it’s simple. Whatever had happened was over.
Carey and his two troopers came pounding up and reined in, and Carey was crying.
“We must pray ... I am ruined ... the Prince is killed ... oh, woe is me, woe is me.” He really said “woe is me.” I almost shot him for that—it was one of Custer’s favorite expressions.
“Get hold of yourself, man,” snapped Harford. “You must report to General Wood.”
We pounded back across the veldt, startling antelope which had put up for the night out of their beds. My horse was the fleetest, and I was used to riding hard in this sort of country, so they followed strung out behind. We cut a line straight across as near as we could, but it was damn dark before we pulled up at the camp.
Both Buller and Evelyn Wood were pacing about, Buller with a huge unlit cheroot in his clenched teeth. The sight of Carey made the veins in his temples throb.
Wood was a lumpy little man, nearsighted and always blinking, but tough as nails. One of those deceptively soft little fellows who it is unwise to ignore. Carey dismounted and walked off with them to Wood’s tent. They went inside, and a lamp flared up. I swung down and led my horse to the picket and off-saddled and rubbed him down and grained and watered him and checked his hooves. He would need shoes soon.
Harford was next to me.
“There will be unholy hell to pay for this one,” he said. “I am sure that Chelmsford will have someone’s ballocks.”
“Ought to be,” I said, rubbing my horse with a handful of dry grass. “Letting that arsehole Carey lead the damn thing. I’ll bet he was trying to butter up the Prince and made him an honorary Colonel for a day, you lead the patrol, sir, we’re right behind you. I knew he was a wrong ’un.”
Buller found me shortly, his forehead and cheeks glowing even in the dark.
“What the hell happened,” he said. “They ...”
“What happened was that arselicker Carey let the Prince be the leader for the day is what happened,” I said, “and the boy decided he would stay out late so he wouldn’t look like a fraidy-cat.”
“A what?”
“Cowardly,” I said, “that he must indeed be a parfit, gentil knight, if you want.”
“Can you find the place in the dark?”
Now I lost my temper.
“Yes,” I said, “and we can go out there with five hundred men and it won’t mean spit. He’s dead. All going out with the troopers now means is that some of them will get killed by the Zulus or thrown from their horses.”
“You insubordinate bastard.”
“Yes, sir.”
Buller took a deep breath, and I’m damned if he didn’t apologize to me.
Nobody slept much that night. Wood sent for me eventually—I think he was vaguely aware that I was in his command.
He was quite courteous, but his soft questions got everything out of me that I knew, including that last glimpse I had of the little troop as it went over the hill and down into the donga, with the Prince in the lead.
Wood got a sad look on his face—he looked like a basset hound that has lost a favorite bone—and he lit a mangy old pipe after giving me a glass of brandy.
“He thought he was at war, but he was only a boy playing at war,” said Wood. “Well, perhaps the course of European history changed this afternoon.”
“Ain’t there more of them?”
He nodded. “A sorry lot,” said Wood. “They have no political chance. If you will excuse yourself, Sergeant, I must write my report to Chelmsford. You will be present for the court of inquiry.”
I got a couple of hours’ sleep and got ready before the others—Buller started shouting orders a good hour after I got up and maybe an hour before the dawn we rode off, a thousand strong. There was a Frog correspondent name of Deleage in camp who begged to go, but right now the English didn’t need any further juicy details leaked out. Like what the Zulus do to their dead enemies, for instance, or live ones if they capture them.
We clanked across the veldt, the mist broke, and about nine in the morning we come to the spot where Harford and I had waited for the survivors.
Buller was beside me, Harford right behind.
“I’d suggest you let the two of us go ahead for a hundred yards or so,” I said. “And then we can wave you to the sides when it is time to fan out.”
Harford and I went on ahead and then we heard the troop start up behind us. We went three miles, actually, with the tracks of Carey and his troopers coming straight at us, and then I saw one set of hoofprints come in from the side, and I got off to walk around and squint at the ground. Harford rode on ahead and then he dismounted. I waved to Buller and he began to send out parties to the side.
Perhaps a half mile on there was a deserted kraal—hadn’t been deserted too damn long, there were still live coals in the ashes of the fire and some mealies—they’re a kind of corn—that hadn’t been picked long. I could see by the tracks what had happened. They had come here, a bit past the kraal, dismounted, and sat down on a couple of convenient logs to do a little sketching. The logs was about ten feet from a huge stand of tambookie grass—eight feet high and bunched at the base, a man can walk through it easy. The warriors had come up, maybe fired a shot, and in the confusion the troops scattered, horses rearing.
I heard a whinny.
I swung up and rode toward the noise—it was the Prince’s horse, a gray gelding name of Percy and he was real skittish. The saddle was under his belly. I got down and caught Percy, and fixed the saddle on his back and tied the stirrups together over the seat. The saddlehorn was torn plumb across right to left as you are facing forward on it, so there it was.
The attack came, Percy shied, the Prince got a grip on the horn but the horse was moving too fast for him to swing up. He went a ways like that, and then the saddlehorn tore—it had no iron core like ours do—and the horse was gone and the Prince was alone. I walked along, Harford beside me. We stopped and looked at each other once and then shrugged and went on. Found a silver spur, all twisted out of shape, and then the Prince’s terrier pinned to the ground with an assegai, and another spur, and then a blue sock with an embroidered “N” on it.
The Prince was a little farther along, lying on his back, naked. The Zulus hadn�
�t ripped him open. He’d been stabbed once through the left eye into the brain. His left arm was hacked and chopped where he’d warded off blows. I knelt and looked at his right hand. The fingers was clenched and they was clenched around a big clump of Zulu hair. Well, he’d done all right by himself, as unnecessary as it had been.
Harford hallooed and Buller come in and that ass Carey, who threw himself on the ground and wept. The other three troopers had been found; they’d pretty much been torn to bits. A burial detail went off to tend to the common folk. Napoleon was wrapped in the canvas that was used for wagon covers and slung across a horse, and so we went back.
The court of inquiry was held that afternoon. I gave ’em what I knew, which wasn’t much, and they couldn’t very well put down what I thought.
Harford and I went out again that night. We looked for Zulus high and low and didn’t find a trace.
47
THE PRINCE IMPERIAL’S CARCASS was sent back down the line to the thanks of a grateful nation—they was a lot more upset and grieving about poor Napoleon than they were about the fifteen hundred line soldiers who had also fallen to the Zulus. Us line soldiers went on toward Ulundi and the end of the war, and it was a damned sour business.
We were smack in the middle of the rainy season. Strung out on the march our column stretched for seven miles and most of them miles was mud and mud and mud. The teamsters and conductors had the worst of it—it sometimes took forty oxen to drag a wagon up the rutted side of a donga. Everyone was wet all of the time, except maybe me. I had a rain slicker. Those of the troops who had early stages of TB were falling away, coughing their lungs out on the hills of Zululand.
Harford and I were out most nights, but now as vedettes, drifting in the dark and picking off the occasional Zulu scout. They weren’t very good at the job—hell, they was farmers and cattle herders—and the only reason that Harford and I did it was that staring at each other in the camp was worse. It was miserable, wet, and seemed endless. The troops had it better, at least they could have fistfights, and the sergeants had their hands full keeping the men in line. The British army didn’t exactly recruit its privates on the playing fields of Eton, mind you, and a lot of the dockside scum and common drunks was somewhere in the Empire, in uniform, making it safe and profitable for decent folk.
Ulundi was barely twenty miles away now—three days’ hard travel for the column. The Zulus didn’t even harry the line much—they didn’t know how to clean the Martini-Henrys, and after fifty rounds or so the pieces were so fouled it was even money that they would blow up if you touched off a round, not to mention that the piece kicked like a Missouri mule when the bore was spotless, and things went downhill as the powder residues and such built up.
Mostly, I think, they didn’t want to. There would be one last battle for the honor of the Zulu nation, and thousands of them would die, and most of what they had known would pass away, and this gave them a sadness I have seen too many times in the Indians. The new world was worthless, and the godwallopers are bad enough on a good day. No doubt there were several dozen following the army like crows follow a plow, ready to pounce as soon as the Zulus were down and give them a good dose of Jesus.
The next night Buller come to us and asked us if we would mind awfully taking a wide circle around Ulundi and taking a look at possible avenues of escape that the King might take after the battle went against him. We said hell yes, we mind.
“In that case it is an order,” he said, his moustache twitching up and down happily. I have never known anyone who actually thrived on bad food, endless rain, mud, and being in the saddle twenty hours a day except Buller. I hated him.
Harford and I headed well west for the entire night—with the rain the Zulus probably weren’t much out in it, but we were damn careful. We had a dark lantern with us, and could study the ground on the trails.
There was old, rain-washed sign, of men and cattle, but they had long gone. We passed a few small kraals, but they seemed deserted.
We laid up the whole day in a donga under a cutbank, eating cold food—a fire would have plumed badly in this wet air—and cleaned ourselves and our horses as best we could. The rain let up and the sun came out and we poached miserably for the afternoon. Nothing moved in the donga except a warthog, which came by looking a lot like a Chicago alderman on voting day, smelled us, snorted and backed down his burrow. He’d stick his head out every once in a while to see if we were still there, and even a snort from a horse would make him back down. It made the time pass, watching him.
The going was much better that night. I was thankful that we weren’t on the Powder River—I have been as paralyzed by gumbo as ever I was by snow, and the Powder River is the worst place in all the world when it rains.
The ground here was rock and sand—we had climbed maybe a thousand feet. There was no sign of anything like Zulus. We took a chance and rode at a canter, and made a loop of thirty miles that night, coming to a long scarp that stuck out over the plain. The fires of Ulundi were a glow far off on our right, and from where we were, we could see twenty miles across the plain straight out and about that to the north. We holed up good and cut fodder for the horses and grained them, and I lay down to glass for an hour on the faraway while Harford kept his neck swiveling and his eyeballs on the up close.
Nothing much happened in the morning, except a lone Zulu trotted down the trail far out on to the plain, coming down from the north. He was unarmed, and I assumed he was carrying an urgent message.
“If Chelmsford suddenly had to face the Zulus and the Shangane Nation he might find it sticky,” Harford said.
I asked who the hell the Shanganes was.
“About fifty years ago there was a battle royal for the crown of Zululand,” said Harford, “and Shaka won and Shoshangane lost. The battle was indecisive, and Shoshangane took his people and his army—it was a considerable number, about forty thousand—and went on up north. There isn’t any real possibility of the Shanganes coming, but the thought is amusing.”
Harford had a strange sense of humor.
I was doing the up close, rifle at the ready and nostrils twitching, when I heard Harford gasp. He was peering off to the south and the east, and whatever it was I couldn’t make out. It was too far away, though I could see some movement. Harford followed whatever it was for a long time—perhaps an hour.
“It’s the King,” said Harford, handing me the binoculars. “With a dozen retainers and a dozen wives bringing up the rear.”
I lay full length on the rocky ledge and watched. Through the glasses I could make out Cetshwayo—he was taller than the others and broader, and he had on some sort of damask cloak, red on gold. I looked closer. It was a tablecloth. A couple of youngsters walked beside him, holding an umbrella. The sun wasn’t hot enough yet for the Royal brow to need shade.
“We must get back,” Harford hissed, “with this.”
“Be a simple matter to sneak down there and ambush him,” I says. “I’m good to five hundred yards with my piece.”
Harford sighed. “Kelly,” he said, “this comes from, no doubt, your various faults as an American. Her Majesty’s forces do not wish to kill Cetshwayo. He is much more valuable alive. We wish to extend the hand of friendship after our little tiff. Now would you please pull your oafish carcass away from that pitiful sight and ride, or I shall do it alone?”
He meant ride, too. We didn’t skulk and we didn’t hole up. We rode straight as we could, steering perhaps five miles west of Ulundi, and only once did we see any Zulus. There were three of them, mounted on horses, and they gave chase, but not having had much practice they all fell off the first two miles or so. Saddles might have helped.
We come on to the column just at dusk, and it was only perhaps five miles from the royal kraal at Ulundi. There was maybe twelve thousand warriors around the kraal, all of the regiments that had been at all of the battles, and they was all sitting on the ground in companies and ranks. The battle would commence just as soon as the h
aze lifted in the morning, and the Zulus and the British and the one American knew it.
Harford was admitted at once to Chelmsford’s tent, while I held the horses and thought about how far away and long ago it seemed that I had tottered down the gangplank into Durban.
Harford wasn’t five minutes with Chelmsford—this was the last battle and he must have had a lot on his mind.
The whole column was laid out now as a huge square, maybe half a mile on a side, and the men were digging trenches and piling up breastworks, leaving channels near the corners for the cavalry to exit through. Each of the four corners had a Gatling gun at it—you ask me the damn doctor that invented it should have stuck to lancing boils and otherwise being useful. The gun can fire three hundred rounds a minute in trials but it always jams in battle.
We slept on the ground in the center of the square, with the casuals and grooms and conductors—Boers, who stayed up all night drinking gin and reading from the Bible. I never have found anything funny in the Bible, but they was laughing like hell. It was cold out and I couldn’t sleep anyway, so I wandered off and found a conductor who had a small liquor business on the side and bought a bottle of brandy and two huge black cheroots. I went back to Harford and we sat up all night drinking brandy and smoking. The stock inside the square was restless—the wagons was about three miles behind, circled around the oxen—the horses stamped and whickered and men laughed and joked.
We waited for the morning here, and they waited over there.
48
THERE WAS A LOT of Victoria Crosses awarded for Ulundi—I guess the British public was getting impatient for heroes or something—but as a battle it was pretty damn one-sided. Some of the crosses was awarded for a stupid sally made by Buller and a few troopers early on, when the ground was slick, and four men were killed and a fifth captured alive. He was handed over to the women in the kraal and his screams went on for hours.
His last bellers were apparently the signal, for the entire Zulu army rose at once and began to trot toward us, the horns suddenly racing out to the sides. They was yelling and coming on. The right horn went into a stand of tambookie grass a thousand yards away and the Gatling ripped a sighting burst into them and many warriors went down, knocked ten feet by the force of the bullets. The bullets are an inch in diameter and weigh one-sixth of a pound, so a man hit with that is through.