by Neil Oliver
Durnford’s fighting retreat, courageous and disciplined though it was, had left Pope’s men dangerously exposed to outflanking by the Zulu left horn. Realizing there was a gap of many hundreds of yards between him and the mounted men, Pope wheeled to his right and began to try to close it. Durnford meanwhile had reached a deep, dry riverbed—called a donga—and ordered his men to get down into it with their horses. Once dismounted, they lined the lip of the donga and began to put steady fire into the advancing Zulus.
For the first time, the attack began to stall. Though they outnumbered the British many times over, disciplined volley fire from Martini-Henrys in professional, steady hands presented a wall of death for men protected only by hide-covered shields. They were youngsters too—the untested teenagers of the uKhandempemvu and the 20-year-olds of the iNgobamakhosi—and they flung themselves down in the long grass.
Seeing this, Ntshingwayo dispatched Mkhosana kaMvundlana of the Biyela clan—a man destined to emerge as the greatest Zulu hero of Isandlwana—to knock some heads together. Sprinting down to the front line, Mkhosana marched back and forth among the prostrate warriors, heedless of the bullets flying around him and kicking up clouds of dust by his feet. As the braves watched, awestruck by his valor, he reminded them of the greatness of their king, who had himself won many battles and crushed his foes and was therefore deserving only of their praise and courage.
“The Little Branch of Leaves that extinguished the Great Fire…gave no such order as this!” he cried, his head thrown back, his face toward the sky.
Shamed by their elder’s words, the boys leaped to their feet and plunged forward once more, toward the rifles spitting fire and smoke into their shining faces. Still unbowed, still urging them onwards, Mkhosana was suddenly silenced, felled at last by a Martini-Henry round.
Durnford meanwhile was in his element—survivors would recall how he walked calmly back and forth among them as they fired their volleys. From time to time a rifle would jam in the hands of a less experienced soldier. The cartridges were not solid brass cylinders but made of thin foil. Often, and especially once the barrel of the rifle was hot, they would jam in the firing mechanism. Durnford had his ruined right arm in a sling, bound close to his chest. But taking the offending weapon from shaking hands, he would jam it between his knees and use his good hand to free the cartridge with one practiced movement.
The greater problem was a rapidly diminishing supply of ammunition. Much has been made by historians of the role of the quartermasters in charge of supplies back at the camp. Some have claimed that a great deal of trouble was caused by go-betweens who were reluctant to hand out the boxes of bullets. In any case, out in the donga Durnford decided it was time to move and he ordered his men to mount up and withdraw.
With thousands of Zulus bearing down on him, he led his men back to a ridge of high ground near the camp, called the Nek, close to where the army’s wagons were parked. He had picked up stragglers of other units along the way and by now he was accompanied too by men of the Natal Carbineers—colleagues of those he’d been with so unhappily at Bushman’s River Pass. It says a great deal for Durnford’s actions and charisma that day that those men chose to stand with him now, rather than take their chances elsewhere.
From here on the Nek the surviving British could see there was no hope of survival where they stood and nowhere to run. Beyond the mountain was the road that led back toward Natal, the way they’d come just two days before. But the right horn of the Zulus had long since completed its maneuver and was blocking all hope of retreat in that direction. Some refugees of the British force would head that way nonetheless, down a route remembered to this day as the Fugitives’ Trail.
From a column of 1,700 men—both black and white—who’d awoken at Isandlwana that morning, no more than 300 would make it to safety. Of them, fewer than 60 were European.
The firing line had been overrun all along its length. The Zulus had broken through en masse and now their sheer weight in numbers was a flood that would not be checked. British order began to fall apart as men, singly or in groups, turned away from the foe and fled in hope of safety back among the tents and wagons—anywhere.
It’s always meaningless to attribute bravery or cowardice in broad brushstrokes. Here at Isandlwana every shade of human behavior, from cowardice to heroism and all points in between, was displayed by men on both sides. There were boys there too—drummer boys of 12 years of age or thereabouts—taking shelter where they could among the men. It was to be the last time the British Army would take children into battle. None of those at Isandlwana would survive the day.
One of the most famous stories of January 22, 1879, details the attempt by two lieutenants to try to save the Queen’s Color. This flag was the rallying point for soldiers in battle—and its loss to the enemy an unbearable shame. Nevill Coghill and Teignmouth Melvill, both on horseback, were said to have tried to see the flag safely off the field, with the blessing of Pulleine. They died in the attempt, overcome by Zulus, and the Color itself was lost for many months. For years their flight was recounted as a tale of great heroism—but it seems that even at the time doubts were cast on their motives. Of the few who survived the battlefield, all but a handful were men on horseback who fled the field early enough to avoid the crush of the throng. It begs the question why two officers saw fit to leave their footsoldiers to their fate, while they themselves headed for safety with a flag. Heroes or cowards…who can easily say?
Killing and dying were everywhere, and men either rose up to meet them, or cowered before them.
A Zulu who fought and survived would say later, “The tumult and the firing was wonderful…those red soldiers! They fought like lions and they fell like stones, each man in his place.”
Cetshwayo had ordered the killing of the red soldiers, after all—and only those on the battlefield in the tunics of other regiments, other colors, would live to tell the tale.
If men on both sides learned anything that day, it was mutual respect. The Zulus would say afterwards that they never fought anyone braver than British soldiers. Whites who made it out would recall the selfless courage of near-naked Zulus, driving themselves on to the bullets and bayonets of the British in the hope their own deaths might bring victory one step closer for their fellows. Before the end they would be throwing the bodies of their dead up on to the stubborn British bayonets so as to drag them down and create an opening for attack.
Up on the slopes directly beneath the sheer walls of the mountain, another knot of British soldiers was looking out over this greatest battlescape of the Victorian era. And right at the height of it all the greater forces of nature played their hand as well. The moon—the “dead moon” that had concerned the Zulus—now passed in front of the sun. For the next half hour the horror would be played out in the twilight of a near-total eclipse.
There in the gloom was Captain Younghusband. He and his men had been fighting their way back toward the camp, using the cliffs to cover their rear. They too had run out of ammunition, and hundreds of Zulus were rushing up the slope toward them. Moved by the spectacle of so few against so many, a Zulu commander raised his voice above the tumult.
“Wait!” he ordered.
The braves did as they were told and looked on in silence as Younghusband went to each of his men in turn, shook his hand and said a few words. Then, according to the watchers, he took “a long knife” from his belt. So it was with saber in hand that Younghusband let out a defiant roar and led his men in a final charge down toward the waiting host.
“We fell upon them and we killed them all,” said the Zulu.
Perhaps before they died Younghusband and his men glimpsed the last of Durnford. He had earlier sent away two of his sergeants, along with his beloved horse, Chieftain, and at the end he was shoulder to shoulder with his men, an ever-tightening knot of red, surrounded by black. Above all else it was his wish to lead his men bravely and to do his duty.
“Fix bayonets, boys,” he said as the
wave broke over them, “and die like British soldiers do.”
Zulus were pouring into the camp, driving before them the cooks and bottle-washers along with the fighting men. Some time now Pulleine himself was killed, perhaps issuing final desperate orders to those who’d remained close to him in those moments.
The last act of the Battle of Isandlwana was performed amid scenes of savagery, where men used empty rifles as clubs, slashed and stabbed with bayonet and spear and finally fell upon the last man they could reach with fists and fingernails and bared teeth.
When there were no more men left to kill, the Zulus turned their attentions to everything from the oxen, to the horses, even to the pet dogs. The camp was torn apart—canvas cut into strips for blankets, all metals scavenged for re-use, all foodstuffs consumed, taken away or destroyed.
A Zulu boy who visited the battlefield some days later described the aftermath:
Dead was the horse, dead too the mule, dead was the dog, dead was the monkey, dead were the wagons, dead were the tents, dead were the boxes, dead was everything, even to the very metals.
When Chelmsford returned to the camp that evening it was to a scene of horror. Every corpse had been stripped and disemboweled, the grass in every direction slick with gore. Never before had such a defeat been inflicted upon a British army by a native force armed only with spears.
The General allowed his men only the briefest stop—for fear they would be overcome by the full impact of the slaughter if they saw it in daylight—and marched them on toward Rorke’s Drift before dawn on the 23rd. He feared the worst, but in fact the 150 or so British defenders there had survived with just a handful of casualties.
A force of 4,000 Zulus under the command of Cetshwayo’s half-brother Dabulamanzi had grown bored sitting back in the reserves at Isandlwana with no hope of “washing their spears.” During the afternoon of the 22nd they’d crossed into Natal, against their king’s express instructions, and picked a fight with the first British soldiers they could find. In spite of their vastly superior numbers they were fought off by disciplined Martini-Henry rifle fire. They returned to their kraals to face the ridicule of their families and the wrath of Cetshwayo, who had been at pains to use his army only to defend his borders.
The British high command, eager to salvage some form of triumph from within disaster, used Rorke’s Drift as a public relations opportunity. A total of 11 Victoria Crosses were awarded to the defenders, and this lesser battle rose to overshadow the disaster of Isandlwana for more than a century.
Victory for the Zulus on January 22, 1879, succeeded only in bloodying the nose of the British Empire. The red soldiers withdrew to lick their wounds and then returned all the stronger. Later the same year they reinvaded, finally wiping out the Zulu army at the Battle of Ulundi in July. Cavalrymen with lances were unleashed before the end, to spear the fleeing Zulus like animals as they ran. Their king was made a prisoner and his kingdom wrested from him.
But Cetshwayo had seen the future months before, while the fires still smoldered on the fields below the mountain of Isandlwana. In fact if he had spent his boyhood learning the lore of the heroes, he would have had an inkling of the nation’s destiny for almost all of his days. The Zulus had been united under Shaka just over 60 years before—and he had ruled them with a cruel hand until his death by assassination in September 1828. As his killers, including members of his own family, plunged their iklwas into his body he cried out:
Sons of my father, you will not rule this land when I am dead, for it will be ruled by the white people who come from the sea.
And so in the moment of his greatest victory, Cetshwayo kaMpande wept. As his army lined up before him at Ulundi, in the aftermath of their triumph, he could not help but notice a great many were missing.
“When will the rest come before me?” he asked.
His indunas told him there would be no return for 3,000 or more left on the bloodied soil, before the mountain that looked like a little hut. Many more, who had made it home, were so terribly wounded by bullet and bayonet they would never fully recover. Knowing all too well that the war had only begun and already his losses were unbearable, Cetshwayo said:
A spear has been thrust into the belly of the nation…If you think you have finished with all the white men you are wrong, because they are still coming.
Like flowers upon the African veldt after rain, victory had sprung from a nation watered by its own blood. The blossoms would not come again.
The heroic age
The battlefield of Isandlwana is a haunting, haunted place. A strange trick of the geology or the topography seems to make the lion-backed mountain the receiver at the center of a huge dish. You can be standing alone, out in the long grass in front of where the camp would have stood, and suddenly hear voices at your shoulder. You look around, startled, and see no one. Then, once you’ve calmed down, you spot a couple of people standing several hundred yards away. It’s their voices you’ve heard, the sound conducted somehow over the distance by the shape of the landscape itself.
If you stand out there and imagine the impact of the sound of 24,000 Zulus, stamping their feet on the dry, rock-hard ground as they draw closer, beating their spears against their shields and shouting their war cries, it’s enough to make the hairs rise on the nape of the neck on the hottest day. That men stood in the face of it, whether or not they were armed with rifles, and coolly obeyed the orders of their officers, makes a person wonder just what such men were all about. What did they know, or understand, or believe that enabled them to stand and fight to the death, “each man in his place” like the Zulu said?
For a start, the world they lived in was much harder than our own. Life was tougher for every soul alive, made of hard work, long hours, physical suffering and no expectation that things were about to change or improve any time soon. Although the boys who survived and made it to manhood might have looked the same as us, they were not the same. How could they be?
With Scott in place as leader and funds of £90,000, the best part of $8 million in today’s money, Britain’s first expedition to explore the interior of Antarctica was finally under way. A brand-new ship, the Discovery, had been specially designed and built in Dundee and on July 31, 1901, she set sail from London, bound for the Isle of Wight. With her steel-plated bow and 26-inch-thick sides crafted of English oak, she was no thing of beauty. She was also tiny by our standards: 172 feet long, 34 feet wide and displacing just over 1,600 tons, but incredibly strong. Some of the bolts holding her together were over eight feet long. To untrained eyes, though, she was just ungainly and slow among the shapely yachts gathered for Cowes Week. She had been designed for a different job, however, and on August 6 she left the lightweights behind and set a course for the end of the world.
This was the time recorded by history as the “heroic age of polar exploration,” and British men were queuing up to try to ensure their place within it. There were still undiscovered countries to be claimed, and those who set out in search of them were reaching as far into the unknown as any astronaut would in the Gemini and Apollo missions of the 1960s and 70s.
The food loaded aboard the Discovery for her 47-strong crew gives a perfect insight into the style of these voyages, the spirit with which they were undertaken. Stored by the ton were whole roasted pheasants, turkeys and partridges, along with rump steak, duck and jugged hare. There were green peas, pemmican (the staple fare of polar explorers, pemmican is a Cree Indian word describing a “cake” of dried meat mixed with animal fat), raisins, onion powder, chocolate, celery seed, blackcurrant vinegar, wild cherry sauce, candied orange peel, Double Gloucester and Stilton cheeses. To wash it all down there were gallons of brandy, whiskey, port, sherry and champagne. And in an age when nearly every manly man smoked like a factory chimney, there were thousands of pounds of pipe and chewing tobacco as well.
There were early problems with the Discovery herself. For one thing she leaked and for another she seemed sluggish and graceless at sea, so
heavy indeed that she never made more than about seven knots. She showed her mettle in the open oceans though, and bobbed like a cork in the teeth of howling gales in the Roaring Forties. They encountered their first ice on November 16, around the time they crossed the 60th parallel, and it was here in this environment that she finally looked and felt the part of a ship made for dangerous endeavors. By the time they reached their final staging post of New Zealand, on the 29th of the month, Scott and his crew had developed a love-hate relationship with the old girl.
So the Discovery never did—nor ever would—win any beauty contests or talent shows. She was built to get a job done, nothing more nor less. What would make the difference was the quality of the men she carried inside her.
D-Day and the Beach Called Omaha
The flat hull of Robert Capa’s landing craft made jarring contact with the shingle, the growl of its beaching all but inaudible amid the enveloping chaos of rifle and artillery fire. All manner of ordnance filled the air with its din and tore at the cold gray water: rifle and machine gun fire, light and heavy artillery, anti-tank guns, shrapnel from exploding mines; unbearable, petrifying noise that could be felt on the face and body as clearly as it could be heard. Iron and concrete obstacles, both beneath and above the waterline, reached out to rend and tear at the hulls of the approaching vessels—and at the flesh and bones of the men they carried. The boatswain lowered the steel-reinforced door forming the bow of the boat and as it fell away in front of him to form the ramp by which he must now leave, 31-year-old Robert caught sight of the coast of France—a country he had known before in better days. “My beautiful France looked sordid and uninviting,” he wrote later, “and a German machine gun, spitting bullets around the barge, fully spoiled my return.” Thanks to weather and waiting and human error, the landing craft carrying the men of Company E was off course and out of position—and Robert was the last to leave it. While the infantrymen in front of him dropped into the water, rifles held high, and began wading through the chilling, strength-sapping waves towards the gray strip of beach many yards in front of them, Robert stopped where he was to try to squeeze off a shot or two. As he crouched and lined up on his target, he felt a thump on his behind that flung him forward into the sea. Had he been shot…hit by a shell fragment? No—looking over his shoulder he saw the boatswain. Having seen Robert pause—and thinking his erstwhile passenger was frozen to the spot—he’d propelled him into the water with the toe of one well-placed boot. Bullets buzzed and zipped around Robert’s head and peppered the sea around his waist as he made for the slight cover provided by one of the jagged iron obstacles that lay scattered across the shingle like lost pieces from a giant’s game of jacks. An infantryman with the same idea got there before him and, having removed the waterproofing from his rifle, began firing toward the beach without bothering to aim. Emboldened by the noise of his weapon, the trooper began making his way through the waves toward dry land. Robert managed a few more shots of his own before, sensing there was no point lingering any longer, he found the courage to leave the shelter of the rusted iron girders and make for a disabled American tank that lay partially submerged in the surf. All the while he felt “a new kind of fear shaking my body from toe to hair, and twisting my face.” His hands shook so badly he was barely able to reload. As though from a distance, he heard himself repeating a sentence he had learned during his time in the Spanish Civil War: “Es una cosa muy seria” (This is a very serious business). After a seeming eternity he turned away from the beach and spotted an empty landing craft. Without a moment’s hesitation, he headed toward it. “I did not think and I didn’t decide it,” he wrote. “I just stood up and ran toward the boat. I knew that I was running away. I tried to turn but couldn’t face the beach and told myself, ‘I am just going to dry my hands on that boat.’” Robert was pulled aboard and out of harm’s way. Taken back to Portsmouth, he was soon on his way to London.