All felt they had to dip their spears before returning home, especially given the startling success of their peers at Isandhlwana in breaking the British lines. Finally, a number had their own muskets, and a smaller group had looted some of the nearly eight hundred Martini-Henry rifles and hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition found at Isandhlwana. If sharpshooters could be positioned on Oskarberg hill above the compound to provide covering fire, while the entire mass charged head-on against the weaker parts of the north wall, then the Zulus might take the compound with the first charge.
The unknown problem facing the Zulus, however, was the nature of the troops in B Company of the 24th Regiment holed up at Rorke’s Drift. Like Leonidas’s Spartans at Thermopylae, there was scarcely any chance that they would flee, despite the odds and the macabre battle to come. At least eighty were regular British riflemen and crack shots who could usually hit an individual Zulu warrior at some three hundred yards and knock down a dense mass of swarming fighters at a thousand yards. All were determined to win or die on the spot, and dying was the far more likely scenario, given the overwhelming numbers of the enemy. Why did the British choose to fight under such hopeless conditions? Theirs was a discipline that grew out of the training and regulation of the British army, the fear of and respect for their officers, and the camaraderie and loyalty to one another. Because they were behind makeshift fortifications, the Zulus could not count on outflanking movements and infiltration that had proved so successful at Isandhlwana. To take the compound, the Zulus would have to brave rifle fire and bayonet thrusts, jump over the makeshift walls, and kill all the men in the compound.
The shooting itself would go on steadily for ten hours—British redcoats methodically blasting apart Zulu bodies at close range with .45-caliber rifle fire and slicing through exposed arms, legs, and bellies with razor-sharp bayonet jabs, the Zulus less successfully trying to stab the shoulders or necks of the riflemen on the ramparts with assegai thrusts and hoping that their own snipers might somehow hit the bright redcoats from the slopes above. During the afternoon of the twenty-second and early morning of the twenty-third, Chard and Bromhead would turn their tiny garrison into a veritable firestorm that would pour lead into the bodies of hundreds of Zulu warriors, such killing all predicated on a strict adherence to formal British military practice and discipline that would keep men at the ramparts shooting continuously without respite, their shoulders, arms, and hands blue and bloody from powder burns and the enormous kick of the Martini-Henry rifles.
Sixteen Hours at Rorke’s Drift
2:30 P.M., January 22, 1879. In the minutes after receiving the news of the slaughter at Isandhlwana, Chard, Bromhead, and Dalton agreed that flight from Rorke’s Drift in slow-moving, ox-drawn wagons with the wounded was impossible. Instead, they ordered all the tents dismantled, but abandoned outside the compound as impediments to the attackers. Next, they surveyed the circumference and quickly planned a wall of defense. The depot’s plentiful supply of heavy biscuit boxes and mealie bags might allow the garrison limited protection—if they could somehow in the next hour or so be stacked chest-high into some type of rampart. Here Chard’s expertise as a Royal Engineer proved invaluable. Immediately, he, Bromhead, and Dalton organized work parties and began building a parapet to connect the two stone buildings, parked wagons, and stone kraal into an oblong circle of defense. Soldiers and the native troopers, who had not yet fled, stacked the boxes (one hundred pounds) and the mealie bags (two hundred pounds) four to five feet high to allow riflemen some protection while aiming and reloading.
The bags were a godsend, since their weight and density meant that bullets could not penetrate the British wall, while it was almost impossible to knock the heavy sacks over. Holes were gouged in the hospital’s outside wall to allow the patients to shoot at the impis approaching from the south. In a stunning feat of improvised labor, officers, native soldiers, the sick, and British enlisted men in little more than an hour constructed a barricade of some four hundred yards—all under the threat of imminent annihilation. Fortunately, there was a slight rise on the north side of the compound, and the mealie-bag rampart there incorporated this natural advantage, resulting in a breastwork whose outer face was often over six feet high. No Zulu could vault such a height, but would have to hoist himself over in the face of British bullets and bayonets.
3:30, January 22, 1879. Chard, who, given his marginal seniority over Bromhead, was exercising command of the defense, returned to the river, collected his small engineering detail that was working on the ferry, brought up the water carriage and tools, and evacuated the landing. While he was now assured by a variety of messengers that thousands of Zulus, who had just massacred a force twenty times larger than his own, were headed his way, neither he nor his men showed any visible signs of panic. Instead, he and Bromhead carefully walked along the circumference of the small makeshift fort, ensuring that the wall was four feet high throughout. Then they ordered work ceased to ensure that the exhausted men could rest before the general assault.
Riflemen of the 24th Regiment were stationed at proper intervals, ammunition pouches filled and piles of additional cartridges heaped at their feet. Bayonets were fixed. The two junior officers, with hardly any experience of Africa, much less of the Zulus, in less than two hours and under the threat of sure destruction, had done the opposite of their senior and more experienced commanders at Isandhlwana—and thus given their vastly outnumbered fighters a chance of survival that the doomed at Isandhlwana never had.
4:30, January 22, 1879. With the arrival of the Zulus and the first scattered fire, the native and colonial contingents abruptly fled, leaving behind B Company, 2nd Battalion, 24th Regiment, with its skeleton force of fewer than a hundred regular British soldiers, who then had to rearrange themselves on the weakened rampart. Chard realized that the original fortification might soon prove too large a perimeter to hold with vastly reduced forces—he had little more than a hundred able-bodied men, no longer 450—so he constructed a second wall of biscuit boxes, running north and south to connect the storehouse with the north wall, in effect providing a vastly smaller circuit should the northwestern wall be overrun.
5:30, January 22, 1879. Firing in earnest began on the north mealie-bag wall. Here the British lines were stretched the thinnest, and there was an unfortunate series of natural obstacles—the orchard, fence, a ditch a mere thirty yards away, and some brush and the six-foot wall immediately outside the British defenses—which gave the waves of running Zulus places of cover to coordinate their attack. Meanwhile, from the slopes of Oskarberg to the south, some Zulus with the captured Martini-Henry rifles were shooting at the backs of the British defenders on the north wall and occasionally scoring hits. Crying “Usuthu! Usuthu!,” the thousand strong of the inDlu-yengwe sprinted against the south wall. Within minutes the entire outpost was under attack—by sniper fire from Oskarberg hill, by repeated human wave attacks against the ramparts by spearmen, and from sporadic shooting by Zulus hidden in the ditch and behind the fence, buildings, and trees right outside the British wall.
For the next hour and a half, a few dozen British soldiers on the north wall mowed down wave after wave of Zulus, most of whom soon found they could not get over the mealie bags without being shot or bayoneted. The chief problem for the British was the overheating of their rifles. When the Martini-Henry’s barrels slowly began to glow red, the soft brass casings of the cartridges began to expand upon insertion, fouling the breech and sometimes preventing firing, requiring the soldier to ram them out with a cleaning rod—thereby allowing small groups of Zulus to cluster under the bags and begin hoisting each other over the barricade. In response, Bromhead organized interior charges of selected riflemen to bayonet and blast apart Zulus that had leaped over the bags. Most of the growing number of dead and wounded British were shot from the rear by hundreds of Zulus perched on the heights of Oskarberg. Almost no riflemen were killed from Zulu assegais. Had the Zulus coordinated their rifle fire and had
they been accurate shots, they could easily have picked off the entire British garrison, inasmuch as they had hundreds of shooters compared to the paltry British firing force of fewer than a hundred.
7:00, January 22, 1879. At the onset of darkness the hospital was on fire, threatening the patients with incineration, and with its capture the collapse of the entire western rampart. For the next hour or more in a heroic escape, all but eight made it out alive—at just about the time Chard ordered the entire garrison to fall back behind the secondary north-south wall of biscuit boxes. While his reduced force was defending about a third of its original perimeter, an additional—and final—fallback position was hastily fortified. This last refuge consisted of a circular redoubt of mealie bags stacked nine feet high, allowing sanctuary for the hospital evacuees, and a secondary rampart from which to shoot over the heads of the riflemen on the shrinking wall.
Somewhere out on the plain—perhaps only a few thousands yards beyond the Zulu ring—Major Spalding at last rode up with his promised reinforcements from Helpmakaar. But once he saw the glow of the burning hospital and the Zulu throng, he turned around and took his reserves back to Helpmakaar. Apparently, he was convinced that his men and camp were already obliterated. Had Spalding continued, there is a good chance he might have fought his way in to add critical reinforcements at the climax of the battle.
10:00, January 22, 1879. After nearly five hours of sustained firing, the battle slowly began to favor the British. Lieutenant Chard noted in his official report, “A desultory fire was kept up all night, and several assaults were attempted and repulsed, the vigor of the attack continuing until after midnight. Our men, firing with the greatest coolness, did not waste a single shot, the light afforded by the burning hospital being of great help to us” (Narrative of Field Operations Connected with the Zulu War of 1879, 46–47).
With the onset of darkness the Zulu snipers on Oskarberg had gradually lost their targets and then joined the general fray. The new reduced perimeter had incorporated the sturdy storehouse as its south wall, in essence eliminating the chance that soldiers on the ramparts could any longer be fired upon freely from the rear. The burning hospital, as Chard noted, had the unintended effect of illuminating the immediate area around the camp and thus highlighting the Zulus as they ran toward the British defenses. Although there were numerous dead and wounded British, the reduced circuit meant that riflemen were also firing much closer together in their final stand, giving a greater concentration of rifle fire than before and making the supply of ammunition more efficient. If the British were bone-tired since their scramble to fortify the compound more than seven hours earlier, the Zulus were in even worse shape—having essentially no food for nearly two days and marching or fighting nonstop for twelve hours.
11:30, January 22, 1879. The British abandoned the stone kraal that had formed the northeastern hinge of their rampart, and now were down to a tiny circuit of less than 150 yards in extent. Many of their bayonets— horrific weapons of triangular steel some twenty-one inches long—were bent or twisted. Their gun barrels burned their hands and routinely jammed. Most expected that a final rush of the 3,000 or so Zulus up in the hills would at last overwhelm the garrison. The beleaguered troops in the tiny circuit could have had no idea of the toll their rifles was taking on the enemy, nor of the enormous hunger and weariness that overcame the attackers as midnight approached.
Still, the Zulus continued to test the British fire, in vain efforts to vault the walls. Most often they were shot or bayoneted as they struggled to wrestle the barrels of the British rifles away—the red-hot steel also often scorching hands and arms in the melee. But after midnight the attacks became sporadic, as Chard and Bromhead dispatched half the defenders to repair the mealie-bag wall, distribute ammunition, and bring the water cart inside the perimeter to prepare for the expected final battle at dawn.
4:00 A.M., January 23, 1879. At first light, Chard surveyed the debris of the battlefield and ordered parties to begin once more to strengthen the wall, to collect Zulu weapons from the killing ground, and cautiously to explore the plain beyond the outpost. The Zulus were mysteriously gone from the killing field, but nevertheless, soldiers were kept on the barricades in expectation of a renewal of a general attack.
7:00, January 23, 1879. An enormous line of Zulus suddenly appeared along the surrounding crests, but then seemed to drift wearily away, abandoning the siege at the moment a final charge surely would have overwhelmed the garrison. They were either too exhausted and hungry to continue or had spied Lord Chelmsford’s relief column in the distance. Reconnaissance parties discovered 351 enemy dead; the number of wounded who crawled away and eventually died may have added another 200 to the fatality total. Later accounts suggest that the total Zulu dead ranged somewhere from 400 to 800 as bodies were found for miles beyond Rorke’s Drift for the next several weeks. It was generally true of the entire Zulu War that the British vastly underestimated the number of Zulu dead, since in the immediate aftermath of their battles they rarely went out beyond a half mile to count bodies, and had no idea that the majority of Zulus they shot, without medical care or food and water, crawled away to die. The British lost just fifteen dead and twelve wounded. Colonel Harford, who arrived with Chelmsford’s relief column the next day, remarked that the wreckage of the fort “gave the appearance and feeling of devastation after a hurricane, with the dead bodies thrown in, the only thing that remained whole being a circular miniature fortress constructed of bags of mealies in the centre” (D. Child, ed., The Zulu War Journal of Colonel Henry Harford, C.B., 37).
After the battle, the British counted more than 20,000 cartridges expended, a phenomenal number for a mere hundred or so soldiers who were doing the actual firing. In over eight hours of continuous shooting, the garrison had fired some two hundred .45 cartridges per man. On average each British soldier had killed or wounded five or so Zulus. For every redcoat killed, more than thirty Zulus fell, in what was a complete reversal of Isandhlwana:
In both actions, the Zulus employed the same simple encircling stratagem, attacking en masse with no great sophistication but extraordinary courage. Rorke’s Drift proved that a company of steady, rifle-armed infantry could repel 4,000 Zulus—with a number of basic provisos: 1) a compact fighting formation; 2) a rudimentary breastwork, or laager, to fight behind; 3) a ready supply of ammunition. The first two of these conditions had been underlined repeatedly by the Boers; the third was elementary. The conclusion was inescapable. The difference between the greater disaster at Isandhlwana and the lesser triumph at Rorke’s Drift was that a couple of not particularly brilliant lieutenants had taken the fundamental precautions neglected by their superiors. (A. Lloyd, The Zulu War, 1879, 103)
In a twenty-four-hour period comprising the greatest victory in Zulu history, King Cetshwayo nevertheless had lost at Isandhlwana and Rorke’s Drift well over 4,000 warriors of his 20,000-man army. There were still two enemy columns in his homeland; and an aroused Britain was scrambling to send thousands of fresh recruits to avenge a massacre. The Zulu nation had no experience with a modern force of disciplined riflemen who would aim, fire, and reload modern firearms on command, and when shooting individually do so according to strict protocols concerning the range and nature of the target.
Why did the British at Rorke’s Drift triumph against such odds? They were clearly better supplied with food, medical treatment, and ammunition; their soldiers were far better-trained shots. Most important, their system of institutionalized discipline ensured a steady curtain of fire unlike anything previously experienced in the native wars of Africa. Britain’s industrialized, fully capitalist economy had the wherewithal to transport and supply thousands of such men miles from home. European science was responsible for the Martini-Henry rifle—a terrible gun whose enormous bullet and uncanny accuracy helped to destroy Zulu manhood outright.
All during the campaign, British officers had sought out decisive battles to win or lose the war through open engagements. Duri
ng the sixteen hours on the ramparts at Rorke’s Drift, dozens of British soldiers—Acting Assistant Commissariat Officer Dalton (Victoria Cross), who was the real stalwart in the organization of the defenders, Surgeon Reynolds (Victoria Cross), who created the ad hoc station for the wounded, and Private Hook (Victoria Cross), who rescued the sick from the hospital—took the initiative and acted in independent fashion to improve the defenses. All the shooters on the wall had entered the army with a clear sense of rights and responsibilities, with abject loyalty to peers of their regiment. Such regimental discipline mandated that the men would continue to shoot until exhaustion and death—and strict British firearms training guaranteed that they would usually hit what they aimed at. On January 22, 1879, the garrison at Rorke’s Drift proved to be the most dangerous hundred men in the world.
Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power Page 39