Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power

by Victor Davis Hanson

  Under Shaka’s reign, the army had largely abandoned the throwing spear for the short stabbing assegai—now to be called the iKlwa from the sucking noise it made when being pulled from the chest or belly of an enemy—and tall cowhide shield. The new assegai had a much larger and heavier iron blade than its throwing counterpart, and a far shorter shaft, inasmuch as it was to be used most often as an underhand stabbing weapon in concert with the larger shield. Like a Roman legionary, who likewise closed with his enemy to battle face-to-face, the Zulu warrior could bang or catch his shield on the enemy as he came up quickly with a sharp upward thrust from his assegai, whose relatively small size and sharp edge made it more similar to a gladius than to a Greek spear. Each warrior also brandished a knobkerrie, or hardwood club with a knob on the end. Unlike nearly every other tribal force in Africa, the Zulus waged war hand-to-hand, without missiles, and expected to meet the enemy head-on and defeat him through greater courage, weapons skill, and muscular strength. Bright uniforms—including feathers of various kinds, cow-tail tassels, and leather necklaces and headdresses—war shouts, the beating of spear against shield, and pre-battle dances were aimed at striking fear into the enemy before the initial onslaught.

  Typically, a Zulu impi might cover as much as one hundred to two hundred miles in a campaign in a matter of three days, as it brought along little food or supplies, but was expected to live off the captured cattle of its enemy. Young boys, or uDibi, carried along sleeping mats and what food they could manage to pack and still keep up with the impis. Once the enemy was targeted, leaders of the impis met to assign respective regiments to the horns, chest, and loins. The army approached the enemy at a run, intending to surround and crush it in a matter of minutes, followed by plundering the defeated’s territory before striking for home. In battle itself, the lifelong training with the assegai and knobkerrie, together with the tough conditioning of the impis and the expertise at rapid envelopment, resulted in a marked fighting edge for Zulu warriors during the hand-to-hand fighting. Yet both past and present panegyrists of Zulu courage have largely forgotten the inherent military weakness of the entire system, inherent flaws that made it extremely vulnerable not only to formal European armies such as the British but even to vastly outnumbered, less well trained colonial militias of Boers and English settlers.

  First, while Zulu warriors endured a tough course of military training, and then submitted to a lifelong and often brutal regimentation in their impis, their resulting courage and ferocity did not result in anything comparable to the European notion of military discipline, which emphasized drill, close-order formation of line and column, synchronized group volleys, a strict chain of command, abstract notions of tactics and strategy, and a written code of military justice. Instead, rival impis were likely to brawl and even fight to the death in internecine disputes, far exceeding any of the typical fistfights in the British army between regiments.

  Nor was there a true system of command, as individual impis often disobeyed direct orders from their king—the uThulwana, uDloko, and inDlu-yengwe regiments at Rorke’s Drift ignored Cetshwayo’s orders not to attack the fortified position or venture into Natal—fighting as independent units without synchronized command. Thus, the uThulwana and uDloko met the inDlu-yengwe regiment largely by chance, as the younger inDlu-yengwe dared Prince Dabulamanzi to join his two older impis for an ad hoc assault on Rorke’s Drift. Other than a loose, formulaic plan of attack, there was no systematic approach to drill and close-order marching, resulting in a general chaos during the actual fighting and little chance that retreats would not turn into simple routs or that attacks would follow in ordered waves. While the Zulus fought face-to-face, they did so as individuals; the impis did not rely on serried ranks and simultaneous spear thrusting to achieve a shock effect at the first collision. Against Rorke’s Drift, a series of uncoordinated assaults resulted in dissipation of Zulu strength. In contrast, a sudden mass assault designed to put thousands of warriors at a concentrated point of the barricade within a few minutes would have overwhelmed the tiny garrison.

  The Zulu warrior lived in a world of spirits and witchcraft that was antithetical to the rather godless European emphasis on sheer military efficacy governed by abstract rules, regulations, and the technology of brutal rifles, Gatling guns, and artillery. Before battle, witch doctors concocted potions of sacrificial bull’s intestines, herbs, and water to give warriors strength for the ordeal to come. Zulus were put on strict diets and given emetics—which could only have weakened their stamina—and pieces of ceremonial human flesh. After slaying a foe, the corpse was disemboweled to allow the spirit to escape and to prevent retribution against the killer. Sorcerers sought to hex rival clans through voodoolike curses and incantations. The mysterious ability of British soldiers to slaughter thousands of attacking Zulus with rifle fire while losing very few was likewise explicable only through magic, not the logic of training, science, and discipline. Thus, after each terrible slaughter, Zulu tactics changed not at all, as superstition was invoked to explain the miraculous curtain of lead that met the impis as they neared the British lines.

  In the Zulu mind witchcraft explained why the British killed hundreds with their rifles, whereas Zulus, with the same captured weapons, invariably hit a small percentage of their targets—in every case, almost always firing far too high (to give the bullet “power”) and never in coordinated volleys. After the terrible Zulu defeat at Kambula, the surviving warriors were convinced of the intervention of supernatural creatures on the British side, and so quizzed Cornelius Vign as to why “so many white birds, such as they had never seen before, came flying over them from the side of the Whites? And why were they attacked also by dogs and apes, clothed and carrying fire-arms on their shoulders? One of them even told me he had even seen four lions in the laager. They said, ‘The Whites don’t fight fairly; they bring animals to draw down destruction upon us’ ” (C. Vign, Cetshwayo’s Dutchman, 38). In later attacks against Europeans tribal attackers shot their rifles at artillery explosions, believing that shells contained little white men who burst out to kill everyone in their midst. In the aftermath of the war, veterans were convinced they had been beaten by a protective curtain of steel that the British had hung over their army, perhaps a divine explanation for either the wall of lead put down by the redcoats or the reflections from British bayonets.

  Brave and Weak

  Zulu tactics were static and thus predictable to Europeans. A fortified camp or British square could expect a double-envelopment movement from the outset as a prelude to the advance of the main “chest.” While in theory the “loins” were a mobile reserve, they were not under central command and thus were not directed to precise points of resistance or weakness in the enemy line. Often they played no role in the fighting at all and were just as likely to flee as to reinforce in cases of initial failure of the chest and horns.

  Much is made of the impressive Zulu mobility, but two key factors are often ignored. The army could carry few firearms—though nearly 20,000 muskets and rifles had been entering Zululand for decades before the British invasion—due to the absence of any wheeled transport to bring along sizable reserves of cartridges. And because food was not carried in any quantity, Zulu armies required immediate victory before exhaustion and hunger set in. At Rorke’s Drift a final concerted effort at daybreak might have broken the British defenses, but by morning the Zulu besiegers had had essentially nothing to eat for over two days and were famished to the point of physical weakness.

  It is easy for modern scholars to ridicule the ponderous supply trains and immobility of Chelmsford’s lugubrious columns. But the British army, not the Zulus, came to each battle well fed, well supplied, and in possession of nearly limitless ammunition and firearms. British wagons may have looked near comical—eighteen feet long, six feet wide, and more than five feet high—and required anywhere from ten to nineteen chained oxen to pull them even five miles a day in the rough terrain of Zululand. Yet they could carry an ama
zing 8,000 pounds of guns and ammunition, as well as plenty of fodder, food, and water. In later battles any Zulus who made their way into British camps immediately broke open captured provisions in the heat of battle—as the partly eaten food in the mouths of their corpses later attested.

  The fully laden, ponderous, and sunburned British soldier in Africa has become a caricature of impracticality, ignorance, and addiction to material comfort. In fact, he was a far more lethal warrior than his lightly clad, nimble Zulu opponent. The latter has recently been nearly deified on American campuses—tragically so, in the case of the genocidal Shaka— as some sort of irresistible and deadly freedom fighter. He was neither fearsome nor freedom loving. In reality, the most deadly man in Africa was typically a pale British soldier, not much over five feet six inches in height, 150 pounds in weight, slightly malnourished, most often enrolled from the industrial ghettos of England, vastly overburdened with a ten-pound rifle and some sixty pounds of food, water, and ammunition on his belt and in his pack. Such an apparently unimpressive warrior, in fact, would himself typically shoot down three or more Zulus in almost every engagement of the war.

  Most impis did not hit the enemy as one cohesive unit, and the absence of body armor had always ensured that Zulu spearmen had never been able to crash headlong even into the lines of their tribal enemies. Shields were used for individual defense and as weapons, not to form a vast wall of protection. Zulus practiced only a swarming method of warfare, in this regard similar to the Aztec manner of running into enemy lines to stab and hack away in small groups. If the attacker was vastly outnumbered, terrified, or in loose formation, then the Zulu charge and envelopment were inevitably successful. But against a fortified position or a defensible square of British riflemen, the entire line of assault would break and then disperse in the face of sustained volleys or subsequent bayonet charges.

  Even the acquisition of firearms did not alter static Zulu tactics, as shooters on their own attempted to fire sporadically at the enemy while other warriors engaged with spears. No Zulus were taught either to charge in line or to shoot on orders. Cetshwayo never sought a comprehensive method of firearms loading and firing, despite the availability of guns in Zululand for some fifty years before the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879. Although horses had been introduced more than two centuries earlier in southern Africa, the Zulus rode only sporadically, and neither bred them in great numbers nor adopted any methodical approach to creating mounted patrols—ensuring that the British had more mobile scouts and deadly pursuers in the aftermath of battle.

  The result was often a haphazard method of Zulu attack with both traditional and European weaponry, in which thousands of men more or less ran at will straight at the enemy, while others shot at random from a distance, hoping that sheer numbers, noise, and their own speed would panic or collapse the adversary. At Isandhlwana the thin British lines, gaps in the formations, and poor distribution of ammunition allowed such attackers success. In nearly all other subsequent engagements—the night fiasco at Hlobane is the notable exception—the tactics of uncoordinated charges turned out to be suicidal. When such assaults failed, there were never ordered calls for retreat, much less a fighting withdrawal or organized covering sorties. Rather, entire impis, as tribal Germans on the Roman frontier, collapsed and ran headlong from the enemy. Thousands in the Zulu wars were ridden down by British horsemen who lanced, shot, and hacked at will once the impis’ charge was broken and panic set in.

  British accounts record hundreds of incidents of unmatched Zulu bravery—men in their forties and fifties who charged headlong into the barrels of blazing Gatling guns, and hundreds of fighters who trampled over their own dead to wrestle with the bayonets of British riflemen at Rorke’s Drift before Martini-Henry rifles discharged their enormous bullets into their necks and faces. During the preliminary fighting before the final battle of Ulundi, Frances Colenso records, “a single warrior, chased by several Lancers, found himself run down and escape impossible. He turned and faced his enemies; spreading his arms abroad he presented his bare breast unflinchingly to the steel, and fell, face to the foe, as a brave soldier should” (History of the Zulu War and Its Origin, 438). In tribal warfare of southern Africa the Zulus found that for nearly a century their unmatched courage, physical prowess, speed, and enormous numbers brought decisive victory and often the slaughter of their enemies. But in a fight against disciplined ranks of trained British riflemen their prior method of success spelled national self-destruction.

  Whereas the Zulus had discarded much of the traditional military rituals of southern Africa—missile warfare, staged contests, and the taking of captives for ransom—Cetshwayo still apparently envisioned the impending war with the British as a single staged event of military prowess. In his mind his army would fight “on one day only” and then come to terms with the British. If the Zulu leadership had examined both the victories and the defeats at Isandhlwana and Rorke’s Drift, they would have jettisoned the entire traditional method of attack and instigated a guerrilla war to ambush British wagon trains on the move—and, at all costs, to avoid charging entrenched positions and squares of British infantry. When the war broke out, Cetshwayo himself seemed to have sensed that the odds were all in favor of the Zulus—if they avoided entrenched British riflemen and fought the European only through surprise, during transit, or at night.

  The Zulus had a much larger army, knew the terrain intimately, and had clear warning of the advance of the three British columns. Moreover, Zululand—without roads, largely unmapped, laced with rivers and streams, hilly and full of gullies and canyons—was nearly impossible to traverse by wagons full of tons of equipment that could scarcely travel more than five miles on a good day. Constant Zulu attacks on such columns might have stranded British regiments deep in Zululand without recourse to resupply, thereby dragging out a war that had no real support from either the general staff or the prime minister back in London. Instead, ritual, custom, and tradition ensured that the horns, chest, and loins of the Zulu impis would attack as usual—and so were to be slaughtered as usual by British riflemen.

  Whereas the Zulus were famous for their obedience to royal edicts, since the reign of Shaka—who had routinely strangled those who sneezed, laughed, or simply looked at him in his presence—there was an arbitrariness surrounding punishment that tended in the long run to undermine Zulu cohesion and central command. Nearly every major Zulu leader from Dingiswayo and Shaka to Cetshwayo—who was probably poisoned after the British conquest—was murdered. Mpande, Cetshwayo’s father, reigned for more than thirty years (1840–72) and died alone in his sleep, but only by abrogating most of his power to local impis and in his later years to his son.

  In contrast, the British army, which routinely flogged and jailed its felons, had a written code of punishment and laws. Individual troopers more or less knew what was expected of them, assumed a relatively uniform and predictable application of justice throughout the ranks, and considered their own persons sacrosanct from arbitrary execution. For the most part, they followed orders from a sense of justice rather than mere fear. No British officer or magistrate had absolute power over an underling in the manner of a Zulu or an Aztec king. The small professional army of England was far more representative of civic militarism than the thousands mustered in Cetshwayo’s impis: the former fought with the understanding that military life was a reflection of civilian customs and values, the latter that the society mirrored the army. In a nation of millions the British army was tiny, but even the queen could not execute a single soldier without at least a hearing or trial.

  COURAGE IS NOT NECESSARILY DISCIPLINE

  The Traditions of the British Army

  By 1879 there were larger and better-organized European militaries—the French and the German especially—than the British colonial army. The murderous American Civil War (1861–65) and the short but violent Franco-Prussian War (1870–71) had put an end to the common use of massed cavalry and the tactics of slow marching through ordere
d lines. The machine gun, new repeating rifles, and artillery shells destroyed the last aristocratic pretensions of mounted grandees and ushered in the dawn of modern industrial warfare. In contrast, the British after Waterloo (1815), with few exceptions (the disastrous Crimean War of 1854–56 is the oddity that proves the rule), fought colonial wars, against enemies that had neither modern weapons, elaborate fortifications, nor sophisticated tactics. The result was the maintenance of a peculiarly reactionary army, which increasingly found itself outside the modern Western evolution toward enormous levies of well-armed conscripts. The Victorian army— more so than the navy—mirrored the class divisions of British society. Since it was largely unchallenged by other more modern European and American forces, it saw no need until the eleventh hour either to dismantle the tactics of a bygone age or to substitute merit for birth as the chief criterion for career advancement.

  Only in the decade before the Zulu War had the British undersecretary of war, Edward Cardwell, at last made any meaningful attempt at reform by eliminating purchased commissions, improving conditions for enlisted men, and urging the adoption of modern rifles, artillery, and Gatling guns. Nevertheless, by 1879 there were still only 180,000 British soldiers—far smaller than the quarter-million-man army of the Roman Empire—to defend an empire that spanned Asia, Africa, Australia, and North America and that was frequently in turmoil throughout India, Afghanistan, and southern and western Africa. Insufficient numbers and class bias were not the only problems. The army was also plagued by chronic budgetary crises—the navy still received the bulk of British defense expenditures—which led to poor pay and weapons that were often outmoded. Far too many officers in the latter nineteenth century, even after the abolition of the purchase system in which aristocrats literally bought commissions, were still ingrained with a conservative mentality that looked suspiciously upon science and the accompanying mechanical expertise that fueled an industrial society. What saved the British army and made it a deadly constabulary force in the colonial wars of the nineteenth century, despite poor generalship and inadequate funding, was its legendary discipline and training. British redcoats for the most part were better drilled and motivated than almost any other troops in the world. When formed up in their infamous squares, they were the best soldiers both in and outside Europe in laying down a continuously accurate and sustained deadly volley of rifle fire.