THE BATTLE OF ISANDLWANA, 22ND JANUARY 1879 [3]

By 20 January - hampered by minor skirmishes and poor tracks - Chelmsford's column had only advanced 11 miles to the rocky lower slopes of a distinctive, sphinx-like hill called Isandlwana which can be seen from Rorke’s Drift.

 

 

Early on the morning of January 22, having received reports of Zulus to the south-east, Chelmsford led forth half his force in pursuit, leaving his base camp with 1,600 men — of whom half were fighting soldiers — in the hands of Colonel Henry Pulleine, who had never before commanded men in battle.

 

 

In the face of the invasion, Cetshwayo mobilised the Zulu armies on a scale not seen before, possibly some 24,000 warriors.

 

 

While Chelmsford was in the field seeking the Zulus, the full Zulu army had outmanoeuvred him, moving behind his force. A patrol sent out from the camp breasted a ridge and met an awesome spectacle. Below, squatting in silence on their shields, were arrayed thousands upon thousands of Zulus in regimental order. The patrol fired a few shots, then fled to carry news to the camp.

 

 

But Pulleine wasn’t worried. With their breech-loading Martini-Henry rifles, field guns and even a rocket troop (a unit equipped with primitive rocket launchers), they looked forward to administering familiar medicine to the natives.

 

 

But due either to overconfidence or lack of experience, Pulleine made some disastrous mistakes. He failed to order the sea of tents to be struck, to clear the area, but worse than that, he dispersed his small force, dispatching a company here, a company there, to create a long, thin firing line a mile forward of the tents and camp followers, held by men posted at five-yard intervals.

 

 

The Zulus attacked — in their customary formation of the loins and horns of a fighting buffalo, where a main force advances in the centre, while left and right wings sweep around to the sides, in this case with the horns five miles apart but advancing with the precision of guardsmen.

 

 

By this time Lord Chelmsford’s force, 12 miles away, knew something was going on back at the camp, but seeing that the camp’s tents had not been struck, they assumed all was well. One wrote: ‘We watched with the keenest interest, never doubting the result and only cursing our luck that we were out of it.’

 

 

For a good while, Pulleine’s riflemen held the enemy at bay in front. But the Zulu right ‘horn’ had raced around behind the camp, cutting off the road to Rorke’s Drift and prompting most of the men of the Natal Native Contingent to take to their heels. The scattering of Pulleine’s garrison enabled the Zulus to engage them piecemeal. The redcoats were simply overwhelmed by the huge Zulu army.

 

Once British ammunition began to run short, yard by yard the companies started to fall back towards the camp, losing men as they went, hacked down or shot. Some of the shrinking clusters of British soldiers died very bravely, fighting to the last, while others fled for their lives in vain, for no man wearing uniform and boots could outpace a running Zulu, and even horsemen struggled to do so.

 

 

The ‘horns’ of the Zulu attack did not quite close around the British camp, some soldiers managing to make their way towards Rorke’s Drift. But the Zulus cut the road and the escaping soldiers from the 24th were forced into the hills, where they were hunted down and killed. Only mounted men managed to make it to the river by the more direct route to the south-west. A group of some sixty soldiers of the 24th Foot were cornered on the banks of a tributary of the Buffalo and wiped out.

 

Done