The water was ice-cold and the current murderously swift. Here and there the heads of men and horses bobbed and swirled as the flow caught them and tumbled them downstream. Melville had disappeared, drowned no doubt, or killed on the bank, but the officer who had been with him was breasting the current and still erect in the saddle, so that Alex, whirled within reach of the tail, grasped it and was trailed slantwise across the channel between two projecting rocks, each big enough to rank as an islet. On the furthermost of them he saw Melville again, lying face downwards half out of the water, his legs enveloped in the sodden folds of the colours. Then, losing his grip on the tail, his knee brushed a submerged rock and his feet found shingle, so that he was able to stagger up the far bank in the wake of the horse and discover, to his amazement, that he was still in possession of his revolver that swung by a lanyard from his neck. He stood there a moment dazed, unaware at first that the man who had crossed on the horse was now spurring it back into the water and striking out for the rock where Melville still lay inert, his feet shrouded in the flag he had carried all the way from the camp. The man’s action struck him as so nonsensical that he cried out, urging him to return before the Zulus got across, but his warning was lost in the continuous roar of the torrent and he remained standing there, watching the current catch the trailing end of the colours, lift it from the rock, and carry it away downstream.
A few men, almost all of them native auxiliaries, scrambled up the bank higher up the river, and as Alex watched, shots came from the bank they had just left, and he saw a party of Zulus standing at the head of the path down which he had run and firing the width of the stream. He turned to run but at that moment Melville or his comrade called to him from the shallows, and he saw that the officer who had re-entered the water had succeeded in dragging his friend clear and regaining the bank. The horse, mortally wounded by shots from across the river, threshed its way ashore and died in an eddy, almost at his feet. He waded in up to his waist and grasped the elbow of the half-conscious Melville, the first action he had performed since he rode down from the plateau that was not directly concerned with his own preservation. Then all three of them, clinging together like home-drifting drunkards, made some kind of attempt to climb the rocky slope directly ahead, pushing up into a trackless area of scrub and boulder that would afford some kind of protection against the scattering fusillade across the river.
They had climbed no more than a couple of hundred yards when Melville fell forward on his knees and his companion said, “Can’t… not without a breather… they’ll come across… mean to get every man… warn Natal… my damned leg…” and Alex saw that the man’s breeches were bloodied and that his foot was turned outward at an awkward angle. The subaltern turned away, now addressing himself to Melville, “Did what we could… rest here and hold ’em off a spell…” and Melville, retching, nodded but seemed unable to do more.
Alex said, carefully, “A few got across, one or two mounted. They’ll make for Helpmakaar and raise the alarm. We could go along the bank to Rorke’s Drift…” but the man said, “Not me… couldn’t walk another step, or Melville either. We’ll stay here and watch out for a stray horse. We’ve got revolvers.” And then, in the authoritative tone all the regulars used towards auxiliaries like himself, “Make your own way upstream. Tell Chard at the mission house to evacuate the sick, loophole the place, and hold on as long as he can. That’s an order. You’ve got ammunition for that revolver?”
“Six in the chamber and a handful of spares.”
“Give me the spares. Go inland beyond the ridge, then strike west and follow the river. Don’t stop.”
Alex groped in his tunic pocket, his fingers searching out the elusive cylindrical bullets embedded there. He found nine and passed them to Melville, now sitting up and making some attempt to dry the mechanism of his revolver. Alex said, falteringly, “I lost your binoculars…” and Melville said, with a grin, “We don’t need binoculars,” and pointed towards the river, clear of fugitives now but dotted with Zulus gathering in a group on the bank about the carcase of a horse. “Name’s Cogshill,” the other man said, briefly. “My respects to Chard at the mission house. Get going, for God’s sake, get going…” and Alex turned away, setting his face to the lower slopes of the hill. Before he reached the crest he heard a volley of shots and looked over his shoulder. Melville, and his friend Cogshill, were seated back to back in a small, open patch of ground. Between them and the bank were a swarm of Zulus.
3
It was only when he was well clear of the river, and relatively secure from pursuit he would judge, that he could make some attempt, however imperfect, to come to terms with the chaotic events of the last three hours. In that brief interval an army of upwards of two thousand men had been eliminated. Wiped from the face of the earth. Slaughtered piecemeal by a race of men he had thought of, up to that time, as subhuman, equating approximately with aboriginals. It was the shock of their vast superiority in field tactics, in mobility, in physique, stamina, and courage, that made the greatest impact on his mind, far greater, at that time, than his own miraculous escape. The heat had gone from the sun and the sky began to cloud over after he had put a mile or more between himself and the clearing, where Melville and Cogshill awaited death with a sangfroid that he did not find so awesome as the matchless hardihood of the humming savages, charging into a crossfire of Martini-Henry bullets and field-gun shells, overturning everything in their path, and running on, heedless of loot, to account for fugitives who had stampeded across the
col
south of the camp. Even a river in spate had not checked their onrush. They were back there now, spearing men like Melville and Cogshill, and after that, he supposed, they would sweep on to overwhelm the whole of Natal, utterly defenceless since the departure of Lord Chelmsford’s widely separated columns. It was an astounding performance on the part of savages and a humiliation on the part of trained and disciplined Europeans that could never be expunged, and he wondered briefly what Cetywayo’s triumph might mean in wider terms and whether, from this day on, the Cape itself was safe from the converging horns of those charging impis. Helpmakaar, a few miles inside Natal, was surely doomed, and so was the hospital and storehouse at Rorke’s Drift, towards which he was supposed to be heading. Perhaps, warned of the Zulu’s approach, Durban might be put in some kind of defence, but the mission station on the river, garrisoned by a single company of 2/24th, would be overwhelmed and squashed like a matchbox, so that there was surely no profit in risking one’s life a second time to bring word to that fellow Cogshill had mentioned… what was his name? “Chown,” “Chartwell,” “Chart”?
The reflection checked him in his stumbling passage along the hillside and he sat down on a spur of rock, realising how utterly spent he was, and how many hours had elapsed since he had eaten or drunk. His mouth, dry with terror and exertion, was like a sandpit, and his limbs, now that he ceased to employ them, began to shake like those of a terrified child. Fleetingly, but with a kind of self-punishing relish, he reviewed his debut as a soldier and found, in the survey, a degree of shame that brought tears to his eyes. From the moment he bolted down from the plateau beyond the sandstone peak he had not shown a single spark of courage or enterprise, save the bare minimum required to save his hide. He had emptied his rifle haphazardly in the general direction of the enemy, had helped the terrified Basutos to break the lines of G Company on the edge of the perimeter, had fiddled about during the brief battle, and finally, at the first chance, grabbed somebody else’s horse and fled for his life. It was no consolation to remind himself, as he did at once, that almost everybody else had behaved in precisely the same way once the Zulus were inside the camp, or that things had happened with such stunning speed and fatality that there had been no time to shape an alternative course. Examples of courage and self-sacrifice had not been entirely wanting on the lost field. There had been that chap Melville, encumbering himself with his regimental colours all the way to the river and beyond; there had been Cogshill, who had made good his landing but sacrificed his horse and chance of escape by riding back into the river to drag Melville from the flood. But above all there was the memory of the tall sergeant who had scrambled up on the waggon and remained there, ringed by savages, shooting down at his assailants as though he had been at target practice on an English range. His mind had recorded these things at the time, but they had done nothing at all to check his headlong flight. It occurred to him then that he might be the sole survivor of the rout. Perhaps, like General Johnny Cope, he would be the first man to carry the news of his own cowardice to Helpmakaar, so that the name of Swann would become as infamous in Africa as it was famous among the merchants of English shires. For a moment the naked prospect of this did battle with the residue of terror that had outlasted his dash for the river and self-respect won. He stood up, half resolved to retrace his steps and add his six revolver bullets to the tiny arsenal of Melville and Cogshill. Then he remembered the latter’s laconic instructions—“My respects to Chard at the mission house. Get going, man… that’s an order…” and a flicker of purpose stirred in him, so that he got up and ploughed on, picking his way among the outcrops and listening to the whistle of his own breath and the dolorous squelch of water in his boots.
He had been walking about an hour when he first saw them: a long, long line of blacks, moving along the bank at a steady, mile-consuming trot. Strung out, it seemed, for a mile or more, they headed upstream at roughly twice the speed he could expect to move over this kind of ground.
At first, catching his breath, he thought it was the entire Zulu army, but then, ducking swiftly between two upright stones, he estimated the force at about three thousand—an impi perhaps, and without the least doubt making for Rorke’s Drift.
The sight, far from appalling him, did something to restore confidence in himself. For up here, three to four hundred feet above the level of the river, he had the edge on them, inasmuch as he could see without being seen, so long as he kept his head down. It occurred to him then that no other survivor, given that there were other survivors, would be as well placed to observe and report upon the arrival of at least one impi on Natal soil; understanding this, he made a long, careful scrutiny of the moving column, noting that less than one man in twenty carried a firearm and that most of them seemed older and scrawnier than the leaping young bucks that had overwhelmed the camp at Isandlwana.
Their heads, he noticed, were ringed. He remembered something a Boer had told him about this ring signifying maturity and old blood on spears carried by men who had gained their battle experience ten or twenty years ago in wars with the Matabele and other tribes. He watched the tail of the long procession disappear round a wide bend in the river and its head reappear a minute later some way inland, as though another encircling movement, of the kind he had observed when he saw the first impi in motion, was already in progress, with Rorke’s Drift as the target of the centre or “chest” of the formation.
He knew his duty then and was resolved to do it, even at the risk of his worthless life. It would be to keep the column under observation, to overlook its attack from the high ground further south, then strike out the moment dusk fell for Helpmakaar. Only by doing this could he hope to outbid General Cope and at least bring information of some importance to Helpmakaar. But before he set off, moving at an angle of forty-five degrees to the river, he spared a moment to clean his revolver, ejecting the cartridges and drying each chamber and the hammer with shreds of cloth torn from the lapel of his tunic, now as dry as tinder where it did not touch his skin.
The first shots came about an hour later, when he had covered, perhaps, four miles on his new route, and they seemed to come from the northeast so that he changed direction again, moving swiftly but carefully in case the Zulus had thrown out flank guards. It wanted no more than an hour to sunset then and the sky in the east was already appreciably darker than overhead. The going was a little easier here, drystone terraces, almost free of scrub, rising to a summit that he judged was the height overlooking the mission station on the Natal side of the Buffalo. He even recalled the name on the map—“Oscarberg”; the Oscarberg Heights, or the Oscarberg Terrace, and it was ideally situated for his plan. From its elevation he could look right down on the mission house and any Zulus occupying its lower slopes would necessarily have their backs to him. Then the sound of firing began again, increasing in intensity until it became almost continuous, and he abandoned his cautious approach and broke into a run, scrambling from ridge to ridge until he gained the summit and flopped, gasping, in a patch of scrub that sprouted from a spider of small crevices that formed a shallow cave. Inching forward on his belly, he moved towards the rim of the little crater and what he saw, peering down, astonished him as much as or more than his initial glimpse of the squatting army in the dongas behind the plateau.
Rorke’s Drift was already beleaguered but it seemed to be giving a far better account of itself than the camp at Isandlwana, for the nearest Zulus were pinned down on three sides of the string of buildings. The men down there seemed to have anticipated attack, for they had converted what he remembered as a huddle of shacks and half-built kraals into a tiny, improvised fortress, buttressed with a rampart of biscuit boxes and mealie bags and strengthened, in the section facing him, by two laagered waggons. The regularly spaced flashes from the mission itself, and from the storehouse further east, told him that both buildings had been loopholed and whoever had improvised the fortification had clearly made provision for a last stand, for the compound was subdivided by another wall of biscuit boxes, and a tiny citadel of mealie bags had been erected inside the eastern section behind the storehouse, adjoining the smaller of the two kraals. He knew that the mission was being used as a sick bay and that two days ago there had been no more than a dozen or so men detained there, but he had no means of knowing the strength of the garrison, except by trying to count the flashes, or estimating the number of men moving about inside the compound. There could hardly be more than a couple of hundred, he would say, and that made the odds around fifteen to one—too heavy he would have thought, despite the obvious advantage to men firing from behind shoulder-high ramparts.