“Very well, Beresford,” replied Sir Sam; “I want you to get over as quickly as may be; but you’d better make a bit of a detour to the rear before you cross the valley. By crossing below the bend you’ll avoid most of the fire that is sweeping the direct way across.”
“All right, sir,” said Bill, with a wink of the eye on the chief’s off side that seemed to say, “I think I see myself detouring.”
He took his sword-belt in a couple of holes and started. To begin with, he had to clamber into the valley down the face of an all but perpendicular precipice, on the projections of which the Afghan shells were striking with malign freedom. Looking down from the upper edge I watched him complete the descent, and then start on the dangerous journey across the valley. No doubt he was making good speed; but it looked to me, anxious as I was, as if he were sauntering. Now and then he was hidden altogether by the smoke and dust of an exploding shell.
Cool hand he was, to be sure! When he reached the hither bank of the Khyber stream, he deliberately sat himself down on a stone, and unlaced his boots, took them and his stockings off, and waded the stream barefoot. Having crossed, he sat down and replaced these articles of attire—how abominably particular he seemed, sitting right in the fair-way of that belch of fire, about the correct lacing of his ankle boots! Finally he lit a cigarette, resumed his tramp across the rest of the valley, and clambering up the rocks bounding its farther side, disappeared among Appleyard’s red-coats. That officer was already committed to an attack, so Bill remained with his force and took part in the effort in which Birch and Swettenham went down.
When Sir Sam Browne was halted in Jellalabad, and there was no chance of any further fighting that winter, Bill went back to Simla to his duties about the Viceroy. Presently I, too, tired of the inaction in the Khyber, and travelling down country to Calcutta, and voyaging across the Bay of Bengal to Rangoon, went up the Irrawaddy River into native Burmah, bound for Mandalay, the capital of King Theebaw. While “worshipping the Golden Feet” there, and investigating the eccentricities of the monarch who not long after lost his throne, a telegram came to me from London, ordering me with all speed to South Africa, where the Zulu war had broken out and where the massacre of Isandlwana had just occurred. Hard on it came a message from Bill, telling he too was off to Zululand, and proposing we should travel down there together. I wired him back a rendezvous at Aden, the port at the mouth of the Red Sea whence once a month a steamer starts on the voyage along the east coast of Africa as far as Zanzibar; from which place there is connection with Port Durban in Natal by another steamer.
Down the Irrawaddy, across the Bay of Bengal, athwart Hindustan to Kurrachee at the mouth of the Indus I hurried; at Kurrachee caught the steamer for Aden, and at Aden there was Bill, impatiently grilling in that extinct volcano-crater till the Zanzibar packet should start. We dodged into every little obscure Portuguese-negro port along that coast—Quillimane, Mozambique, Magadoxa, Melinda, Lourenço Marquez—stagnant, fever-stricken, half barbarous places where, as it seemed, nobody was either quite black or quite white. We reached Port Durban about the middle of April 1879, to find its roadstead crowded with the transports that had brought the reinforcements out from England, and its hotels crammed with officers of all ranks and all branches of the services. General “Fred” Marshall, an old friend of Beresford and myself, commanded the regular cavalry brigade, and Bill hoped for a berth on his staff. But a better billet fell to him. Far up in the Transvaal Sir Evelyn Wood’s little brigade had just gained a brilliant victory over some 20,000 Zulus, who had made a desperate attack on its position. Colonel Redvers Buller commanded Wood’s irregular volunteer cavalry, and in the recent fight his staff officer, Major Ronald Campbell, had been killed. It was a peculiar and difficult post, and Campbell was a man whom it was not easy to succeed. The assignment rested mainly with Marshall, and on the night of our arrival, he, knowing Beresford better than most men then did, named him for the post.
Full of elation;—Bill because of being chosen for a duty that assured him responsibility and plenty of fighting; I because my chum had so fallen on his feet,—we returned to our hotel. As we sat a while in the public room before retiring, there entered a couple of men far from sober. At first they were civil, and told us that one was the second officer, the other the ship’s surgeon, of a transport in the roadstead. Presently the sailor-man’s mood changed, and he became grossly insulting to Beresford; who for a while treated him good-humouredly. At last the fellow said he believed Bill was a coward. Then Bill quietly rose, and simply requested the nautical person to “come outside.” I did not half like the business, for the sailor was a big slab-sided fellow; whereas Bill is one of the light weights, and it was not pleasant to think of his carrying a black eye to his new appointment. But intervention did not seem possible; and it remained for the doctor and myself to “see fair.” In front of the hotel was a garden studded with rose-bushes. At it they went hammer and tongs; Bill fending off the big sailor’s “ugly rush” with skill and coolness—he had not been at Eton for nothing. In the third round the sailor was down, his head in a rose-bush, and Bill sitting thereon—the head, not the bush. The sailor did not want any more; every one shook hands round, and perhaps there was a drink of conciliation.
Bill next day went off up country to his billet; and not long after I joined Wood’s force up at Kambula. I found Bill too busy to do more than give me a hurried hand-shake. He was Buller’s only staff-officer, and the force Buller commanded, about a thousand strong, was the strangest congeries imaginable. It consisted of broken gentlemen, of runagate sailors, of fugitives from justice, of the scum of the South African towns, of stolid Africanders, of Boers whom the Zulus had driven from their farms. Almost every European nationality was represented; there were a few Americans, some good, some bad; a Greaser; a Chilian; several Australians; and a couple of Canadian voyageurs from somewhere in the Arctic regions. There were Frenchmen who could not speak a word of English, and Channel Islanders whose patois neither Englishmen nor Frenchmen could fully understand. One and all were volunteers, recruited for the campaign at the pay of five shillings a day. What added to the complication was that the force comprised a dozen or more sub-commands, each originally, and still to some extent a separate and distinct unit. There were “Baker’s Horse,” and “D’Arcy’s Horse,” and “Beddington’s Horse,” and “Ferreira’s Horse,” and so on; each body asserting a certain distinctive independence. Beresford had to arrange all details, keep the duty rosters, inspect the daily parades and the reconnaissance detachments, accompany the latter, lead them if there was any fighting, restrain the rash, hearten the funkers, and be in everything Buller’s right-hand man. The volunteer officers, some zealous, some sluggish, some cantankerous, were, as regarded any knowledge of duty, for the most part quite useless. In effect the force, which in numerical strength reckoned as a brigade, was “run” by those two men—Redvers Buller and Bill Beresford. Buller was a silent, saturnine, bloodthirsty man, as resolute a fighter as ever drew breath—a born leader of men—who ruled his heterogeneous command with a rod of iron. Beresford, to the full as keen a fighter and as firm in compelling obedience, was of a different temperament. He was cheery; with his ready Irish wit he had a vein of genial yet jibing badinage that kept queer-tempered fellows in good humour while it pricked them into obedience. In fine he disclosed the rare gift of managing men—of evoking without either friction or fuss the best that was in them. And, strangest wonder of all wonders, the fellow whom all men had regarded as the most harum-scarum of mortals—the most “through-other,” to use a curious Scotch expression—was found possessed of a real genius for order and system. I admired him excessively in his novel development, but must confess that, being selfish, I did not enjoy it. For he was very busy and I was rather idle, and I grumbled at the deprivation of the brightening of my life that had been contributed by the humour and gaiety of his leisure time.
The campaign, on which almost at its outset had fallen the shadow of the poor Prince Imperial’s hapless fate, drawled sluggishly along, till at length as, on the 1st of June, the column wound down into the valley from the bluff of Etonganeni, there lay stretched out beyond the silver sparkle of the river among the trees, the broad plain on whose bosom lay the royal Kraal of Ulundi, encircled by its satellites. Over the green face of the great flat there flitted what, seen through the heat-haze, seemed dark shadows, but which the field-glass revealed as the ïmpis of Cetewayo practising their manœuvres. There are times when the keenest fighting man is not sorry that between his enemy and himself there lies a distance of ten miles. Whether in the spirit or only in the stupid deed, those Zulus were quixotic in the chivalry of their manner of fighting. At Isandlwana only had they been rusés. At Kambula, at Ginghilovo, they had marched straight up into the eye of our fire; at Ulundi they held their hands while we scrambled in dislocation through the broken ground that was the vestibule to the plain; waited with calm patience till our square was methodically formed and locked up; then, after the short hesitation that seemed to ask that question, “Are you quite ready now, gentlemen?” they came at us with surpassing valiantness and a noble ardour, as over the fire-swept plain sped the whirlwind of their converging attack. There were cynics in our force who smiled grimly and quoted Bosquet’s historical sneer, as they watched the evolutions of the ïmpis in the hazy distance. Magnificent in their swift precision those evolutions certainly were; but it was not war that the Zulu braves should be wheeling and massing and deploying away there on the plain, instead of taking us at a disadvantage as the long baggage-cumbered column painfully toiled through the dense bush that filled the valley for which we had forsaken the bare upland of the veldt.
Cetewayo was hesitating, to meet the proverbial fate of the hesitator. He sent in the sword of the poor Prince Imperial; and later came from him a drove of cattle, the live spoil of Isandlwana. But he would not definitely consent to the terms offered him; yet he refrained from absolutely refusing them. When the laager was formed on the pleasant slope stretching up from the rippling Umvaloosi, two days were accorded him in which to make up his mind. Meantime our attitude was that of vigilant quiescence. The laager was roughly entrenched; the guns were got into position; the outposts were strengthened; and arms and ammunition were carefully inspected. During the advance the commands of Newdigate and Wood had marched apart; now for the first time they were united, or at least disjoined only by a subdivision of the laager, and there was much visiting to and fro; for it was comparative leisure time for all save Buller’s irregulars, who from beginning to end of the campaign may be said to have been on the chronic scout. Some of us went bathing in the Umvaloosi, but had to “lave that”—a pun is not intended—because of a dropping fire from Zulus concealed in the crannies of a rocky hillock or kopjie, just across the river from the camp. Not alone for the bathers was this fire a nuisance; a part of the laager was within range of the Martini-Henrys got at Isandlwana, which the Zulus on the kopjie were using; and one or two casualties occurred.