About the end of October two men with despatches brought in the first news. There had been a big fight with the Matabele on the 25th October near the Shangani River, when our people had been engaged by a number of the most important of Lobengula’s impis, including the Insukameni regiment, the third best of the King’s crack companies. This battle was afterwards officially described as the Battle of Shangani, and the Matabele losses were about five hundred whilst our forces had lost one man, with six wounded. Two horses had been killed—a very serious matter, for the columns were already short of mounts.
After the Battle of the Shangani our troops had resumed their march to Buluwayo, going slowly, as they were subject to constant small attacks burning kraals as they went, and collecting cattle left behind by the fleeing Matabele.
After this we had no more news until the second week in November, when suddenly one morning the wires were humming with the tidings that Dr Jameson had occupied Buluwayo. The Union Jack strung to a great mimosa tree floated out over the ruined and burning kraal of a dethroned tyrant!
The news came to us from Palapye, the capital of Khama’s country, away down south. It had been brought there by Burnham, that brave and intrepid American, whose name will live for ever in the annals of early Rhodesia and in the history of all scouts. He and his mate Ingram (also an American) had ridden with a Zulu boy who knew the road, one hundred and twenty miles to Tati, hoping to find there a telegraph office from which they could telegraph the news to Mr Rhodes. But at Tati they found no wire—it had not yet reached that place. There was only a heliograph station that because of the cloudy weather was of no use to them. Burnham then, though wearied out by the terrible ride they had already accomplished, decided to push on to Palapye, another ninety miles, and there, on the morning of November 9th, he gave to the world the news that civilisation had advanced another great stride, in the subjugating of a savage and cruel nation; while to the map had been added one more of those little pink stains that stand for Empire and Progress.
Oh! how we stood around the telegraph office that day, and many days after, and drank in details of the victory! In thrilling scraps it all came in.
We heard of the Battle of the Imbembesi, which had taken place on the first of November when the very flower of the Matabele army had come forth in all their glory of native war-dress and waving ostrich plumes, shaking the earth beneath their dancing feet, holding their red-and-white ox-skin shields before them and making jia at the white men with their gleaming assegais. They had fought there and died in hundreds at the very gates of the royal kraal; and the old King, desperate at last at the tidings of defeat brought in by his scouts, had fled, taking with him his wives and children and such of his warriors as remained faithful to him in his adversity. But before he went he gave orders for the burning and utter destruction of the kraal of Buluwayo, that scene of savage splendours and innumerable cruelties now for ever past.
A just fate had overtaken Lobengula, but even while we realised it there seemed to us at that time something terribly pathetic in the thought of the old monarch, swollen and tortured with gout and the madness of defeat, full of fierce spleen against those whose friendship he had himself estranged by treachery and false dealing, fleeing now before the winds of adversity and despair. It seemed that some prophetic thought must have lain in the mind of his mother when she named him Lobengula—“Driven by the wind.”
When our men at last arrived at the royal kraal, pitched high on the brow of a great plateau commanding a view of the whole country, they found that like Jericho of old its walls were down to the feet of the invader, but for a time they could see nothing clearly for the smoke that arose in black-and-grey spirals and suffused the landscape, blotting out the sunlight, while a disgusting and indescribable odour of burning refuse stung their throats and terribly assailed their nostrils. Besides firing the mean dwellings of his tribe, Lobengula had caused huts full of splendid ivory and furs and karosses to be given to the flames, and grain enough to feed a nation had been ruthlessly destroyed. While in the centre of a huge open space surrounded by rings a hundred feet wide of smouldering huts, were the ruins of what had lately been the King’s palace.
This great space had been the place of the King’s privacy and at the same time his Throne-room and the arena of justice and state. There had been times when its white dust lay shimmering in an almost terrible peace, while the King sat before his door in the morning sunlight watching his magnificent peacocks as they strutted and scratched, preening their jewelled feathers and crying their sinister unmusical cries. In those hours many eyes secretly watched the tyrant through holes bored in the walls of their huts, but none except the peacocks dared break the silence when the Lion of Matabeleland sat considering his savage politics and arranging the affairs of his nation.
There were other times when the court-yard witnessed scenes of barbaric glory and ferocity unparalleled since the time of Bloody Tchaka of Zululand. It was there that the King would come forth in state to receive the royal salute—“Bayete!”—from the brazen throats of his impis drawn up in countless splendid lines—lines of rippling muscular bodies, black as polished ebony and as bare, save for the moocha of leopard skin and the bands and bangles of brass. There when the spirit moved them to slay and they wished for permission to go forth and plunge their assegais into the bosoms of the hapless Mashonas, his warriors danced before Lobengula, making the ground tremble and thunder beneath their leaping feet. There the great indabas had taken place and the bloody “smelling out” ceremonies of the witch-doctors. Many a time had the wide level space been stained with hot gushing life-blood, and strewn with dead men, while the old King, great in stature as in cruelty, sat upon his three-legged stool of state, laughing in his thick throat, his small keen eyes like knife-points in his grossly featured face.