History of the Zulu war and its origin

by Frances Ellen Colenso

It was well said: “The field of Isandhlwana is beginning to give up its secrets; the mists of fiction are being dispersed by the dry light of fact. It has not been through mere idle curiosity that there has been a desire to know what passed during the final moments of that fatal struggle. There were difficulties to be explained, reputations to be cleared, allegations to be contradicted. There was the desire to know how those who were lost had died. To be sure that they died with their faces to the foe; to be satisfied that their death was not attended with any excess of cruelty or suffering. And there can be little doubt that it is the very anxiety to be assured of all this that stands responsible for the numerous fictions—as we must now hold them to be—which have been circulated with regard to what passed on that memorable day.”—Natal Witness, 29th May, 1879.

A short description of the spot, taken from that written by Mr. Archibald Forbes, may be of interest: At the top of the ascent beyond the Bashi we saw, on our left front, rising above the surrounding country, the steep, isolated, and almost inaccessible hill, or rather crag, of Isandhlwana; the contour of its rugged crest strangely resembling a side view of a couchant lion. On the lower neck of the high ground on its right were clearly visible up against the sky-line the abandoned waggons of the destroyed column. Now we crossed the rocky bed of the little stream and were cantering up the slope leading to the crest on which were the waggons, and already tokens of the combat and bootless flight were apparent. The line of retreat towards Fugitives’ Drift, along which, through a gap in the Zulu environment, our unfortunate comrades who thus far survived tried to escape, lay athwart a rocky slope to our right front, with a precipitous ravine at its base. In this ravine dead men lay thick. All the way up the slope could be traced the fitful line of flight. Most of the dead here were 24th men; single bodies and groups where they seemed to have gathered to make a hopeless gallant stand and die. On the edge of a gully was a gun-limber jammed, its horses hanging in their harness down the steep face of the ravine; a little farther on a broken ambulance-waggon, with its team of mules dead in their harness, and around were the bodies of the poor fellows who had been dragged from the intercepted vehicle. Following the trail of bodies through long grass and scattered stores, the crest was reached. Here the dead lay thick, many in the uniform of the Natal Mounted Police. On the bare ground on the crest itself, among the waggons, the dead were less thick; but on the slope beyond, on which from the crest we looked down, the scene was the saddest and more full of weird desolation than any I had yet gazed upon. There was none of the horror of a recent battle-field; nothing of all that makes the scene of yesterday’s battle so rampantly ghastly shocked the senses. A strange dead calm reigned in this solitude; grain had grown luxuriantly round the waggons, sprouting from the seed that dropped from the loads, falling on soil fertilised by the life-blood of gallant men. So long in most places had grown the grass that it mercifully shrouded the dead, whom four long months to-morrow we have left unburied. In a patch of long grass, near the right flank of the camp, lay Colonel Durnford’s body, a central figure of a knot of brave men who had fought it out around their chief to the bitter end. A stalwart Zulu, covered by his shield, lay at the Colonel’s feet. Around him lay fourteen Natal Carbineers and their officer, Lieutenant Scott, with a few Mounted Police[170] (twenty). Clearly they had rallied round Colonel Durnford in a last despairing attempt to cover the flank of the camp, and had stood fast from choice, when they might have essayed to fly for their horses, who were close by their side at the piquet-line. With this group were about thirty gallant fellows of the 24th. In other places the 24th men were found as if fallen in rallying square, and there were bodies scattered all along the front of the camp.

The fallen were roughly buried, except those of the men of the 24th Regiment. These were ordered to be left untouched. General Marshall had nourished a natural and seemly wish to give interment to all the dead who so long had lain at Isandhlwana, but it appeared that the 24th desired to perform the ceremony themselves in presence of both battalions. One has much sympathy with the regiment, but General Marshall offered to convey a burial-party with tools from Rorke’s Drift in waggons, and it seemed scarcely right to postpone longer than absolutely necessary what respect for our honoured dead required. Thus, the Zulus, who have carefully buried their own dead, will return to find we visited the place, not to bury our dead, but to remove a batch of waggons!

In the desolate camp were many sad relics, and the ground was strewn with them and the spoil of the plundered waggons. Scarcely any arms were found, and no ammunition—a few stray rusted bayonets and assegais only were to be seen.

Teams of horses were hitched on to the soundest of the waggons, till forty fit to travel were collected on the crest, and sent under escort to Rorke’s Drift, and meantime scouting-parties had fired the kraals around, but found no Zulus.

“I shall offer few comments on the Isandhlwana position. Had the world been searched for a position offering the easiest facilities for being surprised, none could have been well found to surpass it. The position seems to offer a premium on disaster, and asks to be attacked. In the rear laagered waggons would have discounted its defects; but the camp was more defenceless than an English village. Systematic scouting could alone have justified such a position, and this too clearly cannot have been carried out.”—Daily News, 20th June, 1879.

On the 20th, 23rd, and 26th June the burial of the remainder of those who fell at Isandhlwana was completed by a force under the command of Lieut.-Colonel Black, 24th Regiment. He carefully noted the signs of the fight, and reported that the bodies of the slain lay thickest in the 1-24th camp, in which 130 dead lay (in two distinct spots), with their officers, Captain Wardell, Lieutenant Dyer, and a captain and a subaltern not recognisable; close to the place where the bodies of Colonel Durnford, Lieutenant Scott, and other Carbineers, and men of the Natal Mounted Police were found. This is described as being a “centre of resistance,” as the bodies of men of all arms were found converging as it were to the spot. About sixty bodies, with those of Captain Younghusband and two other officers, lay in a group under the southern precipice of Isandhlwana, as if they had held the crags and fought till ammunition failed. The proofs of hand-to-hand fighting were frequent. The fugitives’ track, too, told its tale: “Here and there around a waggon, here and there around a tree, a group had formed and stood at bay; shoulder to shoulder they fired their last cartridge, and shoulder to shoulder they plied the steel; side by side their bones are lying and tell the tale.”

Eight hundred yards from the road the guns had come upon ground no wheels could pass, and from here the bodies were more and more apart till, about two miles from camp, the last one lies and marks the limit reached by white men on foot.

The fatal trail again began near the river’s bank, where Major Smith, R.A., and others rest, a river’s breadth from Natal; across the river it runs until the graves of Melville and Coghill nearly mark its end.