They had not to wait long. The Africanders under Captain Van Niekerk were ordered to cross the river about half a mile below the ford, which they did at the same time that the remainder of Colonel Spreckley's force and the mounted men of the Salisbury contingent crossed by the main road, the latter then deploying to the left.
At this time we were hidden from the Kafirs by the slope of rising ground behind which they had retreated, but when this was crested they were seen in the bush little more than a hundred yards in front of the foremost horsemen. The order was at once given to charge, on which a whirlwind of horsemen bore down on them, Grey's Scouts and Brand's men being in the centre, the Africanders on the left, and the Salisbury men on the right.
On this occasion the Kafirs must have been quite 1000 strong, spread out in skirmishing order through the open bush in face of the long line of advancing horsemen, yet they never stood for a moment, but were seized with a panic just as the smaller number of their compatriots had been when charged at Thaba Induna, as I have already related. In the same way as these latter, they fired a hurried ill-aimed volley and then turned and ran. In the chase which followed, a large number of them were shot down, and the pursuit was only abandoned when the fleetest-footed amongst them had gained the shelter of the belt of thick bush which runs down from the western side of Thaba Induna towards the Umguza.
I am of opinion myself that the Matabele lost more heavily on this occasion than at any other fight during the campaign, for the very reason that it was not a fight but only a pursuit in which the natives were killed as fast as they were overtaken. Just as on the day at Thaba Induna, so on this occasion the panic-stricken savages accepted death when the horsemen came up with them without making any attempt at resistance, except in a few instances. One man turned on Trooper Davey of Grey's Scouts and shot him through the thigh with an old musket at close quarters, the large bullet smashing the thigh-bone and necessitating the amputation of the limb; whilst another, leaping out of a bush, rushed on to Trooper Hamilton of the Salisbury contingent and stabbed him in the right side, the assegai entering his liver. Hamilton wrenched the assegai out of his assailant's hand and then shot him. My old friend, Mr. F. C. Farley of Grey's Scouts and a well-known figure in the Bulawayo of to-day, as he was also in the native kraal of Lo Bengula many years ago, had too a very narrow escape. He had dismounted to shoot a Kafir running a short distance in front of him, when the latter turned and rushed at him shaking his shield in front of him. Farley luckily carried a double-barrelled rifle, for he missed the Kafir with the first shot, and only brought him down with the second barrel when his assailant was so near him that his assegai struck the ground close to his feet. Two other men were slightly wounded, but these were the only casualties on our side, whilst the loss sustained by the Matabele was very heavy, not only in number, but in the rank of the men who were killed, for it was naturally the young and nimble who were able to make good their escape, whilst the greater part of the older men were overtaken and slain. Some of the latter, however, outlived this fatal day by hiding themselves in the midst of thick bushes.
That this impi should have dared to come close up to Bulawayo and take up its quarters at a point on the Umguza where the bush was not nearly so thick as it is farther down the river, at the point where several large impis had already tried conclusions and failed to hold their own against the white men, certainly took everyone by surprise; but since then several hundred men of this impi have surrendered to Mr. W. Fynn, and we now know that when they approached Bulawayo they did so under the superstitious belief that their enemies would be delivered into their hands by the Umlimo, and that they would be able to kill them all without any loss to themselves.
The story is as follows: Since the outbreak of the rebellion there has appeared amongst that section of the insurgents to which the defeated impi belonged a man who professes himself to be the prophet and mouthpiece of the "Umlimo" or invisible spirit. This man, it is said, possesses the power of throwing himself into an ecstatic condition, under the influence of which he swallows stones, rolls on the ground, dances on hot ashes, puts burning coals into his mouth, and goes through many other strange performances. He is known to the Matabele by the name of "Si ginya amachi," "He who swallows stones," and his utterances have come to be implicitly believed in, insomuch that when he called for an impi to go and destroy all the white men in Bulawayo, he had no difficulty in getting a number of picked men from seven different regiments to obey his behests. His orders were that the men composing this impi should take up their quarters where we found them on the Salisbury road, and there wait for the white men to attack them. They were on no account to endeavour to prevent their enemies from crossing the Umguza, but were to offer them every encouragement to do so, "for," said the stone-swallower, "once they have crossed to the east of the river the Umlimo will strike them all blind, and you will then be able to kill them without trouble, and then go on and murder all the women and children in Bulawayo." As the white men were not struck blind, whilst on the other hand a large number of the prophet's dupes lost their lives through their superstitious belief in his supernatural gifts, it would be interesting to know how "Si ginya amachi" has accounted to the survivors for his most dismal failure; for the fact that he has not yet been put to death seems to show that he has been able to offer some excuse which has saved his life up to the present time.
It is this episode of the killing of a large number of Matabele at the Umguza by the colonists whom they had come to kill, of which Mr. Labouchere has made so much capital lately, and which has enabled him to indulge in so many sneers against the white settlers in Rhodesia; his stock phrase being "that the natives are being shot down like game at a battue, with apparently as little danger to the shooters as to those killing hares and rabbits." Now no one knows better than Mr. Labouchere himself the utter recklessness of such a statement if applied to the whole campaign, since it is evident that he is ever on the watch for every scrap of news emanating from Rhodesia, in the charitable hope of picking up something discreditable to the settlers or to the government of the Chartered Company, and he must therefore be well aware that the number of white men who have been killed and wounded in the various engagements and skirmishes that have lately taken place in Matabeleland is very considerable. But should any one who does me the honour to read my story be either a constant or a fitful reader of the pages of Truth, and be inclined to believe that the editor of that journal is correct in his oft-repeated assertion that the white men in Matabeleland have suffered an insignificant loss in their encounters with the natives during the present rebellion, I would ask such an one to turn to the Appendix at the end of this book, and look over the lists which I have there given both of the settlers who were murdered on the first outbreak of the rebellion, and also of those who have since been killed and wounded in battle. These lists, if compared with Mr. Labouchere's statements, will, I think, prove to the most prejudiced that Truth—the everlasting Truth which we are told is great and will prevail—is one thing, whilst Mr. Labouchere's Truth, sold at all the bookstalls at 6d. a copy, is quite another.