It would seem, briefly, then, that the charger ridden by the Prince, when he left Lord Chelmsford's camp, and which in the end chiefly led to his death, was a clumsy and awkward animal, given to rearing and shying. After crossing the Ityotyosi, then swollen by the recent rains, the Prince and his party rode on through a district covered with grass-like rush, kreupelboom, and dwarf acacias.
The Prince, who from the time of his landing had always sought out any Frenchmen who might be among the local levies, and frequently gave them sovereigns, was riding with Le Toque by his side; and the latter, in the gaiety of his heart, and exhilarated by the beauty of the morning, sang more than one French song as they rode onward, such as—
'Eh gai, gai, gai, mon officier!'
And as they began to ascend a still nameless hill with a flat top, the Prince sang loudly 'Les deux Grenadiers,' an old Bonapartist ditty—Le Toque joining in the chorus of Beranger's chanson:—
'Vieux grenadiers suivons un vieux soldat,
Suivon un vieux soldat!
Suivon un vieux soldat!
Suivon un vieux soldat!'
On the summit of the koppie the party slackened their girths, while the Prince made a sketch of the landscape. 'We may here digress to say,' adds the Cape Argus, 'that the Prince's talent with pen and pencil, combined with his remarkable proficiency in military surveying (which so distinguished the first Napoleon), made his contributions to our knowledge of the country to be traversed of great value.'
Amid the heat and splendour of an African noon they now rode on to a deserted kraal, consisting of five beehive-shaped huts, near a dry donga, or old watercourse, where they unsaddled and knee-haltered their horses to graze, while the Prince and his companions chatted and smoked, all unaware that some forty armed Zulus were actually stalking them like deer, crawling stealthily and softly on their hands and knees through the long Tambookie grass and mealies, drawing their rifles and assegais after them.
About four o'clock Corporal Grub, of Bettington's Horse, got a glimpse of a Zulu, and warned the Prince of the circumstance.
'Saddle up at once!' said the latter; 'prepare to mount!'
The brief orders had scarcely left his lips when a volley from forty rifles crashed through the long Tambookie grass and waving reeds, which bent as if before a breeze, and then the ferocious lurkers rushed with flashing and glistening teeth, bloodshot, rolling eyes, and loud yells, upon the solitary party of eight men.