'A thousand thanks to you, Captain Hammersley,' replied Florian, his heart swelling and his colour deepening with gratitude; 'but I have no need to trespass on your kindness—I want nothing here; we are all pretty much alike in Zululand—officer and private, general and drum-boy.'
'Yes, by Jove! but in the time to come?'
'Thanks again, I say, dear Hammersley, but I am inclined to let to-morrow take care of to-morrow, especially while campaigning in Zululand.'
'Tiresome work I find that, with all my zeal for the service,' observed Hammersley, as the entire cavalry force moved off about four in the morning, when the sky and landscape were alike dark. 'We have much bodily endurance, and run enormous risks which the people at home don't understand or fully appreciate, because our antagonists are naked savages, though second to no men in the world for reckless valour; thus honour may be accorded to us but scantily and grudgingly, because they are savages and not civilised enemies, or, as some one says of the days of the Great Duke, when so many thousand men in red coats and blue breeches met and beat so many thousand men in blue coats and red breeches.'
General Marshall, with the King's Dragoon Guards and 17th Lancers, had reconnoitred the country in advance as far as the Upoko River, and there effected a junction with Buller's command on the same ground where the latter had escaped the ambuscade referred to.
On a green plain below it a great mass of Zulus, sombre and dark, spotted with the grey of their oval shields, was seen hovering, the flash of an assegai-head sparkling out at times when the sun arose, and near them, enveloped in smoke and all sheeted with flame at once, were some kraals that had been set on fire by the Irregular Horse; so the scene, if beautiful, was also a stirring one.
Above the vast mountain opposite, where the Upoko (a tributary of the great White Umvulosi, which flows towards the sea) was rolling in golden sheen between banks clothed with date palms, Kaffir plums, flowering acacias, and thornwood, the uprisen sun was shining in all his glory. The mountain was torn by ravines and studded with mimosa groups. On the left of the troops rose the vast Inhlatzatye, or mountain of greenstone, turned to crimson in the morning sun, its base clothed with lovely pasture, and twenty miles in its rear was known to be Ulundi, the great military kraal of Cetewayo, the chief object of the advance.
In the immediate foreground was the force of cavalry, with all their white helmets and sword blades shining in the sun, the dark blue of the Lancers, and the sombre uniforms of the Irregular Horse, relieved and varied by the bright scarlet of the King's Dragoon Guards and the mimosa-coloured tunics of the Mounted Infantry.
The sharp blare of the trumpets sounded 'the advance.'
'Buller's Horse to the left!' cried the officer of that name, digging spurs into his charger; 'Whalley's to the right! Frontier Light Horse and Hammersley's Mounted Infantry the centre!'