To lure them on, Florian was sent with twenty Mounted Infantry, and, on seeing so petty a force riding towards them, the enemy wheeled back a portion of their front as a trap.
'Come on, lads,' cried Florian, brandishing his sword, 'come on!—though not a man of us may return!' he thought.
But the twenty men only poured in a rifle fire, wheeled about by fours, and, galloping back, won the shelter of the square, the four faces of which were fringed by steel and garlanded with jets of fire and smoke, while the roar of artillery shook the air, and high overhead was heard the fierce rush of the red rockets as they were shot into the royal kraal of Ulundi and fired it in many places.
With the rest of the mounted men, Florian stood in the centre of the square, holding his horse by the bridle and looking quietly about him, and, like the rest, his heart beat high, every pulse was quickened, and the excitement became intense, as the long, long horns of the Zulu army in its thousands closed round the square, and as the circle contracted and came within closer range it was a splendid and thrilling but terrible sight to see the masses mowed down like swathes of crass beneath a mighty scythe.
The British troops were formed in ranks four deep, two kneeling as if to receive cavalry, the rifle-butt placed against the right knee, and two erect, firing steadily, all with bayonets fixed; and in this dense formation, sad indeed would have been our casualties had the Zulu fire been well delivered.
Closing upon their skirmishers rather than permitting the latter to fall back upon their lines, their attack embraced the four faces of the vast hollow square, now shrouded with white whirling smoke, and edged by glittering fire and flashing steel. Out of the dark masses that were pouring on came bullets of every calibre, from the sharp pinging cone of the Martini-Henry to the heavy whirring charge of the long elephant-gun, and many a man and many a horse was wounded and done to death thereby. The old Zulu tactics were pursued; the attack was ever augmented by fresh bodies of infuriated savages, with the same dire results to them; while all their devotion and desperation could rarely carry them past the verge of the cloud of smoke enveloping the square; and thus, of the thousands who came on, only hundreds remained to waver or prolong the attack.
Whole crowds of naked and sombre forms seemed to lie as if suddenly struck dead, each man where he stood; and it was so. Some, however, succeeded in flinging their bare breasts upon the bayonet points, and, with dying grasp on the rifle muzzles, went down almost at the feet of the front rank men, fierce, stern, fearless to the last, their white teeth set, their eyeballs gleaming like those of exasperated fiends, and their yells rending the air.
'Steady, men, steady,' the officers were heard to cry again and again; 'fire low—low, and not so fast!'
Drury Lowe was unhorsed by a spent bullet, but vaulted into his saddle again. Eight companies of the Perthshire Light Infantry, flanked by seven and nine pounder guns in one face of the square, fought well and valiantly, though young soldiers, and in physique unlike those of whom Sir Francis Head wrote when at Paris in 1815, when he stated 'that a body of Scottish Highlanders, or Lowlanders, standing shoulder to shoulder, stretched over more ground than a similar number of inhabitants, soldier or civilian, of any other nation in Europe.'
The coolness of the men amid this close strife, while the dead and dying fell about them fast, was wonderful, the doctors attending the latter; and in several instances the former, ere they were cold, were buried to save time, while the chaplain stood by to read the burial service amid a tempest of bullets.