Cilliers sent out a loud-voiced envoy to inquire why they came to fight the white men who had done them no harm. At once the thousands of warriors sprang to their feet with the mighty war cry: "Umsiligaas alone has the right to speak!" Brandishing their shields and assegais, the front ranks deployed to right and left, forming those two horns, so celebrated in Zulu warfare, which were intended to inclose the enemy. The emigrants mounted their horses, reloading their heavy muskets as they went and firing at the points of the horns; and with great difficulty, in an hour and a half, they reached the laager. Here men, women, and children knelt down for a short prayer, while the Matabele indunas were massing the column for the grand assault. Then followed a desperate fight. The Zulus poured forward in thousands with magnificent courage, even seizing hold of the wagons with their hands to tear them apart, and piercing the wagon sails again and again with their assegais. The Boers fought with desperate determination, the women reloading the guns and handing them to the men who stood at the corners of the laager. In the end, with heavy loss on both sides, the Matabele were repulsed, but in their retreat they swept away with them all the sheep and cattle of the emigrants. Hunger and desolation then reigned in the laager, and had it not been for the timely arrival of another party of emigrants all must have perished. Later on, the combined emigrants followed up the Matabele to their strongholds in the Transvaal in the hope of recovering their goods and the lost children. After long and bitter conflict the old flintlock gun conquered, and the Matabele moved northward towards the territory where they are now found, known as Matabeleland.
Of this war, it can only be said that South Africa has no reason to be ashamed of the way in which either of her children, black or white, fought. On the one side there was the Zulu with his great theory of imperial expansion, not wholly unpardonable in a savage, resenting the intrusion of any other powers within his sphere of influence, if not into his actual territory, and determined to use his mighty armies to extend his rule. On the other hand, the white emigrant, in his small and feeble numbers, but armed with his old flintlock gun (which, though it took some minutes to load and discharge once, was a formidable weapon when compared with the best Zulu assegai), who was equally determined to make a home for himself and his wife and children in the great South African wilds. It was a fine, free fight, if any conflict between humans can be so termed. One looks back to it with none of that pain with which the generous spirit beholds the conflict of overwhelming strength with weakness. When two equally prepared gladiators enter the arena, repulsive though the sight may be, one may well feel sympathy with both. This was no case of blowing naked savages to fragments with Maxims or Winchester repeating rifles, and, if in the end the old flintlock gun conquered, there were times when it seemed more than probable the victory would be on the other side. The African lion and the African tiger rolled together on the ground in a fair and free fight. If the Boer fell, with him fell wife and children; he fought for life and a home as the Zulu fought. Behind him there was no vast civilized power to whom, when he had provoked war, he could cry for aid, and whose hired soldiers could wipe out and be avenged upon the feebler foe. Alone, unbacked by any extraneous force, dependent on his own right arm, the Boer went forth. South Africa has no reason to be ashamed of the way in which either of her sons, black or white, fought in those old, terrible days.
In the highly cultured citizen of the end of the nineteenth century, we rightly demand, as a primal and common virtue, breadth of human sympathy and catholic impartiality of intellectual judgment, unwarped by personal interests, which is the attribute of the developed man; but we are yet able, in regarding more primitive times and men who laid no claim to our transcendent modern virtues, to accept indomitable courage and love of independence, though the most primitive of virtues, as a possible foundation from which later all those higher mental beatitudes, which we have a right to demand from the self-exulting nineteenth-century human, may spring. In these two primitive virtues neither Boer nor Zulu ever showed himself wanting in those old days.
While one part of the emigrant body remained in the Transvaal and Northern Free State, another passed over the Drakensberg Mountains into Natal, under a man who stands forth as the most romantic figure among the early fore-trekkers, Piet Retief, a man of some culture, and of a singular generosity of nature.
The land of Natal was at that time practically uninhabited. Tchaka and his warriors had swept the country clean of its native tribes; but he considered it within his sphere of imperial influence. When Retief and his companions, who went to examine the land, looked down at it from the top of Spion Kop, they saw that the land was fair and good and almost wholly uninhabited, and they made overtures to Dingaan, Tchaka's successor, who resided at his kraal on the White Umvolosi, a hundred miles distant in Zululand, for the right without let or hindrance from the Zulus to inhabit this country. Dingaan readily consented, on one condition—that the emigrants should obtain from a Basuto tribe some cattle they had taken from his people. This was easily done, and Dingaan expressing complete satisfaction, a thousand wagons containing the Boer families trekked over the Drakensberg into Natal, and scattered over the unpeopled country along the banks of the Upper Tugela and Mooi Rivers. Piet Retief, with sixty-five followers, some of whom were mere lads of fifteen or sixteen, went to visit Dingaan at his kraal on the White Umvolosi, in order that their agreement might be finally ratified. Some advised caution in going, but Retief fearlessly laughed their counsels to scorn. Dingaan met his visitors with much apparent joy and kindliness. Great dances were given in their honour, and an agreement of permanent peace and fellowship was drawn up by Mr. Owen, the missionary who was with Dingaan. On the last day, when the party came to bid farewell to the chief, they were directed, as usual, to lay aside their weapons when entering the king's presence, and they did so. They were then offered Kaffir beer to drink. Then, in an instant, at a given signal from Dingaan, his warriors fell on them. "Seize the wizards!" he cried in Kaffir. Some of them defended themselves gallantly with their pocket knives, but all were at last overpowered and dragged to the official place of execution, a ridge of high rocks on one side of the kraal, where their brains were knocked out. Their bodies were then left exposed. Not one of the men escaped.
The manner of their death was recorded by the missionary who, as soon as possible, left the Zulu kraal with all his party, fearing the same fate for himself.
On that day a great army of ten thousand Zulu warriors moved forward silently to attack the scattered emigrants in Natal.
At a spot near to the present village of Weenen ("Weeping"—so called in remembrance of that terrible day), which lies not very far from the village of Colenso, the Zulu army killed an entire body of emigrants—forty-one men, fifty-six women, one hundred and eighty-five children, and two hundred and fifty coloured servants. The bodies were mutilated, and neither woman nor child were spared; some were found with as many as thirty spear-wounds in them. All the white souls in Natal would have perished had not three young men escaped, who warned the remaining scattered parties of their danger. The wagons were hastily drawn together into little laagers, and after a long and desperate struggle the Zulus were repulsed, women standing beside the men, reloading their guns and aiding almost as greatly in the defence as the men.
Then the remnant of the people gathered themselves together to discuss what should be done. A few had given up all hope, and even spoke of retracing their steps across the hundreds of weary miles they had traversed. But the women—then as always, the strength of the South African people, and who resembled more those old Teutonic ancestresses of our northern races, of whom Tacitus tells us that "they dared with their men in war and suffered with them in peace," than we in the drawing-room and the ballroom—the women raised their voices unanimously, and cried that there should be no surrender; there, where their fellows had fallen, they would found their republic or die, and they, who had faced death, beside man, were listened to. In one battle ten Boers fell, among them Piet Uys, the father of a family noted down to the present day for courage, whose young son, a mere lad, seeing his father unhorsed and stabbed by the Zulu soldiers, rushed back and died beside him.[67]
But in the end, at the great and terrible battle of Blood River, December 16, 1838, the Zulus were defeated, and Dingaan fled. His brother Panda was made king in his stead. From that time the 16th of December has been always a holiday in the African Republic.