Читать книгу Warriors: Extraordinary Tales from the Battlefield - Max Hastings, Sir Max Hastings, Max Hastings - Страница 11

MOST OF THE CHARACTERS portrayed in this book distinguished themselves through months or years of active service. Yet there is another kind of warrior, who stumbles upon a single moment of glory. Lieutenant John Chard was considered by most of his peers to be one of the least impressive soldiers in the British army. Indeed, there could scarcely be a greater contrast with Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. Until a January afternoon in 1879, Chard was esteemed only for his good nature and was notorious for his professional indolence. Then, wholly unexpectedly, he found himself thrust onto the centre of a stage where he gave a performance that won the applause of Victorian England. In a few hours of violent action, Chard achieved a celebrity which persisted to his death, though he never again did anything of military worth. Today, Chard would be relegated to the musty archives of imperial history but for the fact that in 1964 his exploit was embroidered into the epic film Zulu, which almost everyone susceptible to cinema adventure must at some time have seen and delighted in, and in which he was played by Stanley Baker. Modern readers must judge for themselves how far, in reality, its principal player deserved the status conferred upon him when he became one of the more honoured officers of the nineteenth-century British army.

John Rouse Merriott Chard was born into a family of minor Devon gentlefolk on 21 December 1847. He was educated partly at Plymouth New Grammar School, partly by tutors. He followed his elder brother William into the army, entering the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich aged eighteen for the usual thirty-month course of gunnery, fortification and bridging, mathematics, natural and experimental philosophy, landscape drawing, mechanics, French and Hindustani. After passing out of Woolwich eighteenth in a batch of nineteen, he was gazetted lieutenant in the Royal Engineers in July 1868. A subaltern he stubbornly remained through the next eleven years. Until December 1878 he served in a dreary succession of home and foreign garrison postings – Chatham, Bermuda, Malta, Aldershot, Devonport and Chatham again. ‘A partir de trente ans, on commence à être moins propre à faire la guerre,’ Napoleon observed incontrovertibly. Even after passing thirty Chard did not marry: in those days his humble rank discouraged family responsibilities. Not merely did he fail to distinguish himself professionally, he irked superior officers by his laziness. The only memory Woolwich contemporaries retained of Chard was that he was always late for breakfast. His chief merit, in the eyes of his peers, was that his West Country affability rendered him an easy companion in the mess, an important consideration when one had to meet a man there for three meals a day, month in and month out, amid a routine of irksome monotony. When Sir Garnet Wolseley, supreme British field commander of his generation, met Chard later he was unimpressed, dismissing him as ‘a slow, heavy fellow’. The engineer, with his big black beard and a manner diffident to the point of ineffectuality, left youth behind without making any mark upon his chosen profession.

It will never be known why Chard was posted to South Africa as war with the Zulus loomed, nor whether he welcomed the opportunity for active service. Most likely, and as usual in these matters, some engineers had to go, and Chard’s name chanced to be on a list. His nature was to accept, oxlike, whatever duty the army in its wisdom decreed for him. On 11 January 1879 Chard found himself accompanying Lieutenant-General Lord Chelmsford’s army into Zululand, following the expiry of a British ultimatum to King Cete-wayo to which that monarch had deigned no reply. Chelmsford’s expedition was characteristic of its time and kind. The Zulus displayed less deference and more truculence than the conceit of the neighbouring imperial power would tolerate. The British resolved to impose their will, and despatched four columns to pre-empt the threat of a Zulu incursion into Natal. The only thing unusual about this venture was that those who knew Cetewayo’s people warned that they ranked among the most formidable and disciplined warriors in the continent.

Chelmsford’s No. 3 Column reached its intended base at Isandlwana, some ten miles inside Cetewayo’s territory, on 20 January, after a single desultory skirmish with the inhabitants. His lordship left a battalion of the 24th Foot to garrison the camp, while he led out his remaining force in search of the enemy. Ten miles south of Isandlwana stood the little mission station of Rorke’s Drift, a few hundred yards on the near side of the Buffalo River border from Zululand, and thus inside British Natal. Amid a cluster of stone and wooden kraals stood two single-storey thatched buildings, in one of which the British had established a hospital. The other was stacked almost to the roof with biscuit, mealies and ammunition. In command of the post was Chelmsford’s deputy assistant quartermaster-general, Major Henry Spalding.

This officer had been given a company of the 24th Foot and a detachment of Natal Native Levies to guard the supplies, and was also left responsible for thirty-six sick and injured men. The 24th was mostly composed of Englishmen, but around a quarter of its strength was Welsh. Among the ranks of B Company were five men named Jones and another five named Williams. The riflemen at Rorke’s Drift were commanded by Lieutenant Gonville Bromhead. He, like Chard, was an unimpressive officer, who had served more than a decade without attaining a captaincy, despite being the product of a line of distinguished soldiers. One of his brothers was a rising star of the ‘Wolseley ring’. ‘Gonny’, however, was something of a disappointment. Though two years older than Chard, his lieutenancy was three years younger. His professional career was hampered by the fact that he was deaf, and deemed by his superiors almost as lazy as the engineer. Indeed, the two men shared a reputation for good nature and incompetence. It is almost certain that Bromhead had been left at Rorke’s Drift because he was deemed unfit to command a company of the 24th in field operations.

Chard, meanwhile, with four sappers was repairing the broken cables of one of two big iron punts at the ferry built to carry Chelmsford’s heavy equipment across the Buffalo. The engineers completed this task on the evening of 21 January. The ferry was then fully occupied moving wagons across the river, for onward passage to Isandlwana. It was heavy work, for rain had churned the crossing approaches into a quagmire. A steady stream of visitors passed through on their way to join Chelmsford’s column. On the morning of the twenty-second, young Lieutenant Horace Smith-Dorrien paused for a gossip. He observed that ‘a big fight was expected’, and borrowed a few rounds of revolver ammunition from his friend ‘Gonny’ Bromhead. Then he rode on his way.

Chard’s sappers received orders to join the main force at Isandlwana. They boarded a wagon behind a native driver, and bumped their way slowly round the hills, in the wide loop that was necessary for anything but a bird to pass from Rorke’s Drift to Chelmsford’s base. Chard himself was given Major Spalding’s permission to ride over, nominally in search of further orders for himself, but chiefly to indulge a little war tourism. In two hours, Chard reached Isandlwana to find most of the force there roused by glimpses of Zulu movements on the surrounding hills. Seeing some enemy moving towards the Nqutu Plateau, the possibility crossed the engineer’s mind that they might ‘make a dash at the drift’ – Rorke’s Drift. He himself was told to return to the river, continue supervising the ferry, and build a redoubt to enable riflemen to cover it. The camp’s senior officer Colonel Durnford asked Chard, on his way, to pass movement orders to some detachments. There was a general expectancy of action at Isandlwana, but little apprehension. Here was a substantial, well-armed British force, preparing to dispense the usual medicine to savages. Chard rode unhurriedly back to the ferry with his batman, Driver Robson, the two men oblivious that they had escaped death by a couple of hours.

At noon, some twenty thousand Zulus stormed Isandlwana, catching the defenders poorly deployed on open ground. After a brisk and costly fight, the warriors overran Durnford’s position when the 24th’s riflemen ran out of ammunition. Some 1,350 defenders were slaughtered. Only seventy-five escaped. One of the most scenically beautiful battlefields of history witnessed one of the most deplorable British humiliations. The Zulus were able to exploit their numbers to swamp the redcoats’ line, because the defenders manoeuvred clumsily and allowed themselves to be cut off from their ammunition supply. It took Cetewayo’s men little time to overcome the British, but rather longer to loot their camp, from which all cattle and mules were driven off to the king’s kraal. Horses were killed. They played no role in Zulu society and, in the disdainful words of a warrior, ‘they were the feet for the white men’.

The garrison at Rorke’s Drift heard gunfire over the hills. Of itself, this was neither surprising nor alarming. Lord Chelmsford had gone to find Zulus. The crackle of musketry suggested that he had been successful. Three men – Surgeon-Major Reynolds, an army chaplain and the Swedish missionary Otto Witt – rode to the crest of the Oscarberg, a hill behind the post, to see what was happening. Witt had sent his wife and three children away to Pietermaritzburg, but himself remained as an interpreter for the British. The horsemen scanned the horizon in vain. The mountains intervening between Isandlwana and the Drift muffled even sounds of musketry. When they spotted natives in the northern distance, they took them for British levies. Only later did they realise that these were Zulus hunting down fugitives. The sightseers gingerly picked a path back down the Oscarberg to the mission.

Major Spalding, however, remained uneasy. He was conscious of the vulnerability of his position and the weakness of its defenders. Around 2 p.m., he himself mounted a horse and set off briskly towards Helpmakaar, some ten miles southwards, to hurry forward two companies of the 24th that were posted there. Before leaving, he ascertained that Chard’s lieutenancy predated that of Bromhead, and went through the formality of assigning command of Rorke’s Drift to the sapper. Contrary to cinematic myth, this does not appear to have caused any difficulties with Bromhead, with whom Chard was on easy terms. No one perceived the issue as significant, for Spalding intended to return before darkness fell.

Chard was evidently undisturbed by what he had seen of the enemy milling above Isandlwana. In his little camp by the river he ate a leisurely lunch before retiring to his tent to write letters, unaware that the four sappers who had left him only that morning were lying dead and eviscerated less than ten miles away. Around 3 p.m., however, tranquillity was banished. Two lathered horses scrambled down to the waterside, bearing fugitives from the catastrophe – Lieutenants Adendorff and Vaines of the Natal Native Contingent. They shouted the headlines from the far bank of the Buffalo, before urging their mounts across the drift. Not only had there been a massacre, they reported that a Zulu impi was moving towards Rorke’s Drift. Chard at once despatched a sergeant and five men to picket the high ground beyond the river. Vaines hastened the few hundred yards to the mission station to tell his news, then rode for Helpmakaar. Adendorff also seized an opportunity to slip away, avoiding the subsequent battle. He was later arrested in Pietermaritzburg as a deserter.

Bromhead, it transpired, had received a note scribbled by an officer of No. 3 Column at the same time and of the same import as the tidings borne by the slouch-hatted fugitives who met Chard. The infantryman sent his own runner to summon the engineer from the river. Chard took one small but important step before complying – he ordered a water cart to be filled and taken up to the station. He then hurried to the cluster of buildings to find Assistant Commissary James Dalton directing fevered efforts to fortify them. Some men were striking the 24th’s tents to clear the field of fire, tearing out guy ropes and leaving a tangled mass of canvas, which subsequently provided a significant impediment to the attacking Zulus. Other soldiers and native levies were packing wagons with bags and boxes to make solid obstacles, loopholing brick walls and creating new ones with mealie sacks. Bromhead raised with Chard the possibility of evacuation, which it seems that the two lieutenants seriously considered. Dalton, a former sergeant-major, insisted that such a course was madness. The only option was to stand and fight. After a hurried consultation between the three men, Chard agreed that the others were doing everything possible, and went back to his picket.

Sergeant Milne and his riflemen, who were from the 3rd Buffs, roused the officer’s admiration by volunteering to take up firing positions on the punts in mid-river, to delay the Zulu advance. Chard demurred. When the time came, he would need every man at the station. He and Bromhead, as a survivor later approvingly recorded, now joined their men heaving mealie bags in the sweltering heat. There was no nonsense about class condescension at Rorke’s Drift, and indeed no subsequent reports of personal friction between the British defenders. All of them vividly recognised that they faced a struggle for their lives, the outcome of which would be determined solely by their own exertions.

Around 3.30 p.m., Lieutenant Henderson arrived with about a hundred men of the locally-raised Natal Native Horse, a welcome reinforcement. Chard directed them to throw out a scouting screen around the position. A few more stragglers from Isandlwana arrived, in a state of hysteria and despair. They urged the men of the garrison to flee for their lives. A stand was hopeless. If an entire battalion, almost a thousand strong, had failed to stop Zulus that morning, how could a weak company numbering a hundred-odd men do so that afternoon? Yet Chard had made his decision. The seventy-five minutes between the first alert and a sighting of the Zulus – ‘Here they come, black as hell and thick as grass!’ a certain Sergeant Gallagher cried from the south wall – was not long, but just enough time to contrive an effective breastwork. Unlike the victims of the morning, the men at Rorke’s Drift were well supplied with ammunition. Now they also possessed the essentials of every effective infantry defence – obstacles covered by fire. The single-shot .45 falling-block Martini-Henry rifle was a deadly tool against tribesmen chiefly armed with assegais, so long as it could be kept fed with bullets. The biggest problem for the defenders was that considerable cover, bush and trees and grass, extended close to the mission station on two sides. There was no time to clear this away and improve the British field of fire.

By far the most experienced soldier at Rorke’s Drift was Commissary Dalton. Both Chard and Bromhead later paid tribute to his advice and leadership. He was a forty-nine-year-old former NCO of the 85th Foot who had taken his pension six years earlier and settled in Natal. It was Dalton, veteran of a course in field fortification, who hastily sketched the design for a perimeter at the mission station, which Chard and Bromhead seized upon and executed. It is plain that, before the battle began and perhaps also afterwards, Dalton was the strongest personality among the defenders, a forceful, leathery old soldier who knew exactly what he was doing. Surgeon-Major Reynolds noted the opinion of all the officers that if either hospital building or storehouse fell to the Zulus, the whole British position must collapse. But as the little garrison weighed their chances against those of their comrades at Isandlwana that morning, they told each other that their ramparts vastly improved the odds, compared with those facing the victims of the morning, caught in the open. They were right.