The Horns of the Buffalo (38 page)

Another red-coated figure familiar to Simon now appeared from the window and, with one arm hanging useless and bloodstained, Private Frederick Hitch dropped awkwardly down and gestured up above for others to follow him.

So began one of the most remarkable and heroic escapes in British military history. One by one, a broken procession of sick and wounded half fell, half lowered themselves from the window. Private Hitch, faint himself with loss of blood, took the weight of their fall with his body, while Corporal Allen fired repeatedly at Zulus who lunged around from the front of the hospital. The men at the line of boxes thirty yards away kept up a withering fire along the top of the deserted barricades to deter the Zulu marksmen and spearmen.

Watching, Simon marvelled at the courage of the men, many of them wounded or in high fever, who wriggled out of the window into the open compound and that flaring night. One by one, eleven patients dropped down, nine of them helped to safety across the dangerous no-man's-land of the enclosure by Allen and Hitch or the handful of fit men inside the hospital who had survived the room-to-room fighting and who now escaped through the window themselves. One trooper of the Natal Mounted Police was too crippled to walk and attempted to cross the compound by dragging himself along on his elbows. He had reached the centre when a Zulu vaulted the barricade, darted forward and sank his assegai into the small of the trooper's back before a bullet brought him down. Private Robert Jones was the last of the hospital defenders to drop down. As he did so, the roof collapsed behind him.

A small gap had been created in the biscuit box line so that the sick men could be dragged through, and Simon helped to pull the survivors to safety. One man, his face flushed with fever and still in his nightshirt, grabbed Simon's shirt and pulled his face close.

‘Do you know what they did to Joseph Williams, then?' he muttered hoarsely, his eyes wide.

Simon shook his head. ‘Don't talk about it,' he said. ‘The doctor's here.'

‘Bugger the doctor. Williams was holding the door, see, as we crawled through the hole in the wall that John Williams had made. Then the door fell in, and Joseph was left to keep the buggers out with his bayonet. I was lookin' back through the hole when I saw them pull his rifle and 'im with it, look you. Then,' the man's voice broke, ‘they ripped off his jacket, see, an' they 'eld poor old Joseph while they stuck spears in his belly, openin' it up. Oh, it was terrible, terrible . . .' and his voice died away and he sank back. Simon held the man's hand tightly and beckoned an orderly.

Then, suddenly, the sick man's eyes opened again and he sat up. ‘From room to room we went, see, with John Williams choppin' away with his axe to make holes so's we could crawl through. We'd only just get through one hole when the Zulus would break into the room we'd just left. My mate Hookie was kneelin' at one hole with his bayonet keepin' 'em back while we crawled through the next. 'Orrible it was. 'Orrible. Did I tell you what they did to Joseph Williams, then?'

‘Yes, you did,' said Simon. ‘Don't think about it, bach, there's a good fellow. The doctor will give you something.' Then the orderly came and took the man to Surgeon Major Reynolds, who was working grimly on the veranda by the light of the flames.

The perimeter now had contracted to the enclosure in front of the storehouse and the stone-built cattle kraal at its rear. With the yard abandoned, the snipers on the Oskarberg had lost their flame-lit targets on the north wall and they streamed down to join their comrades. The collapse of the hospital freed several hundreds more, who circled the compound looking for a weakness.

They found it in the cattle kraal. It had been comparatively neglected, and the little garrison there had been able to hold its own, despite the fact that the stone walls were not high and were not surmounted by mealie bag embrasures. Now, however, the glare of the blazing hospital silhouetted the defenders, while the Zulus came out of the darkness. Reinforced, they now attacked in a series of savage rushes, boiling up from the blackness beyond to reach the wall unscathed. The defenders were unable to stem the tide and fell back to a secondary stone wall within the kraal where Simon and a handful of redcoats joined them in time to engage in another desperate hand-to-hand conflict, bayonet clashing with assegai and rifle butt swinging against knobkerrie. Chard ordered men to climb on to the roof of the storehouse and fire into the masses in the kraal. The fire proved effective and forced the Zulus to take cover behind the stone perimeters of the kraal, giving some respite to the defenders.

Chard took advantage of the momentary lessening of the pressure on the kraal to call back a handful of men to his command post position in front of the storehouse, between it and the bisecting line of biscuit boxes. The boxes had all been used on the barricades, but plenty of mealie bags remained and he set the men to build a circular redoubt there, seven or eight feet high, with a scooped-out summit that could give protection to the worst of the wounded and a vantage point to a dozen or so riflemen. It was the last retreat. There would be nowhere else to go.

Simon pulled out his watch. It was almost midnight, and the fighting had been raging without pause for nearly eight hours. His shoulder ached from the kick of his rifle, and as he looked around, he could see overheated gun barrels glowing in the dark, cooking off rounds before their owners could raise them to fire. The heat softened the thin rolled brass of the cartridge cases, which then stuck to the chamber, while the extractor handle tore the iron head off the case. He could see men digging at the open breeches with their knives to pick out the empties. Some of these men had fired several hundred rounds through their scorching barrels and had wrapped rags around their left hands to protect them from the heat, or were now simply just resting the barrels on the top of the barricades and trying to fire with one hand. How long could it all go on? How long could the little band hold out against the unrelenting, surging waves of attack?

But the Zulus were not pulling back and the defenders in their enclave in and around the storehouse were running short of water. Most of the men manning the barricades had parched mouths, blistered lips and tongues that tasted of cordite. Their canteens were long since empty and the wounded were now moaning for water.

Confronting them in the no-man's-land of the yard - taunting them all - stood the post's two-wheeled water cart that Chard had prudently filled before the attack was launched. There had been no time to wheel it behind the line of boxes when the perimeter was shortened and it stood tantalisingly near the north wall, which was now, of course, manned by Zulus, who kept up a steady, if inaccurate, fire from behind the mealie-bag embrasures.

‘Right,' said Chard eventually, having carefully assessed the options. ‘Let's go and get it.' He called for volunteers and Simon wearily raised his hand. The big man looked at Simon's gaunt face and smilingly shook his head. ‘Sit this one out, Fonthill,' he said. ‘The night's not over. We shall need you later.' He selected twenty of his fittest men - all strong men with bayonets - and they crouched for a moment behind the boxes. Then, with a shout and with Chard in the lead, they boiled over the barricade and stormed down the north wall, bayoneting, shooting and clubbing the Zulus behind the bags along the wall, while three men grabbed the cart and pushed it to the enclosure. It was all over in less than ninety seconds, and amazingly, not one life was lost in the sally. It was impossible to bring the water cart within the enclosure, of course, but it drained through a valve and leather hose and it was a simple matter to lead the hose through the line and fill the canteens.

Simon watched the exercise with anxiety, and then admiration. The anxiety centred on the risk of losing Chard rather than the failure of the sally, for he realised how vital this officer of engineers was to the defence of the post. If Chard had been brought down by a spear thrust, he doubted if anyone else could lead. Bromhead had skill and bravery all right, but his disability must disqualify him from leadership in these circumstances, although, Simon reflected wryly, his lack of hearing undoubtedly bequeathed him certain elements of calmness in this noisy cauldron. Chard could lead a bayonet charge all right. In fact Chard, it seemed, could do anything.

As for Simon, he was now nearly exhausted. He had lost count of the number of attacks that had been repulsed, of how many bullets he had fired, and of how many times he had lifted that heavy Martini-Henry and thrust away with its long bayonet. He existed in a flickering, fire-lit eternity of rifle shots, screams and shouted commands. He looked with deep admiration at the scarlet backs manning the walls: they were fewer now, but they were still erect, still fighting - about eighty-odd Jenkinses, all, it seemed, sharing the little man's priceless virtues of courage and loyalty; all amazed at the ferocity and bravery of the warriors lunging at them, but all dourly determined to withstand it. Simon ran the back of his hand across his face and found that it came away black with soot. His head was singing with the cacophony of battle, and despite filling his canteen at the hose, his mouth was dry again. His shoulder was aching and his thigh pricking from where the assegai had penetrated lightly. But if these former bricklayers, boot boys and farmhands of the 24th Regiment of Foot could carry on fighting, so could he. He sniffed, inserted another cartridge into the hot breech of his rifle and took aim again.

 

Later, in a brief lull at the kraal wall, he extracted his timepiece to see how far through the night they were. Two thirty a.m. In the last fourteen hours he had endured two battles, lost his best friend, killed he knew not how many men and knocked his erstwhile commanding officer to the ground. He could now barely keep his eyes open, nor summon up the strength to present his bayonet to fight off yet another charge.

Yet Simon was not the only exhausted warrior at Rorke's Drift. The Zulu corps still pressing around the walls of the mission station had left Ulundi on Monday morning, and it was now Thursday. Its warriors had consumed their field rations within the first two days and had had nothing to eat, therefore, for the following two days. Since leaving the Nqutu plateau to attack Isandlwana, they had covered twelve miles to Rorke's Drift, mostly on the trot, and one of their regiments - the inDluyenge - had also harassed the refugees from Isandlwana on their way to the Buffalo. They had attacked the mission station now continually for ten hours in the face of withering fire and a small body of British soldiers who knew how to wield their bayonets and who refused to be beaten. They had lost they knew not how many of their warriors.

The assault on the walls continued, however, through the semi-darkness, with the occasional resurgent flame throwing the attackers and the defenders on the walls into momentary demonic relief. Then, at last, the ferocity of the Zulu charges began to weaken against the unremitting fire of the Martini-Henrys, and as the smoke from the gutted hospital began to die away, so too did the attacks on the walls. By 4.30 a terrible quiet fell on Rorke's Drift. The defenders still stood at the walls of their tiny fortress, but many of them could do no more than nod over their rifle barrels and start guiltily awake for a moment as a blackened rafter crashed on to the floor of the burnt-out hospital.

Dawn when it came showed that the Zulus had gone, leaving a terrible litany of bodies behind them. Against the ledge of the fiercely disputed north wall, they lay four or five deep, limbs protruding from contorted bodies and from beneath hundreds of discarded shields; a forest of assegais pointing to the early sky as a testimony to the fierce firepower of the Martini-Henry rifle - and to the courage of brave men.

But Chard felt no sense of triumph. He called for a count of his casualties and found that fifteen of his men were dead, two more were dying and eight were severely wounded. With barely eighty men left on their feet, he was in no condition to withstand another onslaught of the kind with which the Zulus had begun the battle, and his ammunition was running low. He could not see how reinforcements could reach him from Helpmakaar, and for all he knew, the General's column out there somewhere in the hills across the Buffalo had gone the same way as Pulleine's men at Isandlwana. So it was with great care, then, that he sent out a scouting party to ascertain if the Zulus had retreated or were merely resting on their spears before making a fresh attack.

The patrol returned to report no sign of the Zulus, but a rough count of the bodies around the post showed that some 370 warriors had died there - more than a hundred more were later found in the Buffalo, where the Zulus had carried wounded men away on their shields. A huge sigh of relief ran round the defenders - to be replaced almost immediately by a thrill of horror as the Zulu impi suddenly appeared again, squatting just out of rifle range on the western bank of the Oskarberg. There were hundreds of them, quite enough to overwhelm the reduced garrison, with its denuded ammunition boxes. Simon was shaken awake, as he lay with his back to the stone kraal wall, and joined the weary men who once again picked up their rifles and manned the walls, watching the impi in silence.

The Zulus were taking snuff and resting. They had nothing to eat and empty stomachs. They were far from home and faced a long journey. They also faced an angry king and the wailing of the women in the kraals of those warriors left behind on the field. As the defenders of Rorke's Drift watched, the Zulus gradually stood and walked slowly away, around behind the Oskarberg, towards the drift and their homeland.

Simon was asleep again, drooped over the mealie bags, long before the last warrior had disappeared from sight.

He was gently shaken awake by a smoke-blackened Bromhead. ‘Quite a do, eh, Fonthill?' he said kindly. ‘Well, it looks as though we have survived and the news should give a lift back home, after the downer at Isandlwana.'