PART THREE

Control

EIGHT

Discipline—or Warriors Are Not Always Soldiers

Rorke’s Drift, January 22–23, 1879

Free though they are, they are not entirely free—for law is their master, whom they fear far more than your men fear you. Whatever their law commands, that they do; and it commands them always the same: they are not allowed to flee in battle from any foe, however great the numbers, but rather they are to stay in their ranks and there conquer or perish.

—HERODOTUS, The Histories (7.104)

KILLING FIELDS

“Each Man in His Place”

THE LAST MOMENTS at the battle of Isandhlwana were ghastly. Colonel Anthony Durnford’s Natal Native Horse—250 horsemen and 300 foot soldiers from the Ngwane and Basuto tribes—after minutes of firing murderous volleys that had mowed down the attacking waves of Zulus, ran out of ammunition. Unfortunately for Durnford, his native contingent was not formed up in a square. It had spread itself thinly along the ridge on foot, in a loose line of some six hundred to eight hundred yards, firing carbines without bayonets. Durnford, like every British commander at the camp on the ridges of Isandhlwana, had vastly underestimated the size of the Zulu impis (regiments). Consequently, for most of the late morning he had unnecessarily exposed his men to attack in sorties well beyond camp, failing utterly as the senior officer in command at Isandhlwana to form up the garrison into some type of the standard British defensive perimeter. Durnford would pay for his tactical imbecility with his life and those of his men. Thousands of Zulus easily poured through their thinned ranks, stabbed and routed them, and were soon among the wagons—and at the backs of the regular army itself! Almost everywhere along the British lines, soldiers were firing far more slowly as they searched desperately for additional ammunition.

For the first time, after almost an hour of being butchered by systematic British volleys, the Zulus could at last use their deadly assegais (spears) at will. The close-quarter fighting with the European camp attendants ensured them freedom from the deadly rifle fire that had broken their initial charges across the open ground. Once in the confines of the camp, the barefoot, lightly clad warriors, armed with razor-sharp spears, enjoyed an actual advantage over their heavily laden British enemies, who for the most part wielded awkward single-shot Martini-Henry rifles designed to kill at a thousand yards, not five. “Gwas Unhlongo! Gwas Inglubi!”—“Stab the white men! Stab the pigs!” the Zulus yelled, as any British or native cavalryman still lucky enough to have a mount desperately rode out to attempt to cut a way through the throng.

Meanwhile, the British infantry front some six hundred yards to the northeast—about four hundred imperial riflemen of the veteran 24th Regiment were still alive there—began to break up into small isolated squares, islands of fifty or sixty men who methodically blasted away at the waves of Zulus that lapped around them on all sides. A few dozen, when their ammunition was exhausted, shook hands and then charged with their bayonets. Some used knives and captured assegais to take as many Zulus with them as they could. Zulus reported after the battle that some unarmed British soldiers finally died swinging their empty rifles and pounding the enemy with their fists. All were overwhelmed once they ran out of bullets for their guns, giving the Zulus the opportunity to attack them at a distance with thrown spears and their own sporadic rifle fire.

The bravery of the 24th came as no surprise. The regiment had been described by contemporaries as “no boy recruits but war-worn matured men, mostly with beards. Possessed of splendid discipline and sure of success, they lay on their position making every round tell” (M. Barthorp, The Zulu War, 61). But after Lord Chelmsford had divided his forces, the remaining men of the 24th, too few and too short of easily accessible ammunition, were never formed into one large defensible square and were thus destined to be annihilated in pockets and small groups. It was as if their officers—like the Roman generals at Cannae—had done everything to ignore their intrinsic advantages of Western discipline and superior offensive power.

Nearly 20,000 Zulu warriors roamed freely inside the extended British lines that had once ranged as far as 2,500 yards in a vast and haphazard semicircle around the slopes of the hill of Isandhlwana. Such a deployment, as the British commanders, Lieutenant Colonels Henry Pulleine and Anthony W. Durnford, at last realized in the moments before they were butchered, was no way to fight the Zulu nation. Methlagazulu, a Zulu veteran of the battle, later told the British of Colonel Durnford’s last minutes:

They made a desperate resistance, some firing with pistols and others using swords. I repeatedly heard the word “fire” given by someone, but we proved too many for them, and killed them all where they stood. When all was over I had a look at these men, and saw an officer with his arm in a sling, and with a big moustache, surrounded by carbineers, soldiers, and other men I didn’t know. (Narrative of Field Operations Connected with the Zulu War of 1879, 38)

By 2:00 in the afternoon of January 22, 1879, it was all over, a little less than two hours after the Zulu impis had first surrounded the camp. Of the six companies of the 24th Regiment, fewer than a dozen men escaped. Twenty-one officers were killed on the spot. Almost all of the original 1,800 troops at Isandhlwana died—950 regular British troops, colonial volunteers, and camp and wagon attendants, along with 850 native Africans in various Natal regiments. Only a few scattered survivors managed to ride to safety in the general confusion. Several hours later the troops of Lord Chelmsford’s center column of relief returned to the site of the slaughter:

The dead lay everywhere, in windrows. Every body was mutilated, with the stomach slashed open, in order, the Zulus believed, to release the spirit of the dead. Here, a ghastly circle of soldiers’ heads was laid out; there, a drummer boy hanging from a wagon by his feet, with his throat cut. A Natal mounted policeman and a Zulu lay dead, locked together as they had fallen, the policeman uppermost. Two other combatants lay close together, the Zulu with a bayonet thrust through his skull and the white man with an assegaiplunged into his chest. A soldier of the 24th lay speared through the back, with two other assegais by him, the blades bent double. It was the same all over the field. (D. Clammer, The Zulu War, 96–97)

In fact, the British army never again put underage boys on active service—they had found at Isandhlwana five youths with their genitals cut off and placed in their mouths. Many Zulu warriors cut out the bearded jaws of the British dead as victory trophies. Others had stomped the intestines of the corpses to jelly and further desecrated the truncated torsos. Some heads were arranged in a circle. In turn, the grotesque blasts from the enormous .45-caliber slugs of the British Martini-Henry rifles—limbs blown away, cheeks and faces blasted apart, chests and stomachs shredded with gaping holes—marked the far more numerous Zulu dead and would identify the surviving wounded from Isandhlwana for a generation to come. Later European observers noted aging warriors still in agony decades after the battle, legs and arms missing and their bodies disfigured with hideous bullet scars.

A century of fighting in South Africa had taught the Boer settlers that vastly outnumbered Europeans, even equipped with slow-firing and inaccurate flintlock muzzle-loaders, could defeat Zulu forces fifty to a hundred times their number—if a series of careful protocols was followed. Discipline was the key. A secure camp had to be established in the bush, with the clumsy supply wagons circled and then chained together into a fortified laager—a bothersome task requiring hours of strenuous labor to unhitch, maneuver, and interlock the wagons into an impenetrable wall. Scouts and patrols were to be sent at regular hourly intervals, given the Zulu propensity to crawl stealthily through the range grass in great numbers without being seen. Ammunition had to be stockpiled in the center and freely distributed among the wagons in the circle to ensure a continuous volley of fire from single-shot rifles that would keep the much faster Zulus away from the ramparts. Ideally, shooters would be placed shoulder-to-shoulder to provide a carpet of fire and to prevent Zulus from leaping between the defenders and pouring through gaps—as well as reinforcing group morale and facilitating talking to one another as soldiers fired.

If there was time, the ground around the laager should be first cleared of major obstacles, allowing an open field of fire for riflemen—and then limbs of thornbushes and broken bottles scattered, or better yet, ditches and ramparts readied to slow down the rush of barefoot and exposed warriors. Field artillery—and primitive Gatling machine guns if available— should be anchored at vulnerable points of the laager to divert waves of the attackers toward rifle fire on the sides. All this was necessary to overcome the intrinsic advantages of enormous numerical superiority, speed, and surprise enjoyed by the Zulus. The vastly outnumbered Europeans, to be successful, had to kill Zulus yards distant, before the running warriors leaped into their lines. Yet at Isandhlwana the British followed none of their own carefully established protocols. Why?

Isandhlwana was the first major encounter of the Zulu War, and the British officers in their initial arrogance had not appreciated how adept the Zulus were in moving thousands of their warriors long distances only to remain undetected within yards of British camps. While the Martini-Henry rifle was sighted to 1,500 yards, and fired a deadly .45-caliber bullet weighing 480 grains that lost little of its accuracy even at great distances, it was nevertheless a single-shot, not a repeating, weapon. True, experienced riflemen with the standard seventy cartridges in their pouches for a time could fire off up to twelve rounds a minute. But the need to load each bullet individually meant that dispersed lines of British soldiers, apart from fortifications or reinforced squares, might be overwhelmed by waves of sprinting Zulus, as dozens of the attackers swarmed individual riflemen fumbling for cartridges. Even the best riflemen might take five seconds to eject a cartridge, load a new one, aim, and fire—a mostly unsustainable rate over hours of shooting. If there were even slight interruptions in supplying cartridges—and there were several at Isandhlwana—then the ensuing hiatus of regular volleys might allow a fast-moving impi to close the critical distance through the killing zone to break into and obliterate British lines. Even with full pouches, a rapidfiring rifleman might exhaust his personal supply of cartridges within five or six minutes and then find himself outnumbered in hand-to-hand stabbing contests.

In America, repeating Spencer and Henry rifles had been used in the last years of the Civil War; Union troops under Sherman had employed both on their marches through Georgia and the Carolinas in autumn 1864 and early 1865. The model 1873 Winchester lever-action repeating .32-caliber rifle was ubiquitous on the American plains and could fire three times more rapidly than the Martini-Henry—well over thirty bullets a minute compared to the Martini’s ten or twelve. But innate British military conservatism (the earlier so-called Brown Bess flintlock musket had been retained as the standard infantry weapon for decades), the arrogance that repeating weapons were not critical in colonial wars against spear-carrying natives, shortsighted financial economies, and the desire for a heavy, powerful rifle that could shoot an enormous slug at great ranges—all these factors prevented the adoption of much more rapidfiring, smaller-caliber guns in the English army. The Anglo-Zulu War was about the last occasion in which European troops used single-shot rifles against native forces, and at Isandhlwana there were no Gatling guns to provide repeating fire for the garrison.

Among the British officer corps on the morning of January 22 there was no awareness of the need for caution. Isandhlwana was to be the battle that the English commander in Zululand, Lord Chelmsford, had wanted and got: a chance to pit British riflemen, supported by cavalry and artillery, against the aggregate military strength of the Zulu nation. That desire for open battle may explain why Chelmsford ignored the stream of messages that reached him from his beleaguered camp during the late morning and early afternoon of the twenty-second. In his mind the presence of the Zulu army on a clear plain was something to be welcomed, not feared. The British had sought a decisive battle to end what they envisioned as a short and inexpensive campaign. They now had the high ground.

Their real fear was a protracted guerrilla war of constant skirmishing and ambush, not a European-style collision of arms in broad daylight. Chelmsford also had artillery and more than 500,000 rounds of rifle ammunition in the camp at Isandhlwana. Moreover, there were crack battalions present, like the 24th Regiment, which were long experienced in putting down sustained volleys of gunfire that could kill any advancing native enemy en masse at 1,000 yards and annihilate him at 300. Or so it was thought.

The main Zulu impi of some 20,000 warriors had been on the move for days, and had more than five miles to run before it reached the camp at Isandhlwana. Zulus, who like the Aztecs had evolved their war making from ritualized warfare, still preferred to fight during the day and in swarms—and always to approach openly to attempt their famed outflanking movement: perfect targets for disciplined ranks of British riflemen. Lord Chelmsford knew this and so had few ostensible worries. Four decades earlier in December 1838, had not Andres Pretorius with fewer than 500 Boer ranchers defeated 12,000 Zulus at the Ncome River (thereafter known as Blood River), killing more than 3,000 outright and wounding thousands more? Unlike the English, the Boers had used slowfiring, less accurate, and clumsy flintlock muskets, methodically shooting from their protected wagon laager at the masses of oncoming Zulus for more than two hours before sending out horsemen to ride down hundreds more of the wounded and fleeing.

Other than naïveté and haughtiness, then, what precisely had gone wrong four decades later at Isandhlwana? The British had invaded Zululand in January 1879 with three unwieldy columns, whose total strength was around 17,000 men. A lengthy supply train of 725 wagons and 7,600 oxen carried rations, tents, artillery batteries, and some 2 million rounds of ammunition for an envisioned brief two- to three-month campaign—enough bullets to shoot every Zulu man, woman, and child nearly ten times over. Although the mixed force of British infantry, native auxiliaries, and colonial settlers was itself hardly a third the strength of the Zulu army—there were little more than 5,400 regular British infantrymen under his entire command—Chelmsford’s plan was to separate his forces still further to advance on the Zulu stronghold at Ulundi with three columns that would cross the two-hundred-mile border at seventy- to forty-mile intervals. That way he might systematically flush the Zulus into committing to a decisive battle, thereby precluding either a guerrilla war or a sudden major invasion into British-governed Natal.

The absence of good roads in Zululand made it nearly impossible anyway to drive all 725 wagons of the invasion force in a single file. From the experience of various wars against other tribes in southern Africa, and a recent raid on Zulu kraals a few days earlier, the British were convinced that no native charge in Africa could withstand sustained European rifle fire. They were eventually to be proved right, but such confidence rested on a modicum of disciplined precaution.

Chelmsford himself was attached to the center column that camped out at Isandhlwana. But then he further diluted his center force’s strength by marching out the morning of the attack with 2,500 men—far more than the number left behind at the camp—in search of rumored impis of some 20,000 Zulus. Although warned at 9:30 while he was still only twelve miles away that the British were under attack back at Isandhlwana, Chelmsford believed that Pulleine, Durnford, and their troops were merely being tested by enemy probes and in no real danger. So for the rest of the morning and early afternoon, a British force larger than that left to be annihilated at Isandhlwana would camp less than a four-hour march away and yet send no aid—despite receiving a series of messages that his men were surrounded and desperate. Apparently, Chelmsford believed that he, not Pulleine at Isandhlwana, was closer to the real Zulu main force and that the camp could deal with this sideshow on its own. He was to be proved wrong on every count. Had he marched immediately when the first message arrived from Pulleine, Chelmsford would have perhaps arrived at Isandhlwana during the heat of the battle, thus restoring the camp’s original strength—and thereby still overcoming the flawed tactics of his subordinates.

Lieutenant Colonel Henry Pulleine, along with the reckless Durnford, deserves much of the responsibility for the subsequent catastrophe. After Chelmsford had marched out, Pulleine, who had never been in combat, much less in command of such a large battle force, made no arrangements to bring his forces into a square during the first attack. Instead, fewer than six hundred British troops were arranged to cover more than a mile of camp frontage—far too great a distance to achieve any solid line of defense. Pulleine actually ordered his scattered companies to advance toward the Zulus to form a line that might connect with Durnford’s mounted troops. The latter had foolishly ridden well beyond camp and then in retreat had posted his thin line of natives far too distant from the regular British rifle companies.

There was also to be no reserve; the left flank was not defended but left open. From the onset the British never offered a complete circle of resistance at all, leaving the wagons and tents completely undefended. Some men had rushed from their tents without bayonets or extra cartridges. The Zulus could not have wished for a better scenario under which to attack. After an initial respite of some fifteen minutes in the fighting—the Zulus were bewildered that hundreds of their bravest warriors were blown apart at nearly 1,000 yards by the initial British volleys—Pulleine still had a second opportunity to withdraw all his units to the camp, where they could have re-formed into a square around some of the wagons, food, and ammunition boxes. Instead, due to panic, inexperience, or an inadequate appreciation of the peril his troops were in, he ordered no change in formation.

The wagons the prior night had not been pulled into a laager and thus the camp itself extended well over three-quarters of a mile. Chelmsford, after issuing orders at the onset of the campaign that laagers were mandatory and trenches desirable, himself chose to insist on neither at Isandhlwana. He claimed that he had planned to move out from the temporary encampment at Isandhlwana the next day. He later stated that his inexperienced teamsters would have taken all night to accomplish the wagon fortifications, that the ground had been too hard to dig and entrench, and that the natural rise had ensured the high ground and thus a sure field of fire anyway in case of attack. Almost all the colonial officers in the camp who had experience with the Zulus were alarmed about the lack of preparations; only those who left the next morning with Chelmsford survived.

Chelmsford’s own official written declarations—calling for the need for stout laagers each night, constant communications between columns, frequent cavalry patrols, and high readiness against Zulu surprise attacks—were documents of record only. In practice he operated on the erroneous belief that columns of 1,000 to 2,000 Europeans with Martini-Henry rifles could do as they pleased. And although there were a half million rounds of .45 cartridges in the camp, almost all the defenders ran out of bullets well before the final slaughter. Ammunition was stored in a central depot, in heavy wooden boxes, fastened by copper bands held down by screws in the lids, and had not been liberally distributed among the various companies. Indeed, Durnford’s native troops were soon unable to reach the arms depot. Other colonial and native companies may have been refused resupply by a quibbling quartermaster, on the grounds that they were wrongly opening boxes belonging to the 24th Regiment! Survivors’ accounts relate the confusion of desperate men trying to break open the heavy containers with their bayonets, scoop up bullets, and then frantically run off to their distant lines to resume firing. Those supply parties who found accessible cartridges often had to travel nearly half a mile to resupply the more distant riflemen. Even after the disastrous decision not to laager the camp, to send out more than half the force on a wild-goose chase on the morning of the battle, and to scatter the remaining defenders in an indefensible position, the British nevertheless might well have withstood the Zulu onslaught had plentiful ammunition been dispersed throughout the defense.

After the individual companies of the 24th Regiment were overwhelmed, a few retreated back to the wagons to search for shelter and cartridges. Captain Younghusband, according to Zulu oral accounts, was among the last to die, firing from the bed of the wagon until he was shot down by the horde around him. Zulu narratives stressed the discipline of the last moments of the British defenders: “Ah, those red soldiers at Isandhlwana, how few there were, and how they fought! They fell like stones—each man in his place” (D. Clammer, The Zulu War, 86). Various witnesses attest that Durnford collected together a small circle of riflemen, yelling “Fire” at precise intervals as their limited ammunition ran out. In the last horrific minutes of spearing and shooting, no battalion of regular British riflemen broke and ran, despite being outnumbered by more than forty to one.

So ended the slaughter at the hill of Isandhlwana, the most heralded, though not the most costly, disaster in colonial British history. While the London press would soon make much of the general incompetence that had led to the calamity, it was scarcely mentioned that 2,000 Zulus were killed outright, and another 2,000 crawled away to die or were so disabled by wounds as to be incapable of fighting. Thus, the one clear-cut British defeat of the Zulu War also took the greatest toll on the Zulu nation during the entire war. In each minute of the battle the doomed defenders had killed or wounded more than thirty Zulus! Since not more than six hundred troops in the camp were actually firing with Martini-Henry rifles, we should assume that each British infantryman killed or wounded on average between five and seven Zulus before perishing.

King Cetshwayo, when told the news of his “victory,” remarked in sorrow, “An assegai has been thrust into the belly of the nation. There are not enough tears to mourn the dead.” The price of destroying a small British garrison was the killing or wounding of nearly a tenth of his army. Cornelius Vign, who was visiting the Zulus at the time, reported of the mass mourning among women and children that took place in the kraal of one Msundusi who was killed at Isandhlwana, a scene that must have been repeated thousands of times over for the Zulu dead in the weeks after the battle: “When they came into or close to the kraal, they kept on wailing in front of the kraals, rolling themselves on the ground and never quieting down; nay, in the night they wailed so as to cut through the heart of anyone” (C. Vign, Cetshwayo’s Dutchman, 28). In the Zulu way of war the British defeat suggested an end to hostilities altogether. After all, in an open battle, an opposing tribe had been wiped out and thus should logically cease fighting. “The King was glad when he heard that his people had gained the victory over the Whites,” wrote Vign, who served as a Dutch translator for Cetshwayo, “and thought that the war would now be at an end, supposing that the Whites had no more soldiers” (Cetshwayo’sDutchman, 30).

Another Zulu impi of fresh, mostly middle-aged reserves, more than 4,000 strong, was now heading toward Rorke’s Drift six miles away, against a tiny contingent of little more than a hundred British soldiers who were quietly garrisoning a supply station and hospital. Once these stragglers were finished off, the rest of the British would surely see the futility of their assault and retreat back into Natal. It would prove one of the great ironies of the British-Zulu wars that at the first notice of the attack two “unexceptional” lieutenants in command at Rorke’s Drift immediately began to fortify their position, form up into a close-knit line, distribute ammunition freely, and so in the next sixteen hours utilize the discipline of the British army to offset the vast numerical superiority and great bravery of an entirely fresh Zulu army.

“A Worse Position Could Hardly Be Imagined”

Unlike the high ground at Isandhlwana, everything at Rorke’s Drift favored the Zulus. The two tiny stone houses, about forty yards apart, former farmsteads turned into a missionary station, were nearly indefensible. One structure was employed by the British as a hospital. In it were thirty-five wounded or sick soldiers who somehow had to be incorporated into a makeshift defense of the camp. Thatched roofs meant that the storehouse and hospital could be torched. Worse still, the high ground on three sides of the post was soon to be held by the Zulus. There were a number of encumbrances—orchards, walls, ditches, buildings—surrounding the outpost that might impede fire and allow the running warriors to seek cover.

The hill of Oskarberg to the south of the camp allowed enemy snipers to shoot freely at defenders all along the north rampart. Moreover, hundreds of Europe’s most modern rifles were in the hands of the Zulus, who hours earlier at Isandhlwana had also looted more than 250,000 rounds of .45-caliber ammunition. When the attack began a little past 5:00 P.M., it was getting dark, giving cover to the Zulus as they began to surround the outpost. “A worse position could hardly be imagined,” an officer remarked of the British defenses at Rorke’s Drift. The British found themselves with a contingent only 5 percent of the size of the force that had just perished at Isandhlwana—and there the high ground and terrain had favored the doomed.

There was no experienced senior officer to be found at the compound. The tiny garrison’s commander, Brevet Major Henry Spalding, had shortly before noon ridden from Rorke’s Drift to Helpmakaar ten miles away to seek reinforcements, leaving the post in the hands of two junior officers. As he left he called to his subordinate John Chard to remind him that he was now in command—but added that there was almost no likelihood of any action during his brief absence. Most men of the garrison were disgruntled that the real chance for action and glory lay a few miles to the north in Zululand proper at Isandhlwana, where the center column was trying to flush out the Zulu impis— not at a border supply depot in Natal far behind the purported front lines.

Lieutenant John Chard had only a few weeks earlier arrived in South Africa and was attached to the Royal Engineers; he was supervising the construction of a ferry a few hundred feet below at the drift. His cocommander was Lieutenant Gonville Bromhead, in charge of B Company, 2nd Battalion of the 24th Regiment, whose other companies were being annihilated at Isandhlwana. Neither Chard nor Bromhead, who was essentially deaf, had much battlefield experience. They certainly were not considered stellar officers by their superiors—“hopeless,” a superior of Bromhead once wrote of him. Nothing in the record of either presaged the great heroism and leadership that both would display in the desperate ten hours of continuous shooting to come. But a former master sergeant, James Dalton—over six two in height, barrel-chested, fifty years of age— in charge of the commissary had seen plenty of fighting, and he seems to have been involved in many of the key initial decisions involving the defense of the outpost.

Besides the absence of good natural fortifications and senior experienced command, the post was vastly outnumbered. There were only 139 British soldiers, and 35 were bedridden. Excluding cooks, orderlies, and teamsters, only 80 were actual riflemen. In the minutes after the news arrived that the regiment at Isandhlwana was wiped out, and fresh impis of more than 4,000 Zulus were on their way, a disturbing number of fleeing Europeans and terrified native auxiliaries, who might have aided the trapped garrison, peeled off and rode to safety farther west into Natal. While British accounts suggest that the Zulu attack was haphazard and spontaneous, it was far more likely that tribal leaders realized that most of Chelmsford’s supplies were at Rorke’s Drift. The capture of the outpost would feed thousands of hungry Zulus and essentially wipe out the stores of the center column.

The idea that 80 riflemen could do what nearly 2,000 could not seemed absurd. Westerners usually fought outnumbered—sometimes vastly so at Salamis, Gaugamela, Tenochtitlán, Lepanto, and Midway— but nonetheless they had armies of a few thousand with which to offer a resistance. Even Cortés in his final assault on Mexico City had hundreds, not dozens, of Europeans. Numerical inferiority, as we have seen, can be offset by superior technology, spirited troops, good infantry, plentiful supplies, and discipline, but Europeans needed the cohesiveness or firepower of hundreds to offer a semblance of resistance to thousands. Alexander the Great’s 50,000 could defeat a quarter million Persian troops; but had he only 10,000 on the morning of October 1, 331 B.C., Mazaeus would have overwhelmed Parmenio, and the Macedonians might well have been slaughtered to the man.

A couple of British soldiers were dispatched to the nearby post at Helpmakaar to bring reinforcements. Then the occasional refugees that had escaped Isandhlwana—mostly remnants of the colonial Natal carbineers and mounted police—rode on by the outpost and refused to join in its defense. About one hundred colonial cavalrymen under the command of Lieutenant Vause, who had earlier ridden up from Isandhlwana and taken positions at Rorke’s Drift, suddenly bolted when they saw the size of the Zulu attacking army. Their departure took one hundred potential Martini-Henry rifles from the garrison’s meager defenses. When they fled, Captain Stephenson’s company of native African riflemen also soon fled, along with Stephenson himself and a few noncommissioned European officers. Chard’s men shot one sergeant as he galloped away.

Besides the obvious effect on morale—in the two to three hours between the confirmation of the disaster of Isandhlwana and the attack on the garrison at Rorke’s Drift, the British defenders had witnessed a series of colonial and native troops ride in, spread tales of horror, then flee in terror—the reduction in the number of men for the perimeter defenses changed the entire plan of resistance. If Chard and Bromhead might have had 450 or so troops to man the tiny wall when the news of the impending attack reached them, they were lucky to have even a hundred men either skilled or well enough to fire a rifle—only about one shooter per every twelve feet of the makeshift rampart. Chard quickly determined that the fortifications would need additional interior walls, to serve as an inner sanctum when the thinly manned, mealie-bag outer redoubt was inevitably overwhelmed.

The enemy was especially formidable. An army was approaching of more than 4,000 Zulus under the command of King Cetshwayo’s brother, Prince Dabulamanzi. The latter had broken his brother’s orders on two counts: he was not to enter British-ruled Natal from Zululand—Rorke’s Drift was right across the border—and he was to avoid an assault on any British troops behind ramparts. Although Dabulamanzi found himself in command of two of the older divisions of Cetshwayo’s army—the some 3,000 to 3,500 warriors of the uThulwana and uDloko regiments were mostly married men between forty-one and fifty years of age—he had 1,000 younger unmarried men in their early thirties of the inDlu-yengwe. All had served in the reserve at Isandhlwana. Before the attack on Rorke’s Drift, they had spent the past few hours killing fugitives and the wounded who were crisscrossing the plain in their desperate efforts at escape. After his Zulus were safely across the Buffalo River into Natal, Dabulamanzi quickly united the three divisions and began preparations to have the entire force assault the British outpost. A few of the warriors had had some experience in intertribal fighting of the last decade. Most important, they were relatively fresh and had not seen much action in the slaughter at Isandhlwana, in which a tenth of the Zulu nation’s manhood was wounded or killed in a single afternoon.

All felt they had to dip their spears before returning home, especially given the startling success of their peers at Isandhlwana in breaking the British lines. Finally, a number had their own muskets, and a smaller group had looted some of the nearly eight hundred Martini-Henry rifles and hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition found at Isandhlwana. If sharpshooters could be positioned on Oskarberg hill above the compound to provide covering fire, while the entire mass charged head-on against the weaker parts of the north wall, then the Zulus might take the compound with the first charge.

The unknown problem facing the Zulus, however, was the nature of the troops in B Company of the 24th Regiment holed up at Rorke’s Drift. Like Leonidas’s Spartans at Thermopylae, there was scarcely any chance that they would flee, despite the odds and the macabre battle to come. At least eighty were regular British riflemen and crack shots who could usually hit an individual Zulu warrior at some three hundred yards and knock down a dense mass of swarming fighters at a thousand yards. All were determined to win or die on the spot, and dying was the far more likely scenario, given the overwhelming numbers of the enemy. Why did the British choose to fight under such hopeless conditions? Theirs was a discipline that grew out of the training and regulation of the British army, the fear of and respect for their officers, and the camaraderie and loyalty to one another. Because they were behind makeshift fortifications, the Zulus could not count on outflanking movements and infiltration that had proved so successful at Isandhlwana. To take the compound, the Zulus would have to brave rifle fire and bayonet thrusts, jump over the makeshift walls, and kill all the men in the compound.

The shooting itself would go on steadily for ten hours—British redcoats methodically blasting apart Zulu bodies at close range with .45-caliber rifle fire and slicing through exposed arms, legs, and bellies with razor-sharp bayonet jabs, the Zulus less successfully trying to stab the shoulders or necks of the riflemen on the ramparts with assegai thrusts and hoping that their own snipers might somehow hit the bright redcoats from the slopes above. During the afternoon of the twenty-second and early morning of the twenty-third, Chard and Bromhead would turn their tiny garrison into a veritable firestorm that would pour lead into the bodies of hundreds of Zulu warriors, such killing all predicated on a strict adherence to formal British military practice and discipline that would keep men at the ramparts shooting continuously without respite, their shoulders, arms, and hands blue and bloody from powder burns and the enormous kick of the Martini-Henry rifles.

Sixteen Hours at Rorke’s Drift

2:30 P.M., January 22, 1879. In the minutes after receiving the news of the slaughter at Isandhlwana, Chard, Bromhead, and Dalton agreed that flight from Rorke’s Drift in slow-moving, ox-drawn wagons with the wounded was impossible. Instead, they ordered all the tents dismantled, but abandoned outside the compound as impediments to the attackers. Next, they surveyed the circumference and quickly planned a wall of defense. The depot’s plentiful supply of heavy biscuit boxes and mealie bags might allow the garrison limited protection—if they could somehow in the next hour or so be stacked chest-high into some type of rampart. Here Chard’s expertise as a Royal Engineer proved invaluable. Immediately, he, Bromhead, and Dalton organized work parties and began building a parapet to connect the two stone buildings, parked wagons, and stone kraal into an oblong circle of defense. Soldiers and the native troopers, who had not yet fled, stacked the boxes (one hundred pounds) and the mealie bags (two hundred pounds) four to five feet high to allow riflemen some protection while aiming and reloading.

The bags were a godsend, since their weight and density meant that bullets could not penetrate the British wall, while it was almost impossible to knock the heavy sacks over. Holes were gouged in the hospital’s outside wall to allow the patients to shoot at theimpis approaching from the south. In a stunning feat of improvised labor, officers, native soldiers, the sick, and British enlisted men in little more than an hour constructed a barricade of some four hundred yards—all under the threat of imminent annihilation. Fortunately, there was a slight rise on the north side of the compound, and the mealie-bag rampart there incorporated this natural advantage, resulting in a breastwork whose outer face was often over six feet high. No Zulu could vault such a height, but would have to hoist himself over in the face of British bullets and bayonets.

3:30, January 22, 1879. Chard, who, given his marginal seniority over Bromhead, was exercising command of the defense, returned to the river, collected his small engineering detail that was working on the ferry, brought up the water carriage and tools, and evacuated the landing. While he was now assured by a variety of messengers that thousands of Zulus, who had just massacred a force twenty times larger than his own, were headed his way, neither he nor his men showed any visible signs of panic. Instead, he and Bromhead carefully walked along the circumference of the small makeshift fort, ensuring that the wall was four feet high throughout. Then they ordered work ceased to ensure that the exhausted men could rest before the general assault.

Riflemen of the 24th Regiment were stationed at proper intervals, ammunition pouches filled and piles of additional cartridges heaped at their feet. Bayonets were fixed. The two junior officers, with hardly any experience of Africa, much less of the Zulus, in less than two hours and under the threat of sure destruction, had done the opposite of their senior and more experienced commanders at Isandhlwana—and thus given their vastly outnumbered fighters a chance of survival that the doomed at Isandhlwana never had.

4:30, January 22, 1879. With the arrival of the Zulus and the first scattered fire, the native and colonial contingents abruptly fled, leaving behind B Company, 2nd Battalion, 24th Regiment, with its skeleton force of fewer than a hundred regular British soldiers, who then had to rearrange themselves on the weakened rampart. Chard realized that the original fortification might soon prove too large a perimeter to hold with vastly reduced forces—he had little more than a hundred able-bodied men, no longer 450—so he constructed a second wall of biscuit boxes, running north and south to connect the storehouse with the north wall, in effect providing a vastly smaller circuit should the northwestern wall be overrun.

5:30, January 22, 1879. Firing in earnest began on the north mealie-bag wall. Here the British lines were stretched the thinnest, and there was an unfortunate series of natural obstacles—the orchard, fence, a ditch a mere thirty yards away, and some brush and the six-foot wall immediately outside the British defenses—which gave the waves of running Zulus places of cover to coordinate their attack. Meanwhile, from the slopes of Oskarberg to the south, some Zulus with the captured Martini-Henry rifles were shooting at the backs of the British defenders on the north wall and occasionally scoring hits. Crying “Usuthu! Usuthu!,” the thousand strong of the inDlu-yengwe sprinted against the south wall. Within minutes the entire outpost was under attack—by sniper fire from Oskarberg hill, by repeated human wave attacks against the ramparts by spearmen, and from sporadic shooting by Zulus hidden in the ditch and behind the fence, buildings, and trees right outside the British wall.

For the next hour and a half, a few dozen British soldiers on the north wall mowed down wave after wave of Zulus, most of whom soon found they could not get over the mealie bags without being shot or bayoneted. The chief problem for the British was the overheating of their rifles. When the Martini-Henry’s barrels slowly began to glow red, the soft brass casings of the cartridges began to expand upon insertion, fouling the breech and sometimes preventing firing, requiring the soldier to ram them out with a cleaning rod—thereby allowing small groups of Zulus to cluster under the bags and begin hoisting each other over the barricade. In response, Bromhead organized interior charges of selected riflemen to bayonet and blast apart Zulus that had leaped over the bags. Most of the growing number of dead and wounded British were shot from the rear by hundreds of Zulus perched on the heights of Oskarberg. Almost no riflemen were killed from Zulu assegais. Had the Zulus coordinated their rifle fire and had they been accurate shots, they could easily have picked off the entire British garrison, inasmuch as they had hundreds of shooters compared to the paltry British firing force of fewer than a hundred.

7:00, January 22, 1879. At the onset of darkness the hospital was on fire, threatening the patients with incineration, and with its capture the collapse of the entire western rampart. For the next hour or more in a heroic escape, all but eight made it out alive—at just about the time Chard ordered the entire garrison to fall back behind the secondary north-south wall of biscuit boxes. While his reduced force was defending about a third of its original perimeter, an additional—and final—fallback position was hastily fortified. This last refuge consisted of a circular redoubt of mealie bags stacked nine feet high, allowing sanctuary for the hospital evacuees, and a secondary rampart from which to shoot over the heads of the riflemen on the shrinking wall.

Somewhere out on the plain—perhaps only a few thousands yards beyond the Zulu ring—Major Spalding at last rode up with his promised reinforcements from Helpmakaar. But once he saw the glow of the burning hospital and the Zulu throng, he turned around and took his reserves back to Helpmakaar. Apparently, he was convinced that his men and camp were already obliterated. Had Spalding continued, there is a good chance he might have fought his way in to add critical reinforcements at the climax of the battle.

10:00, January 22, 1879. After nearly five hours of sustained firing, the battle slowly began to favor the British. Lieutenant Chard noted in his official report, “A desultory fire was kept up all night, and several assaults were attempted and repulsed, the vigor of the attack continuing until after midnight. Our men, firing with the greatest coolness, did not waste a single shot, the light afforded by the burning hospital being of great help to us” (Narrative of Field Operations Connected with the Zulu War of 1879, 46–47).

With the onset of darkness the Zulu snipers on Oskarberg had gradually lost their targets and then joined the general fray. The new reduced perimeter had incorporated the sturdy storehouse as its south wall, in essence eliminating the chance that soldiers on the ramparts could any longer be fired upon freely from the rear. The burning hospital, as Chard noted, had the unintended effect of illuminating the immediate area around the camp and thus highlighting the Zulus as they ran toward the British defenses. Although there were numerous dead and wounded British, the reduced circuit meant that riflemen were also firing much closer together in their final stand, giving a greater concentration of rifle fire than before and making the supply of ammunition more efficient. If the British were bone-tired since their scramble to fortify the compound more than seven hours earlier, the Zulus were in even worse shape—having essentially no food for nearly two days and marching or fighting nonstop for twelve hours.

11:30, January 22, 1879. The British abandoned the stone kraal that had formed the northeastern hinge of their rampart, and now were down to a tiny circuit of less than 150 yards in extent. Many of their bayonets— horrific weapons of triangular steel some twenty-one inches long—were bent or twisted. Their gun barrels burned their hands and routinely jammed. Most expected that a final rush of the 3,000 or so Zulus up in the hills would at last overwhelm the garrison. The beleaguered troops in the tiny circuit could have had no idea of the toll their rifles was taking on the enemy, nor of the enormous hunger and weariness that overcame the attackers as midnight approached.

Still, the Zulus continued to test the British fire, in vain efforts to vault the walls. Most often they were shot or bayoneted as they struggled to wrestle the barrels of the British rifles away—the red-hot steel also often scorching hands and arms in the melee. But after midnight the attacks became sporadic, as Chard and Bromhead dispatched half the defenders to repair the mealie-bag wall, distribute ammunition, and bring the water cart inside the perimeter to prepare for the expected final battle at dawn.

4:00 A.M., January 23, 1879. At first light, Chard surveyed the debris of the battlefield and ordered parties to begin once more to strengthen the wall, to collect Zulu weapons from the killing ground, and cautiously to explore the plain beyond the outpost. The Zulus were mysteriously gone from the killing field, but nevertheless, soldiers were kept on the barricades in expectation of a renewal of a general attack.

7:00, January 23, 1879. An enormous line of Zulus suddenly appeared along the surrounding crests, but then seemed to drift wearily away, abandoning the siege at the moment a final charge surely would have overwhelmed the garrison. They were either too exhausted and hungry to continue or had spied Lord Chelmsford’s relief column in the distance. Reconnaissance parties discovered 351 enemy dead; the number of wounded who crawled away and eventually died may have added another 200 to the fatality total. Later accounts suggest that the total Zulu dead ranged somewhere from 400 to 800 as bodies were found for miles beyond Rorke’s Drift for the next several weeks. It was generally true of the entire Zulu War that the British vastly underestimated the number of Zulu dead, since in the immediate aftermath of their battles they rarely went out beyond a half mile to count bodies, and had no idea that the majority of Zulus they shot, without medical care or food and water, crawled away to die. The British lost just fifteen dead and twelve wounded. Colonel Harford, who arrived with Chelmsford’s relief column the next day, remarked that the wreckage of the fort “gave the appearance and feeling of devastation after a hurricane, with the dead bodies thrown in, the only thing that remained whole being a circular miniature fortress constructed of bags of mealies in the centre” (D. Child, ed., The Zulu War Journal of Colonel Henry Harford, C.B., 37).

After the battle, the British counted more than 20,000 cartridges expended, a phenomenal number for a mere hundred or so soldiers who were doing the actual firing. In over eight hours of continuous shooting, the garrison had fired some two hundred .45 cartridges per man. On average each British soldier had killed or wounded five or so Zulus. For every redcoat killed, more than thirty Zulus fell, in what was a complete reversal of Isandhlwana:

In both actions, the Zulus employed the same simple encircling stratagem, attacking en masse with no great sophistication but extraordinary courage. Rorke’s Drift proved that a company of steady, rifle-armed infantry could repel 4,000 Zulus—with a number of basic provisos: 1) a compact fighting formation; 2) a rudimentary breastwork, or laager, to fight behind; 3) a ready supply of ammunition. The first two of these conditions had been underlined repeatedly by the Boers; the third was elementary. The conclusion was inescapable. The difference between the greater disaster at Isandhlwana and the lesser triumph at Rorke’s Drift was that a couple of not particularly brilliant lieutenants had taken the fundamental precautions neglected by their superiors. (A. Lloyd, The Zulu War, 1879, 103)

In a twenty-four-hour period comprising the greatest victory in Zulu history, King Cetshwayo nevertheless had lost at Isandhlwana and Rorke’s Drift well over 4,000 warriors of his 20,000-man army. There were still two enemy columns in his homeland; and an aroused Britain was scrambling to send thousands of fresh recruits to avenge a massacre. The Zulu nation had no experience with a modern force of disciplined riflemen who would aim, fire, and reload modern firearms on command, and when shooting individually do so according to strict protocols concerning the range and nature of the target.

Why did the British at Rorke’s Drift triumph against such odds? They were clearly better supplied with food, medical treatment, and ammunition; their soldiers were far better-trained shots. Most important, their system of institutionalized discipline ensured a steady curtain of fire unlike anything previously experienced in the native wars of Africa. Britain’s industrialized, fully capitalist economy had the wherewithal to transport and supply thousands of such men miles from home. European science was responsible for the Martini-Henry rifle—a terrible gun whose enormous bullet and uncanny accuracy helped to destroy Zulu manhood outright.

All during the campaign, British officers had sought out decisive battles to win or lose the war through open engagements. During the sixteen hours on the ramparts at Rorke’s Drift, dozens of British soldiers—Acting Assistant Commissariat Officer Dalton (Victoria Cross), who was the real stalwart in the organization of the defenders, Surgeon Reynolds (Victoria Cross), who created the ad hoc station for the wounded, and Private Hook (Victoria Cross), who rescued the sick from the hospital—took the initiative and acted in independent fashion to improve the defenses. All the shooters on the wall had entered the army with a clear sense of rights and responsibilities, with abject loyalty to peers of their regiment. Such regimental discipline mandated that the men would continue to shoot until exhaustion and death—and strict British firearms training guaranteed that they would usually hit what they aimed at. On January 22, 1879, the garrison at Rorke’s Drift proved to be the most dangerous hundred men in the world.

THE IMPERIAL WAY

Why Fight the Zulus?

Most conflicts do and yet do not begin over disputed borders. So it was with the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879, which ostensibly started from disagreement over the exact boundaries between Zululand and the European provinces of Natal and the Transvaal, but in truth was inevitable, given the colonials’ desire for more land, labor, and security. Other than the pretext of a preemptory attack, the British had no ostensible reason for invading Zululand. Even most of the state ministries in London wanted nothing to do with a war in southern Africa at a time when the empire’s more critical interests in India, Afghanistan, and Egypt required its full resources. No observer on either side ever made the case that a Zulu army had crossed into either Natal or the Transvaal to prompt hostilities. King Cetshwayo’s repeated orders were to avoid sending his impis across the borders of Zululand.

Although other parts of South Africa were relatively uninhabited when land-hungry Dutch and English ranchers and farmers first settled there during the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, Zululand was the ancestral home of a number of tribes and had been relatively ignored by Europeans. But by the outbreak of the war in 1879 a general division of lands in southwest Africa had been well established, one that marked clear boundaries for King Cetshwayo’s autonomous and densely inhabited Zulu kingdom. Yet in early January 1879 Lord Chelmsford crossed the Buffalo-Tugela River with a combined force of more than 17,000 men and invaded the Zulu nation on orders from the high commissioner of South Africa, Sir Bartle Frere. Whereas Chelmsford was ostensibly “protecting” Natal, his real mission was to find the Zulu impis, destroy them in pitched battle, capture Cetshwayo, and thereby dismantle the autonomous Zulu nation itself. The Anglo-Zulu War from the beginning was a war of aggression against the Zulu people, fought to eliminate forever the threat of a huge indigenous army mustered across the border from relatively sparsely populated British and Boer settlements. The administrator of the Transvaal, Lord Shepstone, candidly outlined the British concern over the presence of Zulu impis: “Had Cetshwayo’s thirty thousand warriors been in time changed to labourers working for wages, Zululand would have been a prosperous peaceful country instead of what it now is, a source of perpetual danger to itself and its neighbours” (J. Guy,The Destruction of the Zulu Kingdom, 47).

After years of border disputes with the Boers of neighboring Transvaal, the question of Zululand’s territorial integrity had earlier been put to a British-sponsored boundary inquiry commission, which promptly reported to Frere that the disputed lands in question probably belonged to the Zulus! Boer aggression, accompanied by British acquiescence, not Zulu imperial expansion, the commissioners found, had prompted the border crisis. Because of the nature of European—and especially Boer—methods of cattle ranching, literally thousands of acres were needed for each autonomous family, creating an absurd paradox of the local landscape: a colonial population that demanded enormous amounts of formerly tribal land, but lacked the population density on its own to defend the very range it had expropriated. In neighboring Natal province over 80 percent of the land— some 10 million acres—was owned by just 20,000 Europeans, leaving 2 million acres of the least desirable countryside to be fought over by 300,000 African natives. The European colonials alone did not have the wherewithal to protect what they had so boldly taken.

Because the British government had no real interest in annexing Zululand—there was little natural wealth there, plenty of disease, and a proud, hard-to-rule population—and since there was no evidence of Zulu aggression toward either Natal or the Transvaal, the exact reasons why the British army invaded in 1879 still remain a mystery. Immediate motives are probably to be found in the wide latitude given the unpredictable Frere, who was determined to prompt a war at all costs in the belief that the tide of history was inevitably against the peculiar brand of Zulu militarism—and that with the conquest of Zululand he might be recognized as the imperial proconsul of a new and huge confederated South Africa.

Specifically, Frere and his staff were mostly concerned with the Zulu army of some 40,000 warriors, an extraordinary muster from a people that probably numbered fewer than 250,000. To Frere’s way of thinking, the existence of such a powerful native military on the borders of European colonies was a disaster waiting to happen, especially given the Zulus’ warlike record of conquest during the past century and the white colonials’ constant demand for grazing range. Frere apparently glossed over the fact that the Zulu army had been mobilized and yet at peace with the British for some thirty-seven years and that the disruption of the prevailing and peaceful status quo would have to start with the Europeans. The complaints of the more levelheaded Sir Henry Bulwer, the governor of Natal, that the British should honor the results of their own board of inquiry, were swept aside. Frere instead sought to extend the protection of his government to the aggressive Boer settlers, who were eager for the imperial army of England to settle scores with their old nemesis, the Zulus.

Desperate to precipitate hostilities, Frere seized on three incidents that he proclaimed made war unavoidable. A Zulu chief, Sihayo, had dragged back two of his adulterous wives from Natal, a British protectorate, and then executed them in Zululand—a deed shocking to Frere’s own sense of British imperial territorial sanctity and purported English nineteenth-century morality in general. King Cetshwayo then refused to hand over Sihayo. In response, the British, like Greek princes who pledged to sail to Troy over a perceived abduction, felt that a question of honor demanded a prompt rejoinder to the kidnapping. Next, an imperial surveying party along the Tugela River between Zululand and Natal was detained—though not harmed—by some Zulu hunting parties, who rightly suspected that such a mapping expedition was a prelude to formal annexation of some of their borderlands. Finally, to Frere’s further chagrin, some missionaries had recently fled Zululand, claiming that their Christian Zulu converts were often treated poorly and sometimes killed by Cetshwayo.

Largely on such secondhand information, and apparently on grounds that Zulus did not conduct themselves in their own country as English gentlemen, Frere believed that he had legal cause for a full-scale invasion of a sovereign Zululand. His final ultimatum demanded that Cetshwayo abandon his remarkable system of military organization and with it his enormous army altogether. The reply of the Zulu king, variously translated and sometimes erroneously reported in a variety of sources, was striking for its candor and pride:

Did I ever tell Somtseu [Shepstone, the British representative to Zululand] I would not kill? Did he tell the white people I made such an arrangement? Because if he did so he deceived them. I do kill; but do not consider that I have done anything yet in the way of killing. Why do the white people start at nothing. I have not yet begun to kill; it is the custom of our nation and I shall not depart from it. Why does the Governor of Natal speak to me about my laws? Do I go to Natal and dictate to him about his laws. . . . (Cf. D. Morris, The Washing of the Spears, 280)

Both Boer and English colonial settlers—slavery had been outlawed in southern Africa for decades—wanted cheap manual labor to develop their farms and the infrastructure of colonies in Transvaal and Natal. They obviously resented the idea that 40,000 adult male Zulus were subject to military service and hardly likely to cross the border unarmed and needy as cheap migrant laborers. Sir Garnet Wolseley, who replaced Chelmsford as commander in chief of British forces at the conclusion of the war, also jotted down in his diary the British view of an ideal postbellum Zululand:

Our dispute with Cetshwayo who had been guilty of cruelties to his people: that he took life without trial & that under his rule neither life nor property were even safe. That by the military system he maintained, he prevented the men from marrying & from working & so kept them poor. . . . In future all men should be allowed to marry & to come & go when they liked & to work for whom they liked, so that they might become rich & and prosperous as we wished them to be. (A. Preston, ed., The South African Journal of Sir Garnet Wolseley, 1879–1880, 59)

In addition, local entrepreneurs relished the idea of a sizable British military commitment to the colony—the crown would eventually spend some £5.25 million during the Zulu wars—and so lined up to supply the army. The horse and stock owners, wagonmakers, and teamsters of Natal welcomed the opportunity to hike prices to astronomical levels, as did colonial residents who appreciated the infusion of capital and manpower into southern Africa. Chelmsford and the British officer corps in Natal also were eager for the chance for a cheap, quick, and glorious victory that could only advance their careers. There was keen competition among officers to win assignments for the envisioned invasion—a military adventure anxiously anticipated as short, relatively safe, and full of opportunities to win glory against an admittedly brave but technologically backward foe.

Europeans and the Other

In a wider sense, the war was also a result of a more insidious British, and characteristically European, attitude toward indigenous peoples, predicated on a strange blend of chauvinism, violent imperialism, and often misguided goodwill. To the British, Cetshwayo’s army was an impediment to the chance of “civilization” for his people, who logically should gladly embrace the religion and culture of a “superior” race. Christianity might bring to the Zulus an end of polygamy, random murder and execution, occasional cannibalism, mutilation of the dead, degrading nudity, sodomy, and what the missionaries considered a bizarre array of ritualistic sexual practices that surrounded the purification of warriors — uku-hlobonga, or intercrural (between the legs) sex without phallic penetration for the unmarried warriors, and sula izembe, full sexual intercourse for the married after the fighting to “wipe the ax.” English law would also prevent the random killing of Cetshwayo’s subjects and lead to a fixed rather than nomadic citizenry, thus providing the necessary foundation for an efficient capitalist economy that would respect private property and foster a higher standard of living—or else.

In 1856, the British pointed out, in a vicious civil war Cetshwayo had butchered more than 7,000 of his brother’s warriors, along with another 20,000 of his own tribal family, including the aged, women, and children. That killing field on the Tugela River was thereafter known as Mathambo, “the Place of the Bones.” Earlier, Shaka had killed ten times the number of Cetshwayo’s victims. Zulu kings, like the Aztec monarchy, had killed far more indigenous people in their own tribal wars and random murder sprees than did the Europeans on the battlefields of their conquest. On the eve of his succession, Cetshwayo had murdered nearly every brother, half brother, cousin, and remote relative in Zululand who could conceivably contest his claim to the throne.

The power of the British army was felt to be proof enough of the general superiority of the European way of life—or so it was thought on the eve of what Frere and Chelmsford assumed would be a rapid conquest. In any case, the British crossed the border on January 11, and Frere proudly wrote, “I hope that by God’s helping a very few weeks will now enable us to get rid of the incubus which has so long strangled nearly all life in these Colonies” (C. Goodfellow, Great Britain and South African Confederation, 1870–1881, 165).

Like the Spanish experience in Mexico and the American westward expansion, the British conquest of Zululand followed an often predictable sequence of events that over some four centuries characterized European entry into Asia, the Americas, Australia, and Africa. By 1800 Europe accounted for only 180 million of the world’s nearly 900 million residents, but occupied or controlled in some form or another almost 85 percent of the world’s land surface. By 1890 two-thirds of all oceangoing ships were British, and half the maritime commerce of the world was facilitated by British-built vessels—most of the transport across the seas in some way facilitated or profited British imperialism. The productive capacity of British factories and the skill of the imperial fleet and merchant marine meant that troops and supplies could be landed at any place on the globe in a matter of weeks—an ability shared by no other country outside Europe and few within. In some sense, Britain was in Asia, Africa, Australia, and the Americas simply because it alone of the peoples of the world easily could be.

Initial European maritime exploration of the sixteenth century had led to sporadic colonization of foreign lands, followed by eventual full-scale invasion and conquest. Small numbers of Europeans—the French in Southeast Asia, the Spanish in the Americas, the Germans in central Africa, the British almost everywhere—usually provoked hostilities by either annexing land outright or trespassing on indigenous hunting or grazing territory in search of minerals, gold, ports, or water. Colonists and traders often followed, intent on permanent settlement. Legal documents—whether fiats of the Spanish crown or wordy proclamations of British bureaucrats—were hurriedly crafted and read to illiterate native royalty to provide the necessary Western pretext for annexation. It was an odd but characteristic Western custom to read out a list of grievances before a European army slaughtered its native and illiterate foes. Lord Frere, like Cortés before, was careful to predicate his destruction of an entire nation on the published premise of legal and moral right: he issued a thirteen-point statement of demands, which an illiterate Cetshwayo could not read or whose logic he could not fully fathom even when translated.

Often initial and tiny expeditionary forces, due to European arrogance in command, overreliance on mere technology, and ignorance about the enormous size of indigenous armies, were slaughtered—the Noche Triste and Isandhlwana could be matched by countless other debacles in Indochina, America, central Africa, and India. The later sale of European firearms at times during the nineteenth century gave native peoples some respite, such as the slaughter of American cavalrymen at Little Big Horn (1876), the British debacle at Maiwand in Afghanistan (1880), and the Ethiopian victory over the Italians at Adwa (1896). But such European setbacks—the great majority confined to the latter nineteenth century when easily operated repeating rifles and plentiful cartridges were traded freely with indigenous peoples—were almost immediately followed by renewed attacks of wiser, better-equipped, and better-led Western armies that sought not merely more land but, as purported vengeance, the entire conquest and at times destruction of a people.

Throughout colonial fighting, the desecration of European dead after an initial defeat—the sacrificed Spaniards on the pyramids of Mexico City, the disemboweled at Isandhlwana, the decapitated British at Khartoum—was felt to be cause enough later to give no quarter and to annihilate, as long as the Europeans slaughtered in pitched battle according to their ideas of fair rules of engagement. Almost always, Europeans were outraged when they discovered the decapitated, scalped, or disemboweled corpses from their small overrun garrisons. They felt that such mutilation—outside of battle, committed against the dead, inclusive of women and children—was a far more depraved act than their blasting apart the bodies of indigenous warriors with cannon and rifle fire—acts committed in battle against the living warrior class.

Tribal leaders such as Montezuma, Crazy Horse, and Cetshwayo occasionally appear as sympathetic figures in European chronicles. Native written accounts do not exist other than in oral interviews collated by Christian missionaries and explorers. Indigenous leaders often naïvely announced that the repulse of European interlopers might mean an end to hostilities, clueless that their own temporary victory over an advance European force sealed their fate against a second wave of Westerners who welcomed the pretext of revenge to cement their plans of conquest.

Cannibalism and human sacrifice, the mutilation of the dead, murdering prisoners, idol worship, polygamy, and the absence of written law were typically cited as pretexts for European annexation of territory during their four centuries of colonialism in the Americas, Asia, and Africa. Unlike their adversaries, the French, Spanish, and British announced that they killed thousands reluctantly and as an unavoidable precursor for improving the lot of indigenous peoples through the difficult process of Westernization. Missionaries, high church officials, and intellectuals in Britain objected to the rapacity of empire building, but sought remedy through amelioration or assimilation rather than withdrawal: Zulus should be Westernized, made into civilized British subjects, and thus protected under the law from both imperial oppression and their own indigenous savagery. Few, if any, of the most liberal critics counseled that the Europeans should go home and leave the Zulus in peace—or as the case might be, free to murder and to continue tribal war among their own.

Usually, a Cortés or Chelmsford found plenty of indigenous allies to help his cause, as Europeans sought to target first the most numerous and warlike tribes of the region to be conquered, on the theory that the fall of an Aztec or a Zulu nation would end native unrest in the environs and find sympathetic allies among those who had previously been brutalized by just such warlike regimes. Providing firearms or European material goods to natives also ensured that there were always plentiful tribal contingents in the Americas or Africa who would join in on European expeditions, eager for plunder, safety from their enemies, and a continuous supply of other sundries from Western traders. Nor should we forget that many natives, victims of decades of tribal slaughter, hated the Aztecs and Zulus far more than they did the Europeans.

The fighting itself, at least in these first-generation colonial struggles, had a typical scenario which pitted technology and discipline against courage and numbers. Thus, the Zulus, like the Aztecs, did not manufacture their own firearms and did not understand Western decisive battle in which lines of soldiers sought to charge or fire in careful unison, and to do so in order and on command before, during, and after the melee. The Zulus had captured or traded for guns for decades, but the British idea of sustained and regular mass volleys—itself a result of careful training and a comprehensive system of discipline—was entirely alien to the African manner of war. Even with the use of some eight hundred modern Martini-Henry rifles and hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition taken after Isandhlwana, Zulu marksmanship remained sporadic, inaccurate, and nearly always ineffective.

In theory the Zulu nation after Isandhlwana was as well armed as the remnants of the British center column and twenty times more numerous. But just as the Ottoman harquebusiers at Lepanto never mastered the European practice of massed musketry formation and firing in unison, so Zulu sharpshooters saw firearms as simply a more effective indigenous weapon—a knobkerrie with better penetrating power or an assegai with superior range—to enhance the traditional emphasis of individual battle prowess. Zulus nearly always aimed high, on the logic that like a javelin cast, the gun’s projectile would otherwise quickly lose momentum and fall. Although they captured a number of field guns at Isandhlwana, and even dragged caissons and supply wagons off, the impis never employed such artillery against the British—lacking not merely the experience and knowledge of heavy gunnery but also the discipline to load, sight, and fire heavy weapons at regular intervals, not to mention the skilled teamsters to hitch draft oxen to caissons.

Ports and oceangoing ships were central to European power, bringing in an almost endless stream of manufactured firearms and supplies to the conflict. In the Zulu War, men, guns, food, and ammunition were continually shipped in from Cape Town and Durban. After the disaster at Isandhlwana, an entirely new British army—nearly 10,000 additional enlisted men and more than 400 officers—in less than fifty days began arriving in Natal from England. Usually, native armies had no conception that a Vera Cruz or Durban was a mere transit station that allowed Spanish or British conquistadors to tap whatever manpower they needed in a matter of weeks from an overcrowded and restless Europe thousands of miles—but only weeks—away.

Aztec, Islamic, or Zulu forces almost always depended on rapid envelopment and outflanking movements, which had worked so well against neighboring indigenous tribes. Without much improvisation they relied on highly trained, far more mobile, numerically superior, and courageous warriors to ambush or surprise smaller, plodding European contingents—successful enterprises in local landscapes of dense brush, forest, or jungle. Traditional battle rituals, even in the final battles with Europeans, were usually not altogether jettisoned, meaning that indigenous people were less likely to fight at night, rarely followed up their occasional military victories with unchecked pursuit, and sometimes allowed cultural (e.g., religious festivals, pre-battle dancing and eating festivities, annual fertility rites) or natural (e.g., seasonal considerations, unusual astronomical observations) phenomena to override sheer battle efficacy. After Lord Chelmsford invaded, Cetshwayo mustered his army and then had his witch doctors induce vomiting among some 20,000 frontline troops. It took three days to administer the tonic, parade each warrior before a massive vomiting pit, and have them wait fasting until the entire army was “cleansed,” severely weakening the critical stamina of the impis.

Westerners, from the Greeks onward, also had an array of war-making rituals: pre-battle sacrifices, harangues, and music; sacred days of truce; ceremonial dress and drill. But these traditional practices were sometimes rigged, often postponed, or even abandoned altogether should military necessity determine otherwise. Predictably, most European armies did not practice pre-battle rituals of fasting, vomiting, purging, or self-mutilation that might impede the effectiveness of soldiers on the battlefield. More likely, as preparation for the fighting, European troops were to receive a rum ration, a stern exhortation, or a last-minute reminder of firing protocol. Since Greek times pre-battle sacrifices and rituals had been faked, since they served more as morale boosters than as real communication with the gods.

The Europeans were willing to fight 365 days a year, day or night, regardless of the exigencies of either their Christian faith or the natural year. Bad weather, disease, and difficult geography were seen as simple obstacles to be conquered by the appropriate technology, military discipline, and capital, rarely as expressions of divine ill will or the hostility of all-powerful spirits. Europeans often looked at temporary setbacks differently from their adversaries in Asia, America, or Africa. Defeat signaled no angry god or adverse fate, but rather a rational flaw in either tactics, logistics, or technology, one to be easily remedied on the next occasion— and there was almost always a next occasion until conquest—through careful audit and analysis. The British in Zululand, like all Western armies, and as Clausewitz saw, did envision battle as a continuation of politics by other means. Unlike the Zulus, the British army did not see war largely as an occasion for individual warriors to garner booty, women, or prestige.

Indigenous peoples more often fought alongside Europeans than did individual Europeans with natives. Cortés found help in the hundreds of thousands of Tlaxcalans in Mexico, as did the British with the so-called Kaffirs in Africa. Both the Aztecs and the Zulus found essentially no Europeans willing to fight alongside them against other white invaders. Narváez wished to destroy Cortés, not the Spanish cause, and thus after his defeat most of his men joined in to march on Tenochtitlán. John Dunn at times helped the Zulus, but in the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 he quickly rejoined the British. Not a single European fought in Cetshwayo’s ranks against the British, although nearly all Boers despised English government in Africa. In contrast, thousands of Africans joined various colonial regiments.

Trouble for Europeans occurred most often only against their own colonials; the Boers in Africa and the Americans both fought costly wars of independence against the British, employing weapons, discipline, and tactics that were in many cases the equal of or superior to those of their British overseers. The Boers, for example, killed far more Englishmen in a single week of the Boer War—nearly 1,800 at Magersfontein, Stormberg, and Colenso alone from December 11 to 16, 1899—than did the Zulus during the entire fighting of 1879!

Many scholars have been reluctant to discuss the question of European military superiority because either they confuse it with larger issues of intelligence or morality or they focus on occasional European setbacks as if they are typical and so negate the general rule of Western dominance. In fact, the European ability to conquer non-Europeans— usually far from Europe, despite enormous problems in logistics, with relatively few numbers of combatants, and in often unfamiliar and hostile terrain and climate—has nothing to do with questions of intelligence, innate morality, or religious superiority, but again illustrates the continuum of a peculiar cultural tradition, beginning with the Greeks, that brought unusual dividends to Western armies on the battlefield.

Zulu Postmortem

The aftermath of Rorke’s Drift is a fair enough representation of the typical colonial war that was waged in the latter nineteenth century, one repeatedly acted out in the Congo, Egypt, the Sudan, Afghanistan, and the Punjab. After the victory of the garrison at Rorke’s Drift, Lord Chelmsford, with a vastly augmented army, renewed his invasion of Zululand. Besides the earlier bloody standoffs that year at Ineyzane (January 22), the River Intombi (March 11), the siege of the small garrison at Eshowe (February 6–April 3), and Hlobane (March 27–28), the British then fought three decisive battles at Kambula (March 29), Gingindhlovu (April 2), and Ulundi (July 4). In the first two of these final three engagements, British and colonial troops, in fortified camps, would have utterly annihilated the attacking Zulus had the latter pressed their near suicidal charges and human wave attacks to the bloody end.

In the last battle of the war at Ulundi, fought near King Cetshwayo’s headquarters, a British square—replete with artillery and Gatling guns— deliberately abandoned its fortified camp to march out in open challenge, thereby prompting an attack by the Zulus, who had learned of the futility of charging fortifications, but not the equal stupidity of trying to break a solid formation of European riflemen in an unobstructed plain of fire. In less than forty minutes, the British square of some 4,165 Europeans and 1,152 Africans repulsed 20,000 Zulus, killing at least 1,500 in the process and wounding twice that number, many of whom wandered off to die in hiding.

When it was all over, the British and Zulu dead were buried on the field of Ulundi; in typical Western fashion the British erected a plaque over those they had wiped out: “In Memory of the Brave Warriors who fell here in 1879 in defence of the Old Zulu Order.” The British, like the Spanish in Mexico and the Americans in the West, had not merely defeated their more numerous enemies but destroyed their autonomy and culture in the process. Books continue to be written about the handful of British redcoats who heroically held firm at Rorke’s Drift, but not more than a few dozen names remain of the several thousand courageous Zulus who were blasted apart by Martini-Henry rifles. In that regard, they tragically joined the thousands of anonymous Persians, Aztecs, and Turks who were killed en masse and remain forgotten as individuals, as real persons apart from the historian’s bloodless figures of “40,000” killed or “20,000” lost. In contrast, the engine of Western historiography—itself the dividend of the free and rationalist tradition—commemorates in detail their far fewer killers. Without a Herodotus, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, or Gianpietro Contarini, men’s bravery in battle fades with the rot of their corpses.

When the Zulu War broke out in January 1879, Cetshwayo could count on somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000 available troops. Six months later the British had shot down at least 10,000 on the various battlefields of Zululand, and no doubt nearly as many later succumbed to wounds. No accurate record of Zulu dead was ever made; but the absence of medical care and the nature of the Martini-Henry .45-caliber slug suggest that thousands of wounded throughout the war died of shock or infection, or simply bled to death. The heavy, soft projectile of a Martini-Henry rifle, not to mention the ordnance of the Gatling gun and artillery piece, made a horrific hole in the human body, as the crippled and ugly scarred bodies of the few surviving Zulu veterans attested. Indeed, on one of the worst days in English colonial history, January 22, 1879, the British army nevertheless may well have killed more than 5,000 Zulus at Isandhlwana, Rorke’s Drift, and Ineyzane, or between 12 and 16 percent of the entire Zulu army.

By war’s end most of the Zulu nation’s cattle were killed, scattered, or stolen. Its system of imperial regimentation was shattered, as the British imposed an unworkable peace, by dividing up Cetshwayo’s kingdom into thirteen warring states—a solution that by design precluded prosperity in Zululand and further war against its neighboring European colonies. The “victory” of 1879 was achieved at the cost of only 1,007 British soldiers killed in battle, along with 76 officers. A small, undetermined number of additional troops succumbed to tropical disease and wounds. For the six months of the war the British soldier had on average killed ten or more Zulus for every trooper lost, despite being generally outnumbered at various battles by magnitudes of between five and forty to one. The legacy of the British invasion, battlefield conquest, and rather shameful settlement that divided the Zulu people into impotent warring factions was the end of an independent state and the virtual destruction of an entire way of life.

ZULU POWER AND IMPOTENCE

Shaka

Africa produced no more warlike tribe than the Zulus. Of the hundreds of tribal armies of the continent, none were as sophisticated as Zulu impis in either their organization or their command structure. In native wars on the continent no other tribe could match Zulu discipline. Alone of native armies, the Zulus had largely abandoned missile weapons, in favor of a short spear in order to fight at close ranges. Yet a minuscule British force obliterated Africa’s most feared military in a matter of months. How was that possible?

Like the Aztec empire before the Spanish invasion, the Zulu nation was a relatively new creation when the Europeans arrived in Natal in real numbers during the nineteenth century. For nearly three hundred years prior to 1800, the Zulus were but one of dozens of nomadic Bantu-speaking tribes who slowly migrated into what is now Natal and Zululand. But at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Dingiswayo, a chief of the Mthethwa, one of many Nguni tribes, radically departed from the traditional Bantu practice of local raiding and skirmishing by seeking to incorporate defeated tribes into a national army.

In his effort to build a federated system through the creation of a professional military, Dingiswayo curtailed the past practice of ritualistic wars fought mostly with missile weapons over grazing rights, in which casualties remained relatively light and noncombatants were largely untouched. In the eight years of his reign (1808–16) Dingiswayo laid the foundations for the Zulu empire by overturning the ancestral protocols of Bantu culture in southwest Africa, incorporating rather than exterminating or enslaving defeated tribes, seeking commerce with the Portuguese along the coast, and making civilian life itself subservient to military training. One of his most successful lieutenants, the revolutionary leader Shaka of the tiny Zulu tribe, eventually assumed control of the empire (1816–28) and transformed it to serve an enormous standing army, in ways unimagined even by old Dingiswayo himself. Shaka’s revolutionary changes in military practice mark the real rise of Zulu power, a warring kingdom that would exist for the next sixty years (1816–76) until the British conquest. Before being murdered by his siblings in 1828, Shaka had entirely altered the African manner of war, resisted white encroachment, slaughtered 50,000 of his enemies in battle, and gratuitously murdered thousands more of his own citizens in increasingly frequent bouts of imperial dementia. The legacy of Shaka’s twelve-year reign was a loose imperial coalition of some half million subjects and a national army of nearly 50,000 warriors. During the decade of formation of the new Zulu empire perhaps as many as 1 million native Africans had been killed or starved to death as a direct result of Shaka’s imperial dreams. South Africa thus illustrates a mostly unrecognized characteristic of the European colonial military experience: in Africa, Asia, and the Americas, both indigenous tribes and Europeans usually killed more of their own people in battle than they did one another. Between 1820 and 1902, for example, Shaka and his successors killed vastly more Zulus than did Lord Chelmsford, and the Boers slaughtered far more British than did Cetshwayo.

A Garrison State

Much myth and romance surround the Zulu military, but we can dispense with the popular idea that its warriors fought so well because of enforced sexual celibacy or the use of stimulant drugs—or even that they learned their regimental system and terrifying tactics of envelopment from British or Dutch tradesmen. Zulu men had plenty of sexual outlets before marriage, carried mostly snuff on campaign, only occasionally smoked cannabis, drank a mild beer, and created their method of battle advance entirely from their own experience from decades of defeating tribal warriors. The general idea of military regimentation, perhaps even the knowledge of casting high-quality metal spearheads, may have been derived from observation of early European colonial armies, but the refined system of age-class regiments and attacking in the manner of the buffalo were entirely indigenous developments.

The undeniable Zulu preponderance of power derived from three traditional sources of military efficacy: manpower, mobilization, and tactics. All three were at odds with almost all native African methods of fighting. The conquest of Bantu tribes in southeast Africa under Shaka’s leadership meant that for most of the nineteenth century until the British conquest—during the subsequent reigns of Kings Dingane (1828–40), Mpande (1840–72), and Cetshwayo (1872–79)—the Zulus controlled a population ranging between 250,000 and 500,000 and could muster an army of some 40,000 to 50,000 in some thirty-five impis, many times larger than any force, black or white, that Africa might field.

Unlike most other tribal armies of the bush, the Zulus were no mere horde that fought as an ad hoc throng. They did not stage ritual fights in which customary protocols and missile warfare discouraged lethality. Rather, Zulu impis were reflections of fundamental social mores of the Zulu nation itself, which was a society designed in almost every facet for the continuous acquisition of booty and the need for individual subjects to taste killing firsthand. If the Aztec warrior sought a record of captive-taking to advance his standing, then a Zulu could find little status or the chance to create his own household until he had “washed his spear” in the blood of an enemy.

The entire nation was regimented—as in the manner of classical Sparta—by age-class systems that might supersede even tribal affiliations. Boys were to undergo formal military training and serve as baggage carriers at fourteen or fifteen. By late adolescence most Zulu males were expected to be full-fledged warriors who could run fifty miles a day without shoes as they entered the impis. Cohorts of bachelors were arranged into lifelong regiments, and men were not allowed to marry officially until their late thirties without special compensation; thus the ability to establish an independent family served as a great social dividing line within the army. Under Shaka’s system as many as 20,000 males under the age of thirty-five were to remain unmarried and subject to constant military service. Even the older warriors, who could take legal wives and establish their own kraals, or autonomous households, often found themselves instead on lengthy campaigns.

Yet a notion of enforced “celibacy” among warriors is exaggerated, since Zulu males routinely engaged in a variety of sexual activities short of full penetration with women. Rather, “celibacy” meant that warriors were not allowed to pair off with permanent mates to form autonomous households or to have intercourse with virgins until their late thirties. Since the delay in childbearing among young women meant a reduction in Zulu fertility itself, such age-class rites may in fact have been intended by Shaka to control the population of Zululand—and the unsustainable exploitation of grazing land by cattle ranching in an already overpopulated landscape.

Whatever the exact cause of the peculiar practice of age-class regimentation, the result was an unusual esprit de corps among troops, as impis— marked by distinctive names, particular headdresses, jewelry, feathers, and shield insignia—usually fought as separate units for the entire life span of their warrior age-cohorts. Tactically, the Zulu mode of attack was simple but efficient. Battle deployment was named after the Cape buffalo, as each impi was divided into four groups, comprising the flanks or “horns” of two younger regiments. These wings quickly spread out around both sides of the enemy, hoping to encircle the opposing force and drive it back against the “chest” or veteran regiment of the impis, while the “loins” or aged reserves would then come up when the hostile force was fully engaged. While predictable, the standardization of attack proved successful against rival tribes of the plains, given the Zulus’ uncanny ability to sneak undetected through the grass and brush, sprint to surround and enclose a surprised enemy, and then finish him off in close combat with stabbing spears and billy clubs.

Under Shaka’s reign, the army had largely abandoned the throwing spear for the short stabbing assegai—now to be called the iKlwa from the sucking noise it made when being pulled from the chest or belly of an enemy—and tall cowhide shield. The new assegai had a much larger and heavier iron blade than its throwing counterpart, and a far shorter shaft, inasmuch as it was to be used most often as an underhand stabbing weapon in concert with the larger shield. Like a Roman legionary, who likewise closed with his enemy to battle face-to-face, the Zulu warrior could bang or catch his shield on the enemy as he came up quickly with a sharp upward thrust from his assegai, whose relatively small size and sharp edge made it more similar to a gladius than to a Greek spear. Each warrior also brandished a knobkerrie, or hardwood club with a knob on the end. Unlike nearly every other tribal force in Africa, the Zulus waged war hand-to-hand, without missiles, and expected to meet the enemy head-on and defeat him through greater courage, weapons skill, and muscular strength. Bright uniforms—including feathers of various kinds, cow-tail tassels, and leather necklaces and headdresses—war shouts, the beating of spear against shield, and pre-battle dances were aimed at striking fear into the enemy before the initial onslaught.

Typically, a Zulu impi might cover as much as one hundred to two hundred miles in a campaign in a matter of three days, as it brought along little food or supplies, but was expected to live off the captured cattle of its enemy. Young boys, or uDibi, carried along sleeping mats and what food they could manage to pack and still keep up with the impis. Once the enemy was targeted, leaders of the impis met to assign respective regiments to the horns, chest, and loins. The army approached the enemy at a run, intending to surround and crush it in a matter of minutes, followed by plundering the defeated’s territory before striking for home. In battle itself, the lifelong training with the assegai and knobkerrie, together with the tough conditioning of the impis and the expertise at rapid envelopment, resulted in a marked fighting edge for Zulu warriors during the hand-to-hand fighting. Yet both past and present panegyrists of Zulu courage have largely forgotten the inherent military weakness of the entire system, inherent flaws that made it extremely vulnerable not only to formal European armies such as the British but even to vastly outnumbered, less well trained colonial militias of Boers and English settlers.

First, while Zulu warriors endured a tough course of military training, and then submitted to a lifelong and often brutal regimentation in their impis, their resulting courage and ferocity did not result in anything comparable to the European notion of military discipline, which emphasized drill, close-order formation of line and column, synchronized group volleys, a strict chain of command, abstract notions of tactics and strategy, and a written code of military justice. Instead, rival impis were likely to brawl and even fight to the death in internecine disputes, far exceeding any of the typical fistfights in the British army between regiments.

Nor was there a true system of command, as individual impis often disobeyed direct orders from their king—the uThulwana, uDloko, and inDlu-yengwe regiments at Rorke’s Drift ignored Cetshwayo’s orders not to attack the fortified position or venture into Natal—fighting as independent units without synchronized command. Thus, the uThulwana and uDloko met the inDlu-yengwe regiment largely by chance, as the younger inDlu-yengwe dared Prince Dabulamanzi to join his two older impis for an ad hoc assault on Rorke’s Drift. Other than a loose, formulaic plan of attack, there was no systematic approach to drill and close-order marching, resulting in a general chaos during the actual fighting and little chance that retreats would not turn into simple routs or that attacks would follow in ordered waves. While the Zulus fought face-to-face, they did so as individuals; the impis did not rely on serried ranks and simultaneous spear thrusting to achieve a shock effect at the first collision. Against Rorke’s Drift, a series of uncoordinated assaults resulted in dissipation of Zulu strength. In contrast, a sudden mass assault designed to put thousands of warriors at a concentrated point of the barricade within a few minutes would have overwhelmed the tiny garrison.

The Zulu warrior lived in a world of spirits and witchcraft that was antithetical to the rather godless European emphasis on sheer military efficacy governed by abstract rules, regulations, and the technology of brutal rifles, Gatling guns, and artillery. Before battle, witch doctors concocted potions of sacrificial bull’s intestines, herbs, and water to give warriors strength for the ordeal to come. Zulus were put on strict diets and given emetics—which could only have weakened their stamina—and pieces of ceremonial human flesh. After slaying a foe, the corpse was disemboweled to allow the spirit to escape and to prevent retribution against the killer. Sorcerers sought to hex rival clans through voodoolike curses and incantations. The mysterious ability of British soldiers to slaughter thousands of attacking Zulus with rifle fire while losing very few was likewise explicable only through magic, not the logic of training, science, and discipline. Thus, after each terrible slaughter, Zulu tactics changed not at all, as superstition was invoked to explain the miraculous curtain of lead that met the impis as they neared the British lines.

In the Zulu mind witchcraft explained why the British killed hundreds with their rifles, whereas Zulus, with the same captured weapons, invariably hit a small percentage of their targets—in every case, almost always firing far too high (to give the bullet “power”) and never in coordinated volleys. After the terrible Zulu defeat at Kambula, the surviving warriors were convinced of the intervention of supernatural creatures on the British side, and so quizzed Cornelius Vign as to why “so many white birds, such as they had never seen before, came flying over them from the side of the Whites? And why were they attacked also by dogs and apes, clothed and carrying fire-arms on their shoulders? One of them even told me he had even seen four lions in the laager. They said, ‘The Whites don’t fight fairly; they bring animals to draw down destruction upon us’ ” (C. Vign,Cetshwayo’s Dutchman, 38). In later attacks against Europeans tribal attackers shot their rifles at artillery explosions, believing that shells contained little white men who burst out to kill everyone in their midst. In the aftermath of the war, veterans were convinced they had been beaten by a protective curtain of steel that the British had hung over their army, perhaps a divine explanation for either the wall of lead put down by the redcoats or the reflections from British bayonets.

Brave and Weak

Zulu tactics were static and thus predictable to Europeans. A fortified camp or British square could expect a double-envelopment movement from the outset as a prelude to the advance of the main “chest.” While in theory the “loins” were a mobile reserve, they were not under central command and thus were not directed to precise points of resistance or weakness in the enemy line. Often they played no role in the fighting at all and were just as likely to flee as to reinforce in cases of initial failure of the chest and horns.

Much is made of the impressive Zulu mobility, but two key factors are often ignored. The army could carry few firearms—though nearly 20,000 muskets and rifles had been entering Zululand for decades before the British invasion—due to the absence of any wheeled transport to bring along sizable reserves of cartridges. And because food was not carried in any quantity, Zulu armies required immediate victory before exhaustion and hunger set in. At Rorke’s Drift a final concerted effort at daybreak might have broken the British defenses, but by morning the Zulu besiegers had had essentially nothing to eat for over two days and were famished to the point of physical weakness.

It is easy for modern scholars to ridicule the ponderous supply trains and immobility of Chelmsford’s lugubrious columns. But the British army, not the Zulus, came to each battle well fed, well supplied, and in possession of nearly limitless ammunition and firearms. British wagons may have looked near comical—eighteen feet long, six feet wide, and more than five feet high—and required anywhere from ten to nineteen chained oxen to pull them even five miles a day in the rough terrain of Zululand. Yet they could carry an amazing 8,000 pounds of guns and ammunition, as well as plenty of fodder, food, and water. In later battles any Zulus who made their way into British camps immediately broke open captured provisions in the heat of battle—as the partly eaten food in the mouths of their corpses later attested.

The fully laden, ponderous, and sunburned British soldier in Africa has become a caricature of impracticality, ignorance, and addiction to material comfort. In fact, he was a far more lethal warrior than his lightly clad, nimble Zulu opponent. The latter has recently been nearly deified on American campuses—tragically so, in the case of the genocidal Shaka— as some sort of irresistible and deadly freedom fighter. He was neither fearsome nor freedom loving. In reality, the most deadly man in Africa was typically a pale British soldier, not much over five feet six inches in height, 150 pounds in weight, slightly malnourished, most often enrolled from the industrial ghettos of England, vastly overburdened with a ten-pound rifle and some sixty pounds of food, water, and ammunition on his belt and in his pack. Such an apparently unimpressive warrior, in fact, would himself typically shoot down three or more Zulus in almost every engagement of the war.

Most impis did not hit the enemy as one cohesive unit, and the absence of body armor had always ensured that Zulu spearmen had never been able to crash headlong even into the lines of their tribal enemies. Shields were used for individual defense and as weapons, not to form a vast wall of protection. Zulus practiced only a swarming method of warfare, in this regard similar to the Aztec manner of running into enemy lines to stab and hack away in small groups. If the attacker was vastly outnumbered, terrified, or in loose formation, then the Zulu charge and envelopment were inevitably successful. But against a fortified position or a defensible square of British riflemen, the entire line of assault would break and then disperse in the face of sustained volleys or subsequent bayonet charges.

Even the acquisition of firearms did not alter static Zulu tactics, as shooters on their own attempted to fire sporadically at the enemy while other warriors engaged with spears. No Zulus were taught either to charge in line or to shoot on orders. Cetshwayo never sought a comprehensive method of firearms loading and firing, despite the availability of guns in Zululand for some fifty years before the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879. Although horses had been introduced more than two centuries earlier in southern Africa, the Zulus rode only sporadically, and neither bred them in great numbers nor adopted any methodical approach to creating mounted patrols—ensuring that the British had more mobile scouts and deadly pursuers in the aftermath of battle.

The result was often a haphazard method of Zulu attack with both traditional and European weaponry, in which thousands of men more or less ran at will straight at the enemy, while others shot at random from a distance, hoping that sheer numbers, noise, and their own speed would panic or collapse the adversary. At Isandhlwana the thin British lines, gaps in the formations, and poor distribution of ammunition allowed such attackers success. In nearly all other subsequent engagements—the night fiasco at Hlobane is the notable exception—the tactics of uncoordinated charges turned out to be suicidal. When such assaults failed, there were never ordered calls for retreat, much less a fighting withdrawal or organized covering sorties. Rather, entire impis, as tribal Germans on the Roman frontier, collapsed and ran headlong from the enemy. Thousands in the Zulu wars were ridden down by British horsemen who lanced, shot, and hacked at will once the impis’ charge was broken and panic set in.

British accounts record hundreds of incidents of unmatched Zulu bravery—men in their forties and fifties who charged headlong into the barrels of blazing Gatling guns, and hundreds of fighters who trampled over their own dead to wrestle with the bayonets of British riflemen at Rorke’s Drift before Martini-Henry rifles discharged their enormous bullets into their necks and faces. During the preliminary fighting before the final battle of Ulundi, Frances Colenso records, “a single warrior, chased by several Lancers, found himself run down and escape impossible. He turned and faced his enemies; spreading his arms abroad he presented his bare breast unflinchingly to the steel, and fell, face to the foe, as a brave soldier should” (History of the Zulu War and Its Origin, 438). In tribal warfare of southern Africa the Zulus found that for nearly a century their unmatched courage, physical prowess, speed, and enormous numbers brought decisive victory and often the slaughter of their enemies. But in a fight against disciplined ranks of trained British riflemen their prior method of success spelled national self-destruction.

Whereas the Zulus had discarded much of the traditional military rituals of southern Africa—missile warfare, staged contests, and the taking of captives for ransom—Cetshwayo still apparently envisioned the impending war with the British as a single staged event of military prowess. In his mind his army would fight “on one day only” and then come to terms with the British. If the Zulu leadership had examined both the victories and the defeats at Isandhlwana and Rorke’s Drift, they would have jettisoned the entire traditional method of attack and instigated a guerrilla war to ambush British wagon trains on the move—and, at all costs, to avoid charging entrenched positions and squares of British infantry. When the war broke out, Cetshwayo himself seemed to have sensed that the odds were all in favor of the Zulus—if they avoided entrenched British riflemen and fought the European only through surprise, during transit, or at night.

The Zulus had a much larger army, knew the terrain intimately, and had clear warning of the advance of the three British columns. Moreover, Zululand—without roads, largely unmapped, laced with rivers and streams, hilly and full of gullies and canyons—was nearly impossible to traverse by wagons full of tons of equipment that could scarcely travel more than five miles on a good day. Constant Zulu attacks on such columns might have stranded British regiments deep in Zululand without recourse to resupply, thereby dragging out a war that had no real support from either the general staff or the prime minister back in London. Instead, ritual, custom, and tradition ensured that the horns, chest, and loins of the Zulu impis would attack as usual—and so were to be slaughtered as usual by British riflemen.

Whereas the Zulus were famous for their obedience to royal edicts, since the reign of Shaka—who had routinely strangled those who sneezed, laughed, or simply looked at him in his presence—there was an arbitrariness surrounding punishment that tended in the long run to undermine Zulu cohesion and central command. Nearly every major Zulu leader from Dingiswayo and Shaka to Cetshwayo—who was probably poisoned after the British conquest—was murdered. Mpande, Cetshwayo’s father, reigned for more than thirty years (1840–72) and died alone in his sleep, but only by abrogating most of his power to local impis and in his later years to his son.

In contrast, the British army, which routinely flogged and jailed its felons, had a written code of punishment and laws. Individual troopers more or less knew what was expected of them, assumed a relatively uniform and predictable application of justice throughout the ranks, and considered their own persons sacrosanct from arbitrary execution. For the most part, they followed orders from a sense of justice rather than mere fear. No British officer or magistrate had absolute power over an underling in the manner of a Zulu or an Aztec king. The small professional army of England was far more representative of civic militarism than the thousands mustered in Cetshwayo’s impis: the former fought with the understanding that military life was a reflection of civilian customs and values, the latter that the society mirrored the army. In a nation of millions the British army was tiny, but even the queen could not execute a single soldier without at least a hearing or trial.

COURAGE IS NOT NECESSARILY DISCIPLINE

The Traditions of the British Army

By 1879 there were larger and better-organized European militaries—the French and the German especially—than the British colonial army. The murderous American Civil War (1861–65) and the short but violent Franco-Prussian War (1870–71) had put an end to the common use of massed cavalry and the tactics of slow marching through ordered lines. The machine gun, new repeating rifles, and artillery shells destroyed the last aristocratic pretensions of mounted grandees and ushered in the dawn of modern industrial warfare. In contrast, the British after Waterloo (1815), with few exceptions (the disastrous Crimean War of 1854–56 is the oddity that proves the rule), fought colonial wars, against enemies that had neither modern weapons, elaborate fortifications, nor sophisticated tactics. The result was the maintenance of a peculiarly reactionary army, which increasingly found itself outside the modern Western evolution toward enormous levies of well-armed conscripts. The Victorian army— more so than the navy—mirrored the class divisions of British society. Since it was largely unchallenged by other more modern European and American forces, it saw no need until the eleventh hour either to dismantle the tactics of a bygone age or to substitute merit for birth as the chief criterion for career advancement.

Only in the decade before the Zulu War had the British undersecretary of war, Edward Cardwell, at last made any meaningful attempt at reform by eliminating purchased commissions, improving conditions for enlisted men, and urging the adoption of modern rifles, artillery, and Gatling guns. Nevertheless, by 1879 there were still only 180,000 British soldiers—far smaller than the quarter-million-man army of the Roman Empire—to defend an empire that spanned Asia, Africa, Australia, and North America and that was frequently in turmoil throughout India, Afghanistan, and southern and western Africa. Insufficient numbers and class bias were not the only problems. The army was also plagued by chronic budgetary crises—the navy still received the bulk of British defense expenditures—which led to poor pay and weapons that were often outmoded. Far too many officers in the latter nineteenth century, even after the abolition of the purchase system in which aristocrats literally bought commissions, were still ingrained with a conservative mentality that looked suspiciously upon science and the accompanying mechanical expertise that fueled an industrial society. What saved the British army and made it a deadly constabulary force in the colonial wars of the nineteenth century, despite poor generalship and inadequate funding, was its legendary discipline and training. British redcoats for the most part were better drilled and motivated than almost any other troops in the world. When formed up in their infamous squares, they were the best soldiers both in and outside Europe in laying down a continuously accurate and sustained deadly volley of rifle fire.

In the minutes before the attack on Rorke’s Drift, not a single regular British soldier fled to join the hundreds of colonials and native troops that took off before the approach of thousands of Zulus. Instead, fewer than one hundred able-bodied men continuously fired more than 20,000 rifle rounds and were at the ramparts for some sixteen hours. At the bloodbath at Isandhlwana hours earlier, nearly all the regular companies of the 24th Regiment of the British regular army were overwhelmed in situ rather than dispersed in flight. Uguku, a Zulu veteran of the slaughter, later recalled of that British final stand:

They were completely surrounded on all sides, and stood back to back, and surrounding some men who were in the centre. Their ammunition was now done, except that they had some revolvers which they fired at us at close quarters. We were quite unable to break their square until we had killed a great many of them, by throwing our assegais at short distances. We eventually overcame them in this way. (F. Colenso, History of the Zulu War and Its Origin, 413)

At Rorke’s Drift in the moments before the Zulu arrival, Lieutenant Chard’s men shot a European sergeant who fled with Captain Stephenson’s Natal Native Contingent. Chard felt no need to mention the shooting in his report, and the British officer corps undertook no investigation into the apparently justified killing of a colonial noncommissioned officer who left his post. Sir Garnet Wolseley later even criticized Lieutenants Melville and Coghill, the valiant duo who tried to save the queen’s color at Isandhlwana. In Wolseley’s view under no circumstances were British officersever to ride out of camp while their beleaguered men were alive and still fighting—despite the sanctity of the regimental banner. The few mounted troops who got away from Isandhlwana after the collapse of the infantry’s resistance naturally came under later suspicion.

After the minor disaster at the Intombi River, Lieutenant Harward was court-marshaled for riding off for help while his soldiers were still surrounded by Zulus. Although Harward was acquitted by a military court of justice, General Wolseley insisted that his own dissent be read at the head of every regiment in the army. Wolseley’s disgust at the idea of a British officer leaving his men framed his apology to the rank and file and illustrated the trust that lay at the heart of the army’s legendary discipline:

The more helpless the position in which an officer finds his men, the more it is his bound duty to stay and share their fortune, whether for good or ill. It is because the British officer has always done so that he occupies the position in which he is held in the estimation of the world, and that he possesses the influence he does in the ranks of our army. The soldier has learned to feel that, come what may, he can in the direst moment of danger look with implicit faith to his officer, knowing that he will never desert him under any possible circumstances. It is to this faith of the British soldier in his officers that we owe most of the gallant deeds recorded in our military annals; and it is because the verdict of this Court-Martial strikes at the root of this faith, that I feel it necessary to mark officially my emphatic dissent from the theory upon which the verdict has been founded. (D. Clammer, The Zulu War, 143)

The great strength of the British army was to form in lines and squares. In the former formation each row of three or four lines of soldiers —often prone, kneeling, and standing—fired on command, reloaded, and then again shot five to ten seconds later. The exact sequence of shots from the entire company ensured a near steady curtain of fire even from single-shot Martini-Henry rifles. In a box four right angles ensured a safe center for baggage, refuge for the wounded, and reserves—the integrity of the entire square predicated on the idea that no British soldier would give way at any point along the perimeter. Often to ensure fire control, stakes were placed at one-hundred-yard intervals in the killing field to allow gunnery sergeants to hone the sequence of firing and individual riflemen to calibrate their aim.

The onslaught of a British lancer attack against the Zulus was equally frightening in its carefully disciplined stages:

The 17th Lancers—the Duke of Cambridge’s Own—were a proud regiment. “Death or Glory” was their motto, and Balaclava was amongst their battle honours. Drury-Lowe [colonel of the regiment] drew them up meticulously, as if on parade. . . . Watching the troopers on their big English horses, with their blue uniforms and white facings, they appeared a machine, so precise was their dressing. Drury-Lowe advanced his regiment at the walk in a column of troops, and, as the ground leveled, gave the orders: “Trot—Form squadrons—Form Line!” then, with the men drawn up two deep, “Gallop!” the horses leapt forward, and as the line of steel-lipped lances came to the rest, pennons streaming, “Charge!” and a cheer broke from the square. The regiment rapidly overtook the retreating Zulus, and the lances, as unsparing as the assegais, rose and fell as the troopers impaled warrior after warrior, and flicked the bodies from the points. (D. Clammer, The Zulu War, 214)

What Is Western Discipline?

The display of courage while under attack is a human trait common to fighters everywhere. All warriors can exhibit extraordinary bravery. Nor is the ancillary of courage, obedience to command, a peculiarly Western characteristic. Both tribal and civilized militaries find success from the fear, even terror, that fighters hold for their leader, general, king, or autocrat. Individual Zulus who grasped the red-hot barrels of Martini-Henry rifles on the north rampart at Rorke’s Drift were as brave as the Englishmen who calmly blew them to pieces seconds later with .45-caliber rifle slugs. They were nearly as obedient to their particular generals as well, charging on command in human wave attacks against fortified positions.

But in the end the Zulus—who could be executed on a nod from their king—not the British, ran away from Rorke’s Drift:

It seems paradoxical to us that men who were so brave in their attacks would run away in panic when their attacks eventually failed. It did not seem paradoxical to the Zulus. They expected to run away if their attacks eventually failed. . . . Once a body of men began to run away, the effect on other men was contagious, as it is in most armies. Shaka’s regiments sometimes ran away like this too. It was the traditional end to a Zulu battle. They either destroyed their enemies or ran away. (R. Edgerton, Like Lions They Fought, 188)

Hours earlier, after the moment of their greatest victory at Isandhlwana, most of the impis dispersed home with booty—far different were they in triumph from the murderous British lancers who six months later after the slaughter at Ulundi still rode down the defeated Zulus for hours on end. Why did brave and obedient Zulus in both victory and defeat lack the discipline of brave and obedient British soldiers?

From the Greeks onward, Westerners have sought to distinguish moments of individual courage and obedience to leaders from a broader, more institutionalized bravery that derives from the harmony of discipline, training, and egalitarian values among men and officers. Beginning with the Hellenic tradition, Europeans were careful to organize types of purported courage into a hierarchy, from the singular rashness of bold individual acts to the cohesive shared bravery along a battle line—insisting that the former was only occasionally critical to victory, the latter always.

Herodotus, for example, after the battle at Plataea (479 B.C.) noted that the Spartans did not bestow the award of valor to Aristodemus, who rushed out from the formation in near suicidal charges to stab away at the Persians. Instead, the Spartans gave the prize to one Posidonius, who fought alongside his fellow hoplites in the phalanx bravely but “without any wish to be killed” (9.71). Herodotus goes on to imply that Aristodemus had not fought with reason, but as a berserker to redeem his sullied reputation incurred from missing out on the glorious last stand at Thermopylae the summer before.

The Greek standard of courage is inextricably tied to training and discipline: the hoplite is to fight with cold reason, not from frenzy. He holds his own life dear, not cheap, and yet is willing to offer it for the polis. His success in battle is gauged not entirely on how many men he kills or how much personal valor he displays, but to the degree his own battleworthiness aids the advance of his comrades, the maintenance of order in defeat, or the preservation of the formation under attack.

This emphasis on the sanctity of the group was not just a Spartan ethos, but a generally held code throughout the Greek city-states. Frequently in Greek literature we hear that same theme of group cohesion among average soldiers—all citizens can be good fighters if they dedicate themselves to the defense of their peers and culture at large. In Thucydides’ second book the Athenian general Pericles reminds the Assembly during his funeral oration that truly brave men are not those berserkers who are in “evil circumstances and thus have the best excuse to be unsparing of their lives.” Such men, he says, “have no hope of better days.” Rather, the truly courageous are those “to whom it makes an enormous difference if they suffer disaster” (Thucydides 2.43.6).

We hear throughout Greek literature of the necessity of staying in rank, of rote and discipline as more important than mere strength and bravado. Men carry their shields, Plutarch wrote, “for the sake of the entire line” (Moralia 220A). Real strength and bravery were for carrying a shield in formation, not for killing dozens of the enemy in individual combat, which was properly the stuff of epic and mythology. Xenophon reminds us that from freeholding property owners comes such group cohesion and discipline: “In fighting, just as in working the soil, it is necessary to have the help of other people” (Oeconomicus 5.14). Punishments were given only to those who threw down their shields, broke rank, or caused panic, never to those who failed to kill enough of the enemy.

Similarly, there is nothing but disdain for gaudy tribal fighters, loud yelling, or terrifying noise if such show is not accompanied by the discipline to march and stay in rank. “Images don’t inflict wounds,” Aeschylus says (Seven Against Thebes, 397–99). Thucydides has the Spartan general Brasidas, in his attack against Illyrian villagers, sum up the early Western contempt for tribal warfare:

They hold terror in the onset of their attack for those who have no experience with them. They are indeed dreadful looking due to their sheer numbers; the very din of their yelling is intolerable; and they create an image of terror even in their empty brandishing of their weapons. But they are not what they seem when it comes time to fighting hand-to-hand with those who can endure such threats. Since they have no regular battle order, they are not ashamed to abandon any position once they are hard pressed; and since both fleeing and attacking are thought to be equally honorable, their courage cannot ever really be tested. . . . Such mobs as these, if one will only withstand their first charge, will only make a boast of courage from afar with threats. But for those who give in to them, they pursue right on their heels, eager to display courage when the situation appears safe. (4.126.5–7)

The Zulus were far more prone than the Illyrians to press home the attack against solid ranks; nevertheless, Thucydides’ general contrast between yelling and spectacle versus holding firm in a line—“regular battle order”—is relevant to the Anglo-Zulu War. Those soldiers in both wars who could drill in formation, accept and pass on orders, and recognize a central chain of command were more likely to advance, stay put, and retreat in unison and formation. Across time and space such a systematic rather than haphazard movement of men proves the more effective in killing the enemy.

The Classical Paradigm

Aristotle, typically so, was the most systematic of Greek thinkers in dissecting the nature of courage and its relationship to self-interest, obedience, and discipline. He reaches almost the same conclusions as other Greek thinkers in explaining why certain types of bravery are preferable and lasting than others—and inseparable from the notion of the state and a trust in its government. In his careful analysis of five types of military bravery, Aristotle gives precedence to civic courage, which amateur citizen soldiers alone possess, due to their fear of cowardice before their commonwealth and fellow citizens and their desire for recognition of virtue that such public bodies offer to selfless men. “A man,” Aristotle notes in echoing Pericles, “should not be brave because he is forced to be, but because courage is itself a noble thing” (Nicomachean Ethics 3.8.5).

Aristotle also recognizes a second apparent courage, that of better-trained or superior-equipped soldiers who can afford to be brave because they hold material advantages. But he warns us that such purportedly courageous men are not really so: once their transitory advantages cease, they are the likely to flee. Aristotle also acknowledges a third type of apparent bravery often mistaken for true courage, that of the berserker, who due either to pain, frenzy, or anger fights without reason and without regard for death—or the welfare of his peers. This, too, is a transitory courage that can flee when the spirit of audacity resides.

Nor do Aristotle’s fourth and fifth categories, those respectively of the blind optimist and of the ignorant, meet the criteria of courageousness. Their war spirit can be based on erroneous perceptions and is thus ephemeral. Some men are brave because they have carefully gauged the odds to be in their favor; but such fighters can be either mistaken in their assessment of the battlefield or unaware that advantage is fickle and prone to change in seconds. In either case their courage is not rooted in values and character, much less is it a product of a system, and thus neither lasting nor always dependable in the heat of battle.

By the same token the ignorant fight well only because they are under the mistaken impression that the advantage is with them; they flee when they gain knowledge of their real danger. Like the optimist, the unaware reflect a relative courage, not an absolute value. Plato in his dialogue Lachesmakes the same point when Socrates argues that true courage is the ability of a soldier to fight and stay in rank, even when he knows the odds are against him—in contrast to the apparent hero who battles bravely only when all the advantages are on his side.

Very early on in Western culture the notion of discipline was institutionalized as staying in rank and obeying the orders of superior officers, who gained their authority from constitutional prerogative. The annual oath of the Athenian ephebes—the young military recruits who for two years were to guard the port of Piraeus and hinterland of Attica—contained the following promise: “And I will not desert the man at my side wherever I am positioned in line . . . I will offer my ready obedience at any time to those who are exercising their authority prudently, and to the established laws and to those laws which will be judiciously in force in the future” (M. Tod, Greek Historical Inscriptions, [Oxford 1948] vol. 2, #204). Authors such as Xenophon and Polybius talked of armies as walls, each course an individual company, each brick a soldier—the mortar of discipline keeping men and companies in their exact places and ensuring the integrity of the bulwark. The alternative, in Xenophon’s words, was chaos “like a crowd leaving a theater” (Cavalry Commander 7.2). Classical culture accepted that militiamen were to be neither terrified of their rulers nor recklessly brave. Rather, they were predictable in battle, both in the placement and movement of their own bodies and in their mental and spiritual readiness to accept commands. In the heat of combat all men are likely to lose their fear of a king before death. Bravery, as Aristotle saw, also can be a fickle emotion. Cossacks, as modern military historians have noted of all such nomad warriors, were reckless in pursuit, but often abjectly cowardly when roles were reversed and they found themselves in shock battle against enemy columns.

The Roman army sought further to bureaucratize civic courage through training and close adherence to close-order formation, regimental élan, and the recognition that bravery was not individual prowess. Josephus, the Jewish Roman historian of the early first century A.D., in a famous and often quoted observation, remarked of Roman battlefield superiority:

If one looks at the Roman military, it is seen that the Empire came into their hands as the result of their valour, not as a gift of fortune. For they do not wait for the outbreak of war to practise with weapons nor do they sit idle in peace mobilizing themselves only in time of need. Instead, they seem to have been born with weapons in their hands; never do they take a break from training or wait for emergencies to arise. . . . One would not be incorrect in saying that their maneuvers are like bloodless battles, and their battles bloody maneuvers. (Jewish War 3.102–7)

Nearly four hundred years later Vegetius, the fourth-century-A.D. author of a manual on Roman military institutions, could once more see such training and organization at the root of Roman battle success: “Victory was granted not by mere numbers and innate courage, but by skill and training. We see that the Roman people owed the conquest of the world to no other cause than military training, discipline in their camps, and practice in warfare” (Vegetius Epitoma rei militaris 1.1). Vegetius’s popularity with the Franks and other Germanic monarchies that evolved in western Europe during the Middle Ages arose from his emphasis on creating disciplined lines and columns. In their eyes, he showed how Teutonic furor might be properly channeled into creating spirited but disciplined foot soldiers.

Drill, Rank, Order, and Command

Discipline as it emerged in Europe is the attempt at the institutionalization of a particular type of courage through training and rote, and is manifested in the preservation of rank and order. This Western obsession with close-order drill is hinged on the fact that whereas all men are prone to bolt and run when the situation becomes hopeless, training and belief can alter such behavior. The key is not to make every man a hero, but to create men who by and large are braver than their untrained allies in withstanding an enemy charge, and in the heat of battle follow the orders of superiors to protect the men at their sides. Their obedience is given to a timeless and enduring civic system, not to a tribe, family, or friends of the moment.

How is discipline achieved and sustained over centuries? Greek, Roman, and later European armies found the answer through drill and a clear-cut written contract between soldier and state. Seventeenth-century commanders like William Louis of Nassau connected their preference for mass firepower directly to Greek and Roman writers of tactics who stressed the need for phalangites and legionaries to stay in close formation. The ability to march in order and line up in rank has immediate and more abstract advantages. Troops can be deployed and be given orders more quickly and efficiently when they march in close formations. Close-order columns and lines are the fountainheads of collective fire and make sequential volleys by rifle companies possible. But drill itself in a larger sense reinforces the soldier’s attention to commands. The willingness to march in step with his peers is at the source of a Western soldier’s readiness to do exactly what his commanding officer orders. A man who can find his spot in formation, march in cadence with his fellows, and keep rank is more likely to obey other more key orders, to use his weapons on command, and ultimately to defeat the enemy.

Westerners especially put a much greater emphasis on just this strange notion of keeping together in time:

But in fact close-order drill is conspicuous by its absence in most armies and military traditions. From a world perspective, indeed, the way Greeks and Romans and then modern Europeans exploited the psychological effect of keeping together in time was an oddity, not the norm of military history. Why should Europeans have specialized in exploiting the extraordinary possibilities of close-order drill? (W. McNeill, Keeping Together in Time, 4)

McNeill goes on to give a variety of answers to his own question, but central to his entire discussion is the notion of civic community, or the idea that freemen enter a consensual contract with their military and thereby expect rights and accept responsibilities. In such an environment, drill is not seen necessarily as oppressive even to highly individualistic Westerners, but as an obvious manifestation of egalitarianism that brings all soldiers from widely varying backgrounds into a uniformly clothed, identical-appearing, and fluid-moving single body, where private identity and individual status is for a time shed. Drill, McNeill believes, was quite at home in “active, participatory citizenship that was the hallmark of the Greek and Roman concepts of freedom” (112). We might add that the close order of the Greek phalanx, where each man occupied a slot equidistant from another, was a reflection of the assembly hall, in which every male citizen held the same right as another—and both egalitarian bodies were ultimately fueled by the Greek countryside, where a checkerboard of farms, not vast estates, was the norm.

Adolescents who enter the freshman class at, for example, Virginia Military Institute are immediately shorn of their hair, deprived of their civilian clothes, and taught to drill and march in step—as prior class, race, or political loyalties fade into the columns of identically appearing, moving, and chanting cadets. Take the most vicious street or motorcycle gang, replete with Uzi machine guns and years of experience in shooting rival thugs, and it would not stand a chance in battle against a regiment of armed VMI classmates—none of whom have a single serious misdemeanor record of arrest or have fired a shot in anger their entire lives. Yet VMI cadets, unlike well-disciplined Nazis or Stalinist goose-stepping infantrymen, are fully apprised of the conditions of their service and are largely protected through a system of military justice from capricious punishment—and accept that gratuitous violence on their own part will be severely punished. Such is the power of drill and the discipline it spawns in creating civic loyalty from tribal and familial obligations.

Fighting in rank and formation is in some sense the ultimate manifestation of Western egalitarianism, as all hierarchy outside the battlefield fades before the anonymity of a phalanx of like-minded and trained peers. Presumably, the Carthaginians hired the Spartan drillmaster Xanthippus in the First Punic War for the same reason the Japanese enlisted French and German field instructors during the latter nineteenth century: to create soldiers, whether phalangites or riflemen, who could drill and march in rank and therefore fight in the deadly manner of Westerners—as both the Romans and the Americans were shortly to learn. Vegetius, some two millennia ago, outlined this peculiar Western emphasis on drill:

Right at the beginning of their training, recruits must be taught the military step. For on the march and in the battle line nothing should be kept safeguarded more diligently than that all the troops should keep in step. This can only be achieved through repeated practice by which they learn how to march quickly and in formation. An army which is split up and not in order is always in serious danger from the enemy. (Epitoma rei militaris 1.1.9)

Central to the European tradition of military discipline is the emphasis on defense, or the belief, as we have seen from Herodotus, that it is better not to run than to be an accomplished killer. Aristotle in the Politics (7.1324b15ff) relates the strange customs of nonpolis peoples who put unusual emphasis on killing the enemy—Scythians cannot drink from a ceremonial cup until they have killed a man, Iberians put spits around warriors’ graves to mark the number of men they had slain in battle, Macedonians must wear a halter, not a belt, until they cut down a man in battle—as in sharp contrast with the mores of the city-state. The Zulu army also belonged to this long tribal tradition, as its warriors received necklaces of willow sticks signifying the number of “kills” each had confirmed.

As Aristotle also pointed out, the Western emphasis on defensive cohesion, closely associated with drill and order, puts the highest premium on maintaining the integrity of a position or formation. All codes of military justice in the West clearly define cowardice first as running from formation or abandoning rank, regardless of the situation, not as a failure to kill particular numbers of the enemy. If an Aztec warrior found prestige in overwhelming and capturing a string of noble prisoners, a Spanish harquebusier or pikeman was heralded for keeping his place in line and supporting the cohesion of the line or column as it rather anonymously mowed down the enemy. In the context of the Zulu wars the British, like the Zulus, possessed a method of attack and a predictable manner of fighting. But the British system accentuated formation, drill, and order, and called courageous those who upheld those very values. In an abstract sense, soldiers who fight as one—shoot in volleys, charge on order as a group, retire when ordered, and do not pursue rashly, prematurely, or for too long—defeat their enemies.

The Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 provides stunning examples of Zulu bravery pitted against British discipline. But whereas the Zulu military was often as brave as the British, no one would claim it was as disciplined:

The key invention is that of the state, that is, civil in contrast with kin-based social control. Civil government is the dividing line, the threshold, the horizon between that which is civilized and that which is not. Only the state can raise large armies. It alone can discipline and train men into soldiers rather than warriors. Only government can command, not request, and can punish those who do not feel like fighting that day. . . . The primitive warrior was without the backing of an organized, structured government. He was unwilling to submit to discipline, and incapable or impatient of obeying definite command. He discovered only the tactical principles inherent in animal hunting. . . . He was too immediately concerned with the engagement just ahead to plan campaigns instead of battles. (H. Turney-High, Primitive War, 258)

There were eleven Victoria Crosses awarded at Rorke’s Drift—one for almost every ten soldiers who fought. None were awarded on the basis of “kills,” though we have several eye-witness accounts of individual British marksmen shooting dozens of Zulus at great ranges. Modern critics suggest such lavishness in commendation was designed to assuage the disaster at Isandhlwana and to reassure a skeptical Victorian public that the fighting ability of the British soldier remained unquestioned. Maybe, maybe not. But in the long annals of military history, it is difficult to find anything quite like Rorke’s Drift, where a beleaguered force, outnumbered forty to one, survived and killed twenty men for every defender lost. But then it is also rare to find warriors as well trained as European soldiers, and rarer still to find any Europeans as disciplined as the British redcoats of the late nineteenth century.