The Defence of Rorke’s Drift, by Alphonse de Neuville (1880)
Acting Assistant Commissary James Dalton had experience constructing field fortifications, and he advised Chard and Bromhead to use grain sacks and biscuit boxes to shore up the defensive perimeter between the hospital and storehouse.
In many ways the Zulu War was like other small wars the British had fought: it began with an initial defeat and ended in victory; it was fought against savages on the Empire’s fringes; and the simple strategy and tactics employed, so well suited to disciplined Victorian soldiers, were not unlike the means used to win other small wars in other parts of the Empire. But the Zulu War was memorable for a number of interesting small events: tragic, humorous, disgraceful and gallant.
The officers of the 24th Regiment who were commanding troops at Isandhlwana stayed and died with their men, though all of them had horses and could have tried to escape. The only officer of the 24th to leave the battlefield was Lieutenant Teignmouth Melvill, and he was ordered by Pulleine to try to save the Queen’s colours of the 1st battalion. He got as far as the Buffalo River, but was drowned trying to cross at a place that came to be called Fugitives’ Drift. The colours were later found and returned to the regiment. In a little ceremony at Osborne on 28 July 1880 the Queen decorated these colours with a wreath of immortelles. Ever after, the staff of the Queen’s colours of the 1st battalion of the 24th carried a silver wreath on it.
After the battle of Boomplatz in 1848 the Queen had noted that, as usual, there was a higher percentage of casualties among the officers than among the other ranks. She wrote to Lord Grey: ‘The loss of so many officers, the Queen is certain, proceeds from their wearing a blue coat whilst the men are in scarlet; the Austrians lost a great proportion of officers in Italy from a similar difference in dress.’ The Queen was probably right. Still, many officers continued to go into battle wearing blue patrol jackets. In at least one instance their blue coats saved their lives.
There were some civilians with Chelmsford’s army, mostly transport and supply people, so the Zulu warriors had been told by their chiefs to concentrate on the soldiers, who could be distinguished from the civilians by their red coats. One of the few soldiers to escape from Isandhlwana was thin, square-jawed Lieutenant Horace Lockwood Smith-Dorrien, nineteen years old, who lived to command the British Second Division in the retreat from Mons in 1914. He, like the other four officers who escaped, was wearing a dark coat that day. All red-coated officers were killed.
Smith-Dorrien did not have a command; he was serving as transport officer. As usual, transportation of supplies was one of the army’s major problems and there was a need for more animals than South Africa could supply. Every ox, mule and horse in the country that was for sale or hire was swept up by the army, and Chelmsford was forced to look outside the country for more. A British officer in the American Far West trying to buy animals for the Zulu War would be a theme too improbable for the producers of Westerns, but one British officer found himself buying mules for Chelmsford in Texas.
Part of the tide of Zulus which swept away the six companies of the 24th Regiment at Isandlhwana lapped at the little post at Rorke’s Drift a few miles away on the same day. Here was enacted one of the most incredible dramas in the history of the British army. The story has been brilliantly told in detail by Donald Morris in The Washing of the Spears, but it deserves to be retold here for it describes an outstanding example of the type of courage so often displayed by ordinary officers and men of Queen Victoria’s army.
Rorke’s Drift had been churned into a muddy quagmire by the passing army and the continued movement of oxen and supply wagons. A mission station-farm was located about a quarter of a mile from the drift on the Natal side of the river and this had been turned into a field hospital and supply centre. On the morning of 22 January there were thirty-six men in the hospital, together with a surgeon, a chaplain, and one orderly; eighty-four men of B Company of the 2nd Battalion of the 24th Regiment and a company of Natal Kaffirs were there to guard the crossing; there was also an engineer officer who helped wagons to cross the river, and a few casuals.
Neither of the two regular officers entitled to hold a command (the surgeon-major did not count) was regarded as outstanding. At least neither of them had ever done anything remarkable in their careers up to this point. The senior of the two was black-bearded Lieutenant John Rouse Merriot Chard, the Royal Engineer officer. Commissioned at the age of twenty-one he had served for more than eleven years without ever seeing action or receiving a promotion.
Lieutenant Gonville Bromhead was in charge of B company of the 24th at Rorke’s Drift. His brother, Major Charles Bromhead was in the same regiment, as was natural, for members of the Bromhead family had served in the 24th Regiment for more than 120 years. Charles was regarded as a brilliant officer; he had been in the Ashanti War with Wolseley and was now on staff duty in London. But Gonville, thirty-three years old with nearly twelve years of service, had been a lieutenant for eight years; he was not so bright and was almost totally deaf. He ought not to have been in the army at all. That he was left behind and assigned to the dull job of watching the river crossing was probably due to the natural reluctance of Pulleine to allow him to command a company in battle.
It was about the middle of the afternoon before Chard and Bromhead learned from two volunteer officers of the Natal Kaffirs of the disaster at Isandhlwana and of their own danger. There were no defences at all at Rorke’s Drift, but Chard decided that it would be impossible to bring away all the sick and injured men in hospital so they must do what they could to make the mission defensible. Using wagons, biscuit boxes, bags of mealies and existing walls, they managed to enclose the house, barn and kraal. Fortunately, the buildings were of stone, as was the wall around the kraal, but the house, now being used as a hospital, had a thatched roof, making it vulnerable. All the sick and injured who were well enough to shoot were given rifles and ammunition and Chard counted on having about 300 men to defend his little improvised fort.
A few refugees from Isandhlwana reached Rorke’s Drift, but most continued their flight. The mounted natives who had been stationed at the drift and the native contingent with Chard all fled, together with their colonial officers and non-commissioned officers. Chard was left with only 140 men, including the patients from the hospital, to man his 300 yard perimeter. Late in the afternoon a man came racing down the hill in back of the station shouting ‘Here they come, black as hell and thick as grass!’ And a Zulu impi of 4,000 warriors now descended on Rorke’s Drift.
The soldiers were still carrying biscuit boxes and mealie bags to the walls when the Zulus, with their black and white cowhide shields and with assegais flashing in the sun, came running into view. Boxes and bags were dropped, rifles and cartridge pouches were seized and the soldiers ran to man the barricades. Rifles crashed as the defenders fired into the black masses of Zulu warriors that swept down on them. The Zulus had a deadly open space to cross and took terrible casualties – but they came on in waves. The soldiers could not shoot fast enough and as the Zulus swept around the walls of the hospital there were hand to hand fights along the makeshift barricades, bayonets against assegais, the Zulus mounting the bodies of their own dead and wounded to grab at the rifle barrels and jab at the soldiers.
The men of the 24th had already been enraged before the Zulus arrived by the sight of their native allies and colonial volunteers deserting them. One soldier had even put a bullet into the retreating back of a European non-commissioned officer of the Native Contingent. They were in a fighting mood, and now with the Zulus upon them they fought with a frenzy.
Some of the Zulus who were armed with rifles crouched behind boulders on the rocky slopes behind the mission and fired at the backs of the defenders on the far wall. Fortunately their shooting was erratic, and they did little damage. The steady marksmanship of the soldiers was better; one private downed eight Zulus with eight cartridges during the first charge. The soldiers had found plenty of ammunition among the stores in the barn and the chaplain circulated among them distributing handfuls of fresh cartridges.
There was wild, vicious room to room fighting when the Zulus broke into the hospital; the sick and wounded, together with a few men from B Company, held them off with desperate courage until they set fire to the thatched roof. Meanwhile, Chard was trying to withdraw his men into a narrower perimeter encompassing only the barn, kraal and the yard in front of the barn. Into this area the men who had escaped from the hospital, the freshly wounded and Chard’s remaining effectives retreated and continued the fight. It was dark now, but the Zulus still came on and by the light of the burning hospital the fight went on.
In rush after rush the Zulus pressed back the soldiers. The kraal, which had been defended by bayonets and clubbed rifles when there was no time to reload, had at last to be abandoned. Rifles had now been fired so often and so fast that the barrels burned the fingers and the fouled guns bruised and battered the shoulders and frequently jammed. The wounded cried for water and the canteens were empty, but Chard led a sally over the wall to retrieve the two-wheeled water cart that stood in the yard by the hospital. It was about four o’clock in the morning before the Zulu attacks subsided, but even then flung assegais continued to whistle over the walls.
It seems nearly incredible that even brave, disciplined British soldiers could have sustained such determined attacks by men equally brave and in such numbers. But they did. By morning, Chard and Bromhead had about eighty men still standing. Fifteen had been killed, two were dying and most were wounded. When dawn broke over the hills, the soldiers looked over the walls and braced their tired, wounded bodies for another charge. Their faces were blackened and their eyes were red; their bodies ached and their nerves were stretched taut from the strain. But the Zulus were gone. Around them were hundreds of black corpses; a few wounded Zulus could be seen retreating painfully over a hill; the ground was littered with the debris of battle: Zulu shields and assegais; British helmets, belts and other accoutrements; broken wagons, biscuit boxes and mealie bags, and the cartridge cases of the 20,000 rounds of ammunition the defenders had fired. Chard sent out some cautious patrols, but there were no signs of the enemy in the immediate vicinity. The soldiers cleared away some dead Zulus from the cook house and began to make tea.
About seven-thirty the Zulus suddenly appeared again. Chard called his men and they manned the walls, but the Zulus simply sat down on a hill out of rifle range. They, too, were exhausted, and they had not eaten for more than two days. They had no desire to renew the fight. Besides, the leader of the impi had disobeyed the order of Cetewayo by crossing the Buffalo River into Natal and he was doubtless considering how he would explain to his chief the costly night of savage fighting outside the boundaries of Zululand. While Chard and his men grimly watched, the Zulus rose and wearily moved off over the hills.
Later in the morning, some mounted infantry rode up and soon after Chelmsford appeared with what was left of his main force. He had hoped that some portion of his troops had been able to retreat from Isandhlwana to Rorke’s Drift, but he found only the survivors of those who had been left there. With the remnants of his column and the handful of men from Rorke’s Drift, he sadly retreated into Natal.
Eleven Victoria Crosses were awarded the defenders of Rorke’s Drift: the most ever given for a single engagement. There might have been even more, but posthumous awards were not then made. Both Chard and Bromhead received the medal. There were many Welshmen in the 24th (which later became the South Wales Borderers), and among the eighty-four men of B Company there were five men named Jones and five named Williams; two of the Joneses and one Williams won the Victoria Cross. Private Williams’s real name, however, was John Williams Fielding; he had run away from home to enlist and had changed his name so that his father, a policeman, would not find him.
Private Frederick Hitch, twenty-four, also won a Victoria Cross and survived his years of service to enjoy the wearing of it as a commissionaire. The bad luck of his regiment seemed to pursue Hitch and his medal, even to the grave. One day while Hitch was in his commissionaire’s uniform and wearing his medals a thief snatched the Victoria Cross from his chest. It was never seen again. King Edward VII eventually gave him another to replace it, but when Hitch died in 1913 this one, too, had disappeared. Fifteen years later it turned up in an auction room; his family bought it and it is now in the museum of his old regiment. Mounted on his tomb in Chiswick cemetery was a bronze replica of the Victoria Cross. In 1968 thieves stole that.
Lieutenant Chard finally received his first promotion – to brevet major, becoming the first officer in the Royal Engineers ever to skip the rank of captain. He was also invited to Balmoral where Queen Victoria gave him a gold signet ring. He served for another eighteen years in Cyprus, India and Singapore, but he received only one more promotion. In 1897 cancer of the tongue caused him to retire and he died three months later.
Bromhead was also promoted to captain and brevet major, though he never rose any higher. He, too, was invited to Balmoral by the Queen, but being on a fishing trip when the invitation arrived he missed the occasion. He died in 1891 at the age of forty-six in Allahabad, still in the 24th Regiment.
Bromhead and Chard were fortunate in a sense when their moment for glory arrived: fighting with their backs to the wall, they had only to show the kind of stubborn bravery and simple leadership for which the British officer was conditioned and which he was best equipped to display. No great decision or military genius was required of them. But this is not to detract from their feat of courage and the British army was rightly proud of them.