that Bromhead had been left at Rorke’s Drift because he was deemed unfit to command a company of the 24th in field operations.
Chard, meanwhile, with four sappers was repairing the broken cables of one of two big iron punts at the ferry built to carry Chelmsford’s heavy equipment across the Buffalo. The engineers completed this task on the evening of 21 January. The ferry was then fully occupied moving wagons across the river, for onward passage to Isandlwana. It was heavy work, for rain had churned the crossing approaches into a quagmire. A steady stream of visitors passed through on their way to join Chelmsford’s column. On the morning of the twenty-second, young Lieutenant Horace Smith-Dorrien paused for a gossip. He observed that ‘a big fight was expected’, and borrowed a few rounds of revolver ammunition from his friend ‘Gonny’ Bromhead. Then he rode on his way.
Chard’s sappers received orders to join the main force at Isandlwana. They boarded a wagon behind a native driver, and bumped their way slowly round the hills, in the wide loop that was necessary for anything but a bird to pass from Rorke’s Drift to Chelmsford’s base. Chard himself was given Major Spalding’s permission to ride over, nominally in search of further orders for himself, but chiefly to indulge a little war tourism. In two hours, Chard reached Isandlwana to find most of the force there roused by glimpses of Zulu movements on the surrounding hills. Seeing some enemy moving towards the Nqutu Plateau, the possibility crossed the engineer’s mind that they might ‘make a dash at the drift’ – Rorke’s Drift. He himself was told to return to the river, continue supervising the ferry, and build a redoubt to enable riflemen to cover it. The camp’s senior officer Colonel Durnford asked Chard, on his way, to pass movement orders to some detachments. There was a general expectancy of action at Isandlwana, but little apprehension. Here was a substantial, well-armed British force, preparing to dispense the usual medicine to savages. Chard rode unhurriedly back to the ferry with his batman, Driver Robson, the two men oblivious that they had escaped death by a couple of hours.
At noon, some twenty thousand Zulus stormed Isandlwana, catching the defenders poorly deployed on open ground. After a brisk and costly fight, the warriors overran Durnford’s position when the 24th’s riflemen ran out of ammunition. Some 1,350 defenders were slaughtered. Only seventy-five escaped. One of the most scenically beautiful battlefields of history witnessed one of the most deplorable British humiliations. The Zulus were able to exploit their numbers to swamp the redcoats’ line, because the defenders manoeuvred clumsily and allowed themselves to be cut off from their ammunition supply. It took Cetewayo’s men little time to overcome the British, but rather longer to loot their camp, from which all cattle and mules were driven off to the king’s kraal. Horses were killed. They played no role in Zulu society and, in the disdainful words of a warrior, ‘they were the feet for the white men’.
The garrison at Rorke’s Drift heard gunfire over the hills. Of itself, this was neither surprising nor alarming. Lord Chelmsford had gone to find Zulus. The crackle of musketry suggested that he had been successful. Three men – Surgeon-Major Reynolds, an army chaplain and the Swedish missionary Otto Witt – rode to the crest of the Oscarberg, a hill behind the post, to see what was happening. Witt had sent his wife and three children away to Pietermaritzburg, but himself remained as an interpreter for the British. The horsemen scanned the horizon in vain. The mountains intervening between Isandlwana and the Drift muffled even sounds of musketry. When they spotted natives in the northern distance, they took them for British levies. Only later did they realise that these were Zulus hunting down fugitives. The sightseers gingerly picked a path back down the Oscarberg to the mission.
Major Spalding, however, remained uneasy. He was conscious of the vulnerability of his position and the weakness of its defenders. Around 2 p.m., he himself mounted a horse and set off briskly towards Helpmakaar, some ten miles southwards, to hurry forward two companies of the 24th that were posted there. Before leaving, he ascertained that Chard’s lieutenancy predated that of Bromhead, and went through the formality of assigning command of Rorke’s Drift to the sapper. Contrary to cinematic myth, this does not appear to have caused any difficulties with Bromhead, with whom Chard was on easy terms. No one perceived the issue as significant, for Spalding intended to return before darkness fell.
Chard was evidently undisturbed by what he had seen of the enemy milling above Isandlwana. In his little camp by the river he ate a leisurely lunch before retiring to his tent to write letters, unaware that the four sappers who had left him only that morning were lying dead and eviscerated less than ten miles away. Around 3 p.m., however, tranquillity was banished. Two lathered horses scrambled down to the waterside, bearing fugitives from the catastrophe – Lieutenants Adendorff and Vaines of the Natal Native Contingent. They shouted the headlines from the far bank of the Buffalo, before urging their mounts across the drift. Not only had there been a massacre, they reported that a Zulu impi was moving towards Rorke’s Drift. Chard at once despatched a sergeant and five men to picket the high ground beyond the river. Vaines hastened the few hundred yards to the mission station to tell his news, then rode for Helpmakaar. Adendorff also seized an opportunity to slip away, avoiding the subsequent battle. He was later arrested in Pietermaritzburg as a deserter.
Bromhead, it transpired, had received a note scribbled by an officer of No. 3 Column at the same time and of the same import as the tidings borne by the slouch-hatted fugitives who met Chard. The infantryman sent his own runner to summon the engineer from the river. Chard took one small but important step before complying – he ordered a water cart to be filled and taken up to the station. He then hurried to the cluster of buildings to find Assistant Commissary James Dalton directing fevered efforts to fortify them. Some men were striking the 24th’s tents to clear the field of fire, tearing out guy ropes and leaving a tangled mass of canvas, which subsequently provided a significant impediment to the attacking Zulus. Other soldiers and native levies were packing wagons with bags and boxes to make solid obstacles, loopholing brick walls and creating new ones with mealie sacks. Bromhead raised with Chard the possibility of evacuation, which it seems that the two lieutenants seriously considered. Dalton, a former sergeant-major, insisted that such a course was madness. The only option was to stand and fight. After a hurried consultation between the three men, Chard agreed that the others were doing everything possible, and went back to his picket.
Sergeant Milne and his riflemen, who were from the 3rd Buffs, roused the officer’s admiration by volunteering to take up firing positions on the punts in mid-river, to delay the Zulu advance. Chard demurred. When the time came, he would need every man at the station. He and Bromhead, as a survivor later approvingly recorded, now joined their men heaving mealie bags in the sweltering heat. There was no nonsense about class condescension at Rorke’s Drift, and indeed no subsequent reports of personal friction between the British defenders. All of them vividly recognised that they faced a struggle for their lives, the outcome of which would be determined solely by their own exertions.
Around 3.30 p.m., Lieutenant Henderson arrived with about a hundred men of the locally-raised Natal Native Horse, a welcome reinforcement. Chard directed them to throw out a scouting screen around the position. A few more stragglers from Isandlwana arrived, in a state of hysteria and despair. They urged the men of the garrison to flee for their lives. A stand was hopeless. If an entire battalion, almost a thousand strong, had failed to stop Zulus that morning, how could a weak company numbering a hundred-odd men do so that afternoon? Yet Chard had made his decision. The seventy-five minutes between the first alert and a sighting of the Zulus – ‘Here they come, black as hell and thick as grass!’ a certain Sergeant Gallagher cried from the south wall – was not long, but just enough time to contrive an effective breastwork. Unlike the victims of the morning, the men at Rorke’s Drift were well supplied with ammunition. Now they also possessed the essentials of every effective infantry defence – obstacles covered by fire. The single-shot .45 falling-block Martini-Henry rifle was a deadly tool against tribesmen chiefly armed with assegais, so long as it could be kept fed with bullets. The biggest problem for the defenders was that considerable cover, bush and trees and grass, extended close to the mission station on two sides. There was no time to clear this away and improve the British field of fire.
By far the most experienced soldier at Rorke’s Drift was Commissary Dalton. Both Chard and Bromhead later paid tribute to his advice and leadership. He was a forty-nine-year-old former NCO of the 85th Foot who had taken his pension six years