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Under Lord Chelmsford, a rather larger army marched confidently into Zululand and was promptly surprised and defeated at Isandlwana, losing nearly 1,400 soldiers at one stroke. Chelmsford was stunned by the loss, but not too stunned to realise that the following day’s heroics at Rorke’s Drift gave him a straw to clutch at. Chelmsford’s successor, General Sir Garnet Wolseley, thought the defence of the outpost was merely the natural action of men with nowhere left to run and facing an enemy that didn’t take prisoners. ‘It is monstrous making heroes of those … who, shut up in buildings at Roorke’s [sic] Drift, could not bolt & fought like rats for their lives, which they could not otherwise save,’ he wrote in his journal. Nevertheless, the battle was quickly polished and publicised to overshadow the disaster at Isandlwana. ‘We are giving the VC very freely, I think,’ worried the commander of the British army, the Duke of Cambridge, after an unprecedented 11 crosses were granted for the action.
Despite the initial disaster, the war was eventually won — though at far higher human, financial and political cost than anticipated — and despite public pressure Chelmsford managed to retain his command until the end, winning a final victory at Ulundi that ensured his reputation would not sink under the weight of his earlier mistakes. David’s account of it all is smooth and remarkably easy to follow, given the wealth of detail he presents. It is even, at times, funny — an almost Goon Show-worthy moment comes when a Lieutenant Maxwell wakes up suddenly at 2.00 a.m.:
[I] heard a frightful noise some distance from me, and found myself alone … Our natives instead of being in front of me were now in my rear and must have jumped over me in the alarm and I slept through it all …
David’s enthusiasm for solving mysteries is evident throughout the book. He patiently describes all the nuances of Chelmsford’s attempt to blame a conveniently dead British officer for Isandlwana. He digs deep to find the overlooked heroes at Rorke’s Drift, and even deflates the 1966 movie Zulu with the rather disappointing conclusion that ‘Men of Harlech’ was probably never sung by the defenders. David is determined to leave us with no illusions at all.
For all his investigator’s demeanour, however, David does allow a number of jarring personal judgments to creep in; most are harmless expressions of opinion, but a few seem to cross the line. He observes, for example, that Lieutenant Chard might have shared his celebratory bottle of beer with Commissary Dalton, the officer who convinced Chard to defend the depot in the first place, ‘… [but] he did not. Dalton had come up from the ranks; he also knew too much.’ This might be true, but it sounds sinister and furthermore is unsupported by any evidence David presents. More serious is his speculation that Chelmsford purposely delayed burying the dead at Isandlwana because of ‘the danger that a full-scale burial party would find incriminating documents’ that would undermine his hastily created cover-up. Given the context, it’s not an unreasonable thought, but no evidence for it is provided, either. There’s more than enough to damn Chelmsford without adding hunches to the case against him.
David concludes by focusing on the aftermath of the war. Its enlisted heroes went the way of most war veterans: to continued service or to invalided and impoverished retirement, and ultimately to private deaths from old age, or disease, or suicide. By contrast, despite being accused by Disraeli of invading Zululand ‘avec un coeur léger’, and criticised by the adjutant-general for five specific errors that led to Isandlwana, Lord Chelmsford never lost the support of Queen Victoria, who promoted him to full general. In the end, Chelmsford went the way of most generals: he died in 1905, aged 78, ‘playing billiards in his club’.
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