I was hardly listening to him; my eyes were fixed on that line of steadily-running black figures, coming on inexorably in our wake. They were losing distance, though, it seemed to me—yes, there must be nearly a quarter of a mile between us now—but our beasts were tiring, too; they couldn’t keep up this speed much longer, dragging a heavy wagon behind them. When we reached the bridge, would there be time for the wagon to make its careful way across, before they caught up? … I scrabbled at Moran’s arm, yammering hopefully, and he grinned as he straightened up from his search among the boxes, holding up a large packet of waxed brown paper in one hand.
"There we are, sonny boy," says he, chuckling. "Thought I remembered it. Blasting powder—and a darling little primer! Now, watch your Uncle Jack!"
I don’t want to live through another five minutes like those last agonising moments while we sped across the plain, slower and slower with every yard, straining our eyes back at those distant black figures behind. Even when we reached the gully, a great rocky cleft that stretched as far as one could see on either side, like a volcanic crack, with a rickety plank bridge spanning its thirty feet, there was the time-consuming labour of getting the wounded out and across. The nigger driver and I managed it between us, and sinful hard it was, for two of ’em had to be carried the whole way; Moran, meanwhile, coaxed the team on to the swaying bridge, until the wagon was fairly in the middle of it; then we outspanned the horses and led them across, glancing back fearfully. There they came, those black fiends of the pit, a bare hundred yards away, sprinting full lick now that they saw we were halted and apparently stuck. They set up a great yell of "Suthu!" as they tore in towards the bridge, and Moran, who had been working in the wagon, jumped down and ran across to the little cluster of boulders where we had laid the wounded.
He dropped down beside me, looking back at the wagon; it was perhaps thirty yards off, with the waxed brown packet of gun-powder sitting on top of the ammunition boxes, and the tiny white primer fixed to the side of the packet. With a rifle, I might have hit it myself; all he had was a hand-gun.
"Well, here’s luck," says he. "One shot’ll have to do it."
He was right, I realised, and my mouth was parched with fear. If he missed the primer, his shot would hit the powder packet, but that wouldn’t explode it. It would just knock it over, and the primer would go God knew where. And the first Zulu was racing on to the bridge, shield aloft in triumph, with his hideous legion shrieking at his heels.
"Gather round, dear boys," murmurs Moran, cocking his pistol. "Get yourselves nice and comfy round the bonfire … Christ!"
His head jerked up, the colour draining from his face. It may have been a puff of wind, or perhaps the Zulus swarming past the wagon on that shaky bridge had disturbed it—but the front flap of the canvas cover suddenly swung across, momentarily hiding the tiny white target. It rapped again—for a split second the primer was visible—the first half-dozen Zulus were past the wagon and within three strides of the solid ground, assegais gleaming and knobkerries brandished—howling black faces—another flap of the canvas—the crash of Moran’s revolver—and with a roar of thunder the wagon, the bridge, and everything on it dissolved in a great blast of orange flame. I was hurled flat, my ears deafened and singing; a piece of timber clattered against the rock beside me. I came dizzily to my feet, to stare at the empty ravine, with a great black cloud billowing in the air above it, a few shreds of rope and timber dangling from the far lip, and on this side, lying in the dust, a single assegai.
Moran reversed his revolver in his hand and pushed it into the back of his sash. Then he tilted his hat back and flicked his fore-finger at its brim.
"Bayete, Udloko," says he softly. "I do like a snap shot, though. Give the gentleman a coconut."
• • •
That was in ’79, my first acquaintance with Tiger Jack, and it was to last only a few more feverish hours which I’ll describe at length some other day, for they don’t matter to the Tiger’s tale, which is strange enough without Rorke’s Drift to interrupt it. That was a nightmare in its own right, if you like—worse than Little Hand or Greasy Grass, for at least at those I’d been able to run. Why, at the Drift there wasn’t even room to hide, and it’ll make a ghastly chapter of its own in my African odyssey, if I can set it down before drink and senility carry me off.
Enough for the moment to say that Moran and I were driven absolutely into that beastly carnage. You see, with our wagon blown to pieces he and I lit out on two of the draught screws, leaving the wounded in a dry cave, Moran intent on fetching help for them, Flashy merely fleeing in his wake—and as dark fell we blundered slap into an impi, for the hills were full of the brutes by now. Then it was head down and heels in, nip and tuck for our lives through the Zulu-infested night with the fiends howling at our heels, and suddenly Moran was yelling and making for a burning building dead ahead, with all hell breaking loose around it, Zulus by the hundred and shots blazing, and there was nothing for it but to follow as he went careering through scrub and bushes, putting his beast to a stone wall, and then a barricade where black bodies and red coats were hacking and slashing in the fire-glare, bayonet against assegai, and my screw took the wall but baulked at the barricade, which I cleared in a frantic dive, launching myself from a pile of Zulu corpses, landing head first on the smoking veranda of what had been the post hospital, going clean through the charred floor, and being hauled half-conscious from the smouldering wreckage by a huge cove with a red beard who left off pistolling to ask me where the dooce I’d come from. I inquired, at the top of my voice, where the hell I was, and between shots he told me.
That, briefly, is how I came to join the garrison at Rorke’s Drift—and all the world knows what happened there. A hundred Warwickshire Welshmen and a handful of invalids stopped four thousand Udloko and Tulwana Zulus in bloody shambles at the mealie-bag ramparts, hammer and tongs and no quarter through that ghastly night with the burning hospital turning the wreckage of the little outpost into a fair semblance of Hell, and Flashy seeking in vain for a quiet corner—which I thought I’d found, once, on the thatch of the commissariat store, and damned if they didn’t set fire to that, too. Eleven Victoria Crosses they won, Chard with his beard scorched, Bromhead stone-deaf, and those ragged Taffies half-dead on their feet, but not too done to fight—oh, and talk. As an unworthy holder of that Cross myself, I’ll say they earned them, and as much glory as you like, for there never was a stand like it in all the history of war. For they didn’t only stand against impossible odds, you see—they stood and won, the garrulous little buggers, and not just ’cos they had Martinis against spears and clubs and a few muskets; they beat ’em hand to hand too, steel against steel at the barricades, and John Zulu gave them best. Well, you know what I think of heroism, and I can’t abide leeks, but I wear a daffodil as my buttonhole on Davy’s Day, for Rorke’s Drift.[8]