of active service. Yet there is another kind of warrior, who stumbles upon a single moment of glory. Lieutenant John Chard was considered by most of his peers to be one of the least impressive soldiers in the British army. Indeed, there could scarcely be a greater contrast with Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. Until a January afternoon in 1879, Chard was esteemed only for his good nature and was notorious for his professional indolence. Then, wholly unexpectedly, he found himself thrust onto the centre of a stage where he gave a performance that won the applause of Victorian England. In a few hours of violent action, Chard achieved a celebrity which persisted to his death, though he never again did anything of military worth. Today, Chard would be relegated to the musty archives of imperial history but for the fact that in 1964 his exploit was embroidered into the epic film Zulu, which almost everyone susceptible to cinema adventure must at some time have seen and delighted in, and in which he was played by Stanley Baker. Modern readers must judge for themselves how far, in reality, its principal player deserved the status conferred upon him when he became one of the more honoured officers of the nineteenth-century British army.
John Rouse Merriott Chard was born into a family of minor Devon gentlefolk on 21 December 1847. He was educated partly at Plymouth New Grammar School, partly by tutors. He followed his elder brother William into the army, entering the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich aged eighteen for the usual thirty-month course of gunnery, fortification and bridging, mathematics, natural and experimental philosophy, landscape drawing, mechanics, French and Hindustani. After passing out of Woolwich eighteenth in a batch of nineteen, he was gazetted lieutenant in the Royal Engineers in July 1868. A subaltern he stubbornly remained through the next eleven years. Until December 1878 he served in a dreary succession of home and foreign garrison postings – Chatham, Bermuda, Malta, Aldershot, Devonport and Chatham again. ‘A partir de trente ans, on commence à être moins propre à faire la guerre,’ Napoleon observed incontrovertibly. Even after passing thirty Chard did not marry: in those days his humble rank discouraged family responsibilities. Not merely did he fail to distinguish himself professionally, he irked superior officers by his laziness. The only memory Woolwich contemporaries retained of Chard was that he was always late for breakfast. His chief merit, in the eyes of his peers, was that his West Country affability rendered him an easy companion in the mess, an important consideration when one had to meet a man there for three meals a day, month in and month out, amid a routine of irksome monotony. When Sir Garnet Wolseley, supreme British field commander of his generation, met Chard later he was unimpressed, dismissing him as ‘a slow, heavy fellow’. The engineer, with his big black beard and a manner diffident to the point of ineffectuality, left youth behind without making any mark upon his chosen profession.
It will never be known why Chard was posted to South Africa as war with the Zulus loomed, nor whether he welcomed the opportunity for active service. Most likely, and as usual in these matters, some engineers had to go, and Chard’s name chanced to be on a list. His nature was to accept, oxlike, whatever duty the army in its wisdom decreed for him. On 11 January 1879 Chard found himself accompanying Lieutenant-General Lord Chelmsford’s army into Zululand, following the expiry of a British ultimatum to King Cete-wayo to which that monarch had deigned no reply. Chelmsford’s expedition was characteristic of its time and kind. The Zulus displayed less deference and more truculence than the conceit of the neighbouring imperial power would tolerate. The British resolved to impose their will, and despatched four columns to pre-empt the threat of a Zulu incursion into Natal. The only thing unusual about this venture was that those who knew Cetewayo’s people warned that they ranked among the most formidable and disciplined warriors in the continent.
Chelmsford’s No. 3 Column reached its intended base at Isandlwana, some ten miles inside Cetewayo’s territory, on 20 January, after a single desultory skirmish with the inhabitants. His lordship left a battalion of the 24th Foot to garrison the camp, while he led out his remaining force in search of the enemy. Ten miles south of Isandlwana stood the little mission station of Rorke’s Drift, a few hundred yards on the near side of the Buffalo River border from Zululand, and thus inside British Natal. Amid a cluster of stone and wooden kraals stood two single-storey thatched buildings, in one of which the British had established a hospital. The other was stacked almost to the roof with biscuit, mealies and ammunition. In command of the post was Chelmsford’s deputy assistant quartermaster-general, Major Henry Spalding.
This officer had been given a company of the 24th Foot and a detachment of Natal Native Levies to guard the supplies, and was also left responsible for thirty-six sick and injured men. The 24th was mostly composed of Englishmen, but around a quarter of its strength was Welsh. Among the ranks of B Company were five men named Jones and another five named Williams. The riflemen at Rorke’s Drift were commanded by Lieutenant Gonville Bromhead. He, like Chard, was an unimpressive officer, who had served more than a decade without attaining a captaincy, despite being the product of a line of distinguished soldiers. One of his brothers was a rising star of the ‘Wolseley ring’. ‘Gonny’, however, was something of a disappointment. Though two years older than Chard, his lieutenancy was three years younger. His professional career was hampered by the fact that he was deaf, and deemed by his superiors almost as lazy as the engineer. Indeed, the two men shared a reputation for good nature and incompetence. It is almost certain 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
