Mistaken Identity
Accompanied by an escort of Natal Carbineers, the body of Louis Napoleon, travelled via Koppie Alleen, Landman’s Drift and Dundee to Pietermaritzburg and then Durban. He was buried in Chislehurst, England, where a large crowd, including Queen Victoria, paid their last respects.
In 1888, his remains, together with those of his father, were re-interred in the crypt of Farnborough Abbey, Hampshire.
His body was brought to Landman’s Drift where Carbutt’s Mounted Troopers formed an escort. It lay for an hour at Fort Jones, Dundee.
Paul Deléage recorded that “We rested for only an hour in Dundee. During this time Col Degacher, with typical French foresight, had requisitioned all the black cloth from the only house in the vicinity and had used it to cover the rough box which was so disagreeable to look upon. There was even enough to drape the inside of the wagon.”
Carbutt’s mounted troopers accompanied the ambulance cart and the coffin down the Uithoek valley towards Wasbank. All the farmers of the neighbourhood stood in silence on the roadside watching the cortege. Seventy years after the event, Lodewyk de Jager’s mother told the story of being one of the silent bystanders.
She was transfixed by a figure she took to be the Prince’s mother, who walked behind the coffin cart wearing a black tricorn hat, white blouse with a large lace collar and a black skirt.
A drawing from the “Graphic” however, revealed the figure’s true identity – it was actually the Roman Catholic priest in his biretta and robes.
His mother, Empress Eugenie, suffered greatly in her sorrow. Once, when the news of his death was fresh, she wrote:
My grief is savage, unquiet, irascible … let no-one talk to me of the consolations that came from God and which I cannot accept at present,”
In March 1880, a few weeks before her 54th birthday, the Empress travelled to South Africa for the cherished purpose of visiting the Zululand donga where her son had died. She intended to spend an all-night vigil at the very spot. It would be the first anniversary of his death.
The circumstances of the vigil were described by the Empress .
“More than once I noticed black forms on top of the bank, which moved silently about and watched me through the tall grasses. This scrutiny was full of curiosity but it was not hostile. I believe these savages wished to express sympathy and pity …. Doubtless they were the very men who had killed my son on this spot … Towards morning a strange thing happened. Although there was not a breath of air, the flames of the candles were suddenly deflected, as if someone wished to extinguish them, and I said to him, “is it indeed you beside me?”
Helpmekaar
Helpmekaar in 1879 was not even a village. Two isolated stone houses and a small chapel some distance away. However, it was the focus of military activity early in 1879. Wagons trains toiled up the heights bringing supplies to the military camp. Three zinc sheds had been erected to hold the reserve stocks of ammunition, biscuits, grain and forage. Tents covered the area and spilled down the hillsides towards Rorkes Drift. Once the sheds were full five thatched huts were erected. A field oven produced fresh bread every other day, despite heavy rain.
A sod fort was constructed, serving as a base for British troop movements. It was to Helpmekaar that the survivors of Isandlwana fled; to where men were taken for burial; where the colours of the 24th Regt were returned to the remnants of the Regiment after being recovered from the Buffalo river.
1899-1900 Anglo Boer War
After the relief of Ladysmith, some 7000-8000 Boer forces took up defences from Glencoe and Dundee to Helpmekaar along the line of the Biggarsberg mountains. General Buller decided to march from Ladysmith, attack Helpmekaar and so roll up the Boer defences towards Dundee. On top of Helpmekaar hill the Boers had settled in, built a fort and some men had the wives in the area to “cook and clean” for them.
On the morning of 13th May, the attack began. The Boers realised too late where the British would attack and had to rapidly move men to the nek at Helpmekaar. It became a race to see whether Lord Dundonald and the British troops or the Boers would be the first to reach the nek. The British won by a few minutes – when the Boers arrived they opened fire on the British and halted their advance. More and more British troops came up and joined in the battle and although the Boers clung obstinately to Helpmekaar, they realised that their position was untenable. During the night they slipped away and were seen in full retreat along the road to Dundee.
The next morning, the 14th, the British followed them. The Boers set fire to the tall winter grass to delay the British pursuit. A dramatic running fight ensued. The Boer rearguard, the American Irish Brigade, fought heroically, using every rocky outcrop as a sangar. The rearguard action by the Irish Brigade gave the Boer forces time to evacuate the Biggarsberg and Dundee. On 15th May, the British forces entered Dundee and the town was relieved.
A Scot Adopts Africa
DR PRIDEAUX SELBY MD (EDINBURGH)
A Northumbrian by birth, Dr Prideaux Selby was already a middle-aged bachelor when he sailed with the Byrnes settlers to South Africa in 1850. He became the first doctor to the Boer families in the Biggarsberg and lived at “Mooiplaas” for 25 years.
Shortly before the beginning of the Anglo-Zulu War in 1879, he moved to the farm “Zarana” in the Dundee area and was a refugee in Fort Pine after the disaster at Isandlwana. A family account tells of Doctor Selby delivering babies at the Fort.
Two days after Lieutenant-Colonel Black had led a volunteer out of Fort Melvill to make a reconnaissance of Isandlwana battlefield, Lord Chelmsford decided to send all the cavalry to Rorkes Drift in order to bury the dead at Isandlwana and bring back the wagons and anything else of value to the military. Captain Robson brought the Buffalo Border Guards and Newcastle Mounted Rifles from Fort Pine accompanied by Doctor Selby, who, as an old frontier hand and doctor to many families in the Biggarsberg came to help identify the Colonial dead. It is a fact that his hair turned white overnight from the horrors of the battlefield. That massacre and the fiasco at Majuba in 1881, estranged the old doctor from the British in his latter days. He identified himself completely with the Boer community and left all his property to his Boer neighbours when he died.
His tombstone in the Smith family graveyard at Talana reads:
Dr Prideaux Selby JPL RCSE
Of Alnwick, Northumberland
Died 30th March 1888
Aged 66 years
“I Lost my spectacles”
(from the diary of James Brickhill)
Mr Brickhill, civilian interpreter with the Central Column, was escaping from the battlefield of Isandlwana, taking the perilous route through what later became known as Fugitives Drift.
“… rising on this side we were again exposed to the full fire of the enemy, still in hot pursuit. Crossing a little ridge we came to a bog. My horse got bogged. I spurred him. He reared and reared and my glasses came off. So serious was this loss for me that for a few seconds I peered down into the green moss to try and catch some reflection of them, but the whirr of a Zulu bullet not far off reminded me that time was precious, so on I sped.”
THREE YEARS LATER
At Isandlwana the horror of the massacre was still real.
“The circles where stood the rows of tents are plainly discernible, while strewn about are tent pegs, cartridge cases, broken glass, bits of rope, meat tins and sardine boxes, pierced with assegai stabs, shrivelled pieces of shoe leather and rubbish of every description: bones of horses and oxen gleam white and ghastly and here and there in the grass one stumbles upon a half buried skeleton.”
As Mitford and Johnson tramped down towards Fugitive’s Drift, the evidence of disaster was still thick on the ground.
“Heaps of debris lay about – bones and skulls of oxen, belt buckles, sardine tins, shrivelled up boots, the nails falling out of rotting soles, odds and ends of clothing, old brushes – in fact, rubbish of all sorts: while every ten or twenty years, we came upon sadder traces of the flight in the shape of little heaps of stones, through the interstices of which could be seen the bones of some unfortunate person buried underneath.”
“At the bottom of one of these fissures lay the fragments of an ammunition train which had evidently taken a regular “header”; the shattered skeletons of four horses or mules in a heap together and thinly covered over with old straps and harness, ammunition boxes, splintered and broken, were strewn.
I found the rope handle of one of the intact and very hard I had to saw at it, before I could get it off. Pretty good this, after 3 years of exposure to weather.”
A ZULU SOLDIER TELLS OF HIS PART IN THE BATTLE OF ISANDLWANA
Early in 1929, two reporters from The Natal Mercury interviewed a number of Zulu survivors of the battle of Isandlwana. One of them was KumbekaGwabe of the uMcijoibutho, who had been born beyond Nongoma in northern Zululand, and who had been in the prime of his manhood in 1879 when he had been summoned to join the army collecting at oNdini. This is how he remembered the Isandlwana campaign.
We left oNdini and went through Mahlabathini across the White Mfolozi up to Babanango, and then on to Nquthu, where, in the distance, we could see the white tents of the white man at Isandlwana …That night [21 January 1879] some of the enemy’s scouts saw us and shot at us. We put out our fires and waited in the darkness for the morning. All of us had two or more assegais [spears] and a small shield, and some also had muzzle-loaders which had been issued to them by Cetshwayo, who got large numbers from the Portuguese …
Just after the sun came up … we crept towards the white men’s tents. We crawled along the grass with the white men shooting at us until we got within assegai throw of them. Then we rose and the white men did the same. A lot of our men had been shot down by the enemy as we were crawling though the grass and we had no more ammunition, so we then rushed and started to fight them hand-to-hand with our assegais, the white men pulling out their revolvers and bayonets …
The fighting … was so fierce that only a very small handful of the white men got away fro us over the Buffalo [Mzinyathi] river. We spared no lives and did not ask for any mercy for ourselves. We killed every white man left in the camp and the horses and cattle too. After killing them we used to split them up the stomach so that their bodies would not swell.
We took the white men’s rifles and tents, after cutting them up into convenient lengths … We left the wagons … Among our people who had been killed was our leader Mkhosana[kaMvundlana, chief of the Biyela and induna of the uMcijo] whose face we covered with a shield until the relations of our dead came and took their bodies away after the battle and also took the wounded home. The dead of the white people we left where they had fallen and some time afterwards they were buried …
That evening when everything was over and quiet we went back to the donga [the Ngwebeni valley] and slept there. The next morning we went back to Mahlabathini … Cetshwayo thanked us for what we had done at Isandlwana. “But,” he said, “if you think you have finished all the white men you are wrong, because they are still coming.” Then we began to sing his praises and told him we had thrown away the white man … We were then told that we could go home …
At Isandlwana I myself only killed one man. Dum! Dum! went his revolver as he was firing from right to left, and I came along beside him and stuck my assegai under his right arm, pushing it through his body until it came out and slit his stomach so that I knew that he would not shoot any more of my people.
[from the Supplement to The Natal Mercury, 22 January 1929]How the Unknown Soldier was Chosen
The war had left millions dead. Some had been identified and buried, many were mutilated beyond recognition, while others sank into the suffocating mud.
Each year the farmers who tilled the former battlefields would find bodies or pieces of bodies.
As a mark of respect for these thousands of lost souls it was decided to create a memorial to the Unknown Soldier.
The unmarked remains of 4 British soldiers were exhumed – one from each of the 4 great battlefields. Draped in Union flags, the 4 anonymous bodies were set before a blindfolded army officer. Whichever body the officer pointed to would become the Unknown Soldier.
Placed in an oak coffin, the remains were sent back to Britain for a state funeral in Westminster Abbey with full military honours on 11 November 1920.
It was a ceremony and a remembrance for all those whose names or final resting place might never be known.
In the 7 days that the Unknown Soldier lay in state, over 1 million people came to pay their respects.
