Dave and Dad are…
Michael Caine.
Today was finally the day we made it to Rorke’s Drift, achieving one of the key items on my bucket list.
But that wasn’t until the afternoon. The morning saw us return to Isandlwana. It was cloudy and overcast, occasionally drizzling a little on us in contrast to yesterday’s sun and heat, but in many ways it was even neater this way.
It’s not a well trod tourist attraction, at least by Western standards, and with the addition of inclement weather we had the place pretty much entirely to ourselves. The effect of having a battlefield completely to yourself cannot be overstated. The solitude really adds dramatically to the ambiance. When I was a kid the fam stopped at Andersonville Prison in Georgia during one of our Civil War road trips, and the eerie calm of that place at 7am was intense.
We went almost immediately to the cave partway up Isandlwana hill. This small cave was where the last British survivor held out, apparently lasting some time before the Zulus could finally get to him. We didn’t have time to go up there yesterday.
In fact we didn’t have time to go on the hill much at all and were excited to be able to do it now, see the cave, and check out the memorial to Younghusband’s last stand. Victorian era officer names ruled. It’s a shame peoples’ names today are so boring. I wish I was Reverend Dave Younghusband or “Left-tenant David Bromhead”.
From there I was all game to ascend the hill. The Old Man’s knees were not so game.
So he went down while I went up.
He’ll regret the decision. It was a pretty mild hike with the exception of two brief vertical climbs and the view from the top was just magnificent.
Exceptional.
I can’t imagine anything better.
Unless it was sepia.
Or me at the top in sepia.
Yeah.
Sepia rules. It’s the way battlefield photos should be taken.
Seriously though, the view from the top was just awesome. You really could see out over the whole plain, miles to the front and even in this weather pick out the ridges where Chelmsford was off bumbling around, the small conical hill where Durnford encountered trouble, the cairns marking where the soldiers made their last stands. And looking the other way, the hill overlooking Rorke’s Drift and way off in the distance, Fugitives’ Drift Lodge itself.
See…
I really didn’t want to leave, but tore myself down in an attempt to convince the Old Man to walk Fugitives’ Trail. It was a doomed venture, after all he’d already used the knee excuse once this morning and we had the car parked back up the hill, but using the “just one more cairn” line I did manage to go a little ways down the hill. There really are an impressive number of cairns along the route, further proof, as if it were needed of how violent and terrifying that route must have been.
…even we look better in sepia.
The only complaint, and not something that we would’ve known to complain about if not for the quality of our guides, was that there was so much forestation. Apparently at the time of the battle none of these trees and shrubs were here. It was open ground, just covered with rocks and boulders. All the green has been brought in since then.
This is not an uncommon situation, in fact, as my dad pointed out, it’s been a huge issue recently at Gettysburg where an effort to remove non-historic trees to return the battlefield to a more historically accurate condition has been loudly opposed by idiot tree huggers who can’t see the battlefield for the trees (so to speak).
The weather cleared up nicely in the afternoon, just in time for our trip to Rorke’s Drift. This tour was led by George (cause the Brits won this one) and it was an odd sort of tour. Not because George wasn’t a good guide, he was excellent (if perhaps somewhat slanted towards the British perspective on some mildly contentious debates) it’s just that the battlefield is about as big as my first apartment in New York, which could fit a twin bed, a narrow desk and me, presuming I held my breath.
Seriously, the mission station was really a small compound with two buildings, one converted to a hospital and one to a storehouse. The whole space was probably the size of an indoor soccer field. Some new buildings had cropped up around it; this was after all, in the middle of ‘town’. But the hospital (now museum) was rebuilt over the same foundations, and a line of bricks laid into the ground delineated where the outer walls once stood. The stone cattle kraal, directly adjacent to the storehouse is still standing and they also have marked out where the final mealie bag redoubt was built. So despite the changes, it was really easy to visualize what it looked like back then.
George set us up with chairs and water and told us the story. He, like Joseph yesterday, played up his individual style (George’s was his stiff upper lip Britisher) while still peppering his talk with David Rattray stories.
He then led us around the hospital, stopping at each room to discuss what happened to its inhabitants over the course of the battle. My Old Man and I were particularly excited about this being big fans of Private Hook. Of course the hard drinking, lazy shirker turned hero of the movie was actually the teetotaling gent known as Hook the Cook in real life. A reality I still choose to ignore in favor of his cinematic counterpart. It turns out that’s not the only reality I’ll have to ignore when watching it from now on. George informed us that Zulu actually contains 97 historical inaccuracies. (The Old Man and I absolutely CANNOT WAIT to rewatch it and try to spot them now. For those of you interested in playing at home lists, though not the full list of 97, can be found HERE, HERE and HERE. I’ll start you off with another one: in real life Bromhead was deaf! )
He then took us over to the final lines of defense and walked us through the last hours of the battle and the aftermath. More Victoria Crosses, Britain’s highest honor for bravery, were awarded here than in any other battle in history. Eleven crosses is even more impressive when you realize there were only 139 soldiers at the battle. Of course, in part this was because of Britain’s desperate need to restore some honor to offset the total disaster that took place a few hours earlier over the hill. And sadly, (though one of the most interesting things we learned during the tour) most of those VC winners died poor, alone, and in some cases insane most likely from PTSD.
Still, very cool tour. We are coming back to look at it some more tomorrow. This trip rules.
The museum had this amazing diorama of the battle all done out in thousands of little miniatures. The Old Man and I spent a considerable amount of time drooling over it.
Misc Notes:
• There is a guy living on Isandlwana Hill. Halfway up it, right where I had to begin a short vertical section I came across a shallow, wide-mouthed cave looking out over the back towards Rorke’s Drift. In it were the remains of a fire, a couple old plastic jugs (presumably for water) and some fruit laid out on a stone that served as a bench/bed. No sign of the resident, which was probably for the best as it was mildly unsettling. After all we were alone in the park and if you’re living in a cave you probably are a little desperate. But nonetheless, if I had to be a homeless cave dweller I cannot imagine a more spectacular place to do it. Shoot I wish he wasn’t there and that the park still allowed camping (it used to 20 years ago when absolutely no one paid any attention to the area’s historical significance. For all the good he did, David Rattray is preventing me from camping right where the 24th did.)
• After sweating all night to know the outcome of the Bears/Packers game we called Max pretty much as soon as cell reception returned. So we heard about the tragic defeat while standing in the cave on the side of Isandlwana Hill. Appropriate. Max was pretty damn jealous. He should be.
• At our table at dinner tonight was a Brit (maybe Scots. Can’t remember) guy who is an ultra-marathon runner. You heard of these people? The ones who treat normal marathons as warm up jogs. This dude flies all around the world to run hundreds of miles in extreme conditions. He did that Saharan one; he’s done one in the Amazon. Cause yeah, nothing says fun more than running 100+ miles IN EXTREME CONDITIONS.
Oh, and did I mention he now does this in those new shoes that have the size and appearance of socks. So essentially, he’s doing all this barefoot! I really don’t understand humanity.