Shaka’s mother, Nandi, was a daughter of a chieftain of the eLangeni clan. Shaka’s father was a chieftain of the small, and then unknown, Zulu clan. But unwed pregnancy and a failed marriage forced Nandi to return to her tribe, where she was less welcomed than she had been then with the Zulus. Shaka grew up fatherless among people who despised him as well as his mother, the butt of every joke, ridiculed for his weakly body (and underdeveloped sexual organs), lonely and bitter.
At the age of twenty-three he was called to serve as a warrior with the Mtetwa clan and did so for the next six years. In his first battle he fought the Butelezi, winning territories that included those of the Zulu. The Mtetwa chieftain, Dingiswayo, saw his leadership qualities and earmarked him to be chieftain of the Zulu, thus making them a buffer to the Mtetwa territory. Dingiswayo made him leader of the Mtetwa army, meanwhile, and here Shaka refined his battle tactics and weapons, as well as the army’s organization. When Senzangakona Zulu died, Shaka was made chieftain.
Shaka worked his Zulu warriors ruthlessly, punishing any the sign of the slightest hesitation with death. The first people he attacked were the eLangeni clan, sparing only those who had showed him and his mother kindness. He destroyed the Butelezi clan, leaving few survivors, taking Butelezi maidens to form a seraglio which eventually numbered over a thousand. But, convinced that any offspring might someday oppose him, he shied from full consummation.
By 1817, Zulu territory had increased fourfold, and Shaka and Dingiswayo compacted to engage in a major expedition to win even more. Dingiswayo died, however, and so by 1820 Shaka ruled most of southeast Africa and Natal.
In 1824 Shaka’s mother, Nandi, died. In hysterical grief at the funeral he ordered several men to be executed, but in the chaos, over 7,000 people died. The true extent of his mental instability was revealed when he then practically ordered the clan’s death by starvation in reverence to Nandi. After three months, sense of a kind was restored, but the seed of doubt against Shaka – and perhaps in his own mind too – had been sown. Shaka and his army began to go downhill, which is where, in the winter of 1827, Matthew Hervey and his men meet them.
Students of early Zulu history may dispute my account of the first contact with Shaka’s army. They would be right to do so. Chief Matiwane owed no allegiance to Shaka. His clan, the Ngwanes, although one of the Nguni people like the ‘pure’ Zulu, had for a decade resisted incorporation into Shaka’s greater Zulu kingdom. In the course of evasion, however, they became a marauding tribe as troublesome as the Zulu to the Xhosa and others of Kaffraria. But at the time of Hervey’s brush with them the precise status of Matiwane’s warriors was unknown, and their depredations were lumped together with those of Shaka in the reports reaching Cape Town. Scholars also disagree: while published sources have tended to make Matiwane non-Zulu, later academic research has not been so certain. For instance, John Burridge Scott in a very thorough doctoral thesis (The British Soldier on the Eastern Cape frontier 1800-1850, University of Port Elizabeth, 1973) calls Matiwane’s tribesmen unequivocally Zulu. And, indeed, after Shaka’s death Matiwane declared his allegiance to the new king, Dingane, Shaka’s half-brother – as Matthew Hervey, his dragoons and the Mounted Rifles will discover to their cost in future adventures.
THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON’S CAVALRY
AN EXPLANATTORY NOTE
Here is a picture – a very incomplete one – of the cavalry in the Duke of Wellington’s day. The picture remained the same, with but minor changes, until after the Crimean War nearly half a century later.
Like the infantry, the cavalry was organized in regiments. Each had a colonel as titular head, usually a very senior officer (in the case of the 10th Light Dragoons, for instance, it was the Prince of Wales; in the case of the fictional 6th Light Dragoons it was first the Earl of Sussex and then Lord George Irvine, both lieutenant generals) who kept a fatherly if distant eye on things, in particular the appointment of officers. The actual command of the regiment was exercised by a lieutenant-colonel. He had a major as his second in command (or ‘senior major’ as he was known in the Sixth and other regiments), an adjutant who was usually commissioned from the ranks, a regimental serjeant-major (RSM) and various other ‘specialist’ staff.
A cavalry regiment comprised a number of troops identified by a letter (A Troop, B Troop, etc.), each of a hundred or so men commanded by a captain, though in practice the troops were usually under strength. The number of troops in a regiment varied depending on where it was stationed; in Spain, for instance, at the height of the war, there were eight.
The captain was assisted by two or three subaltern officers – lieutenants and cornets (second-lieutenants) – and a troop serjeant-major, who before 1811 was known as a quartermaster (QM). After 1811 a regimental quartermaster was established to supervise supply and quartering (accommodation) for the regiment as a whole – men and horses. There was also a riding-master (RM), like the QM usually commissioned from the ranks (‘the ranks’ referred to everyone who was not a commissioned officer, in other words RSM and below). With his staff of rough-riders (a rough was an unbroken remount, a replacement horse) the RM was responsible for training recruits both human and equine.
Troops were sometimes paired in squadrons, numbered First, Second, Third (and occasionally Fourth). On grand reviews in the eighteenth century the colonel would command the first squadron, the lieutenant-colonel the second, and the major the third, each squadron bearing an identifying guidon, a silk banner – similar to the infantry battalion’s colours. By the time of the Peninsular War, however, guidons were no longer carried mounted in the field, and the squadron was commanded by the senior of the two troop leaders (captains).
A troop or squadron leader, as well indeed as the commanding officer, would give his orders in the field by voice and through his trumpeter. His words of command were either carried along the line by the sheer power of his voice, or were repeated by the troop officers, or in the case of the commanding officer were relayed by the adjutant (‘gallopers’ and aides-de-camp performed the same function for general officers). The trumpet was often used for repeating an order and to recall or signal scattered troops. The commanding officer and each captain had his own trumpeter, who was traditionally mounted on a grey, and they were trained by the trumpet-major (who, incidentally, was traditionally responsible for administering floggings).
The lowest rank was private man. In a muster roll, for instance, he was entered as ‘Private John Smith’; he was addressed by all ranks, however, simply as ‘Smith’. In the Sixth and regiments like them he would be referred to as a dragoon. The practice of referring to him as a trooper came much later; the cavalry rank ‘trooper’ only replaced ‘private’ officially after the First World War. In Wellington’s day, a trooper was the man’s horse – troop horse; an officer’s horse was known as a charger (which he had to buy for himself – two of them at least – along with all his uniform and equipment).
A dragoon, a private soldier, would hope in time to be promoted corporal, and he would then be addressed as, say, ‘Corporal Smith’ by all ranks. The rank of lance-corporal, or in some regiments ‘chosen man’, was not yet properly established, though it was used unofficially. In due course a corporal might be promoted sergeant (with a ‘j’ in the Sixth and other regiments) and perhaps serjeant-major. The best of these non-commissioned officers (NCOs – every rank from corporal to RSM, i.e. between private and cornet, since warrant rank was not yet properly established), if he survived long enough, would hope to be promoted RSM, and would then be addressed by the officers as ‘Mr Smith’ (like the subaltern officers), or by subordinates as ‘Sir’. In time the RSM might be commissioned as a lieutenant to be adjutant, QM or RM.