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of the battle was one of universal confusion. Infantrymen were fighting in isolated groups. Back to back, in shrinking squares, the riflemen fought on with bullets and then with rifle-butts and bayonets, falling one by one. Among the tents and wagons, the British and the Zulu warriors carried on a random struggle of individual encounters. The watching horseman saw a sailor of the Naval Brigade, wounded in the leg, fighting madly with his cutlass against the encroaching warriors, his back to a wagon-wheel. One dead tribesman lay across his feet, another at his side. A moment later, a third who had crawled under the wagon pierced him through the body from behind.
    There was a glimpse of Pulleine in the chaos, looking about him for his company commanders. Captain Pope and a dozen men still contested the thrust of the advance. His men fought with fixed bayonets, clubbing with rifle-butts until an assegai stabbed Pope through the breast. Still on his feet, he tried vainly to pull the shaft from his body while the powerful arms of the advancing tribes bore him down.
    On the far side of the wagon-park, Captain Younghusband and the remnants of C Company had turned one of the wagons over in preparation for a last stand behind its shelter. Younghusband was passing down the line of survivors, shaking hands with each in a solemn farewell. A moment later, the warriors had swarmed over the shattered wagon, bringing down the captain and the last of his platoons.
    The time had come for the horseman to draw a little further up the col, beyond the point that any reconnaissance by the tribes might reach in the wake of their victory. He had scouted the ground two nights before and knew the path that would take him higher while keeping out of immediate view. Not that those engaged in the dreadful hand-to-hand combat below would have much time to survey the hills above them. He led the dappled mare quietly, glancing down from time to time as opportunity gave him an aerial view of what was taking place.
    Durnford and a dozen or so of his troopers held out briefly at the foot of the col. Their ammunition spent, they thrust and repelled the black battalions for a while with their bayonets. Then the leaders of the Uvi and Umcijo, splendid in their head-feathers and leopard pelts, seized the bodies of their own dead and bore them like a battle-ram onto the bayonet blades. Before they could free their weapons, Durnford and his men were overwhelmed.
    Pulleine again trained his field-glasses on the ridges, no doubt in a dwindling hope of seeing Chelmsford’s column riding hard to the rescue. He saw nothing but a deserted horizon of rock against the blanched heat of the sky. Had the colonel known where to look, he might have glimpsed a messenger of fate standing by a dappled mare.
    Pulleine was not that witness’s personal enemy. Had there been means of paying tribute to a fallen foe, the hunter might have availed himself of it. As it was, the scene below confirmed that the commander of the camp knew hope was gone and that he must nerve himself for what remained. Pulleine could not see, as the watcher on the col could see, that even in the wagon-park Quartermaster Sergeant Bloomfield was dead, sprawling on the tail-board of an ammunition wagon. A drummer-boy of the 24th had been slaughtered and left dangling by his heels from a wagon shaft.
    Alone among the doomed survivors, Colonel Pulleine had a purpose to fulfil. In a few hours, Chelmsford’s column would return and the debris of defeat must be sifted. The past half hour had seen a disaster without equal in British imperial rule. Two thousand men, armed with the latest rifles, field-guns, a rocket battery, and Gatling guns had been wiped out by barefoot tribes with spears and shields. Pulleine must surely have sworn to himself that the world should know the reason.
    As the hunter watched from his refuge, Pulleine, bareheaded and with his tunic open at the top, drew his revolver and moved