round 8 o’clock on the morning of 23 January 1879, a column of tired and dispirited British soldiers was marching towards the ‘drift’, or river crossing, that would take them out of Zululand and back to friendly territory in Natal.
Their poor state of morale was understandable: they had spent the night camped among the dead on the battlefield of Isandlwana, where on the previous afternoon a battalion of British infantry, 1st Battalion, 24th Regiment of Foot, along with hundreds of African auxiliaries and other supporting troops, had been annihilated by a Zulu army (or impi).
The British commander Lord Chelmsford, who had believed that the Zulus would never attack rifle-armed regulars in the open and would be swiftly defeated if they did, had been proved spectacularly wrong. Now he was approaching his forward supply base, a former mission station on the Natal side of the Mzinyathi (or Buffalo) River known as Rorke’s Drift. It had been left in the hands of a single company from the 2nd Battalion of the 24th.
De Neuville’s painting of the Battle of Rorke’s Drift, which depicted several key events occurring at once. Lieutenant John Chard is seen to the right at the barrier in pale breeches with a rifle, while Lieutenant Gonville Bromhead is standing in the centre of the painting pointing to his left.
