The Bleed by John R. Cronin

Author:John R. Cronin [Cronin, John R.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2012-08-13T14:00:00+00:00

Chapter VIII

Salisbury, Rhodesia

March 1977

* * *

We and Support Commando finished our bush trip at the end of December and split our R&R during the holidays with 1 and 2 Commando in such a way that two of us were in over Christmas and two over New Years. I had 10 glorious days off, so Kitra and I flew down to Cape Town for a week and took the cable car up to Table Mountain, where we had lunch overlooking one of the most beautiful ocean vistas I’ve ever seen. Kind of like Carmel on juice, and from that height, you can actually see the curvature of the earth on the horizon. The confluence of the Indian and Atlantic Oceans lies off the coast, and during the winter from June through August, these are some of the roughest seas anywhere in the world. It was calm when we were there, but only a few months earlier, sixty foot swells were the norm a few miles offshore, and who knows how many ships went down trying to round that treacherous peninsula?

We rented a car and drove towards Durban along a coastal highway that had been graded and paved by Italian POWs during WWII using crushed seashells trucked up from beaches all over the country. Over 30 years later, the road was still a pristine white that emitted such a glare that it hurt the eyes and forced us to stop at a roadside kiosk and buy two pairs of sunglasses before we could continue on. We saw the Wild Coast further on during this trip, with roiling seas crashing among ragged strips of rock that jutted out into the ocean and currents that swept sideways rapidly and looked as dangerous as anywhere.

We also visited the battlefield at Isandlwana, with its distinctive hilltop, where in January of 1879, 20,000 Zulus attacked a column of 1500 British regulars and 2500 Africans, killing about 1500 of them in a series of three-sided envelopments. The first book I had read when I arrived in Rhodesia was Donald R. Morris’s The Washing of the Spears: The Rise and Fall of the Zulu Nation (NY: Simon and Schuster, 1965; also found by NY; Da Capo Press, 1998), and I was anxious to see Isandlwana and Rorke’s Drift, where I could finally put a face to these people and see why, as the most powerful tribe in Southern Africa for 60 years, they paradoxically reached their apex and began their decline with these two battles.

Lord Chelmsford’s command took such devastating losses at Isandlwana because it was strung out over one mile without any flank security and was surprised by the Zulu impis before they were able to organize into defensive squares, and as we looked out over the enormous battlefield, we could see dozens of separate pyramids of stones that had been painted white to mark the positions where pockets of soldiers who had been cut off from the main force had made their last stand before being overrun and cut down.

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