There is a telling sequence early on in the 1964 film Zulu when news of the disaster that has just occurred at the Battle of Isandlwana reaches the command at Rorke’s Drift. It’s a conflab between the upper-crust Lieutenant Gonville Bromhead of the 24th Foot (Michael Caine) and Lieutenant Gert Adendorff (Gert van den Bergh), an Afrikaner officer of the Natal Native Contingent and survivor of the massacre on 22 January 1879 that was the first major encounter in the Anglo-Zulu War. Bromhead (as depicted by Caine) is unable to get his head around the loss of an entire column of 800 men, declaring it ‘damned impossible’. Adendorff responds by pointing out that it was actually 1,200 men who were lost because ‘there were 400 native levies also’ – a consideration summarily and arrogantly dismissed by the British officer, beginning with: ‘Damn the levies, man!’ In response, Adendorff’s fury knows few bounds: ‘What the hell do you mean? …they died on your side didn’t they?’ The rather more grounded Lieutenant John Chard (Stanley Baker), of the Royal Engineers, realises that they will soon need every man they can muster: ‘Talk to our levies, will you?’ he tells Adendorff. ‘Tell them whose side they’re on.’
The subject of ‘native levies’ and ‘side’ first came to me when I was considering another famous battle of the British colonial era: Major General Herbert Kitchener’s standout victory over the Mahdi’s successor at Omdurman on 2 September 1898. Perhaps the best known image of the battle is Edward Matthew Hale’s painting The Charge of the 21st Lancers: the Lancers had defeated an enemy force that appeared on the British right flank. Fought during the Anglo-Egyptian conquest of Sudan, Omdurman was certainly not as straightforward as that vignette might suggest. It was a battle fought by a British-Egyptian expeditionary force against a Sudanese army of the Islamic Mahdist state, a Mahdist army having captured Khartoum 13 years before. This revenge mission culminated in a battle at which the British ‘regulars’ totalled only just over 8,000 men, with more than twice that figure, over 17,500, being Egyptian, a number which also included some Sudanese fighting against their fellow Sudanese. Opposing them was an army of more than 50,000, so ostensibly with a two-to-one advantage. Although we know immediately that the British forces were led by Kitchener and Hector ‘Fighting Mac’ MacDonald, we have no idea who commanded their native allies. They are ‘unknown Egyptian officers’, whose lot it was always to be disregarded; Caine’s Bromhead would probably have approved.
The cost of war
The utilisation of native levies was popular among past imperial powers, but still plays its part in the 21st century, as the U.S. military has become more and more serious about the raising and training of indigenous security forces in its so-called ‘War on Terror’. In both Afghanistan and Iraq, there would be tacit recognition that there would never be sufficient ‘Western’ boots on the ground to wage effective counter-insurgency, and that security needed to be outsourced to ‘locals’. Here is acknowledgement that even a powerful nation like the United States cannot do everything alone. This is nothing new.
Counting cities