uits, and can either
keep with them or ride with my orderlies."

Much pleased with the permission given, the lads returned to the
waggons, and the next morning they started on their way.

The column bivouacked that night at Dill's Town, and reached Rorke's
Drift between three and four o'clock in the morning, and were there
joined by the Natal Carabineers and Colonel Harness, R.A., with guns.

At daybreak on the 20th the reconnoitring force crossed the river. No
signs of the enemy were seen until they neared Isandula; then
signal-fires blazed up on the hills to the right, and spread quickly
from hill to hill far into the interior. Pushing steadily on, the plain
of Isandula was reached by ten o'clock. The whole scene of the conflict
was overgrown with long grass, thickly intermixed with growing crops of
oats and Indian corn. Lying thickly here, and scattered over a wide
area, lay the corpses of the soldiers. The site of the camp itself was
marked by the remains of the tents, intermingled with a mass of broken
trunks, boxes, meat-tins, papers, books, and letters in wild disorder.
The sole visible objects, however, rising above the grass, were the
waggons, all more or less broken up.

The scouts were placed in all directions to give warning of the approach
of any enemies. The Army Service Corps set to work to harness the
seventy pairs of led horses they had brought with them to the best of
the waggons, and the troops wandered over the scene of the engagement,
and searched for and buried all the bodies they found, with the
exception of those of the 24th Regiment, as these, Colonel Glyn had
asked, should be left to be buried by their comrades. The bodies of the
officers of Colonel Durnford's corps were all found together, showing
that when all hope of escape was gone they had formed in a group and
defended themselves to the last. The men of the Royal Artillery buried
all the bodies of their slain comrades who could be found, but the
shortness of the time and the extent of the ground over which the fight
had extended rendered anything like a thorough search impossible.

The object of the expedition was not to fight, and as at any moment the
Zulus might appear in force upon the field, a start was made as soon as
the waggons were ready. Forty of the best waggons were brought out,
with some water-carts, a gun-limber and a rocket-battery cart. Twenty
waggons in a disabled condition were left behind. Some seventy wag