Great Victory

The Maxim machine gun was devastatingly lethal, yet the Indian troops seemed "fearless and undaunted," launching wave after wave of attacks without end. This was completely unlike the performance of the Indian soldiers at the Tugela River.

"None of you are allowed to retreat!" The British blocking detachments in the rear played a major role.

In fact, both the British and Indians were anxious under these circumstances. But it was like a stampede, where those in the rear knew nothing of what was happening ahead and blindly surged forward. Failures in command and coordination meant that the Indian soldiers at the front understood the situation, while those behind did not, and the British blocking detachments behind the Indians knew even less.

Had it been a regular British division, the commander might have quickly discovered the problem. Yet the senior commanders of the Indian divisions were British.

The flat terrain limited the British commander's grasp of what was happening on the front lines, while Indian soldiers surging forward from the rear was actually a common sight. After all, the British knew perfectly well that the Indians had weak fighting spirit. Put another way, it would have been abnormal if the Indians had not fled to the rear.

If one could have looked down from the sky at that moment, one would have seen an utterly bizarre battlefield. East African machine gunners were massacring Indian soldiers in great numbers at the front, while British blocking detachments urged the Indians behind them to keep feeding themselves into the slaughter.

After more than twenty minutes, the British commander finally noticed the change on the battlefield: the number of Indian troops had sharply declined, and as the bodies piled up, the horrors of the fighting ahead could vaguely be seen even from the rear.

It