how to use advance and fire?

[Didz]

Now that I remember, the story I always heard was that the British were sure that they couldn't lose a battle due to their high tech guns and so performed very tactically poorly and were defeated.

Quick interwebs search seems to back that up. They were flanked and out maneuvered. Guns not performing as well as planned also played into it.

The battlefield archeology actually suggests that the official version of events was a fabrication. The dispersal of battlefield debris. spent cartidges, discarded weapons and a equipment etc. suggests that the British lost because they were complacent and over confident in their firepower superiority. The best assessment is that instead of forming a battle line close to their camp they advanced on the Zulu positions on the ridge in open skirmish order, without conductnig any scouting and were swamped by the huge number of warriors who suddenly emerged from behind it in much larger numbers than expected.

Panic then ensued, with jamming weapons and extended ranks not really helping. It seems from concentration of cartridges that some small rally squares were formed but the vast majority of the army simply ran for their lives discarding anything that might hamper their flight.

What they didn't consider was that the Zulu's always attack from three sides, and so in running away from one group the fugitives ran into another. Apparently, the final massacres took place in a waddi several miles from the camp where the Zulu's finally caught up with the last of the routers and finished them off. At this point those who still had weapons had fired most of their ready ammunition and the camp had been overrun so there were very few spent cartidges in this area just a lot of scattered equipment, left buried in the soil.