At a spot near to the present village of Weenen ("Weeping"--so called in remembrance of that terrible day), which lies not very far from the village of Colenso, the Zulu army killed an entire body of emigrants--forty-one men, fifty-six women, one hundred and eighty-five children, and two hundred and fifty coloured servants. The bodies were mutilated, and neither woman nor child were spared; some were found with as many as thirty spear-wounds in them. All the white souls in Natal would have perished had not three young men escaped, who warned the remaining scattered parties of their danger. The wagons were hastily drawn together into little laagers, and after a long and desperate struggle the Zulus were repulsed, women standing beside the men, reloading their guns and aiding almost as greatly in the defence as the men. Then the remnant of the people gathered themselves together to discuss what should be done. A few had given up all hope, and even spoke of retracing their steps across the hundreds of weary miles they had traversed. But the women--then as always, the strength of the South African people, and who resembled more those old Teutonic ancestresses of our northern races, of whom Tacitus tells us that "they dared with their men in war and suffered with them in peace," than we in the drawing-room and the ballroom--the women raised their voices unanimously, and cried that there should be no surrender; there, where their fellows had fallen, they would found their republic or die, and they, who had faced death, beside man, were listened to. In one battle ten Boers fell, among them Piet Uys, the father of a family noted down to the present day for courage, whose young son, a mere lad, seeing his father unhorsed and stabbed by the Zulu soldiers, rushed back and died beside him.[67] [67] It was a younger son of this noted family who so distinguished himself for bravery in a later Zulu war, when fighting side by side with English soldiers, and who is reported, with I know not how much truth, to have saved the life of a noted English General. But in the end, at the great and terrible battle of Blood River, December 16, 1838, the Zulus were defeated, and Dingaan fled. His brother Panda was made king in his stead. From that time the 16th of December has been always a holiday in the African Republic. When the Boer army arrived at Umgungunhlovo, Dingaan's kraal, they found still the bodies of their sixty-six comrades, which after eighteen months were yet untouched by beasts of prey, though dried and decayed. In Retief's leathern bag was found the paper signed with Dingaan's cross, giving them permission to inhabit the land of Natal, from the Drakensberg to the sea at Durban, from the Tugela River to the Umzimvobu.