Hlobane is one of the flat-topped mountains that rise abruptly from the plains of north-western Zululand, near the modern town of Vryheid. The abaQulusi people who held it lived far enough from the Zulu capital at Ulundi to fight largely for their own ground. Wood's task was to keep them occupied while Lord Chelmsford tried to relieve the besieged garrison at Eshowe. The mountain was really two plateaux, joined at its eastern end by a brutal natural staircase. Wood sent Lieutenant-Colonel Redvers Buller's mounted men up the steep eastern track to seize the high ground and lift the cattle, with a second force under Major Russell taking the lower plateau. On paper it was a tidy raid. The terrain and the timing would unmake it.

Buller's troopers gained the summit and the herding began. Wood, climbing with a small escort, met a group of the Border Horse who twice refused his orders to advance into fire from the caves. He pressed on regardless. In the fighting that followed, his staff officer Captain Campbell and his interpreter Lloyd were killed clearing those caves. Then, riding the southern flank, Wood saw the dust of the main Zulu army, perhaps twenty thousand strong and a full day early, sweeping toward the mountain. They would seal Buller on the heights and swallow Russell whole. A garbled order sent Russell's force off in the wrong direction, away toward Zunguin, and the trap closed with Buller's men still stranded on top of Hlobane.

The only way down was the rocky chasm between the plateaux. Horses panicked on the loose boulders; men were thrown, crushed, or shot as the emboldened abaQulusi pressed in from above and the sides. The descent dissolved into chaos, every yard of it fought. Among the dead was Piet Uys, the Boer farmer who had ridden with Wood as a volunteer and who fell defending the retreat; a marker still stands where he died. Captain Robert Barton, commanding the Frontier Light Horse rearguard, was killed, and the Border Horse was cut off and annihilated. Those who reached the plain rode double, two men to a horse, and made for the camp at Kambula with the Zulu army skirmishing on every side.

Hlobane was a clear Zulu victory, the third and last great one of the war after Isandlwana and the Ntombe River. Fifteen British officers and scores of soldiers were killed, and the African levies who had marched with the column suffered grievously, hundreds of them dead or scattered in the rout. The loss of so many horses crippled what mobility the survivors had left. Five Victoria Crosses came out of that single terrible day, three of them for men who turned back into the killing ground to drag wounded comrades to safety. One small grace stands out: Trooper Ernest Grandier, captured alive and taken to Ulundi, was released unharmed on Cetshwayo's order. The disaster lasted barely a day. The very next morning the Zulu army threw itself against Wood's fortified laager at Kambula and was shattered, and the tide of the war turned for good.