Colonel Evelyn Wood had built his position to be attacked. On a ridge stood a hexagonal laager of wagons chained tight, a separate kraal for the cattle, and a stone redoubt on a rise to the north. Trenches and earth parapets ringed it all. Six seven-pounder guns covered the approaches. His force came to about two thousand men. The day before, the Zulu had savaged his mounted troops at Hlobane, and Wood knew the full impi was now coming for him. When his scouts confirmed the army was on the move that morning, he did not panic. Confident his men could man the defenses in ninety seconds, he ordered them to finish their dinner first.

The Zulu came in the classic formation, the chest driving forward while two horns swept wide to envelop. Wood sent Redvers Buller's horsemen out to provoke the right horn early, before the whole army could strike together. The riders fired a volley and raced back, eleven thousand warriors roaring after them: "Don't run away, Johnnie! We want to speak to you." The trap worked. The right horn charged ahead of the rest and broke against disciplined volley fire and shell. Then the center and left horn poured into a ravine below the redoubt and surged out at the cattle kraal, fighting hand to hand until the British fell back to the redoubt. For a moment Zulu morale soared. Riflemen took the kraal walls and the huts beyond and turned the defenders' own fire against them.

Wood ordered a counterattack. Two companies of the 90th Light Infantry, led by Major Hackett, fixed bayonets and charged across open ground to drive the warriors back over the ravine's lip. It worked perfectly, until Zulu marksmen in the surrounding huts opened on Hackett's flank. He took a blinding wound to the head, and forty-four of his men were killed or hurt before the recall. The Royal Artillery worked their guns in the open, pouring round after round into the right horn and shelling the riflemen out of the huts. Again and again the Zulu charged the perimeter, and the sources are unanimous that they did so with extraordinary courage. But the head of each charge was simply shot away. After hours of it, around mid-afternoon, the survivors began to fall back.

What followed was not a battle but a hunt. Wood loosed Buller with six hundred horsemen, and the pursuit toward Zunguin Nek became a slaughter. Mounted men fired from the saddle, clubbed warriors with their carbines, speared the exhausted with discarded assegais. One officer told his troopers to take no prisoners, calling out "remember yesterday" for the comrades lost at Hlobane. The British infantry and African auxiliaries combed the field afterward, killing the wounded where they lay. Only when a mist rose around the Zunguin mountains near dusk did the killing stop. Burial parties counted 785 Zulu bodies close to the camp; many more lay along the line of retreat, and historians estimate perhaps two thousand died in all. The British lost 18 killed and dozens wounded. The Zulu thought their losses here were worse than Isandlwana, and they were right to fear what it meant. The kingdom never recovered its belief in victory, and at Ulundi that July the war ended.