The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1880-01-10 00:00:00

THE FIELD OF ISANDLANA.

The Times has published the following letter, from "One
who Lived Several Years in Zululand ":

Sir,—One of most touching monuments In India
marks the locality around which our English brothers
and sisters fell in the terrible massacre of Cawnpore.
Standing immediately over the well into which their
bodies were cast, it forms a beautiful and appropriate
gravestone. No European traveller passes the neigh-
bourhood of Cawnpore without making a pilgrimage to
the solemn spot from which he looks back into that
terrible past.
-

There ii no spot within the area covered by the late
Zulu campaign so intensely full of painful interest as
that upon which our gallant 24th Regiment was over-
whelmed beneath the Isandlana Hill.

Long after Zululand ia a civilized and a Christian
country, in the days of the children of our children's
children, the place will be pointed out upon the msp
of Africa where, as the Zulus put it, our brave man
" fought till they fell, and what could men do more."
Thousand a passing to and fro in yearn to come upon
the great highway between Cape Town and our
interior possessions will turn aside across the Buffalo
River, at Rorke's Drift, and ask their way to that
fatal hill.
-

Already, in February next, an illustrious lady, the
first of a long line of pilgrims, goes to visit these places
of national interest in Zululand. Pass twenty years,
and who shall be able to say on which side of the hill
the camp stood upon the disastrous 22nd of January,
1879? A Zulu creeping from his hut in answer to the
traveller's call will stretch out his hand, and pointing
with his knobkerrie, will say with Zulu vagueness,
" Angazi kahle mina, bahlaselwa lapaya pesu kwen-
tabs nje." "I don't know exactly, but they were
attacked somewhere over there under the hill."

I know Isandlana, having lived for several years
almost within sight of it, and I think I know pretty
well upon which side of that hill, which dominates
the ridges and dongas of that neighbourhood like a
great couched beast, our poor fellows fell; but I could
not go to the very ucalo, or ridge, between the many
dongas and say, "Here on this spot the camp stood,"

To say that there are mounds over the graves which
mark the spot means nothing at all. African herbage
and African rains obliterate in a very few months all
such traces.

Knowing the shifting character of these dongas, I
ventured to suggest to Her Majesty the Empress
Eug6nie the absolute necessity of marking the spot
where her gallant son fell if the identity of the place
was to be preserved from the devastation of African
rainy reasons; and she at once gave orders for the
erection of a stone cross.

The site of our camp under 'Bandlana is a grave.
'surd where many of our noble hearts lie buried.
3hall we be content to leave it without a record?

The Times of Monday noticed the above suggestion
of its correspondent in a leader, from which we make
the following extracts
"A correspondent ri minded us on Saturday that the anni-
versary at Isandlana is at hand, yet that no steps have been
taken to identify the scene of the disaster for the informa-
tion of future ages. Zulu memory is careless of topographi-
cal details. Our correspondent, who knows the people well,
describes how the native legend of the event will hover about
a dozen lonely hillsides without fastening upon any one. The
English character loves distinctness in its national tradi-
tions. It is not satisfied to know that an act has been done
which has affected its history; it insists upon learning
how it has been done and where. That the exact stretch of
sand on which Csevar landed en the coast of Kent should not
be ascertained beyond the reach of controversy is plain and
grief to a multitude of English scholars. Any doubt and
difficulty in fixing the particular ridge on wbich the Twenty-
fourth Regiment pitched its camp, and about which it was
destroyed on the tragical 22nd of January, will In ooming
years be a much more reasonable ground of mortifica-
tion. English blood has dedicated one especial spot
in the wide region of billowy downs to English
hearts. Tens of thousands of English mourners have pictured
the scene. It would be out of all keeping and propriety that
the local substratum of an epoch of national grief and
anxiety should be left as it were in the air. The site of a
treasure house of the bravest British ashes mutt not be re-
signed to be a puzzle for South African antiquaries to fight
over. What form the memorial should take it ought not to
be very hard to decide. Stranger things have happened
than that some day the camp of the Twenty-fourth
should be the centre of a stirring civilized popula-
tion. A memorial church might then fitly recall
the first appearance in Zaluland in the pages of history. At
present a Gothic chapel in the midst of the wilderness would
be an eccentricity. But a cross solid enough to withstand
hurricanes and rains, and lofty enough to override she more
insidious encroachments of tropical vegetation, would vindi-
cate its place even there. Zulu intelligence itself might be
trusted not to misconstrue the meaning oi such a roomy.
ment. On the contrary, there would soon grow round it a
protecting Incrustation of native piety and reverence.
The field of Isandiana witnessed a grave reverse to
British arms. That is a reason the more why the 22nd of
January should be commemorated. Englishmen are not
fond of raising trophies of victory. They choose rather
scenes signalised by the brave bearing of their countrymen
in some crisis of pain and anguish, to aosleiste themselves,
if not with disaster, at any rate with sill orlon and sorrow.
The Crimean war closed with glory to England; but the
Memorial Church in Constantinople was meant to reflect,
not the triumph over an enemy, but compassion for the
British sufferers by disease and battle. Whether the result
be conquest or defeat, the one sentiment of Eagliihmen
which lasts is neither exultation nor shame, but the simple
determination to honour those who have fallen in an
glish mute. . . .

"In that national mission of sympathy there Is one who
not of England, yet demands to share with England by virtue
of a common grief, and whose claim England gratefully
allows. Next month the Empress Eugenie sails on her pil-
grimage to the region consecrated for her by her son's blood.
A stranger partnership in sorrow has never been known than
that which has linked hers and English sympathies by the
medium of a petty African war. She msy rest assured
that the calamity which left her childless shocked
England hardly less than the terrible news of Isand-
lana itself But her generous heart will not think the
ridge on which perished hundreds of English lives of small
account by the vide even of the affliction which lutv deauliteh
her existence. It was her son's pride to be for the time a
soldier of England. He shared In spirit in the entire cam-
paign. Be rejoiced in its successes, he lamented its checks
and reverses as keenly as any born subjecs of the Queen's.
The same feeling will animate his mother. The cornfield
alone in which the Prince died will not absorb all her
regards ; the whole course and route of the campaign,
from the tire° the English flag reeled at Isandlana
to the day on which it waved triumphantly at
Ulundi, will be of tragic interest to her. It might be well
could the occasion be seized of a visit due to the one
signal calamity of the war to begin the work of marking
the other by a fitting memorial. The hones of the slain
Prince could not repose away from those of his Imperial
father; but any monument to the British soldiers who
rest where they died in Zululand will always recall
the recollection of the brave young stranger who fell
in the same land and in the same cause. Whatever
the future fortunes of his House in Europe, Prince
Louis Napoleon has bound up his memory indissolubly
with Southern Africa. As his mother watches those for-
tunes rise and fade, and glitter and flicker, she herself may
come in time to doubt whether, after all, death by an
obscure assegai were altogether a disaster; whether the pure
o
and single-hearted sympathyf a foreign nation with a
premature death were not more to be desired for her and
for her son than that he should have lived to be the
shuttlecock of veteran intriguers and the Puppet of a fao-
tion."