Camp Fire Yarns of the Lost LegionHamilton-Browne, G.
History
Camp Fire Yarns of the Lost Legion
Hamilton-Browne, G.
Māori (New Zealand people) -- Warfare; New Zealand -- History -- Anecdotes; Zulu War, 1879
In this terrible battle fell John Cane, Robert Biggar, John Stubbs,
Thomas Carden, John Russell,--Blankenburg, Richard Wood, William Wood,
Henry Batt, John Campbell,--Lovedale and Thomas Campbell, with two or
three other white men, leaving not a dozen to return and tell the tale
of woe. Of the Hottentots three or four returned; and of the Kafirs
very few except Ogle's. The few who escaped arrived at home singly,
many of them having been pursued nearly to the Bay of Durban, owing
their deliverance to the shelter of the bush and the darkness of the
night.
Most of the particulars herein recorded I can vouch for as being
correct, having conversed with several who were engaged in the
transaction, and others who were residing in Natal at the time.
Here endeth the extract that I have taken from Moodie's aforementioned
history.
Now, judging by the foregoing account of the battle of the
Tugela--which it must be remembered has been extracted, word for word,
from a history written by a knowledgeable gentleman of undoubted
veracity, who not only knew the survivors of the action, but had heard
the yarn from their own lips, and that the story told me by the old
trader who also had been acquainted with the majority of the men
composing the English army, he being a full-grown boy at the time, and
resident in Port Natal, coincided and agreed with Mr Moodie's
narrative in all the principal details--I think I am not far wrong
when I assert that the battle of the Tugela was a scrumptious one, in
which every man engaged must have enjoyed himself to the utmost of his
ability, and no one could subsequently grumble at not getting his fair
share of the fighting. Yet when you come to consider the numbers and
equipment of that invading force, and compare them with the resources
at Lord Chelmsford's disposal when he began to play the same game,
just forty years afterwards, and which were then declared to be
inadequate, you are forced to come to the conclusion that Cane and his
Lost Legionaries were a bit over-venturesome. For looking back at my
own experience in the Legion, I do not think I could ever have found
twenty men daring enough to undertake the same contract, and I am
quite certain that, even had the men been willing, I individually
should never have possessed sufficient pluck to have bossed the show.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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