unless before the expiration of that time we burnt our Navy.”[142] And the ultimatum was not only a crime, but a hideous blunder. To annihilate instead of utilising the Zulu power was to relieve the Boers of the Transvaal from the pressure on their flank that alone prevented them from throwing off the British yoke. But it was of no use to argue the case on the grounds of justice or common sense. “The men who had been in the country”--who always come forward to defend every act of folly that is about to be perpetrated in a distant colony--dinned their defence of Sir Bartle Frere into the ears of Englishmen, who were at last half persuaded that it must be the duty of England to exterminate the Zulus, when a satrap like Sir Bartle Frere was eager to annihilate them in the interests of Christianity. Moreover, as in the case of the Afghan War, the people were kept in utter ignorance of the arrogant ultimatum by which Frere had gone out of his way to fix a quarrel on King Cetewayo. But if the crime was rank, the retribution by which it was avenged was swift and stern. Chelmsford’s advance guard crossed the Tugela on the 12th of January. A petty success was recorded at Ekowe on the 7th, and then on the 22nd of January the English column at Isandhlwana was smitten as with the sword of Gideon. Our troops were beaten not only in the actual conflict, but they were out-manœuvred and out-generalled. The barbarians under Cetewayo had fought like lions, and they had inflicted on a British army a defeat so disgraceful that the history of half a century supplies no parallel to it. Frere, like a reckless gambler, had staked everything on this cast of the die. Neither he nor Chelmsford had made provision for a disaster, and the result was that the rout of Isandhlwana left the whole colony of Natal, even then discounting the spoils of victory, open to invasion. Nothing, in fact, stood between the Europeans in Natal and extermination, save the little post of Rorke’s Drift. There Lieutenants Bromhead and Chard, with a handful of men, stemmed the tide of invasion, and redeemed the honour of England which had been smirched by the political incapacity of Frere, and the military failure of Chelmsford. In vain did the Queen and the Duke of [Illustration: ISANDHLWANA: THE DASH WITH THE COLOURS.]