Natal : the Land and its Story. By Robert Russell.
(J. M. Dent and Co. 28. 6d. net.)—This book was written before the war, its preface bearing date "November, 1899." (The author, we may state, is Superintendent of Education in the Colony.) It is described as "a Geography and a History," and it is difficult to say in which aspect it is the more interesting. Here is the account of the culminating disaster of Majubs, (culminating, we say, because there had been previous reverses at Laing's Nek and the Ingogo Heights) :—" Fully expecting to be shelled from Amajuba, and to be attacked simultaneously from Mount Prospect, they [the Boers] hastily prepared to evacuate their position. But as no shells came, and no movement was made from the British camp, the first alarm passed away, and Jonbert called for volunteers to storm the mountain. The Boers crept up the slopes from terrace to terrace, and from behind rocks and bushes shot at the soldiers on the sky-line, as if they were stalking deer Gradually they reached the summit, and then poured in a deadly volley. A panic seized the soldiers. They broke and fled for their lives down the rugged steep up which they had climbed." We lost, between January 28th and February 28th, about two hundred and fifty in killed, and as many in wounded and missing (mostly drowned in the Ingogo). This was out of a total force of little more than two thousand.
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