"MY CHIEF AND I."*

Is the bitter cold of this winter, it was some comfort to take up a pleasant-looking book, the scene of which was South Africa, and hope for a sort of reflected warmth and brightness from its pages ; but we were deceived. South Africa—at any rate, a part of Natal—has its unmistakable winter, and we found that, whatever the scene of the book, the time chosen was mid-winter. Such books should not be allowed to issue from the English Press during our "fine, old-fashioned winters ;" under a tree, in summer, this book would have been very enjoyable ; but imagine reading the following passage during our fogs and frosts, by the light of a candle at noon-day, the only sights, from our windows, muffled figures, moving phantom-like through the yellow fog, the only sounds the hollow or choking coughs of the unhappy pedestrians !— " What was my dismay, on awaking at about two o'clock, at hearing once more the soft sound of fast-falling snow and the howl of the rising wind ! 'No work to-day !' thought I, and turned to sleep again. treeless attempt ! The wind howled louder and louder, while the cold grew ever more intense. In another hour a perfect hurricane was blowing, which drove the snow, or rather frozen dust, right through the tents, which were made of cotton stuff, instead of canvas, as well as under their walls. Soon the tents were full of snow, and the sleepers covered with a frozen winding-sheet of the same. It beat in at the tent-doors, and there froze into a mass of ice. We might almost as well have been lying in the open air ; it was indeed a bitter night for us all. When daylight appeared I went out to see how matters stood, and found the colonel out before me, looking at a couple of tents which had been blown down, the occu- pants of which were huddled round a fire. They had a screen-wall round them, without which they could not have kept their fire alight, • My Chief and!. By Atherton Wylde. 1 voL London : Chapman and Hall. and very miserable indeed they looked. I saluted my Chief, and asked for orders ; but the wind blew so strong that we could scarcely stand against it, and forced the icy dust into our faces until it Was .difficult to draw breath. The ice-morsels froze upon one's hair, one's coat, and beard, until one had all the appearance of a snow-man. They collected at the back of one's head, beneath the forage-caps which we all wore, and froze there into a solid mass, which we were obliged to submit to the influence of the fire before we could get rid of it. Such a bitter day I never experienced before or since. Even the colonel looked grave and anxious over our plight ; although his resolute courage and endurance carried him—in spite of the ex- haustion consequent upon long ill-health and yet unhealed wounds —through what tried the fortitude of the strongest man amongst us. The pioneers lay in their tents, covered with snow, and nothing would induce them to stir. They utterly refused to get up, to light their fires and cook their food, to do anything, in short,—begging only to be allowed to die where they were. There was no doing any- thing with them, even for their own comfort. Nor were the Basutos and white men in a much better condition. We endured this state of things until noon, hoping for a change in weather ; but the only change was from bad to worse, for by twelve o'clock the snow was driving in such clouds that we could not see a yard in any direction. The Basutos now became terribly alarmed, fearing that we should be snowed up altogether. So, yielding to dire necessity only, the colonel decided to beat a retreat from the elements."

The book is the history of a short episode in the life of a good man and a brave soldier—Colonel Durnford—between the sad affair of the Bushman's River Pass and the fatal one of Isandhl- wane, where, as we all know to our sorrow, Colonel Durnford fell. The historian is an enthusiastic young friend, who served under him and worshipped him, and whose simple, if sometimes somewhat too detailed narrative, leaves behind a very vivid picture of the object of his devotion. If Mr. Wylde could have sunk himself, it would have been better. His own early mis- conduct is nobody's business but his, and the confession of it only raises a feeling of painful embarrassment in the mind of the reader who unwillingly listens to the humiliating revela- tion. It would have been enough for Mr. 'Wylde to explain his devotion to Colonel Durnford on the ground of great and un- deserved kindness, received at a time of painful necessity. The same self-consciousness which dictates this undesirable ex- posure, runs through the narrative, cropping up in little out- breaks of evidently genuine modesty—which had much better, however, have been altogether omitted—so that we hear fre- quently of his standing aside or behind, fearing to intrude, con- scious that he was unworthy to offer assistance or advice, but envious—nobly envious, evidently—of those who had and used the right of incurring danger to ward it from Colonel Durnford.

As a book of adventure, the interest consists in the incidents that occurred during an expedition—after the rout of Langali- balele's tribe—to destroy the road through Bushman's River Pass and other numerous passes to the north, over the Draakensberg mountains, of which there were a great many, more or less acces- sible. Colonel Durnford commanded, and a hundred prisoners belonging to the Putini tribe were the principal workmen; wages and liberty being promised as the reward of the successful com- pletion of the work. The bitter cold of winter at the summits of those high mountains was the chief difficulty to contend with ; especially by the poor prisoners, unaccustomed to hard work at any time, and scarcely leaving their kraals in the winter. The cold supplies also the bulk of the adventures, and baboons' wild dogs and an occasional ambuscade of natives, the remainder. The work consisted of blasting rocks and building huge walls, so as to fill up or destroy the narrow and already almost in- accessible mountain paths.

But the real interest of the book is divided between the testi- mony of an unsophisticated, simple, and reliable youth to the unjustifiableness of our expedition against Langalibalele, and the picture of a remarkable and admirable man. It is seldom we read of an officer so brave, and yet so modest; so stern a disci- plinarian, and yet so tender-hearted to friend and foe, to strong and weak alike ; so Spartan-like in endurance of personal pain —continuing, amongst other remarkable instances, to command on horseback after suffering most terrible injuries—yet so thoughtful and sympathetic about the sufferings of others. It is a picture which deserves to live, and it is, we think, thoroughly reliable. Mr. Wylde was not only his Colonel's close com- panion through months of severe service, but he had the oppor- tunity of hearing the opinions of privates who had served under him, and who had been with him at the Bushman's River Pass engagement ; and he listened to the account of one of those volunteers who ran away on that occasion, and who, of all men, would have been most ready to bring Colonel Durnford's con- duct, on that sad day, into disgrace. Mr. Wylde concludes his comments on this confession as follows :—

"But I do recollect very distinctly that be was obliged to give up. one point after another to his opponent, and that finally he fairly allowed that he and his comrades had run away in a panic. Some of them, he said, would have stood after the first shock was over, but, seeing the others streaming away a mile ahead, they all followed- suit. Ile further declared that he would stick to this, whoever questioned him ; for it was the truth, and nothing more."

Mr. Wylde went carefully over the ground on which this un- fortunate engagement took place, and says :—

"I took myself the only view of the matter which I had ever heard propounded by men of my own cloth who had seen the ground,— namely, that the position taken up by the colonel was clearly de- fensible, and could have been held long enough to serve all requisite purposes, had he been followed by twenty regulars who knew what is meant by discipline and obedience, two qualities quite as necessary to the making of a good soldier as the mere courage which we are all supposed to possess. My knowledge of my Chief was all that was necessary to convince me that even his vatand• had not outstripped his judgment, as pretended by those whose interest it was to throw the blame of the failure upon one who, according to the rules of the Service, could not speak in his own defence."

And in another place, he tells us that after a careful examina- tion of the positions held by Colonel Durnford and the enemy,. he found that he coincided with all officers who had seen the place, "that the Colonel had been perfectly right in his esti- mate of its capabilities, and in his proposed course of action." In winding-up the defence of his friend's conduct and judgment on the day at Bushman's River Pass—when Colonel Durnford so unjustly lost a reputation which surely he redeemed by his- death at Isandhlwana, shoulder to shoulder with other members of that very Volunteer corps that had deserted him five years before—Mr. Wylde says :—

"Of himself (Colonel Durnford) he never spoke at all, and, great as appears to be the grudge borne against him by the friends of the Volunteers who left him and fled that day, I never heard him say a word against them. As far as I could learn, he has never uttered a word of reproach or accusation against them, beyond his most mode- rate and mercifully-worded report to the commander of the field force, which was published at the time."

But though our author's hero did his best, at Bushman's River Pass- and everywhere else, to carry out the orders of our Government and its officials, his heart and judgment were with the native tribes and Bishop Colenso. He felt keenly the injustice and severity of the expedition against Langalibalele, the treat- ment received by that unhappy chief and his people, and the wanton cruelty inflicted on perfectly innocent tribes,. like that of the Putini, whose men, we have said, he em- ployed in this expedition to destroy the passes, and whose liberty he afterwards obtained from the weak and vacillating- Governor of Natal. We have no space to go into the details of native suffering and English disgrace, but will give the opinion of our author, and as we distinctly gather, of Colonel Durnford also, on the perhaps old, but in our present circumstances, still in- teresting question of the Langalibalele "rebellion,"—an opinion borne out by a mass of interesting detail in the book before us.. What does Mr. Wylde think now of the •" vigilant watch over

her colonies" which our Government keeps, "to prevent unjust and unnecessary wars

"One of the young men accompanied us as a guide when we left Cathkin, as he knew the country well ; and I had some opportunity of conversing with him, and of eliciting his young colonial' views of matters. I thought that from him, living as he did close to the scene of the late disturbances, I should at least be able to learn in what way Langalibalele earned the title of 'bloodthirsty rebel,' which I had so often heard applied to him, and what his people had done to deserve the severe punishment which had fallen upon them. I confeas that I was disappointed by the answers that I received. I hoped to find that at least our cause was good. I wished to think that we English had reason in the main for what we did, and that, although acts had been perpetrated by 'us' which all Englishmen must con- demn, yet that they were but the individual instances of cruelty almost inseparably connected with a Ravage warfare, in which savage auxiliaries and independent volunteers are employed. Could tales have been told of attacks upon farmhouses and the white families living in them, of murder aud insult to women and children, of any such injuries as would naturally put the fire of indignation into our hearts and brains, I should have been satisfied that punishment was justified, harshness excusable, and even cruelty not much to be wondered at, although deeply to be regretted. But of any such justification or excuse I never heard a word. Not a single outrage had been committed of any description, not a head of cattle even stolen from the isolated farms in and close to Langalibalele's loca- tion. In answer to my questions, our young guide had plenty to say, and all the usual complaints to make. The Kaffirs were lazy and cheeky,' they had been getting more and more so, and thought them- selves as good as the white men now. In fact, it was the old story ; the black man did not care to be the white man's slave, and the white- man could not endure the black man in any other position. This feel- ing, and this only, I believe to have been the cause of the expedition of 1873; and this same feeling would very soon bring about—what would prove a very different matter—a war with the Zulus, were it not, fortunately for all concerned (even for those who most resent the restraint put upon them), that our English Government at home keeps suck a vigilant watch over her colonies, to prevent unjust and unnecessary wars. Otherwise, the very existence upon our borders of a large body of natives whom we cannot tax, who are not our servants, nor obliged to treat us with any especial respect, would certainly, sooner or later, bring about aggressive acts on our part, which in -their turn would irritate our neighbours into giving us some handle for undertaking a war of invasion against them. Such a war would certainly be a bloody one on both sides, entailing consetmences hardly to be calculated, either in sorrow or duration. May just and wise rulers, under Providence, spare us such an evil ! As to Langalibalele himself, I must distinctly assert that although I have taken some trouble in making inquiries from those likely to know, I have never been able to gain a clear notion of what con- stituted either his long course of disrespect towards Government, of which I have heard so many vague assertions, or the 'rebellious' conduct for which his tribe has been destroyed. That he ran away, instead of coming when he was called, under a well-founded fear of treachery from the whites seems to be the extent of his offence. The more I heard of the expedition of 1873, of the reasons for it, and of the way in which it was carried out, the more did I hate to think that in such a cause, and in company with such men, was my Colonel sent to fight, and receive the wounds one of which permanently dis- abled him. He simply did his duty, and I need hardly say, perhaps, that he had no share in the cold-blooded butchery,—I can call it nothing else,—which went on for weeks after the one fight at the Bushman's River Pass."

'The style of the book—barring the youthful egotism of the -writer—is very good. It is simple and lively, and written in excellent English. But it has the fault of assuming the

reader's perfect acquaintance with the political and military history of the Langalibalele affair, and is, therefore, much too sparing of dates and explanatory remarks ; and it sadly wants

a map,—that want so easily supplied, and so universally neglected. The public should take the matter into its own

hands, and refuse to buy books of travel that are not accom- panied by a map.