Campaigning in southern Africa

Eyewitness accounts are among the many sources used in the voluminous literature on the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879, a major test of British command, transport arrangements, and the fighting qualities of the short-service soldier. Quite apart from the writings of the late Frank Emery, who refers to eighty-five correspondents in The Red Soldier and another twenty-four in his chapter on that campaign in Marching Over Africa, there are invaluable edited collections of letters from individual officers by Sonia Clark and Daphne Child, and by Adrian Greaves and Brian Best. While the papers and journals of the British commanding officers have been splendidly edited, some perspectives of officers and other ranks appear in testimony before official inquiries (into the disasters at Isandlwana and Ntombe, and the death of the Prince Imperial) and among the sources used by F. W. D. Jackson and Ian Knight, and by Donald Morris in his classic volume The Washing of the Spears. Yet the letters found by Emery – the core of the material used for the views of regimental officers and other ranks – represent only a fraction of the material written during the Anglo-Zulu War. Many more officers and men kept diaries or wrote to friends and family, chronicling their exploits in that war and its immediate predecessors, the Ninth Cape Frontier War (1877–78) and the campaign against the Pedi chief, Sekhukhune (1878). While several soldiers complained about the postal arrangements or the scarcity of stamps and paper, they still wrote letters, even improvising, as Corporal Thomas Davies (2/24th) did, by using gunpowder as ink. Their correspondence forms the core of this Chapter’s review of campaigning in southern Africa. Several of the regiments who fought the Zulus had already served in southern Africa. The 1/24th (of the 2nd Warwickshires, later South Wales Borderers) and the 1/13th (Somerset Light Infantry) had served in southern Africa since 1875; the 2/Buffs, the 80th (2/South Staffordshires) and the 88th (1/Connaught Rangers) had joined them in 1877, C H A P T E R T W O