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Posted: Mon Jul 23, 2007 5:00 pm

hmmmm..that's a good Handelian touch, eh? Nice to see that my favorite composer got in a tune in there among the band and come to think of music and the army and the band I wonder what the first tune was that the band played after Isandhlwana and Rorke's Drift. If you think of music as engaging the emotions well the fellows at the time had to be the morale lifters of the army. They sure had the opportunity to affect all the soldiers there in their hearts and in their minds. If I put myself in their place I would've loved to have heard songs relating to my hometown. But I'm not sure that the band would've played those kinds of real "personal" tunes.

Posted: Tue Jul 24, 2007 9:38 am

Sean

Don't be misled by the title. We Don't Want to Fight was the latest music-hall rant, hot off the press only a year or so before. It summed up the then current anti-Gladstone and anti-Russian feelings among Disraeli's government and their supporters, and was all for fighting! It famously gave us the expression "Jingoism." It was produced as a patriotic song but used by its detractors as an example of rampant nationalism/imperialism. ("Jingoism" as a term has stuck ever since, although is - in my opinion - inaccurately used occasionally). Those British forces in Zululand who'd been in England during the last year or so (such as the Lancers but not, perhaps, many of the 24th) would have been familiar with it.

We don't want to fight,
But by Jingo if we do,
We've got the ships,
We've got the men,
And got the money too.
We've fought the Bear before,
And while we're Britons true
The Russians shall not have Constantinople.

(I can feel 40 years just slipping easily away and my O levels returning clearly as I read these lines!)

Incidentally, reading Gissop's account of the interior of Cetshwayo's abode (he may have been referring to the single European style building) and the finding of a large mirror, reminds me that they should also have found framed and glazed portraits each of the Queen and the Prince of Wales hanging on his "parlour" wall, placed there a few years previously - that would have been a shock to the Lancers! Whether they were destroyed before discovery I don't know, but I have read reports of old copies of the ILN turning up in the homestead.

I suppose that, instead of Cetshwayo ordering his impis to attack Shiyane right in front of Witt and his fictional daughter in ZULU, the King had instead been portrayed sitting in an armchair under the portraits of the Great White Queen and HRH, a copy of the ILN at his elbow while he surveyed his regiments as they prepared to repel the white invader, we would all have scoffed at the ridiculous scene! Truth is stranger than fiction ...

Peter