BOOKS.

AN AUSTRALIAN ON THE STORY OF LADYSMITH.*

WE have read many books on the war, and the tale of those which we shall never read grows daily bigger. Every affair has been described a dozen times, the smallest skirmish has found its chronicler, and there are signs that popular interest in the memorable events will be choked by a flood of printed matter. There is all the more reason, then, to draw attention to what is perhaps the best in the whole list of war-books, Mr. Donald Macdonald's narrative of the siege of Ladysmith. With the exceptions of Mr. G. W. Steevens's brilliant fragment. and Mr. Winston Churchill's able and suggestive war studies, we have no hesitation in saying that in the proper merits of war correspondence this book is far ahead of any other. The author modestly describes himself as "an Australian novice," with no experience of fighting, but he had from the first what is more important, a keen and vigorous mind and the eye of the true observer. In words full of light and colour he tells without rhetoric the things which he saw with his own eyes, and the feelings which he shared in common with some thousands of men. The book is, indeed, no less a private diary than a history, for it deals as much with the inner life of the mind as the events of the beleaguerment. It is the work of one who is alive to the ironies and comedies of life, who has an artist's eye for scenery and weather, and at the same time can tell of a military movement with luminous precision. Above all, the author's temper is perfect; his comments are at all times tolerant, sympathetic, and con- spicuously well bred, and yet he has that infectious en- thusiasm which is the birthright of his countrymen. To read his book is to realise how admirable a thing is Australian loyalty, and how warmth of feeling can be combined with a genuine distinction of manner. We have had examples of the tactless, noisy correspondent produced by the Colonies,

but Mr. Macdonald has shown that the new Commonwealth _

• How We Hoyt the FlaLl7Xtg: the :nory of till Sidglo Of laelyastith. By

Donald Maodonalfl, the Me Argue War Corrwpondftt. London : Wa.t Look, and Co. [6a.]

can also send us a writer who yields to no one in the best qualities of vigour and refinement.

In reviewing such a book it is useless to follow the chrono- logical order of events, and we can only glance at some of the many striking incidents which stand out from the pages.

The journal of the siege was not punctuated by many active adventures. The various night sorties, Christmas Day, the desperate attack on Ctesar's Hill, the distant echo of doings on the Tugela, and then the terrible era of horse-meat and despair, closed by the Relief,'—such were the milestones in its history. The tale of the seventeen hours' continuous fighting on Cassar's Hill is so long and so minute that it cannot be quoted from, but it is as spirited an account of a battle as a man need wish. But take this of the Devons before their great charge :—

" The fight is a medley of mixed impressions, jostling each other for a moment's existence ere passing away, but the getting ready is unforgettable The line of brown riflemen stretched away to the left of us, and it seemed that every trivial action of every man there had become an epic. One noticed most of all the constant moistening of the drylips. and the frequent raising of the water-bottles for a last hurried mouthful. One man tightened a belt, another brought his cartridges handier to his right hand, though he was not to use them. It was something to ease the strain of waiting. . . . . . Then the low clinking, quivering sound of the steel which died away from us in a trickle down the ranks as the bayonets were fixed—and a dry, harsh, artificial laugh, in strong contrast to the quiet of the scene— everything heard easily somehow above the rush and clatter of the storm, and lost only for an instant in the sudden bursts of thunder."

But best of all, perhaps, is the amount of the scene at the Relief, when every nation on earth seemed to have mingled in the rush to the river, from the red-fezzed Malay to the Kaffir. One officer stopped at a street channel, and had not strength to step over it. "I lifted him to the other side, but it was no trouble, he was as light as a child." And here is a fine story:—" An old Kaffir woman tottered along the footpath, the tears streaming down her face. 'Listen to her,' said a Natal farmer. That's good; isn't it ? ' I could listen, but not understand, so he interpreted. The words the Kaffir woman spoke were really the sentiment of that time of triumph, The English can conquer everything but death ; why can't they conquer death ? "

The high spirits of the garrison rose superior to this, the most horrible form of war. The Gordon.s played the Light Horse at football, and when a shell dropped on the ground sneaked a goal under cover of the smoke. Cricket was played constantly, and on the hundred-and- first day of the siege the Manchesters flashed the message "Ladysmith still batting." Even in the worst times there were parties for bridge ; and in the midst of disease men were amused by reflecting that there was no ease in the town of delirium tremens. Mr. Macdonald has imported this spirit into his pages, and is alive to the odd side of things, as when he notes that one of the people concerned with the very deadly Colt automatic gun was a Socialist leader who had adopted this new plan for levelling-up the masses. He is justly severe upon the system of private sales by auction, but he gives full praise to the merchants who gave up all thoughts of gain. On the conduct of the Boers he seems to us to write with admirable fairness. He records one or two disgraceful acts, clearly proven, but he is ready to admit that such misdeeds are inseparable from even the best-conducted war. As troops he finds our only superiority to the Dutch to lie in our artillery work, and he freely grants them on many occasions "a daring and disregard of consequences worthy of the finest troops in the world." He is indignant with the writers who describe the Boer as posturing on the battlefield, as when some of them sang their old Dutch hymns round the open graves at Nicholson's Nek. He points out the difficulties which beset an actor amid the sights and sounds of the battlefield after a fight. "Nero fiddling over burning Rome is a simple-minded, whole-hearted musician as compared with those who can play the mountebank over even an enemy's dead."

The book, as we have said, is as much as anything an analysis of the psychology of siege and battle. The writer traces the progress from comfort to anxiety, and then to

shattered nerves, and last of all to sheer dogged suffering. All is done skilfully and truly, in plain language, with none of the cant jargon which seems to beset most men who writs about the human mind. But the result is a memuralle

picture in which we see the incidents of war not in theatrical exaggeration, but in sober reality. Mr. Macdonald is so far from being a mere blower of the trumpet that he is never so impressive as when he is lamenting this necessary evil of the world. If we had space we might quote many eloquent passages, but we will content ourselves with this "You came home worn down in body and spirits by the strain and by the heat, too tired to talk, too hot to sleep, too apathetic to eat, and with nothing to drink. And back to you like a mockery came that Shakespearian expression of despair, To- morrow—and to-morrow—and to-morrow.' Lastly, the mosquitoes took you to their keeping until daylight, when the flies carried on the work, and a sick and sleepless man cursed from the very depth of his soul all who would appeal from God's high gift of reason to Satan's remedy of the sword. And came to one then, as a lightning flash, the thought that even in our greatest, most inspiring victories, when the bubble of enthusiasm was for the brief moment glorious in the sunshine, the other side were suffering and dying."

And it is only in closing that he adds : "You will be apt to forget, perhaps, that the long cortege of the victims of wrong and error never ends, and that the consequences, could they be gathered together on the one field, would be more grim and sanguinary even than this."

The book is filled with hairbreadth escapes and sadden tragedies, some of them too gruesome to quote. We see the population becoming inured to horrors, growing wary about shells, and falling back to something of that unconcern which alone could make resistance possible. In days when men

were killed in impossible ways and saved by miracles, a kind of grim fatalism could be the only rule of life. In the midst of this apathy the writer kept his senses keen and critical to

the last, and his impressions are as fresh of the Relief as of the first isolation. In conclusion we may note a feature in the book which has especially pleased us. Mr. Macdonald is an Australian, and he has an unfailing sentiment for his own land. A brave deed by a countryman delights him, and he is never tired of telling about the deeds of the gallant Dr.

Hornibrook, the Australian doctor. But at the same time he has a quite peculiar interest in his fellow-Colonials of Natal.

It is the Natal Volunteers who have the bump of locality, it is the Natal men who are the most useful scouts, and after a fine eulogy of the young Englishman, he notes with pleasure how many were serving in the Volunteer corps of Natal. He goes out of his way to describe all the doings of the incom- parable Imperial Light Horse. Indeed, if we seek an instance of true Colonial Imperialism, whose existence some may deny but all must hope for, we may find it in an admirable form in this brilliant and high-spirited book.