WORDS BY AN EYEWITNESS THE STRUGGLE IN NATAL BY LINESMAN" "Words by an eyewitness! You have there the THIRD IMPRESSION WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS EDINBURGH AND LONDON MCMI All Rights reserved PREFACE. THESE papers, reprinted from 'Blackwood's Magazine,' and written hastily from the seat of war in the intervals of the events they describe, are not to be taken as aiming at anything more than they do-viz., to sketch occurrences as accurately as possible before time could wear away the impressions they left on a participant. They are, therefore, not History, nor to be considered as such, but merely an attempt to fill up something of what History, perhaps necessarily, omits, the human side of the great document of war, that side which rapidly becomes illegible when the men who wrote it have forgotten the peril, toil, and fury which inspired them in the writing. Once faded, a palimpsest of such a document is an impossibility. This little volume is thus more a sketchbook of emotions than of facts, though I have |