NATAL REVOLT.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXIII, Issue 1810, 17 July 1906, Page 2

NATAL REVOLT.

PRESS ASSOCIATION—COPYRIGHT Pietermaritzburg, July 15. Colonel Mackenzie has suspended operations to give the rebels a chance of surrendering. The reserves at Durban and Kraut* staktop have been disbanded.

MURDEROUS NATIVES.

A GRUESOME ACT.

TRESS ASSOCIATION—COPYRIGHT. Received 9 7 p.m., July 16. Johannesburg, July 18. The Johannesburg Sunday Times asserts that loyal natives killed the wounded iu the recent fighting at Momo Valley, Finding the Zulus did not believe that Bambaata was dead someone, without Colonel Mackenzie’s permis* sion, exhumed the body. _ A surgeon removed the head, which was shown to many chief of Indunas and then reburied.

The Post on the recent slaughter of Zulus :—This brief narrative has certainly a very ugly look. A British force, equipped, of course, with Maxims and magazine rifles, surrounds a body of ill-armed savages, whom it outnumbers in the proportion of nearly four to one, and bombards them from the high ground forming the edges of the natural trap in which they are caught, the result is that fly® - hundred and forty-seven are killed l “ few escaping,” while there is not single casualty among the British? troops. Is this fair fighting or is it a battue ? Cases are easily conceivable 1 in which no alternative is left to a superior force but to annihilate a smaller one or to give it best. Neither the Spartans at Thermopylae nor the British at Isandula would accept quarter from the overwhelmingly more powerful forces opposed to them, and the Devishes of the Soudan are the kind of fanatics who neither take quarter nor give it. But there is nothing in the report from Natal, or in the nature of the case, to suggest .that the trapped and outnumbered Zulub at the Umvoti Gorge were inspired by similar motives. The natural inference is that they would have surrendered if they had been given the chance, but that the chance was not given. Presumably brutal butchery was considered likely to make a deeper impression on the rebels than accepting the surrender of what was virtually a captured impi, and so the work was carried through. What the moral effect of such cruelty upon the savages themselves may be we cannot, of course, say, but the number of “the enemies of Natal ” must be considerably increased by it, and the friends of the Empire will be inclined to hang their heads in shame. Was it for this that the Government of Natal repudiated the aid of Imperial troops ? and is this the morejexeellent way that it was preparing ?