LONDON TO LADYSMITH, VIA PRETORIA.

Otago Witness, Volume 02, Issue 2420, 2 August 1900, Page 66

LONDON TO LADYSMITH, VIA PRETORIA.

Thouszh I had read " With the Malakand Field Force,"' and xevelled in its graphic description of work on our North-west Indian frontier, I had somehow formed the idea, thai, Churchill's book on the Natal campaign would be a disappointing one — why, I hardly know. Perhaps I had "imagined he was a past master in the art of judiciouc advertising, and I don't know whether I don't imagine so still. But whatever I b.p/1 preconceived, for a book written in bivouac, camp, and captivity, and under so many trying conditions, it is well worth perusal. In it here and there are touches which so clearly single out Churchill from the rest of the war correspondents, and one cannot help thinking when associating him with his father, the late Kandolph Churchill, and his aunt, Lady Sarah Wilson, wlio was taken by the Boers before Maf eking and exchanged for a oonvict, only ,to face the rigours of the s i c g C—lC — I say" one cannot help thinking that there must be a touch of genius allied to madness running through the family. Churchill went out last November in the Bunottar Castle, which carried quite a cargo -of celebrities, from General Buller down to a party of cinematographers, and a tribe of war correspondents iv search of copy to make their papers famous and to pad* books to bs unloaded on a devouring public eagrer for anything connected with a war which is to give a Federated South. Africa, find no doubt has, by the patriotism awakened in Australia, .tended to make federation the easier there.