MASSACRE AT MAJUBA

Thomas Fortescue Carter had never before worked as a war correspondent when he found himself, at age 22, covering the Anglo-Boer War of 1880–1881. “It was the first time I had been under fire,” he would write, “and I confess that the sensation was not a pleasant one.” Carter had come from England to the British colony of Natal, in southeastern Africa, in 1879, two years after Britain annexed the Transvaal in hopes of resolving a long-running border dispute between the Boers and the Zulus. War broke out in 1880 after the Transvaal Boers formally declared their independence from the United Kingdom. It fell to Major General Sir George Pomeroy Colley, a British Army officer who’d been named commander in chief of Natal, to put the rebellious Boers back in their place, and on February 26, 1881, he led some 360 British troops—with Thomas Carter in tow—on a night march to the top of Majuba Hill, which overlooked the main Boer position. But as dawn broke, the Boers charged the summit, and the Battle of Majuba Hill ended with heavy British casualties (Colley was shot in the forehead and died), while the Boers suffered only one killed and five wounded. By the time the war fizzled to an end just a few weeks later, it was already regarded as