by John Wilcox
As I have stated in those earlier adventures of Simon, Jenkins and Alice, The Horns of the Buffalo and The Road to Kandahar, there are precedents for women serving the great British newspapers of the time as war correspondents. Alice, then, though perhaps uniquely feisty, was not alone.
If Alice’s decision in the last chapter strikes some readers as less than credible, I can only insist that adherence to codes of honour ran strongly through the middle and upper classes of nineteenth-century Britain (as did strands of huge immorality - but that’s another story!). For instance, Arthur Wellesley, later to become the great Duke of Wellington, proposed to an Irish lady when he was an impecunious young officer. Her parents refused to let her marry a man with such poor prospects. He remained unmarried but went on to make his name and his fortune in India. Although they had not met in the interim and he had long since fallen out of love with the lady, Wellesley felt that he had to honour his proposal all those years later. It proved a disastrous marriage, but they stayed ‘together’ until she died. ‘Autres temps . . .’
Baker Russell, Captain Macleod, Willie Russell (who did tell his readers on the eve of the battle that he doubted if the invading force had the strength to attack the next day), the German missionary Merensky and John Dunn are all real figures, as was Piet Joubert, the tough Boer leader. His brief defence of the Boer position given to Alice in Pretoria is based on the record of a meeting he had with Wolseley at roughly that time. But Dunn seems to have disappeared from the pages of history after the break-up of the Zulu nation, and I hope that any descendants of his will forgive my manipulation of him for the purposes of my story.
