The Last Stand of the 24th at Isandhlwana

It's the 125th anniversary of the Battle of Rorke's Drift, in which 145 soldiers from the South Wales Borderers (24th Foot) held off an army of thousands of Zulu warriors in one of the major battles of the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879. The attacking Zulus had just killed more than 1,500 soldiers of the 24th in a rout of the British at Isandhlwana on Jan. 22.

Marking the occasion are Thos Fitzpatrick, here and here, and by Mark Cameron. (I hadn't realized Mangosuthu Buthelezi had played the Zulu chief in the 1964 film with Michael Caine.)

A well-known painting of the Last Stand of the 24th Regiment at Isandhlwana was done by Charles Edwin Fripp, battlefield illustrator of the Zulu War:

[H]is final account was of the battle at Ulundi, which he sketched as he lay on the leather roof of an ammunition cart. He wrote: "Now and again a bullet sighed overhead as I watched the beautiful advance of the enemy rapidly spreading over the undulations, disappearing and reappearing as the inequalities were traversed.

How immersed are modern-day military history buffs in the subject? A Rorke's Drift discussion forum takes up Monty Python's treatment of the First Zulu War.

See a website devoted to Rorke's Drift * And another devoted to the Anglo-Zulu War * Lots of toy soldiers here * The Zulu king Cetewayo is among the subjects of 19th-century portrait sketches in this large online collection of Victorian and Edwardian photos

Elsewhere on the British imperialism front, disappointing news: the story of Churchill's Nazi-cursing parrot apparently isn't true.

Plus: Salon on John Huston's Man Who Would be King * The memorable song from that film, "The Minstrel Boy," is played at the page of these Civil War re-enactors * And at this page of Irish-themed Civil War links * And here on the pipes