Perhaps the classic instance of an attempt to preserve the colours at all costs was at Isandhlwana, where 20,000 Zulus overwhelmed a small British force in 1879, When the day was lost, two lieutenants of the 24th Regiment made a desperate attempt to save the regimental colours by swimming across the swift, deep and rocky Buffalo River, One of them, Lieutenant Cog-hill, got safely across. The other, Lieutenant Melvill, was struck by a shot just as he was reaching the bank Coghill turned back to help him, and both were killed.
Their bodies were found some days later "with a group of dead Zulus around them; and in the bed of the river the colours of the regiment, saved, as the historians of the Zulu War put it, "from the degradation of capture and contamination by the hands of savages."
This incident produced the profoundest effect in Britain.
Queen Victoria, deeply moved, bestowed the Victoria Cross posthumously on the two men.
When the colours were brought back to England, they were taken to her at Osborne, where with her Royal hand she attached to them a wreath of imme-telles, New York, Mar. 17.
Loans on security to brokers in New York by the reporting member bunks of the Federal Reserve System, for the week ended March 16. totalled $003,000,000, a decrease of $533,000,000 from the corresponding week last year.
Loans to brokers during the previous week totalled $700,000,000, or $97,000,000 higher than the amount Xecorded for the period under review.—Reuter,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.