It's time to put yourself in another time! The time is now! No pun intended...well, actually it was intended! LOL!How would the members of the BSFS fare in another time period? Let's write about it, starting with me...Southern Africa-1879Ronald T. Jones observed the mass of warriors streaming across the plain, their individual cries of battle coalescing into a deafening climax that should have sent their enemies bounding in flight. But the enemy they faced showed no sign of breaking. The red garbed British stood rock still, formed up in a square bristling with the black barrels of their deadly Martini-Henry rifles. The British had learned a valuable lesson from their disaster at Isandlawa months earlier. There, a Zulu host had overwelmed them, slaughtering the whites almost to a man along with a hundreds of the Englishmen's African allies.The Zulu ambush was masterfully implemented, but the whites' battle line was spread too thin to blunt the black tide crashing toward it. How could men armed with the most effective modern arms at the time have succumbed to other men armed with spears and cowhide shields?The British consoled themselves in placing the blame on their own tactical errors. To an extent they were right. And now they were prepared.Gunshots cracked, rockets whistled, explosions boomed. Ranks of Zulus fell in tangled confusions of ripped flesh and shattered shields. Gouts of Earth geysered where rockets impacted. Mangled bodies were tossed in the air by the blasts. The Zulus kept surging forward, trying with desperate fury to find leeway through this metal laden storm of British firepower. Zulus toppled in droves. Martini-Henry bullets passed through two, sometimes three bodies at a time.Ronald T. Jones looked away from the lopsided battle, fixing the Zulu king, Cetchwayo, with a seething glare. Just behind Cetchwayo, not far in the distance, the Zulu capitol Ulundi sprawled in all its thatch roofed glory. If the British won this battle, which according to the history Ronald had read, they did, Ulundi would be but another notch of subjegated cities to add to their expanding transoceanic domain.But if Cetchwayo could just break out of his inane martial mindset that drove him to send thousands of his brave warriors into mouth of a bullet spewing dragon..."Your majesty, your soldiers are being slaughtered," Ronald appealed. "Let me use the new weapons."Cetchwayo said nothing. His flanking generals and aides were silent as well. Two of them glanced furtively at their king. Ronald could tell that they wanted to bring out the weapons as well. But Cetchwayo was determined to show that his Zulus with their ardor and aggression were the superior of effete white soldiers clustered like cowards with their guns.Clearly, cognitive dissonance prevented the king from recognizing that he was fatally wrong. He did not seem to grasp that the close quarter way of war introduced by his esteemed predecessor, Shaka, was being permanently nailed in the coffin of obsolescence by the murderous hammer of British arms.In a bout of frustration, Ronald broke away from the paralyzed king and his traumatized court. He rushed to a black wooden crate. Ronald gestured to a segment of the Zulu reserves awaiting their chance to go into battle. The Zulus jogged forward as Ronald removed the lid from the crate. He reached in and pulled out a weapon unlike anything ever seen in the increasingly modern battlefields of the late 19th century.Ronald took the time to reveal a most unsavory smile as he cradled in his hands a Heckler & Koch G36 assault rifle with 40 mm underbarrel grenade launcher."Help yourselves, fellas," Ronald said to the Zulus around him, whom he trained in the use of modern weapons. "We're about to party!"
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