by Fred Stenson
Then there was no more talk, and Frank began to feel very tired. Before his brain lost sense, he wondered why he’d cried just now and decided it was because of friendship. Morden had talked to him honestly. When he said what he’d said last, about seeing how it turned out, it meant he’d been listening too. That struck Frank as a kindness, and so he had cried.
Frank could not have been asleep long when the door yanked open with a yowling of hinges.
“Drop your peters, boys, and get out of here. You bunch of lowly sheep thieves.”
It was Harry Gunn.
“What is it, Harry?” asked a private, sounding fearful. He had forgotten all his military manners, probably thinking he was about to be marched into the desert and shot.
“Put it this way: you’re damn lucky to have a lieutenant like Hugh Davidson. He’s been up all night pleading your case with Captain Meech. You’re free to go but you’d better toe the line. There’ll be no second chance.”
Road to De Aar, April 1900
When the flying column staggered back into Van Wyk’s Vlei, they found out many things. The Mounted Rifles trapped on the drowning vlei had gone berserk one night. Their officers had left, presumably to find a drier place to wait out the storm. So the men had formed a mob and looted the town. After that, they’d stolen whisky from their quartermaster, Jack Allan, got drunk, and fought each other. They weren’t sure why they hadn’t been court-martialled. Maybe because their officers had left them without much justification and with no guidance.
Greasy Griesbach was the one who told them, and Frank was one of the fellows who countered with their own story of stealing sheep. Then the group sharing stories went silent awhile, probably thinking how strange it was that this desert had turned them all into criminals. Then Greasy spoke up again to say that the driver Bradley had drowned in the dam trying to water his team. Their first casualty.
Next day, the officers broke the Carnarvon Field Force apart. Mounted Rifles D Battery was sent to garrison Victoria West. E Battery went north. Squadrons D and C were ordered to the railway junction at De Aar.
All along the march to De Aar, Frank saw flowers, the desert’s answer to the rain. Brilliant flowers everywhere, the heat shaking the fanciful colours and making them rise. It was an almost unbearable beauty.
In the Native kraals they came to, the blacks were drumming and dancing. Sometimes Frank’s line of march passed close and he could hear those sounds above the shrieking wagon wheels. Through the open gates, he saw lines of people moving; bobbing, jumping. But no matter how close the Mounted Rifles came or how loud they were, no one inside those kraals paused. No black faces turned toward them.
Such a clean and total shutting out reminded Frank of the Bloods at home and how their old people talked about a place in the Sand Hills where they would go when it was time to die. They said it was not far away, and not much different from their present world.
Maybe the rain had removed the screen that separated those two worlds here in the Great Karoo. Maybe the dancers were looking at other dancers in that other place.
Part Three
MARCHING TO PRETORIA
We are marching to Pretoria,
Pretoria, Pretoria
We are marching to Pretoria,
Pretoria, Hurrah!
Aldershot, April 1900
An army friend had just departed General Butler’s office, leaving him alone and drunk. His orderly was beyond the door, keeping people away, but there was still the problem of getting out of camp, then the problem of arriving home. This was no common occurrence for Butler. He would have been critical of any other senior officer he found drinking in the afternoon.
Butler stood and reeled, braced himself with both fists on the desk blotter. He shouted for the orderly, who slid in and closed the door quietly behind himself.
“Sir?”
“The damn coffee. Where is it?”
“On the way. Oh, and General?”
“What?”
“I’ve taken the liberty of ordering your carriage a half-hour later than usual. I could send a note to your wife.”
“Yes. No. No note. That will be all. But do hurry with the coffee.”
Butler sat back down, heavily. His thoughts churned. The visitor was an Irish-born officer with whom Butler had served in Egypt and Sudan. He had been a young chap then, a lieutenant, and had helped Butler with the system of boats on the Nile. What had walked in the door was a man much older, more so than the interval of years accounted for. His face was gullied, eroded, emptied of all freshness and optimism. Butler had failed to recognize him. Even when he said his name, the general’s brain resisted.
Dumphrey. Now Major Dumphrey. Back from South Africa.
Butler stared at the empty decanter, at his and Dumphrey’s glasses on the tray. The orderly should have taken it away by now. He stared at the empty chair and made Dumphrey reappear in it. The haggard face, not even shaved. The dark eyes moving in their sockets with a kind of squirm. Initially, Dumphrey had set one hand on the desk, and it hopped there of its own accord like something from a pond.
“General Butler, might we have a drink?”
“Celebrate your return, Dumphrey. Of course.”
“A drink, at any rate.”
Studying the man, Butler kept returning to the jacket, done up to the neck. Jackets had to fit so tightly nowadays. Officers insisted their tailors take out every bit of slack. They wanted a slender look, like a whippet, and posture like a sword. If you added anything, an undershirt even, or gained a pound, it showed. That was how Dumphrey looked: bunchy for all that he was thin. Then Butler understood: it was a cloth bandage, wrapped around him from the armpits to the waist. Torn up by shrapnel, likely, or riddled with Mauser bullets. It was no longer rare for a man to come back shot in several places.
Dumphrey threw back his first drink. Butler poured him another.
What had happened to Dumphrey was Paardeburg, followed by a stint in a Bloemfontein hospital. When enteric fever started raging there, they’d moved him to Cape Town. Then home.
Though Dumphrey still looked unhealthy in body, it was his nerves that were most acutely injured. You often saw this with younger soldiers who’d been in an attack for the first time, or who’d been left wounded on a battlefield overnight. The nerves would go, and they would chatter and cry. Getting a mess tin to their lips was like climbing the Matterhorn.
More seasoned officers were assumed to be immune, having seen so many battlefields and wounds. But here was Dumphrey, no poltroon, fluttering like an aspen leaf.
Initially, Butler had not tried to match him drink for drink, but the other’s rapid imbibing caught him up. After the first three, the knot of Dumphrey’s body eased and he relaxed deeper into the chair. He had undone his jacket to make room for that relaxation, and a spot of fresh blood was revealed below the rib cage. When Butler pointed it out, Dumphrey made a not again face, drew his handkerchief, and pushed it between the buttons of his shirt.
That was why Butler had drank, he remembered now. He was trying to help Dumphrey relax, reasoning that a drinker was more at ease if the other fellow drank too.
Butler had inquired about the war, narrowing in on his own concern, which was how Roberts was running up the gut of Africa and distancing his supply convoys. But Dumphrey had no interest in the current state of things. His war had ended at Paardeburg. When he started to speak, compelled to speed like a freezing man trying to warm himself with words, Butler realized Dumphrey’s war had also begun at Paardeburg. Whatever else there’d been, the nine-day battle was all that remained.
“We couldn’t believe our luck when Cronje laagered up. He needn’t have, you know. French’s cavalry had caught him, but couldn’t have held him. Cronje circled his wagons in a flat beside the Modder. Some said it was the women. Cronje should have taken his soldiers and run. Left the women. But he wouldn’t.”
As Dumphrey described the scene, Butler saw it. He had travelled deep inland during his
two stints in South Africa; had seen with his own eyes how the Boers camped with their wagons in a circle. If threatened, they stuffed the gaps with thorn bush. It was how they had trekked inland and fended off the Africans.
Dumphrey kept on with his jittery retelling of Paardeburg. Lieutenant-General Kelly-Kenny had been in charge at the start. From a couple of little kopjes, the British had Cronje’s laager in range of their guns. The thing to do was pound the Boers’ kraal and trenches, and Kelly-Kenny was about to do that.
But then along came Lord Kitchener with orders from Roberts that Kelly-Kenny was to stand aside and let him run the show. The minute Kitchener had the reins, he called for an all-in attack. That was February 18. It went on all day, even after it started to pour rain.
“The Canadians and the Highlanders took an awful cutting up. Such a wide, flat space. Hardly a bush to advance behind.”
Dumphrey had stiffened again. Butler poured his glass full, and the major swatted it across the room trying to grasp it. Butler drew a fresh glass and poured, waving away the apology. “Go on, Dumphrey. I want to hear.”
Dumphrey was with General Kelly-Kenny, whom Kitchener had put in charge of the frontal assault. It was murder, as the Boers were dug in on the far bank of the river and could see the approach. Kelly-Kenny’s men ran out onto the plain, unsupported. Cronje’s Mausers took target practice on them. They faltered, threw themselves flat; crawled behind anthills. Kitchener was on a hill miles away, watching the advance falter and stop. He sent riders demanding renewed attacks, more bravery, more sacrifice.
Sometimes, Kitchener’s orders were so absurd the men receiving them thought they must be a mistake or an enemy trick. Kelly-Kenny was ordered to cross the river. He refused. So many of his men were dead and wounded already.
Perhaps the saddest thing, said Dumphrey, was what happened to Colonel Hannay. Hannay commanded a unit of mounted infantry and had crossed the Modder upstream of Cronje. The order he received from Kitchener was that he and his riders must attack the laager at once and fire into it.
“Fire into their laager.” Dumphrey laughed despairingly. “So good old Hannay, he sent a lot of his men away on errands before he disclosed what he was ordered to do. He finally told the remaining men about the attack. They all knew what it meant, but quite a few said they’d go. Men devoted to him. His old hands.”
“Did you see it, Gerald?”
“No, no. I was shot up by then. A fellow I met in the field hospital was one of them. A lucky one, just wounded. He told me Hannay made no speech, just turned his horse and went. For a long time, Hannay wasn’t hit, even as fellows were dropping behind him. But then, his horse took it in the chest. Fell and pitched Hannay over its head. He jumped up and kept advancing. The fellow in the hospital said Hannay went down for good three hundred yards from the first Boer trench.”
Dumphrey’s cheeks were streaming wet, rivulets riding the furrows to his chin.
“I can’t imagine what I’ll do, William, if they want me to go back.”
“How on earth did we win that battle, Major?”
Dumphrey gathered himself, prepared to do his duty by the conversation. It was complicated, he said. He wondered sometimes if he understood it. Somewhere along the line, De Wet had arrived and taken possession of a hill Kitchener had abandoned. He had a pom-pom, which he used to rake the field hospital.
“Got half my wounds right there under the red cross. After the first battle, Kitchener shelled Cronje’s laager for days. Night, too. During that time, De Wet was signalling Cronje to come to him, but Cronje wouldn’t. De Wet got disgusted and left. Nine days after it started, the white flags went up and the Boers threw their rifles out of the trenches.”
Dumphrey turned his face to Butler. He tried to control his wet, squirming eyes. The effort was too much for him.
“They had us beat, William,” he said. “If De Wet had stayed on that hill with his pom-pom, we might have been the ones running up the white flag. But Cronje gave up before we could. And now Kitchener is Britain’s darling, again. If I could laugh, I’d laugh myself to death.”
When the carriage rolled up in front of Butler’s rented house, he’d had a few miles of wet wind to wash the liquor out of him. Still, he expected Elizabeth to be cool when he came through the door, as he was very late. But she sang out from somewhere in the rear. Her studio was back there. When she appeared, she was wearing her smock. She gestured with a fat brush that he was to follow.
“It’s done, William. Finally.”
She meant the commission. For months, she’d been struggling with a commission from the War Office. By the timing of their request, Butler had guessed they were looking for something to take the sting out of the early defeats in South Africa. But Elizabeth had been all secrecy. For the first time ever, she had not told him what her painting was about. Now she was inviting him into her studio to see it.
“I’m sorry, William, that I kept you in the dark. They wanted something inspirational, you see, something from the current war. You’re so very negative about South Africa that I was certain you’d say, ‘Nothing about this war is inspirational.’ That would not have helped.”
They were in the studio now. She was leading him to an easel, covered in a cloth. She took the cloth by one corner, pursed her lips, and made a bugle sound; whipped the veil away.
“Paardeburg!” she crowed.
Butler squinted.
“Not so close, William. I always tell you it does no good to inspect my brush strokes.”
“I want to see the detail.”
What he had leaned toward was the mounted figure, galloping toward two covered wagons at the centre. The rider had dropped his reins and had his rifle to his shoulder, sighting down it. The line of fire was toward a gap between the wagons. In the gap was a bearded Boer soldier whose look said he knew he was done for. Before thinking, Butler loosed an oath.
“William!”
He turned his back on the painting; stared at a pile of frames in a corner. His cheeks were burning. He felt drunk again.
“Never mind,” he said.
“Oh no,” she said. “You have never looked at one of my paintings and actually cursed before. I will have an explanation.”
Butler continued to look at the frames, but he knew she meant it. She would not let him keep his thoughts to himself, now that he had crudely indicated their direction.
“Fine, then,” he said. He turned to her painting and pointed his finger at the rider.
“That man is Colonel Hannay. That man is dead. He died three hundred yards farther back than your picture suggests. No British soldier at Paardeburg ever got this close.”
Now it was night, and his wife and he were in bed. Not sleeping. Not speaking. Both angry. It would not change for the foreseeable future.
De Aar Junction
Three weeks in the Karoo desert and the Mounted Rifles finally made it back to the railway, at De Aar. A train huffed in from the south as they were approaching across the last span of waste. They cheered to see it.
Then they were cheered themselves, briefly, as they passed down De Aar’s dusty main street. The people clapping and whistling were uitlanders, the Boer word for anyone not Boer. They could tell from the quick and desultory quality of the cheering that the locals had cheered many soldiers at this place and were tired of it. The ragged soldiers marched through and out the other side, toward a smoking town of canvas.
Major Howe, the Mountie officer who was in charge of them now, was waiting at the road entrance to camp with two black men and a cart heaped with mail. They had been half expecting Herchmer, but Howe told them the colonel was still in Cape Town, recovering. He’d sent a message to expect him farther down the road. As for Major Sanders, he was mended, but there were other plans for him, something involving Boer prisoners shipped abroad.
Howe led the way to their place in camp. The two black men hauling the mail cart trailed him, one in the handles and the other pushing from behind. They stopped a
t a sand-drifted spot on a windy edge, already littered with mess from bygone soldiers. Mail and newspapers fluttered in the scrub. Rags of khaki and rotten boots suggested some outfit had received new uniforms here.
They were told to set up camp and see to the horses. Mail distribution would follow.
Frank and Ovide threw up their tent in quick time. Someone watching might have thought they were hurrying to get at their mail, but what they wanted was horse detail. Minding horses was their way of avoiding latrine duty, burning litter, or manning an outpost. They were good with horses, attentive and thorough, and Lieutenant Davidson usually allowed them the choice if they got there early.
When they were watering horses in the town’s dugout, they saw the mark where the water had risen to in the rain and flood, and how it was already down two feet in service of the camp. Returning to the picket line for more horses, they heard names being shouted. They could see the lucky ones running to get their letters and parcels, like children on Christmas morning.
“Think you’ll get a cake, Ovide?”
That would have been cruel had there been any hope of Frank receiving mail. But he was confident he wouldn’t. Frank’s mother could write, but he’d never seen her write a letter. His father had a sister named Polly in Ontario who sent him a fat letter every month. Every third one, he sent a postcard back: Nothing new here. Jim.
Frank and Ovide kept on watering, and putting on feed bags and hay nets. They salved sore spots on the kind of horse that clips itself when it walks. There were injuries of all kinds. The work kept Frank from homesick envy and kept him from picking up some other soldier’s thrown-away letter. It would be a pleasure to read one, but it would also be pathetic.
As they were finishing up, they could smell food. But instead of eating, they were ordered into formation in front of three officers, Major Howe and two British ones. Howe spoke first. The Carnarvon Field Force was disbanded, he said, as of their arrival here. Then he introduced the younger of the two British officers.