The Last Horseman

by David Gilman

  ‘She still does not know anything, she knows no one. She sits, she reads and she gazes out of the window at the gardens. She remembers nothing. Nothing. Grief destroyed her mind.’

  Much of what Radcliffe earned came each month to this private wing in the place of sanctuary. He thanked the woman and made his way to the coachman who had brought him from the city. As they drove through the gates he turned and looked back, hoping his wife might have gone to the window to watch her visitor leave. There was no one there. Arching across the gates’ pillars the sign – Richmond District Lunatic Asylum – seemed even starker than usual.

  *

  Over the next days a new impetus seized Radcliffe. There was much to do in a short time if he were to arrange the shipment of Kingsley’s horse and catch the next steamer to Cape Town. Pierce made all the arrangements while Radcliffe briefed other lawyers to take his upcoming cases.

  Their brief respite of clear bright days was overtaken by stormy weather, thrashing rain, and it was on such an inclement day that Radcliffe returned home to find Mrs Lachlan clattering the kitchen pots more animatedly than usual as she dried and hung them in their places.

  ‘This house has an air of impending doom that no sane person should ignore, Mr Radcliffe. I hope prayers are said and confessions made. A good Catholic house should be on its knees three times a day, five on a Sunday.’

  ‘Not exactly the house, Mrs Lachlan, more perhaps the people in it,’ Radcliffe said gently in an attempt to soothe the woman’s obvious anxiety.

  ‘Mother of God, it’s not the time for cleverness with words, Mr Radcliffe. Your lad’s away in a heathen land and I pray strongly for his safe return but Mr Pierce needs a lesson or two in devout prayer himself. All that bangin’ and cursin’ at the top of the house and him thinking I don’t hear down in the kitchen. The attic is closer to heaven and blaspheming that close to the Lord will bring even more misfortune on us all. And another thing: what am I expected to do rattling around here on my own while you two gentlemen go off on this hare-brained adventure? And you’ll forgive me for saying this, Mr Radcliffe, but you’re both of an age when going off to war should not be a consideration. Old age has its limitations.’

  She had not taken a breath as she berated him and punctuated her final exasperated comment with a bang of a pot on the kitchen table.

  Radcliffe climbed the stairs to the attic.

  Pierce was packing his travel bag, but old chests of clothes and boots had been turned out as he chose the most suitable. The look on Radcliffe’s face pre-empted the question. Pierce gave him a warning look in return.

  ‘You know the boy’s as close to me as my own kin, if it was I had any. Don’t tell me I ain’t going.’

  Radcliffe said nothing for a moment and moved one of the buckets more squarely under one of the leaks from the roof. ‘I’ve arranged to have the roof fixed while I’m away. And I told them you’d be here to oversee the work.’

  ‘Then you can untell them, and have Mrs Lachlan stand over them. She’s a damn sight more difficult to please than me.’ Pierce eased down a bedroll and as he laid it out two US cavalry sabres, their curved blades snug in their scabbards, clattered to the floor.

  Both men looked at the weapons neither had held for many years.

  Radcliffe picked his sabre up from the floor and slid the curved blade halfway clear of its sleeve. ‘They’re calling this a white man’s war. Dammit, Ben, you’re gonna complicate things.’

  Pierce hefted the weight of the weapon in his hands. ‘We people of colour have a tendency to do that,’ he said.

  The drips of rain from the leaking roof dribbled down a rafter, forcing him to find another receptacle. Radcliffe handed him an old storage tin. ‘Neither side is arming the Africans and if you step off the boat you’re likely to start a whole new war of your own. You don’t know anything about the country,’ he said.

  ‘I’m taking it for granted that the sun shines,’ Pierce said hopefully.

  SOUTH AFRICA

  FEBRUARY–MARCH 1900

  CHAPTER NINE

  Young, bareheaded, his khaki uniform bloodstained, the British officer crawled through the low dry grass, his .45 Webley revolver dragged along behind him by its lanyard. He was dying, but valiantly attempted to reach his horse, which grazed nonchalantly twenty yards away.

  As each movement sent agonizing pain through his body, a sense of confused wonderment struck him: he marvelled at how a perfect blue sky embraced the majestic beauty of the mountains. It was a breath-taking amphitheatre of the gods, now tinged with the blood light of the setting sun. The gods must be watching him die, he thought.

  The might of the British Army had engaged in what they hoped would be a short imperial war against a citizen army consisting mostly of farmers, clerks from the city and miners from the gold- and diamond fields. The Afrikaners were Dutch-speaking farmers, Boers who often operated in small, self-reliant groups. They were expert riders and marksmen who struck hard and fast and they called themselves by a name the world had not heard before: commandos.

  The nineteen-year-old British officer carried not only the burden of his wounds but that of being the son of an aristocratic family. Surrender was not an option; the Dutchies would shoot him anyway. They had no means to care for a wounded enemy. All this young man from the gentle landscape of the English countryside could do was uphold the honour of his regiment and his family. That he should die well had been ingrained in him since he was a boy. But he wept from the pain of his efforts and the knowledge that he would be dead before the final rays of the sun speared the mountain peaks.

  It was not only the gods who watched him crawl away from the ambush site. Behind him a ragged group of men wearing homespun clothes, felt hats and bandoliers picked their way across the killing ground where a dozen or more khaki-clad soldiers lay scattered in the grass. The fifty-strong commando ransacked the ambushed supply wagon. One of the men, older than the others, had fought the British in their first war twenty years earlier. With his tobacco-stained beard and his limp from an old wound he looked as if he should be sitting on a rocking chair on the stoep of his dirt-poor farm, gazing out across his beloved land. Piet Van Heerden, Oom Piet, might have been the oldest man in the commando but those who rode with him knew the sixty-three-year-old was a crack shot and horseman. And his age tempered the sense of injustice that had been inflicted on him and his kind. His was a stoic understanding that this war would be vicious and bloody and that independence was the prize. He was glad, though, for the younger men who rode with him. They were mostly from the northern city of Johannesburg and the goldfields, men who had escaped the poverty of Europe to seek out their fortune. These men of the Foreign Brigade were there to fight the cartel of bankers and industrialists who craved the mineral wealth that lay beneath the African soil. It was a war of defiance.

  At first these ragged-arsed volunteers had made fun of Oom Piet’s guttural speech but the Afrikaners in the group had tolerated their jibes, and the men soon realized that they were all moulded from the same clay, labouring men from peasant stock who only wanted freedom from what they saw to be tyranny.

  Oom Piet called out to his twelve-year-old grandson, whose father had died in one of the first engagements two months ago: ‘Boy, take their boots and jackets. We’ll be needing them.’ The old man’s years meant his seniority gave him honorary command of the group of horsemen, but the commando was actually led by Liam Maguire, an Irishman, chosen by common consent for his strength and intelligence, who had outfought the British since the war began. A man who had fled from Ireland to the Transvaal goldfields, who could think of no better way to strike back at his imperial enemy than to join forces with the Boers. He stayed in the saddle as the others pulled sacks from the wagon. Maguire’s brother, Corin, five years younger than Maguire’s twenty-seven, called out, ‘Liam! There’s salt! Flour! And sugar! Sacks of the stuff.’

  ‘Take only what you can carry on the pack mules. Burn the rest,’ Maguire instructed
the men. His eyes had not strayed from the grass and the wounded man fifty yards away who was close to reaching his horse. He muttered to himself: ‘Don’t be a brave officer gentleman now, my lad...’

  The young lieutenant had reached his mount and grabbed the stirrup to haul himself upright. Half-blinded by the pain he fumbled for his revolver at the end of its lanyard. Maguire eased the Mauser rifle into both hands and watched as the soldier’s pistol wavered. The booming shots made everybody duck and seek cover, but the lieutenant’s shots went wild, a desperate and futile act of defiance. Maguire hadn’t moved. He calmed the horse and then, without haste, raised the rifle and shot the young officer dead. His body slammed back into the horse and then tumbled into the dirt. The gods’ cruel laughter echoed and faded across the mountains.

  The men quickly recovered, laughing among themselves at their fear. Corin unhooked his fiddle from his saddle strap and played a few bars of a jaunty jig in celebration.

  ‘Put it away, Corin,’ Maguire told him. ‘There’s men lying dead on the ground. Do ya think it matters that they’re British? Their womenfolk’ll be grieving as much as ours would grieve for us. Let’s not forget that.’

  Chastised, the younger man secured the fiddle, then followed the others from the killing ground.

  He would never admit it to the brother who had cared for him for most of his life, but this unyielding land, an anvil beaten by the sun, made his heart yearn for the mist-laden hills and green fields of Ireland.

  This was a war that would snatch even more men into its madness and inflict its pain and suffering without favour.

  Ireland was a very long way away.

  *

  Since the war began the British had suffered defeats that had shocked those at home. The so-called ragtag army of Boers had been underestimated. These were superb horsemen and marksmen, fast and manoeuvrable, whose German weapons made them even more deadly. The Mauser rifles and Krupp artillery slew many a British soldier sent into a damnable battle by generals who had not yet rid themselves of outdated formations used against a lightly armed indigenous population across the Empire.

  Infighting and rivalry among the generals fuelled the British defeats. Napoleon had believed that no one general should lead an army and after the British were slaughtered at Spion Kop, Colenso and Magersfontein there were those in the British Cabinet Defence Committee who agreed. The British sent Field Marshal Lord Roberts as General Officer Commanding South Africa. ‘Uncle Bob’ had saved India for the Empire, had lost a son at Colenso and was determined that his generals should reverse their failures. Roberts gave himself a fighting force greater than those of his generals who faced tougher odds. Forty thousand men, a hundred artillery pieces and a cavalry division struck into the Orange Free State, sister republic to the Transvaal – the spiritual homes of the Boers. At a cost. The British were exhausted. Poor planning and Roberts’s lack of understanding of how his supply lines could remain intact meant his troops suffered twenty-four hours without food or water and officers and men bravely cast away their lives to even more reckless plans. The Boers, vastly outnumbered, dug in tenaciously on the east and north-west of the Modder River and launched an audacious attack, seizing the whole south-east line from the British. Roberts almost ordered his men to retire from the field, a fatal mistake that would have allowed thousands of Boers to escape. The cost had been too high, but the gods of war saved him when the Boers surrendered. The British artillery had slaughtered most of their horses, and without them the commandos lost their fighting strength. Nigh on four thousand Boers surrendered.

  What became known as the Battle of Paardeberg was the first great victory of the war. Roberts had won almost by default but the casualties from that battle were in plain sight at Naauwpoort; this was an important railway junction, but it was only a strip of corrugated iron houses on each side of the railway line. It was here that many of the wounded were brought from the battle that had been waged, and served as the principal base hospital of Lord Roberts’s advance.

  The British dead and the dying were laid to one side of the railway siding. Flies smothered the wounded but the corpses were being buried as quickly as possible to avoid the spread of disease. A forlorn crop of graves rose up from the arid land and men with shattered limbs, pierced lungs and broken bodies clung to life in appalling conditions. Soldiers lay suffering in stoic silence, regional accents from town and country blending into words of comfort for each other until those in greatest need fell silent, and the hard land claimed them.

  The distant sound of a steam train reached these men, offering hope of evacuation that lifted their spirits. The Red Cross hospital trains would run from the Cape to the battlefield hospitals and take the wounded on the first leg of their journey home. God’s gift, the men thought. Clean sheets and a food sack of fruit, milk and eggs. Linen bags, stencilled in red: the Good Hope and Red Cross Societies had clean clothes and soap, a shaving block and toiletries. It was the human face of war and a welcome relief to the desperate. Walking wounded edged towards the platform’s edge. Was the train slowing? No comforting words from the Indian stretcher-bearers were uttered, no orders were received. They cursed. This was a troop train going up the line to help ‘Uncle Bob’ beat the boojers. There was no fucking train for them. Those that could watched the distant speck get larger, its pennant of black plumed smoke heralding its approach. Good luck to those poor bastards then, they muttered. Rather them than us.

  *

  The Royal Irish Regiment of Foot had landed in Cape Town days earlier: their first sight of the great curving bay was the three-thousand-foot Table Mountain buttressing a spine of peaks raking back to another coast and another ocean. A formidable symbol that seemed to warn those who disembarked not to venture any further. The Irish came ashore from their ship as did other regiments from theirs.

  A dozen ships had unloaded men, supplies and horses. It had been an arduous journey at times on overcrowded ships and insanitary conditions and men died from dysentery. A vicious head wind across the Bay of Biscay had confined soldiers below decks despite their desperation to go topside and suck in the cold air. Anything was better than the stench of vomit below. But rough seas threatened to take men over the side and their lives were cast in misery for another two days.

  By the time the ships reached Tenerife where they took on water and coal they had their sea legs. Some foolishness was had four days later when they crossed the equator and Mulraney had been blessed with a ducking by King Neptune, an embarrassed Sergeant McCory wearing a wig – like a whore on the high seas – quipped Flynn, which earned him extra duties, but then, as the churning ships ploughed their way southwards to St Helena, the men were obliged to strip and clean weapons with unremitting regularity by their NCOs. Had deck space been sufficient, RSM Thornton would have had them drilling; small mercies were few but that was a blessing, though there was to be no escape from a fitness regime that had groups of men stretching, bending and running on the spot.

  With fair winds and mostly clear skies the small flotilla sailed close enough for each regiment’s band to be heard. Bagpipes and flutes from the Scots’ vessels made the Irish music, with their tin whistles, bugles and paper and comb, seem modest by comparison. Seven days after they lost sight of the island they arrived in Cape Town where hundreds of steamers, brilliantly illuminated with their electric lights, lay at anchor in the bay.

  With kitbags slung the men were shuffled into order, squared away as neat and tidy as a soldier’s footlocker, and then they were marched off to camp. The three-week voyage was softened by their first night in Green Point Camp, an expanse of flatland a short march from the docks, where bivouacs nestled beneath the heights of the mountain and Signal Hill. Troops were entertained with sentimental songs from home by Cape Aberdonians, which suited the Scottish regiments, but was met with heckling from those Irish who had arrived with the latest contingent. Inter-regimental rivalry was good for morale but insulting the Aberdonians from the Cape was considered bad
manners. Regimental Sergeant Major Thornton threatened punishment, which quietened them, but Colonel Baxter and his officers secretly lauded their men’s disregard. They would need even greater disdain for their enemy in the following months.

  The comfort of camp was short-lived, however. Next morning they were marched to the city, waiting in ranks to cross the broad thoroughfare as electric tramcars rumbled their way between foreshore and city. Cape Town train station was packed with waiting soldiers, who were issued with a hundred rounds of ammunition per man and then herded into cattle trucks. Welcome to South Africa, one of the Cape Afrikaner railway workers had shouted in English as their train pulled away. Now fuck off home.

  The trains lumbered continually from Cape Town station and docks, hauling not only new recruits but also veterans of Indian and Sudanese campaigns across the South African veld. This was yet another war to hold the Empire together, and Great Britain’s war machine had swung into its efficient role of supplying men, provisions and equipment to the front line several hundred miles to the north. British troops were already engaged with their enemy in the harsh conditions, learning even harsher lessons from the Mauser rifles of the Boer ‘farmers’. It was now widely reported that the British and colonial forces were suffering heavy casualties from battle and illness. But the Irish press concentrated on two elements of the conflict. Irish regiments were beginning to lock horns with the Foreign Brigade, made up of volunteers from Europe and Ireland, but most specifically they were facing Irishmen from the Irish Transvaal Brigade. The Irish Republicans who years earlier had flocked to the goldfields of Johannesburg now gathered themselves into a force to be reckoned with, having seen the ideal opportunity to fight the British Army and, by consequence, the Irishmen who served in it. But the Royal Irish Regiment of Foot was not yet in conflict with the enemy, be they the Foreign Brigade or the thousands-strong Boer Republic’s army.