by David Gilman
*
Major Lawrence Baxter and his men had watched the unfolding contest. They had fallen into an uncommon silence when Radcliffe killed Captain Belmont because now the horseman was galloping beneath them and orders had been issued to stop him.
‘Sergeant McCory! The men will set their sights at five hundred yards. Volley fire when ready,’ Baxter ordered.
McCory hesitated.
‘When you’re ready,’ Baxter said quietly.
McCory smiled grimly. It was the best they could do to give Radcliffe a chance.
‘Enemy to your front! Five hundred yards! Ready!’ McCory commanded.
Mulraney thumbed his sight’s bevelled wheel and set the range. ‘Five hundred yards, my arse. Seven more like. The major’s letting him get through, God bless him.’
Flynn levelled his rifle. ‘He might get past us, but those fucking Scottish Protestant bastards up the line won’t let him through.’
‘FIRE!’ McCory shouted.
Rifle fire splintered the air. They watched as the horse ran, full stride, its rider hunched low as if he were racing for the finish line. As man and horse cut across the valley floor, the bullets struck the ground, keeping pace with the gallop but falling short. The volley fire echoed and then Mulraney could no longer keep the discipline expected. He clambered to his feet and cheered. ‘Go on, man! Go on! Ride! Go on with you!’
The cry was taken up along the Royal Irish ranks. Men stood, waved and cheered, willing the horseman on.
McCory glanced uncertainly at Baxter, who shook his head. Leave them be.
*
Radcliffe saw the bullets fall short. They splattered the ground like a sudden hailstorm. He thought he heard men cheering once the echoing reverberations settled but all he was certain of was the heaving effort of the stallion as it ran for the horizon. The swirling dust chased them but the black horse’s coat shimmered defiantly ahead of it like a flag of war. Pain bit into Radcliffe’s chest. The blood from his wound soaked him further. He ignored it and pumped his arms rhythmically forward, urging the horse to go faster and then faster still. The way ahead seemed clear but then another volley of bullets danced before him, right in his path, and a second later came the ragged sound of gunfire. He pulled the horse wide, felt the snap of air as the bullets sought them out. He ducked low on to the flying mane and spoke to the horse, telling it they would make it, said that they were faster than the wind, that the bullets chasing them couldn’t reach them. He felt the great horse shudder as bullets struck home; it faltered and then regained its pace. Something struck his leg, a vicious punch that numbed him. Another clipped his right arm. Wasps tugged at his jacket, stinging his skin. Tears blurred his vision for a moment as the wind nipped his eyes. Blood made the reins slippery. He curled a fist around the horse’s mane. They were slowing. The devil wind had caught them and began to enshroud man and horse. The rifles from the ridge fell silent. He knew they could still make it home.
But then the luck a man always needs in war ran out.
A platoon of men from the Highland Division were on the valley floor. They saw the surging dust cloud racing towards them and a horseman emerging from it bearing down on them on a black stallion, nostrils flared, blood streaking its flanks. They knelt, levelled their weapons and fired.
The devil wind swept past them taking horse and rider with it into the rippling heat haze, leaving only the distant sound of hoof beats in the desolate valley.
And then silence.
*
High on the ridge Pierce lowered the telescope and turned away.
EPILOGUE
The insistent rapping of the rain against the window pane reminded Pierce of the stuttering gunfire those five years past in South Africa. His friend saved many a life when he took on the guns. The Boer commandos had heard the power of the gunfire in the valley and turned away, forcing the British to regroup, and later an army of several thousand Boers, realizing their cause was lost, surrendered. And finally everyone went home.
Pierce’s finger marked the page in the book he was reading. He stood up and crossed to the slightly open window, allowing a few splattering drops of rain to touch his face before closing it. The coals in the grate glowed comfortingly against the Dublin winter chill. Below, in the street, a cab arrived and a frock-coated Edward stepped down, one sleeve of his coat neatly pinned, the other arm extended to help a pretty young woman step down.
Edward had become a fine scholar and this attractive young woman was likely to become his wife. No doubt, Pierce thought, a family would soon follow. Edward’s success seemed assured and he was already showing signs of becoming an excellent lawyer. Pierce heard the front door open and close. The sound had a familiarity to it, something he welcomed. Voices were muted downstairs but he knew Mrs Lachlan would have helped the young couple ease out of their wet coats and that hot food would soon be offered and accepted. Perhaps he would have a brandy first with Edward. He hoped so. He delighted in talking to the boy, took solace in telling him about his father and the road they had travelled together. It was good to reminisce and Edward enjoyed listening; he never failed to ask questions about the Buffalo Soldier’s life, and always wanted to hear what Pierce had seen that fateful day in South Africa.
And Pierce never tired of the telling.
Edward came bounding up the stairs, smiled and greeted Pierce, making a gesture of putting a glass to his lips as he opened the door of the room opposite. The girl always stayed below stairs for a few moments, making sure that Mrs Lachlan prepared a tray with the food that Edward preferred. Such conversations were a delicate balance between youthful enthusiasm and a stalwart woman of immense patience. Pierce poured two good measures of brandy, catching a glimpse of Eileen Radcliffe in the chamber that had been prepared for her when Edward and Pierce had returned from the war. Pierce had seen to it that her sitting-room fire was kept lit and that she and her companion nurse enjoyed the privacy that that part of the house offered. Edward kissed his mother and she smiled. She still did not know who her son was, only that the young man was kind and gentle with her. Edward returned to where Pierce waited, took the glass and warmed himself next to the coals. Pierce liked that Edward smiled a lot. He was a young man in a hurry. Hungry to get God-knew-where, but he’d succeed wherever it was, no doubt about that, Pierce thought, sipping the brandy.
Their escape from the South African War had been fraught with danger. Once they’d reached Portuguese East Africa, their trusted guide had returned to his own people in Zululand. Pierce never heard of him again. Evelyn’s photograph appeared occasionally in English and Irish newspapers. She had returned to Bergfontein concentration camp and with Pierce’s help raised awareness of the prisoners’ plight back home. One such photograph showed her guiding a group of important men and women from England along the camp’s barbed wire. It was not hatred that had caused such suffering but inexperience, administrative ignorance and a distasteful, ill-judged policy that waged a new kind of war against women and children. Her testimony about Radcliffe and his son was reluctantly accepted by the British Army, with the help of the politicians who knew Radcliffe to be anything but a spy and traitor. General Reece-Sullivan lost his command. A year and a half after their escape Evelyn Charteris died from disease caught in one of the camps. Even though the Boers lost their war they gave this Englishwoman the greatest honour they could bestow: they buried her at the foot of their Women and Children’s Memorial.
Pierce had done as he had promised and brought Edward home. Pierce did not object to the rain so much any more but he always remembered the warmth of the African sun. The Royal Irish had recovered Radcliffe’s body from beneath the dead horse and buried him atop a kopje above the valley where he had died, a place that saw the rising and the setting of the sun on each skyline. His mind’s eye saw Radcliffe on his horse in the warmth of the darkening valley and a small devil wind blowing the memories along with it.
He eased his book open to a page on which a poet had written tha
t when a great man dies, people explore the horizon for a successor, but none comes and none will come, for his likeness is extinguished with him. Yet, because of his greatness, love shall always follow him.
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Historical Note
Further Sources
Glossary
Acknowledgements
About David Gilman
About the Master of War series
An invitation from the Publisher
Historical Notes
Like all great conflicts that can split communities and families there were Irishmen not only from the same country, city or town fighting each other in the Anglo-Boer War, but from the same neighbourhood. Echoes of the American Civil War.
At the outbreak of hostilities between the South African Republics and Great Britain, European countries adopted a strict neutrality, issuing instructions to their citizens that they should refrain from taking any part in the conflict. The German and Dutch governments gave direct warnings that no assistance was to be offered and that any vessel found to be taking supplies to aid South Africa against Great Britain would have its cargo impounded and the shipping line would be subjected to punitive fines. The German people might well have sympathized with the South Africans but Count Von Bülow, the German Imperial Chancellor, issued a statement that the policy of a great country should not at a critical moment be governed by the dictates of feeling, but should be guided solely in accordance with the interests of the country, calmly and deliberately calculated. French popular sympathy was clearly with the Boers but the Paris administration ordered the prefects throughout the country to remove from official minutes the resolutions of sympathy for the Boers which had been adopted by the provincial councils.
The Americans were fascinated by the South African/Boer War of 1899–1902. It was a spectacle of a farmer militia taking on the might of the British Empire and their professional soldiers – a conflict that reflected American’s own struggle for independence. They displayed as much interest in this colonial war as they did in their own fight against Spain a year earlier during the Spanish-American War. America was now a colonial power like Britain and the South African War created divisions within American society. In 1900 Theodore Roosevelt, then governor of New York, wrote: ‘The trouble with the war is not that both sides are wrong, but that from their different standpoints both sides are right.’ He insisted that the Republican administration remain neutral but felt that Britain was undertaking the same role of benevolent international policeman that he sought for the United States. He felt that the interests of the English-speaking peoples and civilization ‘demand the success of the English army’.
Some church ministers were also vociferous in support for the British. Bishop Joseph C. Hartzell – responsible for the American Methodist missions in Africa – proclaimed that only the British were fit to bear the white man’s burden in Africa and explained that the Boers considered the Africans to be children of Ham and treated them as slaves, but the British in the Cape Colony (to the south of the Boer Republics) gave Africans the franchise under the same conditions as their white neighbours.
Needless to say, the German-American Methodists heartily contested Hartzell’s assertions, claiming he had been influenced by the grant of free land for his missions by Cecil Rhodes – the great instigator of imperial expansionism in Southern Africa.
Mark Twain was not pro-British but was forthright in his opinion. ‘England must not fall,’ he said. ‘It would mean an inundation of Russian and German political degradations... a sort of Middle-Age night and slavery which would last until Christ comes again. Even wrong – and she is wrong – England must be upheld.’
Irish Americans saw the conflict through their own eyes and very differently to those who might have seen support for the British in purely economic terms. Gold and diamonds were part of international trade and the Boers were considered too backward to be stewards of the world’s resources. The arguments and passions raged – pro-British, pro-Boer. Irish, Dutch and German Americans raised support and money for the Boers while a group of American women married to Englishmen raised forty thousand pounds to charter, equip and staff a hospital ship, the SS Maine.
More Americans volunteered to fight with the British than with the Boers.
For Irish Americans the fact that Britain was at war meant it was their duty to oppose the nation that held their kinsmen in subjugation in Ireland. Irish Americans were prepared to strike against the hated Empire and even proposed to mount a raid by Fenians into Canada which was thwarted by Theodore Roosevelt who threatened to turn out the militia and throw them into jail.
Similar emotions as those experienced by the Americans – and also those in Britain who were against the war – swept the world. The Boer War of 1899–1902 was the second conflict between the British and the South African Boer Republics of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. These notes are not the place to recount the historical seeds of unrest that had begun two and a half centuries earlier, but when the British abolished slavery in 1834 the immigrant Dutch Calvinists – known as Voortrekkers (pioneers) – who spoke a vernacular form of Dutch known as Afrikaans, and who had settled the harsh land, undertook an exodus that became known as the Great Trek to escape from the Cape and Natal colonies ruled by the British. The Boers were determined to deny political rights to Africans and Coloureds (people of mixed race).
The first war in 1880 – which lasted all of ten weeks – ended in political defeat for the British (following three major military reversals) and a treaty was signed in 1881. From then onwards British political power and economic interest in the vast mineral wealth that South Africa held virtually predetermined another war between the Boers and the British. This imperial war was known by various names – the Anglo-Boer War, the South African War, and the War of Independence by the Boers – but whatever label history has placed on it, it was the cause of enormous suffering. The military lessons learned and tactics employed proved to be a precursor to the First World War, which followed a few years later. Artillery and trench warfare signalled the end of the great cavalry charges favoured by many of the imperial generals.
In 1895 a failed uprising by British immigrants, volunteers and Rhodesian troops – a scheme instigated by Cecil Rhodes, Prime Minister of the Cape Colony – was considered by the South African general, Jan Smuts, as being the real declaration of war, but it was another four years before the Boer Republics themselves declared war against the British in October 1899. The might of the British Empire gave British politicians and generals a false sense that an easy victory would be achieved by Christmas. It is a perpetual mystery why politicians, in particular, seem never to learn the lessons of history.
The war caught the British unprepared. Troops were drafted from the Empire – India, Canada, New Zealand and Australia – and as tensions heightened volunteers joined the Boer Republics to fight in the Foreign Brigade. Irish, French, Scandinavians, Germans, Russians and, in at least one recorded incident, a Scotsman fought for the Afrikaner cause. In the years before the war began, the rush for gold and diamonds in the Transvaal Republic brought men from across the world, and many of them were Irish, who not only brought their strength and dreams to the goldfields but also secured their escape from British rule in Ireland. It was one of the vagaries of war that brought Irishmen to bear arms against each other.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Ireland was part of the British Empire. The Irish Republicans – known then as Fenians – had had little success in their bid for Home Rule. Their ranks were riddled with traitors and the British Army and Irish constabulary had little difficulty in keeping their activities under control. The Irish served in government posts: the civil service,
the military and the navy. It was an inconvenient fact for the Irish Nationalists that more than fifty thousand of their fellow countrymen fought for the British Army during the Boer War and were often led by Irish generals. This constituted the greatest number of Irish troops in any campaign during Queen Victoria’s reign and many of these men were at the forefront of a number of key engagements, serving in Ireland’s thirteen infantry battalions and three cavalry regiments. These men forged a lasting reputation for courage and tenacity. It was this moment in history that I wanted to use in The Last Horseman.
It was never my intention to look over the shoulders of the towering figures who were the key players in this conflict: Cecil John Rhodes; General Sir Redvers Buller; and Field Marshal Frederick Lord Roberts, affectionately known as ‘Uncle Bob’, who had had resounding success in the campaigns in India. That Lord Roberts and Sir Redvers Buller were at loggerheads, and that military and political divisions between many of the commanders became entrenched during this conflict, had a negative impact on the execution of the war. Water and food was scarce – and in general terms so was the feeding of this vast army as supply lines were long and difficult to manage and often destroyed by the enemy.
The British Army were unprepared for guerrilla warfare. They were used to volley fire during their colonial wars, often against a poorly armed enemy; now they were faced by a determined group of men and women who fought for their homeland. The Boers were expert horsemen, accustomed to riding across vast tracts of countryside, and they often depended on their shooting skills to put food on the table. These ‘dirt farmers’, frontiersmen who scraped a living from the harsh land, formed themselves into commandos: groups of highly mobile fighters who could strike fast at the lumbering British. (The same term would be applied to shock troops used by the British in the Second World War.) During the South African conflict the British soldiers had no bush- or fieldcraft and the generals often insisted their men advance on their enemy in closed order – virtually shoulder to shoulder. Boer marksmen with their German Mauser rifles – which had an effective range of two thousand metres and a five-round magazine whose ammunition used smokeless powder making it difficult to spot – made short work of many a brave British Tommy who had never heard of, let alone trained in, fire and manoeuvre. Onward they went against the guns until they could fight hand to hand and deliver a terrifying death to the Boers entrenched on hillsides and the rock-strewn kopjes. Infantry bayonet attacks, and cavalry assaults with lance and sword, put the fear of God into the Afrikaners. The soldiers of the British Army took their poor conditions in good spirits, as cheerful and philosophical as soldiers often are in any campaign, despite exercising a soldier’s right to moan. They looked out for each other and held regimental pride close to their hearts.