by Frank Norris
The dance was slow in starting. Thus far only a few, some score, perhaps, faced each other in two lines dancing and singing. There seemed to be no order about it. Pretty soon in another portion of the crowd a second isolated dance began; then a band of some thirty, gripping their assegais by the very butts and holding them at arm’s length straight before them, clove through the crowd, chanting at the top of their voices, holding their heads high, very proud and brave. Half an hour later some dozen little dances were going on simultaneously. Here and there were bands of musicians sitting on the ground, beating tom-toms with alternate blows of the tips of their fingers and the heels of their hands; others were playing the same three notes over and over again upon concertinas, cheap little concertinas from English toy shops. Every now and then through the vague clamour rose the long shriek of a war whistle. There was disorder, confusion, discord everywhere.
At last, with a certain easy swiftness, and as if acting under some common and indiscoverable impulse, all these different isolated dancers began to draw together and to fall into one another. The dance grew and spread, the circle widened, weaving itself in and out among the crowd, sucking into its vortex all those not yet engaged; it grew larger and larger. The chant deepened in volume, the rhythm became more marked, the little groups on the edges of the crowd were merged in the greater throng, and then all at once there was a second of confusion, a vast discordant chant, a sudden writhing movement all along the great circle of brown moving forms as the dance writhed itself into final shape. The eddies rushing together formed the maelstrom. The great war dance was in full swing in a twinkling, and the vast chanting chorus began to thunder:
“Yaing-gahlabi
Leyo n’ kunze
Yai Ukufa.”
The effect was amazing, almost terrible. The 500 huge Zulus ringed in a vast circle began to chant and dance in perfect unison. They held their assegais by the butts, sometimes pointing them high in the air, sometimes thrusting them point downward toward the earth, sometimes catching them by the middle and brandishing them as if about to throw. The great feature of the dance was the stamp, raising the left knee to the height of the waist and bringing down the foot flat upon the ground with the whole force of the body. A European could not have done it without breaking the bones of the ankle. As the 500 feet came down together with each line of the chant, the sound was tremendous and the earth trembled under the shock as if at the passage of a heavily loaded train.
The excitement of the dance began to seize upon the Zulus, the movement grew more rapid, the song louder, perspiration gleamed upon them, making their skins look like wet brown silk. Occasionally one or another, driven to a frenzy, would start from the ranks and bound into the centre of the circle in one or two springless leaps, yelling shrilly, brandishing his shield and weapons, sounding his weird and hideous war whistle. Then, standing in the middle of the vast circle, he would heave his hand high above him and shout: “Bayete hala, n’hala.” This was the bayete, the royal salute given only to the king.
On a sudden the singing ceased and in its place commenced a curious sound, precisely like that made by a child imitating the puffing of a locomotive, a strange sort of “Chu! chu! chu!” The stamping continued, but now a forward step was made with every stamp. The circle narrowed more and more, as the pressure against shoulder and flank increased a number of men were thrust to the front forming a second rank, then a third rank was formed in the same way; next every assegai was raised high in the air and with a wild medley of yells and shouts the circle of dancers, precisely like the “Siss-boom-ah” figure in the lancers, rushed altogether to the centre till they formed a solid jam.
This was the dance. One might as well have been in Uganda, Barotseland, or in the very heart of the Dark Continent itself — the thing could not have been wilder or more thoroughly savage. As it was certain ladies stood near by and clicked kodaks at it, while not thirty feet distant at the headgear of the mine was a vast pile of modern machinery manufactured by a firm in Chicago.
San Francisco Chronicle, March 15, 1896.
JACK HAMMOND IN JOHANNESBURG AND PRETORIA
As far back as last January, the name of John Hays Hammond began to be heard in connection with South African affairs; a few weeks later he was spoken of around the world, and to-day you will see the familiar name printed in the large type of the newspaper’s scare heads. Mr. Hammond has become, as one might say, a maker of history. Occupying the prominent position he did in the Transvaal, it was but natural that the great political movement of the winter of 1895-1896 should, little by little, settle about him as one of its centres.
Even in the face of imprisonment and sickness, I doubt if Mr. Hammond regrets the part he took in the Uitlander rising of the first day of the year 1896. The insurrection has developed into an historical event, like John Brown’s raid; the names of the men who were involved in it have become part of the chronicle of the world’s doings.
In private life the American mining engineer is as entertaining and approachable as in public affairs he has shown himself to be keen, vigorous, and well able to grasp and to control a vast and complicated situation. It was my very good fortune to meet and to become acquainted with Mr. Hammond in Johannesburg, at what was probably the most exciting and interesting moment of his career. He had his office in Simmonds Street, in what is one of the only brick buildings in the town. It is called the Gold Fields Building, and is a sort of centre for the mining interests of the Rand.
The Consolidated Gold Fields of South Africa is probably one of the largest concerns in existence, aiming as it does to control the output of the whole Witwatersrand. Mr. Hammond’s role is that of consulting engineer for this concern, and in return for his counsel and advice the Gold Fields pays him a magnificent salary.
But for all this the American engineer lives quietly enough. That his home is without the town does not imply any undue desire for magnificence or luxuriousness. No moderately well-to-do man would for a moment think of living in Johannesburg itself. The house is in the suburbs, at New Doornfontein, on the other side of Hospital Hill — the hill from which we were told the Boers were to shell the town. It, and Mr. Tilghman’s place, out at the New Primrose Deep, were the only really habitable homes I saw in all the Transvaal. From Johannesburg it is precisely twelve minutes’ easy drive.
This was on Christmas Day, and some half dozen of Mr. Hammond’s friends were had out to dinner. The house, if I remember, is brick-built, of one story, very broad, low, and surrounded by an immense veranda. It is set in a garden of tropical plants. Taking it altogether, the place is suggestive at once of an American country house and an Indian bungalow.
I have had occasion, later, to wonder at Mr. Hammond’s self-possession during that Christmas dinner. In the Pretoria trials it was brought out that at that very moment our host was in the very thick of the tremendous movement which culminated in the Uitlander rising a few days later. Yet he presided in a delightful manner, talking and chatting with his guests as if the only care upon his mind was that the dinner should be successful and his friends entertained. It must be a man of considerable strength of character who can descend to the light commonplaces of dinner-table talk and make himself agreeable to his company and at the same time keep his grip upon the vast and complicated forces of a great political uprising that is to disorganize the machinery of an entire empire.
Think of it, while Mr. Hammond sat there at the head of his dining table chatting easily over his black coffee and cigarettes, Jameson and his six hundred with their Maxims and Lee-Metfords were straining at the leash, away up there at P’tsanni on the Bechuanaland border, waiting and listening for the word from him to precipitate an insurrection, a crisis whose shock would be felt around the world.
A week later I saw our host in far different circumstances. War had practically been declared, the insurrection was an avowed and indisputable fact, the streets of the town were packed with excited men and with moving bodies of the irregular Uitlander tro
ops. The American engineer’s office was like the headquarters of a general of division. Mounted dispatch riders came and went, armed guards were on the stair landings and before the doors, the hall below was filled with cases of ammunition, stacks of rifles, boxes of canned provisions, army blankets, and all the impedimenta of a campaign, while, singular as it may appear, the flag of the Transvaal was flying over Mr. Hammond’s office.
That Hammond’s motives have been misinterpreted by many of his own countrymen is no doubt largely due to the feeling against England that sprang up during the winter. England came off second best in the Transvaal affair, and for that reason Oom Paul was hailed as the statesman of the hour, the man for the occasion. By implication Oom Paul’s opponents, Rhodes, Jameson, and Hammond, were discountenanced. It became the thing to assert that Hammond would have received only his deserts had he been hanged.
But even admitting that the charges brought against the American were true, one cannot but admire the courage of the man who would confess himself as guilty of a capital crime in order to give his fellow accused the chance to plead guilty to a less serious offense which did not demand the penalty of death.
San Francisco Wave, June 20, 1896.
SPANISH WAR ARTICLES
WITH LAWTON AT EL CANEY
The regiment whose fortunes I had elected to follow, and, incidentally, whose rations I had hoped to share, had landed and gone on ahead the day before. I delayed in Daiquiri only long enough to readjust my pack, then pushed on after it. At Siboney I caught up with it, rolling on the grass and kicking its heels under a grove of coconut palms, after the long days of cramped quarters on shipboard. For a week or more nothing extraordinary happened. We marched and countermarched, broke camp and pitched it. One morning we heard sounds of firing off in the hills, and ten hours later knew that Guasimas had been fought. Then we moved forward by easy marches to a point on the Santiago road about three miles south of El Pozo. For three days we lay there, trying to keep dry, and devising new methods of frying mangoes in bacon grease. Brigades and whole divisions went on ahead of us in such numbers that, instead of being in the lead, we found ourselves in the rear. Already there were rumours of a surrender, and we began to believe that there would be no fighting around Santiago after all.
Then, all at once, every man in the brigade seemed to understand that on the morrow there was going to be a battle. For the first time we heard a new name. Somebody had pronounced the word “Caney.”
When Capron’s battery came along the bugles began to call. At five in the afternoon the brigade (it was Ludlow’s) moved off in the battery’s wake. By the time it was fairly dark the column had begun to climb the slopes of the foot hills that encircle Santiago. The column, consisting of Lawton’s division, went forward through the night by fits and starts, now doubling when the word was passed back to close up, now halting in mud up to its legging tops, for no assignable reason, now moving forward at snail’s pace, and now breaking up completely, when the tired men eased belt and blanket-roll and dropped into the drenched grass by the roadside for a moment’s rest. The march had not been long, but it had been wearisome; for on Cuban trails the men must march in single file, and the column is always elongating or contracting. No two companies went the same gait; there was none of the swing and heave of marching that on better roads picks a man up like an undertow and carries him along in spite of all fatigue.
There was no talking in the ranks, but on ahead we could hear the battery trundling along. Then there was the monotonous squash of many boots churning up the mud of the road, the click of swinging cups against bayonet scabbards, the indefinable murmur of a moving army that recalls the noise of the sea or of forests. There was a moon somewhere, but rather low as yet. To our left, far down the valley, was a cluster of pin points in a faint white glow as of a nebula. Santiago was there, and from mountain top to mountain top the Spanish signal fires were flashing.
We went into camp toward ten o’clock, under orders to light no fires, nor even pipes, and to talk no louder than a whisper. One wondered at this until, some half hour later, when we were eating our supper of hardtack, cold bacon, and water, we heard through the silence the long-drawn centinela alerta of the enemy’s pickets, not a quarter of a mile away. By the time we turned in we knew that the battery would open fire upon the town of El Caney, which lay to the front of us, at daybreak the following morning. The next morning, when I looked in the direction in which our field guns were pointing, Caney was plainly visible — red roofs, a white wall or two, the twin towers of the church, a blockhouse of unusual size on a sugar-loaf knoll just outside the town, and, yes, on its one salient tower a flame-coloured tongue of bunting, the flag of Spain. By five o’clock Capron’s battery was astir. Overnight the guns had been placed in position, and by the time we had gulped our breakfast the battery lieutenants were pottering about with their little brass range-finders and getting the distance of the blockhouse by triangulation. The four guns stood out upon the crest of the hill, the caissons in the rear, the horses picketed in the bushes farther down the slope, while the soldiers who were the support of the battery, the Cuban camp followers, and the correspondents formed a great crowd back of the caissons.
It was about sunrise, and the range-finding was still going on when I happened to turn my glasses upon an open meadow on the left of the town. Cavalry at a slow trot was moving there, leaving the town. I told the news to the man at my elbow, and in a twinkling all the battery knew it. But the commanding officer could not see the cavalry, nor could his lieutenants, and while we pointed and danced with impatience the troops slowly passed out of sight behind a hill. The range-finding was resumed. In all the landscape below us there was no sign of a human being — nothing but trees, open fields, the red roofs of Caney, and the flame-coloured flag on the blockhouse.
Suddenly there was a noise which split the silence of the early tropic morning. It began as corn begins to pop, irregularly and with pauses. Then it gathered volume and rippled and rolled and spread till it awoke a great echo somewhere up in a little gully of the hills. Everyone cried out at the same time. We knew that Ludlow had opened on the left. The firing of rifles on the battle-field is not loud; it is not even sharp when heard at a distance. The rifles sputter, as hot grease sputters, the shots leaping after one another in straggling sequence, sometimes in one-two-three order, like the ticking of a clock, sometimes rushing confusedly together, and sometimes dropping squarely in the midst of an interval of silence, always threatening to stop, yet never quite stopping; or again coming off in isolated rolls when volley firing is the order. But little by little the sputtering on our left gathered strength and settled down at length to steady hammer-and-tongs work.
“There they are! Look, quick, there they are again! See ’em over there!” shouted an artillery sergeant standing on a caisson, with his glasses to his eyes. The cavalry column was emerging from behind a line of hills, and this time everybody, the officer in command as well, made them out. Capron shelled the column. I confess to a certain amount of surprise and a little disappointment. I had imagined the handling of a battery in actual battle to be more businesslike, that the orders would be given with more precision. The captain was on foot, his coat and waistcoat were off, and at every movement he hitched his suspenders over his shoulders. The men did not hurry in serving the guns. They went to the caissons, groped among the ammunition, and talked excitedly while they were cutting the fuses. It was something like this:
“Where are those beggars?” This was from the captain, holding his field glasses to his eyes with one hand and hitching up his suspenders with the other.
“There, there! Don’t you see them, in line with those palms — don’t you see, right where I’m pointing!”
“That’s so! Now, men, hurry up — with shrapnel now! That’s about twenty-six hundred yards; hurry up, now! What are you waiting for? What’s the trouble? They’ll be out of sight in a minute. Everybody stop talking! Everybody that doesn’t belong to this b
attery get back!”
The shells were locked into the breeches, the pieces aimed, and one after another the gunners jumped to one side after sighting, and all down the line one could hear: “Number three, ready!”
“Number two, ready!”
“Number one, ready!”
“Number four, ready!”
Meanwhile the captain had gone to one side, studying the town and the moving column through his glasses; everybody was talking at once, and the correspondents and an attache or two were dodging in and out, notebooks and kodaks in hand.
“What’s the matter?” cried the captain angrily. “Why don’t you begin?”
“All ready here, sir. Number four, ready!”
“Well, fire it, then! Go ahead!”
“Number four, ready!” began the lieutenant. “Fire!” After the report came a piercing, ear-shattering sound as the shell took the air and tore across the valley. All of us went tumbling to the left of the battery’s position, to get out of the way of the smoke and to see the explosion when the shell should burst. There was a silence for about ten seconds, while a hundred eyes watched the moving column and the mass of green bush and hill and pale-blue sky above it. Then suddenly a little ball of white cotton popped out against the blue of the distant landscape; the crowd relaxed its breath.