Death in the Silent Places

by Peter Hathaway Capstick

  When parade was over for the day and the rest of the regiment had turned in, Stigand would saddle Tari, having changed into his ersatz robes, place a service rifle in the camel’s voluminous saddlebags and sneak past the guard into the night. We may be pretty certain that southern Arabia then was nearly as dangerous to wander in alone by night as New York’s Central Park is today, and the fate of a lone, young English officer, obviously a spy and an infidel dressed in believers’ clothing to boot, would likely have had an especially nasty last few hours of life had he been captured by Arabian authorities, or even common bandits.

  But he did it, night after night, reaching well beyond Lahej (now spelled Lahij), mapping out the land. That he had iron nerves is very clear, as he dared to sleep on his way back aboard Tari, counting on being awakened by the swish of grain against his legs as he re-entered the cultivated area around the city of Aden. He then had to sneak past the guard again (ever try to sneak a camel past anybody?) and be back in uniform, trying to stay awake during morning parade. We don’t know if he was ever confronted or if there might be a few old bones still moldering under a lonely desert bush with a British bullet through them. But then, Stigand never spoke about killing people in his own books. Poor form, probably. There is, however, no question that in one of his first actions he showed the initiative and deadliness welded into his professor’s brain and strong man’s body … .

  If you happened to be born in Somaliland sometime late in the last century, you would have learned in short order that what you should aim for was the title Mullah, the Somali term for a powerful combination of political/religious leader. A certain Mrs. Hassan’s boy made the grade, one Muhamed Abdulla, and was causing quite a few upper-echelon British headaches, what with raiding and fomenting revolution as if he was getting a volume discount. The nice part of the job of being Mullah was that you got all the dervishes you needed, a very effective mounted fighting force of ascetic Muslims who, between working themselves up into a religious lather by chanting and dancing, spent the rest of their time chopping up just about anybody handy. The British, after little consideration, decided to cut Muhamed Abdulla bin Hassan and his chaps down a few notches, and an expedition was mounted in January 1901 under a Colonel Swayne, Indian Army, who was at the time in command of the Somali Coast Protectorate. Stigand was ordered, perched swaying on Tari, to hold the town of Hargaisa, about 105 miles from the Mullah and somewhat out on a tactical limb, with only a small force. It would seem that nobody was all that mad at anybody else, because it wasn’t until May 22 that the main expedition finally got moving from its assembly point at Burao. Stigand was given command of A Company, First Corps, under Captain G. E. Phillips. (Incidentally, a lot of these place-names are still left on modern maps; just look in the very northwest corner of Somalia on Africa’s northeast coast.)

  At long last, on July 17, the armies finally clashed at a desolate place you won’t find, Fardiddin, a rocky, hilly battlefield assaulted by Phillips’ force on the right, which put the British in a position to place a hornet’s nest of .303 caliber fire into the Mullah’s dervishes, forcing them to take cover and return fire from behind bushes and boulders. Chauncey saw his chance. Taking a single “tame” Somali in tow, he broke further to the right on his own initiative and outflanked the dervishes, pouring fire into them until they broke and ran for their lives. Stigand was singled out for gallantry in dispatches by Phillips; his action forced the whole dervish line to break and take a bad beating. Among the others of the enemy that Stigand surely shot during the flanking movement were two of the Mullah’s personal bodyguards, distinct in their white turbans.

  That’s the story from official records, but, like the night forays at Aden, Stigand never even mentioned them.

  Although a professional soldier, Stigand was at heart a hunter; in fact, it was largely his skills at bushcraft and tracking that made him so effective in combat. Certainly, he was a grand shot and killed without compunction in action, but his idea of a really big time was to go out and capture somebody—or even a couple of dozen somebodies. As he put it, after commenting that most organized expeditions against the natives were dull, “ … if there is nothing to rejoice the heart of the soldier, the sportsman can often amuse himself, if he can escape from the crowd and get away by himself.” Stigand loved the sport of people-hunting much as a small boy gets a kick out of hide-and-seek. The only difference in Stigand’s case is that the men he was seeking were invariably armed and experienced warriors, trained from earliest childhood.

  During the First Somali Campaign, Stigand and another officer, a Captain Fredericks, were off on their own, trying to nab a prisoner from whom to extract information about the Mullah’s retreat. Spotting four enemy horsemen obviously on an espionage mission, they sat tight until the dervishes rode into a box canyon to leave their horses. At the narrowest point between the walls, Stigand killed the last horse with a single shot, sealing off the enemy, who immediately abandoned their mounts and scampered up the rock walls, with Chauncey firing over their heads to get them to stop. Of course, he could easily have killed them on the wall—they were completely exposed—but he let them go, joking that the last one disappeared over the lip with his shield across his back, as if he believed it was bulletproof. One of the horses captured was a famous steed among the Somalis called Godir Hore, or Swifter than the Lesser Kudu, a mount that Stigand rode for the remainder of the campaign.

  Within a few days of this episode, he took a small force and personally tracked down and so perfectly anticipated the movements of a dervish patrol in rocky country that the whole lot were surprised and captured.

  Stigand did recount a few of the more humorous turns of events of his man-hunting experiences, one taking place in Kenya in 1908. He was off on his own with a very small force of porters and various bush staff, erecting surveyors’ beacons, when a runner reached him with a telegram ordering him to join an expedition against the Kisii tribe, some distance up-country. After quite a few days’ hard walk through heavy jungle, he managed to get within sight of villages burning in the distance. In the lead of his men, as he always was (a habit that finally got him killed), he topped a rise and spotted a lone Kisii warrior coming up from the bottom of the valley. He signed his men to stop, which to them usually meant he had seen game and, therefore, fresh meat.

  Silent as a cat, he began to stalk the native, slipping from bush to bush until he was within twenty yards of the unsuspecting spearman. At this moment, there was the blast of a rifle close behind him, startling both Stigand and the Kisii half to death. One of his porters, who couldn’t resist investigating what Chauncey was after, had crawled up and, seeing the enemy warrior so close, fired an old watchman’s carbine to frighten him away. It sure worked! Instantly, the man was off down the hill with Stigand flat-out on his heels, the native dropping his spear and shield as he fled. At the bottom of the hill was a stream into which the Kisii immediately plunged, Stigand waiting on the bank for him to reappear. Some time went by without a ripple, so Chauncey sent men up- and downstream to look for him, but without a hint of where he had gone. Deciding to examine more closely the place where he had disappeared, Stigand heard a slight breathing sound and made for the exact spot. The Kisii came out from under a small tuft of grass where he had been hiding and stood up in midstream.

  At this moment, with the white man standing a few feet away, a strange native who had attached himself to Stigand’s party came running up with the Kisii’s dropped spear and tried to earn a quick reputation for bravery by stabbing the defenseless prisoner to death in the water. As he thrust, Stigand knocked the butt aside; at the same second, the Kisii, a big, strong man, grabbed the spear away. Frightened out of his skull by the attempted murder, the captive exploded into a frenzy of terror, waving the spear around in huge circles with one hand and throwing chunks of grass at the Englishman with the other, an ancient African peace gesture.

  All of Stigand’s staff were now assembled and babbling so that he could not
make himself heard over their rumpus and the shrieks of the prisoner. Chauncey pushed through them, accepted a tuft of the grass and pulled the Kisii out of the water by his hand. Personally, this seems a bit dicey to me, as the frightened man still had unquestioned possession of that spear and might have used it in desperation. Apparently, Stigand’s native staff would have agreed with me as there was a general shout of, “Look out! He will kill our white man!” at which point a dozen hands grabbed for the spear. With all these bloodthirsty people about, Stigand observed, “ … the Kisii thought his only safety lay in my immediate proximity so, wet, dripping, and covered with mud as he was, he threw himself on my neck.”

  As if there was not enough confusion, the cook rushed forward and made the howling observance that the warrior still had a knife at his belt—which, indeed, he did—and grabbed it by the hilt to take it away. Naturally, the poor Kisii made the immediate assumption that it was required to cut his throat and struggled with his free hand, one being wrapped around Stigand’s neck for protection, to keep the knife from being freed. The cook, however, was equally determined, and the strange tableau continued for some minutes, the weird waltz so ridiculous that Stigand was reduced to laughter as his men tried to separate the knot of struggling, screeching people.

  At long last, the prisoner was calmed down and roped by the neck, led along with the column. Realizing that he wasn’t to be killed in cold blood, Stigand wrote that he assumed the haughty air of an honored guest. It was decided to give him a load to carry, which was half a tent, but after a few minutes the Kisii dropped it and demanded that the rope about his neck also be released! If I know Chauncey, I’ll bet the African picked that half-tent back up in one very big hurry.

  This book could be filled with stories of Stigand’s favorite sport of people-catching, yet there’s one more that proves conclusively that not only was he foolhardily brave, but he knew the African mind with an insight few whites ever gain. On an unrecorded date in Somaliland, surprising a tribe of rebels at dawn, Chauncey gave chase to a couple of men driving camels away and bumped into two more on foot who were trying to reach cover. He captured them and took their spears, ordering them to come along with him. A few minutes later, he spotted a horseman and, hiding behind a large bush, ordered his prisoners to step into the open and tell the rider to come over and dismount. Innocently, he did, and Stigand came around the bush and added him to the bag. Stigand just has to tell you this himself:

  “By this time, I had got six spears and another pony beside my own pony and rifle to look after, so I gave their spears back to the men and told them they must carry them for themselves as I could not be bored with them.” [Author’s italics.] Can you imagine the nerve it took to rearm six of your enemy prisoners? Stigand was pretty clearly not suffering from a self-confidence crisis! He then casually continues, “The mounted man I told to lead his pony and then we set off back to find the column. On the way I made a few more prisoners till we were quite a large party.”

  Everything had gone so smoothly until then that Stigand was a bit off his guard and let the man leading the pony get behind him, to the left, where he would have no way to swing around the saddle to fire. The man jumped into his own saddle and started off, but Chauncey fired at him with his rifle resting over his thigh, missing him but scaring him so badly that he fell from his horse, absolutely convinced he was dead. By the time he found his column, Stigand was so surrounded by armed prisoners that, “To anyone observing the procession approach, it must have appeared that I was the prisoner and that they were guarding me on every side.”

  There’s no need to follow Stigand’s military career to every bush and rock in East and Central Africa; the high points should be enough. At the end of the First Somali Campaign, he was so ill with malaria he had to be shipped back to Britain. Upon his recovery, he was seconded from his own regiment to the First (Central Africa) Battalion of the famous King’s African Rifles at Zomba, then Nyasaland and now Malawi, and promoted to captain on March 21, 1904. Over the next few years, he had much more opportunity to hunt and travel, shooting from Nyasaland to as far as the swamps of Lake Bangweulu in modern Zambia, where he was one of the earlier sportsmen to hunt the rare aquatic antelope, the sitatunga. He hunted my old haunts on the Luangwa River and, on one of these trips, killed a greater kudu, that marvelous spiral-horned antelope in banker’s chalk-stripe gray; his first, but also a probable world record for the time. It’s not listed in Rowland Ward’s Records because another taxidermist mounted it, but the longest horn measured 63 inches on the flat of the curve, a real whopper by any standard.

  Poor Chauncey seemed to have been jinxed as far as his luck with big game went. Oh, sure, he was a great elephant hunter and took a full complement of other dangerous game. The trouble was, he had an unfortunate habit of zigging when he should have been zagging. In fact, of the “Big Five” dangerous, large African man-killers, only two of them didn’t catch up with Chauncey—the buffalo and the leopard. The rhino, lion and elephant all, however, managed to knock one hell of a lot of bark off Stigand. The first to make direct and everlastingly unforgettable contact was a rhino, when he was stationed at Fort Manning in 1905.

  Stigand, in his writings, makes one of the points I pounded to a pulp in Death in the Long Grass: that the degrees of danger and difficulty in hunting a particular species such as rhino depends to a great extent upon local conditions of terrain and vegetation. He had shot quite a few rhino on the open plains of the north and admitted it to have been a fairly uninteresting business. But in the thick grass and miombo scrub of central Africa, where the rhino is not so common and often encountered at uncomfortably close range by mutual surprise, the game is a very different one. Rhino met at short distances in the really thick crud where there is little room to evade them will charge more often than not. If a turning or killing shot isn’t made fast, you’re most likely to regret mightily that you took up big-game hunting instead of interior design.

  The morning that Stigand got a good, solid hint that he was not immortal found him some thirty miles out from Fort Manning, following an oldish elephant spoor across a wide dambo, or flat, covered with growth of twelve feet of grass and offering a visibility of two yards. About halfway across the flat, he noticed another track crossing the elephant trail at right angles, so fresh that the crushed grass was still springing back up, yet covering the tracks of the animal that made it. Curious, Stigand turned onto it for a couple of yards, bending down to try to see what had passed. The Angoni carriers he had with him—members of a northern branch of the Zulu—were still back on the elephant trail behind him. After a few steps, Chauncey’s curiosity was unhappily satisfied as the locomotivelike snorts of a pair of rhino charging from the gloom of the grass cleared up the mystery. The first sight he had was of a great, double-spiked head tearing into view straight at him from no more than six feet away. There was nothing to do but stick the muzzle of his Mannlicher sporting rifle (he never tells us the caliber, but traditionally it would have been fairly light—for that matter, anything smaller than a howitzer is light for stopping rhinos from two yards!) into its face and pull the trigger. Still, it was enough to force the first animal to swerve slightly, and Stigand never knew what became of it. At the same moment, he became aware of the second rhino, a big bull, almost on him from a bit to the left. There was, of course, no time to work the bolt action and reload, so Stigand desperately tried to leap aside.

  He tripped.

  On the initial charge, Stigand said that the rhino “kicked him,” although I think that what he meant was that he probably caught a blow from a foreleg; a rhino actually kicking out like a zebra or mule would be most unusual and perhaps anatomically impossible. Also, let’s admit that he had quite a bit on his mind at that moment—a couple of tons, in fact—for the recollection of the finest detail. Whatever the case, displaying the astounding agility of an animal that appears so unwieldy to anybody who has never been chased by one, the rhino swapped ends with the speed of a Sp
anish fighting bull and charged thundering and snorting back. The next thing Stigand knew, he was flying like a bird. (With his usual classic understatement, he interrupted his own story to observe that, although his men saw him clear the top of the grass, “they are so unreliable in their statements that it would be quite enough for them, if they heard what had happened, to imagine that they had seen it.”)

  Despite the terrific shock of the toss, Stigand had the presence of mind to give some thought to his landing and attempted to control his fall. All those years of tumbling in the gym seem to have paid off; he managed to land heavily on his shoulder blades, thus not breaking any assorted arms, legs or his neck. Although partially stunned, he remembered giving a great mental sigh of relief when he saw the rhino’s wrinkled rear disappearing into the grass. Later, he could recall actually being tossed only once, figuring that the “kick” might have given him the idea of having been on the horn more than one time. From this, it seems pretty safe to conclude that the first thump must have been like a glancing blow from a garbage truck, although Stigand played it down.

  Undaunted, and with a growing sense of relief, he automatically began to look around for his rifle, spotting it on the ground some yards away now that the grass had been so nicely trampled. He got up and walked over to see if it had been damaged. While inspecting it, he noticed that a fingernail had somehow been torn completely off and was bleeding strongly. Even he admits that, after discovering this, it became intensely painful.

  As he was checking out his finger, the Angonis came up and began to howl in horror at the sight of him, which made no sense to Stigand until he followed their stares down to his chest; he must have gotten quite a start himself. He saw that his shirt was torn wide open, sopping in blood, and that there was a god-awful rip of a wound on the upper left side of his chest, “ … just over the spot in which the heart is popularly supposed to be situated.” Chunks of flesh and muscle—he called them “mincemeat”—were scattered all over his shirt and skin from the presumed tearing loose of the rhino’s horn from the gore wound.