by Fred Khumalo
His first thought was that he had to get rid of his greatcoat. But how? His lifebelt was cinched over it. He couldn’t think straight. A combination of cold and fatigue was slowly taking possession of his body. He was making peace with the fact that he was going to take his eternal rest. He was no longer scared, just contented with the way things were. He fell into the arms of a strong, comforting silence, a quietude that blocked out all the noises that had filled the morning air.
He could picture himself smiling and mouthing the words ‘Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.’ How sweet it was that he was indeed dying for his country. At least he was dying going towards the trenches of war – unlike his father, who had run away from battle, from commitment, from fatherhood, from being a breadwinner.
‘Dulce et decorum …’
His journey had come to its end.
Oh, God of love, peace and mercy, the words came to his mind. My journey has come to its end. I’m now beyond all the suffering. But I go down as a soldier, fighting, fighting a different battle …
His head exploded with pain as someone kicked him, startling him from his watery bed. He was shocked to discover that he was underwater. Still alive! He kicked furiously. A new and potent energy boiled inside his arms, which were now working vigorously, pushing the heavy blankets of water from his path as he finally resurfaced. He inhaled the cold air in huge, hungry gulps.
He was alert and hungry for life once again, albeit disoriented. Treading water, he looked sideways, trying to find his bearings again. The roiling waters were alive with the noise of screaming men and ear-splitting whistles and sirens. Through the fog he made out one of the rescue boats. It was a long way off. He had no choice but to swim the distance. As he was fighting the strong, stubborn water, he caught a glimpse of another figure swimming just ahead of him. His heart singing with relief and joy, he realised that the figure was swimming towards a greyish smudge in the water, a smudge that took the shape of a raft as he got closer to it. In that instant, numerous heads mushroomed all around him, all swimming in the direction of the raft. Many were well ahead of him. But that only spurred him to swim even faster.
With a shock, he saw that as the men tried to climb onto the raft, the man who had got there first was kicking them back into the sea. One after the other, he kicked them away. Through the darkness he thought he recognised the wavy mop of hair. Could it be? No, it could not. He squinted his tired, salt-bitten eyes and tried to focus. His vision was blurry, his arms heavy with fatigue.
As he drew nearer, he saw two more men being kicked in their faces as they tried to clamber onto the boat. He squinted once again. Yes, it was him. How could a trained and seasoned soldier like him stoop so low? That little boat could carry easily twenty people without taking strain. As the beam of a powerful torch from one of the ships licked the man’s face, Pitso’s fears were confirmed. He thought of forging ahead, of confronting the miscreant, but realised that, in his tired state, he did not stand a chance of overpowering the man. He had to change course. His heart pounded with anger as he started swimming towards the bigger boat, occasionally having to push people out of the way – those who had given up, who were just floating, not even making an attempt to paddle or swim.
Getting close to the boat, and thanks to the light that somebody was shining in his direction, Pitso saw a figure he thought he recognised. The man turned out to be one of the subjects of the Pondo chief. Then he saw another figure bobbing next to the man, and recognised the chief himself. Pitso shouted at the chief, ‘Nkosi, uphila njani na?’ Chief, how are you? The chief answered, ‘Akukabiko nto.’ There is nothing the matter yet. Pitso shouted encouragement at the chief and his subject as he finally reached the boat.
Some men dragged Pitso aboard. Shivering with a combination of fatigue and relief, he started vomiting. When he’d recovered his breath, he joined the men who were rescuing others from the water, helping them onto the boat. Then he saw the Pondo chief. The man was stiff, quiet and very heavy as they dragged him aboard. Water came out of his mouth as he lay on the floor of the boat. He was not breathing. They dragged him into a corner, swaddled him with some blankets, but it was too late. He was dead.
One of the men, a crew member, called out, ‘We have to paddle as far away from the ship as possible. Let’s get moving …’
‘We can’t go!’ Pitso cried. ‘There are men who need help.’
The crew member, helped by some of his more experienced colleagues, started slicing the surface of the water with the oars, determined to create as much distance as possible between themselves and the sinking ship.
Angry at their cowardice and heartlessness, Pitso got up and looked into the middle distance, to check if he could still see the Mendi. One of the boats kept shining a light across the water surface to assure those floating in lifebelts that they were not alone – and in that light, Pitso spotted the ship.
At the exact moment he recognised the Mendi, she was swept upward – at least the bow seemed to shoot upward – before she staggered into a huge hollow. A thunderous sucking sound reverberated across the darkness. Then a strong current swept across the confined space where the boats and rafts were bobbing up and down. In the ensuing whirlpool, Pitso saw one boat and a number of rafts getting sucked down, sparking a new wave of shouting. The boat in which Pitso stood shook violently. Exhausted, Pitso himself slipped into unconsciousness.
As the hours dragged by, many of the men from the rafts were rescued onto the boats just released by the Brisk, the vessel which had been escorting the Mendi, assisted later by the Sandsend. Even as these vessels moved about in a desperate mission to save the men, they had to sail cautiously in the dark, foggy waters, lest they cause another accident.
When the boats reached Dieppe in France, Pitso, Tlali and other exhausted survivors were rushed to hospital. Pitso learned that his friend Captain Portsmouth had already been admitted to one of the hospitals in France. As reports of what had happened started to flow in, it was revealed that, of the original crew of eighty-nine, thirty-one were lost, as were two of the South African Native Labour Contingent officers, and seven of the seventeen non-commissioned officers. Out of a total of eight hundred and two black troops on board, only one hundred and ninety-five survived.
CHAPTER 29
Pitso had never been admitted to a hospital in his life. While he’d expected a hospital to be a place of hope and comfort, Dieppe Hospital turned out to be more like a slap in the face. Still startled by the screams and shrieks, the groans and gurgles that had greeted him as he was wheeled in, he was soon enveloped in a cloying putrescence of disease and death. It was a smell that reminded him of the stink of a dead dog left on the side of a road for a number of days, only to be picked up and dunked into a bucket of disinfectant, and then pulled out, to be left in the sun to dry.
On his second day at the hospital, they brought in a soldier whose legs had been blown off by a mine. The man had been stationed in Rouen. Even though they were comrades-in-arms, fighting on the same side, Pitso took solace in the fact that the man was British and not South African. It was a mental game he would continue playing with himself for the duration of his stay in hospital. Whenever they brought a body, or a severely injured soldier, he would sigh with relief upon learning that the deceased or injured man was British, or Australian, or from some other colony. As long as he was not South African, it was fine. It meant, he hoped, that South Africans were removed from danger. These thoughts made him feel guilty – made him feel like a coward. After all, they had not travelled thousands of miles from Africa to come and hide in hospital wards.
When he arrived in hospital, he had been running a high fever. It had abated over the three days since he’d been admitted. Only his leg was keeping him confined to a hospital bed. In the agitated fight for space on the rescue boat after the sinking of the Mendi, he had broken an ankle and dislocated a kneecap. He had only discovered his injuries when he regained consciousness, a day after the shipwreck. Althoug
h he could not walk, he couldn’t wait to be sent to camp, to see what exactly he had come to do in Europe. He owed it to his country. He owed it to his fallen comrades.
What made his life in hospital bearable were the nurses. He found that, unlike the white women back home, they did not talk down to him. There was no distaste and suspicion in their voices, or in their interactions with him. The French lessons he had received from Christine back home were to stand him in good stead. Of course, his French was rusty, and his vocabulary limited, but he could understand what the nurses were saying. Sometimes he could even respond confidently, in a full sentence. The nurses would arch their eyebrows, impressed, their smiles full of human warmth.
It was thanks to these nurses that he began to piece together the story of the sinking, which had thus far been a jumbled collection of images, noises and cries in his mind. Through the nurses he learned that the SS Mendi had collided with a large cargo steamship called the SS Darro, which had been sailing from France to Liverpool. The Darro had failed to see the smaller vessel in the thick mist that morning and had collided with the troopship. The nurses had obtained this information from newspaper reports, which further declared that an official inquest into the accident would be held. Even though Pitso did not want to be reminded of that horrific morning, he needed to hear the full story. Justice had to be done, even though it was not going to bring back his friends and comrades. They were gone forever.
He was happy to have these generous nurses as friends. There was one fly in the ointment, though: the white officers who always seemed to hover around the ward when treatment was needed. The official regulation, which had been drummed into their heads even before they left Cape Town, stipulated that black troops could not fraternise with white women in Europe. To ensure that the regulations were observed, white soldiers had to be present whenever a black soldier was being attended to by a white nurse. The soldier did not even have to be an officer, as long as he was white. Pitso knew none of the men. He assumed the white officers who had come on the Mendi were already deployed to the various camps.
Before long, Pitso found that he was developing a warm rapport with one of the nurses in particular. She had introduced herself as Marie-Thérèse something-or-other.
‘You have such lovely hair,’ Pitso said one day, admiring her strawberry-blonde hair tied in a bun. Her eyebrows shot up, then she blushed profusely.
The white soldier present, who hadn’t heard what Pitso had said, looked at her crimson face and smiled, thinking she was blushing on his account.
‘I can feel myself recovering already, in the company of such beauty,’ Pitso continued softly.
‘You speak such good French,’ said the nurse generously, also lowering her voice. ‘You can’t tell me you only learned the language when you got here?’
‘Ah, it’s a long story, my dear lady. Perhaps one day I shall be able to relate it to you.’
The nurse finished what she’d been doing and hurried away. On her next visit, she sneaked him a bunch of grapes when the white officer wasn’t looking. When the following time, she sneaked him a packet of cashews, he reciprocated with a pencil drawing depicting a woman in a nurse’s tunic, accepting a bunch of flowers from a man kneeling next to a bed. Nurse Marie-Thérèse looked furtively at the image on the piece of paper, stole a fleeting glance at Pitso and sped out of the ward.
The next time he saw her, she walked into the ward accompanied by two white men in uniform. One was the usual run-of-the-mill corporal charged with the responsibility of supervising nurses’ visits to the black troops. The other had captain’s stripes on his uniform. The men in the ward who could stand, did so and saluted him.
Pitso hastily whipped his legs over the edge of the bed, stood unsteadily and saluted.
There was a momentary silence as the two men sized each other up, before a whoop of laughter exploded from Portsmouth’s mouth. ‘By Jove! The old rogue is indeed here! I thought you were in Rouen. I am sure somebody said you’d been sent to Rouen.’
‘Jislaaik, Captain, I thought you were dead.’ Pitso looked at Portsmouth, at his close-cropped hair, his clean-shaven face. The other men in the ward stared uncomprehendingly at the emotional exchange between the white captain and the coloured recruit. ‘Every time I asked about you, no one knew who I was talking about. I was beginning to fear the worst. Almost every day one sees corpses from the front and one counts one’s blessings.’
‘That’s true. We’re all mixed up with members of the battalions that got here before us. Sit down, soldier, we need that leg of yours to mend as soon as possible so we can send you over there. Some men are at Mendicourt, Hebreuve, Olhain—’
‘Those names mean nothing to me. Where are you stationed, sir?’
The white corporal who’d come with Portsmouth was taking in the exchange like one watching a fast game of tennis.
Portsmouth addressed the soldier, ‘Corporal, please give us some privacy, will you? Ah, there’s a good chap.’
The soldier saluted and disappeared.
Portsmouth turned back to Pitso and said in Sotho, ‘I am stationed at Arques-la-Bataille, which is just a few miles north-east of here. When they release you, you’re going to join some of the Mendi comrades at the base over there at Arques. We are digging quarries.’
‘That sounds wonderful, sir. Just wonderful. Not that I’ve ever dug a quarry before. But it sounds wonderful that I’ll be in the company of familiar faces. Your Sotho is still impeccable, by the way.’
The nurse, who had been watching the exchange with growing amusement, asked Portsmouth, ‘Moroccan or Algerian?’
‘Non, mademoiselle,’ responded Portsmouth. ‘D’Afrique. Afrique du Sud.’
No sooner had Portsmouth left the ward than some of the other patients crowded around Pitso’s bed. ‘So, is it true? You’re from that ship that sank?’
He told his personal story to soldiers from all over the British Empire until his voice got hoarse. With the war now at stalemate, the sinking of the ship became an exciting distraction, a source of much excitement not only to those directly involved in the war, but also to ordinary people in various countries. The newspapers, especially in Britain and in the rest of the Empire, went on and on about the Mendi.
Even though he was far from the front line, Pitso still witnessed the horrors of war. One day they brought in a young man whose entire body had been covered in bandages, so that he looked like a mummy. His face was a sickly yellow, and pus was oozing from his eyes. Pitso would later learn the young man was a victim of mustard gas.
When the nurse wheeled the bandaged man past Pitso’s bed, Pitso looked away.
‘Why don’t they just kill him?’ Pitso muttered to nurse Marie-Thérèse, who was massaging his ankle.
‘He’ll live. I’ve seen many like that.’
The following day, they brought in a man who had lost an arm. He was South African, and black. Pitso developed an immediate interest in him. When the nurses were done with him, Pitso hobbled over to his bed. The man was high on some drug, which made him animated and loquacious. As he spoke, he seemed unaware of his missing arm.
‘I’m from a base in Dieppe,’ the man said after Pitso had introduced himself. He had arrived in France with the Third Battalion, a year before the sinking of the Mendi. He sounded like one of the so-called ‘Lovedale boys’, the educated Xhosas who had studied at the famous college of the same name. ‘I don’t know how many miles Dieppe is from here …’
‘You are in Dieppe Hospital, my friend.’
‘How can that be? I seem to have travelled hundreds of miles over the last two days. Are you sure we’re in Dieppe?’
‘As sure as Mkhize is our dinner-table guest.’
The man laughed until tears started coming out of his eyes. Then he started sobbing, crying for his mother.
‘Shut the fuck up, you negro!’ someone, who according to the nurses was Australian, shouted from the furthest end of the ward. ‘Why’nt you go home and look a
fter your cattle, you stoopid cowardly cunt.’
Pitso’s new friend eagerly tried to sit up, looking in the general direction of the voice, but Pitso calmed him down.
‘By the way, my name is Joseph Vundla,’ the man said. He spoke in a quiet voice, just as if he hadn’t been crying his eyes out a few minutes before. ‘From the Cape.’ Vundla pointed at the stump where his arm used to be. ‘Just the other day, we are cutting some trees by the forest. Pine trees and gum trees up there. And we see British chaps running to their trenches. Our captain shouts orders, shouts that we too must run.’
Vundla broke into a long fit of coughing. When the coughing stopped, he continued his story. He had switched to English, speaking as loudly as he could, for the benefit of others so they could marvel at his gallantry. ‘So our officer shouts orders, says we must run. This is a funny war. The British chaps are armed, on account of being white, and we are not armed, on account of being who we are. But Mkhize and his boys don’t give a damn. They shoot anything that moves. You can’t say, “Hey, Mkhize, I am black and unarmed.” Mkhize shoots everything that moves. There’s gunfire everywhere. We start running. But Lieutenant Gardner changes his mind. It seems he’s just realised we are too far from the trenches. So the fast-thinking lieutenant says, “Fall down flat, and once you’re down don’t fucking move!”
‘But there’s this chap. From Swaziland. At least that’s what he tells us. Name of Seven. Or is it Eleven? Anyway, he’s a big chap with the build and bearing of a born soldier. But it soon turns out Seven or Eleven is yellow to the core. He does not seem to hear Lieutenant Gardner when he says we mustn’t move. This chap, he is running, and he is screaming, “We mammmme! We mammmmme! Siyafa! Siyafa namuhla!” My mother, my mother, we’re dying, we’re dying today. Another chap called Majola, from the Cape, feisty with big fists to match, connects a mighty punch to the Swazi’s jaw. It’s the only way we could contain the screaming piece of shit who was going to betray our position. Pig-raper goes down like a sack of potatoes.