by John Wilcox
After some thirty minutes Simon found the well-beaten track again, and shortly afterwards they all heard rather than saw the rivers. It was clear that the larger Ingogo and even the small Harte were in spate. In the darkness, the now khaki-coloured waters were tumbling between the banks, tossing small tree branches in the strong current, while a fierce hissing showed that shingle was being forced downstream on the river bed. The good news, however, was that there was no sign of Boer guards or patrols, although it was clear that a large force had gathered at the crossing recently.
‘Sorry, bach sir,’ said Jenkins, ‘but I can’t swim. You’ll never get me goin’ across that lot.’
‘No,’ responded Simon. ‘We must test the depth. I’ll go. You two stay here.’
‘No, suh.’ Hardy urged his giant horse towards the water’s edge. ‘Ol’ Custer heah is bigger ’n your two horses and I’ll back him to get across. Now.’ He unhitched a rope lariat and gave an end to Simon, tying the other to the pommel of his high saddle. ‘Just you two hold on to this an’ pull me out if ah gits into trouble. If ah jerk, it means ah’m across, so let go.’
‘Thanks, Al,’ said Simon. ‘But don’t take risks. When you get across, ride up to the spur and see if that contingent of the 58th is still there. But be cautious. It may be, judging from these tracks here, that the Boers have crossed in force and overwhelmed the post. And for God’s sake take off that blasted Stetson. It positively glows in the dark.’
Hardy, however, paid no attention, and carefully letting out the rope, he urged Custer into the swollen river. At first the big chestnut was wide-eyed and fearful, but he braced his hooves on the bottom and began to make his way across the torrent. It was not, in fact, as deep as it looked and the waters came only up to the horse’s belly.
‘ ’E won’t like that,’ murmured Jenkins. ‘Now ’e’s gettin’ ’is fancy pants wet again. That won’t be popular.’
The tall American quickly disappeared into the gloom and eventually they felt a tug on the rope and let it go, watching it bounce along the top of the surging water as it was retrieved from the other side. Then they were left to wait, listening to the roar and hiss of the torrent.
It was, perhaps, half an hour later when they saw the white Stetson loom out of the darkness. Thankfully, the rain had eased, although the water remained high.
Hardy squeezed the water from his beard. ‘It’s clear, both waters,’ he reported. ‘Ah reckon that, with arms linked, the column could cross right ’nuff, though it won’t be easy. It’ll be slow, an’ if them Boers do come back they could pick us off nice ’n’ easy. But there ain’t no sign of ’em.’
‘What about the 58th on the spur?’
‘They’re still there, sure ’nuff, an’ about an hour an’ a half ago they fought off a large party of Boers who tried to cross from just about heah. They stopped ’em from crossin’, so hopefully there ain’t none o’ the enemy on the other side between us and Mount Prospect.’
‘I’m not sure about that, but thanks, Al. That was good work. I’m amazed that the Boers have left the crossing unguarded. Absolutely amazed.’
Jenkins sniffed and removed a large dewdrop hanging from his nose. ‘Very sensible, if you ask me. This ain’t no night for goin’ poncin’ about crossing rivers, look you.’
Emboldened by the absence of the Boers, the little party followed the track directly back to the plateau and reported to an anxious Colley.
‘What, nobody at all?’
‘Not a sausage, sir.’
‘Could be a t-t-trap, of course.’
‘Possibly. But don’t forget, sir, that, wonderful fighters as they are, the Boers are not a conventionally disciplined army. They are a civilian militia and the burghers would not fancy sitting out all night in this storm. Also, they have no way of knowing that the column has no food and water, so I think they are expecting you to fight it out tomorrow and will have left only the lightest guard to keep an eye on you before mopping you up after daybreak. If you want to move, I recommend you go right away, General.’
The reference to the column’s lack of supplies brought the faintest of winces to Colley’s face, but, polite as ever, he nodded. ‘Thank you, Fonthill. Excellent work as usual. I shall take your advice. We will move out as soon as we are formed up.’
The rain had returned but the noise of the storm muffled the column’s preparations to move out. The men were quietly withdrawn from the perimeter and formed up into a hollow square, with the remaining horses harnessed to the two guns in the centre. The wounded were made as comfortable as possible in the driving rain, but they had to be left behind and their protesting cries mingled with the creak of harnesses as the column pulled out.
The three scouts fanned out ahead of the troops in the lead and Simon thought it wise to eschew the track and make their way to the drifts once again by the convoluted route they had taken earlier. The column halted about half a mile from the two rivers while the scouts went on ahead to ensure that no vedettes had been posted by the Boers during their absence. Again, they found the crossings undefended, although the swirling waters seemed higher.
In the pitch darkness and driving rain the rivers now presented a real danger. Orders were given for the men to link arms and the leading files edged into the swollen torrent. The water came up to their armpits and two men were immediately swept away to be lost into the night. But the gaps were closed, and somehow, inch by inch, the leaders reached the other side and scrambled up the far bank. The guns, virtually submerged, were pulled across by the horses and eventually the whole column had crossed. A total of seven men, however, had been drowned and the general made no attempt in the atrocious conditions to contact his detachment on the spur. The column had to reach Mount Prospect before dawn or offer easy pickings to the Boer marksmen.
Scouting out ahead of the van, Simon and his companions were spared the horrors of that night march back to the camp. Roughly halfway along the five-mile route, the horses could no longer pull the guns unaided and men had to manhandle the cannon the rest of the way. At about four a.m., the bedraggled and exhausted column arrived at Mount Prospect. It had been a miraculous escape and, in its way, a kind of triumph, for the Boers, sheltering from the storm, had allowed Colley and his men to slip away without a shot being fired. Yet nearly half of the three hundred men who had marched out of the camp so happily twenty-four hours earlier had been lost. The guns had been saved but the dead had been left unburied and most of the wounded remained behind.
Like the rest of the returned troops, Simon, Jenkins and Hardy crawled gratefully into their bedrolls as the rain continued to beat on their tent canvas. They were roused some five hours later to ride back to Schuin’s Hoogte under a flag of truce with a major and a burial party to bring back the wounded and inter the dead. The final twist to the tragedy of the ‘reconnaissance in force’, however, occurred two days later when it was revealed that the officers killed had been buried with the other ranks. Colley, it seemed, was unhappy at this solecism, which was very much against the custom of the day, and Simon shook his head in disbelief when he heard that a second party had been sent out to disinter the officers and bring them back to Mount Prospect for burial in the sheltered little cemetery there, reserved for those of commissioned rank.
‘Ah thought that all dead were as one in the eyes of the Lord,’ observed Hardy.
Simon could think of nothing to say.
Chapter 12
Sir George Colley displayed his best qualities in the days following the battle of Ingogo. The men and the guns left on the spur overlooking the drifts had ridden in unscathed the following day, pleased at having repulsed the attack made on them by the Boers during the storm, and he himself referred to the extrication of his column from Schuin’s Hoogte as a triumph and bustled about the camp beaming and smiling as though a great victory had been achieved. He spoke of the fine quality of Wood’s reinforcements now nearing Newcastle, and although he demurred at marching out in strength to meet them
, he expressed no doubt that they would fight their way through if they were attacked. Yet behind the happy countenance his eyes looked tired, and it was notable that his stammer had become worse. He was still in telegraphic communication with Newcastle, and therefore with London, for the Boers had not cut the lines, and it was obvious that a great deal of activity at government level was in progress, for the general was to be seen in his tent every night working far into the early hours by the light of an oil lamp. In these matters he had little help, because his staff had been reduced now to one staff officer and one very young ADC.
The cutting of the telegraph link with the south three days later, therefore, was particularly inconvenient, and Colley mustered his three scouts and a troop of mounted infantry and attempted to slip through the Boer ring by night and ride to Newcastle. Simon, leading the party, hoped that a fog that had sprung up would cloak their passage as they crossed the Buffalo river at the rear of the camp at Mount Prospect. But the mist had cleared when they reached the lower ground of the Buffalo valley, and with a bright moon rising, Simon felt it unsafe to continue. Three days later, however, the party tried again and this time the mist hung low through the night. As a result, Simon, Jenkins and Hardy once again found themselves riding into a Newcastle bursting at the seams with newly arrived troops from the south.
Just under eight hundred men had marched up from the coast, representing the first contingent of Colley’s reinforcements, all of them from India. The main elements consisted of five hundred and eighteen men of the 58th Highlanders, veterans of the recent successful Afghan campaign, among whose officers Simon recognised some familiar faces; a hundred and three horsemen of the 15th Hussars; and, this time, a more substantial Naval Brigade of fifty-eight bluejackets. To Simon and Jenkins the Highlanders presented a strange appearance, for this was the first time that British troops had gone into action wearing the new khaki tunics in place of the traditional red coats, while all their officers sported the new Sam Browne cross belts.
‘Blimey,’ said Jenkins. ‘Put ’em into the desert country and you won’t see ’em.’
‘I think that’s the idea,’ replied Simon.
With the troops rode General Sir Evelyn Wood, bluff and hearty, wearing the ribbon of the Victoria Cross he had won against the Zulus. The two generals were closeted together for two days. During this time the three scouts were forced to kick their heels in the little town, and Simon took the opportunity to attempt to pen a letter to Alice. He wanted to write warmly - though not too warmly - but conventionally, telling her that he had heard that her wedding had been a great occasion and wishing her well in her new life. Yet every word he conjured up seemed trite, anodyne and quite unrepresentative of what he really wanted to say. But what did he want to say? That he loved her still and always would? He could not write that to a married woman. So what was the point? He thought of his desire - no, his lust - for Anna Scheel and realised that he was unworthy anyway to write to Alice Griffith . . . Alice Covington. Ah, the very name seemed to wring his heart! Swearing, he tore up his efforts and gave up the attempt.
It was clear, from the buzzing of clerks around Colley’s headquarters in the main hotel, that the general was back in full contact with his masters in London’s Whitehall. It was also clear that, from the darkening of his usually genial countenance, this long-distance relationship was not going as smoothly as it might. Only five days after his arrival at Newcastle, General Wood was dispatched back to Pietermaritzburg to hasten the arrival of more reinforcements to Newcastle. Simon, an interested observer of the activity, could not help but wonder why a general was needed for this task. Was a rift developing between the two? He could well imagine that the presence of his deputy - a man senior to him in rank anyway - could possibly be proving irksome to Colley. Wood had won his spurs, not to mention his VC, many times over in combat. His superior had commanded only twice in the field - and both times he had been defeated. It would be understandable if even the equable Colley was beginning to show signs of strain.
The general marched back to Camp Prospect, this time at the head of a force too strong for the Boers to attack, and the following day Simon was summoned to his tent. The call was a relief, for now perhaps he could gain some idea of what was happening.
‘Got a job for you.’ Colley’s smile was as genuine as ever, although Simon noticed that a nerve was now twitching just below the general’s right eye.
‘Thank goodness for that, sir,’ said Simon. ‘I was beginning to feel that I ought to hand back my pay.’
Colley’s smile widened. ‘Goodness, don’t do that. The Horse Guards would accept it in a flash.’ They both grinned and then the bearded man’s expression darkened.
‘I don’t mind confessing to you, Fonthill,’ he said, ‘that I am not at all happy with the way our masters back home are b-b-behaving. Here we are, now happily reinforced and for the first time able to advance through into the Transvaal with real c-c-confidence to relieve our people besieged up there, yet the government is negotiating with the Boers and, by the look of it, offering to appease them. Just when we are ready to go.’
‘Good lord. It’s not as though you have suffered two overwhelming defeats, sir.’ Simon felt a twinge of conscience at offering such an ingratiating comment, but his liking for Colley and his desire to give him some scrap of comfort overrode his respect for the truth. And Ingogo, anyway, could count as some sort of draw.
‘Quite so.’ The general shot him a grateful glance. ‘Well, we might still have a chance of having a go at them, although I doubt it. For the moment I have been instructed to offer the so-called B-B-Boer government terms for a suspension of hostilities.’
Colley looked down at the document on his table for a moment and silence ensued. Simon felt a sudden surge of sympathy for the general. Here was a man whose path to the top of his career had been almost uneventfully smooth. Until now, every task he had been offered he had accomplished with elan - district magistrate in South Africa, hard-working subaltern at the sacking of the Summer Palace in the China War of 1860, organiser of Wolseley’s transport and logistics in the Ashanti War, writer of the chapter on the British Army for the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and private secretary and chief adviser to the Viceroy of India. Now that the longed-for first command of an army in the field had arrived, he had sustained two setbacks but, it seemed, was not to be allowed the opportunity to reverse them. It was a cruel and even puzzling intervention by Gladstone’s government, particularly so after it had expended so much time and money on providing him with the means of achieving a final career-saving victory.
Colley was now gazing unseeingly out of the tent opening and Simon felt it unwise to interrupt. Eventually, the general looked back and smiled at him. ‘Your f-f-friend Brand of the Orange Free State has been working away between London and Heidelberg attempting to broker an agreement, and our government has floated some sort of proposal to divide the Transvaal into two, r-r-restoring independence to the purely Dutch districts while retaining our sovereignty over the native b-b-border districts. Of course, I have advised strongly against that. But amazingly, Kruger, on behalf of the Triumvirate, has now written to me out of the b-b-blue offering to withdraw from Natal and s-s-submit the Boers’ case to a Royal Commission of Inquiry, if we too withdraw our t-t-troops from the Transvaal.’
Simon’s eyebrows lifted. ‘So the war could be over?’
‘Perhaps, but it’s not quite as s-s-simple as that. I have been instructed to agree to the setting up of a Royal Commission, if the Boers now in arms cease their opposition. I have also been instructed to set a r-r-reasonable timetable for the Boers’ reply to this offer. I have asked for their agreement within forty-eight hours.’ He held up the document. ‘This letter says all that. You know I always believe in telling the messenger the content of the message he is carrying. I want you to take this letter through to the Boer commander on Laing’s Nek. I think it better that a civilian takes it, rather than an officer in brigh
t brass and a red coat. Makes it seem rather more Colonial Office than Horse Guards - and so it jolly well is, because I know that the army would never bend the knee in these circumstances. Take your two scouts with you as escorts.’
Colley stood and gave Simon the envelope. ‘I also know, Fonthill, that I can trust you to do the job well. The letter is addressed to Vice President Kruger, but I understand that General Nicholas Smit - he’s the chap who attacked us at the Ingogo plain - is now in command at the Nek. He has already proven himself to be an honourable and fine man, by the way - over the burials and so on. Hand the letter to him personally and no one else.’
Simon’s mind raced. The importance of the letter put a heavy responsibility on his shoulders, although there should be no real difficulty about delivering it under the protection of a flag of truce. But it also gave him entry to the Boers’ position on Laing’s Nek, with the consequent chance of assessing their positions.
He gulped. ‘Sir, would you wish me to wait the forty-eight hours within the Boer camp and bring back the reply?’
Colley shook his head. ‘No. Tell them to send their own messenger back to me at Prospect.’ A wintry smile stole across his face for a brief moment but it did not reach his eyes. ‘If they can give me a reply within forty-eight hours, that is. Now, off you go.’