by John Wilcox
A slow, sad smile broke on to Simon’s face. ‘I hope she’s happy. I think I’ll write her a letter at last. Get me a bit of writing paper and then you’d better start packing.’
Jenkins’s own face mirrored the smile. ‘Very good, bach sir,’ he said.
Author’s Note
What was fact and what fiction? Most of Fonthill’s adventures are woven around factual events, and so the descriptions of the build-up to the war and of the three battles in it are as accurate as a plundering of respected sources can make them.
Simon, Jenkins, Hardy, von Bethman, Anna, ter Haar and van der Wath are all fictional characters, of course. But Sir George Pomeroy-Colley, although a forgotten figure now, was a high-profile military leader in Victoria’s Britain, and until he met his tragic end was indeed regarded as the coming man of his time. I based much of his conversation in the novel with Simon and others on his letters. President Brand, Commandant-General Joubert and General Smit were real figures, as were Colonel Stewart, Major Fraser, Lieutenants MacGregor and Macdonald and young Elwes. The latter really did cry ‘Floreat Etona!’ a few seconds before a bullet took his life on Deane’s Hill, and somehow Joubert did ride his pony to the top of Majuba.
Colonel Stewart went on to garner fame four years later by winning a victory at Abu Klea in the abortive march to relieve Gordon at Khartoum, only to be mortally wounded the next day. The heroic defender of Macdonald’s Kopje, Lieutenant Hector Macdonald, did, of course, receive his sword from Joubert and went on to be lauded as ‘Fighting Mac’ and become a major general, only to take his own life in a Paris hotel room with a charge of homosexuality hanging over him. He did so, it was rumoured, on the advice of the Prince of Wales, that perfect example of fine Victorian morality.
I confess to cheating somewhat with the other Mac, Captain MacGregor, who charged with Simon across that bullet-swept plateau above the Ingogo. I have him die by a sniper’s bullet behind the rock bastion, the defence of which did save the British from encirclement that day. In fact, quite predictably, he was killed on horseback as he led the charge to the rocks. I gave the gallant man life for a few hours after that because I wanted him to have the opportunity of explaining why any professional soldier leading foot soldiers across a plain against a well-entrenched enemy consisting of the best marksmen in the world, who were urged to kill officers first, would be so idiotic as to ride a horse. I felt the reader deserved some sort of explanation. There is no evidence to suggest that the explanation I give is what MacGregor would have said, but I feel in my bones that it is.
Majuba, of course, although a bloodbath, was really no more than a skirmish by modern standards in terms of forces deployed and casualties sustained. But it was very significant in its way. An armistice - mainly engineered by the indefatigable President Brand - led to a negotiated truce, which satisfied no one. The Boers of the Transvaal, under the emergent President Kruger, were later to break the terms of the agreement and to grow ever more anti-British, while Imperial Britain itched to avenge Majuba. It had its chance eighteen years later when the Second Boer War broke out (the British called the affair of 1880-81 the First Boer War, while to the Afrikaners it has always been revered as the Transvaal War of Independence). In that conflict, the leaders of the British Army were to show that they had learned virtually nothing about the military effectiveness of rifle fire directed by skilled marksmen. It was as though the battle of Majuba Hill had never taken place.
J. W.