The Peerlberg Hotel was set amid some fine high-gabled Dutch architecture. Finch found it hard to fathom for a moment that we was in Africa. Inside, the hotel was modern – airy, cool and rambling with a large entrance hallway. There was a trestle table set up beneath an RAMC flag – three horizontal bands of cherry, blue and gold – at which he had to register with some cheery underlings.
A bellboy hovered to take his kit bag to his room, Finch asked reception if he could make use of a sewing kit.
“Finch. I say … Ingo.”
It was the welcome voice of his old pal Hawley Jenkins.
“You hear about Cox?”
“Had to identify the body—”
“Jesus. Can’t bloody believe it.”
“Not exactly a dose of seasonal cheer”
“Every day out here is Christmas,” Jenkins deadpanned.
He was being called away.
“This evening. Grab dinner? Must tell all. Jesus—”
“Love to,” said Finch. “But I’ve got to break bread with the new CO.”
“Exactly,” said Jenkins, issuing a mischievous grin.
He grabbed Jenkins’ hand again and shook.
“Congratulations, Hawley. You deserve it. Glad, at last, that they’ve trusted us not be babysat.”
“Have to borrow that sewing kit … Crown I need to add to my epaulettes … Though not the circumstances I’d anticipated.”
As soon as he had registered for the conference, picking up his agenda, Finch went upstairs to his shared room. It, too, was light and airy with wooden floors, a balcony and a mosquito net draped over each bed. The other occupant, a lieutenant, was sprawled on his, leafing through a penny dreadful. He scrambled to attention. Finch stood him at ease.
The lieutenant was full of questions. He hadn’t yet been to the Front.
Finch had to stop him. His first order of duty was to dig out his leather-bound notebook. He sat at the room’s desk and spent a full three-quarters of an hour writing down everything he could remember, interrupted only by the occasional chortle from the lieutenant, evidently enjoying his novella, and a knock on the door and the bellboy brandishing a needle and thread.
After he fixed his tunic, Finch spruced himself up, spent 20 minutes leafing through an incongruous tourist handbook entitled Warner’s Guide to the Cape and, at seven o’clock, descended to the main hall for a lecture by the RAMC’s surgeon-general.
The troop surge was an open secret. Soldiers were docking at Cape Town, Port Elizabeth and Durban from all over the Empire – a quarter of a million men in the field.
It was now official that old Redvers Buller had been relieved of his command. Painful lessons had been learned, it was admitted, a rare concession on the part of Her Majesty’s Armed Forces. Buller, formerly one if its stars, was the sacrificial lamb.
The officer gave a near eulogy on behalf of the Boer soldier, a brave and resourceful character from whom Tommy needed to steal a trick or two.
Kimberley and Mafeking were still under siege. So too, in Natal, was Ladysmith. It was these that had captured the public’s attention back home. It was all the Boers could cling on to. Break the sieges and the war could be wrapped up in four to six months. The two Boer Republics didn’t have the manpower to withstand a protracted assault.
Afterwards they were poured a glass of sherry and had a chance to mingle. Jenkins came over and introduced Finch to a fellow medic named Doyle, a big-framed Scotsman with a handlebar moustache, who now lived on the south coast of England and whose interest seemed focused on sport, primarily Association Football, styling himself as a goalkeeper.
“Can you bat?” he added.
“Doyle also plays for the MCC,” Jenkins interjected.
“You’re a man of many talents,” quipped Finch.
Doyle smiled, exchanged some more pleasantries and then moved on.
“Pretty versatile, now you mention it, old A.C.” said Jenkins.
“A.C.?”
“Arthur Conan.”
The Welshman was smirking.
“My God, that was him? … I have The Sign Of The Four in my kitbag … If I’d have known I’d have—”
“… behaved liked a besotted schoolgirl,” laughed Jenkins.
Over dinner, Finch told Jenkins all that had happened with regard to Cox though, for the sake of propriety, held back the information about the mysterious Verity.
Finch was going to elaborate on the various other incidents and characters that had drifted in and out over the last few days but, realising Jenkins was in demand, and through a number of interruptions at their table, kept it to the facts, an act that brought Brookman’s voice echoing in his head.
Jenkins, in his new guise, had evidently been busy.
“Been assembling information for a delegation to High Command. From what we’re hearing it actually had some impact. Penny’s finally dropped. This isn’t the bloody Crimea. Been a rude awakening.”
Sure enough, Jenkins had to move on. Left alone, Finch finished his sea bass, drained the bottle of Chenin Blanc – two gourmet meals in one day, he sighed – and returned to exchange small-talk with his colleagues.
There seemed a new air of professionalism about the RAMC. Tomorrow, he was informed, he would be assigned an assistant. There would be greater emphasis on the aftercare of the wounded. Field hospitals were no longer to resemble ad hoc abattoirs. They knew, by now, what to expect in terms of the volume and the type of casualty. Hospital ships would soon be stationed offshore to relieve the over-burdened city military infirmaries.
There was a basic problem with the British Tommy. He was not fit, a legacy of industrialisation and squalid urban living. The general standard of health in Great Britain was appalling – men were frail, malnourished and diseased before they even got into the field – although, it was noted, the colonials seemed in finer fettle. Ensuring fitness and quality of a soldier’s diet would make for a more efficient fighting man and improve his chances should he be wounded.
As for the military campaign, there was a new sense of purpose there, too. The Boers were to be re-engaged at the Modder River, it was whispered, for the big push on Kimberley. Relieving the city would provide a huge political victory.
Finch could see it now, the headlines in the Daily Mail and Morning Post, crowing about the salvation of innocent women and children from the clutches of the barbarous, baby-eating Dutchmen.
Finch was not alone in thinking that, admirable though the new sense of professionalism was, they were still not addressing a crucial issue – disease.
From his personal experience already of an outbreak of typhus among the troops, it was shaping up to be a bigger threat to the Empire’s armies than anything the Boers could throw at them. Not just armies but civilians too. Clean water, sanitation and hygiene were fundamental. Had Florence Nightingale taught them nothing?
Jenkins appeared again. He proffered a crystal tumbler. Finch swirled the pale amber liquid and inhaled its aroma with deep satisfaction.
“Talisker. Hawley, you bloody beauty.”
Jenkins clinked a glass of his own.
“Chin-chin.”
They chatted briefly about the disaster of a typhus epidemic breaking out and the prevalence of dysentery among large encampments.
“Not just the men, Hawley, but the women, the children and, God knows, the poor blighters who’ve been ridden over roughshod in all this … the natives.”
Jenkins felt the same way. They had discussed it enough in the past.
“Politics, Ingo,” he confided. “On paper it’s all abstract. It’s a case of demonstrating it to the brass, letting them bear witness.”
He took another sip.
“And, tomorrow morning, mark my words, they will bear witness. They will.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
There were only two of them selected to undertake the task – Nurse Sullivan and herself. Though they had all been sisters-in-arms, Annie was glad to be away from the hospital, aw
ay from Hanwell in particular.
The shape of the war was about to change, they were told. Units were being reformed. They would be assigned new duties.
Paarl had seemed the very model of genteel civility, with its neat vineyards, its fine Dutch architecture and its stunning mountain backdrop. The great Paarl dome reminded her of the pictures she had seen of Ayers Rock.
The town, however, was certainly not for their delight. No sooner had they stepped off the train than an RAMC corporal appeared to usher them into a clapped-out, covered mule wagon.
For an uncomfortable two hours it clopped north, winding through a mountain pass into flatter, more arid lands. The heat rose.
The corporal was annoyingly evasive about their destination, his summations amounting to a deliberate ‘You’ll see’ or ‘Just you wait’.
But eventually, in the distance, there it was. You could smell it before you could see it – a swelling mass of humanity, an amorphous human lake set in a great dusty crucible. A dirty streak of air hovered over it. It was the biggest number of people Annie had ever seen assembled in one place, thousands upon thousands of them – and all, apparently, as they neared, Africans, black Africans.
They stopped 100 yards short of the encampment – if you could even call it that, for there was only a smattering of tents.
“Here we are, Shangri-La,” quipped the irritating corporal, hopping out over the tailboard. He delved into his pocket and pulled out a linen surgical mask which he began tying on.
“What, they didn’t tell you?” he shrugged.
He held out a hand as if to help them down, then withdrew it.
Their long, thick skirts and buttoned up tunics were utterly impractical for their duties, let alone clambering over tailboards, but they were used to it. Both women were dripping with sweat. It was an everyday occurrence.
Annie looked ahead to the throng. For such a large body of people it seemed calm. As they followed the corporal, the smell became overpowering and they reached for their pocket kerchiefs.
It was the stench of human excrement, of a vast crushed makeshift city devoid of sanitation. Then Annie realised – the ambient hum; it was not voices, it was flies. The black cloud hovering over it was flies.
“Wait here.”
The corporal stomped off ahead and down an arbitrary walkway through the human mass towards one of the few tents visible. He returned accompanied by a puffing, red-faced, middle-aged man who wore a battered Panama, a faded pink shirt, braces, canvas trousers, scuffed boots and the black bib of a clerical dog collar.
“Good day, ladies,” said the man, seemingly untroubled by his surroundings. “Dean Ephraim Newbold at your service.”
He proffered his hand in salutation, then nodded at the corporal.
“Right you are, Cedric. Shake a leg.”
The corporal returned to the wagon, unceremoniously dumped the nurses’ kitbags on the ground, then instructed the driver to wheel the cart around. He clambered up on board.
“Enjoy your stay,” he shouted.
“Oh, don’t mind him,” dismissed Newbold, swinging his arm out full stretch to herald all before them.
“Welcome to Cape Government Native Emergency Resettlement Station No. 624-16. Or as I like to call it, Camp Eureka. Population 30,000 … give or take. Depends on the time of day.”
“Eureka?” asked Annie.
Newbold turned, the signal for them to follow. He pointed to their kitbags.
“Sorry, not the Ritz.”
They dragged them behind them.
“Theory of displacement. You know, Archimedes … sat in a bathtub, water sloshed over the sides. What we have here is human displacement. War plonks itself down in the tribal lands, these poor folk are the overspill. We’ve got Xhosa, Basuto, Matabele, Tswana, Tsonga …”
There were no boundaries, no fences or gates. It had determined its own limits. One moment the women were walking across dirty ground, the next they were picking their way past bodies … emaciated bodies … poor forlorn wretches stretched on the ground or huddled together. Some alive, some dead. Those that were living were barely more than skeletons. No one spoke. They just sat exhausted, listless, eyes dull, unfocused.
“Oh yes, Swazi too,” said Newbold.
The younger children were a shocking sight, their round distended bellies an aberration – all ribs and angular joints and eyes sunk deep within sockets. They looked suddenly elderly, as if accelerated artificially along their life cycles. Large angry flies crawled around mouths and nostrils at will.
Malnutrition and starvation were just the start. A place like this, given what the nurses knew about what was already happening among large concentrations of soldiers, would be a breeding ground for dysentery and typhoid.
“Local missions gather them in as best they can. They, too, then find themselves on the front line or can’t cope with the influx. Send them down here to us … And then, of course, we can’t cope with them either.”
“Missions … you’re not an army chaplain?” asked Sullivan.
“Christian Friendship Society, my dear. Doing the Good Lord’s donkey work here in the Darkened Continent. Despite the government’s lofty title for it, camps like this are run purely as civilian operations, by volunteers. The army, the government, no one wants to know … I say we have 30,000 here, that’s by mid-afternoon when the new arrivals have swelled the numbers. Come morning up to 500 could have perished. State of equilibrium. We were burying them at first, but, what with the typhus, we find it more expedient to cremate. Keeps these beggars away …”
He flapped at a squadron of particularly attentive horseflies. In the distance, black smoke rose.
“Jesus,” snorted Annie.
“…would be proud of you. The reason you’re here, the reason the Good Lord brought you ladies here, is to help us. The instructions are for you to have a good look around. Please, go where you will. Take stock, impart some basic medical knowledge to my helpers … and then, the crucial part, further your observations to the party of army VIPs who will be arriving for inspection tomorrow morning.”
He noticed looks of disdain.
“Actually, in this case, I’m glad for some joined-up thinking. A few wise heads in the Medical Corps realising that the Empire can’t wash its hands of all this, must take responsibility. Doesn’t sell the war well. And if the army pushes on into The Free State and the Transvaal, like they’re all saying … well, it won’t just be natives cast adrift, but Europeans, too.”
“You don’t have enough medical staff to care for these people?”
“My dear girl, other than some St John’s Ambulance, I don’t have any medical staff. Me? I scare up sacks of mealies and buttermilk; furnish old clothing and blankets; recite the Scriptures.”
“Dear God,” said Sullivan.
“… moves in mysterious ways,” added Newbold. “… moves in mysterious ways.”
They stepped into a large tent. There were some 15–20 casualties laid out on the floor. Young white women and Coloured female orderlies were attending to the sick. They were mostly elderly or children, some mere babes in arms, their coughs hacked painfully, the weaker ones rasping forlorn little life-or-death struggles.
“Other than a few medicines we can poach from the Red Cross, we’re relying on what little fresh water we can find. That plus tenderness and prayer.”
The nurses dumped their kit bags and stepped forward to help. He put his hand up to stop them.
“First, I need you to do something.”
He led them to the other end of the tent and opened the flap. Apparently they had come in by the rear entrance. Out front, a queue stretched on forever. Newbold registered the shock on their faces. He had meant it that way.
“Here we must also play God.”
He pointed at the queue.
“Go down the line. Anyone you think over 60, anyone who, in your estimation, has a less than an eight-in-ten chance of survival, turn them away.”
* *
*
That night, neither Annie nor Nurse Sullivan slept. They rose at dawn and took a mere mouthful of the mealies offered at the food station.
Annie was not religious but found Newbold an endearing man and complied, head bowed, when he read a brief prayer.
In the orange glow of daybreak, they aided his staff in their near impossible task, another logistical one – a question of sorting through the human debris, organising disposal of corpses, deciding on the odds of survival of the sick, and making sure not to waste precious food or time on those who were lost causes.
Annie and Nurse Sullivan gave practical advice to Newbold’s loyal Christian soldiers, whose medical knowledge extended to little more than emergency first aid.
But with so many cases, where on earth to begin?
When the sun rose fully, Dean Newbold called them. He pointed back up the trail. There was a puff of dust. Another wagon was approaching. They watched at distance as it came to a halt where theirs had done and a party of officers disembarked, loosening stiff limbs after the long road haul up form Paarl. They seemed to be going through the same ritual of shock, though she noted that the corporal was handing out surgical masks this time.
“You’ll have to pardon me,” said Newbold. “Got to show these fellows around. Want to make it absolutely clear what we’re up against. Only way we’re going to help these people is with proper resources. And you, ladies …”
Annie and Sullivan looked at each other.
“Us?”
“They’ll be asking your opinion. You’re part of our diplomatic offensive … our charm offensive … There’s one officer in particular. Welsh chap. Hopes to bring us under the RAMC umbrella and start coordinating aid with the Red Cross.”
The corporal led the men to the edge of the camp. Newbold came to greet them, bellowing his somewhat insincere wish that they’d enjoyed a pleasant journey. He steered them towards the main tent on what looked like a similar sort of tour he had conducted yesterday.
Fifteen minutes later, Newbold re-appeared with the officer party, about six or seven of them, heading in their direction. No, not all military … there was a civilian … he was scrawling in a notebook.
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