1999 - Ladysmith

by Giles Foden

  Lucky boy, to have escaped coaling duty. Officers as well as men had been drafted in to help the regular stokers, such was the urgency of the Dunnotar’s journey. Ships of the Castle Line ate coal like monsters on a normal run to the Cape, but this time it was different. Speed was of the essence. The Army Corps (of which this was only the advance guard) had to get to South Africa as soon as possible. The ultimatum of President Kruger—demanding, amongst other things, withdrawal of British troops from the Transvaal borders—had expired, and a state of war existed between the Empire and the Transvaal Republic. For months the two sides had been negotiating, but that time was now over. As Kruger had reportedly said to Milner, the High Commissioner, before walking out to his carriage, “What you really want is my country.” It was true. Milner’s despatches were warlike and—although he was far more prudent—the Secretary of State for the Colonies Joe Chamberlain’s use of words like ‘suzerainty’ in Parliament had enraged Kruger and his parliament, the Raad.

  The Biographer wondered where it was all leading, now that negotiations had come to nothing. It was true that an air of great responsibility hung over some of the officers and men on board. Others, sadly, were prone to giving out loud cries for vengeance for the battle of Majuba, where the British had suffered a heavy defeat and four hundred casualties at the hands of the Boers, eighteen years before. There was a naked ferocity about these cries, one that turned to empty words the boasted progress and civilization that were said to be the spirit of the age.

  The Biographer had watched this kind of thing during his dinners on board in the junior officers’ mess: some of them behaved like oafs when they were drunk. He never said anything—it wouldn’t do to seem a fish out of water amongst military men…Did they think him effeminate, he wondered? There was a story about a correspondent being debagged by soldiers while covering the war in the Sudan, just because he wore his hair fashionably long. Some of the other correspondents, like Churchill and Atkins, had managed to get themselves a place at the Captain’s table with Buller’s staff, but the Biographer had not been admitted to this inner circle. He suspected it was because his type of journalism was not taken seriously. Some said it was unnatural to fix life’s transitory moments in the way that he did.

  Well, time would tell whose record of Buller’s expedition was the most lasting. Already the Biographer had caught him—General Sir Redvers Buller, VC—on still plates, caught the heavy moustache, the Crombie with a buttonhole of violets, the felt hat, the stolid figure and big, kindly face. He had also made a number of moving Biographs of Buller and his staff, and of various other scenes concerning the Advance Guard’s entrainment for Southampton and embarkation for South Africa. He was particularly proud of a description of the crowds on the platform at Waterloo, civilians and soldiers in a mêlée of uniforms, suits and dresses, all singing and shouting and leaning out of the train windows waving hats, and then, finally—as they’d pulled out with a hoot and a jolt and a puff of steam—what John Atkins had remarked upon, “the long frieze of faces drawn past one’s carriage.” Atkins was the Manchester Guardian correspondent, who was allowed upstairs with the others. A good man.

  To the Biographer’s eye, if not his lens, there had been among those faces many suddenly saddened by an intimation of the greater loss that war might bring. But the grief-stricken ones and the glad, the womenfolk wise and foolish, and the double-chinned Cockney porters leaning on their trolleys—all of them had merged into one as the train picked up speed. The Biographer had been worried that his machine would produce nothing but a blur in trying to record this final part of the scene; but all its mysteries had not yet been revealed, and the answer would not be known until his packet of plates and film reached London and his colleagues at the Biograph Company. Sometimes, in any case, he thought the image came out better when shrouded in gauziness.

  One way or another, he hoped that in that packet would be pictures of the train journey—attempts to catch, as they skimmed past, gleaming pastures and hedgerows full of birds which, like the locomotive’s human cargo, would be in Africa that winter. Pictures, too, of the ordinary soldiers, sat among kitbags and clouds of tobacco. If only he had been able to portray their chat as well, their lively humour and fatalistic cracks. As if to compensate, he had used more film than he need have done, spun it out, just as the train had spun across its ringing web of steel through the down-land and forest of Surrey and Hampshire—to Southampton.

  At Southampton Water the Castle had awaited them, a towering vessel, almost too big for his lens. There was a medieval quality to the scene, one most appropriate to the ship’s white-painted name (over that too his lens had panned). The mass of people and the little boats nosing about under the quay walls had been like traders or importunate beggars on the banks of a moat, the busy gangplank serving as a drawbridge. For a while there had been a stable little world there on the quayside: a large crowd of cheering patriots standing, or perched on roofs and dock-side machinery, singing ‘Rule Britannia’ and ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’. Then the tin trunks and weapons and officers’ valises had gone up, followed by Buller’s stallions, Ironmonger and Biffin, and all the other horses. Finally, the moment for departure had come and, in the month of October at the end of a century, the foghorn had blooped and the great prow had ranged forward.

  He twisted in his canvas chair to look at one of the paddle-boxes, a great fairground wheel of a thing criss-crossed by struts. Then he glanced back down at the stokers. The pile of coal on the dock had gone down somewhat, but they would not be done till dusk. Only then, when the sun came down over the island, would the furnace be red again, its beastly maw secure of its black food for 2,000 tons’ worth of nautical miles.

  “Hullo,” shouted a smart voice from above him. “You—down there.”

  The Biographer raised himself from the canvas chair and looked up. Sticking out from under the white rail of the deck above was a pair of brown calfskin boots. Tucked into these were faded khaki trousers and above them a tunic of the same fabric, the collars of which framed the eager, button-nosed face of Mr Winston Spencer Churchill, correspondent of the Morning Post.

  “You’re the Biograph fellow, yes?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, Atkins spoke to me about your plight. I’ve arranged for you to join us at Captain Rigby’s table tonight. No more slumming.”

  “That’s very kind of you.”

  “Six o’clock sharp.”

  The brown boots were suddenly gone, and the Biographer found himself looking into the sky. He felt a rush of gratitude towards Atkins and Churchill. Perhaps he might be taken seriously after all. Then he twigged that Churchill probably just wanted to get himself on film; he was said to have a genius for self-publicity. He had lately been a parliamentary candidate for Oldham, and apparently wanted to follow his father, Lord Randolph, into politics. What lives these people led; a different world from the Birmingham tenement in which the Biographer had grown up. Still, it was his early apprenticeship in the watchmaking quarter of that city that had taken him, by roundabout routes, into the photography business, a trade in which he found great satisfaction. The nobs could keep their glamorous careers; they were already outmoded.

  The sound of a whinny caught the Biographer’s attention. He turned to see Perry Barnes taking up the hind leg of a horse, the last of the line, between his own legs. It struck him that it would make a good picture, and he went off to his cabin to fetch his tripod and camera.

  On the dock below the Biographer’s empty canvas chair, Perry Barnes watched as another sliver of browny-blue hoof fell to the ground in front of him. He liked clipping horses; it reminded him of home. The farm at Radford. Lizzie, his sister—she had a passion for horses. Anything was better than coaling, anyway. But that was the last one. He put the heavy clippers into the pocket of his tunic and went over to pick up the big shoe pincer, which was leaning like a layabout against the clapboard wall of the marine office. He pushed a hand through his
hair and looked at the wall, its white paint smeared with coal-dust. Layabout: Tom had called him that once when they were pitching hay and he’d sat down under the yellow stook for a swig of lemonade. His brother was already out in the Cape, having been in India. A garrison town called Ladysmith. He had followed in Tom’s footsteps—too many brothers for thirty acres, with Arthur the eldest as well—but hadn’t managed to get into the same regiment. Bloody Army.

  “You couldn’t just clip another horse for me?”

  Perry looked up to see the photographer fellow he had talked to on the train, struggling with a bundle of outlandish equipment.

  “They’re all done, I’m afraid.”

  “Can’t you just go through the motions?”

  Perry squinted up at him. “I can’t really. We’ve got to get moving. Anyway, what would be the point?”

  “Never mind,” said the Biographer.

  Once the coaling was over, the decks were swabbed to rid them of dust, and the coalers queued up for showers. Perry joined them. The water coming down over his creamy, adolescent flesh smelt of the tank, and the young blacksmith suddenly missed the butt of fresh rainwater under the downpipe on the farm. They used it for making tea, and for washing their hair once a week. Three brothers washing their hair before going to the Red Lion on a Friday. The image made him feel homesick. Still, snap time soon, he thought; half a pint of beer and some corned beef hash on a tin plate would do very nicely…

  The Biographer took the opportunity of having brought out his equipment to take a covert shot of the showering men, and another of General Buller, climbing up on to a skylight to escape the deluge of the deck-swabbing.

  “You can catch me if you can, but I won’t pose for you,” the General called down to the cameraman, as he balanced on the sloping glass. “Not up here, at any rate.”

  Afterwards, a common sailor asked him to come down, so that he could wash the skylight too.

  “Now you wouldn’t wash me off, would you?” Buller chuckled, and then jumped down on to the slippery deck. For an oldish man, he kept his footing very well.

  A little later, a gong called the inner circle to the Captain’s dining saloon. There was more music inside, where a band played popular airs as the diners took their seats. The conversation, the Biographer discovered on his own uncomfortable entrance, was at first exclusively political.

  He soon became aware that the members of the General’s inner circle were far more blase about the outcome of the war than the ordinary soldier. The General’s staff, presenting themselves as a band of stout-hearted experts, seemed to think the war would be over very swiftly.

  Of the correspondents, only Atkins would countenance any sense of the justification of the Boer cause. “It is, after all, their land,” he said, as the waiters brought in a great silver tureen of mulligatawny. John the Baptist, the Biographer thought, as they lifted off the round lid—as large as Buller’s head—and started ladling it. “Well, there are the natives…” he ventured nervously.

  Silence fell over the table, and the Biographer’s long, pointed nose descended towards his soup plate. There was an awful moment in which the clank of cutlery was all that could be heard. Idiot, the Biographer thought.

  “Oh my goodness,” called out an aide-de-camp, eventually. “Someone’s invited a kaffir-lover to the Captain’s table. If we’d known you were of that stamp, we wouldn’t have asked you.”

  “He’ll learn, I guess,” said Churchill. “He’s the new photographic chappie, everyone. So keep on your toes and mind your tongues, lest he creep up on you with his camera and show you in an unfavourable light.”

  The Biographer’s nose descended further, like that of a dog which has been firmly admonished, and he felt cravenly thankful for Churchill’s remark, condescending as it was. At least it let him off having to explain himself.

  But the incident was soon forgotten, as the conversation moved on. “They are both inferior races, anyhow,” someone else said. “Boers and natives. What was it Milner said? The ultimate end is a self-governing white community.”

  “Supported by well-treated and justly governed black labour from Cape Town to the Zambesi,” picked up another. “But that mean Boers, too.”

  Milner: there was a justice of the peace called that in Birmingham, the Biographer remembered. But this one, the Cape Governor, was a real jingo, responsible for pushing the Boers over the brink.

  “Milner told Asquith you just have to screw Kruger, sacrifice the nigger completely and the game is easy,” shouted one of the swells.

  The Biographer wished he was elsewhere. These people, these colonels and aides-de-camp, these Major Pole-Carews and Lord Gerards, these civil servants and silver-tongued correspondents, even genial old Rigby, the Dunottar Castle’s captain—they were like another breed. Even the way they held their bodies was different. Look at Churchill now, for instance, listening as another one of them blathered on. Even when he wasn’t the centre of attention, he had a patronizing air, a way of holding his head that said, “I’m cock of the walk.” The Biographer never felt like that. He wished he had his big camera by him; with its armour in front of him—its huge elm-wood box, glass plate and hood—he felt protected, in control, unassailable.

  He looked across the table again at Churchill, who had begun to hold forth about Boer armaments. He had the slightest wisp of ginger moustache and, also slight, a lisp which distorted his pronunciation of the letter Y. Yet in spite of this impediment, and of his aristocrat’s arrogance, he had something about him. His remarks displayed the kind of interest and depth that was absent from the other talk round the table.

  On the way into supper, for instance, he had whispered conspiratorially to the Biographer—“Isn’t it odious, a voyage? The sea’s heavy silence all around; you keep expecting something to leap up out of the water. But it never does.”

  There was nothing to it, really. It was just an odd, slightly elaborate fragment of conversation; but still, fools didn’t make observations like that. The Pole-Carews and Gerards simply didn’t talk in that way. Atkins, perhaps, but not the officers. Buller, though, he was something else: full of the wisdom and caution born of years of campaigning. But an air of worry hung about him tonight as they tucked into crown of lamb. The jollity he had shown on deck had quite disappeared, and he kept looking up crossly whenever one of the gathering made an inflammatory remark.

  “Listen here,” he finally growled. “I don’t like dinner becoming a political discussion. We are on our way to do a difficult job. It is important for us to resist the prejudices and antipathies of religion and race if we are to have a clear view of the military task.”

  One consequence of Buller’s statement was that a substantial portion of the rest of the dinner was spent discussing Scintillant’s recent by-a-neck victory over Ercildoune in the Cesarewitch at Newmarket. This, oddly enough, had taken place at almost exactly the time Kruger’s ultimatum had expired. Many of the diners seemed to have been at the course, and one had landed a hefty wager. The Biographer smiled to himself. He had watched a different kind of sport that week—Villa tackling Spurs, in the first round of the Cup. Now he lifted to his lips another cup, a porcelain one full of coffee, and glanced across the table into the penetrating eyes of Winston Spencer Churchill. No, these weren’t his people. They even drank coffee differently, holding up the saucer daintily as they sipped.

  Four

  The coffee bushes were in blossom with little white flowers. Muhle Maseku noticed these, and thereupon chided himself. For this was not the time for beauty. He heard the crack of the long whip behind him, driving one of the bullock carts upon which the ill and infirm were piled, and all around the murmuring tramp of seven thousand men and their families. Seven thousand! They had been mineworkers on the Rand, most of them, out of Natal, and with rumours of war they had lost their jobs. At the back was the white man, Marwick, tending the sick, at the front the concertinas, mouth organs and drums of the mine band.

  The tunes w
ere painfully jaunty, for such a miserable time. Otherwise, all was solemn calm. Muhle himself was worried about his wife, Nandi, and their young son Wellington. They were marching alongside Marwick’s bullock carts at the back, with the other women and children. Muhle was worried that his own family or he himself would become sick soon. His feet were a mess of blisters from the walking, and what little food they had been able to bring with them was exhausted. He turned against the flow—thirty abreast, in some places—and went back to the women’s group. Looking through the crowd, where the heads of babies peeked out from between the shoulder-blades of their mothers, riding in knapsacks made of folded cloth, he could see neither Nandi nor Wellington. He became anxious. Then he spotted them stumbling along, both clutching bundles of precious possessions. A tin mug, a mirror, a bag of maize meal: all that was left of their life on the Rand.

  “I salute you,” said Nandi, “but your son is tired now, and we must rest and find food.” She touched the beads at her plum-coloured throat, and Muhle felt tears prick his eyes at the sight of it.

  “I am not tired,” countered Wellington from beside her. “I can march as well as father, as well as any. My heart is full, my muscles are strong.”

  He lifted up a bony arm, as if to show that strength, and Muhle looked down at it, following the contours of the flesh up the dusty forearm to where a bicep swelled, then over the shoulder where the skin was smoother and cleaner, flowing into the neck and face: that face which reminded him of his own father’s, with broad cheeks and stubborn forehead, eyes the colour of honey from the acacia blossom of Natal and small ears set back flat against the skull.

  “What are we going to do?” demanded Nandi.

  Maseku could see the strain in her face, but did not answer. There was no appropriate reply to make. Instead he put an arm round her, reaching down at the same time to take Wellington’s hand. The boy—he was only twelve, but looked older—smiled at him. So handsome, Muhle thought, just one year younger than he had been when he married Nandi, but still just a sapling. A furrow creased his brow then. Already on this long march some other boys had tried to bully Wellington. He had beaten them fiercely off his son. Only Nandi’s urgent cry had stopped him from chasing after them.