by Giles Foden
Now, as they walked towards a ridge of hills, the cry was coming from Muhle’s belly. Every time they passed a store by the side of the road the shopkeeper would turn them away. They were frightened, these Boer traders, Muhle could see that; frightened of the crowds of his people and their pain.
They marched on, passing other groups of refugees: Hindus in bright saris, wearing bangles and gold noserings, a company of whites—Scots and Irish—on horseback, a Boer family in an ox wagon, going in the opposite direction, the mother with a baby clutched in her arms. At one point they came upon an accordion, dropped in the middle of the road: the column just opened up and passed round it, paying little heed. They knew what it meant, though. For all, like Muhle himself, had left behind households, possessions, livelihoods. And now they themselves, no less than their belongings, were flotsam scattered on the veld, by the wave of impending war.
Late in the day, a long murmur came down the column, and it slowly eased to a halt. Muhle saw Marwick—the kindly Englishman from the Natal Native Affairs Department—go up to the front, where there was some commotion.
“Stay in this spot,” he said to his wife. “I will go to see what happens. Maybe there is some food.” He followed Marwick past the ranks of black men—Zulu and Xhosa, Sotho, Swazi and other tribes from Natal and the Cape, and not a few from the north also, strangers from Nyasa and Bulawayo.
This curiosity—no, it wasn’t that, it was responsibility—was the undoing of Muhle Maseku. For they had just crossed the border into Natal and on the British side were some Boers, on horseback, with their rifles in their hands and their trademark slouch hats upon their heads. The Boers were engaged in strenuous argument with Marwick, every now and then interjecting their broken English with the nee and ja of their own strange tongue. Marwick looked ill and afraid, Muhle thought. As he watched, many more Boers appeared and began sectioning off a part of the crowd of marchers, herding them with their rifles. Muhle panicked, trying to move back away from the vanguard. But then one young Boer with pale blue eyes prodded him back, and he began to be carried along by the flow of the rest. Terrified of being separated from his family, Muhle shouted out to one he recognized on the other side of the cordon, a comrade from the mines.
“Mbejane! They are taking me. You must tell Nandi that if I do not see them soon they must foot it to my kraal. I will see them in the old place.”
But Muhle never knew whether Mbejane had heard him, as the rifle of the young Boer with pale blue eyes was behind him, and he and the stolen four hundred were first walking up the hill, then running in the slow jog that is the custom in those parts. Muhle, swept along with them, looked desperately back for his wife and son, but all he could see was a mass of faces, each as frightened as his own.
All that afternoon, the Boers made them drag heavy siege guns up to the summit of the next hill, taking the whip to those who did not comply fast enough. It soon began to rain, which made the task more difficult and the Boers bad-tempered. They did not spare the sjambok then, its tongue stinging all the more where it sizzled on wet skin. But Muhle was tough, he had worked in the hardest mines—the Ferreira, the Robinson Deep—so he did not slack from weakness. As he pulled on the chains attached to the gun carriages, he thought only of staying alive and getting back to Nandi and Wellington as soon as possible. The dark spectre crossed his mind that he would not get back, that these Boers would keep him here to fight in this white man’s war for ever—but he dismissed it, and then swore as his feet slipped in the mud.
The scene at General Joubert’s artillery laager, to where they were pulling the guns, was a strange mixture of busyness and ghostliness. In the wake of the rain had come mist, its eerie tendrils draping the aloes and acacia trees. Through it, and all around the emplacements, moved the bullock carts and horses of the Boer burghers. At one point, Muhle caught sight of the General himself, his long beard ruffling in the breeze which, that evening, came to sweep the mist from the hills. Sitting on his horse, surveying his dispositions in the half light, he looked coolly competent: blue frock coat, brown slouch hat with a crepe band, and shrewd, piercing eyes. Muhle shivered, and saw how his own breath, like that of the General, and of the General’s horse and the stamping lines of bullocks, was making shapes in the cold air.
They worked late into the night. The Boers brought out torches, lengths of wood soaked in pitch, and the oily yellow flame of these combined with the light of the moon to make the laager a still stranger place. As he toiled, Muhle thought of his wife and child. He was not the only one with such thoughts, for amid the sweat and groans of the four hundred men taken by the Boers came the murmurs of others concerned about their families. When, at last, the final gun was in place and the order came for the men to disband, it was as if the lid had been taken off a boiling pot. All four hundred ran pell-mell down the hill, sliding like children in the rich brown mud.
Someone was bound to get hurt and, as the gods disposed it, it was bound to be Muhle Maseku. In the rush down to that dark valley whose small firelights signalled the place where Marwick’s column of refugees had camped for the night, he tripped and fell. No, more than that, his foot found its way into the hole made by an aardvark in the edge of an anthill and he broke his ankle. As he fell, Muhle realized that he had heard the sound many times before. It was the sound acacia branches made when you snapped them off for firewood. Then the pain tore through him and—before he could begin to cry out for help, for at least someone to fetch Nandi to him—Muhle Maseku fainted in the hills outside Ladysmith.
Five
Stood on a blazing kopje, Henry Nevinson of the Daily Chronicle lifted his spyglass to his eye and surveyed the yellow-brown plain in the pan. Three or four miles wide, and like the town itself surrounded by hills, it was almost circular in shape. It reminded the correspondent of a shield. Not an African one, made of dried cowhide and wattles and good for rapping your assegai on to frighten the enemy, but a Greek or Trojan one. For it had come into Nevinson’s head that he was some classical character—King Priam’s trusted herald Idaeus, perhaps—and the plain of Ladysmith that of Dium.
Actually, the classical speculation had first been that of Steevens. The Mail–man, who was well read in Greek, had accompanied Nevinson on an earlier visit to the plain. Today, unable to maintain his colleague’s analogy, Nevinson put the idea out of his head. He lowered his glass, musing on how, in these days of ratiocination, analogy was no longer the intellectual power it once had been. The kings of the old time are dead, as a poet friend of his once put it. Now all was facts and evidence. And moving photography. Other members of the press corps in Ladysmith had heard how a representative of the Biograph Company was headed for the Cape with General Buller, and sneered accordingly; but Nevinson had kept his counsel. He could see it had potential, this new art. Or was it a science?
He secreted his spyglass in the shade of a bare rock, and picked up his notebook. Balancing it on his knee, he began to write. Already, since the invasion and the declaration of martial law, he had filled two booklets with his tidy hand. For the time being, the wire was intact, and from these scribblings he would assemble the atoms of the telegraphs he would send back to his office—via Durban and the cable, passing deep under the sea, up to Zanzibar, Aden, and finally through to London, centre of the known world. But what if the wire was cut? Preparations had been made with carrier pigeons, and a squad of native runners, yet the former could be shot by keen-eyed Boer marksmen and the latter intercepted by sentries and their messages turned open.
The answer to the problem lay near by, on Signal Hill, where lately the heliograph and flagmen had been working, trying to blink and flap messages in Morse and semaphore to troops at other stations. But so far, in the anteroom of crisis, they had not got through, and weren’t likely to do so until loyal forces were able to fix another heliograph station at Weenen on the Kolombo mountain, thirty-five miles away. In that, as in everything, Nevinson thought, we await General Buller’s grace. It struck him that it
was possibly interesting to his readers, this question of how what they were reading was borne unto them, out of a moment of emergency—but it wasn’t the sort of item Major Mott, the military censor, would let him put in a telegraph.
Nor, though he had done the calculations, would he be able to put in the figures which would no doubt determine the outcome of the whole affair. There were now 13,500 soldiers in the town, about 5,500 civilians and—he made this distinction without hesitation—2,500 native Africans and Indian immigrants. There would have been a lot more of those to feed, had General White not ordered all non-essential servants to be dismissed. Even so, with a total ration demand of around 21,500 mouths, the town could last only about two months. Ignoring, that is, the problem of 12,500 livestock—horses, mules and oxen—for which they had only a month’s forage in store.
None of this could go in his despatch. But there was plenty of other material to write about. Armoured trains crammed with military stores had been steaming into Ladysmith station all week, filled with compressed beef, compressed forage, jam, oil, sardines, ammunition and more—all the necessities of army supply. Last Wednesday, General White himself had arrived with his entourage. Nevinson had noted how decrepit the man charged with the defence of Natal had seemed: his old riding accident was plaguing him in the heat, making him limp. It didn’t augur well, that gammy leg.
Neither did the news of the Boer advance, led by the other general, Joubert. “Slim”—cunning—Piet, as he was known. And cunning he was proving to be. Creeping down mountain passes from the two republics, the Boers’ three columns now controlled most of northern Natal. Joubert himself had come by Laing’s Nek. Although both Charlestown and Newcastle had been captured, there had been little serious action, as the British residents had mainly already left. What had taken place was mostly bloodless—some police and a passenger train captured. The worrying thing was how well supplied the Boers appeared to be, especially with Krupp artillery, which was reported to come with skilled German gunners supplied by the factory. More worrying still was the speed of the advance: at this rate Brother Boer would be in Durban within the month.
So far as the inhabitants of Ladysmith were concerned, the point was that a large number of Boers, perhaps twenty-five thousand organized into commandos, had massed within fifteen miles of the town. The outposts of both the Carbineers and the 5th Lancers had been engaged on successive nights, and heavy firing was beginning to be heard in the distance. People were saying that the first real shots of the war had been fired at nearby Dundee, to where a column had been rashly thrown forward. This was under Perm Symons, the impetuous man in charge of forces in Natal until the arrival of Generals White and—if he ever would arrive—Buller, with his Army Corps.
Other noises than those first shots at Dundee had maintained an air of normality in Ladysmith itself, albeit normality of a rather infernal character: the other day the band of the Leicesters had played scales all morning. Slow time, Nevinson had observed. That was the awful thing: the whole place was just waiting for the Boers to come on. Not surprisingly, this feeling of dreadful anticipation had given rise to suspicion. The few Dutch left in the town had been arrested, and now the military police were rounding up suspicious characters. This seemed pointless to Nevinson: most of them were simply refugees displaced by the war, mine-hands and uitlander servants down from Johannesburg.
He rubbed his face—the sun had brought out a rash—and made a note to himself to get a hat with a wider brim. Below him, the dipping slope which the kopje crowned was swaying its tall grasses with a hypnotic motion, and for a second it seemed that the emptiness he saw, still further below on the plain itself, was nothing but a mirage.
It had all changed so quickly, testament to fear as much as to military necessity. Before, the lines of white bell tents had been busy with activity. Pickets with fixed bayonets had kept guard, and mounted patrols skirted the perimeter. Men had played cards, cleaned their kit, smoked their pipes. Yesterday they had dismantled the camp, it being deemed impossible to defend, and moved into town. Wagons had stirred up great clouds of dust, and kit had lain revealed on the ground, ready to be packed up. Now it was nearly all gone, and the tents were being repitched beside the river.
He looked out over the sun-scorched, stone-freckled plain again. It wasn’t vast enough to be a desert, but the bare expanse he could see created that impression: freedom, space, a kind of totality that was also crushing. It absorbed one ineluctably, drawing the eye towards the infinite. As Steevens had said, of coming up on the train, “You arrive and arrive, and once more you arrive—and once more you see the same vast nothing you are coming from.” Here all was gaunt and wild, as the Cape, with its Dutch gardens, had been cultivated and picturesque; how far away those dark greens and purples seemed today, as if situated in an altogether different realm. For now, without the soldiers, the plain was truly desolate. There was only dust, litter, a few goats browsing, and—he noted in his glass—the occasional African poking about in the debris.
It was with this pitiful sight in mind that Nevinson packed up his belongings, remounted, and made his way back to town. At least he had a good pony. The horse which had brought him down the Helpmakaar Road, after his initial tour with Steevens and the other correspondents, had gone lame. He had had to get another. This would have cost him a sovereign, but he had brought several boxes of cigarettes with him and an officer of Hussars had been willing to exchange his polo pony for one.
After the scene on the plain, the outskirts of Ladysmith itself seemed idyllic—cottages with rose gardens and honeysuckle about their shady verandas. One was the house commandeered by White, the commander-in-chief.
Near by, with many a merry shout, a detachment of the Green Horse were pursuing a football. He saw Tom Barnes among them, and waved from his horse. Barnes, bare-chested, waved back, and then scrambled into a tackle. Like the gardens—some had trees bearing that buttery fruit, avocado, that he had tasted here for the first time—the football pitch was a calming sight, for all the world such as one might encounter in a village of Herefordshire or Worcestershire on a Sunday afternoon in the middle of summer.
The impression didn’t last long. Entering the main street was to throw yourself into a chaos of steaming horses, pannier-laden mules and bellowing oxen, of stacked firewood, Lee Metford rifles, lances and cavalry sabres, bales of forage, soldiers in uniform, volunteers in riding boots and shirt-sleeves, and African drivers cracking their whips. Nevinson had to dismount and tether his pony. There was a general mood of fear and anticipation and want of confidence, a feeling that things would very soon change. Of all the evidence of people preparing for the worst, the most affecting was the sight of a large number of lady cyclists with their wicker baskets piled high with provisions bought in panic. One of these, a thin, ascetic-looking woman, with an abundance of grey hair and a long black gown, nearly ran into him as he watched, and in doing so, almost fell off her bicycle. Steadying her, he grabbed hold of the handlebars. Some of her goods fell to the ground.
“Careful, young man,” she snapped, dismounting. “You should watch where you are walking.”
“I’m sorry, madam,” said Nevinson, going down on his knees to pick up the provisions. “I was taking in the scene.”
“Were you indeed?” She stood over him with one hand on the bicycle, the other on her hip—the very image of indomitable womanhood.
He straightened, putting the paper bags and cartons back into the basket. “I am afraid one of these eggs seems to be broken.” He cupped the goo of the broken egg in his palm and flicked it on to the ground.
“And so we shall all be cast down,” said the woman.
“I’m sorry?” queried Nevinson, wiping his palm with a handkerchief.
“This unspeakable war. It is a curse from the Lord, a judgement on the pride of the politicians and generals. On both sides! If they were nearer the light, this state of affairs would never have arisen.”
“I am sure you are right,” sa
id Nevinson. “To whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?”
“My name is Mrs Frinton. Now if you will excuse me, I must get to Star’s bakery before the bread runs out.”
She remounted her bicycle and rode off. Nevinson watched her thread her way through the crowd, wobbling dangerously, and reflected that perhaps her premonition of disaster was right. Women had a sixth sense about such things, he believed. The laying in of essentials and home comforts by the ladies of Ladysmith seemed to him a certain sign that the greater comfort, the way in which the town had hitherto complacently risen and settled into itself each day, sun-up to sundown, could not persist. He retrieved his pony and led it back to the cottage he had taken with Steevens and MacDonald, wondering where it was all going to end. For if Ladysmith fell, why not Natal, the Cape, indeed why not, as subject peoples everywhere saw that it was possible, the Empire itself?
It was a question that came back to him later that evening, when he was exploring the new cottage. The landlord had a surprisingly extensive library, which included a set of Gibbon: the 1872 edition, annotated by Doctor Smith. Steevens, who was a Gibbonian, had been delighted when his attention had been drawn to it. For want of anything else to read, Nevinson carried the first volume up to bed with him that night. He wouldn’t have time to get through much of it, of course, but just a few words from the great man would be a dose of good for his own prose.
But he found it as heavy to read as it was to carry, and after half an hour went downstairs again in his pyjamas to find something a bit more congenial. It wasn’t that he couldn’t stomach true learning. He was as well read as Steevens and had already published two books on German letters—one on Herder, one on Schiller—in addition to Neighbours of Ours, his Cockney fantasia about ordinary life in the East End. It was just that he wanted a good read to take his mind off things. He scanned the shelves: Kloof Yarns, The Phantom Future, Women Adventurers, In the Heart of the Storm…