by Giles Foden
“Almagtig,” breathed Sterkx. “Almighty God.”
The Boer riflemen moved forward, swarming over the wrecked gun teams, then moving up the ridge.
“Now we have got them.”
Horrified, Muhle watched as the Boers gained ground. Soon, the sound of a bugle was heard and a white flag went up on the other side of the ridge.
“Come on,” said Sterkx. “We’d better move down. It seems I will be searching for Boer bullets in Englishmen today.”
An hour or two later, at the bottom of the hill, Muhle watched the British prisoners march in, with dragging steps and downcast faces.
“They were mostly Irish,” Sterkx told him later, “and will be sent to gaol in Pretoria.”
Nine
The capture of more than a thousand prisoners, mostly Dublin Fusiliers, at nearby Nicholson’s Nek, the falling of heavy shells on a number of farms near the town, and the army’s shameful retreat were each in themselves cause for consternation. Together, they made a disastrous impression on the morale of Ladysmith. These events also had the effect of speeding up the ‘evacuation’, as the military were calling the rush from the town. That it was a shameful business was confirmed to Nevinson on a sticky, thunderous Natal evening, when he went down to the railway station. A strange and disturbing sight greeted him there.
In a yellow light, three trains were waiting, amid great confusion and congestion. Panic-stricken whites mixed with a vast crowd of Indians and Africans. The cause of the alarm was the Boers’ imminent closing of the railway line. Out of the windows of the carriages poked the excited faces of white children, and the anxious ones of their mothers; in the open trucks, the other races were thickly packed. The general idea amongst all seemed to be ‘save your skin’—plus the cloth-wrapped bundle of goods upon your head, if that was your unfortunate lot—and, whatever its colour, every one of those skins dripped with sweat in the oven-like heat.
Nevinson looked about, and was shocked by what he saw. The native police were hitting both Africans and Indians with knobkerries, or prodding them as if they were livestock. It was cruel and pointless, not least since the more they were beaten and prodded, the more they shouted, pushed and pulled. Thinking there might be some copy in the scene, Nevinson took out his notebook and shoved his way through the crush. As he was scribbling down some notes, he heard an Australian voice in his ear.
“Well, at least we’re clearing the town of its human refuse.”
He recognized the voice as that of MacDonald, his fellow correspondent, and a bit of a jingo. He carried a swagger stick and affected the more ostentatious kind of uniform. Many of the press corps wore khaki and other officers’ equipment—sword belt, sun helmet—in some combination, but MacDonald’s outfit, together with his wide-brimmed Australian hat, was so carefully calculated as to suggest considerable vanity.
“I think it’s rather sad,” Nevinson replied, levelly.
“Do you really? Myself, I have no doubt that the mass of Hindus and kaffirs will one day furnish Natal with its greatest social and political problem.”
“Perhaps so. But I don’t think, just now, we’re in a position to make any prophecies.”
“Well, at least we’re staying here. Only thing a solid bloke could do. See those white bleeders. Look at them! In my opinion, Nevinson, manhood is besmirched by flight in such company.”
“Some have been ordered out, you know.”
“Is that so? I know Burleigh has gone.”
“For good?” Nevinson was surprised that the Telegraph correspondent hadn’t decided to stick it out.
“Yes, fled the coop. Say, do you fancy a drink at the Royal later?”
“I won’t, MacDonald, if you don’t mind. Feeling a bit weary.”
He pocketed his notebook and walked off, suddenly wanting to get as far away as possible from this Babel, and from MacDonald. It made him flinch, the way the race hostility rankled so deep in the Australian. He regretted having billeted with him. Steevens, who shared the cottage with them, was extremely pleasant. A refined and thoughtful scholar who could also cut it with Fleet Street’s yellowest, he put the point upon honour but softened its edge with an easy wit. MacDonald’s coarseness, on the other hand, made their little cottage rather tiresome at times.
The sun was almost down when he got back there, having strolled round the town picking up colour in the interim. At one point he stopped and watched a group of native women dancing at a street corner. Dressed in brightly printed wraps, they were moving with somnolent ease to the combined music of a mouth organ and a thumb piano. Nevinson stood entranced by the simple rhythm. He watched the feet move in the dust, and then slowly lifted his eyes. The women looked back at him unblinking, with something halfway between interest and resentment in their eyes. Nevinson met their gaze momentarily, then looked down and continued his journey.
“The last train has gone,” he told Steevens, on entering.
The hero of the Mail—balding and bespectacled, though scarcely thirty—was sitting writing at the kitchen table.
“So we’re stuck here then,” he said, removing his glasses. Small, brown-eyed, white-faced, he didn’t seem the war correspondent type, but his confidence under fire—and in print—was already legendary.
“Looks like it.”
“Beleaguered.”
“Well, let’s see how it goes,” said Nevinson. “Place for the story, though. Although Burleigh seems to think otherwise—he’s gone, MacDonald tells me.”
“Has he? The bugger. When I send my next despatch I’ll put him down as missing in action. That’ll ginger up the boys in the Telegraph offices.”
Steevens got up, walked over to the window and looked out—into darkness, for in the few seconds since Nevinson had entered the room, night had fallen in its quick, tropical way, like a heavy curtain at the theatre. Steevens’s torso was marked out against the blackness of the pane.
“Beyond is the world,” he declaimed, “…under the wide and starry sky.”
He turned round, and leaned against the windowsill, his stiff white collars contrasting brightly with the black glass. “I used to watch the sky in the Sudan, of a night. Glorious, the open desert.”
“Rather refreshing, I should think,” said Nevinson, taking a seat at the table.
“Yes. It didn’t attack the nerves, being on campaign, like this place does. Well, until Omdurman, when the death toll was too much for one to entertain any thought but that of the grave. The bombardment, it did the job, but by Christ…Heads without faces, faces without anything below, and black skins grilled to crackling.”
Nevinson paused, thinking about what Steevens had said. Eventually, he spoke. “Will it come to that here, do you think? If they bring Kitchener over to help Buller? There’s rumours of it.”
“Let’s hope they don’t need to. Anyway, this is different. A white man’s war. I wonder how long it will last, though.”
“They say Buller will be here in a week or two. But I’m not so certain.”
“Nor I,” said Steevens. He hit the window sill with the side of his hand. “What irks me about all this is how unnecessary it all is. The swaggering figure of Universal Trade is the man with his finger on the trigger, and yet no one is saying it.”
“I take it you mean the gold-bugs,” said Nevinson, who was already aware of Steevens’s Radical sympathies—despite his working for a Tory halfpenny paper, where such political inclinations, not to mention literary ones, were held in contempt.
“Indeed. Milner, Rhodes, even Chamberlain is culpable to some degree. They are all after the gold and diamond fields really, and to my mind that makes the whole thing stink. Blood shouldn’t be spilt for such things.”
Steevens certainly had passion, thought Nevinson, even if he didn’t think it crucial to a victorious military campaign. Maybe it was that which had brought him recognition at such a young age. Exciting books about India and the Sudan campaign, incisive reports from America and the ranks of the Turks at The
ssaly…What was the title of that one, With the Conquering Turk?…Nevinson had been on that campaign too, on the other side, but he hadn’t heard Steevens’s name in those days. He ought to have done. Head boy at his school, fellow of his college, Steevens had left both behind and swept Fleet Street before him. Nevinson felt a twinge of jealousy; he had worked in journalism for a decade longer. But there was, it was true, a brilliant austerity about Steevens’s writing: by picking out the right details, he gave you a very powerful picture of a scene, making you feel as if you were there.
“What’s this then?” Nevinson said, looking down at the pages of manuscript in front of him on the deal table, and catching a glimpse of a Greek name.
The prodigy came over from the window and picked up the pad. “Oh, you don’t want to look at that.”
“Come on, George, what is it?”
Steevens held the papers to his chest, like a modest virgin, and then sat down in the chair, looking a bit embarrassed. “Oh, nothing. Well…you know I published a book before I came out, The Monologues of the Dead.”
“Of course,” said Nevinson, who acted as literary editor of the tiny-staffed Chronicle when he wasn’t on campaign. He remembered getting the review in: classical figures, historical and invented, tell their story in modern speech—Troilus, Themistocles, the Mother of the Gracchi, Constan-tine the Great. “The Lucan imitation,” he added.
“That’s right,” said Steevens. “Well, I thought I’d try to write something in the same manner. About this place.”
“Voices of a siege, you mean?”
“If it comes to that.” Then the young man grinned. “Though I’m not sure that’s the title for me. Might have to be Monologues of the Dead, Part Two, if those Boer guns do let rip.”
The sound of a heavy tread on the porch steps interrupted them, followed by the noise of the front door opening.
“That’ll be MacDonald,” said Nevinson. “I ran into him down at the station. Cursing the kaffirs as usual.”
“I know what you mean. No gentleman he.”
Nevinson stood up from the table. “I’ll turn in, I think. Lest we face a monologue—on the virtues of Australian butter.”
“Or mutton,” replied Steevens, before giving a harsh guffaw. MacDonald’s paeans to Australian produce, and its superiority over the South African equivalents, had already become a regular feature of the journalists’ evenings in the cottage.
As MacDonald opened one door, Nevinson closed the other. “Have I missed a joke then?” he heard the Australian say. “Hope I’m not the butt.”
Ten
Nevinson watched a man sink to the ground—shot as he lifted the butt of his own rifle to his shoulder—and saw the stretcher-bearers run towards him. The correspondent crouched down further in the sangar, and listened to the tearing, roaring sound of shells passing overhead and the rattle of Mauser bullets chipping the fortification’s rock wall. The town was now utterly surrounded, and they had been under fire for two days. It was on a Thursday, November 2, that the first of the Boer shells came crashing into town, from their big gun—‘Long Tom’ as it had been christened. A woman was wounded by a shell splinter, but Nevinson had still not got her name, such was the confusion. On the Friday, the bluejackets, the naval gunners who had been rushed up from the coast, fired their own first cannonades back at the Boers. The sailors’ battery had some reasonably sized guns, but they were small fry compared with the Boers’ great piece. It seemed, as he thought, a desperate case. In all earnestness now, the straitened state, the siege, had begun.
The effect on all was considerable. Donald MacDonald had come into the cottage visibly shaken, after seeing what he described as ‘a mass of splintered shell come hurtling over the camp and take off the leg of an unfortunate kaffir’. On the first day, the shells had pitched mainly among military positions—the outer camp lines (where Nevinson now was), and the military stores near the railway line—but on the second, streets and houses had begun receiving attention. The heart of the town was blasted by no fewer than three big guns. The townsfolk stood transfixed in their doorways listening to the roar, and then rushing back inside if it sounded as though the deadly charge were coming their way.
Some of the naval men had been badly hit, one losing his legs—carried off on a stretcher, he died in the hospital—another mortally wounded in the groin. Through his glass, Nevinson could watch the Boers come out from behind their guns, stand with hands on hips to watch the fall of shot and then, when the response came from the British guns, dash back behind their shelters. Already many people in Ladysmith were complaining that Sir George White had left too many superior positions to the enemy. They overlooked the town from almost every point of the compass.
Confidence, on that first day, was not high among the British. Everywhere people were ducking and dodging for shelter whenever they heard the report. Some civilians were taking more careful steps, beginning to dig themselves caves and holes in the south area of the town, where the Klip river ran close and softened the earth. Others stayed in their homes, or—if they had a conscience, and many did—went to help in the hospital that had been set up in the Town Hall.
The casualties were slowly beginning to mount, adding to those injured in the earlier battles outside the town. A cavalryman on patrol had taken a bullet in the back of his head: MacDonald, who seemed to be a magnet for wounds, had seen this too, had watched helpless as the poor man lay there on the open veld, bleeding to death, his horse grazing next to him. In addition, two of the Natal Volunteers had fallen, another two had been shot through the upper arm, and three troopers of the Imperial Light Horse had been first mown down by Maxim fire and then, as if to seal their fate, rained upon by a hail of shell splinter. Another volunteer had been shot through both cheeks: an awful injury, but at least he lived and his jaw remained unshattered, such was the exactitude of the Mauser bullets with which the Kaiser had supplied the enemy.
From noon till night, this hell had persisted. A cottage had been exploded, and the Royal Hotel had suffered—if that was the word—a near miss. Cavalry and artillery flying behind teams of horses had been sent out, but were almost immediately driven back. The Ladysmith war balloons, sent up for observation, had proved consistent targets for the gunners of the Staats Artillerie, although so far they had escaped unscathed—and even now one hovered in the darkening sky above the crouching correspondent; a symbol, as he saw it, of misplaced British faith in technical capability.
Nevinson carefully put his head above the parapet, and then ducked down again immediately as a Mauser bullet sang past him. He lay down again, and waited for the firing to slacken. When it did, he slowly crept back to the opening of the sangar behind him. Bidding farewell to the men inside—they were too fraught to reply, even though it appeared that this day’s assault might be over—he left the line of rocky circles that marked this outer perimeter of defence, and walked nervously towards the main part of the town.
Night began to fall in earnest. His way took him down a gradually inclining slope, so that below him he could see the dim flickering lights of camps and houses, lit in expectation of darkness. So far the Boers had not fired at night, so a lantern, candle or bonfire was not conceived of as a dangerous attraction. But how long before they did? Then those lights would die, and in dying give the lie to the swagger that had persisted in the Empire before the war had begun. He felt it was his duty to support the British, but all the experience of his early youth, from Ruskin and the Christian Socialists at Oxford to his time with the reformers at Toynbee Hall, teaching the poor in the East End, went against it. His youthful abhorrence of the State and all its enormities—he had known Peter Kropotkin and the other London anarchists in those days—seemed out of place here in Ladysmith. But what was the suppression of the Boer republics if not a liberal cause?
It was pitchy black by the time he reached the cottage, and he might have had trouble finding it if it had not been for the clucking of some fowls they had been keeping in a pen
in the garden; it was MacDonald’s idea, a way of supplementing their food supplies. On going inside, he expressed some of his thoughts about the siege to Steevens, who was sitting with his feet up on the kitchen table, smoking a pipe. He was inclined to enthusiasm about the present fight, and about the Empire too.
“I used to be against it all, like you. But then I went to India. Have you seen Bombay?”
“I haven’t,” Nevinson said.
“Well, you must go there. Any Englishman would feel himself greater for a sight of that city. I came back a changed man. It was no more long hair and crush hat for me after Bombay, I can tell you.”
“I’ve heard it’s an appalling place.”
“Not at all. All human life is there, and therein lies the glory.”
“Do you really believe in that stuff any more, after what we’ve been through these last few days? Is Empire really worth it, George, after all? I saw a man horribly shot today, and I really began to doubt it.”
“I’m with Thucydides, I’m afraid. On the Athenian Empire. It may seem wickedness to have won it…” A shell went off, but he continued speaking, without hesitation or change of tone. “…but it is certainly folly to let it go.”
“But the purpose falters, George,” said Nevinson. “With every despatch you or I or MacDonald gets out, detailing another defeat or setback, the world laughs at us. They are calling Buller ‘Sir Reverse’ rather than Sir Redvers now, you know. It is the farce that comes when you strip away the illusion, the theatre.”
“Cheek, I call it. Product of socialists and cigarette-smoking new women. Well, actually, I have to concede that the Bull is being rather slow at the business end.”
His colleague’s mishmash of attitudes puzzled Nevinson. Steevens’s Radical antipathy to the moneyed classes didn’t seem to sit well with his support for Empire.