by Giles Foden
He followed in the direction of the sound until, rounding a corner, he came upon a scene that might have been out of Dante: several hundred men digging furiously at the clay bank—men of all colours and walks of life, from natives to town worthies, from lowly privates to the type of officer who, clearly, had rarely dirtied his hands in this way before. And they were dirty, all of them: many had stripped off their shirts and the red clay stuck to them like paint, giving them the warlike appearance of the American Indian.
The diggers wielded picks and spades and the like, and everywhere about lay the great stacks of wood that would be used for buttressing the caves. Nevinson recognized some familiar faces in the melee: Farquhar, the mayor, who gave him a weary smile and lifted up his spade in acknowledgement; Willie Maud, the war artist, who had exchanged his brush for a shovel; even the Greenacre boy, whom he had seen rushing about the town, was struggling to heft a pickaxe. Operations were being directed by one of the uitlander miners.
Behind the bankside fortifications were other defences: forts within forts known as sangars, that is to say circles of piled-up rocks buttressed with sand-filled mealie bags, cases of corned beef and—pity to regard—the personal bags and boxes of the soldiers. Already the white ant, servant of Joubert, was chewing his way through these.
He noticed Torres, the barber, among the diggers. Stripped to the waist, the Portuguese was throwing his spade’s edge at the red clay with such ferocity that he might have been driving a bayonet into a man’s chest. The muscles of his bare olive chest and back stood out clearly above his trousers, the legs of which were tucked into tall boots that might have been a cavalryman’s, save that they were jet-black instead of regulation brown. Although they were now mostly brown, or red at any rate, being covered with wild stripes of clay.
Smelling perfume beside him, Nevinson realized that he was not the only spectator. He turned, and saw standing beside him a young woman with short dark hair and the kind of light cotton dress which a rigorous eye would have deemed too informal for walking out; but this was siege time, he reflected, and all conventions were falling away.
“Hullo,” she said, smiling at him—she had bright, even teeth, which contrasted sharply with her well-tanned skin. “Come to join the troglodytes?”
“Just an observer…though I suspect we might all be down here soon.”
“I very much hope not,” she said. “I’m Bella Kiernan, by the way.”
Nevinson made an indistinct gesture, some semblance of a bow, with his head.
“I have seen you in the hotel, miss. My friend, George Steevens, mentioned that he met you yesterday.”
“He was most kind,” said Bella.
Bobby Greenacre ran over to them. “Have you heard what happened to Mr Torres?” cried the boy, panting.
“No,” said Bella. “What?”
They both looked at the barber.
“He’s been bombed out.”
They looked again. As they watched, Torres dropped his spade and, picking up his white shirt from where it hung over a wooden post, wiped his face with it.
“Poor man,” said Nevinson. “I went in to him for a haircut only recently.”
“Well, you were lucky, mister,” said Bobby Greenacre. “The chair was blown to pieces.”
The boy scampered off, back to the diggings.
“It’s just excitement for them, isn’t it?” said Nevinson.
Nodding her head, Bella looked at the barber again; she found herself raising her hand and giving him a little wave. Seeing he was observed, Torres began to make his way over to them, jacket and shirt flung over his bare shoulder, sweat making tunnels down his muddied torso.
“I heard your dreadful news,” called Bella over the din. “I’m sorry.”
“Bad luck,” said Nevinson, shaking his head as the man approached them.
Giving a sad smile, the barber kicked a rock with his tall boot. “I have lost everything.”
“The chair,” said Nevinson, sympathetically. “I heard.”
“My best leather one, and all of my jars and much else besides.”
Nevinson saw the girl from the hotel instinctively reach out to touch the barber’s arm, and then draw back suddenly, as if shocked by its glistening nakedness. He watched her lift the hand to her mouth, realizing that she had overstepped some bound or other. It was a picture that stuck with him: the girl’s lips, the man’s arm, the eyes of both meeting in recognition that something out of the ordinary had taken place.
Sixteen
Things, Nevinson noted in his journal, are getting worse. The sentiment was mainly prompted by Steevens having taken to his bed with a bout of fever. It was not just his friend, though. Everywhere in the town, the signs of destruction and decline were beginning to show, as shelling and disease took their toll. In the month or so since the telegraph wires had been cut, the shelling had increased dramatically in intensity. By December 5, nearly 3,500 cylinders of explosive iron had been hurled at a patch of ground not measuring three miles each way. The more complete the isolation, the harder fell the bombardment. The whirr of shells had become more familiar a noise than any other, and the clamour of explosion was fearfully echoed, or presaged, by unexpected sounds: a dropped fork in the dining room of the Royal, for instance, would raise a gasp from every table. Battery followed battery, and worst of all was the terrible shrapnel, the iron rain.
The contents of these shrapnel shells, either circlets of metal—lightly welded so as to fly apart easily on the explosion—or canisters full of sharp-edged factory dies, ripped through the human frame, tearing through bone and sinew to make horrible wounds that healed, if at all, with much more difficulty than the puncture of a Mauser bullet or a blunt explosive amputation.
Only the other day, a shell had burst next to Nevinson himself and another correspondent, the artist Willie Maud, while they were riding the perimeter. Their horses had plunged wildly, but the two men had simply resumed their conversation once the mounts had calmed down, as if nothing had happened.
Others were not so lucky. The Boer gunners calculated their ranges and elevations very nicely, and when an officer of the Dublin Fusiliers had his leg taken clean off in the main street, as if by a butcher’s cleaver, it was said to be in reprisal for a successful raid he had made the previous week. So it went on, the shrapnel scarring a wall here, the heavy shells embedding themselves in an earthwork there. The cycle of events had a Sisyphean, ever-present quality to it.
Nevinson tried to explain how, with the smaller guns, like that on Umbulwana, the shell travelled more swiftly than the sound. In the case of Long Tom, emplaced on Pep-worth Hill, the report was heard first, then the whirring howl, and then the explosion. PONG!—s—ss—sst—ssst—sssst—Z—WOUF! And then a cloud of red dust, a burst of shrapnel a few yards further on and (in all likelihood) a death. Before all this, a puff of smoke high up in the circle of hills—but be still, it probably is too late to move, and you may move, in any case, into the line of fire rather than out of it.
The mood of the townsfolk was changing. At first there had been consternation and despair and, among some, that tendency to wild laughter which was a sign of siege madness. Now many were quiet and submissive, as if they had become accustomed, if not indifferent, to the danger. And yet precautions were still being taken. Tom’s regiment had been covering their white tents with mud to make them khaki-coloured. More holes had been dug for shelled-out civilians. Archdeacon Barker had prayed that the Lord ‘Guide the shells into scrub places’, and sometimes He had, producing a religious feeling in the town among others than the faithful, chief of whose number was Mrs Frinton.
But the most widespread feeling was one of gloom. With good reason—enteric fever and dysentery were beginning to take hold among troops and civilians, while food, fodder and ammunition were running low. It was difficult to buy anything at the semi-official sales of produce. Potatoes were one-and-six a pound, and milk had long since been reserved for the sick and wounded. As for egg
s, they were half a guinea a dozen. Butter, tinned meats, jam—all gone. The quality of the food was also deteriorating: beef now came from trek ox, tough as boots even after hours of boiling; bread was now being baked, in the Stars’ establishment, with laundry starch as the thickening agent. It was horrible stuff, this ‘siege bread’.
One consequence of the adulterated bread was that, in search of a full belly, many whites were taking to hard biscuit or to the native staple, mealie meal, which could be made into a kind of porridge. It was not just bread, however. The ingredients of every dish became questionable, as rumours circulated about glue and hair oil being put into stews.
The cavalry’s thousands of horses were also suffering: bedding hay was now used as fodder, and pure dust as bedding. There was talk of these poor, half-fed beasts having to be destroyed. Many had already been turned loose on the veld, to be promptly rounded up by the Boers.
Water, too, was scarce: the Klip had become discoloured and soup-like owing to the number of people camped on its banks; it was poison to drink from this torrent of filth, and yet people did. So even though thirst, of which there was plenty, could be slaked, the slaking always carried the danger of disease. Flies were another hazard, their onslaught only leaving off in the frequent heavy rainstorms, which then brought out large, lumbering mosquitoes at night. The rain, accompanied by stupendous thunder, was a particular curse. This deluge came at least weekly. Afterwards, the main street of Ladysmith was like a ploughed field (or rice pudding, as Steevens had once called it), churned up by the heavy wheels of guns in transit and the constant traffic of horses. The quagmire would then dry out, turning into a deeply rutted expanse which, through half-closed eyes, could pass for the surface of the moon.
Indeed, remembering that the site of Ladysmith was said to have been a lagoon or lake in bygone ages (thereby becoming a hollow amid hills and difficult to defend), Nevinson was able to imagine himself an intelligent agent unaccountably transported back to the primeval sludge, man’s first slime. Take any poor Tommy, out at his picket on the bare hillside or rocky kloof, either blistering in 104-degree heat or shivering under his waterproof sheet, and he could easily believe it so. But civilization was insistent. Unshorn and reeking, the miserable soldier would hum a music-hall tune, think of his girl, and set his woollen cap more firmly on his head. This for a shilling a day. And the Queen, of course.
On hot days, a wild west wind, coming up from the deserted plain of the old camp Nevinson had surveyed all those weeks ago, blew right through the town. It carried dry filth on its wings in a long yellow cloud. The street acted like a tunnel and—as he noted with horror—most of the muck seemed to end up in the emergency hospital in the Town Hall, where it fell upon wounds, dressings and surgical instruments in a noxious layer, making the extraction of bullets, the staunching of blood, and the amputation of limbs more liable than ever to infection. Through it all, swamping even the smell of iodoform, persisted the stink of diarrhoea and gangrene, forcing the white-aproned wound-dressers to hold handkerchiefs to their noses.
So it went on. The shelling had become so constant and familiar a companion that, as the correspondent rather guiltily admitted to himself, he missed it on quiet days, craving the awful excitement. Then the bombardment would build up again, and the next three days would bring a barrage of shells. Night shelling had now become common, and on bad nights it was not unusual to see people rushing about the streets in their bedclothes, weirdly lit up by the orange flashes of gunfire.
As the siege continued through the first month and into early December, there was more contact with the Boers: military messengers went between the two lines, carrying white flags. Men from opposing sides, protected by their forts, had shouted conversations. Boer medical orderlies came into the town for some chlorodyne (they too were suffering from dysentery); and were given it, too, though many thought this beyond the duties of even a gentlemanly war.
And yet, at the same time, there were also occasional sorties against the enemy. In one instance a big gun was destroyed, on ‘Surprise Hill’, as it had been named. Gunner Foster had been on this expedition, kitting up with other artillerymen and engineers in the dead of night with forage caps and light boots, rifles and revolvers, and equipment to spike the guns. Overpowering the sleepy Boer guards, some of whom were bayoneted, the raiders had exploded the barrel by stuffing it with gun-cotton, and removed the breech block—which now sat on a table in the mess of the Imperial Light Horse, receptacle for a bunch of flowers.
It was a good trophy, but as there were now several Long Toms ranged on Ladysmith, it could not be said that Long Tom had been vanquished, not to speak of the lesser siege guns, field guns, pom-poms and ranks of unpleasantly whining Mausers which still surrounded the town. Yet the destruction of the big gun was news and Nevinson was determined that it should get back to his paper. The heliograph station had now been set on the round shoulder of Weenen and from it to Ladysmith and back the instrument would wink, weather permitting—and military priorities permitting. At present Major Mott, who as censor presided over the heliograph, allowed correspondents to send only thirty words per week, which was nothing like enough to satisfy the hungry reading public, not to mention the colleagues whom Nevinson and the others knew were awaiting their despatches back in London.
Besides, today was a dull day, overcast and showery. The device would not work under such a curtain of weeping cloud, so Nevinson had remained in the cottage, writing up his journal. He was alone—MacDonald was out with patrols, and Steevens was still upstairs in bed—and would have been enjoying his own company, except that he desperately craved a drink (too expensive) and was ravenously hungry (there was nothing in the house, and they weren’t due anything more from the Commissariat till the morrow). Still, be thankful for small mercies, he thought. At least the corrugated iron roof was not roasting above, as it often was; though every now and then a little piece of stray shrapnel, or a spent bullet falling from on high, rattled down it into the gutter.
It was ironic, he reflected, that although Ladysmith was now festooned with wires from the new field telephones that linked the outposts to General White’s headquarters, so far as communication with the outside world was concerned, they might as well be in the Dark Ages.
So it was back to pen and paper, like the monks of old. He put into his notebook an amusing item about Lieutenant Norris, Tom Barnes’s officer, who had been lecturing his men on the futility of ducking—“When you hear it, it’s actually passed, so ducking is quite useless”—and at that moment a shell had come over, and he had ducked. Tom Barnes had burst out laughing, and been reprimanded by the embarrassed lieutenant.
Hunched over the page, Nevinson set down descriptions of men suffering from typhoid fever—how they raved and how their lost eyes stared into the distance above one’s head. He tried to reproduce the dual experience of men and women waiting for both shellfire and relief—smoking, reading, sewing, knitting, playing cards or chess, but above all waiting—how it tried their minds in a fashion that was rather intriguing, weighing them down with threatful expectancy, buoying them up with hopeful anticipation.
He drew word pictures of the Boer guards on Surprise Hill, of the bayonets being driven through their chests, with their cautious challenge—Wie kom dar?—hardly formed on their lips. He wrote ‘The Story of a Sortie’ in the margin, as a possible title for a chapter on this subject in some projected book (when this is all over!), and then crossed it out again.
He related the tale of how one night a spare locomotive was sent out, driverless and at full speed, on the intact line leading towards the Boer junction at nearby Harrismith, with the intention of smashing up the Boer engine sitting in the station there; and how it dashed off the rails at a curve and, fizzling itself cold, became a welcome addition to General Joubert’s stores.
He told the curious story of how Mr Lynch, who along with Steevens had been a correspondent in the war in Cuba the previous year, had appeared to lose his head. How h
e rode a grey called Kruger, one side of which had been dyed khaki with Condy’s fluid (for camouflage, rather than fashion) and the other left white for want of dye. How this reckless man had interpreted the journalistic ethic of transmitting news with a literalism and severity unknown on Fleet Street, riding off into the veld with but two things in his pockets: a copy of the Ladysmith Lyre, and a rare bottle of whisky. The latter was a present for Joubert, the former he aimed to exchange for any news the Boers might have. He had not been seen since.
As a matter of fact, in the days before he had taken to his bed, Steevens had made a pair with Lynch through his riding of a dapple grey, which made him too a conspicuous mark and the object of curses from soldiers when he rode by them. “Very handsome and showy to look at,” as MacDonald had said, “but a danger to your person, I reckon.” The old army hands had marvelled that he was not hit. But now he was down with enteric.
Nevinson related too how Mr Grimble had continued to plough his fields near the racecourse, he and his team quite indifferent to the war—until the Boers began to shell him deliberately, following him up and down the field. It was the fact that the shells ploughed up the earth all wrong that really got Grimble’s goat, rather than the danger to his person. Yet still he drove his plough on.
And many other incidents, accidents and realities Nevinson committed to his notebook. Mainly ennui and illness and hunger, enlivened only (if he could be pardoned the paradox) by sudden death. Here came the tragic note: the sadness of the nightly burials, at which the lanterns gleamed on the white crosses and the bodies, of soldiers and civilians alike, were slipped into their graves with pauper’s dignity. Last night a shell had fallen near by as the burial party were carrying the body. They dropped it and fell to the ground; and then, once they were certain—though of course they never could be—that another shell would not follow in the same course, continued with their depressing errand.