1999 - Ladysmith

by Giles Foden

  The effect of such events as these upon all in the town was to change their very nature. Even a fellow like MacDonald, with strong opinions, was forced to alter his outlook.

  “I’ve seen horrible things today,” he said to Nevinson on coming in that evening. “This war is different, isn’t it? Without bands and flags and all that glitter and circumstance, it’s just plain killing. There’s no redemption in it.”

  Nevinson was shocked at such a swerve in the character of his house mate. But then MacDonald had spoiled it by reverting to cynical type. “The loss in artistic effect is enormous,” he sniggered.

  Nevinson told Steevens of this as they sat on the veranda later that night, smoking their pipes. Against doctor’s advice, the sick Mail–man had come downstairs, determined not to let his illness get the better of him.

  “The important thing,” Steevens said in his slow, trenchant voice as they discussed the war, “is that we are learning lessons every day from the Boer. We are getting to know his game, and learning to play it ourselves.”

  Seventeen

  “Play it yourself then, if you’re so good.”

  Tom gathered up the cards and handed them to Bob. He had been playing Patience outside the bell tent, but his friend’s interfering advice, combined with his own ineptitude, had finally proved too much.

  “No thanks,” said Bob. “I just wanted to see you get it right.”

  They were not the only two companions getting on each other’s nerves. All around the camp, the waiting was wearing people down. The lack of beer played some part in this, as did the constant threat of fever and shell, but mostly it was the lack of action. Many were all for rushing the Boers and being done with it, whatever the cost.

  “We’ve got exercise soon, anyway,” Bob said. “Let’s go up there now. Then we won’t have to queue.”

  Tom didn’t reply. He watched his friend pick up his saddle and other tack and hoist them on to his shoulder. Then, sighing, he did the same and followed Bob over to the compound in which the horses were kept.

  He hung the saddle and bridle on the wooden fence and looked for Bashful in the swirling mass of brown horseflesh. Eventually, he picked out the blaze of white down his mount’s nose, and whistled: a particular, three-tone melody that the horse already knew as his. Whinnying with delight, Bashful came over. It cheered Tom to see him, and he smiled at the horse as if he were an old friend, and patted his neck. The horse’s long eyelashes were beautiful, he thought. Balancing on the lower rung of the wooden fence, he draped the reins over the horse’s neck and slipped the bridle on—Bashful standing there calmly all the while—then slung the saddle over its back. He then got down and stooped beneath the horse to tighten the girth.

  Finally, when it was all done, he climbed back on to the fence and took the saddle. By this time Bob had also mounted, and the two of them guided their horses through the crowd to the gate and waited there until the guard let them out. Then over to the open ground where the exercise would take place. This business had become part of Ladysmith routine. As the siege had progressed, and cutting-out expeditions become more infrequent, the horses had had to be exercised within the town thrice weekly. It was a complex task, involving a couple of hundred beasts trotting in concentric circles over a small area.

  Lieutenant Norris, on marshal duty, was supposed to make sure that the exercise ran smoothly. Of course, thought Tom, he will make a mess of it as usual, but in fact the Lieutenant was surprisingly efficient today. If the man in the war balloon had been watching the Green Horse on exercise, what he would have seen would have looked much like a ballet or a Morris dance: the lines of mounted men weaving in and out of each other in perfect harmony, all bobbing up and down in time with the beat of hoofs and the tinkle of bit and curb chain. In the centre of it all was Norris, stationary on his own horse, signalling when the leader of each line of men should make his turn.

  “Appeals to his sense of order, this,” said Bob, who was trotting in front of Tom, his elegant seat on a horse belying his ungainly frame.

  “He’d have us running round in rings without horses if he could.”

  Norris, spotting them chatting, waved his baton at them from the centre of the ring. “Quiet there, Barnes. No time for gossiping.”

  The Lieutenant’s voice was drowned by the insistent whirr of a shell, courtesy of the Staats Artillerie. Obviously meant for him, it went wide and pitched a few feet away from Tom and Bashful. The horse reared, and Tom was thrown clear. In the air, all he could think about was the smell of death, and he readied himself for the bigger blast. This is my end, he thought, but no explosion came, only a wild neighing and a tumbled vision of plunging horses and men. Tom fell to the ground.

  As he lay there, horses and men began to get to their feet, the former throwing themselves upright in their paroxys-mic way, the latter rising more slowly, brushing down their clothes. Tom, dazed, sat up in the dust. He reached for his ankle. It was already swelling up in the tight cavalry boot. All around, amid the slowly ebbing noise of horses, was the quieter whisper of men, thanking their lucky stars. Somewhere, a little way away, he could hear something being read out. And then laughter.

  Bob came over, walking his horse. “You get a knock, mate?”

  “Twisted ankle. Must have been a dud.”

  “Uh-uh. No charge. There was a note tied to it with string. To Norris. Someone’s just read it out.”

  “Saying what?”

  “The circus has left town, and you left your top hat in your tent!”

  Tom grunted and, taking Bob’s proffered hand, winced as he tried to put weight on his ankle.

  “Reckon exercise will be cancelled today,” said his friend, and they began to walk towards the perimeter of the parade ring, with Bob’s horse ambling along behind them.

  “Christ,” exclaimed Tom. “Bashful. I forgot him.”

  Fearful that his mount had been injured, he turned back quickly to look at the untangling crowd of men and horses, to see where he was. But Bashful was already trotting towards them.

  Tom took the rein. “I’d say he was grinning, if a horse could do such a thing.”

  “They can,” said Bob. “I was reading it in one of my magazines. There’s a fellow back home’s published a book on the expressions of animals. It had diagrams. Pictures—of dogs and monkeys. Horses too.”

  “I bet there were no sheep. I’ve never seen a sheep that didn’t look stupid.”

  “No, there weren’t any sheep. But it said we’re just like them.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It said humans make the same faces.” Bob bared his teeth in imitation of an animal.

  Tom snorted in derision, and pointed to an African woman with a basket of yellow corn on her head. “Them maybe. Not us.”

  Eighteen

  After all they had been through—after the rout from Goli, the procession of refugees from that place of gold, after the disappearance of her husband, and their first, awful weeks in a closed-up Ladysmith looking for work and food—Wellington did this. Mntanami, mntanami…

  The ragged, careworn figure of Nandi Maseku was squatting outside the back door of the Royal Hotel, grinding maize with a large pestle and mortar. This was the wages the young mama, Miss Bella, had promised her in recompense for working in the kitchen and gardens of the hotel, together with lodging in the servants’ quarters. Though Nandi’s thoughts turned constantly to Muhle and his fate—wherever he was, outside the perimeter—she had been feeling a little less anxious, until now.

  When Wellington had told her that he intended to become a message-runner, having been offered the colossal sum of £20 for each journey, she hadn’t at first grasped what it involved. Then, later that night, when her son had explained, she had broken down.

  “How can you do this?” she had cried, taking him by the shirt. “I am already worried enough about your father, without you endangering yourself in this way.”

  “Mother, it is better this way. I will be ab
le to get more food from the bush, and the money will help us greatly when this siege is over.”

  “We don’t know when it will be over. We don’t know what has happened to your father.”

  “Father will be all right. He is strong and clever. I may be able to find him, while I am on my journey.”

  “I forbid you to go.”

  But he had gone, leaving before dawn, or rather in the very moment that the soft grey light of the moon began to ease away. She had watched him put the message packet into his trousers, felt his kiss upon her cheek, and seen his slight figure jog towards the orchards and, quickly becoming indistinct in the strange light, disappear among the trees. And now nearly a whole day had passed. She looked out at the hills around the town. The cloud lay low today, covering the table of Bulwan like a cloth, and mixing with the smoke of the Boer guns, which thundered still.

  Somewhere, out there, were all that she loved, husband and son. She suddenly felt very angry about this white man’s war, and she pounded the maize all the harder. She thought of what might be happening to either of them, especially to Wellington: the sudden crack of a bullet, and him thrown down in the grass, bloodied. Mntanami, she whispered again, and salt tears fell into the coarse meal, mntanami—my child, my child.

  She began to sing softly to herself, beguiling the tedium of the task with the chant, repeating the words over and over again. Very soon, the maize-grinding went with a swing, comfort and healing coming into her from the words and their rhythm, coming into her like a glow.

  And then she stopped and, worried again, looked into the ukhamba, the bowl, and saw unokufa, death: saw Wellington shot in the head as he ran. Saw it in her own head. Filled once again with anxiety, she put down the heavy, four-foot pestle and went into the servants’ quarters. It was dark inside, and as her eyes adjusted after the harsh sunlight it took her a little time to find what she was looking for. She finally laid hands on a long-stemmed object made of white clay. Filling it with rough tobacco, and adding a pinch of dagga, the strong Zulu marijuana, she sat down on the packed-earth floor, lit the pipe, drew on it deeply, and tried to forget.

  Sengiyokholwake…I shall believe, I shall believe you have died only when inqomfi, the lark, hovers over my head in the evil omen of my people. Only then. So thought Wellington as he ran through the ruffling quilts of grass, ducking down, skulking like a bandit in his own country. His father’s country, whose milch-cows the sons of the white men had sucked dry since the time of Cetewayo. Not till the lark rose above him would he believe his father was dead. As he ran, his eyes slanted everywhere, looking for a sign. This precious packet, nestling in his groin, would be as nothing in a trade for such a sign. He knew how to look out for them, his father had taught him the markings on trees and in the dust that betokened a message.

  There were other things to look out for. All across the paths and byways, the Boers had laid bell wires to alert them to movement: one was placed closed to the ground, the other at head height. He had to move carefully, as looking out for one meant that you could easily strike another. Yet he kept up his pace.

  After about two miles he became breathless and halted. He wanted, in any case, to check his burden was not soaked. He had had to make a pipe of reeds to cross under the water at a place where there was a Boer guard, a young man with a rifle who, in spite of his lack of beard, was no less frightening to Wellington than the tokoloshe, the water kelpie of legend that aided witches and resembled a hairy giant. Most of the Boers were like that, it seemed to him, and maybe this one—whose pale blue eyes had not seen him as he had insinuated himself into the river and crept across—was just a shape-changer. He hoped the oilskin cloth which the white man had wrapped around his bundle of paper had given adequate protection during the crossing. He looked. Yes, it was so.

  He lay down in the fields of Bulwan, the great hill, and rested then. And prayed, as he lay there—low, like a dassie, among the yellow grasses—that Nomkhubulwana, goddess of rain and harvests, would send a great storm to wash this battle from her hair. Then they could return to their kraal. He had never been there, having grown up in Goli, Johannesburg, the place of the mines, but his father had told him how he longed for the smell of goat roasting over wood, the sound of the women chattering in their huts, the girls with calabashes on their heads, and all around the bounty of Zululand, the ripening fields of millet, the melons and berries and pumpkins that were his birthright.

  But there were other bounties. Below him he could see the railway track, which Boer—Mzondwase, the Hated One—and British—Khalisile, the Causer of Tears—had fought over; and he wondered if, one day, these things of iron would be the slaves of black men rather than Kwini Vittoria. With this thought in his head, he slept a while, knowing that he would have to wait till nightfall now, if he was to continue his journey unhindered by the Boer sentries. Slept, yes, but like a hare, with one eye unclosed. Slept in the sun in a dell of Bulwan, while around him crickets chirruped, millipedes made their epoch-long progress up stalk and across leaf, and doves and finches sang their song.

  Near by, but not near enough, Muhle lay in his hut of straw and thought of other huts: the wattle-and-daub ones the Dutch had first made when they came to the country, the huts of which Shaka, the great king, had said to his brothers Dingaan and Mhlanga: “You think you will rule this country, but I see the coming of the swallows who build with mud, and they will become your masters.” And so it had proved, and now he lay here imprisoned. But his ankle was healing, becoming stronger, and soon he would creep like a lizard out of this camp.

  Sterkx had continued to be kind to him, but he saw less of the good doctor now; since the shelling had begun, the Dutchman had been busy at his wagon, tending to the injured. The worst casualties were from the new explosive the English were using, lyddite, the yellow-and-green fumes of which burned the chest and throat. This, and the moment when General Buller would launch his long-expected attempt to ford the Tugela River and break through to relieve Ladysmith, was the talk of the camp.

  But there was other talk. There was talk going on outside Muhle’s hut right there and then. Through the opening, a few yards away, he could just see two Boers squatting down, sharing a pipe. But they weren’t Boers, they were talking English—an English that Muhle recognized as having the same queer singing tones as that of the prisoners taken at Nicholson’s Nek a few weeks earlier.

  “We got one of our boys in the town, hugger-mugger. Not a gas man, but a solid fellow all the same, and doing mighty work. I knew him back in the early days of the Brotherhood.”

  “Is that a fact, Major MacBride?” said the other. “Well, we’ll jolly him up with a sup then, when we get in there. How long so, do you reckon?”

  “Inside of a month. We’ll have Christmas Mass said in Ladysmith this year, sure as eggs, and we’ll go on the Wren too.”

  Then the man called MacBride stood up, and started to sing:

  The wren, the wren, the king of all birds,

  On Saint Stephen’s Day he was caught in the furze…

  And the other joined in:

  Up with the kettle and down with the pan…

  And give us a copper to bury the wren.

  They went off, laughing and slapping each other on the back. Perhaps all white men, thought Muhle as the figures were obscured by the edge of the opening, are just plain mad.

  The following morning, he saw the same two men involved in a commotion, along with some others of their brigade. The noise of it had woken him up, making him glance up from his bed. Through the gap, he focused on white hands and faces, and something—what? It was a black face, a thin body, he saw there in the middle of the group of white men just a little way across the camp: the recognition came not to his sleepy eyes, though, but to the pit of his stomach…it was Wellington. They were cuffing him and throwing him from one side of the group to the other. Muhle didn’t stop to think. With a cry, he leaped up from his straw bed and, reaching for his crutches, lurched towards the group of me
n as fast as he could. When he reached the edge of the circle, he saw his son had fallen to the ground, and that one of the men was kicking him in the ribs and back with his heavy boots. The man called MacBride was leafing through a packet of papers.

  Muhle burst into the circle. “Stop!”

  The white men looked astonished, and the one in the middle left off kicking.

  “What’s this then?” he said. “Are we taking orders from the likes of ye now?”

  At his feet, Wellington lay curled in a ball, moaning. Muhle tried to move forward on his crutches, but felt the hands of one of the white men grabbing his collar.

  “Are you in with him too, then? Is that it?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Muhle said, trembling. He pointed with the crutch. “He is my son! Why are you beating him?”

  MacBride came forward, with the papers in his hand. “He is in the service of the English. We found him going through our lines in the night, with these papers.”

  Muhle looked down at Wellington. He had sat up now, and was holding his stomach.

  “Is this true?” Muhle said.

  Wellington nodded miserably. Muhle turned to MacBride. “Please, let him go. He is too young; the English must have forced him.”

  “I don’t think so. He’ll be shot like all the other spies.”

  Two of the other men reached down and grasped Wellington under the arms. Muhle dropped one crutch and pulled at the sleeve of the man with the papers.

  “No!”

  “Father…”

  Muhle saw Wellington struggle in the arms of the white men. With a roar he ran at them. One of them laughed and, planting his hand four square in Muhle’s chest, pushed him over. They lifted Wellington up. From the ground, Muhle saw his son’s thin legs kicking out. He was helpless; no, here was his crutch. Sitting up, he thrust it into the groin of MacBride.