1999 - Ladysmith

by Giles Foden

  All that could be heard was the booming of the guns outside.

  Full of inquisitive silence, the men crowded round Bella, Torres and his antagonist. In closer proximity, she was again aware of how badly they all smelled.

  “Apologize to Miss Kiernan,” said Torres, his eyes blazing.

  “It’s all right,” said Bella. “Please. Just stop fighting.”

  “No, he insulted you,” exclaimed Torres. “He must apologize.”

  “Yes, tell the lady you are sorry,” said someone else, and then suddenly everyone in the cave seemed to be on Torres’s side. But the other man just spat on the ground, and retreated into the darkness.

  Once the brouhaha had died down, the men spoiled Bella terribly, bringing her bits and pieces of food, as if to atone for the behaviour of their fellow. A tall man in an overcoat made a cup of tea and carried it over to her, taking great care not to spill it. One even fried up some slices of eel, but the greasy look of them turned her stomach and she had to refuse. Outside, all the while, Long Tom rattled and roared.

  It was nearly four o’clock before there was a lull in the shelling and Torres was able to escort her back to the women’s shelter.

  “I am sorry about all that,” he said, taking her arm casually and naturally. “I am afraid that some of these men are very uncouth.”

  “You shouldn’t have tried to fight him. I think perhaps you are not so tough as some of those people.”

  “No doubt. But it was the honourable thing to do,” said Torres. “You would not have respected me if I had not done so.” They had reached the edge of the women’s shelter. “Well,” he said. “Here we are. I hope your next visit will be more pleasant.”

  He took her hand and kissed it in courtly fashion, before turning on his heel and heading back. Bella couldn’t help smiling, and stood for a little while watching him as he strode in his tall boots across the broken earth.

  When, that evening, Bella told Mrs Frinton about the incident, the widow cluck-clucked and shook her head.

  “Well, you shouldn’t have gone there. You might have been…might have had advantage taken of you!”

  “I had no choice—the shells.”

  “Well,” said Mrs Frinton. “Men are men, you know, just as shells are shells.”

  Bella could not agree. At no point in the encounter had she felt that her virtue was in danger.

  “They are just like us, really,” she ventured. “Only most of the time we don’t realize it.”

  “That’s a very newfangled view,” said the widow. “It’s not one I hold with myself. You or I wouldn’t fight—not just brawling, I mean, we wouldn’t be fighting this war. This—it’s all men, just men. Believe you me, when we get to the Good Place, we will find many more women there than men.”

  Bella smiled to herself, and said nothing. Everyone else had gone to bed, and she and the widow were sitting up in the mouth of the cave, watching the night shelling. The town was now completely surrounded by Boer guns, but at night the shells seemed to be mostly pitched from behind them. Most of them were off target, and hit the rock ridge on the opposite side of the river, shattering into a thousand fiery splinters. In the darkness the curving sweep of these glowing fragments was a sight to see.

  Eventually it grew too cold to sit up, and they retired. Wrapped up on her pallet, Bella felt sad and lonely. She could not sleep, and wasted the candle, letting it burn to no purpose. The closeness of the little cell bred anxiety. Her heart and lungs felt tight. She wanted to see her father. She wondered what had happened to Tom: she had not seen him since their intimate encounter, and was beginning to experience uncertainty about the vision of love—slow, spacious, unfolding—which she had attached to him. She thought about the barber, too, and other things. Disappointments…hopes…responsibilities. She realized, for instance, that she had left the new servants at the hotel without any instructions, and hoped Father was taking care of them. All these thoughts jumped around in her head, impish as the shadows cast by the candle.

  Every now and then a shell fell near the shelter with a dull thud, making it vibrate, and she would pull her bedding more closely about her. All through the tunnels could be heard the gasps and murmurs of others who also were awake and fearful. The candle diminished. She kept thinking she should blow it out, but was unable to summon up the energy. Then it went out of its own accord.

  Still she could not sleep. For one thing, it was freezing cold. Ladysmith above ground could get very nippy at night, in spite of scorching heat during the day. Down in the caves, the cold seemed to be powerfully amplified. The chill of the earthy air, the dampness coming up from the floor, seemed to seep not only into her bones but also into her mind, where she began to equate it with all the unsatisfactory elements of her world, both before and since the siege: Father’s rigidity and moodiness, his deep inconsolability; Jane, ill and on her own at Intombi; Tom, once more; the loss of the hotel…She pressed her face into the pillow. Why would it all not go away? Why could she herself not go away—ship abroad under splendid purple clouds, leaving Father, even Jane, everyone, shaking handkerchiefs on a jetty?

  As she turned from side to side and the night wore on, she tried to clear her mind of these foolish, troublesome images by building in it a wall; a wall around some empty space, her own to inhabit. She imagined this construction as something like a tower, at the top of which was a white-painted room with long, open views from its windows. As she eventually began to drift off, that was the picture she tried to keep in her head. Then, to her intense irritation, she found herself growing unsure whether the tower was not a troublesome picture in itself. The mental dwelling on it all made her yet more anxious, fearfully tightening lungs and heart once again, fending off sleep once more. But sleep she did, finally.

  And so other nights and other mornings came. Life in the tunnels developed into a routine. Like everything else, it was governed by shellfire. The ear was deafened, then came a sinister silence. This would be the pattern of Bella’s days and nights until Christmas. Explosion. Silence. Explosion. Silence. Explosion…It was hardly bearable. When the tunnel-dwellers had to come inside, the booms were quieter, and all around the catacomb could be heard the sound of plaintive murmuring:

  “When will it end?”

  “I never thought I would see myself like this.”

  “Mummy!”

  “My God, I have no hope left in me.”

  Then the silence again. Outside for a breath of fresh air, or a drink of water, the only thing that would quell the hunger. And then only for a short while. As Mrs Frinton had said, it was not a good idea to drink the tainted stuff without boiling it first: those who had been careless about this were going down with dysentery. Whenever she felt a twinge in her stomach, Bella dreaded that she was going down with it.

  Mostly, this morbid fear of illness came at night, riding on the chill air she had grown to hate so much. She tried to steel herself into recognizing that all her feelings of dread, and the upset stomachs that went with them, were nothing but the expression of extreme discomfort—not the first signs of enteric fever, nor the early symptoms of an hysteric madness. But as she lay on her pallet the image of the tower kept coming back to her, so much so that she began to wonder if what she was imagining was not a tower at all, but a vastly magnified shell. She tried to understand her feelings, though with little success. One thing she knew, however. There was this wanting that persisted: a terrible emptiness of soul and heart, as she described it to herself. That sounded too grand. She didn’t have the words. Yet it was how she felt.

  So what did she want, exactly? She didn’t know, though she had asked herself that question every one of those cold nights. Tom? Tom as her husband? Any husband? To be sure, the tunk-tunk of the banjo and the drone of the accordion from the men’s tunnels sang that tune, or the possibility of it, each night. As indeed, in more raucous fashion, did the shouts accompanying a favourite card game, the roars of “Top of the house! Top of the house!” But she ha
dn’t spoken to a man since the business with Torres, and the most she saw of the male sex was the flicker of a match as one of them lit his pipe or, from time to time, a great-coated sentry lumbering past, rigid with cold and drenched with wet.

  Her frets and fancies seemed to come from so deep within that they frightened her, and some nights she thought she might be losing her mind. And then, one night, she realized. The tower was a prison, not a haven or somewhere from which to view her prospects of future happiness. Yes, the tower and the wanting were one and the same. It was just like the inside and outside of the siege. Accepting this, she said to herself: no more. Even as she said it, she was not convinced of the efficacy of this self-instruction—but it did give her a certain amount of satisfaction to be back in authority over her thoughts and feelings…

  Nobody in true authority was taking much notice of the troglodytes. One afternoon, General White did come by with his staff, and leaned into the Bella’s tunnel.

  “It’s a fine tunnel, ladies,” he said, taking off his hat. “But you won’t need it long—there are three brigades coming.”

  And then continued down the line of catacombs, like an Egyptologist inspecting a row of mummies.

  Buller won’t bring my home back, Bella thought, as she watched the old man limp along the bank. Nor will his three brigades. All her stuff, all the bits and pieces in her room: she must go back and retrieve them. But Father had said she should remain in the tunnels. She felt naked without her things; the barriers between her and the world were gone. All she had was a suitcase full of clothes covered in masonry dust. A woman in the tunnel next door was wearing some of them; everything was exchangeable for food now, and this woman had offered a tomato for a pair of woollen stockings of Bella’s. She had not wanted to give them up, but the idea of a fresh vegetable had been too attractive to resist. There were almost none left in the town now, the Royal’s and other vegetable gardens having been either shelled or simply stripped of everything edible.

  Food, food: it was that which consumed them most, after the ‘mere fact’ of shelling. Even bad food: the sour, acidic bread, the grey potatoes and stringy trek ox. Eating this stuff seemed to make the bad dreams worse. She tried to steel herself at night now. As she well knew already, you could get lost like that in the tunnels: one or two of the women had become properly hysterical, and had to be taken away to Intombi. She had toyed with the idea of pretending, so she could get through to see Jane. But the council would have to sign the pass. Father would know, and he would see that her application was refused.

  She had not seen much of him. Every now and then he would come down, bringing some little offering of food—dried peas, an onion—in a paper bag, but otherwise it seemed he was busy with his work. He had been made a member of the Alien Persons Committee, which was vetting those civilians the army thought might be passing information to the Boers. It seemed that this had become a serious problem, for the Boer gunners had managed to pick out two of the main ammunition magazines. As these had been hidden, the deduction was made that information on their whereabouts had been transmitted from within the town. Said the widow: “The spies would have done better to tell them the location of the food stores.” Food, again. Bella thought of the kitchen in the hotel: the big range, the implements hanging from their hooks. All that stuff was useless now, when all that was available for cooking was a few sticks, a tiny flame and a pot of boiling water. It was as if they had gone back in time to a prehistoric era; it was as if they were real cave-dwellers now.

  For Neanderthals, they got along well enough. Sometimes, in the outer gallery, the gloomy atmosphere lightened unaccountably, and they had a bit of a sing-song. One woman had a grey parrot, which at least provided much entertainment for the children: it had to be covered up during shelling, however, as otherwise it would get nervous and start to hop about and squawk.

  There were incidents, of course. Another woman was hit by a shell as she was washing clothes, and bled to death before a doctor could be fetched. One day, a piece of the bank broke, and a section of the tunnels was flooded: everybody helped to bail it out, passing pots and buckets from hand to hand. Soldiers came to dam up the broken bank. Tom was among them, but though he waved, he appeared too busy to talk to her. That hurt her feelings. Had he abandoned her now? Left her to the underworld of the tunnels? Perhaps he really was just too busy. Bella thought about all this for some while, and in the end persuaded herself that she could accept his lack of attention.

  There were excuses: this was a siege, he was a soldier. In any case, her—she struggled for a word—encounter with him, and her already mixed feelings for him, seemed now to belong to another age: the time of the hotel. Now they were in the time of the tunnels, and everything was changed and distorted and full of upset. The only thing to look forward to was the dance that had been scheduled for Christmas Day. Bella had put aside a white blouse especially for it, and spent the long days in the catacombs dreaming of being whirled round by a khaki youth. The only thing was, he didn’t have Tom’s face. She was not sure whose face he had.

  Thirty-One

  Office of Commissioner of Police,

  Pretoria, 20th December 1899

  Honourable Sir,

  Herewith I send you 3 portraits of the prisoner of war, Winston Spencer Churchill, correspondent of the ‘Morning Post’ of London, who ran away from the State Model School here presumably between the hours of 10 o’clock on the evening of 12th and 4 o’clock on the morning of the 13th inst. Further described as follows:—

  Englishman, 25 years of age, about 5 feet 8 inches in height, medium build, stooping gait, fair complexion, reddish brown hair, almost invisible slight moustache, speaks through his nose, cannot give full expression of the letter V, and does not speak a word of Dutch. Wore a suit of brown clothes, but not uniform—an ordinary suit of clothes.

  It is necessary to mention that the accompanying photograph is a copy of one taken most probably about 18 months ago. Be good enough to show the public (as far as possible) this photograph, and request your police and the burghers to keep a sharp look out for the fugitive, and if he is identified to place him under arrest at once. Should anything important come to light with regard to the said prisoner I request that you will inform me of the same without delay.

  I have the honour to be,

  Your obedient servant,

  The Honourable Resident Justice of the Peace

  SCHWEIZER-RENECKE.

  Thirty-Two

  Bella was applying what little powder and rouge she had left, or had been able to borrow, when the shell landed—so close that pellets of earth stung her face. It was a horrible thing to happen to a young woman on Christmas Day, especially one who had been happily anticipating going to a dance. After the explosion she fell grovelling to the ground and for several hours afterwards could only murmur, “Not hurt, not hurt.” Mrs Frinton took her in her arms and comforted her before putting her to bed.

  So passed Bella’s Christmas morning. When her father came down to see her, he produced a letter from his jacket pocket and gave it to her.

  “Happy Christmas, my love.”

  It was from Jane.

  Intombi Camp,

  December 23, 1899.

  My dearest Bella and Papa,

  You will be pleased to hear that I am now fully recovered from my hysterics. I suppose I ought to tell you my story. When I was got into the train, they put me on a mattress and I was fed milk and biscuits—the only milk I have had since I saw you, as that commodity has long since run out. The journey was short, but even in my distress I was surprised when we just stopped and had to jump down in the middle of the veld, there being no platform of course, only a barbed-wire fence, inside which were pitched a vast field of tents and marquees.

  I was put in a corner of one of these marquees, along with many other patients, some so badly wounded that I am ashamed I took my place there. A soldier who had lost his arm gave me a cup of stout, as I was still crying and shouting.
You know that I normally detest it, but in a few moments I fell asleep. In the morning, I got talking to him, and he touched his tunic pocket and said, “Incase I kick the bucket, there are letters in here for my parents. I want you to have them.” The next day, he was dead, from loss of blood. This is a horrible place for making friends and losing them. Crosses are being put up in a field next door for all those who die.

  There are some good and kindly nurses here. Nurses Wall and Rounsel have been especially sweet to me, and since my recovery I have been helping them in their work—which activity has helped me while waiting for all this to end and get back to you. Mostly I make arrowroot tea and distribute food—and talk to the patients, though there is a rule here that only the most ill must be petted or spoiled. The groans and cries of those with bad wounds, echoing out over the camp during the night, are too dismal to describe.

  So do not let the fact that my spirits are higher than when I was with you last, persuade you that this is a pleasant place. In the day the heat in the tents is intense, and there are many scorpions, tarantulas and centipedesto contend with. Lately I have been helping in the fever tent, which is filling more rapidly than the wounds tent where I first slept. Now that I am ‘helper’ rather than ‘patient’ I sleep in a small tent: as I write, if I look up at the white roof of it, I see that the outside is dotted with thousands of black flies. They are drawn by the diarrhoea of the enteric sufferers, which gets everywhere, thereby infecting others, including many of the nurses and helpers. It often seems a hopeless business. The place smells terribly, and there are almost no medicines. Hardly a day passes but someone dies.