by Giles Foden
“I will try to help. I will do whatever I can.”
He smiled again. “You are a good woman, too good to concern yourself with this. Go back to the tunnels. Keep your head down against the shells. I will be all right here. My scores I will settle myself, when this is over.” With that, he squeezed her hand, turned about and walked back to the steps of the church, where a number of men and women had seated themselves. How many others, thought Bella, are waiting, inside and outside the town, for the walls and fences, the wire and earthworks, to come down?
She decided that she must confront Father again, and instead of heading straight back to the Klip, made her way to the hotel. The sight of it, of the torn-up floors and lumps of scattered masonry, was still distressing, even though she knew to expect it this time. She stepped carefully through the mess and climbed the staircase—the banister had quite gone, which made the climb a sobering experience. At one point the stairs creaked terribly and she thought the whole structure was going to come down. But it held, and when she reached the Star Room, she found the door open.
Her father was sitting at his desk with his back to her, and she stood for a second in the doorway and looked at him there under his toy universe: the thick neck and red hair, the broad, uncompromising shoulders.
“I’ve come to talk to you,” she said.
He spoke in a low voice, without turning round.
“I am surprised you dare show your face here.”
She walked up to him, her heart beating fast, and touched him on the arm. He almost jumped up, seeming to shake a little. Then he spun round in his chair, and she saw that his face had lost its usual florid tones and become unnaturally white. It was the face of someone under great strain. Gripping the edges of the chair, he spoke very slowly.
“Bella, I am sorry that we fell out in such a disagreeable manner. That is not important. What is, and I want you to listen to me very carefully, is that you keep away from here, and from me, until the siege is ended. There are too many things at stake here for a young girl to be around.”
Not knowing what to say, she looked into his eyes, and saw that there were tears in them. In the distance, she heard the sound of a shell.
“Do you understand?”
Her gaze fell, unable to meet his any longer, and she noticed that his revolver was lying amid the clutter on his desk: a long-barrelled, heavy-looking thing that was usually kept locked in a drawer. Seeing her look, he stood up suddenly, his voice louder and more peremptory.
“You must go. Now.”
“I want to talk to you,” Bella said. “About Mr Torres.”
“Never mind that,” he said, taking her arm and propelling her towards the door. “I want you to go back to the tunnels and keep away from here. You must do what I say.”
“What about Torres?” she said, stubbornly.
He looked at the floor.
“Why won’t you talk to me?” she pleaded, facing him in the doorway. But he said nothing, just folded his arms and stood there.
“Father,” she said. “I’m sorry for what I said.”
He reached out and touched her face. “Go now. I don’t want you to come back here, or look for me, until the siege is finished. Promise me.”
“I promise,” she said, bewildered, and then he began to close the door, almost pushing her out on to the landing.
She descended the unsteady staircase in a daze, unable to make sense of the encounter. The breath piled up in her chest. She wished Jane were there, to talk to about it, and then felt a surge of guilt about her sister. If only she could get to Intombi…But mainly it was the vision of her father that possessed her, the vision of him standing there in front of her: silent, fortified, impregnable.
Emerging, blinking, into the daylight, she almost tripped over a dead horse lying in the street. It must have been hit by the shell she had heard. Strange how it had sounded further away. She walked back to the tunnels with a mind full of unresolved desires.
When she reached the Klip, she saw that the diggers had been busy again, sinking a shaft to make a new section of tunnel. Everywhere there were men smeared with clay and sweat. She made her way past them, nodded at Mrs Frin-ton, and went straight through to her own cave.
Inside, exhausted, she lit a candle and began to take off her clothes. If she went to bed early, maybe all the confusion in her head would go away. Once in her nightgown, she sat on the edge of the pallet. The hammering-in of new support posts by the men outside was thumping through the whole network. She shivered. She felt the power of these fortifications arranged in and beyond Ladysmith as something vital and dangerous, pressing both upon her and from within her. As she sat there in the trembling candlelight, she tried to understand the notion. It was as if there were earthworks inside her very soul, stopping the impetuous flow of her natural feelings.
She looked at her feet. The mud of Ladysmith was between her toes. This—this earth—was what all the trouble was about, the shelling and the firing and the bayoneting, and yet she knew she would have given it all up for two pins if she could only be the person she wanted to be—a person whose character she could hardly place. General White had said that Ladysmith was co-existent with Britain, ‘one and the same’, and yet she felt utterly apart from all that; surely somewhere, out there, was a place that was co-existent with her.
Perhaps, when sleep came, it was these thoughts, combined with the accumulated anxieties of three months of close beleaguerment, that cast the dream upon her. In the morning, the vividness of it was positively shocking. The bristling, perfect defences of the town had appeared to her as the red face and hair of her father. The face was that of a colossus, and she was riding over his hair on a horse, as if over grass. In spite of its vividness, the effort of collecting up all the broken pieces of the dream was draining. How to understand it all? There lingered in particular a secondary image of the horse as it galloped away from the town; she was still riding it, and yet she was also watching herself come towards her, the horse getting closer and closer. It had Torres’s face.
Whatever this fantastical vision meant, she knew then that she had to try to help the barber, in spite of what Father had said. She got up and splashed some water on her face from a tin bucket. The water had not been boiled, but Mrs Frinton had dripped a few drops of carbolic into it as a germicide. She supposed that the typhoid germs would not be able to sink through the pores in her skin—but in any case the disease was now so prevalent that one almost took a careless attitude to it. Wiping her face, she caught a glimpse of it reflected in the bucket: her eye sockets had become deeply sunken, her cheeks concave. She went through to the main gallery, feeling ugly—and hungry.
As she sipped a mug of Chevril, her warm breath made shapes in the cold morning air. They were having the musky, brown-bottled stuff for breakfast, lunch and supper now, as not keeping sweet for long it had to be drunk immediately. She looked out over the hills—vast and rolling, with thin tendrils of mist draped over the low summits. Her eye was caught first by some flaming red lilies on the opposite bank of the Klip, and then by the sight of the war balloon ascending over the range of hills.
She had hardly finished her Chevril when the firing started. There was a flash and a rasping, steel-throated bang. The Hindu sentinel on Wagon Hill cried out: “L-o-o-o-n-g T-o-o-o-o-m!” She didn’t bother to move. Somewhere back in the town, the shell exploded, and then there was a noise of shrapnel falling on tin roofs. She thought of poor Foster, and then of Jane.
Then another gun began. She could see its muzzle projecting from behind a large bank of earth. That was the one they called Lazy Susan, because it took longer than the others to load. There were so many guns around them now that people were running out of nicknames. They had all grown used to spotting the positions of the different guns from their reports. Lazy Susan was smaller than Long Tom: she made a pip-pip sound and her shells left little snowballs of white smoke suspended above the rocks and bushes. Bella watched them mix in with the remainder
of the morning mist, and then the great orb of the observation balloon drifted into her field of vision again. It seemed to be altogether romantic and otherworldly—nothing to do with sieges and wars—and, in its slow, floating way, to offer passage to another time. She watched it move across the turbid sky.
PART III
Amours de Voyage
Thirty-Six
Nevinson watched men of the Royal Engineers wind the balloon down to the copse behind which its winch had now been anchored. The previous tethering point, outside the hotel, had been deemed too dangerous after the riddling of that establishment. Now this scrub-entangled hole behind the Dopper Church—in the pre-siege era, the kind of place where a runaway prisoner might have hidden—was the most envied place in town.
As he watched the men hauling down the balloon, which pulled back at them like something alive, two of the Boers’ big guns began to concentrate a crossfire upon the town. Nevinson heard a dog yelp and, rounding a corner, saw the corpse of a brown-and-white pointer lying on the ground, with a small shrapnel wound in its skull the size of a jigsaw piece. It almost brought tears to his eyes: there was something human concentrated in this animal tragedy, as if the whole uselessness of the enterprise were summed up in a dead dog. He hurried homewards, as all around him the roofs of houses cowered under the bombardment and men and horses ran about madly. The shops of the main street had become ghostly shacks, and the Town Hall a model ruin.
He reached the supposed safe haven of the cottage to see one of their few remaining fowls killed by shrapnel—fluttered up in the air, leaving nothing but a cloud of feathers. He went inside and sat down at the kitchen table to catch his breath. He was sick of the siege, the way it raised hopes and then threw them back. He was sick of what had, since Christmas, passed for food: in front of him on the table were two brown-smeared plates, upon which he and MacDonald had eaten a stew of horseflesh, now the main source of fresh meat in the town. He himself had watched the slaughtering, seen poor Tom Barnes lift the knife to his colt’s throat and, with tears in his eyes, cut the thick cord of the artery. The beast had collapsed, and its blood pumped out on to the soil of the parade ground; by the time the Green Horse had finished the place was a shambles of rib-cages and entrails and discarded hoofs and heads. As the flies began to gather, the poor men had collected up these pieces—these pieces of animals they had lately ridden—and taken them for cooking at the railway station.
Human casualties had also been mounting. The farmer, Mr Grimble, had ploughed his last furrow, Mr and Mrs Star had been killed, and many others had also fallen victim to shellfire and disease. Five of the Devons had been hit by a shell while eating their breakfast, the body of one being split open, his head burnt and smashed to mummy. Others had lost legs, fingers or eyes to shrapnel. Nearly a thousand people had enteric, and the stench of infected human waste was everywhere. Sickness stalked the streets, the gutters after heavy storms becoming fever beds, stewing under the fierce sun.
Some, like MacDonald, were quick to blame the non-white races. “Drainage in its true, wholesome sense is unknown here,” he had observed. “The reason why ninety per cent of the town is down with sickness is because what methods of sanitation there are, are entirely worthy of the people by whom they are carried out—coolies and kaffirs. It’s no cause for wonder.”
“Don’t be a greater ass than you need to be,” was Nevinson’s response. “One type of ordure is much the same as another.”
The condition of their colleague, Steevens, had worsened considerably, after a brief period in which he had seemed to be out of danger. Raving had now become his normal behaviour, so far had his constitution broken down. The effort of caring for him becoming overwhelming, they had sought out a nurse to take charge of him at night. To give him fresh air, he had also been moved to a tent, in a scooped-out hollow by the river. Around this Nevinson and MacDonald built a sandbag fort, with the help of Maud, the admirable artist of the Graphic.
A strange thing had happened on the night Nevinson engaged the nurse. He was walking with Maud along the main road, under a crescent moon, when he caught sight of something black moving swiftly across the dirt before them. About three feet long, it inched forward in quick little darts.
“It’s a snake!” cried Maud—but Nevinson had already leapt forward to crack it across the back with his stick. It kept moving, stopping only when Nevinson crushed its head with his boot, Maud stamping on its tail for good measure.
They then continued on their journey. Nevinson returned on his own later that night, the nurse having been duly instructed. Passing the spot where the snake-killing had taken place, on a whim he picked up its remains on the end of his stick and brought them back to the cottage, throwing the corpse under a tree with the intention of inspecting it in the morning.
As it happened, that morning brought a huge bombardment, one of the heaviest the town had yet received. Coming out into the garden of the cottage to watch it—as he had recklessly taken to doing—Nevinson was nearly hit by a fragment of shell. The lump of iron passed by his head and winged into the eucalyptus tree under which he had tossed the body of the snake. Dazed from his narrow escape, he went over to look. He found that the piece of shell casing had struck the snake’s body, cutting it in two.
As he later recorded it: “To my astonishment, I noticed that the snake’s inside was pure white. I looked closer. It was white cotton wool. The skin was a silken umbrella case. The body was carefully wound round with black thread, and a long piece of cotton projected from the mouth—the place where the deadly fangs ought to have been.”
Maud’s china-blue eyes widened in amazement when Nevinson told him about it, and the affair of ‘the magic snake’, as it came to be known, provided much material for discussion in later days and weeks.
So did the grievous condition of Steevens, who continually asked for them to fetch his wife. Whenever the nurse came into the tent, he would think it was her. At other times he believed himself in a ship journeying homewards, and would cry out “Five bells! Five bells!” in a most distressing manner.
Nevinson suspected this last fantasy was due to Steevens’s memory of his final trip outside the cottage before his confinement, during which he had visited one of the naval gun emplacements. He had read Steevens’s notes on the subject, and could divine in them clear signs of delirium, for his colleague had written of being on deck among white-clad ladies in long chairs, of swishing through cool-blue water with the hot iron hills of Natal swimming away in the background. It was poetic, but pitiful. Amours de voyage? Hardly.
They had been feeding Steevens with Chevril. The bottled horse extract issued by the Commissariat was sustaining but frightful stuff. Far stronger than the Bovril in imitation of which it was named, it went off quickly, often smelling high when the brown bottle was opened. The brew was made by stewing the bones and flesh of the horses, the strength being raised by successive bouts of boiling and evaporation. It was said to be the intestines and other internal organs of the animals that gave Chevril its flavour, and since many of the animals had simply withered away, dropping in the street and lying there unable to get up again, it did seem likely that there could not be much taste in the muscles that had once been their pride, and were now simply meat.
Many of the Indians and Africans were dropping in the street as well, being on still skimpier rations than the Europeans, in spite of the sterling service they were now doing in trench-digging, domestic work and scouting. The young lad Wellington was now employing himself sneaking supplies through the Boer lines into Intombi Camp, and had been commended for it by Major Mott. No one had really been counting the casualties among these races, but Nevinson suspected that they suffered more than their fair share, given the paucity of shelter that was left to them. The Hindus especially were brave in the face of shellfire, looking on Destiny with fateful resignation. Rashid, former carrier to Gunner Foster, had since the latter’s death become famous in the town for falling reverently to his knees and
uttering prayers at the approach of a shell from Long Tom.
At evening, with his stick under his arm, Nevinson took his customary constitutional. His route happened to take him up by the railway station. Unused for its true purposes since the beginning of the siege, the engine shed was now the soup manufactory where the corpses of the recently slaughtered horses were boiled up to make the Chevril and other new products which necessity had generated: jellies, lozenges and a rather ghoulish ‘sandwich spread’ made of pounded bone. Every day, huge red sides of horseflesh were run through the town in trolleys up to this place.
The vapours resulting from the boiling—which went on every night now—could be smelt a good five hundred yards away. Yet despite feeling queasy, Nevinson couldn’t resist having a look. He pushed open the large wooden door of the shed and went in. It was a veritable hell’s kitchen, filled with smoke and greasy steam. The men from the Commissariat had lit wood fires in the long trenches where the engineers had hitherto worked beneath the engines, and left them to burn overnight under seventeen large steel tanks. These cauldrons—in fact, iron trucks with the wheels removed—had been plastered round with clay to keep in the heat. Inside them (as Nevinson peered in) could be seen bluish joints of horsemeat, tumbling about in the simmering water. There was something hypnotic about this sight, and he stood there for a good five minutes watching pieces of flesh detach themselves from bones and flick up in the grey foam: every now and then a recognizable fragment could be seen—a piece of rib-cage, or a skull’s empty eye socket.
On seeing this, Nevinson had to avert his own eyes, though he was not so sickened that he failed to take advantage of there being no one about to scrape up a bit of fibrous matter from the bottom of an empty tank with his stick. At the same time as making him feel nauseous, the smells had made him realize how hungry he was; or more specifically, how he craved protein. He chewed this meaty residue as he walked back to the cottage, reflecting that it was rather like bits of mashed-up rope, and probably didn’t actually contain much nourishment. Still, it filled the belly, and he slept well that night.