1999 - Ladysmith

by Giles Foden

  Great confusion. Lieutenant Churchill, the one who made that famous escape, was up here with a message from Warren. Reinforcements were finally coming, he said, and guns. At last. But Thorneycroft says they are to go down, what’s left of them. So that’s what they did, Perry and his comrades, dragging wounded men under the very moon by whose light, the night before, they had climbed the blasted hill. On the way down, they met the party sent to rescue them. God, what a mess.

  It was past two in the morning. All night long, the Biographer had listened to the guns; watched Gandhi and his Indians come and go under flare and torchlight; watched the barrels smoking and spurting orange flame as the gunners continued to rain death on the Boer positions beyond Spion Kop; watched the men smoking as they lay on the stretchers, pulling furiously on pipes to ease their pain. It was as if, he thought, the shells were going off inside them. Terrible slaughter. He tried to sleep, but it brought no respite: the distorted faces of those smokers haunted him like ghosts, and in his dreams the ambulance wagons became wagonloads of human hams.

  Sterkx woke with a start, realizing that he had fallen asleep on the chest of a dead man. Where was he? At the foot of Spion Kop. He looked up at the grim, mist-shrouded slope, expecting to see a phalanx of British troops in front of him. The sky paled, and a figure emerged from the mist, his hat dripping with dew. It was a broad-brimmed hat, a Boer one.

  “It is ours,” the man said, in the Taal. “Look.”

  He pointed up at the summit, where rays of sun were beginning to penetrate the mist shroud. There at the top were two more figures, waving their rifles. They had broad-brimmed hats as well.

  “My commando,” said the man, grinning. His beard, Sterkx noticed, was stiff with dried blood. “We have won, meneer.”

  Once more, Sterkx climbed the hill. Breasting the ridge, he saw the remains of the British trench in the clearing mist. Between them lay an expanse of grass, dotted here and there with Boer corpses. He checked each one to see if any were living. No. Of course not. Then he walked further over towards the silent British trench, still slightly nervous. Peering over the parapet, he suddenly came face to face with a British trooper; the man was squatting in the trench, his feet gathered on the body of another, with his rifle grasped between his thighs and hands. It looked as if he had coiled himself up in a ball, like a porcupine. Sterkx looked around: everywhere there were bodies, parts of bodies, and parts of parts: feet, heads, arms, all torn asunder…Here was humanity blown to atoms.

  Later that morning, the Biographer tried to take his cart closer to the site of battle, was dissuaded by an officer, and so waited by the banks of the river. Another armistice had been agreed to gather the dead. Once again, he saw Gandhi toiling down the narrow track from the summit, rallying his volunteers. He learned that the Indian had had the honour of carrying General Woodgate’s stretcher. Others were now being carried on the backs of the Indians. There was a want of stretchers, and those wounded who had not been tended to staggered alone, or leant on the arm of a comrade. All by the sides of the track lay those whose strength had failed: ripped by shell and bullet, they bled to death. Slowly, as flies clustered in black heaps on blood-stained uniforms, the picture became clearer, and it was ghastly. Over thirteen hundred men lost. The ridge abandoned, and no ground gained. A pointless sacrifice.

  Fourty-One

  57109 Trooper Barnes, P.,

  Military Camp N° 3,

  Spion Kop,

  Natal.

  January 27th, 1900

  Dear Lizzie,

  The first month of the new century sees me in the clear-up stage of a bloody slaughter, which cannot bode well for the next hundred years. I have seen such sights. Dead and wounded men lying all in heaps in a long trench or on open grass, killed or maimed. They look like bits and pieces of clothing, thrown down when you are going to bed. But they are people, and are covered with black stains of blood. The man with the camera has been photographing their faces, which are dreadful, since the eyes and mouths tend to have fallen open and all the muscles frozen.

  It should never have happened, and I can only say I don’t want another lot like it. They are saying it is the heaviest cannon fire ever. No reprisals could be too severe for the monsters of iniquity who did this to our men, and I mean our own Generals as well as the Boers.

  On the battlefield afterwards, Boers were picking bits of kit off our dead men. They are as keen for curios as we are, but to my mind it is a disrespectful thing for either side to do after such a fight.

  I am going to write another letter to Deacon a chap who was invalided home after this do. I shall tell him to call and see you as he lives in Cubbington. Lucky dog. I never want to see a battlefield again as long as I live.

  It is hard for me to think about how things are with you at this time, but rest assured that I desperately want to be back with you. I think much on the business of life on the farm, missing my forge in particular; my own furnace and tools, not the shoddy portable stuff they give me here. I didn’t hear what sort of man Father got in response to the advertisement I saw in the Mail. I hope he is good with the beasts.

  Thank-you for the pipe and the ¼lb of Tobacco. I have also been sent a woollen Tam-o’-Shanter by a lady from Manchester, as a charitable donation, so that will serve as a smoking cap. The Tobacco here is awfully strong stuff. The white clay pipes the Africans use are not bad but not like the one you sent me, which is a little gem. I have degenerated into quite a big smoker, I am afraid. But so would you have done if you had seen what I have seen.

  Hoping you are all in the best of health and temper, I will now close with love to all.

  I am as ever

  Yours etc,

  Perry

  PS You might send me some tea tabloids and saccharine, which we carry in our wallets and are handy when we go on these flying expeditions with nothing but what we carry on our horses. Be certain that when we ‘fly’ into Ladysmith I will give some to Tom.

  Fourty-Two

  Keeping flies off was the worst of it. But under Doctor Sterkx’s attentions, over the course of two months, the entry wound in his thigh had slowly begun to close up. He saw it whenever the doctor changed the bandages: a ragged hole, with the purple skin around it puckered and stained with cordite. The exit wound was still causing him a great deal of trouble: messier and more ragged, it continued to be painful. Both wounds were difficult to keep clean, and the doctor had warned him that if it began to show signs of infection he might lose the leg. Sometimes the Zulu wondered if he would ever get out of the camp. He had talked no more of his escape, but as the days crawled by, he began to get up and limp around the camp, trying to strengthen his withered muscles. With or without Sterkx’s help, he was determined to go.

  Then, unexpectedly—after a particularly fierce bombardment of Ladysmith by the Boer guns—Sterkx came into the hut one evening, carrying a bundle wrapped in grey cloth. He sat down next to Muhle.

  “I have got the things you asked for. A knife too. I still think you have little chance of getting into the town, but I cannot stand the thought of my Frannie being hit by one of our own shells.”

  Muhle looked at the anxious white face of the doctor, then reached out and grasped his hand.

  “I will do everything I can to help her. Have you put a letter in?”

  Sterkx shook his head. “It is too dangerous. Joubert would have me shot if he knew I was letting you go into the town with your knowledge of our camp. I would come under suspicion of being a spy. No, I want you to find her, if you get inside, and tell her that I am all right. And also that when it is over she is to try to get to her mother’s house in Lichtenburg. I will leave instructions for her there.”

  Muhle sat up. “What about you? Why don’t you come with me?”

  Sterkx shook his head again. “I must stay here and do my duty. I still believe in the cause of this war: if we don’t drive the British out, we will never have freedom in our land.”

  Muhle bit his lip. “You are
good doctor,” he said, in even tones. “And a brave man. Well you deserve the Zulu name of Nkombose, surrounder of hills. When this is over, you will come to my kraal at Inanda, on the Mngeni river, and the women shall do a dance in honour of that name.”

  Before Muhle had finished speaking, Sterkx stood up. “Good luck, kaffir. If you are caught, I will deny all knowledge of this.”

  Brooding, Bella kept the siege, looking out over the yellow Klip with hooded eyes. The guns were briefly silent. Only the rats could be heard, and the sighs of the wind as it rippled over the water. The winder of a hand-line sat in her lap, the line’s free end attached to a hook baited with a worm. Besides eels, what they mostly caught was a kind of barbel, a frightful thing that sat in the mud at the bottom. It tasted powerfully stale, and she doubted whether the flesh was not poisonous. From where she sat, she could see the lumps of horse dung slowly breaking up in the slow-moving, stagnant water. A week or so ago, the Boers had tried to dam the river upstream, in the hope of diverting its flow into the middle of the town, to flood people out: the plan had not worked, but the attempt at damming did seem to have made all the waste come to the surface.

  Every now and then, a rat would pop up its head by the bank, and chatter its teeth. She wished it was those horrible creatures which were damaged by the shells, not the birds and flowers. Only the other day, she had seen a mockingbird knocked out of the air by a fragment of shell. It was still alive when she got to it, one leg smashed and its wings fluttering hopelessly. She had picked it up and broken its neck. Mrs Frinton, she knew, was in the habit of bringing such casualties to the cooking pot, but unable to do so herself, she had buried the poor little thing. There was, in any case, something a bit ghostly about the whole episode, in so far as the mockingbirds had taken to imitating the whine and buzz of shells, and of the whistles that the wardens blew to warn of them.

  As she looked out over the lilies and swamp grass on the riverbank—as she had looked out over them for so many weeks now—the whole view, with its wind-swayed palette of reds and greens, became soft and hazy in a way that could not simply be accounted for by the breeze. It was as if, without hard concentration, particular objects and colours would slip away from her. Sometimes she seemed to feel herself sliding into the scene, becoming a part of it…just another shape among all the others ranged along the river. Other times, she was distinct, alive and alert inside herself. All the while, she hoped for something to emerge from the picture in front of her. But she did not know what it was: the departure she had wished for, the longed-for scenes—they had all been shipwrecked in a living sea of waking dreams.

  It was no wonder she was so shaken and confused. The relentless pounding of iron and explosive, hurled four miles through the air, reduced all to a terrible sameness. For while the sights and smells and sounds of the town had become shocking and extraordinary—the horses with their skeleton ribs and drooping eyes, the soldiers with bare, bleeding feet, the oxen bellowing as they tried to tear themselves from the yokes out of pure hunger—the constant noise and brightness of explosion dulled the power of the senses to register these things. Some days, she felt she might never see or hear straight again.

  And yet another part of her felt that she had never really done so anyway. Only when she had spoken back at her father had she felt clear of all the things that were jammed up inside her. That was why she had to do it, that was why she had to do what she had been planning and pondering all these long weeks. When she was ready, and had amassed a store of food, a pair of pliers and other requisites, she would go and talk to Nandi and Wellington about it.

  On February 5, Nevinson fell sick. He took to his bed in the cottage, mindful of the parallel with Steevens, but telling himself this was just one of his usual spells of ill health. But on the 9th MacDonald called for the Hindu coolies to carry him away to one of the hospitals, in a high fever.

  Knowledge of his innocence, and frustration at his imprisonment, bred a kind of despair in the barber. The dreary tempo of life in the Dopper Church weighed down on Torres’s spirits. He sank very low, and began wishing that he had never left Lourenço Marques. At least, there, he had had his freedom. Each week it became harder not to rage at the doltish English guards, or run full-pelt at the wire and try to climb it, regardless of the consequences. During the day, he would pace round the dusty ground inside the fence. At night—sour, depressed and hungry—he would lie on one of the mats the army had provided and try to ignore the crying children. There was no division of prisoners by gender nor (and this annoyed the Boers greatly) by race, and they all dressed, washed and ate together. The children’s wails, echoing under the roof of the big church, had an eerie, unearthly quality that was very disturbing in the blackness. They were mostly Boers, and some had lost their mothers in the confusion of the early days of the war.

  The orphaned children were being looked after by a blonde, plumpish Dutchwoman. One of the most curious sights of the prison yard was the pet goose which she took around with her on a lead, thereby providing much amusement for the children. She was a brisk, businesslike person who paid little attention to anyone or anything except the children and the goose.

  At six o’clock one evening, however, while making his final tour of the yard, Torres found her crouched in a corner, sitting in a little alcove between an outhouse and the main building.

  She was weeping, holding the goose between her knees. He got down next to her. “What is the matter?” he said, reaching out to touch the stained white linen of her sleeve.

  She looked up at him with tear-stained eyes, and said something in Dutch.

  “I don’t understand,” said Torres. “Do you speak English?”

  She smiled thinly, and shook her head. Then, pointing at her chest, she said the word “Vrouw”.

  Wife, he knew that.

  Then she pointed at the hills where the Boer guns were massed, and said another word which Torres could not catch. At that moment there came a distant puff of smoke and, as if by command of her speech, the guns began to thunder. The Boer woman curled herself into a ball next to Torres. As the shells screamed over, making the air throb, the two of them found themselves holding each other in the dank little corner of masonry, with the goose squirming between them. Torres found his lips were softly pressed against the Boer woman’s hair, and his arms grasping her trembling body. The yellow beak of the goose flapped from side to side, hissing with anxiety. All around was noise and explosion. Sparks flew off the roof of the church. Torres couldn’t believe that the Boers would take such risks in landing shells so close to the church; surely they knew that some of their own people were inside. A red flash blazed; there was a cracking sound; the British were firing back.

  All told, the encounter must have lasted half an hour or so. Once the Boer shelling had slackened slightly, they released each other. Torres stood up, sweating heavily. He nodded at the woman, and she got to her feet. They walked back round to the front of the church, where the sentry at the gate regarded them closely. Torres realized it was one of the soldiers who had brought him in when he was first detained, the one who had talked with Miss Kiernan outside the Town Hall. Their eyes held each others’ for a second, and then the soldier waved his rifle in the direction of the doors. It was getting dark; it was time to go in.

  Fourty-Three

  It was time to get out; it was getting dark—and the British shells were falling. Tying the bundle to his belt, Muhle poked his head out of the hut. All around were the tents and abandoned campfires of the Boers, the whole lot encircled by the laager of wagons; several of these had been tipped over by shells, and the canvas covering of one was burning. That was where to head for, the smoke would mask him…though there was not enough, not yet. He waited for another shell to fall, watching the shadowy figures of Boers running about between the tents, heading for the rock-walled schanses in front of the laager. They were swearing and shouting; then, as he watched, the force of another explosion swept across the encampment. It picked u
p the white glow of a tent as if it were nothing but a handkerchief—picked it up, crumpled it, and tossed it aside.

  We moya! Hail, wind. Crouching, and moving along the ground quickly in the pall of green lyddite smoke, with every muscle tensed Muhle reached the edge of the laager, slipped underneath a wagon, and rolled down a slope. At the bottom of the incline, the bundle banging uncomfortably into his hip, he threw himself into a thicket of low underbrush. Time to gauge the situation, time to catch his breath. The green smoke had begun to fill his lungs and sting his eyes, and he was coughing loudly; but it was better to do that now, while the noise of the engagement still covered him. Behind him he could see the tips of Boer guns, and here and there the brimmed hat of a sentry ducking beneath the wall of his schanse. In front of him, lit by moonlight and the afterglow of shellfire, was another, taller hill, split up the middle by a donga, a gully filled with rocks and boulders. He ran towards it.

  Before he could gain it, he heard the snap of a Mauser bullet, plucking at the earth next to his feet. One of the sentries must have seen him. Nayaphi? Where should he go now? Think. Follow the way of the isidawana, the weasel. Cunning his only salvation. They would expect him to go up the donga. Instead, he waited for another shroud of smoke to drift across the escarpment, then veered sideways, away from the gully, heading for some more undergrowth. The physical effort of it almost broke him: his wound felt as though someone was turning a knife inside it. Worse still were his eyes, which were streaming from the effect of the lyddite fumes. He crashed into a patch of brush and, lurching and gasping and tripping over branches, made his way through to the other side. The edge of the thicketed piece of ground fell away towards a long, open area of country affording no cover whatsoever, and then rose to another crest. He knew that as soon as the bombardment had ceased, the Boer sentries would come down looking for the strange dark figure they had glimpsed in the moonlit smoke.