1999 - Ladysmith

by Giles Foden

  His rescuer dropped down beside him.

  “Wait,” said the boy, and pointed over towards the sentry hut.

  In the moonlight, Torres saw the slim figure of Bella Kiernan approaching the soldier where he sat on the stool outside the hut. The soldier sprung up immediately on seeing her and, as Torres watched, the two of them were soon locked in an embrace.

  “Now,” the boy said, and began to run across the yard towards the eastern fence. Mystified, and not at all sure of the good sense of embarking upon this adventure, Torres followed. There was no point in hesitating now. On reaching the fence, the boy knelt down and crawled through a neat square hole, evidently cut by pliers. Again Torres followed. Suddenly they were outside. He wanted to stop, wanted to catch his breath, but the boy was running on, with light, quick steps. As they passed from an area of ruined, deserted buildings to scrubland covered with bush and trees, the details of the plan which had, for reasons deep in the heart of Bella Kiernan, been hatched on his behalf, suddenly became apparent to the barber.

  “You must get inside,” said the African. “Miss Bella, she said wait for her.”

  Wellington pushed aside the branches of the trees, into the clear space they fringed. Torres came behind, nearly tripping over one of the straining mooring ropes. The brazier which heated the air had been lit earlier in the night, and the great linen-clad shape was now full and warm. Torres stood motionless for a second, and then climbed into the basket.

  He understood now, this was what it had all been leading up to, this was where fate had been pointing.

  His guide handed him a knife. “For the ropes. I must go now, nkosi. If the soldiers find me here, they will kill me.”

  “Me also, I should think,” said Torres. “How can I thank you for this?”

  The Zulu boy stood there in his ragged clothes, the whites of his eyes picked out by the glow of the brazier.

  “You do not need to thank me. I was paid.”

  “All the same,” said Torres, “you have been very brave.”

  Wellington said nothing, just turned his head, and then was gone, into the shadows.

  Alone, Torres waited. He warmed his hands over the coals, and looked out into the foliage, hoping to spot the white of a petticoat or bonnet. Above him, the quilted membrane fluttered and flapped. The only other noise was the hiss of the brazier and, now and then, the faint sound of a falling coal knocking against the iron, near by and visible, but so faint that it sounded like something heard over a long distance. He looked into the fire and, as his thoughts drifted, seemed to see into the depths of life. How had this happened to him? He shook his head, as if to shake off an illusion.

  When Bella came, panting from having run, Torres was like a man in a trance, and it was almost as if he did not know what he was doing as he cut the ropes. The balloon, shrugging itself free of the copse like someone trying to evade grasping hands, lifted from the earth into the night air above Ladysmith.

  By imperceptible gradations, the moon-flushed grey linen sphere rose into the sky. Tom, himself flushed from Bella’s kisses, bemused by her inexplicable change of heart and her sudden departure, saw it in the sky, and thought it odd that the observers should take it out so late at night. Gleaming, an exclamation mark of reflected light, the balloon slid above the town, passing over the journalists’ cottage, over the battered roof of the Royal Hotel, where Bella’s father slept the uneasy sleep of the guilty, over Mr Grimble’s untended fields, where starved, released horses roamed loose, over Mrs Frinton, as her gentle snores drew in the damp air of the tunnels, over the oxbow of the Klip, over the V where the railway branched, over the thorn-tree dotted scrub of a hill—in the lee of which lay Muhle Maseku, curled up in his burrow, under its lid of leaves and branches.

  Fourty-Eight

  At Intombi, one evening towards the end of February, Jane Kiernan found Tom Barnes shading his eyes against the setting sun and looking in the direction of the hills above town. She asked him what he was looking at.

  “Men,” he said.

  “Boers?” she queried.

  “I think,” he said, quietly, “that they might be our own.”

  Although exhausted from the heavy work there at the hospital camp, Jane found herself flinging her arms round the battered soldier, who winced when she did so. She said she was sorry, and then shouted out. Others came to look, straining their eyes at the specks on the red horizon. But soon it grew too dark. Everyone was so excited they could hardly speak, still less sleep…

  That night, by candlelight, Jane applied more Condy’s fluid to the lacerations on Tom’s back. He had arrived at Intombi in a bad way, having been ordered flogged by Lieutenant Norris for allowing Torres to escape. They talked about Bella again. Neither could believe what had happened.

  Among the others who had gathered at the hospital camp to watch the silhouettes of the distant soldiers that evening was Wellington Maseku. He was quite well known there now, but his arrival there this last time, on the same day as Tom, had caused quite a stir. With a tramp-like, leaf-covered, leg-dragging figure leaning upon him, he had burst into the wounds tent demanding attention for his companion. It was his father, whose burrow he had finally discovered, having stumbled across the isivivane.

  Under normal circumstances, the doctors and nurses would not have countenanced treating a stray African, but they were grateful for the supply runs Wellington had made in the past, and considered that the least they could do was clean and dress Muhle’s wound. Full of dirt and badly infected, it had deteriorated considerably, on account of the long, dangerous walk from his hiding place to the camp. One doctor said he thought the leg was turning gangrenous, and might have to be amputated.

  So as Wellington watched the figures on the horizon with the others, his mind was elsewhere. The relief of Ladysmith did not seem, to the young Zulu boy, the most important thing at all. He decided that in the early morning he would make his way back to the town to bear the bittersweet news to his mother. Once again, he would brave the Boer lines—the lines in which Dr Sterkx, trying to keep his mind occupied with his work, thought constantly about his wife, and whether the kaffir had got through. It was the last time Wellington Maseku would pass through those lines, and it was the worst of all his journeys, as the battle round Ladysmith began in earnest that day.

  In the town itself, about a week later, Nevinson—recovered from his illness, and just about free from the lure of morphine—noted through his glass a great disturbance in the Boer camps. Lines of men and wagons had started moving towards the railway junction, and the roads that led to the Free State. A derrick or tripod of wooden posts, like a huge letter ‘A’, had been erected above the remaining Long Tom, to lift it from its pit. It gave the correspondent great pleasure to see the whole machinery brought down by a shot from one of the naval guns. Later in the day, he rode up to one of the outposts with MacDonald to get a better view of the long silver snake of Boer wagons disappearing into the green background of the hills. The silvery aspect came, he realized, from the sun reflecting off the white covers on the Boer wagons.

  “What do you make of it?” asked MacDonald, who was standing next to him.

  “It’s a trek,” said Nevinson. “A great trek.”

  On either side of the line of wagons were black- and brown-coated horsemen moving forward in dense groups, sweeping across the landscape in ever extending curves.

  “They are pulling back their columns,” observed Nevinson.

  “That’s not a column in retreat,” said MacDonald. “That’s an army.”

  “It’s a shame our cavalry and galloper guns cannot pursue them.”

  “Not a chance,” said MacDonald. “We’ve eaten our horses into immobility. Anyway, our kit is too heavy. He must fly light who goes in pursuit of the flying Boer.”

  As they watched, they heard a loud boom, and saw a great cloud of debris appear on the plain.

  “Blowing up the bridges behind them,” said Nevinson.

  On their
return, the correspondents sat down to what would prove to be their last dinner of horseflesh. They were just about to tuck in when a shout came from outside.

  “Buller’s cavalry are in sight! They are coming across the flats!”

  Going into the centre of town, the two correspondents found a great crowd of people running through the streets, shouting and cheering—a confused throng of military and civilians, white and black and all the races, mixed together in an ecstasy of joy. All were headed for a drift in the Klip, the place where any incoming column would have to cross, and together they presented a skeletal, hollow-cheeked, spindle-shanked collection.

  Tumbled along in this bony crowd, MacDonald and Nevinson could hardly see when they got to the river. Then, craning their necks above the battered, mud-stained helmets of soldiers, the bonnets and straw hats of white womenfolk, above the red fezzes of the Malays and the turbans of the Sikhs and the heads of the leaping, chanting Zulus, they caught a glimpse of a column of khaki-uniformed horsemen splashing through the water.

  Two squadrons of Light Horse and mixed irregulars. Nevinson knew they must be from outside, as their mounts were far too plump and sleek to be Ladysmith horses. The crowd opened to let them trot past, and then followed as they swung into the main street, the vanguard of an exultant avenue of humanity, each crying or laughing as the moment took them, letting go their emotions as if siege walls had tumbled in their very breasts. There was no sense, any more, of the mark of the superior race or caste.

  The procession came to a climax when General White came out on horseback to meet the rescuers. Straightening up in the saddle, he began to speak.

  “Citizens…”

  The old man’s voice trembled. The tumult of the crowd died down. He tried again.

  “Citizens and soldiers, this…is a great day. It is the time for you to rejoice and not, any longer, for me to give you orders…” He faltered, and then continued. “I thank you for your loyalty, and your co-operation in the defence of the town…Thank God we kept the flag flying!”

  Laughs and cheers drowned him out.

  “It cut me to the heart,” he continued, “to reduce your rations as I did.”

  Then he broke down again, and had visibly to steel himself to control his feelings. He was helped along by the encouraging shouts of the crowd—among whom, it must be said, were many who had cursed him in earlier days. Finally, a smile passed across his face.

  “I promise you, though, that I’ll never do it again.”

  There were more laughs and cheers from among the mass of straining voices and shrunken faces. Jostled by the crowd, Nevinson was separated from MacDonald. He glimpsed Bobby Greenacre running round and round in a circle, and Mrs Frinton kneeling on the ground in the middle of it, her hands held up in an attitude of prayer.

  Others saw the raising of the siege from different aspects. Looking down on Ladysmith from the back of a wagon, Dr Sterkx fretted about the fate of his wife, cursing in the same breath the stubbornness of the English and the treachery ‘of kaffirs who don’t deliver messages as they promise’.

  Up in the Star Room of the wrecked Royal Hotel, other eyes, those of Bella’s father, also watched the performance. Under simulacra of Orion and Cassiopeia, he cradled his heavy revolver in his hand, and wondered what to do.

  Below the Irishman, too close to the broken frontage of the Royal for Kiernan to see them, MacDonald encountered a Zulu woman, sitting on the wooden stoep. She was weeping. There was a young boy by her side, whom he recognized as Nevinson’s runner.

  Looking up at him, with tears streaming down her face, the woman said something in Zulu to the Australian.

  “What’s that she’s saying?” MacDonald asked the boy.

  “She said—the English can conquer everything but death; why can’t they conquer death?”

  “Why’s she saying that then?”

  “We have just heard that my father has died.”

  It was true. Wellington had made several trips between Intombi and Ladysmith as the siege was being raised, in the course of which Muhle’s leg had been operated on by surgeons of the Army Medical Corps, who had already reached the hospital camp, and were engaged in helping ease the strain among the weary doctors there. A young Indian auxiliary, Mohandas Gandhi, had been among the attendants at the operation, holding Muhle’s hand, and looking into the Zulu’s eyes as they enquired the surgeon’s preparation of his knives and saw. Once morphia had been injected, and its creeping numbness had taken effect, the operator cut the flesh swiftly, and then set to work on the bone with the saw. Within a couple of minutes, the leg was being wrapped in a blanket on the floor; within an hour, Muhle had departed into the world of the spirits. Efficient as he had been, the surgeon had cut too close to an artery in the groin, and had been unable to staunch the flow of blood.

  There were many other casualties in the last days of the siege. In the final battle to secure the town, the toll was heaviest among regiments of the Irish Brigade. The Connaught Rangers, Dublin Fusiliers and Inniskilling Fusiliers together lost nearly five hundred men in under twenty-four hours. “My brave Irish,” as Queen Victoria said on receiving the news.

  Another who died was Perry Barnes—riding along when a shell struck off his head. The horse carried on down the line with its headless rider still in the saddle. After about a hundred yards, he had fallen off, to be dragged along, like Hector at Troy, with one foot in the stirrup.

  The Biographer, who had been filming his chum as he rode, had turned his head away from the eyepiece and promptly fainted. He was hysterical for several days afterwards, and when, together with Churchill, he entered the town, it was with a broken heart, and a heavy message to deliver to Perry’s brother.

  Churchill would always maintain that he was with the first column to reach Ladysmith, but in fact he did not arrive until that night, after the initial celebrations were over. He was not the only one to present a ‘colour piece’ as one of the correspondents might have called it. On March 1, Buller came into the town in secret, and departed incognito after a meal with General White. Two days afterwards, a triumphant entry into the town was staged, with the garrison lining the route as Buller’s army marched in. Unable to stand through weakness, they sat down on the kerbs and pavements. In the vanguard of the triumphant procession was Buller, large and powerful-looking on his horse, as he rode up towards where General White and his staff waited to salute them on the steps of the shell-damaged Town Hall. Everyone expected Buller to come over and shake hands, or even embrace his counterpart; but he just rode on.

  As Nevinson would write, looking back in later years: “In various antiquated inns and lodging houses, one still may admire a picture representing Buller and White meeting with enthusiastic grip of hands, while lusty crowds applaud the patriotic triumph. Nothing of the kind happened.”

  People did celebrate, but the cheers they gave this time were thin and wavering. For by now many in the emaciated garrison were in fact giving vent to frustration that the relief column had taken so long to arrive. So much for the ‘intense enthusiasm’ recorded by Churchill—though we may be fairly sure that the sadness he recorded on learning of the death of his friend and mentor, Steevens, is genuine.

  However it was thought to have ended, the siege was over, having lasted one hundred and eighteen days. The facts, under their particular descriptions (some people said it was a hundred and nineteen), were transmitted by cable, newspaper article and letter to Britain, and her rejoicing was mighty. Journals were written up and published, even a couple of novels. The siege was indeed over.

  PART IV

  The Monologues of the Dead

  Tom

  We have been uprooting the Boers, burning their farms and driving them off their lands. We strip the houses bare and the sheep we just kill and leave there, stopping only to cut out their hearts and livers. These choice pieces are put in gunny sacks and later cooked over our camp fires.

  In this way, it is said, we hope to prosecute the
real end of the war, by preventing the guerrillas getting supplies from their wives and from the few farmers who have stayed put. It is General Kitchener’s plan, and to my mind it is a beastly business. It is like driving pheasant for a shoot. The latest thing is that the dispossessed people are being put into camps.

  We have also been building things called blockhouses, made of tin and concrete, right across the land. The Boers snipe at us as we build; they are using expanding bullets, which make a horrible mess of our fellows. But in spite of these attentions there is now a line from here to Klerks-dorp. The grim little buildings we make are connected by barbed wire, which we unroll from large wooden drums, dividing up the country across hundreds of miles in an endless web. The idea is that our columns will chase the Boers into the grids made by this arrangement, going from blockhouse line to blockhouse line.

  The Boers have recently been trying to get through by driving herds of bullocks against the fences, to crash them down. But there is always another square beyond in which we can catch them. They are all so short on stores now that they dress in the strangest costumes—some with sacks with holes in for trousers, others with women’s bonnets and skirts. All in all, it is an odd way to wage a war, in my opinion more blockhead than blockhouse. I cannot say when or how it will end.