1999 - Ladysmith

by Giles Foden

  We are now using native troops, which raises the enemy to a pitch of anger. Whenever they capture any, they kill them outright. General Smuts’s troops did this at a village outside Modderfontein lately. When we came there, the bodies of the blacks were still unburied, lying there rotting in the sun. They were all put in one grave, yours truly wielding one of the shovels.

  For myself, all I know is that I am quite done in now. Once I heard of Perry’s death, the fighting spirit went out of me. I no longer look after myself either, eating my food with one hand and delousing myself with the other, taking dozens of the vermin out of my shirt simply by running my finger down a seam.

  This is, it seems to me, the worse-run campaign ever. We have to replace our horses every two or three weeks now. Many of the mares are in foal, and the other day one foaled while we were actually on the move. The poor thing was half out before someone shouted, “Look out, she’s foaling down,” and the column halted.

  When I came out here, I was full of Queen and Country. I am no longer. Partly it is the conditions and the time it is taking to wrap things up, but also it is Kitchener. He is very unjust and arrogant, and untouchable to ordinary soldiers—of an altogether different kidney to White or Buller.

  As for the rest, the business with Bella Kiernan, flying off like that with the Portuguee, I was outraged and shamed by it, especially when her gulling of me came to light. Her sister gave me some calming comfort at Intombi, that is true, but I doubt I shall go back to Ladysmith when I am discharged, even though I have promised her that I will try. I must confess a certain amount of self-distrust about my motives towards Jane in this respect.

  In truth, maybe it would be better if I just went home. This is a cruel land that has been too much overrun by war. At one farm, there was a woman who was about to give birth in a few days. She was weeping her eyes out, since her man had been killed. We were marching on and there was nothing much we could do. I did help arrange a cart to get her to a rail junction, so as she could be taken to a camp, but whether she or the baby survived I do not know.

  December, 1901

  Mrs Sterkx

  Epidemic has struck in this place I am being held in, adding to the burden of starvation. My goose, I am sad to say, has long been eaten. I have no idea where my husband is, and can only pray that he is still alive. When the train brought us in, like animals in open trucks, many of the children were already lying on the floor, sick with fever. At least fifty of those in my train are now dead. A girl from a place outside Lichtenburg gave birth on the train, but the baby was lifeless when it came out. She too has gone now.

  On arrival the soldiers pushed us into dirty bell tents: often fifteen or more of us in a space meant for eight. The stink is beyond belief. No soap, not enough water, and hardly any beds or mattresses at all. I myself sleep on bare earth. We do our toilet in steel pails and throw the doings into pits behind the tents, where great clouds of flies swarm over them.

  We are given only a little food, nor much fuel to cook with. More and more people are being sent in. Thousands at a time. If it wasn’t for the numbers dying—nearly a hundred each day now—there would be no room for them, and as it is we get packed closer and closer. It is said there are nearly two hundred thousand people in camps such as this now. Many of those interned are kaffirs, and it does us great dishonour to live cheek by jowl with them. They too are dying by the score.

  Sometimes we have to wash our clothes in water thick with human foulness. Most of us have no clothes apart from those we stand in. All our linen is filled with lice. I know one woman who has taken to wearing male kaffir clothes, giving up her last bit of money to a black who is in authority here. It is typical of the English that they should use the kaffirs in this way.

  Apart from the soldiers guarding the wire, the only English person I have seen here is a woman who has come to write a report on the conditions, which she says she will send to their parliament. She says they are pursuing a policy of extermination against us. I can believe it, which is more than can be said for the British newspapers. Someone who can read English says their Times has reported that ‘the enemy’s wives are being fed and looked after’. It is a lie.

  March, 1902

  Nevinson

  The landing of troops here, mainly Anzacs in this area, was surely a dangerous and almost unachievable task from the start. Now we are withdrawing, and the Gallipoli expedition comes to an end after more than eight months. Far longer than the siege of Ladysmith, of which it greatly reminds me for some reason, though it dwarfs that episode in its human cost. Here the sound of the big guns blazing, and the sight of Tommies squeezed together in trenches as the shells fall upon them, makes the South African war seem like fire-crackers at a party.

  The sand is crimson with Australian and New Zealand blood. And that of Indians and other races from the farthest corners of the Empire. Mule-carts ply to and fro picking up the corpses amid the barbed-wire entanglements on the beach. The Indians manage the mules like well-trained dogs, with the Turks taking pot-shots at them all the while.

  Many are hit. I do not think I have ever seen so many bodies in one place. I will not discuss policy, but people are furious at Mr Churchill for setting this fiasco in motion, some saying he ought to be publicly hanged. One of the Australian press corps, Keith Murdoch, is planning to blow the whistle on the whole shambles. He says he knows MacDonald. Another ghost of Ladysmith days: Lieu-tenant-General Hamilton has been here too, and Major Mott, my old censor, now Inspector-General of Communications.

  It is strange how that place comes back to haunt me. Or perhaps it is not. It may be that every moment in the history of humankind is a crucible like that. In any case, one could not account for even the tiniest fraction of the sparks that fly out—unless every single thing that moved our ancestors, that spurred their appetites and emotions, came down to us as a message with the colour of our hair and the shapes of our noses. But still it would not be enough, as the role of chance and of the incalculable dooms us to a continuous functioning. The mightiest moments pass uncalendered. No tables could compute them. Like the white-hot particles that we now know to whirl round sun and stars, like the myriad points of this bloodstained sand in front of me, the sum of events outstrips our understanding.

  December, 1915

  Bobby Greenacre

  I would prefer to be fighting than convalescing. I have just been down to Estcourt to sign up, and would by now be on my way to Europe, if I hadn’t done something stupid on the way. I went for a swim in the famous ‘Map of Africa’ pool at Dalton Bridge, it being very hot. Just my luck to get bitten by a puff adder as I was dressing. If I hadn’t already got my trousers half on, the damn thing’s fangs would have gone a lot deeper into me. Half an inch long, and yellow, they were.

  It pleases Mother though, who wants to save me from the trenches to be a lawyer. They are thinking of moving to Australia. God knows why. As I lie here in my bed, one thing about the adder episode has cheered me up: remembering how those two correspondents fell for that magic snake trick I used to play when I was a boy. I could hardly contain myself as I sat, hidden behind my wall, pulling on the cotton thread and they danced up and down on it. And when I heard one of them saying he’d picked it up and taken it home on his stick, still without realizing, well that was the end.

  January, 1916

  Nevinson

  Back on the dope again. On my sickbed, where I have so often found myself since returning from Gallipoli, I have been reading Yeats’s autobiographical Reveries, which he gave to me. I think I prefer his previous title for it, Memory Harbour. But that’s as may be; he is a greater man than I. It will be a relief to get off my back and resume the literary life, not least my visits to his chambers at Woburn Place. Last time I was there, he was entertainingly full of his psychical researches, harking on Leo Africanus, his sixteenth-century attendant spirit, who converses with him in Italian; and also on Freud and Jung and the Sub-Conscious Self.

  He did apply h
is own self to present matters too, however. He is worried about the fate of Maud Gonne, his erstwhile love. I believe she is in Northern France, nursing wounded soldiers. My own admiration for that beautiful woman has worn off somewhat. Well, whatever the danger, she is better off there than with that drunken bounder MacBride, who brought nothing but evil back with him from South Africa. I always knew that marriage would end in disaster: as was the case with that family in Ladysmith (Leo Kiernan was also a Nationalist, I have learned), it shows that domestic and political virtue don’t necessarily go hand in hand.

  In spite of my support for the Irish cause, I can shed no tears for MacBride; indeed, my harsher part thinks it is a good thing that they executed him in Dublin—not for the charge, his supposed role in the Easter Rising, but for the unnatural molestations he visited upon his daughter by Maud.

  As for Kiernan and his poor girls, I heard a story about the one who escaped in the balloon with the barber. What was her name? Bella? Yes, Bella the barmaid…My informant told me that when the balloon came down, they disposed of the empty linen and basket by giving it to the nearest black tribe, who between them carved it up and distributed it in roughly the same manner in which they deal with the corpses of elephants—and that even now, in the region, pieces of the fabric are highly prized, having an almost cult-like status. I don’t know whether this is true or not.

  November, 1916

  The Biographer

  (voice-over)

  British Movie-tone News

  It Speaks for Itself!

  Only recently released from prison, Mr Gandhi arrives to attend negotiations with the Viceroy of India at his new palace, designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens. The scantily-clad Mahatma said afterwards that he is aware he must have given the Viceroy cause for irritation, and also have tried his patience, but that right is on his side. Mr Gandhi, shown here with his famous spinning wheel, said that the agreement reached with the Viceroy represented a truce, and that his goal remained complete independence for India.

  February, 1931

  Churchill

  “It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceregal palace, while he is still organizing and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor.”

  Speech to the West Essex Conservatives, February, 1931

  Jane

  Two months ago I buried Tom. Last month I sold the farm. Now I am in an hotel by the port, at Lourenço Marques. It hurt me to see all our ploughs and other implements up for auction, but I knew I had to do it. Every day, I have had to steel myself, and only the thought that a long-overdue meeting is shortly to take place has kept me going.

  There is a pretty piece of Portuguese embroidery in a frame on the wall of this room, showing a flower with red petals. I have closed my eyes now, but the image is still there in front of them. It is strange how that happens.

  Tom died peacefully, in his sleep, although he had been ill for some time. I have not cried so much since hearing of Bella’s disappearance and then finding Father on the floor of the Star Room as the siege ended at Ladysmith, all those years ago. He was lying on his back in a puddle of blood, with the revolver in his hand. The hole, which was in his throat, was only small. I couldn’t believe that there could be so much blood from it. Father had left a note, saying that he was sorry and that he had ‘betrayed his family for his country’, and that he loved us both very much.

  At first I did not know what this talk of betrayal meant, but in later years heard from Boers how he had been working with Major MacBride’s Irishmen on their side. That MacBride was a bad man, he fathered a bastard child in the Cape later, and got up to God knows what when he returned to Ireland. It shocks me that Father was associated with him, though both are still seen as heroes by the Boers round Ladysmith.

  Tom was with me when we discovered the body. It was then that he promised to come back once the war was over. We had grown close at Intombi; it was almost by mistake, but I suppose we were both healing each other’s wounds over Bella. When, at the end of the war in May 1902, he never came, I had given up hope of him. Those were my worst months, running the hotel on my own, with only Nandi and Wellington to help me. Father was dead and I had no idea at all where Bella was. Then, one day in early 1903, Tom just turned up.

  At first it was difficult, as I did not trust him. But as the months went by, we rekindled the feelings we had discovered at Intombi and eventually were married. It was natural. We sold the hotel later, and bought a farm in Bechuanaland. We have had thirty years of happy life together. My only regret is that we were never able to have children.

  By the time Tom and I were together, I had long given Bella and her Portuguese man up for dead. When the news got out about the balloon, the army had sent out patrols looking for it. There were rumours that it had been shot down by the Boers and that Bella and Torres had been killed in the descent. But not a trace of it was found. After the war, I put advertisements in the papers seeking information, but received no replies, except crank ones.

  It was some years later that Nandi told me, during a visit back to Ladysmith, where she had a little stall. She was ill then, her limbs swollen and her voice faint from shortness of breath. I almost fainted myself when she revealed the truth: how, shortly after we had left for Bechuanaland, Bella and Torres had turned up at the hotel. The new owners had sent them to Nandi. When Nandi told her what had happened between me and Tom, she said that Bella was very distraught. That Bella told her not to tell me that she had come; that it was better that way, lest she destroy my happiness. I railed at the old woman then, and would have struck her had she not been so ill. But later I knew that, in her terms, she had done right. As she pointed out, she was keeping a promise.

  Nandi died of heart failure not long after. Keeping it all secret from Tom, I set myself the task of tracking Bella down. I wrote to Portuguese East Africa, where they had gone, and after long correspondence with the British Embassy and others learned that they had left there for Portugal itself. Lisbon. I discovered that Torres had made a deal of money from a bauxite claim he bought with an inheritance, and they had decided to go to the mother country—or his mother country, rather—to live in luxury. So then I started writing to the embassy there too, and newspapers and any other places I could think of.

  At long last, in the final months of Tom’s illness, I received a letter from Bella—and a photograph. It shows her with Torres, standing next to a fancy white motor car. Bella is wearing a cocktail dress, with a feather boa, Torres a linen suit and spotted tie. He has his foot up on the running board and looks very tanned and handsome, although his hair and beard have gone white.

  Bella said in the letter that she is ‘sorry that she has been so selfish, that her adventures have taken precedence over family duty’. It was eerily like father’s note, so long ago. Lord, how it all comes back: the sight of him there on the floor, his complexion drained to a terrible paleness, and his hair soaked with blood. I wonder whether I will ever be able to forgive Bella for leaving me to face that on my own; but we shall have to see. And will, as my present journey takes me to Portugal to meet with her.

  As for her so-called adventures, she says she will tell me all when I see her. The long and short of it is that when the balloon came down, they sank the empty linen and basket in a lake, weighting them with stones. Then walked for miles across the bush, going through great difficulties until, like Mr Churchill before them, they hit the Delagoa Bay railway and boarded a train covertly.

  Tomorrow, when my ship leaves, I will sail out in the shiny blue water of that bay myself. The barman downstairs says you can see porpoise swimming by the side of the ship; only the way he said it, with a strong Portuguese accent, it sounded like ‘purpose’, and at first I didn’t know what he meant. It is only just now that I have realized. I am looking forward to
it.

  May, 1933

  Macdonald

  Today I ran into—of all people—Bobby Greenacre, who in his prime has become a top-notch barrister (Robert Greenacre KC!) at the Australian Bar. I was giving evidence in a patent action brought against another paper. Greenacre was our adversary’s lawyer. The action had reference to the printing of ‘stop press’, or late news, in newspapers. My own company, as the plaintiffs, were owners of a special ‘fudge box’, a technical device by which late news can be inserted while the rest of the paper is being printed. We were alleging that the other lot had infringed our patent with a so-called new invention. Greenacre spoke well, but the judge, Mr Justice Kelly, upheld our case, on the grounds that their device had been anticipated by prior patents.

  The case relates to the form of newspaper printing machine known as the endless-web letterpress. These machines were the outcome of the discovery of how to make up and print quickly with small cylindrical stereotypes. They are especially important to evening newspapers, which have to publish rapidly the latest news arriving: the speed in the insertion of late news is the essence of our patent. The point is, our gadget gave us the chance to revise or review our record of events in the very act of putting them on record.