by James Whyle
XIX
Idyll at Post Retief – Unhygienic conditions – The Captain considers his reader – Night sortie with refreshment – War and literacy – Luminosity in a being endarkened – Voyeurs at a shadow-play – The tree – Hayes.
THE IRREGULARS CAME again to Post Retief on a bright clear afternoon. The mountains stood painted in shades of green and their shadows were a dark purple and the two hues met in a faint radiance that outlined the contours of the landscape. The little citadel looked as bright and cheerful on that December day as it had appeared desolate when the irregulars came to bury the Lieutenant Colonel in November.
The column’s arrival caused a great commotion among the garrison who had been cut off without communication for some time and were not expecting relief. The irregulars found much of the accommodation occupied by big Dutch women and ragged children and the Captain ordered that they be ejected along with their pigs and poultry and lumber. The barracks square had been used as a cattle enclosure for some months and the dung lay three feet thick in places. The irregulars’ first days were spent in shovelling and wagons rolled out with loads of manure for deposit outside the walls. The private mounds outside each room were likewise removed and the chambers were painted and became soldiers’ quarters once more and when the kid slept beneath a roof for the first time he felt as if he was suffocating.
The Captain watched the work and he spoke with Lieutenant Bruce of the Highlanders and with the resident officers and he noted in his book that the fort was formerly a farmhouse belonging to the governor and commander-in-chief of the Dutch border colonists, Piet Retief.
Retief was murdered, wrote the Captain, by the warlike monarch of the Zulu while actually partaking of his hospitality.
The Captain put his pen down and rose and stretched and yawned. When his muscles were loosened he looked down at his book. How much of this heathen history did a reader want? How much did he want himself? The world was complex and it changed constantly and inevitably action had to be taken before full understanding was reached. If such a thing as full understanding was even possible. Perhaps it was better not to ponder and scribble but just do the work fast and thorough as Colonel Ire advised.
That evening the officers sat around a log fire and drank brandy from the Captain’s remaining supplies. They heard distant shooting and rose and went outside just as two of the Dutch scouts arrived from a nearby farm. The officers conferred with the scouts and then Herrid shouted an order and the irregulars assembled with their arms.
The doors of the fort were heaved open and the irregulars followed the scouts into the night. They marched in silence and pitch darkness and grave doubt for two miles and then flashes of musket fire ahead confirmed that their course was correct. They proceeded and glimpsed the light of the farmhouse and then the moon came out and they were fired upon from rocks next to the huts of some Fingo herders.
The irregulars took cover in the grasses and fired a volley. The Captain shouted charge and he ran and the irregulars leapt after him with dirks in hand and roared curses into the night. They arrived at the rocks breathless and wild-eyed and they stared about. The place was deserted. They squatted down and did not move and maintained silence for some time but they heard nothing. They reloaded their weapons and the Captain conferred with the scouts and the party moved forward towards the farmhouse.
A sentry called out in Dutch and one of the scouts replied. The irregulars halted and a prolonged and suspicious negotiation ensued. They moved on and went past the side of the house and the kid saw that the windows were all bricked up and that it was pierced only by narrow loopholes.
The Dutch scout spoke with a voice within and then he and the Captain were admitted. They passed through some outworks of timber and mud and stepped into a low dank room lit by a couple of flickering oil lamps. There were sacks of meal and corn on the mud floor and barrels and furniture piled along the walls. There were women squatting half-dressed around a fire and strapping girls and younger children who peeped out from coverings on the beds allotted to each family. A group of men stood about a lamp. They wore round jackets and broad-brimmed hats and large horn powder flasks hung at their sides. Each man held a massive flintlock and they were all talking at once.
The Dutch scout spoke with the Dutchmen and the Captain inferred that the heathen had attempted to carry off the sheep and cattle but the force of the resistance and the unexpected reinforcements had driven them off. The leader of the Dutchmen turned to the Captain.
Kleine sopie, he said.
The Captain stared and the Dutchman gestured as though drinking.
Sopie.
Ah, said the Captain. Thank you.
A form of grappa or aquavit was brought out in a corked bottle and a second bottle was taken to the men outside and given to Herrid.
Herrid uncorked the bottle and sniffed at it.
What is it, said Evans.
Don’t know, said Herrid.
He lifted the bottle and drank a little and then he closed his eyes and shook his head and passed the bottle on.
No, he said.
Evans took the bottle.
This is more like it.
He lifted it and drank freely and the joiner reached out and took it. Evans swallowed and closed his eyes and contorted his face. He wiped at his mouth.
What they make that of, said the kid.
Evans’ eyes were still closed and the single word he uttered came out in a strange groan.
Hooves.
The men drank, each one curious and outraged in his turn, and when the bottle was empty the Captain thanked the Dutchman and then they formed up and moved on.
Over the days following the force at Post Retief made regular patrols about the country and often they encountered a pair of great secretary birds which paced out the grasslands like thoughtful land surveyors. They visited the remaining occupied farmhouses in the region and found them in a state of barricade and alarm. Loaded guns stood capped in the corners of rooms and the Hottentot and Fingo labourers worked with firelocks by their sides.
One day they came upon a ruined schoolhouse which stood alone at the foot of a great mountain. The shattered doors creaked in the wind and swallows swooped from nests in the corners. Spelling books and catechisms lay about and their pages turned in the breeze. The books were stamped with the paw marks of wolf and jackal as though the children had departed via this eerie border post into some wilder world where the written word is no longer useful.
At each farm that the irregulars patrolled they found orchards of peach and nectarine and apricot and fig and plum and pomegranate. The branches of the trees hung down on the ground from the weight of the fruit and many a man cursed his overindulgence as he squatted over the latrine or crouched alone and exposed upon the plain.
But the men became accustomed to the fruit and vegetables which they bought from the farmers or took from deserted farms and after some weeks they began to shine with health beneath their grime. It was a place of grassy plains and verdant mountains and they came to know it as they walked and worked and each night they ate like starving men and then they slumbered without interruption for up to nine hours.
The Captain found occupation and amusement in surveying and making maps of the country and parties were set to work improving the defences. They removed detached rocks and filled small quarries and built a flanking bastion which enfiladed two unprotected faces of the fort.
There were storms in the afternoons but it did not rain. Sometimes in the sultry evenings electrical flames shimmered about the points of the bayonets of the sentries on the walls and once the Captain pulled off a woollen vest and found himself enveloped in a crackling light. On this same night the kid could not sleep and he went and found the yellow dog and lay with it on the wall. They watched how the sheet lightning lit the sky and flickered over the grey peaks. A mystery glimpsed in flashes and dissolving into darkness. The dog pricked its ears and it sniffed the air and whined and lightning struck somew
here over behind the cattle enclosure and revealed the shapes of three heathens creeping towards it.
The kid ran down the wall and woke the Captain. The Captain grasped his Adams and went out and shouted for Herrid. The irregulars rose from their bedding and charged their rifles and took up positions on the wall facing the cattle enclosure. There were two men to each loophole and they were naked apart from their shirts and might have been a convocation of voyeurs revealed sporadically as they peered out at some obscenity beyond.
The kid waited behind the joiner and when the lightning came the joiner fired and stood back and the kid took his place. The sky was lit again and he fired and he saw heathen figures cast up in attitudes of horror and despair. A ghastly shadow-play stencilled upon the night and disappearing before it could be assessed or reckoned with. The thunder groaned and grumbled in the mountains and when the next flash came the plain was bare.
The Captain rode out with a company of horsemen but they could find nothing. A jagged streak of light came from the sky and a great report and the bark of a lone tree leapt out from the trunk and left it naked and pale as the image of it faded.
The horsemen galloped back through the gates and the irregulars retired to their beds and the next morning there was much dried blood on the ground near the cattle enclosure. There were no heathen bodies but four oxen had been wounded and had died in the night and the light-struck tree stood like a flayed and ragged sentinel.
In the more distant valleys there were fields of ripe corn which waved uncut but closer to the fort settlers and Dutch farmers assisted each other in the harvest and the Captain asked for volunteers to aid them. Evans and the kid eyed each other uncertainly. They had learnt that it is not wise to volunteer when engaged with the military but when the joiner stepped forward they followed him.
They laboured in the fields of a small grey-haired man called Hayes. Hayes told the irregulars that he had come out to the country as a man of means and had farmed with considerable energy. He had experienced a series of reversals which had culminated in the destruction of his property at the commencement of the war. Hayes lived in a bedraggled domed hut of grass and sapling which stood against what remained of the walls of his house. He took the Captain by the arm and led him into the hut. He opened a wooden chest and took out a scarlet jacket.
Used to wear this, he said.
The Captain looked at the coat.
Riding to the hounds, said Hayes.
The Captain took the lapel between his finger and thumb and moved them against the grain.
A good cloth, said Hayes.
He was bent and grey and old. The Captain stood staring down at the fine red cloth and then he looked about at the ragged grass walls of the hut.
How do you live through times like this?
As best you can.
The Captain looked at Hayes and Hayes smiled and nodded and the Captain stepped outside.
When the irregulars next passed that place nothing remained of the little hut but a kind of hearth where something had been charred and eaten and Hayes’ body lay in the reeds along a rivulet.
That night the Captain sat and wrote in his book.
To an Aborigines Protection Society, Mr Hayes’ history would suggest itself as a special retributive providence on the unjust aggressor. It is but one colonist’s history among many similar, and not less sad because it is unknown.
The Captain wrote on for some time and the words spooled out steadily on the white paper in the candlelight and when he stepped outside at midnight the air was cool and the stars swung close above in a great vivid arc across the sky and some bright thing burned and fell among them.
XX
An African – Watching others work – Captured women – Surrounded – Rautenbach – A plague as staple.
ON THEIR PATROLS THEY came upon a Dutch farmer who sat on his veranda and smoked a green stone pipe. He rose from his chair as the irregulars approached and he stood and waited. The Captain dismounted and raised his hand.
Goede dag, Mynheer.
Goede dag, Baas, said the Dutchman.
He stood back and gestured and the Captain walked across the veranda and into a large dim room with a stone floor. Narrow shafts of light came in from the loopholes in the wall and the Captain saw a woman who sat unmoving in a chair. The Dutchman took out a bottle and poured measures into two battered cups and he gave one to the Captain and the men drank.
The Dutchman wiped his hand across his mouth and then he began a slow and earnest enumeration of his troubles with the heathen and of his accumulated losses and of his grievances against the various powers which had arbitrarily claimed sovereignty over land upon which he had been long since resident.
The Captain nodded and he looked up. The Dutchman had a chest like a barrel and he towered above by perhaps a foot and a half.
The Dutch, said the Captain, zijn onze grootste … allies. Our greatest friends.
And he lifted his hand high to pat the Dutchman just below the shoulder.
The Dutchman looked down with eyes narrowed and he started speaking again and he did not stop for a long time. The Captain was merely beginning to pick up a few words of the language but the Dutchman made it explicit to him that there was no such thing as the Dutch, although there were such things as Nederlanders. He said that he himself was neither but that he had met a Nederlander once and the language he spoke was virtually unintelligible to the Nederlander. It had in fact occasioned some mirth in that man. He said that his family had been on the continent for perhaps two hundred years and that was what he was, an Afrikander, an African.
Afrikander, said the Captain.
Ja, said The Dutchman. Afrikander.
The next day the irregulars returned to the place to assist with the harvest of the grape vines. The men worked up the rows and picked the big sweet bunches and Fingo women carried them in great baskets and tipped the purple and green grapes together into a vat where naked Fingo men trod and chanted in a circle. The Fingos laboured and chanted in the heat and the sweat ran down from their heads and mingled with the juices of the grapes and the Dutchman stood with his pipe in the shade of a tree and watched.
A patrol came in with two Hottentot women and a small boy with a dripping nose and thick crusts of mucus on his upper lip. Providence the Fingo stepped forward to help the Captain with the interrogation. The women said they new nothing of Jinqi or Branders or their intentions and then Providence began to cuff the older of the two. The woman cried out and knelt and grasped his knees.
Sla mij niet, she said.
Providence hit her again and she wailed.
Sla mij niet. Zij gaan aanvallen.
Aanvallen?
Ja. Zij gaan aanvallen.
The Hottentots were questioned further and the time of the proposed attack was ascertained and the Hottentots were held so that the quality of their intelligence could be assessed.
On the night of the expected assault the kid stood guard with Evans and one of the Dutch scouts at an outer picquet. They were a hundred yards from the walls and had little cover apart from the grasses. The plain was quiet and the men did not speak and they hunkered down and did not move unless they had to.
A little past midnight they heard strange yips and shrieks and hoots and wailing sounds that continued for a time and then ceased. The men stared at each other in alarm. The kid spoke in a whisper.
What was that?
There was silence for perhaps three minutes and then the dark plain became alive with animal sound as though whole menageries were in discussion preparatory to boarding an ark. And then there was silence once more. The scout rose carefully and looked about and squatted down again.
You see anything?
The scout shook his head.
What is it? Animals?
None of them knew. There was a strange rising hoot and it was answered by another from the opposite side of the fort.
Owl?
Wolf, said Evans.
The so
und came again.
Niet uil, said the scout.
Not owl?
The scout shook his head.
En het is geen wolven.
What is it?
Heidenen.
Heidenen?
Heathen, said the scout.
The kid gripped his rifle and lifted his head carefully above the grasses. The plain was a dim sea of grass and nothing moved on it. The sounds came once more before they were relieved and upon relief they recounted their experiences and were much laughed at. But on the day following there were naked footprints in the soft ground on three sides of the fort and the marks also of the simple plains shoes which the Dutchmen made from antelope or bullock skin and which the Hottentots sometimes wear.
At midday on the 9th of January shots were heard from the farm of a Dutchman called Rautenbach who lived some four miles from the fort. The alarm was taken up by the Fingos on the lookout hills and the wall pieces at the fort were fired as a signal to the surrounding farmers.
Within twenty minutes the Captain rode out with a mounted party. They passed a fortified Dutch farmhouse where some forty men were ramming great four-ounce balls down the bores of their weapons while their women saddled the horses. They rode on and the Dutchmen caught up with them via a short cut and they came to Rautenbach’s farm. There they learnt that mounted defectors and heathen had concealed themselves overnight in a dry riverbed. They had emerged in the daylight to wound Rautenbach’s nephew and drive off Rautenbach’s herds.
The party rode on and came to a bend in the valley which revealed the landscape beyond. There was a mountain to their right and half a mile further up the valley mounted heathen were driving the missing cattle. The Dutchmen called out and lay close on their mounts and beat them about the rear with their hats and their manes and tails flew as they galloped. Balls sang past and the heathen before them urged the cattle on towards the entrance of a narrow gorge.
They passed the foot of the mountain and ten men veered off towards a herd of sheep deserted there and the rest rode on. The Captain rode and a horse fell before him and then another and the riders tumbled in the dust. The Captain steered past the treacherous holes and approached the gorge and came down into a depression. He plunged through a belt of bush and halted at the banks of a small stream. Men were dismounting and leading their horses across and they were under fire. The Captain followed and downstream of him a horse staggered and fell and its rider cursed in the water.