The Book of War

by James Whyle

  As each man forded the brook he mounted and rode on into the ravine and when the last had passed, a group of heathen came down to close off their exit. The Captain galloped on through the bush and passed the cattle. He emerged from behind a boulder and came upon a defector who rose up and ran and the Captain shot him in the back of the neck with the Adams. There was gunfire all about and men cried out and killed each other and one group of heathen abandoned their flight and fought back with knives and spears and the butts of their rifles until all were dead.

  A bugle called and the party assembled. The men were bloodied and the horses were so worn out that the party moved out on foot. At the entrance to the gorge they met the ten men who had stayed behind with the sheep and fought off the party of heathen which had planned to ambush them.

  They led their horses back to Rautenbach’s farm and herded the stock as they went and found the Dutchman grieving over his nephew. The fort’s surgeon was among the company and he examined the boy. He had been shot at short range with a weapon loaded with scraps of lead and metal which included three bits of typeface from a printing machine and his left shoulder was all but destroyed.

  The sun was sinking towards the mountains as they approached the fort and the Captain heard a sound like wind but no wind blew. A shadow fell upon him and he looked up to see a strange vision that approached from the west. It seemed that snow was falling in the heat of the day. There was a cloud coming that shimmered with filaments that caught the light. And then the cloud turned dim and came down from the sky in great dark whorls.

  The Captain sat his horse and stared. He spoke to the Dutch scout next to him.

  What is that?

  Sprinkhanen.

  The Captain narrowed his eyes and they rode on and within minutes the locusts were all about them. The Captain kept his eyes half closed and let his mount walk after the horse before. The insects covered the ground and moved in waves and caught the sun with their strange radiance and they passed above like thick black smoke and they devoured all vegetable matter before them.

  After three days the highlands were bare. The locusts had eaten everything and now everything began in turn to eat them. The Dutch and Hottentot workers fried them up in fat and devoured them by the bucketful. The fowls ran after them with open beaks and the yellow dog jumped and turned in the air as he tried to pluck them from the sky. The cattle grazed placidly upon locusts and the horses chewed them suspiciously with lifted lips. Among the irregulars the joiner and Higgs and Basson ate them also and Evans called them savages.

  Lieutenant Bruce put his head into the Captain’s room one afternoon and found the Captain putting aside a plate of locusts which Johnny Fingo’s cook had prepared for him.

  Try one, said the Captain.

  Lieutenant Bruce stared at him for some time.

  What are they like?

  To be frank with you I find them indifferent eating.

  Lieutenant Bruce moved a locust on the plate with his finger.

  A Dutchman told me that there are tribes in the north that live on them during the season.

  Live on them?

  As a staple. They eat them fresh on arrival. But they also dry them in the sun and pound them between stones. They make a flour which they lay by for the winter months.

  The Captain shook his head.

  No easy task to civilise such a tribe.

  These are people that store up bags of dried ants for family use, said Lieutenant Bruce. They kipper snakes.

  XXI

  Goliath – Rautenbach’s nephew – How wars start – Sacrifices of a chieftain – The General’s problems – Starvation as a weapon – The sinking of the Birkenhead – The General recalled – A Masonic reburial.

  THERE WAS A MINOR chieftain among the Fingos at Post Retief whom the officers knew as Goliath. Goliath was perhaps fifty years old and he was very tall and he had only one eye and once a month he led a small party to Fort Cox with the post. He came one evening to the officers as they were dining in their mess. The Captain gave him the mail bag and sat again and began to pour brandy into the glasses on the table. Goliath stood and watched and when the Captain had finished pouring he looked up at the Fingo.

  What is it, Goliath?

  Plenty cold, Baas.

  Yes it is chilly tonight.

  The Captain turned to Lieutenant Bruce.

  We must tell the women to make a fire.

  Lieutenant Bruce called out and a Fingo in the kitchen went to instruct the women. The officers drank and Goliath stood and watched.

  Kleine sopie, he said. Voor de briewe.

  He put his thumb between his teeth and assumed a self-deprecatory inclination of the head. AmaXhosa in de pad, my Baas, he said.

  The Captain smiled and rose and took up a cracked mug which was kept aside for this purpose and poured three inches of brandy. Goliath drank the brandy in one draught and took a deep breath.

  Dankie Baas.

  That’s a pleasure, Goliath. Hamba khahle.

  Sala khahle, Baas, said Goliath. And he went out and he gathered ten men and together they put on the garb and aspect of heathen warriors and went out of the gates and began to make their way to Fort Cox by secret paths.

  The officers sat around the table and drank.

  The last time they went, said Lieutenant Bruce, they walked for three miles and sat down and smoked their pipes in a ravine. Came back the next morning to say they’d been fallen upon by heathens. Claimed they’d barely escaped with their lives.

  How did you know they were lying?

  I suspected it. So I put them in the guard room for the rest of the night. We followed their trail the next morning. Presented them with the evidence. They seemed greatly surprised that a white man had the ability to follow a spoor. I told them that they had shown themselves rascals but that I would offer them the privilege of proving themselves men and allow them to set off again.

  On the day following at six o’clock the Captain was woken by a great commotion from the barracks square. He went out and found Goliath’s wife in a group of women. They stood about the survivor of the post party who bled from gashes in the neck and chest. They had been waylaid, he said. Goliath was dead. All but the single messenger were dead.

  The women questioned the man and he spoke further and they repeated his words among themselves. Goliath’s wife drew breath and expelled it in a great wail. She dropped down onto her knees and collapsed forwards and pressed her forehead to the ground.

  The officers conferred among themselves and issued orders. A cow and a calf were picked out from the animals in the cattle enclosure and brought into the fort and given to the widow and when the women saw them the wailing subsided.

  We were greatly grieved at his loss, the Captain wrote that night. Goliath’s amusing and eccentric habits, his respectful manner and regular attendance at our church services made him a great favourite.

  On the day following the Captain and Lieutenant Bruce rode out to Rautenbach’s farm and they took a tin of salmon from their diminishing supplies. They found Rautenbach where he stood smoking in a storeroom with six other men. Three Fingos sat before them on the stone floor about a heap of dried corn on the cob. They beat the cobs with their knobbed sticks and the corn flew from them like shrapnel. The Captain and the Lieutenant flinched as the kernels hit them but the Dutchmen did not move or blink unless struck directly in the eye.

  Rautenbach’s nephew lay next door and sweated as his shoulder mortified. The officers went there and greeted him and gave him the salmon and they rode away and they heard the next day that the boy was dead.

  At the end of January the post came with news that the General had returned from the eastern banks of the Big Fat with thirty thousand head of cattle and fourteen thousand goats and a great number of horses. Seven thousand Fingos marched with him and the Fingos herded a further thirty thousand head of Tsaleka cattle which they had appropriated before joining forces with the invaders.

  The General made
a tour of inspection on the highlands and he dined one night at Post Retief on venison that came in his own personal supplies. A friendly chieftain came to meet the General and the chieftain’s retinue encamped outside the walls.

  The joiner and the kid were on guard at the gates when the chieftain passed through on his way to dine with the General. The chieftain wore a dark suit of British manufacture and a white shirt and the kid noted it.

  That chief, he said.

  Yes?

  He’s fighting with us.

  Yes.

  But he’s a heathen.

  Yes.

  The kid pondered.

  So who is this war between? Us and who?

  Mainly between us and the Gaika.

  Why?

  Been wars here for eighty years. Last one started because a chief’s son stole an axe. So they arrested him. Chained him to a Hottentot policeman and took him to Gatestown. Heathen ambushed them at the rocky pass. Cut the Tottie’s arm off to set him free.

  What this one start from?

  General told the Gaika their chief wasn’t their chief any more. He said he was their chief.

  The General?

  Yes.

  And then?

  And then he sent a big patrol up into their country on Christmas Eve. Officers took wine with them. And plates. Thought they were going on a picnic.

  And then?

  Gaikas thought they were after their chief. Remember when they took Hartung? Coming down from the Kromme?

  Yes.

  They were ambushed like that. General was stuck in Fort Vic. Up in the Eastern Mountains. Christmas day those settler villages round there woke up and there were heathens everywhere. Midday they let the women and the children out.

  And then?

  Men fought till their powder ran out.

  And then?

  Then they killed them.

  The kid pondered for a moment.

  They try to surrender?

  Wouldn’t have made any difference, said the joiner.

  The kid pondered further.

  And the Hottentots?

  What about them?

  Why they join in?

  They had farms in the Shining Water Valley.

  So why they join in?

  I’m getting there. They had farms in the valley. And the settlers wanted them.

  Why?

  You seen how things grow there?

  Yes.

  So they accused the Totties of stealing cattle. Went and burned their houses. Those Totties are half Dutch anyway. They been living with missionaries for fifty years. They whiter than Waine. So half of them up and joined with Jinqi.

  Did they steal the cattle? The Totties?

  Who knows.

  They meant to be the best. In the bush.

  Totties?

  Yes.

  They see better than other people, said the joiner.

  In the officer’s mess the meal was served on the General’s china and the Captain noted that the chieftain conducted himself with great dignity and used a knife and fork as though long accustomed to those implements. Johnny Fingo stood by as interpreter and through him the chieftain reminded the General that although his great wife, the mother of his heir, was a sister to Jinqi he had done good service to the English during the course of the war. He mentioned that he had lost three sons in the fighting. He requested that the General not make peace with the Gaika or the Tsaleka until all the Gaika had moved across the Big Fat into Tsaleka territory.

  The General nodded and thanked the chieftain. He could find no strategic method to counter the enemy and all he could think of was more money and more men. Some days later when he reached Gatestown he issued a public proclamation ordering all Dutch citizens on the frontier to assemble on the 25th of February under the commando system peculiar to them.

  The appointed date came and went and there was little response and the General wrote despatches in which he complained of the melancholy shuffling of the Dutch. His complaints made no difference and the General longed for the body of his lithe Spanish wife. He dithered for some days and then he consulted with Colonel Ire.

  Sir, said Colonel Ire, the Kromme ravines are where the heathen choose to fight. But where the Gaika live is in the foothills of the Eastern Mountains. That is where their food is. And their wives and children.

  At the beginning of March the General despatched troops armed with scythes and old swords and reaping hooks into the Eastern Mountains to destroy the ripening crops of the heathen. The lands of the chieftain of the Gaika were laid waste as were the gardens of the subsidiary chieftain who had fallen upon the settler villages on Christmas day at the commencement of the war.

  The irregulars remained at Post Retief and the General received answers to his despatches that questioned why, when he claimed the war was going well, the heathen general Jinqi had not surrendered and the entire eastern colony continued in a state of siege and alarm.

  The General sent a secret message to the chieftain of the Gaika in which he suggested terms of surrender, but the Gaika and Branders and Jinqi had heard rumours via certain of the missionaries and rejected the offer. Their intelligence was good and on the 1st of April the General sat in his tent and read the letter of his dismissal and a simultaneous despatch which notified him that his expected reinforcements had foundered in the Birkenhead on a rock off Cape Agulhas.

  In late April the General announced relinquishment of his command and General Cathcart’s imminent arrival to replace him. The General sailed to rejoin the Spanish princess he had first lain with during the siege of Badajoz on the Spanish Peninsula when she was a fourteen-year-old girl. He lunched often with the Duke of Wellington and other friends at the Horse Guards but they were old men now and the Spanish campaign and Waterloo and the burning of the White House on the Potomac were long past. The newspapers wrote of the General’s failure. Some raised old questions regarding the beheading of the heathen king Hintsa. Some went so far as to say that it was the General’s very theatrical posturing and calling heathen chieftains his children that had caused the war he was unable to win and which had greatly contributed in bringing down the government.

  An application was made by the Masonic body of Gatestown to have the body of the Lieutenant Colonel interred in that town.

  Evans and Higgs and Basson were assigned to do the digging and they laboured in the heat. They paused when their spades scraped upon the wood of the coffin. Higgs and Basson sat on the edge of the grave with their legs hanging. Evans stood with his spade and looked down at the dark wood.

  Take both hands, he said, to count the times he nearly got me killed.

  You know how he made his money, said Basson.

  How?

  Transport. Army hired his wagons.

  Evans leaned forward and spat on the coffin.

  I heard, said Higgs, he used to go on patrol with a Hottentot harem.

  You won’t find a Tottie in the Cape Corps, said Basson, who isn’t kin to him.

  Evans wiped his brow and shook his head and sighed and then he sat and the three men looked out at the highlands. The grasses glinted in the sun like the fine hair on a young girl’s arm. The wind whispered and the mountains stood grave and listening.

  A week later the coffin and its decaying cargo were part of a procession down the main street of Gatestown where the Lieutenant Colonel was consigned to his final resting place with full military and Masonic honours.

  XXII

  General Cathcart – Botha imprisoned – Ire’s ire – Established on the highlands – Roadworks – A green serpent – Clayton’s third misfortune – The Captain interrogates – The kid names the culprit.

  GENERAL CATHCART WAS a tall thin man with an aquiline nose and a careful disposition. He arrived at the Cape in early May and presided over the trial of a Hottentot defector by the name of Botha. Botha was convicted on the evidence of men serving life sentences and hoping to ease their punishment. He stood in the dock and the judge told him t
hat he was reputed to be a brave man in the field and so he must prove on the scaffold.

  Mercy, said the judge, cannot come hence. Never, never, never, never.

  And he sentenced Botha to be hanged by the neck until he was dead.

  General Cathcart, however, commuted the sentence to life imprisonment. He then sailed for the frontier where he galloped about in full dress uniform and long thigh boots and always with cavalry escort. These men travelled likewise in parade-ground uniform with ceremonial swords at their sides and Colonel Ire was so disgusted that he requested sick leave and went to the Cape to calm himself.

  On the 24th of May the irregulars marched from Post Retief at five o’clock in the morning with a party of artillerymen and a six-pound howitzer and a wagon loaded with tents and tools and rations. They moved south across the highlands towards Mount Misery and within two hours the wagon was sunk to its axles in boggy ground. Herrid cursed and yelled orders and the wagon was unloaded and dragged from the mud and loaded again and so they proceeded. They came to the pass to the Kromme Heights in the late afternoon and took up a position commanding the approach from the Great Western Ravine. There was no movement in the valley and the irregulars bivouacked there and although it was cold the kid was glad to lie once more beneath the stars.

  On the day following the scouts came in with word that a column was coming up the Western Ravine and the irregulars moved into position to cover their ascent. The column halted for breakfast and the Captain watched them through his Dollond. Rows of piled arms glinted in the sun and the white-covered wagons were scattered in the green bush and the smoke from the fires rose like pillars in the still air. There were herds of grazing cattle and small figures scuttled among them. The Captain heard the faint sound of a bugle and watched how the oxen were driven in and the confusion of troops rose up and fell into companies and the oxen took their places at the wagons and the whole agglomeration moved forward like a monster able to form itself miraculously from divergent parts.