So why did he keep thinking of the girl, the one who had come to alert the commando? He saw her, standing there like a totem pole in the middle of his vision. All danced about her. In his mind, the girl, beautiful to begin with, was being invested with desires, beliefs and qualities he projected onto her. She seemed to Gideon the most captivating person he had ever encountered.
Overhead, a couple of white clouds had appeared, so beautiful you could imagine angels up there.
‘Oh shit. No.’ The voice came from up ahead.
They had reached the girl’s farm. Fifteen, twenty dead lambs lay in a group, their throats cut, the wool smeared with blood. Up ahead the farmstead was still smouldering. A dog whimpered, started towards them, but then cowered under a broken cart. Three barrel hoops hung on a branch, banging against each other every so often; a thin, tinny sound. A lone cock strutted by, dragging a broken wing in the dirt. Nobody tried to catch it, though it would make a good dinner. They rode on at walking pace, circling around to the front of the house. A washboard lay in the open. Two chairs and a small table had been carried out and abandoned. Despite all the destruction, the scorched ghost of everyday life still hung around.
Gideon tried to imagine the scene as it had been before: butter being churned, dogs fed, flowers tended, evening falling and cows lowing in the stone kraal. This was the setting for that woman’s life. She would look at the same landscape he was looking at and everything would have a different meaning to her; trees and fences would hold memories. Behind the house where he had grown up there was a large jacaranda. He had climbed in it and fallen out. There were the slopes of Mount Eden, which he’d recognise among a hundred different hills. These ridges would be the same for her. He tried to look at the environment like someone who had known it for years, imagined having memories of this place, but in vain. The smell of singed hair burnt his nose.
‘I’ve seen worse,’ said a young man who had joined them recently from down Rouxville way.
‘Near Marquard once I saw the bastards had put all the sheep in a kraal and set them alight.’
‘This isn’t that bad. Do you think they’re getting tired of it?’
‘Maybe this lot are Australians or Maorilanders; they’re supposed to be more like us.’ It was the same man who had seen the burnt sheep, a skinny farmer with a big black beard and tufts of hair sprouting from his nostrils.
Gideon tried not to show anything at the mention of his country. What if they were New Zealanders? He’d never had to fight against his countrymen before. It shouldn’t be different to all the other Empire soldiers he had fired on in the last month or so, yet it was. The mere fact that they came from the same place seemed to create a bond of some kind, irrational as that may be.
Jacob Eksteen dismounted in front of the Calitz homestead, like he had so many times before, coming to see Esther but pretending it was her brother he’d come for. He gave the reins to Du Plessis, who was right beside him with a grim expression, wiping his mouth with possibly the last remaining handkerchief in the commando. Making the man his de facto aide was one way to keep Du Plessis from commanding men. Jacob pushed the garden gate open. The remains of a chick were smeared on the garden path – it must have got under someone’s foot. Or was it the canary that used to hang in the cage by the front door? The cage was still there, torn open. Jacob stepped past it, into the ruin. The roof had fallen in and he had to step over the burnt beams. He could see the harmonium. Most of the wood had burnt away, exposing the metal innards. Glass crunched under his feet and he spotted a watercolour that had fallen off the wall. The paper had become brittle and disintegrated at his touch. He dropped it and went back outside. ‘We’ll come by later to take anything useful. Let’s first go get the people who did this.’
Ten minutes later they encountered two of their scouts. The other two had stayed in touch with the enemy. The column was moving slowly, as they had a small flock of sheep with them and a few head of cattle. It appeared to be a force of company strength, about ninety men, most of them mounted. They had a Maxim machine gun on a wagon. They travelled together, except for four scouts who rode about half a mile away on either side, two ahead of the column and two keeping behind.
‘We split up here,’ said Jacob.
At about this time, Esther and Klein Steyn arrived at the Lost Lamb. He couldn’t believe his eyes – there was a grandfather clock standing under a tree. The women and children walked past it as if it didn’t exist. They were carrying things in different directions, sorting out who was going to live where from now on. ‘I must go back,’ he said.
‘You’re staying for supper.’ Esther was friendly and firm in a way that allowed no protest. She smiled at him and he had to steady himself not to teeter off his horse. If only he had been older. She slid off her horse and handed the reins to a gleeful black boy. ‘Stompie will take the animals to the water.’ Steyn gave his horse to the Sotho boy and walked with Esther to where her mother and grandmother were trying to erect a tent. ‘Is everyone here?’ he heard Esther ask her mother.
‘The Naudés had to hide for a few hours; they only just arrived half an hour ago,’ said the older woman. She wiped her hands on her apron and came up to Steyn with a hand extended. ‘Welcome to our new home.’
He shook her hand, which felt strangely waxy.
‘Steyn is with Jacob Eksteen’s commando,’ said Esther. ‘He’s going to make the Khakis pay for what they have done.’
‘It’s too late for that.’ Mrs Calitz had lost a son to the war already and her husband was a prisoner of war in Ceylon.
‘Ma, we should never give up. You taught me that.’
‘Of course not.’ There was little conviction in her voice. She turned to Steyn. ‘How would you like some real coffee?’
‘Very much.’
‘It’s somewhere on that wagon. If we can only find it.’
Steyn found the set-up enticing. It wasn’t quite like home, more like a church bazaar, with so many women and children busying themselves with setting up camp and cooking and taking care of niceties the men on commando had stopped bothering with long ago, if they ever did. The hard work, like digging sewage pits, was done by their black servants. The women organised places to sleep and eat. Steyn even spotted a few tablecloths. He helped, clumsily repeating tasks from his childhood, marvelling at the existence of porcelain and towels.
It had clouded over and the atmosphere had become oppressive. A thunderstorm wasn’t too far off. A tremor shook the fresh cup of coffee in his hand, but it had nothing to do with the weather. He thought of the commando who had effectively become his family, some of whom he might never see alive again.
The first lightning struck and the boom rolled over the veldt. Gideon lay flat on the rocky ground, binoculars to his eyes, his mind wandering. There are millions of rocks on earth, he thought, and you look at them and walk and ride past them and all you might be able to say is that the area is rocky. And then you lie down behind one of those anonymous rocks with a rifle and suddenly it becomes a very personal thing, your protector and friend. You look at its every indentation and facet and crack, at the way the colours vary across its surface, at the almost-microscopic rim of a primeval bubble, and realise there is no other like it in the whole wide world. How amazing that he was here now, in a place he didn’t know existed a few months before, doing something unthinkable. Looking back, he could see the links, how one thing flowed from another, but if he considered it from the point of view of a few years before, there was no way he could’ve foreseen the way his life would turn out. How utterly unbelievable that he should be on the other side of the world, at war, lying among unfamiliar vegetation and men, ready to shoot at his own comrades.
His loyalty was firmly with the British. Some of the men from his father’s nation may be scoundrels – the Boers seemed to believe they all were – but it wasn’t for nothing that Britain was the greatest nation on earth. Factories and ships, fortitude and self-belief had seen them expand the Empi
re to all parts of the globe, civilising all manner of natives. Officially, even this country was now under the Union Jack.
He wiped the breech of his Lee-Enfield with the tip of his shirt, slid the bolt back and forth. The Boers had taken the rifle from a fallen Khaki when his ammunition for the Lebel rifle ran out. He knew the Lee-Enfield well, having had a similar weapon issued to him a few months after arriving in this country. Many of the Boers used captured British weapons, switching to the enemy weapon as the ammunition for their German Mausers ran out. The Lee-Enfield was a beautiful piece of machinery, all the parts gleaming and smooth, each interlocking component working together in perfect unison, performing a series of complex tasks – pulling the used cartridge from the chamber, picking up a new one from the magazine and cocking the firing pin at the same time. You had to admire the ingenuity and precision. When he was still fighting with the people he was now expected to shoot at, Gideon had developed the knack of working the bolt of the Lee-Enfield very quickly, achieving a tremendous rate of fire. It came in handy now, when his aim was to suppress enemy fire rather than try to kill anyone.
Down at the roadside, the British column was making camp for the night. Unlike back home, where roads tended to run along ridgelines, they always seemed to travel along the valleys here, trying to stick close to water rather than get away from it. There seemed to be fewer than the hundred Khakis the scouts had told them to expect. The routines were familiar to Gideon. What he wouldn’t give for some of that food now! He had grown to hate Maconochie’s rations when that was a regular part of his diet, but living off meat and beskuit and cornflour for weeks on end changed one’s perspective, even if the Boers did manage to turn cornflour into three different dishes: smooth porridge, lumpy stywepap or gravelly krummelpap, eaten at breakfast with sugar, butter or milk if available, at other times with meat sauce. He tried to find some indication of who these Imperial soldiers might be, tried to think of all the places you might see clear insignia. The faces told him nothing; they were white Europeans, as were all the soldiers in this war, officially. A few Maoris had snuck into the New Zealand units. The men he saw here wore uniforms that were the worse for wear, which made them even harder to recognise. He picked a new-looking tunic, not as faded as the others, and adjusted the focus of his binoculars. The man’s collar was embroidered with a black fern. No mistaking the New Zealand symbol. Gideon’s heart beat against the ground and the sound of it filled his ears.
Major Bryce had said his first priority was survival. If that meant shooting at friendly forces, he had to. He could try to miss if it wouldn’t put him in danger or compromise his cover, otherwise he had to aim to wound rather than kill, but he wasn’t that reliable a shot, so … There had been instances when he had seen a khaki-clad soldier slump out of his sights. He tried not to think about it. Major Bryce had said his mission was worth more than the life of any ordinary soldier.
‘What about officers?’ he had asked.
‘More,’ came the answer. Gideon wondered what the major would say if his life were the one in question. ‘De Wet is worth more than any one man we have,’ said Major Bryce. ‘If we capture him, the war will be shortened and many more lives will be spared.’
As the weeks dragged by, Gideon had started to wonder if his mission would ever work out, but last week he had heard talk of combining forces in the north-eastern Free State. That would mean a meeting with De Wet. If he could find out where and when this would happen and get to British lines with the news, his mission would be complete.
More lightning, closer now. He could not get used to these storms. Rationally he decided he’d rather be killed by the laws of nature than by the flaws of human nature. Still the lightning scared him to his core, the power of it and his relative insignificance. The very air shook in his lungs.
A volley of rifle fire sounded from the ridge on the other side of the Khaki column, about half a mile to the east. Two or three of the New Zealanders had fallen backwards before the first ones went to ground and grabbed their rifles. Then came broken fire, vying with God’s mighty thunder.
Gideon glanced sideways, waiting for the signal to open fire from their side. The next man was about three yards away, lying half obscured by a bush and dry grass. As expected, it was Matzdorff.
The Kiwi Lee-Enfields had started up in earnest. Someone down there was laying down some very rapid fire and the Boers had become quieter. Gideon felt a flickering of pride. The commando will find out the Kiwis aren’t a bunch of English city dwellers; they’re tough frontier types too. There, two men had the Maxim ready, the barrel swinging towards the Boer position on the opposite ridge.
‘On my signal,’ came Commandant Eksteen’s voice, somewhere to the left. ‘Fire!’
Gideon decided to shoot into the supplies. That way if it did fall into Boer hands, it may not be that useful. He was very aware that the clumps of yellow grass were too sparse to obscure his outline, the jagged black rocks too small to shelter his innards. He fired as fast as he could.
The air crackled with gunshots. Plugs of metal zipped past each other in opposite directions, the way battles had been fought for the last two-hundred years, except that now they came from invisible sources. This was the first major war fought with smokeless cartridges. Here and there, some unfortunate man had a hole ripped through him. Depending on where it was, it led to pain or death. Every shot increased the fear and desperation that hung over the battlefield. Men breathed it. They sweated – cold when shot, hot when not. Commands were barked. On the New Zealand side, soldiers were trying to remember what they had learned. Not having had any training, the Boers only had to remember what they were fighting for, shooting at the enemy like they were sluggish antelope or aardvarks in khaki, not quite human in any case. Devout as they were, this killing was not sin. Devout as they were, the rewards of heaven did not make death more appealing. The smell of cordite overpowered that of soil and grass. Here and there, the fragrance of hot blood bloomed. Sweat and dust made Gideon’s temples itch. He closed one eye, lined up the sights and squeezed the trigger. BOOM! Man – the master of fire. Still alive. Next round …
A bullet chipped a piece of rock from the ground four feet ahead of him, kicking the flint up into his cheek. Damn! He wasn’t going to let himself be shot. He saw the man aiming at him, from underneath a wagon. Gideon trained his sights on the soldier, the front bead neatly blotting out the man’s face. He squeezed the trigger.
Shouts rose from his left. Someone ran, then another. Gideon rolled onto his side to see what was going on. A platoon of mounted infantry came over the crest of a hill, men in khaki charging at their left flank, shooting from the saddle. The Boers were scattering, running for their horses. ‘Run, boys!’ Gideon saw Commandant Eksteen drop to his knee and fire two quick shots. Then he, too, ran. Gideon tried to follow suit, but as he rose, the earth was jerked from under his feet. He flew backwards and briefly saw the evening clouds before his head crashed into the ground and darkness fell.
27–28 October 1901
Hours later, when night had fallen for everyone, Esther Calitz and Jacob Eksteen were doing exactly the same thing, miles apart – walking among people sleeping or ready to go to sleep.
Esther checked that everyone had settled into their new quarters, shared a few words with mothers here and there, heard others trying to lull their children to sleep. She did not carry a light, but was guided by the lamps and candles in tents and lean-to shelters, sometimes by nothing but the whiteness of canvas in moonlight. It had been a momentous day for these people; they had lost their homes but kept their freedom. In that was the story of the Boer nation. She heard prayers and lullabies. The first night. She felt tired and satisfied.
Jacob Eksteen was vexed beyond belief. What had gone wrong? It was like the Khakis had known they would be attacked, and where it would come from. How was that possible? It was the sheer shock of it as much as anything that set his men fleeing. At least he got the commando to split up. That way, the
enemy couldn’t follow everyone, so at least some would escape. But would everyone? He watched for new arrivals, listened for the sound of horses approaching. A few riderless horses had come back, running with the others. It could mean something and it could mean nothing. Their owners could come walking into camp in the next day or so. Judging by the stars, it was two o’clock already. He counted the men as he walked by. Some had curled up under blankets, or whatever they used in the place of blankets. Liebenberg was sleeping under what had once been a tailcoat. He had it pulled right up, bundled about his neck, leaving his legs exposed. For other men, it was their loins they chose to cover. They lay down as vulnerable as sheep. A few of the men were still preparing places to sleep. One or two were nursing light wounds. Who was still missing?
Miles away, Gideon gradually became aware of discomfort, which was good, because it meant he wasn’t dead. A cricket kicked up a racket close to his ear. A rock dug into his back. His right shoulder ached something awful. He opened his eyes and saw a magnificent night sky. He picked up the Southern Cross, Canis Major, Orion … The constellations he had got to know as a child. He was thirsty and, groping around with his left hand, found his water canteen. He let some of the tepid water trickle into his mouth. Feeling stronger now, he rolled to his good side and pushed himself up into a sitting position. A gash had torn through his left forearm, but the arm seemed to function okay. His right shoulder and the upper part of his chest were bloody and swollen. He didn’t appear to be bleeding any more. His breathing was fine, no blood in his mouth. He felt around the back for an exit wound. There wasn’t any. The front did not look like a bullet wound, at least not a clean one. Some sort of shrapnel. Then he saw his rifle, lying a few feet away. The stock was shattered. The bullet must have hit that first. He took a few deep breaths. The back of his head hurt too. He felt it with his fingers and found swelling and blood. He must’ve hit his head when he fell. A choir of African women sang in his head. Halala, they said. Apart from the localised pain, he seemed to be fine. He drank more water and struggled to his feet, steadying himself against a knee-high rock. He retrieved his rifle. The mechanism worked and the magazine was full. It would be awkward to hold, but he could fire from the hip if needed.
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