by Peter Bowen
She took us back to her stateroom and ordered champagne and oysters and caviar. Work she might, but she wouldn’t stint on the necessaries.
Speaking of which, she had a new husband name of George Cornwallis-West, who was three years younger than Winston.
“Father!” said Winston, opening his arms.
George retired from the scene, muttering.
Jennie laughed. She cared for no one’s opinion but her own, and I liked her for that.
Jennie fastened her dark eyes on Winston while he lisped out the tale of his harrowing and dangerous escape from the cruel clutches of the Boers. He didn’t mention that if he’d waited one more day the Boers were going to toss him back to the British as more trouble than he was worth.
We had dinner with Jennie that night, pheasant, two soups, and sorbets, claret, hock, and brandy and seegars. A few times we heard some screaming from the hospital wards below, but, considering all, it was a pleasant meal.
Jennie saw us down the stairs to a longboat, and the tars pulled sharp at the oars and soon we were up to the docks. An escort of soldiers in the new khaki uniforms gathered around us to protect us from Boer revenge or some damn thing—silly, you ask me, Winston could be counted upon to offer himself at every opportunity as a target. If I had the opportunity to shoot him I would be sore tempted, as he was likely to affect my health, happiness, and well-being. (If I had the slightest inkling of just how much he was to do that, I’d have shot the bastard in front of his mother and taken the chance on pleading with the jury.)
Winston was about as popular as a plague of boils at Staff Headquarters. Subalterns are forever at odds with their superiors but damn few of them write for the Times of London. Winston being Winston, he went direct to poor overmatched Buller, asking for a soldier’s billet. Buller harrumphed and said that Army regulations forbade serving officers from writing for newspapers.
That rule had been hastily added two years before solely because of Winston’s accounts of the Sirdar’s Nile expedition. And now this arrogant pup was demanding that the rule be suspended for him.
Buller was drinking a lot these days, and he stared off in befuddlement, focused his eyes on me, gave a start, said, “Kelly, you blackguard, is that you?” to which I nodded.
“I’ll hang the pair of you on Bungo,” said Buller.
“Is Bungo for us or against us?” I snarled. “Or a black king or something.”
Turned out it was Gen. Julian Byng, Commander of the South African Light Horse.
Having this moment placed us elsewhere, Buller nodded off to sleep and an adjutant led us out.
“And where is the South African Light Horse?” Winston asked.
The adjutant said we’d have to find them he supposed.
Outside, I stopped and looked to the northeast, where I’d fought and run from the Zulus, where the Prince Imperial of France had been killed, more or less dying of flattery, and where I had lain with a lovely young Boer girl who had more guts than me and was a better hand with a horse, too.
And here I was once again, stuck fighting a war that did not concern me.
We went to look up our comrades, and they us.
8
AS IS ITS HABIT, the British Army came back to Africa fully prepared to fight the Zulus. The time they’d been ready to fight the Zulus before, the British managed to lose twelve hundred soldiers of a morning—to a foe armed with shields and spears.
I asked around and found that the Boers were armed with Mauser rifles, Krupp cannon, barbed wire, Skoda mortars, and other modern horrors.
I occupied myself whistling “Heads of Oak” and wondering if I could somehow make it back to my California spread and start over with whatever managed to survive without me.
Sir Julian Byng eyed us with extreme distaste. He hated Americans much more than he hated Boers, and he hated newspapermen worse than the Devil or Americans. He made this quite plain to us.
“I do not need some sucked-up snip of a scribbler,” snarled Sir Julian, “or his colonial lout either. But I have to make the best of it. Either of you ever heard a gun fired in anger? Can you ride?”
“I’m a Sandhurst man,” spluttered Winston.
“Oh, God,” said Sir Julian, “that too?”
I liked the man. He was intelligent and a swift and sure judge of character and the secret hearts of men. He spoke without malice or forethought—hindthought, neither.
“Wul,” I says in my best Rocky Mountain argle-bargle, “Tain’t fer certain I don’t think ya lime-sucking pansies could whip a passel of crippled wog nursemaids. Maybe you’d best hire some Amurrican boys that knows what fighting’s about. Ya ain’t whupped nobody since Napoleon and I hears his piles was actin’ up bad that day. Mebbe yuh should just crawl back on the ships and go home. The brussels sprouts is in season.”
Sir Julian looked at me down the length of his considerable nose and he rang for an orderly.
“Fetch two chota pegs of scotch,” said Sir Julian, “and take this goddamned ... correspondent with you.” The orderly grabbed Winston and dragged him out of the office. A short while later he was back with the whiskeys, and then he withdrew.
“An amazing performance,” said Sir Julian. “All but trying to convince me you were chewing tobacco. You lack the visible signs of that filthy habit. The yellow drool down your clothes. I didn’t get your name.”
“Major Luther Kelly, United States Army,” I says.
“Your Army dress like this?”
He had a point. I was wearing chamois-skin pants, high boots all tooled with gila monsters and gold, a gunbelt and twin Colts, a lace-edged shirt, a watered silk waistcoat, a silver and turquoise choker, and a tall cream-colored Stetson. Why? Well, there was this package waiting for me in Cape Town, from Theodore, who wished me well dressed for this occasion. There was no commission in the package. I also had a Presentation grade .405 Winchester rifle all chased with silver and gold, depicting Theodore killing things.
“No,” I admitted modestly.
“Does entering battle dressed like a procurer give you advantages I cannot at this moment see?” Sir Julian asked.
“You ever met Theodore Roosevelt?” I asked.
Sir Julian nodded.
“Frightening, ain’t it?” I said.
“Horrifying,” he agreed.
“These duds are his little idea of a joke—he gets to tweak me and the British Empire.”
“Could I, er, ah,” said Sir Julian, “um, assist you in any way?”
An hour later my finery was boxed up and shipped off and I flexed some of the starch out of the khakis that Bungo had been so good as to find me. I still had the Colts, for protection against snakes and other mean animals. But now I wore good plain heavy high riding boots decorated only with stitching, and not much of that, and I by God had an observer’s warrant tucked inside my coat. I’d watch this war and let Winston fight it. Buller’s subtlest tactic was to gather as many men as he could and charge, which worked good against natives armed with spears but I didn’t think it would be as effective and fun against entrenched troops with repeating rifles, machine guns, and artillery.
My God that Winston was a royal pain in the butt. He was a hell of a good horseman, and he lacked physical fear, but he was always posing at the goddamnedest times, with bullets cutting all around him, and quoted Macaulay or Shakespeare or himself at the top of his lungs when a wise feller would have been curled up behind a nice thick rock being quiet and as unobtrusive as possible.
I was just going to observe this little war, which looked like it might not be so little, and as a war it decided nothing at all.
Often I found myself with Sir Julian, and in the warm evenings we’d drink whiskey. Byng was a good solider, and he was an intelligent man.
“Other than the odd tribal war—Isandhlwana was the largest loss of troops since Waterloo—we haven’t fought a real enemy since Waterloo,” said Sir Julian, “and we are splendidly ready to fight Waterloo tomorrow.”
“The Boer is a cunning and resourceful foe,” Byng went on. “He cuts and slashes and runs and when he stands he entrenches and arranges his artillery, firing from ten miles behind his lines so it can’t be got at readily. Buller is a brave man, but overmatched here ...”
That was true, for sure. Buller may have been the best major ever commissioned, but anything up from that he’d be as lost as a fish in a tree.
All hell broke loose down at the far end of the camp, a lot of hallooing and such, and eventually a subaltern came running to Sir Julian. The boy was breathless and spattered with mud. Winston came on soon behind him.
“The Boers have struck at the Cape Telegraph,” said the boy, “not twenty miles from Cape Town.”
“We must pursue!” Winston said, hotly.
I suppose it was four o’clock in the afternoon.
Byng nodded.
“Kelly,” he said. “Whist?”
“No,” I said, “but I’ll play bezique.”
We went back to the card table in front of Sir Julian’s tent and fell to a hard-fought game of cards while Winston swelled up like a poisoned pup.
“I give him ten minutes,” I says, watching the man of the hour darken with choler.
“Five,” said Byng.
“We have had our honor insulted and you sit at cards?!” said Winston, glaring wrathfully at us.
“You’ve a better suggestion?” said Byng, solicitude dripping from every pore.
“Pursue them!” said Winston, jutting out his jaw.
“Winston,” said Byng, “this fellow across from me is not a subject of the Queen. He is a citizen of an independent nation because we had generals like you there, in the 1770s. Now Kelly will explain what I mean.”
“They are a day, day and a half ahead of us. If we chase them they will eventually let us catch them. Now, I don’t know exactly where that would be, but I do know that ten miles behind them there would be several Krupp Long Toms. All sighted and set. They’d make forcemeat out of us. Then they’d come down and cut Cape Telegraph again, since we were stupid enough to follow long behind the first time.” I turned to Sir Julian. “I miss anything?”
He shook his head.
“We’ll be in the field shortly,” said Sir Julian, “and I can assure you we will find the Boer, and we shall both bleed.”
“It’s that kind of war,” I said.
“Winston,” said Byng, “your kind of war went out with Agincourt.”
Winston pouted. I wanted to crack him over the head with a stout chunk of stovewood.
Finally he stalked away, to sulk I supposed.
“He’ll either be hung or Prime Minister someday,” said Sir Julian.
Both Winston and Theodore were sure they were not like other men, and if they gained power other men would die at their bidding. They felt themselves fit to dictate destiny. I’m not like that. I never have enjoyed telling anybody else what to do.
The next day I wandered around Cape Town picking up odds and ends of things might come in handy, and I happened to be down at the wharves when one of the cranes unloading a cargo ship lost a brakeblock and the load fell. It was barbed wire, huge balls of it, and they crushed the wooden planking and went on into the sea beneath, all but a couple of five-hundred-pound rolls that stuck to the wharves like burrs to cloth.
I have a lurch in my body every time I see barbed wire—it carved up my free country like a knife does cake.
I stood there a moment and thought of the amount of wire—it was covered in a peculiar gray canvas—and with a war on I couldn’t see why the cattle business was booming so.
I shook my head and went on.
The next morning the horses was loaded and we entrained for the “front,” which I have always found very hard to find in a guerrilla war, and this was no different. The actual war was to recover the gold and diamonds of the Rand, it was a mere accident that the Boers happened to be on it. It was an oversight and had England known at the time the Boers would not have been on it at all. Statecraft is solely a matter of correcting such oversights.
The Orange Free State and the Transvaal were the Boer republics, and the Boers was frontier folk so they didn’t have a government to speak of, just shouting matches. Behind all of it was Oom Paul Krueger, old, cunning, God-callen, ruthless, and a good judge of generals. His generals had been whipping the British handily and it was getting embarrassing to the greatest Empire the world has ever known.
We off-trained and saddled up and rode the queasy horses around to get the idea through their thick heads that they were back on firm earth, and then we fed them a little and watered them and curried them down.
The Boers was riding out of one or both of their republics and fighting a little and riding on. It wasn’t a war, it was a goddamned steeplechase.
Byng supposed we would look around a bit. I gazed longingly toward the south until he got the point and snorted and walked away. Wouldn’t do for him to think I was eager for this.
We were living on cold rations because the rest hadn’t come up yet—I had four loaves of veldt bread in my saddlebags, a mix of meat flour and wheat flour—and as usual headquarters had only the vaguest suggestions to make to us, because they had no decent intelligence because Buller hadn’t any intelligence at all.
As wars go, I have seen ones better run—not many, but some.
We were in the middle of the South African winter, here on to the end of July, and the rains came daily and washed down the dust, and then in early August it got to be spring, and the hot dusty summer up ahead.
The rest of the South African Light Horse was made of young fellers of good family and the scum of the diamond fields—an arrangement much like the Rough Riders. I thanked my stars I had no part in this but to observe.
Byng sought me out late in the day, and he put a hand on my shoulder and his face got mournful.
“What?” I says.
“The Republicans have nominated William McKinley for President and Theodore Roosevelt for Vice President.”
I nodded and vomited on my boots.
“God Almighty help us all,” said Sir Julian.
Even though you know something is bound to happen it don’t sometimes soften the blow when it does. I could look forward in what little life remained to me to an endless succession of errands all over the world, anywhere Theodore could possibly invade something.
More trains arrived at this piece of track—there wasn’t even a station here—and it seemed that the British were going to try to chase down cavalry with infantry. Our experience in America trying to chase down the Plains Indians didn’t count—Americans lacked British pluck, as everyone knew.
The infantry was coming off the trains in a fine mist of rain and we sodden troopers were watching them from three hundred yards away; all of a sudden there were the high-pitched screams of heavy artillery shells coming at us. The bursts hit two cars of the train and khaki-clad dolls flew loose-limbed through the air.
Our horses were tired and not too skittish, but then a couple 140-pound Long Tom shells burst near us, disemboweling several horses and riders with white-hot shrapnel.
Sir Julian had casually thrown his field jacket over his horse’s head, and he was standing there calmly with a compass and two sticks marking the tracks of the shells so he knew about which direction they come from.
“ALL YOU WHORESONS MOUNT UP AND FOLLOW ME!” Byng yelled, he had the loudest voice but for Liver-Eatin’ Jack’s I’d ever hear.
All the whoresons did and we headed off in the mist NNW. I gestured to some troopers and they fell in behind me—my natural air of command, don’t you know—and we cut to the ridgetops and flushed a couple of snipers who couldn’t see through the rain either. I shot one while running him down and the horse leaped over him and we joined up with Byng at the bottom of the long shallow descent.
“If we can get some of the big guns,” said Byng, “we might have some ch
ance.”
The low cloud and mist made it hard to gauge just where the guns was. There was fresh horse sign of a sudden, ten or twelve riders moving fast the same direction we was.
The shells was passing high above. I thought of what they were doing to the train and the men packed round it, and I shook my head.
There was a shot from off to the right up ahead, and I saw a trooper throw up his hands and tumble back off his horse. The way his neck bent when he hit the ground said not to bother with him, not in this life.
Byng called a halt and he motioned me to him. I rode to him and bent over to hear what he had to say.
“I haven’t another officer worth a pissed on cravat,” he said. “Will you assist me? Take about half and go up that donga, I’ll bear left.”
My morals wrestled one with another and fled. “Yes,” I said.
One certain thing, the Long Toms and Pom-poms would have a heavy guard around them. Without them big guns, the Boers warn’t no more than bandits.
Byng moved off and he was soon gone in the soft gray rain. The yellow mud on the trails reminded me of Wyoming. I waved my arm twice and the troopers fell in behind me. The rain pulsed up, hard enough now to splash when it hit the puddles.
I went up a long spur, to try and ear-sight the guns. They seemed to be above and not too far off. I sent half my troopers down to sweep the base of the mountain—here a mountain may be fifty miles long—and I led the rest up and then out over a flat top studded with boulders.
I could see no sign of any Boers, and we went on slow, and the next time we came to the rim there was the sound of a hot fight down below, but we couldn’t get there down the jumbled boulders that hold to the mountains like a beach holds the sea.
The guns fired, damn close. I led the men single-file ahead, and then we dismounted and picketed the horses. We walked forward in a ragged skirmish line.
A single Boer sentry stood up of a sudden thirty feet in front of me, a kid, no more than fifteen, and he fired wild, dropping a man behind me. I shot him in the leg and watched him drop his gun and grab the hole in his thigh and look very startled.