by Bowen, Peter
I watched for a couple hours—the mountains screened where I was from artillery—and then I saw a line of khakis cheering and the top seemed to have been cleared.
Something about this wasn’t right. I untied my horse and led it away east, and found a hiding place under a cut bank for the animal and I crept back and looked down at the picketed horses and piles of stores and the soldiers waiting on the heights being cleared. Then Boers started boiling out of every shadow and donga and hole to the west, pausing to fire and coming on. There was easy a thousand of them.
The soldiers in camp made a hasty retreat to the winding trail that led up to the mountaintop where the Light Horse was.
About half the troops that had been in the laager were near to the top of the trail, and they began to move out to help the Light Horse. I felt an icy finger go down my spine. The Boers who had been threatening the camp and stores withdrew. All of the troopers were up on the tabletop, which was flat as piss on a plate.
The artillery started, rapid fire. I could imagine what was going on up there, no cover and the shells falling every few seconds. They’d be minced up fine as sand, and then the Boers would stick up their heads, do a little counting, and wipe the whole business out, in not that much time. Them as could get down would get down and fall back on the camp, I figured. I rode like hell south, along the trail I had just come up.
It was an even shorter distance than I had thought, and I raised hell till I was brought to Pauncefote, General Commanding, and he screwed his monocle in another couple of cranks and barked a few orders and his subordinates hopped to and I never seen an Army get down to business that fast, at least a British one.
Troopers loaded themselves down with spare ammunition and took off at a gallop, sorting themselves out on the fly, and the infantry, battle ready, set out at a fast clip not long after. They was going to save brother soldiers and that fires up troops like nothing else.
Even I rode back.
Now, I know I’m not brave, no hero, not even a good fourth at bridge, but I sort of thought that I should fetch Winston out as unscathed as possible, on account of his mother, who would chase me to the ends of the earth if her boy was killed while I was on the same continent. You know how mothers are, they are fond of their offspring. (The more monstrous the better.)
Time I got back to the battleground the wounded was being carried down by stretcher-bearers in turbans—Indians, from India, calmly hauling the maimed off the mountaintop and not even flinching at the fire when it was close. Once in a while the bearers would stop and hide behind boulders if the barrage was bad, then they’d get up and go on.
“All volunteers,” said Bungo, at my elbow. “Pacifists. Won’t lift a finger to harm another man, but they do this so bravely.”
That was a new one on me. I looked at them little wogs hauling the stretchers and wondered why they warn’t extinct.
A flying column of troopers had gone on some time ago and we could sure on tell when they got to the big guns, because the shells stopped coming in, cut off sudden.
I decided I’d better go on up and look about for Winston, and no sooner had I got to the foot of the trail than I saw him on one end of a stretcher, talking a blue streak at the little Indian on the other, who was smiling and shaking his head and laughing at times.
I walked along with them to the stack the doctor was working on. They rolled their bloody hero off on the grass and began to walk back toward the bloody mountain.
“Indjah is no more a country than the Equatorhh,” said Winston.
I gathered they was deciding the fate of millions to pass the time.
“Ach!” said Winston. He hopped around a bit holding on to his boot, and then he fell on his arse struggling with it. He pulled it off and I saw one of them big velvet ants—a wasp actually—run off through the grass stems.
Winston was cursing and pulling off his sock. He looked at a red spot swelling rapidly on his instep.
“I’ll make a trip with you,” I says to Winston’s chum. He nodded and laughed, delighted-like. He held out his hand.
“Mohandas K. Gandhi,” he said.
“Luther Kelly,” I said, and shook it. It was dry and very small, like a child’s.
“Are there many more wounded?” I asked.
“I don’t think so,” said Gandhi. “I think we merely need to gather the dead. So you are an American?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Tell me about America.”
Well, that threw me, but I took a stab at it anyway.
11
BY THE TIME THE dead was rolled into a common grave on the top of the mountain it was coming on light again. I’d worked all through the night, talking with this little Indian lawyer. He reminded me of Crazy Horse. There was something not quite human about him.
He’d graduated, if that’s what you call it, from the Inns of Court and could therefore practice law anywhere in the Empire—that is, anywhere that wasn’t put off by his skin.
We made one last round, checking the crevices and such for dead men, but we found none, and the chaplain read a short service and the grave was filled in, and then the soldiers went to piling stones on it to keep the jackals and hyenas out. The carrion birds circled overhead until the rocks went on and they lofted away. They do well in wartime. There would be horse carcases to eat as soon as we left.
I got to talk to Mohandas a lot as we got ready to pull out and head on up the railroad line to the next place the Boers would fight a spoiling action. I remembered Marieke’s saying the Boers was too fast for the British and the British too strong for the Boers, which was how it had been with the Injuns I’d scouted on—until we cut off their food by killing the buffalo. All these small out-of-the-way places to fight wars like that, there should be decades of work for the soldiers.
I shook hands with Winston, who thought I was “a coward and poltroon” for leaving, and I told the little fool I was sent to observe and I had done observed and I could tell him the rest of the story, if he’d like.
He smiled then, a canny smile, and said he was here for a way to Parliament. He wanted honors, and battle scars.
I wished him both.
The train south held wounded and them as was dead and had commissions and so couldn’t be expected to be dead with the common soldiers in the mass grave.
Mohandas looked me up—he was going back down, and on these special trains the usual color sortings didn’t seem to apply, and we talked all the slow ride down to Cape Town. He was sure he had the key for all men to live in peace, and I told him having the key was one thing, he needed an Army so the key would be used. I think he thought more of folks than I do. I suspected he’d go back to India and preach till the British got tired of his yammering, and then they’d hang him quiet-like and that would be that. Not my problem, thank God.
He also felt that most of life’s problems stayed away from them as owned goats. This conversation was getting a little rich for my thick wits—no more so than Theodore’s babblings about Manifest Destiny and America standing forth in the world (meaning we can knock the teeth out of anybody) and Taking Our Rightful Place in the Sun (where we likely will get burned). I never had trusted these folks with prescriptions for all the ills of man. Me, I was trying to find a decent seegar and a warm, willing woman.
Finally Mohandas went too far and allowed as how I was a better man than I let on. This gave me a chance to beller some about how I was not, I was infinitely worse than anything he could imagine and two Guardsmen come up and plucked Mohandas out of the seat and tossed him out the window into the weeds that grew so thick by the train line.
“Sorry the little wog was exercising you so, sorr,” said one, snapping me a salute. I was goggle-mouthed for a moment, and then I lost my temper.
“Stop the train,” I said, flaring up like a match.
The guards didn’t know what to do. I did. I went to the coupling and shot out the air lines. The train commenced slowing down then.
I ju
mped off and ran back up the right of way, hollering “Mohandas” at the top of my lungs.
I cussed and hollered for a while and the longer I did the worrieder I got—the fall could have broken his neck.
Finally I heard him, saying in a normal tone of voice that he was all right and not to worry. He come up through the weeds, limping a little and smiling like he always did. He put his hands together and bowed to me.
“Are you sure you are ... the hell you are. What happened to your goddamned ankle?”
He went on insisting it was all right. I finally threw the little man over my shoulder and walked back toward the train. I could see the Provost Marshal and some guards poking in the grass up ahead.
“Who the hell else did you throw out?” I snarled. I was about ready to shoot several of them, social gaffe or not.
“Kelly,” Mohandas said weakly, “please. No violence. If you commit violence I’ll shoot myself.”
I have been a gunrunner, which is fairly silly, I got froze into a buffalo hide once and had them big jocker wolves almost chew my ass off, I been an interpreter for the Sioux against the Americans, I have often cut a ridiculous figure or been somewheres without a real good excuse for it, but standing there by the railroad line in South Africa with a demented wog over my shoulder and me about to go to war on a hundred Brits was maybe the low one. (I ain’t dead yet. We’ll see.)
“Shoot yourself with what?” I says. He waved one of my Colts at me. I set him down and snatched my pistol back.
“That would be theft,” I snarls. “Them bullets is expensive.”
“WOOOINTHABLUIDYHELL IS GOINOINNN HERRRR?” said the very large Scot at the head to the troops.
“Yer arseholes threw my friend out the window,” I says, “and you’re in luck he ain’t hurt.”
Not much consideration was given to us, for we was roughly handled and clapped in irons for the rest of the journey. Portions of the irons was attached to the same seatback, so me and Mohandas got to chat as the train went along.
“You are a turbulent man, Kelly,” he said. “I fear you have killed many others.”
“Not enough yet,” I says. “I’ll let you know when I’m happy with the score.”
Mohandas sighed. He sighed sort of exasperated-like.
I was expecting further lectures but when I looked he had his eyes closed and seemed to be praying.
“Please don’t do that on my account,” I says. “I don’t want the Heavenly Attention. I plan to keep on bein’ a small and movin’ target.”
“Bugger off, Kelly,” he said, smiling, and on he went. Odd little bird-man, risking his neck for Englishmen who had their boots on his neck at all other times.
We pulled into the military depot at Cape Town and Mohandas and me was hauled off the train and then they took off our irons—had to account for them to the quartermaster, I suppose—and then we was marched off to the stockade and put in a fenced pen with the drunks and other petty offenders.
We sat there all night, and in the morning a couple lawyer-looking types follered by two—my gut jumped—officers of the American Navy come stalking up behind a guard, who inserted a key in the gate and beckoned to us.
“Kelly and Gandhi arf’ out!” he said. The naval officers was taking an unseemly interest in me, I hate being stared at.
“Captain Forrest,” said one, looking at me like he’d rather not. “What in Christ’s name did you shoot up the train for? Fun?”
“Fun,” I said. “Much fun.”
The lawyers was talking a mile a minute at Mohandas, who was waving his hands and jabbering, too.
“You’re ordered to the Philippines,” said Captain Forrest. “And we have a destroyer waiting to take you there.”
“I ain’t going,” I said. “I can already tell you what’s there. My being there won’t change it.”
“Kelly,” said Mohandas, “God go with you!”
“Mohandas,” I said, “I’d druther God went and I didn’t have to.”
I thought to ask if he was going to be all right and he said I shouldn’t worry, which wasn’t an answer and I knew I wasn’t going to get much better out of him. Why this little pain-in-the-ass wog with his continual praying and stubborn refusal to quit doing whatever it was that he thought fair and right should bother me I purely did not know.
Some guards—British Regulars—had commenced gathering around us and it made me nervous because I couldn’t see a reason for it. A leftenant came up to Mohandas and began reading off from a list of charges, treason heading it.
The Brits hang folks for treason.
“I’ll go if we take him,” I said. “I ain’t leaving him to be strung up by these lime-sucking sonsabitches.”
Well, we had a pretty good shouting match there for a while, till it dawned on the Brits that I was offering to deport Mohandas free of charge, thereby saving the overburdened British taxpayer the trouble and expense.
Or shock if Mohandas was found dead of hanging in his cell.
So Her Majesty Queen Victoria did deliver her subject Mohandas Gandhi to Captain Forrest to take wherever he liked, and it was hoped burial at sea would be necessary. If not, sigh, then India would accept him.
“We will have to coal in Goa anyway,” said Captain Forrest. He was beginning to see the humor in this, his mouth was twitching as he wrote out a receipt.
So we went at a slow pace down toward the harbor. A bit over half of the way there we came to the Indian quarter, streets of shops and tiny houses, where the women wore the sari and the curry scent tickled your nostrils.
“Kelly, my friend,” said Gandhi, “I must ... say goodbye!” And he dashed into a narrow street packed with people. He disappeared in the time it takes for one breath.
Forrest let off a string of ripe cussings, and then he shrugged his shoulders. The three of us could hardly surround the quarter and search house to house. Less said about it the better.
The destroyer Kiefer was loaded and coaled and ready to sail—it was one of the fast new four-stack ships. I was coming up in the world if this ship was here just for me.
We was piped aboard and I was shown to a roomy cabin big enough for the bed and me—all the rest of the room was taken up with cases and cases of canned goods. In half an hour we’d slipped the cables and were on our way.
Captain Forrest invited me up to the bridge. Right as I got there the ship wound up to cruising speed—I was impressed, never having gone so fast on the water before.
In a few hours we hit the hard ocean and set a course east, and I felt the familiar pangs of seasickness coming on. The good Captain Forrest sent me back to my cabin, and I cleared the canned goods off the bed and commenced feeling very sorry for myself. This was easy to do because every time we were hit with a following sea a couple cartons of pineapple would drop on me. I was too weak to cuss much.
I laid there on that damned bunk for three days, and then one morning I got madder than hell and the sudden burst of rage settled my stomach. I stomped out on the deck and put foot to a flying fish—oily devils, they are—and I slid half the length of the ship, bowling over a couple officers, and fetched up against a railing that bent considerably from my hitting it.
Captain Forrest come and looked down upon me crumpled into his ship’s works and shook his head some.
“What?” I snarled.
“Just thanking God Almighty you didn’t run away to sea,” he said, offering me a hand.
I snarled something about being happy to go ashore the next shore we passed—I warn’t particular at all.
After that we got on fine, and though it’s against regulations for anyone but the ship’s surgeon to have liquor, that worthy had enough to keep the whole ship’s company medicinally spackled for the whole journey.
Forrest never touched a drop, but he was good company to me and we talked over the Boer War and when I mentioned the concentration camps for the women and children, and how they was dying of camp diseases, he looked sad for a moment and then
he said war had gone from glorious to squalid in a generation, and he wondered if it was worth waging under those terms.
“That’s the way nations settle those questions,” I said. “I don’t think it’ll wither away because it’s bloodier. I wonder if it can ever get bloody enough to not pay out.”
And I told him of the slaughtered prisoners rotting in the donga.
The weather grew stormy so we didn’t go to Goa to coal but on round to Ceylon. We were two days in Trincomalee, and I was happy to wander around the town, risking my health on the food from the bazaar stalls and knowing for certain that I would have another vile bout with seasickness as soon as the Kiefer hit the open ocean.
Ceylon is a grand place for gems—about half of the island is digging for rubies, sapphires, moonstones, and the like, and the rough gems were dirt cheap. I bought quite a few for a couple hundred in Yankee gold. They were wrapped in a piece of chintz and tucked in a compartment of my money belt.
I had a couple wicker-wrapped carboys of the local rum delivered to the Kiefer. All I had for company in the cabin was the rum and a couple cases of chutney.
Coaled up and running the Kiefer made better than twenty knots, and before long we were winding our way through the green islands that hang down south from Asia all the way to Australia. Them islands is pretty to look on, and deadly to walk upon. Snakes, bloodsuckers, leeches, and tropical fevers can kill you in a couple of days. The natives is cannibals often as not.
As soon as we passed through the Straits of Sunda we bore north, toward the Philippines, and I got testier by the hour.
The Filipinos, like the Cubans, had looked to us for aid, and after the Spaniards was thrown out we stayed; they had not fought their bloody war to change one set of conquerors for another.
Cuba would have been hell to administer, and there was enough common sense in Congress to avoid annexing that one, but the Philippines was a thousand times worse and far away and so the damned fools thought it was practical.
I never have had much use for my government or any other, because they are forever buying a bad horse and commanding me to break it.