1999 - Ladysmith (13 page)

In the morning she woke not to the sound of shellfire but to the glow of the Natal sunshine which, on good days, would strengthen until noon, when even the scorpions would decide that shade must be found. The sun, and the sight of the gleaming, though much depleted, rows of vegetables in the kitchen garden—as she dressed, she could see the Zulu woman gathering produce for the day’s meals—filled her with hope and excitement, erasing the previous day’s worries and the night’s ghastly dream. As she ate her breakfast, she determined that she would go over to Tom’s camp and tell him that she did want to see him after all. She asked Jane if she would come with her.

“Are you sure it’s sensible?” queried her sister. “It might cause a bit of a stir, two young women going into an army camp.”

“We’ll take them some food,” said Bella, thinking of Nandi among the vegetables.

“Father won’t like it.”

“He won’t miss a few potatoes.”

So it was that the two Kiernan sisters, Bella carrying a basket on her arm, made their way over to Green Horse Valley. They approached the lines of white bell tents with some trepidation, inquiring after Trooper Barnes from a young, fresh-faced sentry. Sitting on a fallen tree at the perimeter, he couldn’t have been more than seventeen.

“Barnes? He’s one of Lieutenant Norris’s men, isn’t he? I think they are out on a job, but his tent’s in line seven. What you got in there, ladies?”

With a twinkle in her eye, Bella lifted back the muslin covering of her basket.

“Potatoes!” exclaimed the sentry-boy. “We haven’t seen much of them. Or of much else.”

His face suddenly became older, craftier. “Say, I’ve got my billy here. Want some tea?”

“I am afraid we are engaged, young man,” said Jane, with a condescending smile.

The two sisters linked arms and began to walk off.

“Wait!” shouted the boy. “At least give us a spud or two.”

“We’d better,” said Bella, rolling her eyes.

She picked a potato out of the basket and tossed it to the sentry, who—encumbered by his rifle—fluffed catching it, and then went down on his hands and knees to look for it as it rolled beneath the tree he had been sitting on. The sisters giggled, and walked on into the middle of the camp, where soldiers passed them astonished, and then lascivious looks. When they came to line seven, they stopped outside the first tent.

“Excuse me,” said Bella, loudly. “Is there anyone in there?”

A face, covered in shaving lather, poked out of the flaps. “Bloody hell!” said the face’s owner on seeing them.

“Sorry to disturb you,” said Jane, sweetly. “We are looking for Trooper Barnes’s tent.”

“Three down,” said the lather-covered man, bewildered by this female visitation.

Tom’s tent mate was just as surprised to see them. “Well! I’m afraid he’s not here. He’s on a cutting-out expedition, see. Can I give him a message?”

“We brought these,” said Bella, kneeling down in front of the tent and unpacking her basket.

“That’s a boon,” said the bewhiskered soldier. “Thank you, thank you very much, ladies.”

“Could you tell him that I called?” said Bella.

“You must be the Bella he’s been talking about.”

Bella blushed. “That’s right. Just tell him he would be welcome at the hotel.”

“I will do,” said the man. “I most certainly will.”

On the way back, the sisters met Mr Steevens, the famous correspondent, and after having introduced himself he took them up on to a bluff to watch the fighting.

“It will be safe today, as the Boers have left off shelling the town. They are training their guns on the Green Horse’s cutting-out expedition.”

He lent them his spyglass. Bella saw below her, careless of formation and galloping in an untidy ruck, a company of Green Horse, riding against the Boer lines. Shells were bursting around them in the pan of dust.

“My God,” said Bella. “They are riding right into it.”

Bella fancied she could see Tom Barnes among the riders, a little way apart along with another horseman. There were shells falling all around, like apples on a windy day. One burst between the two riders, and she gave a gasp.

“They must be killed,” she whispered to Jane, and let the glass fall to her breast. Her stomach turned at the thought of it, and then she looked again. Only smoke, down there on the plain, grey smoke and grey dust. It was hard to tell the difference.

“Who are you worrying about?” asked Steevens, who looked a little grey himself to Bella’s mind.

“We thought it might be Trooper Barnes down there,” she explained.

“Is he your beau, then?” enquired the correspondent.

He reached over for the spyglass.

“Oh no,” said Bella, a little too forcefully.

“You can’t tell at this distance,” said Steevens, his eye glued to the instrument. “Who it is, I mean. Anyway, I think they’ve got through all right, whoever they are.”

He handed the spyglass back to her. Bella looked again. The curtain of smoke and dust had lifted, and the two cavalrymen were emerging from the pall unscathed. They watched for a little longer and then, leaving Steevens on the bluff, the young women took the long road home, through Grimble’s orchard. On the way, to fill her empty basket, Bella picked some mignonette and wild roses from between the rows. She felt exhilarated. The trip to the men’s camp, the sight of battle in the spyglass, the whole siege, it was all beginning to open up inside her in an entirely unexpected way. It was quite the strangest sensation, a mood of anticipated change that affected her very nerves and fibres, its modulations humming in her toes and fingers, in her breasts and the lobes of her ears.

Some things did not change, however. When they got back home, Father was in the kitchen, supervising the preparations for that evening’s dinner. Everyone, from General White to the lowliest guest, was to have half portions, and hearing this decree Bella felt guilty about having taken the potatoes to the camp. She went to bed fearful that her father might find out that she had done so, only to have her worries exacerbated by a frightful night of shelling.

The Boers were obviously hoping to catch up on the day’s lost work.

I
n the correspondents’ cottage the following morning, the fact or otherwise of a night bombardment was disputed ground, as hotly contested as Ladysmith itself. Over breakfast, Steevens—who wasn’t feeling well—was maintaining that there had been shelling during the night.

“Thud—thud—thud—ten or a dozen, I should say.”

But his Australian colleague was having none of it. “You were dreaming. There was no shelling last night.”

“There was. Say, Nevinson, shall we run a survey in the
Lyre
on the preponderance of imaginary shellfire in these days of strife? If MacDonald is right, I’m surely not the only one suffering from this condition.”

Nevinson shrugged. “So far as the success of that paper goes, the more real shelling the better. When I took a few copies to some of the outlying troops last week, they were happy as sandboys. I think people will read anything if they’ve been shut up for a month under bombardment.”

“They do lap it up, don’t they?” said Steevens. “What do you think, though? We could write a spoof about how shellfire affects the imagination.”

“It has certainly affected yours,” said MacDonald crossly. “No shells fell last night. I’m a light sleeper, and would have woken immediately.”

“Well, last night you must have had a thick head. There was shelling, I tell you.”

Leaving them to their bickering, Nevinson got up from the table and went for a stroll. It was a beautiful, bright day and the outskirts of the town, with their fruit trees and syringas were rather pretty. One large orchard of pears, however, had been dreadfully devastated by shellfire. All over the ground were smashed branches and splinters of wood. Fallen pears lay among the broken pieces. Some were still whole, but most were bruised and pulpy. Sitting in the middle of it, on the trunk of an overturned tree, was the owner. Nevinson recognized him as William Grimble, the farmer who had spoken at the Town Hall meeting. He had a basket full of fruit at his feet, evidently having been collecting it up.

“Ah, you,” he said, a little sourly, on looking up as Nevinson entered the glade. “I hope you are going to write something down about what we townsfolk are suffering here.”

“Well, the censors don’t let me get much of that nature out. I see you’ve been under a bit of a hurricane here.”

“Nothing compared with what has happened to my other orchard. General White, in his wisdom, has ordered it chopped up for firewood.”

“That’s a blow.”

“Of course it’s a blow! But what annoys me most is how pointless the whole thing is; however many shells they throw at us the rebels will never get possession of the place. If General White wasn’t such a coward, we’d get out there and give them a hiding.”

“I’m sure he has considered that option,” said Nevinson, with a conciliatory smile. “And how many lives it would cost.”

“This grove used to bring me in £25 a year, and the other twice as much.”

“Send a bill to the Boers.”

“Send a bill to our own army more like. One hundred thousand would not compensate us for the damage British troops have wrought on this town. They have taken our houses and property and knocked them about; they have drawn Boer shells into our streets; they’re now telling me they want this fruit, my fruit, for provisions. Well, I’m going to take away as much as I can for myself. They call it martial law but to me it seems more like tyranny. I’m damn sure the Boers wouldn’t have robbed us so blindly.”

He reached out for another half-ruined pear and dropped it into the basket. “And if we do ever get out of here, I’ll wager the compensation for it all will be but one per cent of the actual damage. I’m not convinced we will, anyway. Our so-called victories don’t seem to amount to much.”

“Cheer up,” said Nevinson. “I’m sure Buller will be here soon, with a whole army. He said they would be in Pretoria within a month.”

“Did he? Well, that’s true enough. Many of them are already there—as prisoners of war!”

“Don’t you think you are being a little too pessimistic?”

“You haven’t seen as much life as I have, young man. I think we’re going to be shut up in here for quite a while. It’s no way for a mighty nation to be carrying on a war.”

Realizing that they weren’t going to see eye to eye on the matter, Nevinson smiled at him again, raised his hand slightly to say goodbye, and continued on his stroll. His nostrils were full of the smell of broken fruit. It made him hungry. The man could at least have offered him a pear, to see him on his journey.

The path wound through more orchards and then broke out into a space by the river, which it then ran alongside. The Klip took a tortuous course through the town and its environs, and the bank in parts was fairly high. It was so where he was walking, falling sharply away to the water. Here and there, poking up out of rushes and marsh grass, camel thorns struggled to gain a foothold in the inhospitable soil. Many of these bankside trees were hung with the oval, basket-like nests of weaver birds. Nevinson paused awhile, watching the small birds flit in and out of the little holes that gave entrance to their curious houses. As he watched, he realized he could hear a noise: not the birds, not the sound of the running water, nor the distant rumble of gunfire, but that of a great number of human voices, in conjunction with the kind of clanking busy-ness that betokened repetitive physical labour.

He followed in the direction of the sound until, rounding a corner, he came upon a scene that might have been out of Dante: several hundred men digging furiously at the clay bank—men of all colours and walks of life, from natives to town worthies, from lowly privates to the type of officer who, clearly, had rarely dirtied his hands in this way before. And they were dirty, all of them: many had stripped off their shirts and the red clay stuck to them like paint, giving them the warlike appearance of the American Indian.

The diggers wielded picks and spades and the like, and everywhere about lay the great stacks of wood that would be used for buttressing the caves. Nevinson recognized some familiar faces in the melee: Farquhar, the mayor, who gave him a weary smile and lifted up his spade in acknowledgement; Willie Maud, the war artist, who had exchanged his brush for a shovel; even the Greenacre boy, whom he had seen rushing about the town, was struggling to heft a pickaxe. Operations were being directed by one of the uitlander miners.

Behind the bankside fortifications were other defences: forts within forts known as sangars, that is to say circles of piled-up rocks buttressed with sand-filled mealie bags, cases of corned beef and—pity to regard—the personal bags and boxes of the soldiers. Already the white ant, servant of Joubert, was chewing his way through these.

He noticed Torres, the barber, among the diggers. Stripped to the waist, the Portuguese was throwing his spade’s edge at the red clay with such ferocity that he might have been driving a bayonet into a man’s chest. The muscles of his bare olive chest and back stood out clearly above his trousers, the legs of which were tucked into tall boots that might have been a cavalryman’s, save that they were jet-black instead of regulation brown. Although they
were
now mostly brown, or red at any rate, being covered with wild stripes of clay.

Smelling perfume beside him, Nevinson realized that he was not the only spectator. He turned, and saw standing beside him a young woman with short dark hair and the kind of light cotton dress which a rigorous eye would have deemed too informal for walking out; but this was siege time, he reflected, and all conventions were falling away.

“Hullo,” she said, smiling at him—she had bright, even teeth, which contrasted sharply with her well-tanned skin. “Come to join the troglodytes?”

“Just an observer…though I suspect we might all be down here soon.”

“I very much hope not,” she said. “I’m Bella Kiernan, by the way.”

Nevinson made an indistinct gesture, some semblance of a bow, with his head.

“I have seen you in the hotel, miss. My friend, George Steevens, mentioned that he met you yesterday.”