1999 - Ladysmith (3 page)

“What you think is not the point,” said Mr Kiernan, glowering. “Come on, what do you want?”

“I’ll have a gin, if I may.” He smiled at Bella. “Tom Barnes, Green Horse.”

Like your eyes, Bella said to herself.

“I’ll deal with you later,” her father said to her, as if he knew her train of thought, “and I’ll please you, sir, not to exchange pleasantries with my staff.” Mr Kiernan pushed the gin across the bar to the soldier, and turned to his daughter, pointing at the floor. “Take that crate of empties down to the cellar. And bring up a full one while you’re about it.”

“Don’t be hard on her, sir,” Bella heard the soldier say as she went out. He seemed a decent fellow, she thought, as she struggled down the cellar steps with the crate. Though really it would have been better if he had kept quiet.

The fellow in question returned to his table. Tom Barnes was sitting with four war correspondents. They were quenching their thirst after a tour, having ridden down the Helpmakaar road and stopped for a breather on Pound Plateau. The journalists hadn’t had permission for the scouting expedition and now he had been assigned by the censor’s office to keep an eye on them. This was a lucky chance since it meant he got a night out. Having ignored him at first, they were now—the quartet comprising George Steevens of the
Mail
, Henry Nevinson of the
Daily Chronicle
, Donald MacDonald of the Melbourne
Argus
and William Maud, the
Graphic’s
‘special artist’—quizzing him about the army’s readiness for the impending war. In particular, Nevinson—a bearded, elegant character—was worried that the British had pushed up too far from the Cape.

“Look,” he said, cupping his glass with his hand. “I was up in Pretoria earlier this month. I saw it. The Boers may be ragged and disorganized but they’ve quite simply got more men than us—nearly twice as many. Twenty thousand to our ten. And we don’t know the land so well. They do, and they are full of passion too. I saw their General Joubert when I was up there, and do you know what the first thing he said to me was?”

“What?” queried Maud, on behalf of all.

“He said: The heart of my soul is bloody with sorrow.”

“Typical Boer rhetoric,” sniffed MacDonald, lighting his pipe.

“No, it’s good,” countered Maud. “I can see it as a caption.”

“Just for effect,” said MacDonald. “You shouldn’t have been taken in.”

“On the contrary,” exclaimed Nevinson. “He meant it. Joubert was one of the ones who desperately wanted peace. He feels about this in a way that we don’t, and that passion, conveyed to his troops if it comes to war, could prove dangerous.”

“Passion doesn’t always win a war,” said Steevens. “Guns and food, that’s what you need.”

“Oh come on. Passion is necessary too,” said Nevinson. “Absolutely.”

“Not if you’re an Englishman. There is a simple argument to it. If we win, it will be through brute force and logistics. If they win, it will, as you would say, be through passion. For although I’ve only made a sketchy study of the Boer character, I have learned one thing about that race.”

“What’s that, then?” said MacDonald.

“That they are a people hard to arouse, but harder to subdue.”

Tom Barnes took a drink and looked at the men around him. They all seemed a little foolish. None had yet quite got to grips with the realities of ‘the coming scrap’, as it was now known. From the tiny ration of water from the pumps, the dysentery and enteric, the hot sun beating down on your head or, if you were off duty, the breathless haze of your tent, to the white ants and flies on everything—your food, your tobacco, your writing paper, even your underclothes—it was no picnic. Not to mention the dust in your mouth and in the workings of your fob-watch, or the likelihood of getting shot at by an army of men who never showed themselves and who saw warfare in the same light that they saw hunting antelope. Stalking was the Boer way, the old hands from Majuba said, which was why all the training the British cavalry were doing—charges with lances, for God’s sake—seemed pretty pointless; and all the training the infantry had been doing—marching forward in close order, easy to pick off—totally so. He had tried to describe all this from India in a letter to Perry, his younger brother, once he’d heard that he, too, had signed up and was headed for the Cape: the sheer drudgery of a lot of soldiering—young lieutenants shouting at you or having you flogged, blisters on your feet, boils on your thighs, food not fit for dogs…

He had the idea that Perry—two years his junior—believed that soldiering was a bit like the ferreting expeditions they had gone in for on the farm when they were younger: an adventure, a lark with a prize, a bloody one to be held up by its hind legs and presented to Ma for skinning when you got home. The fact is, you were more like rabbit on the battlefield than ferret or ferreter. That was what he had said to Lizzie, their sister, in another letter—written on board the
Lindula
, en route from Princes Dock, Bombay, to Durban—in a last-ditch attempt to get her to persuade Perry to think again. He couldn’t forgive himself the possibility of his younger brother being killed because Perry wanted to imitate him, as he had done all his life.

Thought of these letters reminded him that he hadn’t written home recently, something he had done religiously in India. There was the voyage to cover, for instance, and the medical and veterinary inspections beforehand. How there had been a case of anthrax at Deolali, and B and C

Squadrons had had to be left behind. How he himself had had to apply for two replacement horses on the way, one cast from the ship, lame in two feet, the other injured in the train from Durban to Ladysmith, having slipped on the iron floor of the truck after heavy rain.

He looked about him at the members of the press. They were still talking about passion. It seemed to him—mindful as he was that they were scholars and he was only the son of a farmer—an inappropriate word to describe fighting. He had seen quite a bit (they’d been at Sialkot, in the Punjab), even if it was only against the curly-slippered armies of bedizened maharajas. The Indians didn’t have Mausers, as Brother Boer was known to have, just scimitars and muzzle-loading muskets. Still, he had seen them make some hot wounds in men he had liked to call friends. But passion, no: that word made him think of women. In particular it made him think of the slender, crop-haired girl at the bar. He looked down at his gin. It was half full. That could be quickly remedied.

Bella saw the young man drain his glass, standing up in the same movement, and moved herself into a position along the bar where he’d necessarily come towards her rather than Jane or, Lord preserve us, their father. She needn’t have bothered. The trooper, his green eyes twinkling, was making a beeline for her. So, unfortunately, was Jane. Her own admirer, Gunner Foster of the Naval Brigade, had returned to his table, slightly worse for the wear of too many whisky-sodas—bought, Bella had said, on account of love rather than necessity.

“I meant what I said about your hair,” said Tom to Bella, putting both his elbows on the bar. “It’s very bold.”

“You’d better keep quiet. Our father will hear you,” said Jane, bustling up beside her.

“Same again?” Bella asked breezily, flashing her a hard look.

Tom looked at Jane. “You’re sisters then?” He held up his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Ah well, it’s nothing but the truth. You’ve both got bold hair!”

“What’ll you have?” said Bella, her tone a little less friendly. “Another gin?”

“I think I’ll switch to beer,” he said, nodding his head in mock seriousness. “I’ve got a bit of a dry throat. A Castle, if you please, miss.”

T
he Biographer sat on the deck of the
Dunottar Castle
, watching them put it in. Whenever the hoists rose there was a din of ironwork gears, overlying the harsher, continual scrape of steel on stone. He was wearing a pair of black boots, and between his toecaps—his crossed feet were resting on the glossy lower bar of the balcony railings—he could see the stokers. They were black, too, stripped to the waist and sweating as they shovelled away, under the sunshine of Madeira. For the island was an Admiralty coaling station in those days.

He reached into the pocket of his white canvas jacket and removed a square brass lighter. The smoke danced in front of his sunburned face. In spite of the grime that covered them, he could recognize some of the men working on the dock. That was Perry Barnes there, the young Warwickshire farrier, clipping horses on the quayside next to the marine office. A long line of animals were waiting for his attentions, having come down from hill pasture, to which they had been taken from the ship for grazing. He and the farrier had talked on the train to Southampton, finding common cause in their Midlands background. The Biographer watched as another horse was brought forward, and the curly-haired, good-looking Barnes took it in hand.

Lucky boy, to have escaped coaling duty. Officers as well as men had been drafted in to help the regular stokers, such was the urgency of the
Dunnotar’s
journey. Ships of the Castle Line ate coal like monsters on a normal run to the Cape, but this time it was different. Speed was of the essence. The Army Corps (of which this was only the advance guard) had to get to South Africa as soon as possible. The ultimatum of President Kruger—demanding, amongst other things, withdrawal of British troops from the Transvaal borders—had expired, and a state of war existed between the Empire and the Transvaal Republic. For months the two sides had been negotiating, but that time was now over. As Kruger had reportedly said to Milner, the High Commissioner, before walking out to his carriage, “What you really want is my country.” It was true. Milner’s despatches were warlike and—although he was far more prudent—the Secretary of State for the Colonies Joe Chamberlain’s use of words like ‘suzerainty’ in Parliament had enraged Kruger and his parliament, the Raad.

The Biographer wondered where it was all leading, now that negotiations had come to nothing. It was true that an air of great responsibility hung over some of the officers and men on board. Others, sadly, were prone to giving out loud cries for vengeance for the battle of Majuba, where the British had suffered a heavy defeat and four hundred casualties at the hands of the Boers, eighteen years before. There was a naked ferocity about these cries, one that turned to empty words the boasted progress and civilization that were said to be the spirit of the age.

The Biographer had watched this kind of thing during his dinners on board in the junior officers’ mess: some of them behaved like oafs when they were drunk. He never said anything—it wouldn’t do to seem a fish out of water amongst military men…Did they think him effeminate, he wondered? There was a story about a correspondent being debagged by soldiers while covering the war in the Sudan, just because he wore his hair fashionably long. Some of the other correspondents, like Churchill and Atkins, had managed to get themselves a place at the Captain’s table with Buller’s staff, but the Biographer had not been admitted to this inner circle. He suspected it was because his type of journalism was not taken seriously. Some said it was unnatural to fix life’s transitory moments in the way that he did.

Well, time would tell whose record of Buller’s expedition was the most lasting. Already the Biographer had caught him—General Sir Redvers Buller, VC—on still plates, caught the heavy moustache, the Crombie with a buttonhole of violets, the felt hat, the stolid figure and big, kindly face. He had also made a number of moving Biographs of Buller and his staff, and of various other scenes concerning the Advance Guard’s entrainment for Southampton and embarkation for South Africa. He was particularly proud of a description of the crowds on the platform at Waterloo, civilians and soldiers in a mêlée of uniforms, suits and dresses, all singing and shouting and leaning out of the train windows waving hats, and then, finally—as they’d pulled out with a hoot and a jolt and a puff of steam—what John Atkins had remarked upon, “the long frieze of faces drawn past one’s carriage.” Atkins was the
Manchester Guardian
correspondent, who was allowed upstairs with the others. A good man.

To the Biographer’s eye, if not his lens, there had been among those faces many suddenly saddened by an intimation of the greater loss that war might bring. But the grief-stricken ones and the glad, the womenfolk wise and foolish, and the double-chinned Cockney porters leaning on their trolleys—all of them had merged into one as the train picked up speed. The Biographer had been worried that his machine would produce nothing but a blur in trying to record this final part of the scene; but all its mysteries had not yet been revealed, and the answer would not be known until his packet of plates and film reached London and his colleagues at the Biograph Company. Sometimes, in any case, he thought the image came out better when shrouded in gauziness.

One way or another, he hoped that in that packet would be pictures of the train journey—attempts to catch, as they skimmed past, gleaming pastures and hedgerows full of birds which, like the locomotive’s human cargo, would be in Africa that winter. Pictures, too, of the ordinary soldiers, sat among kitbags and clouds of tobacco. If only he had been able to portray their chat as well, their lively humour and fatalistic cracks. As if to compensate, he had used more film than he need have done, spun it out, just as the train had spun across its ringing web of steel through the down-land and forest of Surrey and Hampshire—to Southampton.

At Southampton Water the
Castle
had awaited them, a towering vessel, almost too big for his lens. There was a medieval quality to the scene, one most appropriate to the ship’s white-painted name (over that too his lens had panned). The mass of people and the little boats nosing about under the quay walls had been like traders or importunate beggars on the banks of a moat, the busy gangplank serving as a drawbridge. For a while there had been a stable little world there on the quayside: a large crowd of cheering patriots standing, or perched on roofs and dock-side machinery, singing ‘Rule Britannia’ and ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’. Then the tin trunks and weapons and officers’ valises had gone up, followed by Buller’s stallions, Ironmonger and Biffin, and all the other horses. Finally, the moment for departure had come and, in the month of October at the end of a century, the foghorn had blooped and the great prow had ranged forward.