Authors: Wilbur Smith
‘Less than sixty miles to GuBulawayo,’ Jan Cheroot murmured. ‘It’s taken us more than thirty years – but now at last I feel we are coming home.’
‘I have bought up almost forty land grants,’ Zouga agreed. ‘That is nearly a quarter of a million acres. Yes, Jan Cheroot, we are coming home at last. By God, it’s been a
long, hard road, though, from the pit of Kimberley mine to the Zambezi—’ Zouga broke off and listened. There had been a faint cry, almost like a night bird, from beyond the laager.
‘The Mashona,’ Jan Cheroot grunted. ‘The general should have let them stay in the laager.’
During the slow trek up from Iron Mine Hill, many small groups of Mashona had come to the wagons, begging protection from the assembling Matabele. They knew from bitter experience what to expect
when the impis swept across the land in battle array.
‘The general could not take that chance.’ Zouga shook his head. ‘There may be Matabele spies amongst them, he has to guard against treachery.’
Mungo St John had ordered the refugees to keep clear of the laager, and now there were three of four hundred, mostly black women and children, camped amongst the thorn trees on the river bank,
five hundred yards from the nearest wagon.
Zouga lifted the coffee pot from the coals and poured the steaming black brew into his mug, then he cocked his head again to listen. There was a faint hubbub, a distant chorus of shrieks and
shouts from the direction of the river. With the mug in his hand Zouga strolled across to the nearest wagon in the square, and climbed up onto the disselboom. He peered out of the laager, towards
the river.
The open expanse of flat clay was ghostly pale in the starlight, and the treeline beyond it was solid blackness. There was nothing to be seen – except – he blinked his eyes rapidly,
for they were playing him false. Nothing, except the blackness of the treeline seemed to be closer, the blackness was spreading towards the laager across the pale clay, like spilled oil or a pool
of blood.
Now there was a sound, a rustle like locust wings when the swarms pass overhead, and the engulfing blackness was coming closer, with eerie swiftness.
At that moment another sky-rocket went swooshing up into the night sky, and when it burst, it flooded the pan with a soft, pink light and Zouga dropped the mug of steaming coffee.
The earth was black with the Matabele horde. It swept like a black tide towards the wagons, rank upon rank of great oval shields, and the assegais twinkled in the reflection of the rocket
flare.
Zouga pulled the pistol from its holster, and fired towards the racing black wall of shields.
‘Stand to your guns,’ he bellowed, the heavy revolver bouncing and crashing in his fist. ‘The Matabele are coming! Stand to your guns.’ And from the black tide swelled a
sound like a swarm of bees when the hive is overturned.
The hammer of Zouga’s revolver clicked on a spent cartridge, and he jumped down from the disselboom and raced down the line of wagons to where the nearest Maxim was emplaced.
Throughout the laager there was a rush of bodies and the shouts of frightened men running to their posts, and as Zouga reached the corner of the square, the machine-gunner came stumbling out
from his bed under a wagon body. His face was a pale blob, and his hair was hanging into his eyes. He was in stockinged feet and his braces dangled down his legs as he hitched his breeches and
plumped himself down on the little seat that was built onto the rear leg of the Maxim tripod.
His number two loader was nowhere to be seen, perhaps lost in the milling confusion of newly-awakened bodies, so Zouga stuffed the revolver into his belt and dropped upon his knees beside the
ungainly weapon. He yanked the top off the ammunition box and lifted out the first length of the canvas belt.
‘Good-oh, mate!’ muttered the gunner, as Zouga lifted the shutter in the side of the breech and passed the brass tag loader of the belt through the block.
‘Ready! Load one!’ he snapped, and the gunner jerked back the crank handle on the opposite side of the block and let it fly home, and the gib at the top of the extractor gripped the
first round.
The spears were drumming on the rawhide shields now, and the deep humming chorus of the running warriors was almost deafening. They could only be yards from the barricade of wagons, but Zouga
did not look up. He concentrated all his attention on the intricate task of loading the Maxim.
‘Load two!’ The gunner cranked again, and the feed block clattered. Zouga jerked the brass tag leader and the gunner let the handle fly back the second time. The first round shot
smoothly into the breech.
‘Loaded and cocked!’ Zouga said, and tapped the gunner on the shoulder. Now they both looked up. The front rank of shields and war plumes seemed to curl over where they squatted
beside the weapon, like a wave breaking on a beach.
It was the moment of the ‘closing in’ that the
amadoda
loved and lived for, already the shields were going up on high to free the spear arms and the steel rasped as the
blades were cleared for the stabbing.
The joyous roar of the killing chant sundered the night; they were at the wagons, breaking into the laager, and the gunner sat stiffly upright with the gun between his knees and both hands on
the traversing handles. He hooked his fingers through the rings of the safety guard, and as it lifted, he pressed his thumbs down on the chequered firing button.
The muzzle was almost touching the belly of a tall plumed warrior coming in between the wagons when the thick barrel shuddered, and a bright bar of flickering light sprang from the muzzle and
the hammering clatter dinned upon Zouga’s eardrums. It sounded as though a giant was drawing a steel bar horizontally across a sheet of corrugated iron, and miraculously the warrior was blown
away.
The gunner traversed the Maxim back and forth, like a meticulous housewife sweeping a dusty floor, and the continuous muzzle flashes lit the open clay pan with a dancing unearthly light.
The black tide of Matabele was no longer advancing; it stood static in front of the wagons; and though its crest foamed with dancing plumes and the shields that formed the body of the wave
heaved and clattered and tumbled, they came no closer. They were dammed by the stroking, flickering bar of light that sprang from the Maxim gun. The solid stream of bullets played like a jet of
water from a firehose upon them, and as each of the chanting warriors came racing up, he died on the same spot as the man in front of him had died, and he fell upon his corpse, while another
warrior appeared in the space he had left, and the gun swung back, hammering and jerking, and that man went down, his shield clattering on the baked clay of the pan and the flash of the gun
reflected from the burnished steel of his assegai as it went spinning from his nerveless hand.
All around the square the Maxims ripped and roared, and six hundred repeating rifles underscored that hellish chorus. The air was blue with gunsmoke, and the reek of cordite burned the throats
of the troopers and made their eyes run, so that they seemed to be weeping for the terrible butchery in which they were engaged.
Still the Matabele came on, though now they had to clamber over a shapeless barricade of their own dead, and the gunner beside Zouga lifted his thumbs from the button trigger and twirled the
elevation wheel of the Maxim, lifting the muzzle an inch so as to keep the fire on the belly line of the warriors as they climbed over the mounds of corpses.
Then once again the gun fluttered and roared, the glossy black bodies jerked and twitched and bucked as the stream of bullets tore into them.
Still the Matabele came on.
‘By God, will they never stop!’ yelled the gunner. The muzzle of the gun glowed cherry red, like a horseshoe fresh from the forge, and the steam from the water jacket whistled
shrilly as the coolant boiled. The bright brass cases spewed from the extractor; they pinged and pattered against the iron-shod wheel of the wagon and formed a glittering mound beneath it.
‘Empty gun!’ Zouga yelled, as the end of the belt whipped into the clattering breech. They had been firing for less than sixty seconds, and the case of five hundred belted cartridges
was empty.
Zouga kicked it aside and dragged up a fresh case, and the Matabele surged towards the silent gun.
‘Ready, load one!’ Zouga yelled.
‘Load two!’ They were swarming into the gap between the wagons.
‘Loaded and cocked!’ And once again that fluttering beat like the wings of a dark angel dulled their senses, and the barrel swung back and forth, back and forth, washing them away
into the darkness.
‘They’re running,’ shouted the gunner. ‘Look at them run!’
In front of the wagons lay nothing but the piles of bodies. Here and there a dying man made feeble little movements, groping for a lost assegai or trying to staunch one of the awful holes in his
flesh with fumbling fingers.
Beyond the massed corpses, the wounded and maimed were dragging themselves back towards the treeline, leaving dark wet smears on the clay. One of them was on his feet, staggering in aimless
circles, using both hands to hold his bulging entrails from falling out of the open pouch of his belly. The Maxim had gutted him like a fish.
Beyond the trees the sky was a marvellous shade of ashes of roses, and the clouds were picked out in smoking scarlets and pipings of pale gold as the dawn came up in silent fury over the reeking
field.
‘Them black bastards have had enough.’ The Maxim gunner giggled with mirthless, nervous reaction to that glimpse that he had just had into hell itself.
‘They’ll be back,’ said Zouga quietly, as he dragged up another case of belted ammunition and knocked off the lid.
‘You did all right, mate,’ the gunner giggled again, staring with wide horrified eyes at the piles of dead.
‘Refill the water in your condenser, soldier,’ Zouga ordered him. ‘The gun’s over-heating, you’ll have a jam when the next wave hits.’
‘Sir!’ The gunner realized suddenly who Zouga was. ‘Sorry, sir.’
‘Here is your loader.’ The number two came up breathlessly. He was a fresh-faced lad, curly-headed and pink-cheeked. He looked more like a choirboy than a machine-gunner.
‘Where were you, trooper?’ Zouga demanded.
‘Checking the horses, sir. It was all over so quickly.’
‘Listen!’ Zouga ordered, as the boy took his place at the gun.
From the treeline, across the bloodied clay pan, came the sound of singing – deep and sonorous in the dawn. It was the praise song of the
‘Moles-who-burrow-under-a-mountain’.
‘Stand to your gun, trooper,’ Zouga ordered. ‘It’s not over yet.’ And he turned on his heel and went striding down the line of wagons, reloading the revolver from
his belt as he went.
S
inging, Bazo strode down the squatting lines of his impi, and they sang with him.
He had held their shattered ranks just beyond the edge of the treeline as they came streaming back from the square of wagons. They were re-grouped now, singing as they screwed their courage for
the next assault. What remained of Manonda’s impi was mingled with his. They had been in the first wave of the attack, and very few of them were left.
Suddenly there was a great rushing sound in the air above the tree tops, like the onrush of the first wild storm of summer. Then in the midst of the squatting ranks a tall column of smoke and
dust and flame sprang into the air, and the bodies of men were flung high with it.
‘Kill the smoke devil,’ somebody screamed, and another shell burst amongst them, and another, leaping fountains of smoke and flame; and the maddened warriors fired their ancient
Martini-Henry rifles at these smoke devils, killing and wounding their comrades on the far side.
‘They are not devils,’ shouted Bazo, but his voice was lost in the barrage of artillery fire, and the pandemonium of warriors trying to defend themselves against something they did
not understand.
‘Come!’ Bazo bellowed. There was only one way to bring them under control again.
‘To the wagons. Forward to the wagons.’ And those close enough to hear him followed, and the others, seeing them go, went bounding after them. They came out of the treeline in a
swarm, and the other shattered impis heard the war chant go up, and turned again back onto the open pan of pale grey clay – and immediately that terrible clattering din, like the laughter of
maniacs, began again and the air was filled with the flute and crack of a thousand whiplashes.
‘T
hey are coming again,’ Zouga said quietly, almost to himself. ‘This is the fifth time.’
‘It’s madness.’ Mungo St John murmured, as the racing ranks came out of the trees and over the lip of the river bank, their plumes seething like the surface of boiling milk as
they came onto the guns.
The field guns were depressed to the limit of their travel, the fuses screwed down to their shortest range, and the shrapnel bursts were strangely beautiful in the morning sky, popping open like
pods of new cotton, shot through with pretty red fire.
The storm of small-arms fire was like the monsoon rains beating on an iron roof, and as the impis came into the drifting banks of gunsmoke, the dense ranks thinned out, and lost momentum, like a
wave sliding up a steep beach.
Once again the wave faltered, and just short of the wagons it stopped, hesitated and then was going back, and the storm of gunfire continued long after the last of them had disappeared amongst
the trees. In a kind of insensate fury the Maxim bullets tore wet white slabs of bark off the tree trunks, and then one after the other fell silent.
Standing beside Zouga, Dr Jameson scrubbed his hands together gleefully. ‘It’s all over. Their impis are destroyed, shattered, blown away. It’s better than we could ever have
hoped for. Tell me, St John, as a military man, what do you estimate their losses to be so far?’
Mungo St John considered the question seriously, climbing up onto one of the wagons the better to survey the field, ignoring the spattering of Martini-Henry rifle fire from the edge of the
treeline where a few Matabele snipers were making very poor practice; convinced that raising their sights to the maximum made the bullets more powerful, most of their fire crackled high over the
heads of the men manning the wagons.