The Burning Shore (30 page)

However, Jannie Smuts sent this remarkable man a message: Call out your commando, Oom Koen, and ride with me. The reply was immediate. Ja my old friend, we are mounted and ready to ride, but who do we fight, Germany or England? So they lost Brits to the Unionists.

Then Koos De La Rey, travelling to a final meeting with Jannie Smuts at which he would make his decision, ran into a police roadblock outside Pretoria and instructed his chauffeur to drive through it. The police marksmen shot him in the head. So they lost De La Rey.

Of course, Jannie Smuts, that cold, crafty devil, had an excuse. He said that the roadblock had been ordered to prevent the escape of the notorious band of bank robbers, the Foster gang, from the area, and that the police had opened fire on a mistaken identity. However, the rebels knew better. Lothar’s father had wept openly when they received the news of his brother’s murder, and they had known that there was no turning back, no further chance for parley, they would have to carry the land at rifle-point.

The plan was for all the rebel commandos to join up with Maritz on the Orange river, but they had underestimated the new mobility of the forces against them, afforded by the petrol-driven motor car. They had forgotten also that Botha and Smuts had long ago proved themselves the most able of all the Boer generals. When at last they moved, these two moved with the deadly speed of angry mambas.

They caught De Wet at Mushroom Valley and smashed his commando with artillery and machine- guns. There gu were terrible casualties, and De Wet fled into the Kalah ari, pursued by Koen Brits and a motorized column that captured him at Waterburg in the desert.

Then the Unionists swung back and engaged Beyers and his commando near Rustenberg. Once the battle was lost Beyers tried to escape by swimming the flooded Vaal river. His boot-laces became entangled and they found his body three days later on the bank downstream.

On the Orange river, Lothar and his father waited for the inevitable onslaught, but bad news reached them before the Unionists did.

The English Admiral, Sir Doveton Sturdee, had intercepted Von Spee at the Falkland Islands, and sunk his great cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau and the rest of his squadron with only ten British seamen killed. The rebels hope of succour had gone down with the German fleet.

Still they fought doggedly when the Unionists came, but it was in vain. Lothar’s father took a bullet through the gut, and Lothar carried him off the field and tried to get him back across the desert to Windhoek where Christina could nurse him. It was five hundred miles of terrible going through the waterless wastes. The old man’s pain was so fierce that Lothar wept for him, and the wound was contaminated by the contents of his perforated intestines and mortified so that the stench brought the hyenas howling around the camp at night.

But he was a tough old man and it took him many days to die.

Promise me, my son, he demanded with his last breath that stank of death, promise me that the war with the English will never end. I promise you, Father. Lothar leaned over him to kiss his cheek, and the old man smiled and closed his eyes.

Lothar buried him under a camelthorn tree in the wilderness; he buried him deeply so that the hyena would not smell him and dig him up. Then he rode on home to Windhoek.

Colonel Franke, the German commander, recognized Lothar’s value, and asked him to raise a levy of scouts.

Lothar assembled a small band of hardy Boers, German settlers, Bondelswart Hottentots and black tribesmen, and took them out into the desert to await the invasion of Unionist troops.

Smuts and Botha came with 45,000 men and landed at Swakopmund and Ldderitzhucht. From there they drove into the interior, employing their usual tactics, lightning forced marches, often without water for great distances, double-pronged attacks and encircling movements, using the newfangled petrol-driven motor cars the same way they had used horses during the Boer War. Against this multitude Franke had 8,ooo German troops to defend a territory of over 300,000 square miles with a 1,000-mile coastline.

Lothar and his scouts fought the Unionists with their own tactics, poisoning the water-holes ahead of the Union troops, dynamiting the railway lines, hooking around them to attack their supply lines, setting ambushes and landmines, raiding at night and at dawn, driving off the horses, pushing his scouts to even their far borders of endurance.

It was all unavailing. Botha and Smuts caught the tiny German army between them, and with a casuality list of only 5 3o dead and wounded exacted an unconditional surrender from Colonel Franke, but not from Lothar De La Rey. To honour the promise he had made to his father, he took what remained of his band of scouts northwards into the dreaded kakao veld to continue the struggle.

Lothar’s mother, Christina, and his wife and child went into the internment camp for German nationals that was set up by the Unionists at Windhoek, and there all three of them died.

They died in a typhoid epidemic, but Lothar De La Rey knew who was ultimately to blame for their deaths, and in the desert he cherished and nourished his hatred, for it was all that he had left. His family was slain by the English and his estates seized and confiscated. Hatred was the fuel that drove him forward.

He was thinking of his murdered family now as he stood at his horse’s head on the crest of one of the high dunes that overlooked the green Atlantic Ocean where the Benguela current steamed in the early sunlight.

His mother’s face seemed to rise out of the twisting fog banks before him. She had been a beautiful woman. Tall and statuesque, with thick blonde hair that hung to her knees when she brushed it out, but which she wore twisted into thick plaited golden ropes on top of her head to enhance her height. Her eyes had been golden also, with the direct cold gaze of a leopardess.

She could sing like one of the Valkyries from Wagner, and she had passed on to Lothar her love of music and learning and art. She had passed on to him also her finc looks, classical Teutonic features, and the dense curls that now hung to his shoulders from under the wide terai hat with the waving bunch of ostrich feathers stuck jauntily in the puggaree. Like Christina’s, his hair was the colour of newly minted bronze, but his eyebrows were thick and dark over the golden leopard eyes that were now probing the silver mists of the Benguela.

The beauty of the scene moved Lothar the way that music could; like the violins playing Mozart, it induced in him the same feeling of mystic melancholy at the centre of his soul. The sea was green and still, not a ripple spoiled its velvety sheen. The low and gentle sound of the ocean swelled and subsided like the breathing of all creation. Yet along the shoreline the dense growth of dark sea-kelp absorbed the sea’s motion and there was no break of white water. The kelp beds danced a slow, graceful minuet, bowing and undulating to the rhythm of the ocean.

The horns of the bay were armed with rock, split into geometric shapes and streaked white with the droppings of the seabirds and seals that basked upon them. The coats of the seals glowed in the mist-filtered sunlight, and their weird honking cries carried on the windless air to where Lothar stood on the crest of the dune high above them.

In the throat of the bay the rock gave way to tawny, lion-coloured beach, and behind the first dune was trapped a wide lagoon hemmed in by nodding reedbeds, the only green in this landscape. In its shallow waters there waded troops of long-legged flamingo. The marvelous pink of their massed formations burned like unearthly fire, drawing Lothar’s gaze away from his search of the sea.

The flamingo were not the only birds upon the lagoon.

There were troops of pelican and white egrets, solitary blue herons and a legion of smaller long-legged waders foraging the food-rich waters.

The dunes upon which Lothar waited rose like the crested back of a monstrous serpent, writhing and twisting along the shoreline, rising five hundred feet and more against the misty sky, their restless, ever-changing bulk sculptured by the sea wind into soft plastic coils and knife-sharp peaks.

Suddenly, far out on the sea there was a dark boil of movement, and the silk green surface changed to the colour of gunmetal. Lothar felt the jump of his nerves and the race of anticipation through his veins as his gaze darted to it. Was this what he had waited and kept vigil for all these weary weeks? He lifted the binoculars that hung upon his chest, and felt the slide of disappointment.

What he had seen was merely a shoal of fish, but what a shoal! The tip-top of the living mass dimpled the surface, but as he watched, the rest of the shoal rose to feed on the rich green plankton and the commotion spread out until as far as he could see, to the edge of the fog banks three miles out; the ocean seethed and boiled with life. It was a shoal of pilchards five miles across, each individual only as long as a man’s hand, but in their countless millions generating the power to move the ocean.

Over this mighty multitude, the yellow-headed gannets and hysterical gulls shrieked and wheeled and plunged, their bodies kicking up white puffs of spray as they hit the water. Squadrons of seals charged back and forth, like the cavalry of the sea, breaking the water white as they gorged on the silver masses, and through this gluttonous chaos, the triangular fins of the great sharks passed with the stately motion of tall sailing ships.

For an hour Lothar watched in wonder, and then abruptly, as though at a signal, the entire living mass sounded, and within minutes the stillness descended over the ocean again. The only movement was the gentle swell of waters and the soft advance and retreat of the silver fog banks under the watery sun.

Lothar hobbled his horse, took a book from his saddlebag and settled on the warm sand. Every few minutes he raised his eyes from the page, but the hours wore away and at last he stood and stretched and went to his horse, his fruitless vigil ended for another day. With one foot in the stirrup, he paused and made a last careful survey of the seascape smudged to bloody carnelian and dull brass by the sunset.

Then, even as he watched, the sea opened before his eyes, and out of it rose an enormous dark shape, in the image of Leviathan, but greater than any living denizen of the oceans. Shining with wetness, gleaming water streaming from its decks and steel sides, it wallowed upon the surface.

At last! Lothar shouted with excitement and relief. I thought they would never come. He stared avidly through his binoculars at the long sinister black vessel. He saw the encrustations of barnacle and weed, that fouled the hull. She had been long at sea, and battered by the elements. On the tall conning tower her registration numerals were almost obliterated. U-32.Lothar read them with difficulty, and then his attention was diverted by activity on the submarine’s foredeck.

From one of the hatches a gun team swarmed out and ran forward to man the quick-firing cannon near the bows. They were taking no chances. Lothar saw the weapon traverse towards him, ready to reply to any hostile gesture from the shore. On the conning tower human heads appeared, and he saw binoculars trained towards him.

Hastily Lothar found the signal rocket in his saddlebag. Its glowing red fireball arced out over the sea, and was answered immediately by a rocket from the submarine hurling skyward on a tail of smoke.

Lothar flung himself on to the back of his mount and pushed him over the edge of the dune. They went sliding down, the horse squatting on its haunches and bringing down a slipping, hissing cascade of sand around them.

At the bottom of the dune Lothar gathered his mount and they went flying across the hard damp beach, with Lothar waving his hat, standing in the stirrups and shouting with laughter. He rode into the camp at the edge of the lagoon and sprang from the saddle. He ran from one of the crude shelters of driftwood and canvas to the next, who had come intimately to understand death and fear down there in the dark and secret depths. You have had a successful cruise, Kapitiin? One hundred and twenty-six days at sea and twentysix thousand tons of enemy shipping, the submariner nodded.

With God’s help, another twenty-six thousand tons, Lothar suggested.

With God’s help, and your fuel oil, the captain agreed, and glanced down at the deck where the first drums were being swayed aboard. Then he looked back at Lothar. You have torpedoes? he asked anxiously.

Content yourself, Lothar reassured him. The torpedoes are ready, but I thought it prudent to refuel before rearming. Of course. Neither of them had to mention the consequence of the U-boat, with her tanks empty, being caught against a hostile shore by an English warship.

I still have a little schnapps, the captain changed the subject, my officers and I would be honoured. As Lothar descended the steel ladder into the submarine’s interior, he felt his gorge rise.

The stench was a solid thing, so that he wondered that any man could endure it more than a few minutes. It was the smell of sixty men living in a confined space for months on end, living without sunlight or fresh air, without the means of washing their bodies or their clothing. It was the smell of pervading damp and of the fungus that turned their uniforms green and rotted the cloth off their bodies, the stench of hot fuel oil and bilges, of greasy food and the sickly sweat of fear, the clinging odour of bedding that had been slept in for I26 days and nights, of socks and boots that were never changed and the reek of the sewage buckets which could only be emptied once every twenty four hours.

Lothar hid his revulsion and clicked his heels and bowed when the captain introduced his junior officers.

The overhead deck was so low that Lothar had to hunch his head down on his shoulders, and the space between the bulkheads was so narrow that two men were forced to turn sideways to pass each other. He tried to imagine living in these conditions and found his face beading with cold sweat.

Do you have any intelligence of enemy shipping, Herr De La Rey? The captain poured a tiny measure of schnapps into each of the crystal glasses and sighed when the last drop fell from the bottle.