George winced. The cat had left a livid welt that ran obliquely from Thomas’s right shoulder to his left hip.
‘Two!’
Another blow fell.
‘Three!
‘Four!’ The welts had merged into a thick stripe.
‘Five!’
Now it was the second corporal’s turn, using his left hand.
‘Six!’ A new welt appeared on Thomas’s other shoulder.
‘Seven!’
And so it went on. After the thirteenth stroke, blood began to flow from the mangled flesh, dripping in rivulets down Thomas’s back. George felt physically sick. From the ranks arose a murmur of discontent.
‘Silence!’ roared the lieutenant.
‘Fourteen!’
‘Fifteen!’
George tried to intervene. ‘Surely he’s had enough,’ he urged Crealock. ‘Can’t you ask the general to put a stop to this?’
‘Of course I can’t.’
‘At least ask the doctor to examine him.’
‘No,’ said Crealock, tight-lipped.
‘Sixteen!’ shouted the lieutenant.
‘Seventeen!’
George turned away.
By the time the twenty-fifth and last stroke had been administered, Thomas was hanging limply by his arms, his back disfigured by a bloody ‘X’.
‘Cut him down and douse his wounds with salt water.’
George gagged. The sickly-sweet smell of blood and antiseptic was almost overpowering, and it took a while for his eyes to accustom to the gloom of the sickbay. Thomas was lying face down on a makeshift bunk, his back the colour of raw steak. George felt a surge of anger at the pointless brutality of it all. How could the most advanced nation in the world, he wondered, treat its soldiers as if they were mere beasts of burden, to be thrashed when they got out of hand? He shook his head.
‘How is he?’
‘A little feverish, which is to be expected,’ said the ship’s surgeon, his white apron stained with blood. ‘But his pulse is strong, which is the main thing.’
‘How long has he been unconscious?’
‘Since they brought him in, and he’s likely to remain that way for some time. Come back later if you need to talk.’
‘I’ll stay, if you don’t mind,’ said George, pulling up a chair.
Sitting there, staring at Thomas’s lacerated back, George felt for the first time a sense of relief that he was no longer a soldier. Harris aside, he had loved his time in the King’s Dragoon Guards. The comradeship of his fellow officers had given him a sense of belonging that he had never known before. Yet the British Army, even in its reformed state, was still far from ideal. Too many of its officers were ignorant snobs who expended more energy on the hunting field than in learning their profession. They made little effort to know, still less to understand, their men, and were far too quick to flog them for minor infractions. Thomas was a case in point. No, he decided, it was no longer a world he wanted to be part of.
He would forge a new career for himself. He thought of his mother, and all she had been through: born in Africa, removed from her mother at birth, a painful childhood in Dublin, a succession of unsuitable or unavailable lovers. No wonder she reserved her love for her son, and had been so distraught at their parting. He had let her down once; it would not happen again. But how to make her proud and, more importantly, ensure she did not want for money?
A groan made George start. Thomas’s eyes flickered open. ‘Ah, back with us at last,’ said George. ‘How’re you feeling?’
Thomas was silent.
‘A stupid question.
Would you like some water?’
Thomas nodded. George held the tin cup to his chapped lips. The awkward angle caused much of the water to spill on the sheet.
‘Thank you,’ croaked Thomas.
‘How could you be so foolish?’ said George gently. ‘Surely you knew the penalty?’
Thomas turned his head slightly, his pale cheek pinched with pain. ‘Tweedledum dared me,’ he whispered. ‘I had to do it.’
At dinner that evening, George said little. It irked him that his fellow passengers were behaving as if nothing had happened; even Captain Wilson, who had seemed so affected at the time, was joviality himself as the port did the rounds.
‘Yes, it’s all true, Lieutenant Melvill,’ said Wilson, addressing the dapper officer who had presided over the flogging. ‘I did once mistake the lights of the Channel fleet for the coast. My exact words, if I remember rightly, were, “Hard-a-port!
We must be running into Brighton, but I never knew they had so many chemist shops there.” My junior officers have never let me forget it.’
Of those in earshot, only George failed to laugh. He could bear the merriment no longer and, addressing Melvill opposite him, blurted out, ‘How can it be right to disfigure a man for life for stealing an extra ration of rum?’
Melvill looked at George with a mixture of pity and contempt. ‘It may seem harsh,’ he responded, ‘but most of the soldiers on board are young recruits and it’s important to set an example.’
‘Surely a period of confinement would have sufficed?’
Crealock, who was sitting next to Melvill, responded, ‘The members of the court considered it. But when we discovered that the ship’s prison was far from secure, with a ventilation slit that allowed beer to be passed through, we settled for flogging. Some men prefer it, you know.’
‘I find that hard to believe,’ said George. ‘How can you hope to win the men’s trust if they’re in constant fear of the lash?’
Crealock snorted. ‘You’ve got a lot to learn. If you don’t mind me asking, Hart, how long did you serve?’
‘Five months.’
‘Well, I’ve been a serving soldier for more than twenty years, which makes me slightly better qualified to talk about discipline than you. Most soldiers join the army as a last resort. They’re the dregs of society, and the only way to keep them in order is to make them fear authority. To mollycoddle them is the worst thing you can do.’
‘Poppycock,’ said a voice from further up the table. George turned to look and was met by Major Buller’s steely gaze. ‘Proper discipline,’ continued
Buller,
‘depends upon mutual respect. It can only be achieved by force of personality and not by coercion. There’s no place for the lash in a modern professional army. The sooner it’s
abolished,
the better.’
Crealock was about to respond, but so emphatic was Buller’s statement, so self-assured his manner, that he held his tongue. At that moment George revelled in Crealock’s discomfiture. Thinking about it later, however, he realized how foolish he had been to draw attention to himself. He resolved to keep a lower profile and not to make any more enemies.
A couple of days after the flogging, while taking a turn on deck, deep in thought, George walked straight into a fellow passenger. Caught by surprise, the man stumbled and fell. ‘Please excuse me,’ said George, helping the man to his feet. ‘I wasn’t looking where I was going.’
Their eyes met. ‘Major Buller!’
‘Have we met?’
‘Not exactly, sir. But you were kind enough to take my side in the flogging debate at dinner the other night.’
‘Of course,’ said Buller, his gaunt face breaking into a smile. ‘Think nothing of it. It makes my blood boil to hear anyone defend flogging. The battlefield is a bloody, horrific place to be.
It’s bad enough having
to face that, without the additional threat of barbaric punishments hanging over you off the field as well. People imagine war to be an honourable affair fought by
gentlemen
, but it’s not. A point that will be amply illustrated in Colonel Wood’s talk, I don’t doubt.’
‘Which talk is that?’ asked George.
‘He’s giving a lecture in the saloon at three. Strictly speaking it’s only for officers, but I’m sure the general will make an exception.’
George was less certain, and was pleasantly surprised when Gossett brought word that Thesiger was happy for him to attend. At the appointed hour, George made his way to the saloon, where an impromptu lecture theatre had been set up at one end of the room, with a blackboard facing three rows of chairs. Around a dozen officers were present, including Thesiger.
The lecture was a fascinating resume of South African history, delivered in Wood’s typical jaunty style. He used an expertly drawn map to trace the story of European encroachment, pointing out that while the Portuguese had rounded the Cape of Good Hope as far back as 1488, the Dutch had been the first to settle, landing at Table Bay in 1652. They were later joined by German and Huguenot settlers, and together these early Boers were able to dominate the indigenous population of small, semi-nomadic, yellowish-black people known as Hottentots, who had themselves supplanted the even smaller and more primitive Bushmen. Until, that is, the arrival of two new threats: the Bantu and the British.
The Bantu were a taller and stronger race of black tribesman - called ‘Kaffirs’ by Europeans - who drifted down from the north. The British came from the sea, capturing Cape Town from the Dutch in 1806. By the 1830s, to avoid being caught between the hammer of hostile Bantu tribes and the anvil of British colonial authority, more than 15,000 Boers left the Cape Colony in their ox-drawn wagons and trekked north in search of new territory. This brought them into conflict with yet more Bantu tribes, notably the Zulu, and the British settlers in Natal, where, for a brief time in the early 1840s, the Boers proclaimed the ‘Free Province of New Holland’. These same Boers helped Prince Mpande overthrow his brother Dingane and become King of the Zulus in 1840. When the British responded by annexing Natal in 1842, the Boers simply moved north to their other independent territories, later known as the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. But this uneasy situation could not last and, in 1877, just a year before George set off for Africa, Britain annexed the Transvaal.
Seeking out Wood after the lecture, George asked the significance of this recent annexation.
‘Well, the excuse they gave,’ said
Wood,
‘was that the Transvaal government was bankrupt and couldn’t defend itself against hostile blacks, particularly the Zulu. But that was just a smokescreen. What the British government really wants is a self-governing confederation of South Africa, which would both save money on imperial defence and keep the whole of the region within Britain’s sphere of influence. The annexation of the Transvaal is just another step along that road. But there’s still a long way to go.’
‘Surely,’ said George, ‘African tribes like the Zulus will never agree to confederation.’
‘Of course not.
Which is why, sooner or later, they’ll all be conquered.’
George bristled. A few weeks earlier he would not have thought twice about the fate of an obscure African tribe. But his mother’s confession had changed all that, and he now felt oddly protective towards his Zulu kin. Not that that made him, in his own mind, any less European. He certainly didn’t
feel
African, and was only too aware of the need to keep his Zulu links hidden if he wanted to masquerade as a British
gentleman
. But nor could he any longer see the British Empire - and her African colonies in particular - from a strictly white perspective.
Wood sensed his unease. ‘I can see you’re not convinced. Can I suggest you read some of the material the War Office has provided us with? If nothing else, it will help to pass the time.’
That afternoon, George returned to his cabin to find a neat stack of books and pamphlets on his desk. It included War Office blue-books, Silver’s
Guide to South Africa
, Galton’s
Art of Travel,
a number of Xhosa and Zulu dictionaries, and a précis from the Intelligence Department on the manner and customs of the South African tribes. Over the course of the next week George read them all, but gave particular attention to the Zulu dictionary.
He could speak passable French and German, having excelled in his language exams at Harrow and Sandhurst, and was determined to learn a smattering of Zulu before he landed. To speed up the process he persuaded the Natal trader Laband, who had travelled extensively in Zululand and spoke the language fluently, to teach him the rudiments of Zulu grammar. The sessions went well, but Laband made no attempt to conceal his contempt for the Zulus, a prejudice George found hard to stomach.
‘What exactly have you got against the Zulus?’ asked George, after one particularly vituperative jibe.
‘Got against them?’ said Laband, a look of surprise on his craggy face. ‘Why, only that they’re violent savages who stand in the way of progress.’
‘I don’t understand?’
‘It’s quite simply, really. All right-thinking people agree that the long-term economic wellbeing of South Africa depends upon the establishment of a confederation of white, self-governing colonies. This won’t happen until the Zulus have been conquered, partly for reasons of security and partly because they’re a simple people with no interest in developing the trade and mineral potential of their land.’
George frowned. ‘I’m not sure your government would agree. According to the blue-books, it’s been on friendly terms with the Zulus for years. Why, it even sent an official to preside over King Cetshwayo’s coronation in seventy- three.’
‘That’s true, but times change. When it suits our politicians to make enemies of the Zulus, they won’t hesitate, and if they need a pretext for war, they’ll find one. Mark my words.’