1999 - Ladysmith (16 page)

But there were other bounties. Below him he could see the railway track, which Boer—Mzondwase, the Hated One—and British—Khalisile, the Causer of Tears—had fought over; and he wondered if, one day, these things of iron would be the slaves of black men rather than Kwini Vittoria. With this thought in his head, he slept a while, knowing that he would have to wait till nightfall now, if he was to continue his journey unhindered by the Boer sentries. Slept, yes, but like a hare, with one eye unclosed. Slept in the sun in a dell of Bulwan, while around him crickets chirruped, millipedes made their epoch-long progress up stalk and across leaf, and doves and finches sang their song.

Near by, but not near enough, Muhle lay in his hut of straw and thought of other huts: the wattle-and-daub ones the Dutch had first made when they came to the country, the huts of which Shaka, the great king, had said to his brothers Dingaan and Mhlanga: “You think you will rule this country, but I see the coming of the swallows who build with mud, and they will become your masters.” And so it had proved, and now he lay here imprisoned. But his ankle was healing, becoming stronger, and soon he would creep like a lizard out of this camp.

Sterkx had continued to be kind to him, but he saw less of the good doctor now; since the shelling had begun, the Dutchman had been busy at his wagon, tending to the injured. The worst casualties were from the new explosive the English were using, lyddite, the yellow-and-green fumes of which burned the chest and throat. This, and the moment when General Buller would launch his long-expected attempt to ford the Tugela River and break through to relieve Ladysmith, was the talk of the camp.

But there was other talk. There was talk going on outside Muhle’s hut right there and then. Through the opening, a few yards away, he could just see two Boers squatting down, sharing a pipe. But they weren’t Boers, they were talking English—an English that Muhle recognized as having the same queer singing tones as that of the prisoners taken at Nicholson’s Nek a few weeks earlier.

“We got one of our boys in the town, hugger-mugger. Not a gas man, but a solid fellow all the same, and doing mighty work. I knew him back in the early days of the Brotherhood.”

“Is that a fact, Major MacBride?” said the other. “Well, we’ll jolly him up with a sup then, when we get in there. How long so, do you reckon?”

“Inside of a month. We’ll have Christmas Mass said in Ladysmith this year, sure as eggs, and we’ll go on the Wren too.”

Then the man called MacBride stood up, and started to sing:

The wren, the wren, the king of all birds
,

On Saint Stephen’s Day he was caught in the furze
…

And the other joined in:

Up with the kettle and down with the pan…

And give us a copper to bury the wren
.

They went off, laughing and slapping each other on the back. Perhaps all white men, thought Muhle as the figures were obscured by the edge of the opening, are just plain mad.

The following morning, he saw the same two men involved in a commotion, along with some others of their brigade. The noise of it had woken him up, making him glance up from his bed. Through the gap, he focused on white hands and faces, and something—what? It was a black face, a thin body, he saw there in the middle of the group of white men just a little way across the camp: the recognition came not to his sleepy eyes, though, but to the pit of his stomach…it was Wellington. They were cuffing him and throwing him from one side of the group to the other. Muhle didn’t stop to think. With a cry, he leaped up from his straw bed and, reaching for his crutches, lurched towards the group of men as fast as he could. When he reached the edge of the circle, he saw his son had fallen to the ground, and that one of the men was kicking him in the ribs and back with his heavy boots. The man called MacBride was leafing through a packet of papers.

Muhle burst into the circle. “Stop!”

The white men looked astonished, and the one in the middle left off kicking.

“What’s this then?” he said. “Are we taking orders from the likes of ye now?”

At his feet, Wellington lay curled in a ball, moaning. Muhle tried to move forward on his crutches, but felt the hands of one of the white men grabbing his collar.

“Are you in with him too, then? Is that it?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Muhle said, trembling. He pointed with the crutch. “He is my son! Why are you beating him?”

MacBride came forward, with the papers in his hand. “He is in the service of the English. We found him going through our lines in the night, with these papers.”

Muhle looked down at Wellington. He had sat up now, and was holding his stomach.

“Is this true?” Muhle said.

Wellington nodded miserably. Muhle turned to MacBride. “Please, let him go. He is too young; the English must have forced him.”

“I don’t think so. He’ll be shot like all the other spies.”

Two of the other men reached down and grasped Wellington under the arms. Muhle dropped one crutch and pulled at the sleeve of the man with the papers.

“No!”

“Father…”

Muhle saw Wellington struggle in the arms of the white men. With a roar he ran at them. One of them laughed and, planting his hand four square in Muhle’s chest, pushed him over. They lifted Wellington up. From the ground, Muhle saw his son’s thin legs kicking out. He was helpless; no, here was his crutch. Sitting up, he thrust it into the groin of MacBride.

“Jesus!” shouted the Irishman, doubling over and dropping the packet.

The papers scattered, some of them falling into Muhle’s lap. Almost purple with rage, MacBride drew his revolver and shot the Zulu in the thigh. At such close quarters the report was impossibly loud, and the force of the bullet hit him like a hammer. Muhle shrieked and clutched at his leg; and then the pain started, a searing sensation that circled outward from the centre of the wound and then enveloped him, leaving him teetering on the edge of consciousness. Suddenly, all he was aware of was the warm wetness on his hands.

The rest of it he could only recall vaguely, or heard later from the doctor as he lay delirious with pain: Sterkx himself coming over and falling into an argument with Major MacBride’s Irishmen…The doctor demanding by what right they would make the execution…Joubert being summoned and the case being put before him…Sterkx cutting away some of his trouser leg and applying a tourniquet…

T
he Biographer sipped a scalding cup of black tea outside his tent, and looked about him. Estcourt at dusk: a mean little town of two or three hundred corrugated-iron houses. The drift of dust and dirt to which the place amounted was quickly becoming hidden by night. A portion of Buller’s army was now at the town, having driven the Boers further up the line. Atkins and Churchill had been here for a week or so, but the latter had now gone and got himself captured in a foolish incident in which the Boers had ambushed and derailed an armoured train. Only days before, he had been mocking the name of the thing, laughing at the idea of ‘a locomotive disguised as a knight-errant’ and now it had proved the instrument of his imprisonment. Reports said that he had conducted himself heroically in trying to resist the capture of the train, however, and his case had been taken up with gusto by the remaining correspondents. He was said to be in gaol in Pretoria. The Biographer couldn’t quite summon up the fervour with which everyone else was bruiting the ignominy of Churchill’s situation, and felt that it served him right. Then he chided himself for allowing such an ungracious thought to pass through his head.

From a professional point of view, it was a shame that the train had been captured. With the use of the engine and a flat car, Biograph panorama runs of the camp and columns on the move had been proving very effective—in spite of there being some danger of vibration, owing to the car’s want of decent springs. But another engine was being brought up. Soon, he hoped, there would be real action to photograph in any case. The Boers were only five miles away, and the guns around Ladysmith could be clearly heard. Now, taking advantage of the ripening darkness, the signallers were streaking the sky with searchlights, making dots and dashes against the horizon. The signal light here was powered by a dynamo and consisted of a 15-inch mirror and a slatted shutter worked by a lever. It threw a great, epic beam into the sky; the one at Ladysmith was less advanced and sent out much feebler signals. Last night, the Biographer had stayed up too late trying to decipher them, but the intricacies of the code and the faintness of the beam made it impossible. Determined not to make the same mistake tonight, he turned in to get some sleep.

The noise of the new train woke him in the morning. Summoning the Zulu rickshaw runner, whom he had taken on as a servant back at the Cape, he loaded the cart and made preparations to travel to Frere: the end of the line since the Boers had blown up the bridge over the Tugela, thus preventing further rail traffic towards Ladysmith and beyond. With great difficulty, the cart was levered on to an open truck and lashed down. The ride was an exciting one, and the Biographer found himself, at every turn of the track, expecting to suffer the same fate as Churchill, but the journey passed off without mishap.

Frere was much busier than Estcourt: as far as the eye could see were tents and soldiers. Many were concerned with the repair of the broken bridge, in which labour they were helped invaluably by hundreds of Africans, who chanted rhythmically to keep time as they worked. To the Biographer it seemed a natural scene to record, but when he unloaded the equipment and set the big iron tripod in position, the natives stopped working, thus depriving him of the very movement the Biograph was uniquely qualified to register. He was none too pleased, and nor was the sapper officer in charge of the work, who sent him away in disgrace for holding up proceedings.

Instead, he contented himself with filming some troopers as they ate their lunch—if the leathery, indestructible trek ox they were consuming could be favoured with such a name. Among them was Perry Barnes, and he and his mates were much taken with the Biograph.

“Hey, Perry, come and see your face,” said one. “There’s a looking glass in this here machine.”

The young farrier regarded his unshaven, sunburned face in the mirror of the camera’s distance finder.

“What would Mother think of me now?” he said, and laughed.

The company kindly shared their food with the Biographer who, not being attached to any particular regiment, was having great difficulties in this regard—not that anyone was eating particularly well, the lines of supply being both irregular and badly organized. As Perry Barnes said mournfully, “We might just as well be under siege ourselves.”

The Biographer had been reduced to foraging in abandoned Boer farms. In one looted house he had found a half-eaten joint of beef and some bread and jam. This had proved a great feast, although its grandeur was much undone by the state of the place. It had been discovered that the men of the house had gone off to join the enemy, so the troopers had taken violent revenge, sending the wife and daughter off the place while they smashed it up. Each room was littered with torn books and letters and the glass of broken pictures. Some of the soldiers had defecated in corners of the house, with the result that there were flies everywhere. But the Biographer was so hungry that he had eaten the food none the less.

Otherwise, he was forced to subsist on the same mealie meal that his Zulu ate every day. As for water, every drop in the camp was guarded, and he had to send the Zulu two miles to fill his water bucket each morning. Often he would return with the bucket empty, having been stopped by soldiers on the way, who took advantage of his being a native and drank the water, ignoring his protestations.

This business of securing grub for man and beast, and fetching water for the same, got very much in the way of photography, as did the constant interruption of sentries asking for passes. “Halt! Who goes there?” the cry would come, and he would reply, ‘Friend’, and then give the password, which was ‘Aldershot’, and show his pass. To his great irritation, the Biographer discovered that the petition signed by Buller was not good for passing between stations. He had to get other, more detailed passes for this purpose, such was the worry about spies. Perry Barnes afforded him every assistance in his dealings with the army in this matter, and as the column waited for the order to advance, via Colenso, on Ladysmith the two of them became friends.

The order never seemed to come and they were left with a deal of time on their hands. One afternoon, after going out on a sortie with units from Lord Dundonald’s cavalry brigade, the Biographer was lying in his tent, too exhausted to do anything except read. He heard a slight scratching sound, and on looking up saw an immense tarantula crawling across the canvas. With a yell he leapt up and dealt it a crushing blow with his book. It fell down stunned, and disappeared among the bedding and equipment. The Biographer’s shout alerted the Zulu and Barnes, and it was only after much turning up of linen and clothing in the tent that the creature was found—lurking under the Biographer’s satchel. Seeing it there, twirling its hairy antennae, it struck the Biographer that the tarantula would make a good picture in close-up. He suggested this to Barnes, and the brave farmer’s son held the spider down with the flap of the satchel while the Biographer fetched a bottle in which to imprison it.

“Tell you what, sir,” said Barnes afterwards, as the two of them regarded the creature scurrying about in the bottle. “If you got yourself a scorpion you could put the two of them together and take a picture of a duel.”

In spite of the fright he had had, the Biographer thought this a good idea, and the word was put around camp that he wanted to make a collection of fearsome insects. By that time the next afternoon, there had been brought to him two trapdoor spiders, another tarantula, a fair-sized scorpion, two small, flat, black-headed snakes and a large number of common centipedes. Sometimes they came in bottles, but most often the specimens were proffered between the ends of two sticks, held by a cheerful soldier exclaiming, “We heard you were collecting these things.”