Fire Across the Veldt (3 page)

Mzingeli was back, it seemed, almost as soon as he had gone. He slipped down between the two. ‘Camp is on a plateau over the back,’ he whispered, gesturing with his hand. ‘Away from horses, which are nearer.’

‘Now there’s a stroke of luck,’ beamed Jenkins. ‘How many guards?’

‘Only one I see. He up on right there, on top of path. We must get round him. But I think he sleeps.’

‘Ah.’ Fonthill’s teeth flashed in the moonlight. ‘As I said. Bad soldiering. Good. Now, 352, crawl away to the right and get behind the guard. We will go to just below the top and wait until you’ve dealt with the Boer – I know you can do it. Very quietly. Now. Off you go.’

Jenkins wriggled away like an eel between the rocks and Fonthill followed Mzingeli as the tracker crawled upwards, placing hands and feet with care. As the hunched figure of the guard came into sight, silhouetted against a now star-strewn sky, they froze onto the grass. They kept their eyes fixed on the man, who remained immobile, crouched like some ancient shepherd guarding his flock. Then, as they watched, a figure suddenly rose behind him, putting one arm under his throat and presenting the stumpy barrel of the revolver to his ear. The man attempted to rise and shout but Jenkins clasped a hand to his mouth and whispered to him. Immediately, the guard froze, immobile.

Simon and Mzingeli were upon him in a flash. Fonthill forced open the man’s mouth and thrust a rolled handkerchief into it, tying it into place with a bandana knotted at the back of his neck. Then they rolled him over and bound his hands behind his back before tying his legs together. The Boer lay looking up at them, eyes bulging.

‘Can’t see any more guards, bach sir,’ whispered Jenkins. ‘The camp’s over there,’ he nodded with his head, ‘beyond the ’orses. They’ve ’obbled all the ’orses by binding one foreleg back. I call that bloody cruel. An’ them supposed to be marvellous ’orsemen, look you.’

Fonthill nodded. Jenkins had been brought up on a farm in the north of Wales and was a superb horseman. He was also a lover of horseflesh.

‘Mzingeli,’ he whispered. ‘You and Jenkins see if you can find our horses and bring them over here quietly. The Boers will have got back here in the darkness so there’s just a possibility that they’ve not unsaddled them. Go now. I’ll watch over this fellow.’

Within minutes the two were back, leading three horses, all fully saddled and bridled. ‘Look,’ said Jenkins, his face expressing disgust. ‘They’ve even put our rifles back in the saddle holsters, see. Lazy bastards. They know nothin’ about ’orses, absolutely.’

‘Splendid. Right. Let’s go. Quietly, now.’

They had retreated some five minutes down the path when Jenkins gave the reins of the horses he was leading to Mzingeli. ‘I’ll just be ’alf a mo’, bach sir,’ he said.

‘No,’ hissed Fonthill. ‘Where are you going? Come back. Now.’

But the little Welshman had disappeared back up the hill into the night.

Cursing, Simon indicated to the tracker that they should continue the descent but they had reached the bottom and were met by a relieved Alice before Jenkins rejoined them.

‘Where the hell did you go?’ demanded Fonthill.

‘I couldn’t let them beasts stay up there with one leg tied up,’ he said. ‘So I cut as many free as I could. Too many, o’course, to do ’em all. But enough to let ’em wander about a bit and stray, like. That’ll give them Boer buggers a bit to think about first thing in the mornin’, see. Oh.’ He held up his knife, the point of which was bloodstained. ‘I just poked this into the leg of that guard, see. Not far. Just a bit of a scratch. That’ll teach ’im to sleep on guard and serve ’im right for treatin’ ’orses that way, so it will.’

Fonthill blew out his cheeks. ‘For God’s sake get on your horse. Alice, you get in the saddle, 352 can ride behind you. Leave the cart and the mules. We must ride hard through the night so that we don’t have a horde of bloodthirsty Boers breathing down our necks. Right. Now ride!’

Heads down, with Jenkins clinging to Alice for dear life, they rode through the darkness as fast as the horses and the terrain would allow. Just before dawn they reached the armoured train. It was getting steam up, for the sappers had worked through the night to repair the rails. They were just in time to wolf down hot tea and bacon sandwiches before the train snorted into motion, on its journey to Pretoria, the newly captured capital of the Transvaal, carrying them aboard.

On the journey, which proved uneventful, Fonthill looked again at the cable that he had received only last month in the half-ruined British consulate in Peking, after the siege of the capital had been raised. He, Alice and Jenkins had been visiting his wife’s uncle, a missionary in China, when the Boxer Rebellion had burst around their ears. The three of them had played a role in the defence and final relief of the besieged consulates in the heart of the city – a role that had been well reported in the world’s press. As a result, General Kitchener, Roberts’s chief of staff in South Africa, had cabled him:

Kitchener had been only a major of intelligence when Fonthill and Jenkins had infiltrated the Dervish lines around Khartoum to reach the besieged General Gordon years before. But Simon knew, of course, of the meteoric nature of the man’s rise to become Sirdar of the Egyptian army and the eventual conqueror of the Mahdi’s forces at the Battle of Omdurman two years before. He was now Lord Kitchener of Khartoum – ‘K of K’ – and rumoured soon to take over from the elderly Roberts as commander-in-chief in South Africa.

Fonthill, having rather surprisingly received Alice’s approval, had cabled his acceptance but Kitchener’s explanatory letter had revealed little more when it had arrived just before they took ship for the Cape. It merely referred to a need to find ‘a new way of fighting the Boers’, for which Fonthill’s wide experience and ‘unconventional military methods’ would eminently suit him. Simon remembered ruefully that that very unconventionality had brought him into conflict several times years before with General Roberts in the second Anglo-Afghan war and that Kitchener would surely have conferred with his chief before sending the cable. So Roberts had approved of the choice. There could be no more validation of the need for ‘something new needed’. He was undeniably intrigued. Of one thing, however, he was certain – he would never return to the regular army.

They arrived in the pretty little Transvaal town of Pretoria, final destination of the Boer
voetrekkers
so long ago, and Fonthill booked them all into a small hotel in the centre – not without a disputatious argument before Mzingeli was accepted as a guest. Then he sent a message to Kitchener’s headquarters, announcing his arrival and requesting an interview. A reply came flatteringly quickly, asking Simon to call at four p.m. that day.

The army HQ was Melrose House, a two-storey, wooden dwelling near the centre of the town, fringed by a conventional African veranda or
stoep
and whose only clue to its militaristic role was the presence of a flagpole bearing a Union Jack, and the constant toing and froing of uniformed men at its entrance. Fonthill presented his card and was asked to wait in an anteroom.

The wait was short and Simon was ushered into a much larger room. He absorbed a quick impression of map-covered walls and tables holding what seemed to be
objets d’art
of an eclectic variety and he recalled reading somewhere that the soldier was a collector of such things. Then he was confronted by Kitchener himself, who strode towards him, hand extended, seeming to fill the room.

Fonthill regarded him intently. In a very short time, Kitchener had come to represent the imperial age in a manner that had even eluded such eminent military leaders as Wolseley and Roberts. Perhaps it was the great moustache, which thrust across the man’s upper lip, oiled, clipped yet luxurious and slightly tilted upwards at the end so confidently. He was tall but surprisingly narrow-shouldered, and quite slim. The face behind the moustache was bronzed with purple, heavy jowls and hair slicked back either side of a central parting. It was the eyes, however, which drew the gaze. They were set far apart and there was a curious cast in the right eye. And they were china blue, exuding a kind of intensity that was compelling.

‘Good of you to come so quickly, Fonthill,’ said the general. He grasped Simon’s hand in a firm grip. ‘Do sit down.’ Kitchener strode back to his chair but remained standing, holding his visitor’s card in his hand. He indicated it. ‘C.B. eh? Order of the Bath. That was for Khartoum, I seem to remember?’

‘Yes, General. Came up with the rations.’

‘I’m sure it didn’t. Getting through the Mahdi’s lines, being captured and then escaping was quite a feat. Didn’t your man get a DSM?’

‘Yes. Jenkins, the Distinguished Service Medal. That certainly didn’t come up with the rations. Couldn’t have done a thing without him.’

‘And is he still with you?’

‘Yes, he’s here now. We’ve been together, one way or another, for more than twenty years.’

‘Splendid. We can use him, too. Now then. You must be wondering what I have in mind, eh? Don’t suppose my letter helped much?’ Fonthill noted that Kitchener never seemed to smile. His face remained set, despite the modulations of his voice. It was as though it was that of an icon.

‘No, sir. But I am anxious to help.’

‘Good. The C-in-C assured me you would.’

Fonthill marvelled at this. The last time he had met the famous “Bobs”, the general had distinctly taken umbrage at Simon’s refusal to rejoin the army. He kept silent now. It was up to Kitchener to do the talking.

‘Yes. Quite. You must have been quite a bit out of touch in China with things here in South Africa? Yes?’

‘Very much so.’

‘Very well. A bit of background is necessary. Come over here.’

The two men approached the biggest of the maps, which almost covered one wall of the room. It was a large-scale ordnance of the whole of South Africa. It was studded with pins, red and blue.

‘Disregard the flags,’ said Kitchener. ‘Look here. This is where the war really started, here on the Natal border.’ He indicated the right-hand side of the Southern African continent. ‘This is where the Boers made their first thrust, while we were outnumbered and before Buller arrived with reinforcements. That bloody fool Sir George White …’ He looked up sharply. ‘Fonthill, I am treating you as a senior officer and speaking freely to you. I presume I can rely on your discretion?’

‘Absolutely, General.’

‘Good. Well, White got himself cooped up here in Ladysmith with a goodly portion of his Natal command and remained stuck there. Same thing happened to a smaller degree at Kimberley where your old friend Rhodes stayed with his mines, squealing to be rescued, and to an even smaller degree here in the north-west at Mafeking. Now, when General Buller arrived with his army he felt that his main priority had to be to relieve Ladysmith – not least because White had got a large unit of our cavalry stuck there doing nothing; and cavalry, I don’t need to tell you, Fonthill, is worth its weight in gold in this country.’

Simon nodded.

‘Trouble is that Buller got himself into an awful hole here on the Tugela and was savagely mauled by the Boers, firing from entrenched positions under the Boer general, Botha, at Colenso. Same thing had happened to the west on the Modder, where Methuen tried to get through to Kimberley and was soundly defeated. Shortly afterwards, Buller caught it again at Spion Kop, another bloodbath. It was a terrible time and that’s when it was realised back home that we were fighting a savagely determined foe, equipped with the latest weapons.’

Kitchener regarded Fonthill with his icy stare. ‘Not Afghans with muskets nor Dervishes with spears. But marksmen, with Mauser rifles
that could outrange us and extremely modern Creusot and Krupps artillery from Europe. This had become a war where the range of the modern rifle had spread the battlefield over five or ten miles. Conventional scouting was made impossible over the flat ground of the veldt, where the best scouts in the world could be picked off by the enemy more than a mile away.

‘What’s more,’ Kitchener went on, speaking quietly, ‘our artillery turned out to be useless, as I expected. All our field guns were originally twelve-pounders, they were then bored out to make them fifteen-pounders, with the result that they could be used only with reduced charges.’ The general smoothed upwards the edges of his moustache and his voice took on a confidential air, as though breathing confidences to a friend. ‘Do yer know, Fonthill, we had become virtually the laughing stock of Europe. We had sent overseas the biggest British army in history to overcome one of the world’s smallest nations – although to be fair, most of the army had not yet arrived. Even so, we were ridiculed, with Germany leading the laughter. The Boers were saying that our command was so incompetent that they would court-martial any of their men who killed a British general.’

A silence hung in the air for a moment and then the general continued. ‘So Roberts was sent out to take command, with me as his chief of staff and with a vast number of reinforcements. You will remember, of course, from Afghanistan that the field marshal knows what he is doing and his grasp of the situation and the increased size of the army soon produced results. He outflanked the enemy and relieved Kimberley and then we cornered a large section of the Boer army here,’ he tapped the map, ‘at Paardeberg and Cronje was forced to surrender with some five thousand men.’

Simon nodded. ‘The turning point?’

‘In terms of conventional warfare, yes. I was able to throw out the Boer commandos who were trying to foment rebellion in the Cape Colony and in the north there were further successes when we beat Botha at Diamond Hill, here, near Pretoria, and even better when we were able to relieve Mafeking and then take Johannesburg, with its important mines, and the Transvaal capital here. Importantly, Buller – a falsely maligned general, in my view – was able, at last, to break through to relieve Ladysmith and the Boers were unrolled all across the map, with President Kruger fleeing through Mozambique in the east here to take ship to Holland.’

For the first time, a faint smile crept across Kitchener’s broad face. ‘War over, then, eh?’

Fonthill returned the smile. ‘Except that it wasn’t.’

‘Quite so, except that the chief, Field Marshal Roberts, is more or less convinced that it is. You may have heard that Wolseley is retiring as head of the army at the Horse Guards?’

‘Ah, no. I had not.’ A faint pang of regret shot through Fonthill at the news. He and Jenkins had served under the field marshal – guyed by W.S. Gilbert as ‘the very model of a modern major general’ on the London stage – in campaigns on the Mozambique border, in the conquest of Egypt and then in the abortive attempt to relieve Gordon, and he had great respect for the little man.

‘Yes. Bobs will return to England very shortly to take up the post and I will take over here. I think the chief believes that he will be leaving me with just a bit of clearing up to do. But I knew it wouldn’t be as easy as that and that is why I sent for you. Now, come and sit down and I will explain.’

The two strode back and Fonthill looked across at the tall soldier now with a growing regard. No one had greater respect for the Boers than Simon. He had seen, in the Transvaal War, how competent they had been in outmanoeuvring a conventional army in the field and then defeating it in a pitched battle at Majuba. But to hear a British general give an ‘amateur army’ credit was new to him. From Isandlwana (‘let the Zulus come – we’ll give them a bloody nose’) to the Sudan (‘the Dervishes are not disciplined, they will never break a British square’) he had heard British officers pour scorn on their opponents. The change was refreshing. He sat on the edge of his chair listening carefully to the tall man opposite.

Kitchener leant forward. ‘We were told that the Boers would run away. Well, they ran away very often, but they always came back again. We were told that they would never hold together in any cohesive formation but I fully believe that there is no one more
self-confident
of his own individual opinions than the Boer. They have subordinated themselves to their leaders and have worked together with discipline. We have seen them courageous in attack and in retreat. They have always shown an ability to give lessons to us all.’

Fonthill opened his mouth to speak but the general held up his hand. ‘There is another characteristic they have displayed which, if we are true descendants of our forefathers, we ought to be most capable of fully appreciating. I refer to that wonderful tenacity of purpose, that “don’t know when you are beaten” quality which they are prominently displaying in this war. There may be individuals among them whose characteristics and methods we do not like but, judged as a whole, I maintain that they are a virile race.

‘Now, this was underlined about six months ago, when we were
rolling ’em back all along what we then thought was the front in the north, and the Boer leaders held a meeting – they call it a
krijgsraad
or council of war – about a hundred and thirty miles north of Bloemfontein just a few days after the fall of the Free State capital. They seemed to have lost the war. It was Christiian de Wet, the new commandant of the Free State army, who had a different idea. Guerilla warfare. Take to the veldt.’

The general was now almost animated and made a slashing motion with his arm. ‘Cut out the cumbersome wagon trains so beloved of the Boers from the Great Trek and which trapped Cronje. No more fighting “at the front”. Instead, adopt a raiding strategy behind the British lines, attacking our lines of communications, which, Fonthill, are damned long and vulnerable, swooping down on our flanks, hitting and riding off again, hitting us where it hurts. Riding swiftly and carrying little provisions—’

Fonthill interrupted. ‘Just a bag of flour, a parcel of tea and a few strips of biltong on the saddle bow.’

Kitchener frowned. ‘What? How do you know that?’

‘I saw it.’ And he explained his party’s brush with de Wet on the Free State veldt.

The general blew out his cheeks and leant back in his chair. ‘Well bless my soul, Fonthill. You’re not in this damned country five minutes and you meet one of the enemy’s leading generals, raid his camp and steal back your horses from him.’ The glare softened into a grin that seemed to sit ill at ease beneath the great moustache. ‘Well done, my dear fellow. And you say he betrayed his intention to invade the Cape Colony?’